Defending Israel against Reform evangelism

Posted on November 30, 2017 by Victor Rosenthal

This week the conflict between liberal and progressive elements in American Jewry and the government of Israel was escalated.

On November 16, Rabbi Rick Jacobs, President of the American Union for Reform Judaism (URJ), and others tried to push their way (see video here) into the Western Wall area carrying Torah scrolls in defiance of rules established by the Orthodox authorities that manage the site, intending to pass them to members of the Women of the Wall group, also in violation of the rules. They ultimately succeeded after a shoving match with security guards and ultra-Orthodox protesters.

It should be noted that none of them were arrested, nor did the reaction of the guards rise above the level of shoving (Jacobs was threatened with pepper spray, but not sprayed). It seems clear that the guards made the decision not to use greater force in order not to injure anyone. The behavior of the Haredi protesters was abominable, of course. I don’t know if any of them were arrested, but those guilty of assault should have been.

The New Israel Fund (NIF), an organization that has been criticized for funding groups active in the delegitimization of the Jewish state as well as BDS and lawfare against it, almost immediately organized a joint letter from non-Orthodox rabbis to PM Netanyahu, expressing “outrage.” Would that the NIF might express outrage over the lies, libels and distortions told around the world by their grantee, Breaking the Silence!

The hand of the NIF is seen throughout this conflict. Jacobs himself has a long-time connection to the NIF. Before he was elected to the presidency of the URJ in 2011, he served on its Board of Directors as chair of its committee on religious pluralism. The NIF is a big donor to the Israel Religious Action Center, the NGO arm of the American Reform movement in Israel, which is the main sponsor of the demonstrations at the Western Wall, and which has recently inaugurated a campaign to bring American political correctness and hysteria over race to Israel.

On November 24, Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely was criticized by the PM and forced to apologize for remarks that she had made earlier, in which she tried to express the (very true) fact that American Jews are disconnected from the realities of life in Israel, and their criticisms of Israeli policy are often misconceived. Unfortunately she appeared to suggest that American Jews do not participate proportionally in the US military, something which is almost certainly not true. The response was vicious and instantaneous. Despite her clarification, Rick Jacobs of URJ was not satisfied, and called for her to be fired. So far, Netanyahu has resisted the pressure.

On November 27, the Masorti Movement in Israel – associated with the American United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism – released a video attack aimed directly at the PM, accusing him of presenting an “alternative truth” about the Western Wall controversy, and concluding “shame on you, Mr. Prime Minister.” They could have attacked the Haredi parties, which had initially agreed to a compromise, but reneged when their constituents complained. But they chose to blame Netanyahu.

The leaders of non-Orthodox Judaism are spoiling for a fight. The main objective seems to be to create anger among American Jews by telling them over and over how Israel disrespects them. The Western Wall argument is presented as a rejection of Reform and Conservative (i.e., American) customs of mixed-gender prayer, although aside from the provocative actions of Jacobs and his crew, few if any Reform or Conservative Jews have wanted to pray in a mixed group at the Wall (if they had, one would think that at least a few of them would have done so at the location that is set aside for this, despite their objections to the arrangements for access to the site). But the point is not the facts but the “insult” inherent in it.

The same is true for the various crises over attempts to permit or forbid conversions to Judaism in Israel outside the official rabbinate. Israel is accused of treating non-Orthodox Jews as “second-class citizens,” or “delegitimizing” the non-Orthodox Diaspora. Again, the emphasis  is not on what the practical effects of legislation might be in Israel or outside of it, but on how it can be construed as insulting to non-Orthodox Jews.

The tactic is simple, and always works. Provoke a confrontation by making demands that anger the Haredim, who then threaten the PM that they will leave the coalition. The PM will look for a compromise – after all, he has a country to run – which can be construed as “submission to the ultra-Orthodox” and insulting to the Diaspora. The Haredim can always be counted on to play their role, including calling the non-Orthodox Jews names and thus increasing the degree of insult.

Orchestrating a physical confrontation, as with the Western Wall security guards, who clearly don’t want trouble, or the helpful Haredi protesters, who clearly do, is another wonderful tactic. Expect more of it.

And then don’t be surprised when, in the next election, Israelis will be told by the opposition not to vote for Netanyahu, because he “damaged our essential relationship with the US.”

The proper response to all of this is that as a sovereign state, we get to determine the rules within our borders. Jacobs thinks that the Western Wall – indeed all of the state of Israel – belongs to world Jewry, and therefore the big machers like him should be able to give us orders. I am willing to agree that in some sense the Western Wall “belongs” to all Jews, but decisions about how it operates must be made by the state in which it is located. And it certainly isn’t appropriate for Jews from America to come here and violate our laws in an attempt to change the rules. This isn’t Birmingham in 1963. It’s about religious customs, not civil rights.

We also get to make our own rules about things like marriage, conversion, divorce and burial for Jews in our country. I and many other Israelis don’t like the ones we have very much, but it isn’t up to Jacobs to try to change them for us. That’s why we have a sovereign state, a democratic state in which we elect our leaders, a state that protects us in return for our fulfilling our (sometimes heavy) obligations to it.

The Reform Movement has an ideology that is a result of the replacement of mitzvah-observance with “tikun olam,” which seems to mean a universalist social-justice ethic that is more at home in Berkeley than Jerusalem. Unfortunately, like the Jews for Jesus, the Reform movement is evangelical in nature, and it won’t be satisfied until it converts the rest of the Jewish world – particularly the uppity Jews of Israel – to its vision of a borderless, multicultural, gender-fluid socialistic worldview. Apparently it has gotten the Conservative Movement (which still maintains a commitment to halacha) on board by exploiting the Western Wall and conversion issues.

The New Israel Fund is in effect the military wing of the Reform Movement, using dollars instead of rockets as weapons. It gives millions of dollars each year to groups working to remake the state of Israel in accordance with its vision, and even to some groups whose goal is to destroy it.

Israel seems to have learned how to deal with evangelical Christians. We will accept their support, but they must understand from the start that trying to change us is out of bounds. Those who nevertheless try to proselytize among us are asked to leave.

Perhaps the same should go for politically evangelical Reform Jews like Rick Jacobs?

Posted in American Jews, Israeli Politics, Israeli Society | 3 Comments

Who’s appropriating whom?

Posted on November 27, 2017 by Victor Rosenthal
"Hebrew Liberation" banner at Columbia University.

“Hebrew Liberation” banner at Columbia University.

Sick and tired of “Israel Apartheid Week” and other projects to demonize and delegitimize the Jewish state, some Columbia University students have established “Hebrew Liberation Week” during which they emphasize Jewish peoplehood and the Jewish connection to the land.

One of the exhibits (which was placed near the “apartheid wall” built by Students for Justice in Palestine) showed a Jew wearing a tallit standing together with other indigenous people in their traditional outfits. The idea, of course, was to drive home the point that the Jews are indigenous to the Land of Israel, and not “settler-colonialists” as the progressive gospel insists.

But the sight infuriated a new professor at Columbia, Gil Hochberg. Hochberg, who is in some sense Jewish, previously taught Comparative Literature and Gender Studies (of course!) at UCLA, and received her doctorate from UC Berkeley. And she was outraged.

There is, of course, nothing wrong in suggesting an alliance between Jews and Indigenous people, and in the context of Jews living in Europe and elsewhere as “inside outsiders” and as part of internal European colonization (too much has been written about “The Jewish Question” for me to summarize here) it indeed makes sense to compare and point out similarities between the position of Jews as a fragile minority and the position of other oppressed groups, like the indigenous, colonized, enslaved, and more. However, placing such images underneath the Israeli flag makes them, at best, tasteless depictions of a pseudo alliance. Suggesting, as the posters do, that Jews have been driven out of their land (like indigenous people) and have finally returned to Israel–a trajectory that all indigenous people should unite behind–is a crude and cynical manipulation of (Jewish) history and a vulgar fabrication that not only makes no sense, but is also offensive in its use and abuse of indigenous peoples’ histories of oppression. (my emphasis)

What is crude, cynical or fabricated here? Jews are indigenous to the Land of Israel, were driven out “like indigenous people,” and did – unlike so many indigenous groups – succeed in reestablishing a sovereign state in their historical home.

The real fabrication is the tendentious Palestinian narrative. Do I need to remind readers yet again that the ones trying to steal the Jewish historical narrative – the real “cultural appropriators” – are the so-called “Palestinians,” most of whom are descended from late-19th or 20th century migrants? And that even the few that could trace their patrimony back to the 7th century Muslim conquest are, after all, descended from foreign colonialist invaders? And that the Palestinian story of Jewish ethnic cleansing is mostly false? And that the Palestinian Arabs and their allies fully intended to finish Hitler’s genocide of the Jewish people and were only prevented by hard-fought Jewish victories in 1948 and 1967? And that the “Palestinians” have no unique language, religion, or common place of origin, and have only even considered themselves a people since the 1960s? The essence of their peoplehood, that which separates them from other Arabs and makes them uniquely Palestinian, is just their commitment to eternal hatred for and confrontation with Israel!

Hochberg would probably say, following Edward Said, that the Jews don’t “belong” in the Middle East. Yes, it’s true that the Jewish people – some of them – underwent a process of Westernization which made them think somewhat like Europeans (although Jews who lived in the Middle East today comprise about half of Israel’s population). Regardless, the Jewish people did not lose their right to their historical homeland because of this.

Consider the Maori people of New Zealand: do they have aboriginal rights to their homeland that the Jewish people do not have to theirs? Why aren’t Jews like native Americans? Does success in defending oneself against genocide and achieving sovereignty void a people’s rights?

Pictures of dark-skinned Israelis particularly outraged Hochberg:

As a bold background to the blue and white kaffiyehs being sold on location, there were posters covering the plaza, inundated with images of Brown and Black people and proud Israeli soldiers: Asians (children of mainly Filipin@ guest workers who became Israeli citizens and “won” the opportunity to serve in the Israeli army), Ethiopian Jews, Bedouins, and overtly joyful Druze. If yesterday’s message was that the Israeli army is welcoming of gays*, today’s message is that the IDF is a place where Brown, Black, African, and Arab people all feel happy. Together.

In addition to the soldiers, there are images of Arab-Jews (Mizrahim) who must not be forgotten, not again. Images of Yemeni families, perhaps making their way to the Promised Land, are shown on other banners.

Here we see the vacuous circular reasoning so beloved by those who have been forced to replace the racial Jew-hatred of the Nazis with the more abstract but equally irrational and obsessive hatred of the Jewish state. Why can’t Israeli tolerance for LGBT people be an argument for Israel being a progressive, tolerant state? Because, they insist, it isn’t a progressive, tolerant state. Why can’t there be dark-skinned, non-Ashkenazi Jews as well as Druze, Bedouins and others who identify with the state of Israel strongly enough to serve in the IDF? Because, they insist, Israel is a racist, apartheid Ashkenazi-ruled state.

The truth, that Israel is populated by all kinds of people who are not alienated from their society and not suffering from endemic racism; that many Ashkenazim, Mizrahim (emphatically not “Arab-Jews”), Ethiopians, Druze and others, like each other and are friends; that many Israeli soldiers, Druze included, actually are overtly joyful from time to time, is simply too much for the social-justice-warrior conceptual scheme espoused by Hochberg and her ilk.

So they simply preserve their ideology by denying the evidence of their eyes.

Posted in Academia, Post-Zionism | Comments Off on Who’s appropriating whom?

Paying for peace

Posted on November 23, 2017 by Victor Rosenthal

The most basic rule in dealing with the Saudis and their friends is that Israel must not feel that it has to pay anything for peace, anything at all. Nothing. Zilch. Zero. Nada. – Dr. Mordechai Kedar

Dr. Kedar is talking about Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states, but this is true for all of Israel’s foreign relations. So many times when dealing with Europe, the US, and of course Arab countries, agreements are made contingent on concessions on the “Palestinian issue.” And what does that mean? Usually it implies acceptance to some degree of the “Palestinian narrative,” namely that we Jews came along and dispossessed the “native” Palestinian Arabs, and now if we want to be left alone (never mind being treated like a normal nation and not the spawn of Satan) we need to make it up to them. Often the concessions demanded lead directly to the destruction of our state, but hey, the Jews lived so happily as a  Diaspora in the Christian and Muslim spheres for thousands of years, so why would that be a problem?

Enough. As Ben-Dror Yemini shows in his impressive but depressing new book, Industry of Lies: Media, Academia and the Israeli-Arab Conflict, demonization of Israel is pervasive. It is everywhere, it is irrational, it feeds on itself and it is effective. Ultimately everyone who studies in a university, a grade school, a high school or even a kindergarten has it explained to them that Israel is a uniquely evil enterprise that tortures and murders Palestinians, keeping them under a system of apartheid until they can be killed by the ongoing genocide.

So naturally, everyone, even if they are Israeli, thinks it is perfectly OK to demand that we give up to the Palestinians what we “owe” them, and maybe even a little more as punishment for the pain and suffering we’ve inflicted.

As I said, enough. Israelis, at least, should be capable of standing up for the truth, not to mention their own survival. Especially when the falsity of the accusations against Israel are self-evidently false: Yemini discusses “genocide” claims, including a particularly egregious one by Israeli academic Yitzhak Laor, who published an article in the London Review of Books including a statement that “gas chambers are not the only way to destroy a nation, it is enough to develop high rates of infant mortality.” But publicly available data show that Palestinian infant mortality dropped from between 152-162 per thousand births in 1967 to between 53-63 in 1985 and less than 20 in 2014. Palestinian life expectancy at birth has gone from 49 to 76 since 1967, and the Arab population of Judea, Samaria and Gaza has at least tripled since 1970. Genocide indeed!

Other accusations are logically inconsistent, not even needing empirical data to refute them. One of the well known ones is “pinkwashing,” the idea that Israel’s tolerance of LGBT people cannot be used as evidence for Israel’s overall liberal, tolerant behavior, including toward Palestinians – because Israel oppresses Palestinians. Could an argument be more circular?

One can’t forget the famous master’s thesis by Tal Nitzan at Hebrew University, which generated a storm of astonished criticism 10 years ago, when she received a high grade and a prize for a paper that claimed that the fact that IDF soldiers did not rape Palestinian women implied that Israeli Jews are racists who don’t find Arabs attractive! Leaving aside the fact that there has been an Arab Miss Israel (Rana Raslan, 1999) and that an Arab woman won the popular Israeli singing competition “The Voice” (Lina Makhoul, 2013), the argument illustrates a misunderstanding of the nature of military rape (which is about power and subjugation, not attractiveness) in addition to being, well, just blindingly stupid.

A great deal of the political discourse about Israel is based on premises which, while not so obviously false as Tal Nitzan’s thesis, are simply made up. Every day “journalists” around the world (especially in Israel) make up stories which are either completely false, biased, contextless, or exaggerated, and which cast Israel in an ugly light. Gideon Levy and Amira Hass of Ha’aretz are tireless masters of the art form. And anything ugly about Israel is immediately accepted as true by the hundreds of millions of people on this earth – I don’t think this is an exaggeration – who must believe that Israel is far more evil than Hitler was.

Political leaders, presidents, popes, prime ministers and EU officials are not immune, as we saw when President Obama and Pope Francis repeated Hamas-sourced accusations about child casualties in Gaza, or when then-EU Parliament President Martin Schultz parroted falsehoods about Israel keeping water from Palestinians.

Along with the continued demonization, there is also the suggestion that Israel’s very statehood is illegitimate, a colonial enterprise that should be undone, like white minority rule in Zimbabwe or South Africa. We are told that if we want “peace,” we need to surrender like the whites in what used to be Rhodesia did, although in our case there is a Jewish majority. But, no problem – that is precisely what would be achieved by implementing a Palestinian “right of return” for millions of descendents of “refugees,” many of whom were migrants who came to Mandate Palestine as late as 1946 before fleeing the war that the Arabs started. After all, that would be “justice,” because they are “colonized” and we are “colonizers.” Never mind that there is no precedent for any such “right” in modern history.

No, it wouldn’t be justice, and we don’t need “peace” on these terms, not with Saudi Arabia, not with the EU that is placing identification badges  on goods from the “settlements” that it speciously calls “illegal,” not with the PLO – which should never have been crowned “legitimate representative of the Palestinian people” in the first place – and not with the UN Human Rights Commission, which apparently is about to release a blacklist of companies to boycott who do business across the Green Line.

All of these entities see us as less than legitimate, not even the “normal” state that Herzl longed for, but far lower than normal. They project their own dark history – imagine, Europeans calling us “colonialists” and Arabs accusing us of racism and ethnic cleansing! – and they pretend that they’ll let us live if we repent from our “crimes” and compensate our “victims.”

The Gulf states, led by the Saudis, want something from us today: to stop Iran’s march across the region. Tomorrow the West may need something – you laugh, but look at the direction Europe is going. Whatever any of them offer, we should demand in return an end to their abusive treatment, including a true end to the academic incitement that governments allow to pass and even fund. And they can stop it if they want to: anti-Israel academics are whores – watch their fervor evaporate with their grants. If countries can make it illegal to use the “wrong” pronoun, they can stop the demonization of Israel in their schools.

That’s part of what we should get. And what we should pay in return?

Other than our contributions to science, technology, medicine and the arts – that we would freely give them anyway – nothing. Zilch. Zero. Nada.

Posted in Information war, Jew Hatred, Middle East politics | 2 Comments

Rick Jacobs and his MLK complex

Posted on November 21, 2017 by Victor Rosenthal

Rabbi Rick Jacobs of the Union for Reform Judaism was seven years old when Martin Luther King was arrested in Birmingham, so he is unlikely to have participated in the American civil rights movement. But he is making it up in spades by orchestrating a “civil rights movement” in Israel that includes a high-profile struggle over control of the Western Wall, as well as trying to introduce American social justice warrior concepts into Israeli discourse.

Last week, Jacobs and the head of the Israeli Reform Movement, Rabbi Gilad Kariv, took part in the monthly event in which the Women of the Wall pray, sing and dance with Torah scrolls. The Orthodox authorities that manage the site provide scrolls for Orthodox men, but do not allow women to carry them, nor do they allow mixed-gender groups to pray. Jacobs and friends pushed their way into the site while hapless security guards tried to prevent them from doing so without hurting them.

Let me interject that I personally don’t believe in sex-segregated prayer or some of the customary limitations on women that have accrued in Orthodox Judaism. But the fact is that the Western Wall is treated as an Orthodox synagogue, with an Orthodox rabbi, Shmuel Rabinovich, in charge. There are rules which they try to enforce, and obviously when someone deliberately violates them there will be friction.

This is not helped by the unofficial “enforcers,” Haredi men who insult the worshippers and try to interfere with them, and women who blow whistles and shriek (video) in order to drown out the women’s prayers (their tactics are reminiscent of Muslims on the Temple Mount who make the visits of Jews as unpleasant as possible).

Jacobs clearly sees himself as the Jewish Martin Luther King Jr., and would like nothing more than to get arrested on behalf of his struggle. But there is almost nothing in common between the civil rights movement of the 1960s and Jacob’s attempts to provoke confrontations at one of Judaism’s holiest sites. For one thing, the demands of the minuscule fraction of the Jewish population of Israel who identify with non-Orthodox Judaism – many of whom are transplants from America – to pray in their fashion at the Wall can’t possibly be compared to the discrimination in public accommodation, employment and education that the black population of Birmingham faced in 1963. It’s embarrassing to watch him try.

This is not to say that Israelis are happy with the Haredi (“ultra-Orthodox”) domination of the state-supported Rabbinate, which controls marriage, divorce, burials and kashrut supervision, or the way the Haredi parties use their balance of power in the government to reach their narrow goals – often to the detriment of the society in general. They aren’t, and this includes many Israelis who identify as “religious.” But mixed-gender prayer or women reading from the Torah at the Wall are not among the issues they care about, and neither is government support for non-Orthodox synagogues.

Jacobs, who often refers to himself as the representative of the largest non-Orthodox  Jewish denomination in the world, believes that the Wall and other Jewish sites and perhaps the state of Israel itself belong to the Jewish people as a whole, and therefore he has many votes in its management. Orthodox Jews tend to respond that he and his movement practice a religion other than Judaism, and therefore he has no votes at all. This isn’t an argument that’s amenable to compromise (my own view is that Jews of any denomination who don’t live in Israel tend to be massively ignorant about the state and everything connected with it, and for that reason should not be able to influence its policies).

Nevertheless, Jacobs surely knows enough about the beliefs and attitudes of Orthodox Jews to understand that no matter how hard he pushes, they will not compromise on the recognition of non-Orthodox Judaism. The carefully-worked out compromise that would have provided a special area next to the traditional Western Wall Plaza for mixed-gender prayer foundered primarily on the part that called for Reform and Conservative representatives on a committee that would govern the operation of the site. They might as well have asked for Muslim, Christian and Satanist representation. When the wider Haredi community found out about it, they forced the Haredi political parties that had already agreed to the compromise to back out.

Yet Jacobs continues to provoke confrontations and make demands. Part of the reason is his MLK complex, but another part is that the continued conflict itself serves several less-obvious purposes.

One of them is to embarrass the government and the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Although the Western Wall compromise was not implemented because of Haredi opposition – the Haredi parties threatened to bring down the government if it were – the groups that favor it always blame Netanyahu, saying that he “reneged” on the deal or even that he “betrayed” them. Did they expect him to shut down the country and call new elections because of their hurt feelings?

Rick Jacobs and much of the Reform Movement that he leads, more so than ever before, has moved to the left politically. Many Reform rabbis are members of J Street, the supposedly “pro-Israel, pro-peace” movement that takes many anti-Israel positions and supports the most anti-Israel members of the US Congress. Jacobs was forced to drop his position on J Street’s rabbinic cabinet when he was chosen to head the Reform Movement, as well as his seat on the board of the New Israel Fund, which supports numerous anti-Israel causes. The Reform association of rabbis, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, even decided to take no position on President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. Is it any wonder, then, that Reform would like to see Netanyahu in trouble?

It is also a fact that the Reform Movement in America, like many religious institutions, has been losing members and income recently. One of Jacobs’ strategies to reverse this trend seems to be to emphasize “social action” in order to energize younger Jews, who are much more drawn to it than to traditional ritual and life cycle programming. Part of this social action is directed at Israel, which the movement’s Israeli arm suggests is becoming undemocratic, theocratic and racist. Only intervention by America’s social justice experts can save it.

Needless to say, anyone who knows anything about the realities of life in Israel and Israel’s position in the Middle East understands that this is nonsense, propaganda of the tiny extreme left wing in Israeli politics.

Rick Jacobs is not likely to succeed in making changes at the Western Wall. In fact, his confrontational approach may actually hurt the Reform Movement in Israel. But it is doing a great job in making American Jews angry, and causing them to withdraw their support from Israel.

Maybe that’s part of the idea.

Posted in American Jews | 1 Comment

Urgent advice to my fellow Jews

Posted on November 17, 2017 by Victor Rosenthal

Right now, today, is a critical point in Jewish history. Maybe you don’t think so, because it’s easy to be distracted by the small stuff. But we need to step back and look at the forest instead of the trees.

Israel, a Jewish state reborn after almost two millennia, is facing a real threat to its survival – perhaps as great or greater than at any time since 1948. The threat is from Iran, which a) has taken control of Lebanon and built a massive rocket and missile installation aimed at our critical infrastructure, b) has achieved strategic dominance of critical territory in Iraq and Syria, will soon have its own troops and proxy militias on our Syrian border as well (with the acquiescence of the US and Russia), and c) either already has or could presently have nuclear weapons.

Iran’s enmity to Israel is a result of religious dogma, and of Iran’s determination to dominate the Mideast and become a world superpower by defeating the US. In the past few years it has moved steadily toward its strategic goals, which include eliminating the Jewish state that it sees as both an outpost of the US and the major obstacle to its local ambitions.

Some day historians will ask why an American president, Barack Obama, did so much to help one of America’s most dangerous enemies – and also to hurt the Jewish people. But that’s not my subject today.

At the same time that the Iranian threat grows, there is a pandemic of Jew-hatred spreading throughout the world. Europe at times seems to have regressed to pre-WWII conditions or worse, with Jews caught between re-empowered right-wing Jew-baiting, fierce Islamic hatred, and left-wing “intersectional” antisemitism. Similar phenomena exist in the US, although less severe so far – except possibly on university campuses.

But while some European Jews are starting to worry about their future, in America and in  Israel – where they absolutely should know better – they are acting irrationally, busying themselves  with trivia or even doing exactly the opposite of what’s needed to ensure their survival and that of the Jewish state and people.

To European Jews – and here I include the UK – I have a simple message: get out. The natives don’t like you (they never did, as Herzl noticed), and Islamification is proceeding apace. It can’t get better, only worse. I would like to see you make aliyah, but I understand the economic realities, and also the risk from the coming Mideast war. This is a decision you will have to make yourselves.

The US and Canada together have about half the world’s Jews, 90% of these are non-Orthodox, and the majority of them don’t have a clue about Jewish history or the Jewish state and the conflicts and issues surrounding it. They are geographically far from the Middle East, and can’t read Jewish texts or anything else in Hebrew. For most of them, their Judaism has become attenuated and even replaced by a form of liberal humanism that makes them blind to the dangers they face and drives them away from the Jewish state.  For these Jews I have several messages, depending on which of several groups they fall into.

To the supporters of J Street, Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, the New Israel Fund, and so on: if you still have positive feelings about the Jewish people, please believe me that you are not doing it any favors, and find some other cause – helping the homeless in your own country is a good one – that will allow you to feel good about yourself without hurting your people.

To those who think that it is their duty to make Israel a better place by activism on behalf of Jewish pluralism, improving the treatment of our Arab citizens, protecting the rights of illegal immigrants or Palestinians, or even promoting the (impossible) “two-state solution:” please understand that you know less than nothing about these issues; and the fact that your parents were Jewish does not give you the right to intervene in our affairs. If you want to change things here, then make aliyah, vote, and send your kids to the army. Otherwise leave us alone.

To those that think that they are making things better by engaging in interfaith dialogue with Muslims, fighting “Islamophobia,” and favoring increased immigration from Muslim countries, you are being used. Don’t complain when the US and Canada have the same problems as Europe.

And now some suggestions for my fellow Israelis, for whom ignorance is not an excuse.

If you are the Prime Minister  you should be meeting with the Chief of Staff and insisting that he develop a plan and a timetable to fight and win the inevitable war with Iran and its proxies. Waiting to see what will happen and then responding is not a strategy for victory: preemption is.

If you are the Minister of Defense, in addition to assisting in planning for the unavoidable war, you should be directing massive resources toward strengthening the home front, especially in the north of the country, which will bear the brunt of Hezbollah’s 130,000 rockets when war breaks out.

If you are the police commissioner, you should investigate the seditious publisher of Ha’aretz Amos Schocken, his poison-pen writer Gideon Levy, or the arguably treasonous Breaking the Silence organization, rather than engaging in politically-motivated harassment of the Prime Minister and his wife.

If you are a Member of the Knesset, you should ask yourself whether the “status quo” concerning whether markets should be open on Shabbat in Tel Aviv is really a question that is worthy of your time right now.

The world and especially the region that we live in is undergoing great strategic shifts, and their direction is not to our advantage. It seems as though events are driven according to the plans of Iran and Russia, and we are playing defense.

Israel is a powerful country, but one with little strategic depth or capacity to absorb a surprise attack. The coming war promises to be extremely destructive, both for us and for our opponents. In addition to conventional warfare, it will see cyber attacks and possibly the use of electromagnetic pulse weapons.  Even the employment of nuclear weapons by one or both sides is not unimaginable.

Israel must be ready to win the “kinetic” war, the cyber battles, and the psychological warfare that will come along with them, while protecting her population and infrastructure. Not an easy task – but one that requires focus and unity of purpose. There are few obvious signs of this.

Of course I don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes. Maybe the PM is sitting with the Chief of Staff every day (after his regular police interrogation). Maybe they are working to ensure adequate shelters for the population in the north of the country. Maybe Schocken is planning to close his “newspaper” and move to Germany.

Most importantly, maybe the courageous decision has finally been made to launch a preemptive attack and not wait for thousands of rockets to fall.

Posted in Iran, Israeli Politics, Jew Hatred, War | 2 Comments

Is the US worried about the security of its radar installation?

Posted on November 13, 2017 by Victor Rosenthal

This happened in September:

TEL AVIV, Israel — U.S. and Israeli officers broke ground in Israel on Monday for a permanent U.S. Army base that will house dozens of U.S. soldiers, operating under the American flag, and charged with the mission of defending against rocket and missile attack.

The American base, officers in Israel say, will be an independent facility co-located at the Israel Defense Forces Air Defense School in southern Israel, near the desert capital of Beersheba. Once completed, the base will house U.S. operational systems to identify and intercept a spectrum of aerial threats, along with barracks, recreational and other facilities required to support several dozen American air defenders. …

According to [IAF Brig. Gen. Tzvika] Haimovich, the co-located, permanent U.S. presence will enhance Israel’s ability to detect and defend against the growing rocket and missile threat. “The purpose of their presence is not for training or for exercises, but rather as part of a joint Israeli and American effort to sustain and enhance our defensive capabilities.” …

In his briefing to reporters, Haimovich said the IDF has been working with its U.S. counterparts for nearly two years to establish the new facility. He emphasized that the American presence “would not hamper the IDF‘s ability to act independently against any threat to the security of the State of Israel.”

Israel has had an American X-band radar installation on Har Keren, not far from the location of the new “base,” for nine years. The unit, which is operated and guarded by US personnel, is off-limits to Israelis. The IDF does not have direct access to the data it produces, which is first sent to California where it is analyzed. Of course, the Americans have promised to let Israel know right away about any incoming missiles! The radar is technically capable of extremely high resolution, able to track ballistic missiles in their “terminal” phase, when they are descending. But it also has the ability to track missiles in their launch phase – or aircraft taking off. More about this later.

Haimovich’s statement implied that the new facility will add new “operational systems” to “identify and intercept” threats in addition to providing housing and other facilities for the US personnel who operate them. But the next day, the US European Command, which operates the radar, claimed that  there was nothing new about it except the American flag. The “base” was no more than a new barracks for the radar operators and guards.

But back to the radar itself. When it was installed some Israeli defense officials complained that it was too good, able to see even a small drone taking off anywhere in Israel. Israel would have no secrets from its powerful partner. An unnamed Israeli official referred to it as “golden handcuffs.” In 2012, Time Magazine noted that

The workaday reality of the U.S. radar — it has been operating since 2009 — also undercuts the notion of Israel launching a surprise attack on Iran that would also take Washington unawares. Not only does it see all traffic at Israeli air bases, it would certainly detect any large scale or other unusual patterns, including preparations for a massive air assault. Allowing the Americans that capability was a trade-off Israeli officials conceded only grudgingly, as TIME reported when the radar installation was announced in 2008.

It’s been revealed that Israel was close to launching an attack on the Iranian nuclear program late in 2012, which was strongly opposed by the Obama Administration. It seems reasonable to believe that part of the reason Israel decided not to go ahead anyway was that it would be impossible to keep the Americans from finding out about it, even before the start of the operation.

Although President Trump and his close associates seem to be far more understanding of Israel’s security concerns than Obama – who in my opinion was personally in the anti-Israel camp and was only restrained from expressing his beliefs explicitly by political considerations – there are elements in the permanent bureaucracy of the CIA and State Department that would be happy to see Israel disappear.

In any event, recent incidents like the theft of sensitive cyber-warfare code from the NSA show that no data anywhere is totally safe. If information about an Israeli preemptive strike were to fall into the hands of her enemies, it might allow them to take defensive measures or even – in the case of Iran or Hezbollah –  to launch a massive rocket barrage before their launchers were hit. This could cost thousands of Israeli lives.

No matter how much Israel trusts its American partners, this isn’t a risk she can afford to take. I am probably not the only one who thinks that it will be necessary for Israel to somehow neutralize the X-band radar before beginning any large-scale operation against Iran, Hezbollah or even Hamas in Gaza.

Tension in the region today is probably the highest it’s been since the end of the Second Lebanon War in 2006. And this leads me to speculate about the purpose of the new American installation being built in Israel. Is it really no more than a new barracks for existing personnel?

The 120 American radar operators and guards are not sleeping in tents now – they’ve been here since 2008. So perhaps the new building is intended to provide living quarters for additional troops.

Perhaps the Americans feel that there are not enough guards on site to prevent the IDF from seizing and shutting down the radar in an emergency. But beefing up security at the site itself would draw attention to their concern. So the solution is to garrison some troops nearby that could rush to its defense if necessary.

It’s interesting that Brig. Gen. Haimovich felt the need to emphasize that this wouldn’t interfere with Israel’s self defense (which of course it does), and that they had been working on it for two years (don’t ask why now).

And it’s just as interesting that the US European Command wanted to make as little fuss about it as possible. And that there’s been nothing in the news about it since September.

Nothing to see here, folks. You can go about your business. Move along.

Posted in US-Israel Relations | 1 Comment

Zionism and ‘Lennonism’

Posted on November 9, 2017 by Victor Rosenthal

Who among us wouldn’t – doesn’t – prioritize the well-being of members of one’s own immediate family above others? Other things being equal, if one has a chance to help a family member or a non-member (but not both), then one will choose the family member. Or, in other words, being a family member is a factor that has significant weight in decisions about whom to favor when one is forced to make a choice.

This behavior has probably developed in response to evolutionary pressures over millennia. Discussions of precisely how and why and its relationship to altruistic behavior (helping another person even if it is not to one’s advantage) are complicated, but there is no doubt that it is almost universal among humans. It can be called nepotism, to broaden the common meaning of the term.

In many cases nepotism extends beyond family to include members of extended families, tribes and even nations. The phenomenon is called ethnic nepotism. It’s argued that this preference is also caused by evolutionary pressures, both on individuals and groups.

But how far does it extend? Apparently that varies a great deal among groups and individuals. Clan loyalties, for example, are important to Arabs. Broader national loyalty – patriotism – characterizes certain groups of Americans or Europeans, but by no means all.

In addition to the intuitive feeling of affinity for members of the relevant groups, there is also the influence of ideology. This takes place at a higher level of consciousness than intuition. So a person can believe that he should prefer members of a particular group. Alternatively, he can believe that it is morally wrong to do so, and suppress any intuitive feelings to the contrary.

I call the ideological position opposed to ethnic nepotism Lennonism (not a misspelling!) Lennonists believe in part that ethnic or religious preferences are the root cause of human misery, and that if we could overcome them, everyone could be “living life in peace.” Lennonism is opposed to borders and even private property.

Lennonism appeals almost entirely to people in developed societies who are unlikely to have had the pleasure of being attacked through inadequately fortified borders by members of other ethnic groups in order to kill or enslave them and steal their private property. Lennonism is thus most popular in Western Europe and North America than in places with a more recent memory of instability.

The Jewish people meet all the criteria for a distinct nation – self-identification, a common origin, a unique language and religion, cultural similarities, and more. Many Jews feel their Jewish identity – their connection to the Jewish people – very strongly. However, in the US, where a majority of those of Jewish descent have either become completely secular, or adopted an attenuated form of Jewish observance without maintaining a knowledge of their language, their ethnic connection has weakened also.

Many US Jews, even if they haven’t adopted a Lenonnist point of view and see themselves as “world citizens,” consider themselves primarily American and only secondarily Jewish. If they do have intuitive feelings of ethnic nepotism, they choose to suppress them, consciously or subconsciously.

This suppression of ethnic feeling is necessary for survival in a culture which is ready to accuse Jews of disloyalty if they place their Jewish identity above their American one. This perhaps explains the distaste for Zionism among many American Jews. They understand, on some level, that they are living in a nation which does not belong to them, and at any moment they can become personae non gratae. Zionists who suggest that Jews should care strongly about Israel – a foreign country – endanger all American Jews, who can be tarred by the brush of disloyalty.

This points precisely to the difficulty faced by the Diaspora Jew. Even if he does feel a pull to identify strongly with his people, he is unable to express it without endangering his status in the overwhelmingly non-Jewish society.

Some Jews deal with it by insisting that their Jewishness is entirely religious in nature: Americans of the Jewish persuasion. But anybody who pays attention to the weekly Torah readings understands the true importance of Eretz Israel in Judaism.

Others redefine Judaism. They understand Biblical injunctions to treat your Jewish neighbors and the ger that lives alongside you as you would treat yourself to refer to all humankind. In effect, they claim that Judaism is Lennonism. But there is no textual support for this, and anyone who tries to take it seriously soon finds out. Judaism cannot be Lennonism.

Some simply define themselves as Americans of Jewish extraction and leave it at that.

And sometimes, the tension brings about a violent rejection of the Jewish people and their state, and drives American Jews into the arms of anti-Zionist groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now.

The fact is that Jewish nationalism or Zionism is a perfectly natural ideology for a Jew to adopt, regardless of where he lives.

If it becomes uncomfortable where you are, well, that’s why there is a Jewish state.

Posted in American Jews, The Jewish people, Zionism | 2 Comments

Keeping the Jewish State

Posted on November 6, 2017 by Victor Rosenthal

Uri Avnery, the grand old man of the Israeli Left, recently wrote that with the establishment of the State of Israel, Zionism had lost its utility and even its meaning.

Zionism, as is commonly known, was born as a term at the end of the 19th century and came to express a perfectly simple idea – to take the Jews out of the Diaspora and concentrate them in the Land of Israel. It was indeed a revolutionary idea – a geographic revolution that was inevitably an ideological revolution: turning the Jews from an ethno-religious community dispersed around the world into a modern “nation” concentrated in one country, in the spirit of nationalism that was intensifying in Europe. …

From Herzl’s point of view, the term “American Zionist” is an oxymoron, an absurd contradiction in terms. To him, a Jewish American could be a Zionist for a few months, but to stay one he had to board a ship heading for Ottoman Palestine. This Zionism, the real Zionism, of Herzl’s came to an end with Israel’s establishment as a state. The idea had been realized. Israel’s citizens are a nation, as he dreamed. Like every nation they want their state to thrive, while the Jews throughout the world remain an ethno-religious community, as they were before the birth of Zionism. …

In this day, in this reality, the Zionist brand is unnecessary and a hindrance. It’s confusing and serves as a tool for politicians who seek to extort money and political support from Jews around the world. It’s a false brand misused for fraud.

In a different world, this might make sense. In a world where Israel was treated like the “normal” nation Herzl aspired to, we could dispense with Zionism. Do Italian-Americans in New York argue about whether they support the Risorgimento? Nobody today thinks there should not be a unified state of Italy (except perhaps some jihadists who want to conquer Rome).

But we did not achieve normalcy. Despite a pedigree in historical provenance and international law that is matched by almost no modern nation, half the world thinks that the creation of the state was a crime, and much of it would be happy to see it disappear. Zionism today is the ideology that insists that not only is it just that there is a Jewish state, but that it is essential for the survival of the Jewish people and must be protected. The Zionist revolution that Avnery talks about has not been completely realized, and perhaps never will – not because of the Jews who demanded self-determination, but because of those who have never stopped fighting to deny it to them.

Israel feels like a normal nation from within, with political quarrels, social issues, popular culture, and of course the day-to-day activity of trying to make a living and raise a family. But from without – in the halls of the UN and the countless organizations, governments, media, and places of evil council where she is seen as a pariah which should not exist, she is anything but normal. Nazi ideas about the corrupt and corrupting Jew have been moved up one level of abstraction, and are now applied to the Jewish state. Plans to weaken and ultimately destroy her are pursued in numerous venues, sometimes by mutual enemies who could never find anything else to agree upon.

Against Avnery, I would say that Zionism is an international movement to oppose the forces arrayed against the Jewish state, something both meaningful and useful – even essential. It did not end when the state was declared; thanks to our enemies, Zionism is a continuing struggle.

It therefore makes perfect sense that someone living in Los Angeles can be a Zionist even if he doesn’t choose to live in Eretz Israel.

Benjamin Franklin, when asked if the new United States of America would be a republic or a monarchy, answered, “a republic – if you can keep it.”

After several thousand years, the Jewish people again have a nation-state – if they can keep it.

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