The real crisis of racism in Israel

Posted on August 28, 2017 by Victor Rosenthal

The strategy of the US Reform Movement along with home-grown leftists to introduce an American-style obsession with “racism” into Israeli consciousness shows just how far from understanding regional reality these people are.

The movement’s Israel Religious Action Center (IRAC) plans to document incidents of racism in Israel and sue the perpetrators in court, following the model of the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center in the US, which – despite illegitimately multiplying the numbers of right-wing “hate” groups, counting Christian, conservative, and anti-jihad groups and individuals as “hate groups” or “extremists,” and minimizing or ignoring Islamic, black and left-wing extremism – has managed to get itself treated as an authoritative arbiter of who should be denied a platform to speak, or even silenced by the removal of Internet services.

Let’s look at the list of groups in Israel that IRAC claims are victims of racism, and whose members it asks to report incidents of racism by telephone hotline or web form:

The Racism Crisis Center will provide support in cases of discrimination, hate speech, and hate crimes against minority populations, and collect data on the growing phenomenon of racism in Israel. The center provides support to victims of all backgrounds: Arab[s], Ethiopian Jews, Russian Jews, Mizrahi Jews, asylum seekers and migrant workers, and provides services in Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, Amharic and English [my emphasis].

The first thing we notice is that apparently IRAC accepts the pernicious definition of ‘racism’ that is lately popular on the Left: racism = bigotry + privilege. According to this definition, it is impossible for a member of an oppressed group to be a racist, because no matter how bigoted oppressed individuals may be, they don’t have power to oppress. This explains the second thing that we notice in the statement above, which is that the list doesn’t include “Jews” without qualification.

In Leftyworld, privilege and oppression are relative. A logical consequence of accepting the definition of racism above is that a hierarchy of oppression is created in which an oppressed person can only be victimized by the racism of a more “privileged” one. So if a Mizrachi Jew beats up an Arab, that is considered a racist hate crime; but when an Arab stabs a Jew the motive must be something else (the Arabs themselves call it “resistance”). Once you have the hierarchy you can use it for all kinds of things, such as who is allowed to speak and who is expected to be a silent “ally.”

Since all Jews, even Mizrachi, Russian or Ethiopian Jews, have more privilege than Arabs, there is no need for a category for racism against Jews. Jews qua Jews can’t complain of racism, unless the complainant is a member of one of the oppressed groups complaining about a more privileged person or group. And no, I don’t know whether Mizrachis or Russians are more oppressed.

This definition and the ideology that flows from it have created more racial hostility in the US than understanding or reconciliation. Bringing it to Israel is a terrible idea.

If we look at the basic difference between the “racial issue” here and in the US, we can see how blisteringly ignorant these people are of reality in Israel and the rest of the Middle East. Without the slightest doubt, the most common, blatant and vicious manifestation of racism in the region is Muslim Arab racism toward Jews.

Hate crimes by Arabs against Jews ranging from assault to mass murder are common. Jews are attacked on the roads with stones and firebombs, and stabbed on the streets. But there is also less deadly but equally humiliating behavior. Could there be a more classically apartheid-like phenomenon than the refusal to allow a Jewish child to drink (video) from a faucet that is used by Muslims to wash their hands? Isn’t it reminiscent of the Jim Crow American South when the police enforce racist rules?

The so-called “status quo” on the Temple Mount is a prime example of Muslim Arab racism. Arabs are free to come and go on the Mount, even to play football there, while Jews are required to go only in small groups, with specially humiliating treatment reserved for those who appear religious. The “president” of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, even publically stated that Jews have no right to “defile [the Mount] with their filthy feet.” If that isn’t racism, what is?

Consider also the racism inherent in a law that punishes Arabs (until recently a death-penalty offense) for selling land to Jews. Consider the opposition to Jews living in eastern Jerusalem, not to mention Judea and Samaria. Consider, finally, the opposition to Jewish sovereignty which is the essence of “Palestinian” identity, which has almost no other content. Simply put, Palestinianism is racism.

IRAC will probably say that none of that counts because Jews are a privileged majority in Israel. But only an artificial definition allows them to limit themselves to Jewish racism when murderous Arab racism is so prevalent and so much more severe. Why should they ignore the Muslim Arab racism that expelled Jews almost entirely from all of the Middle East, and is currently murdering and expelling Christians, and which suffuses the Palestinian population as well as many Arab citizens of Israel?

Here is what we should do: if you are a Jewish victim of Arab racism – if your car has been stoned, if Arabs tried to lynch you, if your home has been damaged by a Hamas rocket, or if you have been injured in a terror attack, go to the IRAC Racism Crisis Center website or call their hotline (1-700-704-408) and file a hate crimes complaint.

Even if your injuries are purely psychic, complain. Did you go up to the Temple Mount and have the police treat you like a criminal? Do you find the weekly sermons by imams at mosques all over the country in which they describe Jews as descendents of apes and pigs insulting? Do the maps published by the Palestinian Authority which erase Israel make you feel “unsafe?” Call the hotline or fill out the form.

IRAC’s campaign is a radically distorted inversion of reality, a denial of what should be visible to anyone with eyes. Let’s show them the real nucleus of race hatred in the Middle East.

Posted in Israel and Palestinian Arabs, Israeli Society | 4 Comments

A non-solution to a non-crisis

Posted on August 25, 2017 by Victor Rosenthal

If you are an Israeli, do you feel smug that the neurotic politics of political correctness and victimology that lately are so prevalent in the USA are rare in Israel? Are you pleased to think that most Israelis are not obsessed with race the way Americans are?

If so, you will be sorry to hear that the folks that hijacked the Women of Wall and other internal Israeli controversies in order to depict Israel as undemocratic or worse have decided to bring the socio-political pathology of the US to our country.

The Israel Religious Action Center (IRAC), created and primarily funded by the American Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) has proudly announced the establishment of a “Racism Crisis Center” in Israel.

Did you know there was a crisis of racism here? I didn’t, and in fact it seems to me that racially-based conflict is much lower here than in the US and many other places.

You may be shocked by that statement. Isn’t Israel the conflict capital of the world? Yes and no.

Yes, the Palestinian Arabs led by Hamas and Fatah want to kill us and take our land. But this is ideologically and religiously-based racism on the Arab side. it’s remarkable how well Jewish Israelis get along with the Arabs that they come into contact with who do not espouse this ideology.

Of course there are exceptions. And one can say that given the violent expressions of hatred by the Palestinian Arabs, it is surprising that there aren’t more. There are issues of resource allocation to Arab municipalities, but there are also reasons for this having to do with their own municipal governance. In some areas – higher education, for example – Arab citizens arguably get preferential treatment. And of course Muslims are not required to do military service (they are permitted to volunteer). How many countries in the world can maintain a population that is 20% Muslim without violent civil conflict? Probably only Israel.

And yes, it is true that the police have behaved improperly toward Ethiopian immigrants. But unlike the persistent black underclass in the US, the Ethiopian Jews – who were brought to Israel to save them from famine and persecution rather than as slaves – have been undergoing the usual processes of acculturation of immigrants, and each generation is economically better off and has members in higher and higher status positions. Discrimination against them because of skin color exists to some extent, but is getting rarer every day. There is not and never has been anything that remotely resembles the discrimination against blacks in either the North or South of the US.

Other immigrants, like Mizrachim and Russians, have had and in some cases are still having problems integrating into the society. But these are normal immigrant problems which will be solved by the passage of time, not examples of endemic racism. These groups are well-represented in the Knesset and government, and more and more getting their share of the economic and social status pie.

Nevertheless, the director of IRAC, Anat Hoffman, thinks there is a crisis that needs to solved – by the introduction to Israel of the hierarchy of victimization that has so greatly increased the divisions in American society. In an email to supporters, she writes,

The Racism Crisis Center is modeled after the Southern Poverty Law Center, based in Montgomery, Alabama. Like the SPLC, IRAC will use litigation to protect the rights of minorities in Israel by elevating the voices of victims of racism and discrimination.

The Racism Crisis Center will provide support in cases of discrimination, hate speech, and hate crimes against minority populations, and collect data on the growing phenomenon of racism in Israel. The center provides support to victims of all backgrounds: Arab, Ethiopian Jews, Russian Jews, Mizrahi Jews, asylum seekers and migrant workers, and provides services in Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, Amharic and English.

Perhaps Hoffman is not aware of the criticism that has been leveled against the SPLC for its bias – it seems to see “hate groups” only on the right – its inflation of the number of “hate groups,” its use of lawsuits for intimidation of impecunious opponents, or for its shameless pursuit of cash. Or perhaps she is aware, and she sees all of these things as worth emulating.

One wonders if she will create a list of “hate groups” like that of the SPLC, and if it will include Hamas, Fatah, the Islamic Movement, and similar organizations? Will it list MK Haneen Zouabi as an extremist? Ayman Odeh?

The website of the “crisis center” provides an emergency hotline telephone number and an online form for reporting “hate crimes” and other incidents of racism. In addition to making it possible for someone to blacken the reputation of any individual or group instantaneously, it will provide a rich source for incidents that can be used by IRAC to impress its overseas donors, to produce “documentation” of its charge that Israel is being inundated by a “tide of bigotry” (Hoffman’s phrase), and maybe even – as is the case with the SPLC in the US – to be used to shut down right-wing voices. Will the Israeli branch of PayPal close the accounts of right-wing groups like Im Tirtzu as happened to the Jihad Watch website in the US?

Israel’s social problems can’t be solved by trying to fit them into a conceptual scheme that was developed in a different society in a different environment with totally different problems – and which failed miserably there, arguably making social divisions and conflicts worse. Non-Americans often look at the US with wonderment, unable to understand the obsession with race, the accusations of racism flying in all directions, the “litigizing” of every imaginable dispute, “intersectionality” and the creation of a hierarchy of victimization, and the excesses of political correctness. And this is precisely what Anat Hoffman and her bosses at the URJ want to introduce to Israel!

The URJ’s interests are not necessarily aligned with those of the Jewish state. It has consistently sided with the Left on the issue of the “peace process,” in spite of a total lack of understanding of the security situation here. It is closely associated with the Democratic Party in the US, and indeed couldn’t even bring itself to oppose Obama’s Iran deal. Many Reform rabbis are members of J Street, the phony “pro-Israel” organization that is supported by George Soros and even elements associated with Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. The head of the URJ, Rabbi Rick Jacobs, was a member of J Street’s Rabbinic Cabinet and a board member of the New Israel Fund before taking over the URJ. These are not the people we need to help save Israel from herself, either in our dealings with the Palestinians or our own social issues.

Despite her American education and connections, Anat Hoffman was born in Israel and lived most of her life here, so she should know better. But apparently she is being paid not to.

Posted in Israeli Society | 1 Comment

Hands off my free press!

Posted on August 20, 2017 by Victor Rosenthal

As the founding fathers of the US understood, limiting speech and expression is a slippery slope. The recent controversy about statues and other symbols is an example of how slippery. Confederate flags are offensive, so get rid of them. But what about statues of Robert E. Lee and other Confederate personalities? Also offensive, so tear them down too. Andrew Jackson was a racist and guilty of genocide, so take him off the US $20 bill. Woodrow Wilson was a segregationist who went to Princeton, and his name and likeness are all over it; erase him. As Trump pointed out, Washington and Jefferson owned slaves (and held viciously racist beliefs); should their pictures and statues be removed too? Where do you stop? And who decides?

How dare I agree with Trump about anything? Because this time he’s right. But although the removal of symbols is particularly ominous – to me, it reeks of the Taliban, of Stalinism, of 1984’s Ingsoc – the limitation of speech is more immediately dangerous. Events like the shouting down of Charles Murray by students at Middlebury College represent a growing trend in which certain ideas are considered sufficiently objectionable that it becomes acceptable to use force to prevent their expression.

I started my first blog because I had things to say that weren’t popular locally. No big deal, just that my Jewish friends mostly found Israel an embarrassment, while non-Jews thought my obsession with defending it was boring. One day I was reminded of this remark by newspaperman A. J. Liebling,

Freedom of the Press Is Guaranteed Only to Those Who Own One

and I decided to get my own “press.” The Internet made it possible. I couldn’t afford to buy a newspaper or a radio or TV station, and even if I could, I doubt that I could do what I wanted with it and stay in business. But a blog costs nothing and can reach hundreds, thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people.

Of course it’s not that easy, and I never achieved that degree of success. But I can say exactly what I want to say, and anyone who wants to read it can do so.

Unsurprisingly, the absolute freedom of the Internet has led to it being used for incitement to murder, invasion of privacy and other things which go far beyond the boundaries of legitimate speech. And even more unsurprisingly, those who want to shut up or shout down voices that they simply don’t like are using this fact as an excuse to impose their will on everyone.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), anything but a “conservative” organization, recently criticized three of the most influential companies providing internet services after they acted to take the neo-Nazi website “Daily Stormer” down:

In the wake of Charlottesville, both GoDaddy and Google have refused to manage the domain registration for the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website that, in the words of the Southern Poverty Law Center, is “dedicated to spreading anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism, and white nationalism.” Subsequently Cloudflare, whose service was used to protect the site from denial-of-service attacks, has also dropped them as a customer, with a telling quote from Cloudflare’s CEO: “Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power.” We agree.

Cloudflare’s CEO may have had regrets, but he didn’t shrink from using what he recognized as his excessive power. While it’s impossible to defend the Daily Stormer, we’re starting down the slippery slope here as well. EFF continues,

…we strongly believe that what GoDaddy, Google, and Cloudflare did here was dangerous. That’s because, even when the facts are the most vile, we must remain vigilant when platforms exercise these rights. Because Internet intermediaries, especially those with few competitors, control so much online speech, the consequences of their decisions have far-reaching impacts on speech around the world. And at EFF we see the consequences first hand: every time a company throws a vile neo-Nazi site off the Net, thousands of less visible decisions are made by companies with little oversight or transparency. [my emphasis]

I can personally attest to this. This blog, Abu Yehuda, is blocked by default by Sky, the second largest ISP in Britain (and probably the largest provider of mobile Internet services there). The reason given is content about “weapons.” As I pointed out to them, while I often write about things like Iranian or North Korean nuclear weapons, I don’t tell anyone how to construct them at home. But someone apparently found my message objectionable enough to complain, and Sky blocked the site. This has happened over and over to pro-Israel blogs, so either someone within the company is deliberately blocking these sites, or their procedures don’t include verifying complaints before taking action.

In a worrisome development, Google is partnering with several liberal organizations to help “document hate crimes and events.” This sounds reasonable, until you note that one of Google’s partners is the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which – according to Robert Spencer (not to be confused with neo-Nazi Richard Spencer!), has lumped together “groups such as Jihad Watch, [The American Freedom Defense Initiative], the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and the Center for Security Policy with the KKK and neo-Nazis.”

SPLC focuses very heavily on right-wing groups and goes easy on radical left-wing ones. While its “hate map” has separate categories for anti-immigrant, anti-LGBT, anti-Muslim, KKK, neo-Nazi, black separatist, Christian identity, racist skinhead, white nationalist, radical traditional Catholicism, hate music, and Holocaust denial groups, there is no entry for radical Islam (those few Muslim groups that do appear are found under “general hate”), and none for anti-Jewish (other than Holocaust denial) or anti-Zionist organizations. Daniel Greenfield’s blog, “Sultan Knish” is included as a “hate group,” but Ammar Shahin, the Davis California Imam who called from his pulpit for Muslims to murder Jews is not on their list of “extremists.”

SPLC, incidentally, is also a prime mover in the movement to remove confederate monuments, which makes sense for an organization whose goal seems to be to stop the expression of views that it dislikes.

Another Google partner is ProPublica, which vows to diligently track “hate incidents” in the coming months. “Everyday people — not just avowed ‘white nationalists’ — intimidate, harass, humiliate and even harm their fellow Americans because of the color of their skin, how they worship or who they love,” they say. One could be excused from wondering if an article critical of Islamic ideology or denying that people have an inalienable right to the gender of their choice will be interpreted as a “hate incident.”

ProPublica created a list of websites that the ADL or SPLC consider hate or extremist. Then they took 70 of the most popular sites on the list and surveyed whether and how they were “monetized,” i.e., whether they ran ads, accepted donations, and so forth. The intention, although it is unstated, is to pressure the companies providing ads or payment processing to drop these sites as customers.

These organizations have created a category of vaguely defined “hate speech,” speech that is offensive – particularly to favored groups like Muslims. The next step is to enforce their version of political correctness.

But who is to decide? If it’s “hate speech” to warn (as several of the sites on the list do) that the Muslim Brotherhood wants to Islamize the United States, then isn’t the viciously anti-Israel site Electronic Intifada (which is not on ProPublica’s list) also employing hate speech when it calls Israel an apartheid state or accuse it of genocide?

I don’t think SPLC, ProPublica or left-leaning tech companies like Google ought to control my speech. The American founding fathers had the right idea. Hate speech has been made illegal in many countries, but the US has always insisted that no matter how vile their words, the government may not interfere with the freedom of expression enjoyed by neo-Nazis, the Westboro Baptist Church, and others like them. Unfortunately, Internet companies are not the government and can legally place restrictions on speech – even though today they may have a greater effect on free expression than the government could!

It’s true that the openness of the Internet has been a mixed blessing. But it’s a mistake to allow some political violence – of which there was more in the 1960s and 70s than there is today – to be the Reichstag Fire that will force us to knuckle under to the totalitarian vision of the PC Left.

I own my printing press and I’m not going to give it up.

Posted in American politics, American society, Jew Hatred | 1 Comment

Why American Jews should make aliyah

Posted on August 18, 2017 by Victor Rosenthal

Advocating aliyah creates friction. Sometimes people think you are trying to display your moral superiority (“nyah, nyah, I moved to the Jewish state and you didn’t”). Sometimes they think you are trying to steal their children – my wife was a religious school teacher in the US, and some parents didn’t forgive her when their kids became lone soldiers here. Sometimes they hate you for reminding them of what they already believe, but haven’t acted on. Sometimes they think that you are a pest, because they are happy being Americans or French or British. And sometimes they dislike Israel itself, oppose nationalism of any kind, or feel sorry for the Palestinians.

I used to avoid doing it. But not anymore.

For those living in continental Europe or Britain, it’s simply a question of how much Jew-hatred you are prepared to tolerate in your daily life. Yes, you are a tough guy, no antisemite can force you to do anything, but do you really want to live in a place where a large proportion of your neighbors dislike or even hate you? You know it’s going to get worse over time, so unless you perversely enjoy conflict, you are probably already thinking of leaving.

But what if you live in the US? The commitment to tolerance of Jews and other minorities is high, expressions of Jew-hatred have been relatively rare (until very recently), and there are large Jewish communities as well as places where there are practically no Jews at all, so you can choose whichever you prefer. You are not going to be rounded up and forced into ghettos, and your kids probably won’t get beaten up on their way to school (although that’s more likely than it was 10 years ago).

Nevertheless, you should still start planning your aliyah.

As a member of the Jewish people, can you share the national goals of your diaspora home? For example, the US has just delivered a shipment of weapons and equipment to the Lebanese Armed Forces, which we know is tantamount to giving them to Hezbollah, Israel’s most immediately threatening enemy. And this happened during the relatively friendly, if somewhat erratic, Trump Administration! The previous President did far worse, of course, making a deal with Iran that basically granted the regime the right to develop nuclear weapons in a relatively short time span, and pumped money into its economy (including delivering pallets containing millions of dollars in cash). How do you feel about the way your taxes are used?

We don’t want to admit this, but the interests of the US and the Jewish people are not the same. Support for Israel has become a partisan issue, and surveys show that the Democratic party has moved far to the left on issues related to Israel. When the Republican administration is replaced (as it surely will be) by a Democratic one led by a progressive candidate (almost a certainty) then the relationship with Israel will take a sharp turn for the worse.

Yes, you can stay where you are and try to turn it around, a frustrating and probably impossible enterprise (anyone involved in pro-Israel advocacy in the US today knows this). Or you can decide to try to strengthen the Jewish state with your own hands.

Recent news reports about violent confrontations in the US between the extreme Right and Left have been shocking. Not so surprisingly, when their spokespersons are interviewed, it turns out that they agree about one thing – the Jews. The Right prefers to say that Jews control international finance and the media, while the Left is all about intersectional anti-Zionism and how it’s Israel’s fault when black people in America are shot by police, but they both have a problem with Jews.

Don’t kid yourself, the distinction between anti-Zionism and Jew-hatred is one without a difference. Although it is still socially unacceptable on the moderate Left to directly attack Jews (but even that is changing), the Jewish state is a legitimate target. It’s not an accident that the same people support self-determination for every indigenous group except the Jewish people, ignore oppression throughout the world but discover it when Israelis defend themselves against Arab terrorism, and question the right to exist of only one out of 193 UN member states.

If you live in a large city or a suburb of one, are a student or academic, or in a coastal area – in other words, a “blue” area, your neighbors will probably share some of the “progressive” attitudes about Israel mentioned above. If you live in a “red” area, many of them will hold more traditional anti-Jewish beliefs. Which do you prefer? Neither will be comfortable.

Many of the strongest anti-Zionists (and therefore antisemites) are Jewish. This has driven a wedge through liberal Jewish congregations in which many older members still believe that the Zionist aspiration for self-determination in our historical homeland is still legitimate, and those, mostly younger, who see it as a contradiction of their intersectional progressive belief systems. This phenomenon is increasing as anti-Zionism becomes more and more entrenched in the educational system.

What should a Zionist Jew who finds him or herself in such a community do? What if even the leaders of the community share the anti-Zionist position, something increasingly common in liberal congregations?

Polarization in America is increasing. I lived in America through the Clinton, Bush and much of the Obama years, but judging by the media (mainstream, alternative and social) and my own correspondents, I don’t recognize my former home today. Social cohesiveness seem to be disappearing, divisions deepening, the economic state of the middle class never recovered from 2008, and confidence in government, media, business, law enforcement, education, health care – almost every major institution and societal function has fallen to unprecedented lows.

This is bad for America as a whole, but it is terrible for the Jews. For literally thousands of years, whenever there has been social instability, the Jews suffer. They are a visible element (even those who think they aren’t, are) and it is natural and traditional to blame them. They were blamed for the Black Death, for Germany’s defeat in WWI, for Communism, for various financial panics, for AIDS, for 9/11, for Obama and for Trump.

I am not predicting pogroms or purges of Jews. But I do think that life in America for Jews will become less comfortable, possibly more dangerous, and most importantly for those who are Zionists, without national purpose.

I’m not discussing all the problems involved in living in Israel. There are plenty. But in the diaspora, you struggle just to survive. In the Jewish state, you struggle, at least in part, for the Jewish people. If this is something you care about, it’s more significant than anything else.

There are those with good reasons to stay where they are: family, age, responsibilities. But if you believe that the Jewish people should exercise their right of self-determination in their historic homeland and are not prevented from making your own contribution, then – what are you waiting for?

Posted in American Jews, American politics, American society, Jew Hatred, The Jewish people, US-Israel Relations, Zionism | 1 Comment

Why you should make aliyah

Posted on August 14, 2017 by Victor Rosenthal

There about 6.5 million Jews living in each of Israel and the USA, and another two million in the rest of the world. As everyone knows, the great Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, the Muslim world and Russia have declined precipitously as a result of the Holocaust, expulsions and voluntary emigration.

In some places, like the UK, Sweden, France, Poland and Venezuela, Jews who had no problem with diaspora life a short time ago are discovering that their neighbors (in the case of the UK, Sweden and France, we are particularly talking about their new Muslim neighbors) are not as friendly as they previously thought.

Good riddance to those places, many say. And I agree. In fact, in light of recent developments, I have decided to change my general recommendation about aliyah to Israel. In the past, my view has been that you should make aliyah only if you find yourself driven by love for the idea of a Jewish state, or if your life or well-being are endangered by Jew-hatred.

My new advice is this: if you are a Jew and not an anti-Zionist (either the religious or leftist kind), then it is past time for you to make aliyah.

Right now some of you are saying that you are perfectly happy in London or Los Angeles and I have no right to tell you what to do. That’s true, but I’m doing it anyway.

Here are some reasons to not make aliyah: if you are middle class, your standard of living will probably decline. If you live in the US now, you will almost certainly end up with less living space. If you are young you will have to do military service, and if you are older your children will. If you are a professional like a doctor, lawyer or architect, you will have to jump through hoops to be permitted to practice your profession in Israel. Unless you are lucky enough to have a Jewish education, you will have to learn the Hebrew language starting from zero. There will probably be a war here within the next couple of years, during which rockets will hit our cities.

I could go on, but you get the idea. So why am I urging that you make aliyah? Two reasons:

One is that I care about the survival of the Jewish people as a people, and I am convinced that this depends on the survival of the Jewish state. And the Jewish state needs you. We need your Jewish DNA, we need you and your children to be soldiers, and we need your children and their children to give birth to more Jews. This is the place to do it, the place in which it will be most likely that they will remain Jews.

Let me interject a short true story: I knew a man in California that I will call Avraham. Avraham was a survivor of the camps and an artist. His wife and children and other relatives had all been murdered by the Nazis. Only Hashem knows how he managed to survive. In America he painted pictures of destroyed synagogues that he remembered from before, married a nice (non-Jewish) Mexican woman and had numerous children. “This is my answer to the Nazis,” he said. When he died and was buried, I went to a big party at his house in his honor. I looked around, and there was his big Mexican family. Not one of his children or his wife had wanted to convert to Judaism or had the slightest interest in it. There was absolutely nothing Jewish left except his paintings and some incomprehensible books that the family would give away. So much for his answer to the Nazis.

The other reason is that the diaspora is coming apart. Europe’s Islamification is proceeding apace, and will either make countries like France or the UK as inhospitable to Jews as Iraq is today, or give rise to a bloody civil struggle, like in Syria. Do you want to live – do you want your children to live – in an Iraq or a Syria?

America is another, different story. Although I wouldn’t try to predict what will happen there as a result of its crazy politics and growing social unrest, one thing that I can be sure of is that the non-Orthodox community is hemorrhaging Jews. More than half are intermarried, and the ones that aren’t are having children at a rate way below what is required to maintain a stable population. Many are drifting off into a totally secular condition, where all that is left of their Jewishness is nostalgia for “Jewish food.” Many of them, formerly traditional pro-Israel Jewish liberals, have become political progressives and adopted the conventional wisdom of the Left, which sees Israel as the villain in the Mideast conflict. This is the lost generation of American Jews, and most of them are lost forever. Those who still crave some connection to either Judaism or the Jewish people might or might not find it in Israel – but they certainly won’t find it in America.

Orthodox American Jews do have more stable communities, but the demise of the “lost generation” will leave them a tiny minority in an increasingly hostile gentile society. What progressives call tolerance and diversity, things that should theoretically make the lives of all minorities better, are actually forms of identity politics in which Jews, especially visible Jews, are the losers. Clearly, the writing is on the wall.

And despite all of the things on my list above about why aliyah and living in Israel can be hard, the fact is that Israelis, according to the 2017 World Happiness Report, are happier than the great majority of people in the world, coming in 13th out of 156 countries (the US only made 19th place). Israelis prove it by having children: even secular people have 3-4 children, and religious families even more. There is something special here. In my opinion, it is a sense of national purpose that no longer exists in France, for example (in 24th place).

If you are Jewish, not anti-Zionist (members of Neturei Karta, Jewish Voice for Peace, or If Not Now are excluded from my invitation), then start thinking seriously about aliyah. The world is changing – maybe faster than you expect.

Update [12 July 2019]: I’ve replaced a bad link to the 2017 World Happiness Report with one to the latest (2019) version, and adjusted the numbers in the text. Israel is now 13th instead of 11th, and the US has fallen from 14th to 19th. France, surprisingly, rose all the way from 44th to 24th. None of these changes affect my overall point.

Posted in Jew Hatred, The Jewish people, Zionism | 2 Comments

The People of the Narrative

Posted on August 11, 2017 by Victor Rosenthal

Tuesday’s news contained a particularly infuriating although totally predictable report to add to my collection of “things that show why coexistence is impossible.” It seems that Israel is required by the 1994 Paris Protocol to the Oslo Accords to grant permission to ‘qualified’ Palestinian tour guides to work in Israel. Tour companies hire them because they cost about half as much as an Israeli tour guide, or in some cases if the company wants to provide a ‘balanced’ tour in which both the Israeli and Arab narratives are honored.

So what happens is that Palestinian guides take naïve foreigners to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial and  explain that the lessons to be learned there are that today’s Israelis treat Palestinians the way the Nazis treated them; that Israel was founded because of Western guilt over the Holocaust; and that Palestinians are victims of genocide (despite the fact that their number has tripled since 1970).

Then they go to the Old City where they tell their clients that the Jews have no history in Jerusalem, and that whether or not there was a Jewish Temple there is “controversial.” They explain that there was a Palestinian civilization in existence for hundreds or even thousands of years, until colonialist Jews came along and dispossessed, expelled and occupied them.

This is yet another small but significant way that the Palestinian Arabs chip away at historical reality and promote their narrative – an untrue story that they believe with absolute sincerity.

They believe that the Jewish state is entirely illegitimate and has no moral or legal authority to arrest or imprison Palestinian murderers, who are not terrorists or criminals but political prisoners or prisoners of war, and that it is appropriate to treat them as heroes and for the Palestinian Authority to pay pensions to their families.

And they believe that the occupation narrative justifies any form of ‘resistance’ including the murder of Jews, whom they call “settlers” (even if they live in Tel Aviv). They even believe that like James Bond, they have a license to kill, granted to them by international law!

But it isn’t merely a belief about historical facts or international law or human rights or who was here first or whether Arab refugees fled voluntarily in 1948 or were kicked out (both happened). There is an overwhelmingly powerful emotional content in the narrative. It places a massive weight of humiliation and shame on the shoulders of the Palestinian Arabs, whom the entire world knows were defeated in war, expelled and subjugated – by Jews, of all people!

Every argument is used to prove that the Jews didn’t do it themselves – that they had the Western world on their side  and the money of international Jewry behind them, that the Arab nations betrayed the Palestinians, and so on. But excuses don’t cut it. The only thing that can lift the burden of the narrative from the Palestinian man is the blood of the Jews who humiliated him.

The narrative is independent of the religious imperative that drives pious Muslims to murder infidels who infest a land that was once and therefore must forever be, Muslim. It is independent of the fury born of shame felt by a Muslim who has to submit to even the slightest restraints on his right to worship (like metal detectors, or temporary closures or age restrictions at the Temple Mount) imposed by Jews. But the intense shame and rage it generates fit neatly alongside the religious humiliation felt by Muslim Palestinians.

If you sat down and tried to invent a way to prolong a conflict forever, you couldn’t do better than the Palestinian narrative. It is the narrative that justified the way the Arab nations that hosted the 1948 refugees forced them into refugee camps and refused to allow them to integrate into their societies. Even the Palestinian Authority, which they claim is actually the “State of Palestine,” refuses to end their refugee status! It is the narrative that fuels the rejection of any kind of “normalization” process that might help make it possible for Jews and Arabs to live side by side in the future. It is the narrative that insists that only the “return” of the descendents of the 1948 refugees to “their homes” – that is, the expulsion of the Jewish people from the Land of Israel – can even begin to correct what they view as the moral inversion of 1948.

Some Zionists say that there is no Palestinian people, that they are just a bunch of Arabs whose ancestors migrated into the land in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And it is correct that few of them have any long-term history here, and that they don’t have a distinct language or religion.

But I would not agree that there is no such thing as a Palestinian people. If the Jewish people are “the people of the book,” the Palestinians are the people of the narrative. The narrative, and the always simmering and sometimes boiling conflict with the Jews, made a people out of them just as the journey through the desert finished the work of creating the Jewish people.

The Palestinian identity today rests entirely on their narrative and their opposition to us, even their hatred of us. If the Jewish people disappeared tomorrow, there would be no Palestinians, just Arabs.

And this is why the conflict will not be ended by a peace agreement, a compromise of some kind, another partition or even a gradual reconciliation. An end to the conflict would mean an end to Palestinian identity, something which they will not give up voluntarily. It’s all they have.

The narrative feeds on itself and only grows stronger with conflict and time; and the stronger it is, the more conflict there is. There is only one way for it to end: one side must win and the other must lose.

Posted in Israel and Palestinian Arabs | Comments Off on The People of the Narrative

The most clueless Jew in the world

Posted on August 7, 2017 by Victor Rosenthal

Arik Ascherman calls himself a “human rights activist.” I call him an anti-Zionist one. For years he has been doing his best to interfere with the Israeli authority in the territories, support Bedouin tribes squatting in the Negev, oppose the demolition of the homes of terrorists, and besmirch IDF soldiers fighting in Gaza.

Ascherman’s former organization, Rabbis for Human Rights, is paid for its activism by European anti-Zionists and the American New Israel Fund. He sees no moral problem in taking their money (he is no longer associated with RHR and has recently started a new Jewish/Arab organization called “Haqel.” Doubtless he will continue to take money from the enemies of Israel. Who else would support him?)

He works against the state because “all human beings are created in God’s image” and therefore it is forbidden to “discriminate” against any of them, even, apparently, those who murder us or steal our land and property.

But the other day he met a Jew who wasn’t clueless, and the interaction – documented by Ascherman himself to display his moral superiority – shows precisely what is lacking in his soul (or psyche, if you prefer).

Ascherman took some old recording media to a technical expert to convert it to digital form, and this is what happened:

The ultra-Orthodox man took a look at the first film clip, which included aggressive behavior from Itai Zar, the founder of the infamous Khavat Gilad outpost  He then looked at me, and asked what I did.  I explained that I was a human rights activist, working for the rights of all human beings, Jewish and non-Jewish, because all human beings are created in God’s Image.   No amount of recounting what I have done on behalf of Jews living in poverty, or any other argument helped.  I was harming the Jewish people.  He politely said that he was willing to pay me for the time I had wasted getting to him, but was not willing to work with my material.

Ascherman, who has rabbinical ordination from the Reform movement in the US, tried to argue “Judaism, theology and halakha” with the man, who apparently was better grounded in these subjects than he was. After losing the argument (he believes that he won, but he lost), he notes that,

I was dumbstruck by the enormity of the moral disaster that has befallen us as the Jewish people. How could a deeply religious man so blithely desecrate God’s Name and defame Judaism by saying that the God of all creation could possibly endorse discrimination against fellow human beings whom God created in God’s Image?

I, on the other hand, am equally dumbstruck by the fact that Ascherman and other Jewish activists of his stripe believe that they owe no special loyalty to the Jewish people.

The Torah is a story starring Hashem, the Jewish people and the Land of Israel. I am not a scholar but it’s hard to miss. Yes, there are things in the texts of Judaism that call for doing justice to all the nations, but certainly not to consistently take the part of others against the Jewish people.

Ascherman and many in the Reform world find a different message in our texts, a universalist one in which the job of a Jew is to be an example for how to provide justice and equality for every human being. The greatest sin for them is “discrimination” in favor of one’s own people.

Even if it were correct, this interpretation of Judaism would be suicidal in a world where the Jews and their state are commonly despised and targets for violence.

Ascherman is myopic. He looks at the microcosm of relations between, say, the IDF and the Palestinian Arabs of the territories, or the government of Israel and the Bedouins, and sees that we are the stronger party. So he takes the side of the perceived underdog, even when, for example, the Palestinians are trying to murder us and the Bedouins are stealing us blind. They have “rights” that he must defend.

But his vision doesn’t take in the bigger picture in which Israel is very much the underdog, facing a huge Arab and Muslim world that would be happy to wipe her off the map, as well as a Europe – and an American State Department – that believe it is unfortunate a Jewish state was ever created.

That’s a logical explanation of his thought process. But there is another way to see it, which is that he simply lacks a connection to his people. A piece of his brain, his psyche, or his Jewish soul (as you prefer) is missing. He can see tragedy in the lives of Palestinian Arabs and Bedouins, but he doesn’t see or feel the tragedy in the potential loss of this miraculous reconstitution of Jewish sovereignty in the land promised by Hashem. Ascherman sees “God’s image” in Palestinian Arabs, but he doesn’t see it in the Jewish people or their state. That’s the “moral disaster!”

Ascherman’s technical expert politely told him that he wished that he would stop harming the Jewish people. I couldn’t agree more.

Posted in Israel and Palestinian Arabs, The Jewish people | 3 Comments

Tisha b’Av 5777

Posted on August 3, 2017 by Victor Rosenthal

Tisha b’Av was weird for me this year. I sat in shul and listened to the eicha reading, and it spoke to me about current events, not about what happened thousands of years ago. Last week the Jewish people suffered a terrible defeat, but unlike the sack of Jerusalem life went on though the wall was already breached. Jerusalem wasn’t destroyed and we didn’t eat our children, and everything is continuing as it was before – perhaps there is an upsurge in Arab terrorism, but as yet it’s still small (give it time) – but notice or not, we have just passed over a crack in history, one of those currently invisible seams that historians a hundred years from now will describe as chasms.

The Arabs noticed. What most Jewish Israelis saw as yet another incident in Jerusalem (and most diaspora Jews had no idea even occurred) was marked by the Arabs with celebrations, giving out sweets and firing in the air. The Arabs who breathe the air of symbolism and national honor understood the significance of their victory over the yahood.

All your enemies have opened their mouths wide against you; they hissed and gnashed their teeth and said, “We have engulfed her! Indeed, this is the day we longed for; we have found it; we have seen it!” – Eicha, II-16

At first it seemed the opposite. It seemed as though we might have started to turn around what has been an inexorable process of retreat and submission that began almost immediately after our great victory in 1967, when the entirety of the holy city of Jerusalem and its Temple Mount came into our possession for the first time since the days of King David. “What do we need this whole Vatican for?” said Moshe Dayan, when he relinquished control of the Mount to the Muslim waqf and planted the seed for the conflict over the heart of our land that has been simmering and sometimes boiling ever since.

Dayan and the de facto alliance of Haredim and leftists that would be happy without “this whole Vatican” ignored the symbolic importance of this spot, the center of the world for Judaism. But the Arabs did not ignore it. Every chance they got, they pushed and chipped and nibbled away at the “status quo,” which actually hasn’t been static at all but has moved steadily in the direction of the Muslims for the past 50 years.

So our government installed metal detectors and cameras in response to the bloody murder of our policemen, a step that any rational being can understand, and the Arabs answered by inciting their street to rage and murdering three members of a Jewish family. But then the unexpected happened. The waqf called for a boycott of the site, and for the first time in years Jews could walk about on the Temple Mount unmolested!

Some of us thought that this time the Arabs had overreached themselves. This time all we have to do is stand firm to assert our sovereignty over the place that, after all, is in the center of our capital. Maybe this can be the start of a process that could bring about a change in the demeaning policy that Jews aren’t allowed to pray on the Temple Mount, or do anything (even to cry) that looks to our Muslim overlords like praying. Maybe more hours could be allocated to Jewish visits, and maybe the banshees that shriek allahu akbar into Jewish ears could finally be banished.

But as everyone knows, we did not stand firm. None of the above will happen. There were riots all over the country and even in Europe and the US, and our leaders, our Prime Minister, blinked. We removed the metal detectors, took down the security cameras, and when that didn’t calm the ravening mob we even removed the scaffolding that had been installed to hold the cameras. At the same time announcements were made about new super-high tech security devices that someday would replace them.

As if. The Arabs weren’t fooled. They understood that we had submitted to their demands, submitted, actually, to the power of Islam, because the Jewish people are weak, because we are cowards, because we aren’t prepared to fight for what belongs to us. All of the explanations, the excuse of the crisis with Jordan – we had to bring the hostages home, didn’t we? –  the need to calm things down, the argument that the metal detectors would be difficult to use and wouldn’t provide adequate security (so no security is better?), it’s all a bunch of crap and the Arabs know it.

And the victory has made them hunger for more. Maybe it will become harder for Jews to visit the Mount. Or maybe they will press their claim for what they call the “al-Buraq wall” (our Kotel). Maybe they will find a new issue that nobody has thought of yet. Or maybe they will just try harder to murder Jews wherever and whenever they can.

What starts in Jerusalem spreads throughout the country. Just a few hours ago in a town next to mine, an Arab walked into a supermarket, pulled out a knife and stabbed one of the workers. The victim is currently fighting for his life. Expect more like this.

Our government made a serious mistake. But not because nobody predicted what would happen. Many voices in and out of politics told them to be strong. And not because they didn’t know what to expect. Simply, they couldn’t take the pressure, so they gave in.

Personally, I have lost confidence in PM Netanyahu. Not because I think he didn’t understand the situation or our enemies, but because he did. He understood, but he didn’t  act with strength as he should have. It’s not the first time.

Today the Jewish state and Jewish people are threatened from multiple directions. There is very little room left for mistakes or weakness.

Where (and who) are our leaders?

And gone from the daughter of Zion is all her splendor; her princes were like harts who did not find pasture, and they departed without strength before their pursuer. – Eicha, I-6

Posted in Israel and Palestinian Arabs, Israeli Politics, Terrorism | 7 Comments