What’s the Plan?

Posted on March 24, 2022 by Victor Rosenthal

If you live in Israel, you know what happened in Beer Sheva on Tuesday. You know that a terrorist who was an Israeli citizen from one of the larger Bedouin towns that sprawl over Israel’s Negev desert, a former teacher (!) who spent four years in prison for his activities on behalf of ISIS, brutally murdered two women and two men because they were Jews living in Eretz Yisrael.

The terrorist, Mohammad Jalab Abu al-Quian, stabbed a woman at a gas station and then drove to a nearby shopping center, running over a bicycle rider on the way. He got out of his car and stabbed three more people before being shot dead by two armed citizens. Four of his victims died, and the fifth was very seriously injured. The nightmare took eight minutes.

Here are the names of those whose lives he took:

1) Laura Yitzchak, 43. Mother of 3 girls. Resident of Be’er Sheva.

2) [Rabbi] Moshe Kravitzky, 50. Father of 4. Managed a Colel Chabad soup kitchen in Be’er Sheva. Chabad Shaliach [he was the bicycle rider].

3) Doris Yahbas, 49. Mother of 3. From Moshav Gilat.

4) Menachem Menuchin Yechezkel, age 67.

As always happens, Gazans distributed sweets in honor of the successful “operation,” like it was a military triumph, instead of a vicious murder spree victimizing the softest of soft targets.

In recent weeks, there have been several attempts to murder police officers and random Jews in Jerusalem. And there are the daily cases of drivers been attacked with large rocks and firebombs.

I have a question for the Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett, his cabinet, and indeed every member of the Knesset:

What is your long range plan to deal with Palestinian Arab terrorism, both by Palestinians from the territories and Israeli Arabs?

I am not talking about your plans to increase the police presence over the Pesach and Ramadan holidays. That is the shortest of short-term plans. I am not talking about your plans to improve the economic conditions in Gaza, the PA, and the Negev, a slightly longer-term plan which will probably lead to more, not less, terrorism.

I want to know if you have any idea of what to do about the Palestinians in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, who have been so radicalized by Hamas and the PLO that teenagers are capable of murdering Jewish babies? And I want to know if you understand the dangers of the continuing Islamization and Palestinization of the Arab citizens of Israel, which was demonstrated in May 2021 by the Arab pogroms against the Jewish residents of Lod, Acco, Bat Yam, Haifa, Yafo, and Tiberias?

Lately our leadership has been concerned with the war in Ukraine and a possible influx of refugees from there, Jewish and non-Jewish. It has been concerned with the betrayal of Israel by the Biden Administration, which seems to be prepared to go to almost any length to make a deal with Iran that will provide the evil regime with a Niagara of dollars and a free pass to deploy nuclear weapons. These are not small issues.

But the war between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs has been going on for far longer than the Ukraine war, and started long before the Iranian revolution. Unless there is a massive escalation into what would become WWIII – something that I doubt will happen – the war in Ukraine will be over soon. And either Israel will find a way to deal with Iran in the next year or two, or there won’t be a State of Israel to worry about.

Some will say that more people are killed in road accidents than are victims of terror. Some will say that most Arab citizens of Israel are loyal to the state, that only a minority took part in the 2021 riots, and that the Palestinian Authority and Hamas are viewed as corrupt and dictatorial by the residents of the territories. These things are all true. But it is also true that virtually all the Arabs living in Israel and the territories share the view that the Jewish presence between the river and the sea is illegitimate and temporary. And I think that in a situation in which they see the possibility of success in ending the Jewish occupation of the land – all of it – virtually all of them would support the effort to do so.

Today there is no such possibility on the immediate horizon. But in the context of a major war with Iran and her proxies, a war that will treat our home front very harshly – and a war that I believe to be inevitable – the glimmer of possible victory might appear visible to them on the horizon. If that happens it will make the Second Intifada and the May 2021 riots look small, as the “pragmatic” Arabs, including the doctors and professors that we are so proud of as examples of successful coexistence come together in support of the Palestinian national objective: the reversal of the Nakba and the “redemption of all of Palestine.”

The problem of Palestinian Arab terrorism will not go away by itself. The incitement that feeds it, coming from the PLO, Hamas, ISIS, and Iran, is greater today than it ever was. And today it feeds itself, too, via social media.

In 1993, Israel’s leadership, under pressure from outsiders who understood the situation even less well than they did, tried to solve the problem by an attempt at reconciliation and compromise. But they were fooled. They entirely misread the Palestinians, who have never lost sight of their national goals, which definitely do not include living at peace along with a Jewish state. The consequences of that mistake have compounded themselves over the years, and today the threat is greater than ever.

Our 1993 leaders had a plan, and it failed. Very few Israelis still think that a solution can be found via reconciliation and compromise. The rational thing to do in response to failure is to develop a different plan that takes into account the lessons learned. Such a plan would have to recognize the Palestinian narrative and objective that drives terrorism. It would have to comprehend that you can’t reconcile with those who hold onto an overwhelming sense of grievance. It would have to replace the idea of compromise with one of victory.

But today’s leaders have no plan at all.

Posted in Israel and Palestinian Arabs, Israeli Arabs, Terrorism | 3 Comments

The Ambassador from Obamastan

Posted on March 20, 2022 by Victor Rosenthal

It was profoundly depressing to listen to the new American ambassador to Israel, Thomas Nides, speak on a webinar produced by Americans for Peace Now. Both the tone and the substance of his remarks were discouraging.

The tone expressed the arrogance that we learned to expect from Obama Administration officials, of which Nides was one. Jonathan Tobin said that American ambassadors to Israel often act more like “imperial proconsuls,” sent to give orders to the colonials, and that fits Nides. Jewish communities in Judea/Samaria “infuriate” him. Infuriate! The Palestinians, on the other hand, are merely less than perfect:

The Palestinians aren’t perfect either … these martyr payments [sic!] … have caused an enormous amount of problems … I’m working with minister Gantz and with the Prime Minister and the Palestinians to figure out how to stop it because it gives the haters – and there are haters – an excuse “well, we can’t do THIS, because they’re paying for people who kill Jews.”

So, wait. The trouble with the Palestinian Authority paying terrorists to murder Jews is that someone might cite this as a reason to withhold concessions to the Palestinians? That’s actually the problem, not the fact that they are murdering Jews? And anyone who thinks this way is a hater? I had to listen to this several times to believe that he actually said it. I was hamum, as they say in Hebrew, thunderstruck.

Nides doesn’t seem to realize how patronizing he sounds. In regard to Ukraine, he said “[Bennett and Lapid] have done everything we asked them to. They haven’t made a move without being in contact with us.” That makes me feel so … sovereign.

That’s the tone. But the substance is actually more pernicious, if possible.

Unsurprisingly, Nides wants a “two-state solution,” since that is the policy of his administration. He sees his job as removing the obstacles to achieving it, which he seems to think are primarily on the Israeli side. He is incredibly naïve about the attitude of the Palestinians, which he describes as though all they want is a little America in the “West Bank,” with 4G (or 5G!) cellular service available to everyone, with Google and Amazon opening facilities in their country, and of course “freedom” and “dignity.”

Somehow he has failed to notice that these admittedly imperfect Palestinians overwhelmingly – both the leadership and the street – reject the existence of any Jewish state between the river and the sea, and consider a two-state arrangement as only a temporary expedient on the way to “redeeming all of Palestine.” And somehow, the folks at Peace Now didn’t bring this up. They also failed to mention that a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria is, by simple geography, a deadly threat to the survival of Israel.

Nides is one of those who speak in clauses, sometimes changing track in the middle of a sentence, so it can be hard to get a coherent quote out of it. But listen to what he said about Jerusalem:

He [Biden] is fully and completely supportive of a two state solution with a divided … you know, how that’s divided, the capital, and all the conversations around, you know, what the territories look like… my job is to knock down things that make that possibility impossible … if they lose hope …

A divided what? As if we don’t know! And I like the addition of “if they lose hope,” a nod to the view that Palestinian terrorism is a result of despair, when in fact it is encouraged when they think they are winning.

I say that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, that is true, however I also say that the final status of Jerusalem will have to be decided by the parties. The reason that we [prior to Trump] never moved the embassy was to leave that open as a final status issue to be decided by the parties …

It’s clear that we are back in Obamastan now, where the aspirations of the Palestinians have equal or greater weight than the security of the Jewish state; and where Israel must pay the price for the failures of the Arab leadership. I expect to see renewed pressure to freeze construction of any kind in Judea/Samaria and eastern Jerusalem, and possibly a return to “peace processing,” whose goal is to create a sovereign Palestinian state with its capital in a divided Jerusalem.

I know I must sound like an endless loop, but we got ourselves into this situation when we allowed our country to become a satellite of the US. Jonathan Tobin suggests that the Foreign Ministry should call Nides into its office and give him a dressing down, explaining that he is not an “imperial proconsul” and that Israel is a sovereign state. But who’s kidding whom – that is very unlikely, because we are a satellite. Thanks to our over-reliance on American military aid, we are vulnerable to sudden cut-offs of critical items, as when Obama stopped supplying US-made Hellfire missiles during one of our periodic wars with Hamas in Gaza, because he thought – after hearing casualty figures provided by Hamas! – that Israel was killing too many people in Gaza. And the recent hold-up in the allocation of funds for the Tamir interceptors used by the Iron Dome system should make us think.

There is no quick solution. We can’t cut off our “golden handcuffs” all at once. It will be a long process of developing home-grown sources for military hardware and other strategic goods (food can’t be ignored, either. I was shocked to notice how much of the stuff in my local supermarket was imported from Europe). We have now been blessed with a large supply of natural gas, which is an extremely important piece of the self-sufficiency puzzle.

But we won’t arrive at our destination if we don’t start our journey, and so far, I see no movement.

Posted in 'Peace' Process, Israel and Palestinian Arabs, US-Israel Relations | 4 Comments

The Czechoslovakian Option

Posted on March 17, 2022 by Victor Rosenthal
Biden-Chamberlain

Photoshop by Judah Rosenthal

The negotiations between Iran and the West are free to continue after the hiccup caused by a Russian demand for a “right to free and full trade, economic and investment cooperation and military-technical cooperation.” Either the Russians got what they wanted, or they decided to accept something less; but in any event, the rush to sign an agreement that lifts sanctions on Iran is on again.

I think it’s safe to say that everybody – Americans, Iranians, Russians, Europeans, and certainly Israelis – knows that this agreement presents only a minor impediment (if any) to the deployment of nuclear weapons by Iran. In fact, it is a get out of jail free card for the violations of the Non-Proliferation Treaty of which Iran is guilty. It is primarily a device to lift virtually all sanctions on Iran – even those that are not related to nuclear weapons – and provide an immediate windfall of tens of billions of dollars to Iran, and only secondarily a limitation on nuclear weapons development.

Numerous Israeli officials from Prime Ministers to IDF Chiefs of Staff have sat down with the Americans and explained and documented why the agreement will not prevent or significantly slow Iran’s progress toward a weapon, and how the injection of cash into Iran’s struggling economy will be used to finance weapons development, proxy warfare against Israel and the Gulf states, and terrorism around the world – including the US. What isn’t clear about “death to America,” they asked?

The Americans listened politely, but did not change direction.

It’s obvious why the Iranians are anxious to make a deal, but what the US gets out of it is not certain. Yes, President Joe Biden can reverse a Trump policy, accuse the Republicans of failure, and declare “peace in our time” while waving the new, even worse, version of Obama’s JCPOA. But I think that the main motivation is to continue a policy, going back to the 1970s, to reverse the outcome of the 1967 war.

This policy was initially justified by the “realist” argument that American alignment with Israel was counterproductive, given the larger populations of her enemies, and their possession of critical resources. Later, after 9/11, it became fashionable to believe that US support for Israel was one of the causes of terrorism against the US (after all, Osama bin Laden said so), and that Syria and Iran could be bought off from supporting the insurgency in Iraq by forcing Israel to surrender the Golan Heights and create a Palestinian state in Judea/Samaria.

With the advent of President Barack Obama, the anti-Israel policy took another turn. Obama sees the Jewish state through a postcolonialist lens. He really does believe that Israel is a settler-colonialist oppressor of indigenous Palestinians, and accepts the Palestinian narrative of dispossession. He pays lip service to Israel’s right to exist, but adoption of his policies would quickly lead to her replacement by an Arab state. His heart is with the Palestinians, whom he sees as representatives of a black and brown third world, oppressed by “white, European” Israelis.

Biden’s policymakers are either former Obama Administration officials, or others with even more radically anti-Israel views. His administration tries to avoid the kind of direct confrontation that Obama seemed to enjoy, but its policies are no better. And one of the goals of the Iran deal is to weaken Israel, make her more dependent on the US for protection against an increasingly powerful Iran, and thus make it possible to continue the process of reducing Israel to her indefensible pre-1967 borders. And it isn’t unlikely that many of those involved would be happy to see the Jewish state gone entirely.

The immediate consequence of the implementation of a new Iran deal would very likely be regional war. There are two possibilities: either Iran will develop its conventional forces and those of its proxies (with or without a nuclear umbrella) to the point that the regime feels confident to unleash them against Israel; or Israel will find its nuclear red lines crossed and preemptively attack Iran. In either case, there would be – at least – involvement of Israel, Iran, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and the Palestinian Authority. Intervention by outside powers like Russia and the US is possible. Civilian casualties on all sides would be in the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands. The possibility that nuclear weapons will be used can’t be discounted.

Bret Stephens wrote that the invasion of Ukraine was facilitated by years of Western appeasement, and slaps on the wrist for Putin and other bad actors. After he was allowed to invade Crimea, Georgia, and Eastern Ukraine; after Syria was allowed to use chemical weapons on her own people and China to crush Hong Kong’s autonomy, asks Stephens, why should Putin think he wouldn’t get away with invading Ukraine?

Iran, too, has learned that only Israel is prepared to oppose its increasing aggression against its neighbors. Europe seems to have allowed the benefits of profitable trade with Iran to distract her from being in missile range of a revolutionary Islamic republic with nuclear weapons. The US seems to see no problem with a nuclear-armed Shiite caliphate stretching all the way to the Mediterranean, and controlling all the oil and gas in the Middle East. Why shouldn’t it continue to make agreements and violate them?

But suppose that Trump’s Maximum Pressure campaign had been continued under Biden (or a reelected Trump). Suppose that it had been expanded to a full-on international boycott of everything Iranian, like has been done to (the much stronger) Russia in the past few weeks. Suppose this were combined with a campaign of sabotage, cyberattacks, assistance to local dissidents, and pinpoint military operations – and then the regime were presented with an ultimatum, not an offer of appeasement. Would it have worked? I think so. It might even have been possible to topple the regime.

Is it too late now? I’m not sure. More importantly, though, there is no will in the West to do it, and certainly no desire on the part of the Biden Administration, “led” by its senile gasbag and actually directed by unknown forces.

There is very little that Israel can do to affect the behavior of the Western appeasers, just as Czechoslovakia had no options in 1938. What’s left is to prepare for the war that will certainly follow; to develop plans – I prefer preemption – to make it as short and decisive as possible. The worst possible approach, which I fear appeals to our government, is to try to obtain guarantees from the Americans that they will act in some way to protect us.

Just ask Ukraine how good their word is!

Posted in Iran, US-Israel Relations, War | 2 Comments

Iran is No Less Dangerous than Russia

Posted on March 13, 2022 by Victor Rosenthal

Last week, Russia threw a monkey wrench into the Iran nuclear talks by insisting that any deal removing sanctions from Iran must also remove any sanctions impacting Russian trade with Iran. The talks had supposedly been on the verge of success, with only a few issues remaining.

You might be excused for asking how sanctions put on Russia for her invasion of Ukraine are related to sanctions on Iran for developing nuclear weapons in violation of the non-proliferation treaty (NPT). And the answer would be that they aren’t. But Russia is critical to the deal because part of it is that Iran is supposed to get rid of highly-enriched uranium by sending it to Russia. So the Russians have a lot of leverage.

Israeli officials have argued, correctly, that the deal does not present a significant impediment to Iran’s nuclear program, that it actually legitimizes Iran’s violation of the NPT that it signed, and that it provides a huge pot of money, billions up front in unfrozen accounts and billions in oil revenues going forward.

The Russian action is welcome, insofar as it delays the cash bonanza for Iran – which will be used to support its proxy war in Yemen and its clients Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, all of whom are waging on-and-off warfare against Israel. The Biden Administration has already acted to free up cash for the Iranian regime, by half-hearted enforcement of oil sanctions and even by waiving sanctions on Iran’s supposedly “civilian” nuclear program. All this is justified as necessary to “show good faith” to move the talks forward; but what it actually does is reduce the pressure on the Iranians, which allows them to harden their stance.

It should be noted that Iranian demands in the Vienna negotiations are no less absurd than the Russian ones. Iran is insisting that all sanctions that have ever been applied to individuals or groups in Iran be removed, whether or not they are related to the nuclear project. So for example, individual sanctions will be removed from Mohsen Rezaei and Ali Akbar Velayati, implicated in the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Argentina in which 85 people were murdered. Another case is Brigadier General Hossein Dehghan, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander responsible for the 1982 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, where 241 Americans and 58 French soldiers were killed. Even the IRGC itself will no longer be sanctioned.

It helps to understand the Iranian desire for the deal to know that many of the sanctions target individuals and corrupt organizations that in turn benefit individuals. Lifting the sanctions puts money directly into the pockets of people in and close to the Iranian leadership.

American officials claim that without a deal, Iran is galloping toward the nuclear finish line. But it won’t be appreciably slowed even if the deal is signed. At this point, only military action is likely to prevent Iran from reaching its goal. Watching the chaos that the West has been able to create in Russia by its coordinated financial and diplomatic attack, I wonder whether the far-weaker Iran would have been able to withstand a similar attack. The Trump Administration tried – with its “maximum pressure” policy – but it got less cooperation from its partners, and the program was cut short when Trump wasn’t reelected.

The situation might have been different if the Biden Administration hadn’t been so intent on reversing everything Trump did, and if it hadn’t been wedded to the pro-Iranian and anti-Israeli policies of the Obama Administration. It didn’t help that individuals close to Biden told the Iranians to “sit tight” until the new administration came in, because they would get a better deal then.

Iran ratcheted up the pressure on the US last night when it launched about a dozen rockets at the unfinished new American Consulate in Erbil, in the Kurdish autonomous area of Iraq. Several rockets struck a courtyard outside the building (they also claimed to be targeting “Mossad training centers” in the area). No one was hurt, but the attack was obviously intended to send a message to the Americans about what could happen if they didn’t hurry up and give the Iranians what they want. Technically this is an act of war, but the US hasn’t responded to similar attacks in the last few months, in order not to disrupt negotiations (although it would seem that the attacks themselves ought to be considered disruptive).

Why did the Russians upset the Iranian applecart? I doubt that they realistically expected that the US would agree to make an exception to the Ukraine-related sanctions on Russia for trade with Iran, especially now when the world is brimming over with indignation over the Russian invasion. It is at least in part a way of punishing the Biden administration for supporting Ukraine, and warning it not to intervene any further.

It is also a gift to Israel. But it’s not clear what Israel has done to deserve it. Israel has tried very hard to remain neutral, not easy when two of the world’s superpowers are pulling in opposite directions. Just today Foreign Minister Yair Lapid condemned Russia for invading Ukraine “without justification.” At the same time, the US has joined Ukraine in asking Israel to impose economic sanctions on Russia, something that I strongly doubt will happen. Indeed, I’m not sure why the Americans would ask for this, other than to embarrass Israel. We are not among Russia’s top trading partners, and Israeli sanctions would have little effect on Russia.

The invasion of Ukraine and the war that has followed has been shocking to Europeans and North Americans who believed that except for rogue states in less-developed parts of the world, diplomacy mediated by international law and institutions has replaced raw force as the way to settle disputes. Israelis, too, sometimes fancy themselves part of this modern, post-violence, sophisticated world, until the repeated viciousness of their local enemies reminds them that they are not. This explains the perennial frustration of American, European, (and elite Israeli) “peace processors.”

But with the decline of the Pax Americana, the atavistic forces formerly found only on the continent of Africa or in the Middle East have encroached into the eastern part of Europe. Unless the West is prepared to take back its world leadership – if it can – I expect to see more of this sort of thing.

The short-term plans of the Iranian regime are limited to the Middle East, but if it is allowed to continue on its course of developing long-range missiles and nuclear warheads, it will quickly become a threat to Europe as well.

If the price of ignoring Russian ambitions in Europe is beginning to look like WWII, disregarding Iran’s global ones might appear more like WWIII.

Posted in Europe, Iran, War | 2 Comments

Who’s Intolerant?

Posted on March 10, 2022 by Victor Rosenthal

The refugee crisis in Ukraine has illuminated a deep moral divide among Israelis, which I think reflects a similar division in the moral consciousness of humans everywhere. On one side we have Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked, who announced yesterday that Israel would accept all Jewish refugees – that is, all of those, according to the Law of Return, who have at least one Jewish grandparent – but that only up to 5,000 non-Jewish Ukrainian refugees would be accepted, and those would have to agree to leave after three months. There are 20,000 non-Jewish Ukrainians who are already living in Israel illegally, after overstaying tourist visas, and they will also be allowed to stay temporarily.

On the other side, we find Ha’aretz writer Zvi Bar’el who argues – in a remarkably sarcastic article – that Israel’s concern for the Jewish people is racist, and that true morality calls for us to open our doors equally to all who suffer. And that not only includes Ukrainians, but also the Eritrean and Sudanese illegal immigrants who found life hard and dangerous under kleptocratic and brutal regimes. The Supreme Court, apparently sharing Bar’el’s point of view, threw a series of monkey wrenches into the attempts to deport them. They were bused to South Tel Aviv on arrival, where they colonized the area around the main bus station. The crime rate there has soared as a result.

Bar’el also thinks we have no right to complain about the Russians invading and occupying Ukraine, because we have “occupied” Judea and Samaria. I am embarrassed that it’s necessary to explain to an educated, adult Israeli that Ukraine was an independent country that did not attack Russia, while Judea and Samaria were parts of the original Mandate that were occupied illegally and ethnically cleansed by Jordan, whose army then attacked Israel in a war intended to end her independence.

It’s obvious which side I’m on. But where I disagree with Bar’el is not, as he might say, because he loves all mankind and I am a racist who thinks Jews are better than non-Jews. Actually I too believe in human rights, justice, and equal treatment, even for cultures, like the Palestinian Arabs, whose values happen to be despicable.

Where we differ is this: I think the State of Israel is different from the great majority of countries, because it has a mission: the preservation of the physical and cultural existence of the Jewish people.

Other countries may also be ethnic nation-states like Israel, which means that they represent the realization of self-determination for a particular people. Or alternatively, they may be like the US, which in essence defines the “American People” as those who are born there or who choose to receive citizenship, with no ethnic consideration at all. But I can’t think of any state other than Israel that was born with the specific objective of preserving an endangered people. This is implied in Israel’s Declaration of Independence:

The catastrophe which recently befell the Jewish people – the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe – was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness by re-establishing in Eretz-Israel the Jewish State, which would open the gates of the homeland wide to every Jew and confer upon the Jewish people the status of a fully privileged member of the comity of nations.

This doesn’t mean that the founders (probably these are the words of Ben Gurion) thought that the Holocaust was in itself a justification for the establishment of the state; that this is not what they thought is clear from the rest of the document. But it is emblematic of the fact that Israel was established as a bulwark against the forces of antisemitism, assimilation, and cultural dilution that were erasing the Jewish people from the world.

In order to carry out her mission, the State of Israel must, minimally, maintain a Jewish majority; but she also needs to limit the expansion of non-Jewish religious and cultural influences. Israel is a very small country of 9 million people, 21% of whom are not Jewish. There are, from time to time, antisemitic outbursts right here, such as the Arab riots of May 2021 in which Jews and Jewish property were attacked. Several years ago, there were even incidents of antisemitism involving violence and swastika graffiti perpetrated by Russian-speaking antisemites!

Israel is no. 100 on the list of countries by population. Following it are Switzerland, Togo, Sierra Leone, Hong Kong, and Laos. I haven’t noticed pressure on these countries to take tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees.

I know that a large number of Israelis, often the ones called the “Ashkenazi elite,” find this point of view distasteful. They say that those of us who are concerned about the erosion of the Jewish character of the state are “intolerant” of other cultures.

I suggest that they are the ones who need to exercise more tolerance, in this case for the continued existence of the one, only one, Jewish state in the world. If that upsets them so much, then rather than trying to change it into something else, they should move to any one of the countless countries that are “states of their citizens.” I see advertisements in the newspaper on a regular basis for companies that offer help in obtaining European passports. I recommend them to Zvi Bar’el and the rest of the Ha’aretz crew.

Posted in The Jewish people, Zionism | 2 Comments

The 800-Pound Gorilla of the Non-Orthodox World

Posted on March 6, 2022 by Victor Rosenthal

The Jewish Press reports:

Hundreds of members of the Reform and Conservative movements from Israel and the United States arrived on Friday morning at the Kotel plaza for the Rosh Chodesh Adar B prayer. They were met with enormous resistance from mostly Haredi Jews, including an estimated ten thousand seminary women who followed the instructions of two leaders of the Haredi Lithuanian public, Rabbis Chaim Kanievsky and Gershon Edelstein, to protest the Reform and Conservative presence. Large police forces separated the two parties of obviously God-loving Jews.

There are life-and-death issues that Israel and its leaders are contending with today, and this isn’t one of them. But in the long term, the unity or lack thereof of the Jewish people will have effects on them no less serious than the threat of the Iranian bomb or the invasion of Ukraine.

Most accounts of the controversy in the media are misleading, because they are incomplete or lack context. Reading them, one gets the idea that mixed-gender groups of “reformim” are invading the segregated prayer areas of the Western Wall. That isn’t the case.

One important player is the Rabbi of the Kotel [Wall], Shmuel Rabinowitz. He is a government employee, appointed in 1995 by then-Prime Minister (Yitzhak Rabin) and the Ashkenazi and Sephardi chief rabbis of Israel. There is no defined term for this position, and Rabinowitz is the fourth person to hold it. The first occupant of the office, Rabbi Yitzchak Avigdor Orenstein, was appointed by the British in 1930, and served until he was killed when the Jordanians shelled the Old City in May, 1948.

Rabinowitz, supported by a large portion of the Orthodox community, takes the position that the Kotel is an Orthodox synagogue, and therefore what happens there must follow Orthodox custom. In particular, the prayer area next to the Kotel is divided into men’s and women’s sections, and women are not permitted to pray with a sefer Torah [Torah scroll], even in their section.

The Nashot Hakotel [Women of the Wall], wish to be allowed to pray out loud in the women’s section, wearing a Tallit [prayer shawl] in the women’s section, with a sefer Torah. Officials of the Kotel, on the instructions of Rabbi Rabinowitz, attempt to prevent them from bringing a sefer Torah into the Kotel area; and their monthly services are often disrupted, sometimes quite violently, by large groups of Haredi [“ultra-Orthodox”] men and women.

At the same time, the American Reform Movement and its Israeli offshoot, along with the Israeli Masorti [Conservative] Movement demanded a section of the Kotel where they could be allowed to pray in mixed groups of men and women, as their custom.

It is controversial whether the prohibitions in question are a matter of halacha [Jewish law], or are only local customs which have lesser (but not negligible) force. The Nashot Hakotel, which includes Orthodox women, argue that a woman reading the Torah out loud in an all-woman group is entirely acceptable according to halacha. Those that oppose it generally argue that it should be prohibited because it offends others to hear a woman sing in public, and to see her wearing a tallit.

In 2017 a compromise was reached between the Reform and Masorti groups and the government (including representatives of the Haredi parties) to set aside an area to the south of the men’s and women’s sections of the Kotel where mixed prayer would be allowed. The Nashot Hakotel joined them, because they wanted the support of the Reform Movement. Led by Anat Hoffman, who was both the head of the Nashot Hakotel and the American Reform Movement’s Israel Religious Action Center, they agreed to hold their women-only services in the to-be-created egalitarian area. This created a split in the organization, with those who felt it was important to pray in the main women’s section forming a group called the “Original Women of the Wall.”

In any case, due to pressure from the Haredi public, the compromise was never fully implemented. Although a location was set aside, it had an entrance separate from the main Kotel plaza, was hard to find, and was smaller and less developed than needed. Most important, the compromise provided for a council that would govern the practices in the new area that would include Reform and Masorti representatives. Haredi opposition was especially strong to this, and it didn’t come about.

The question has been tied up in legal and political wrangling, and still hasn’t been settled. At this time, the area is available for egalitarian prayer, but there are often disputes between the liberal groups and Orthodox worshipers, who appear at the space and provocatively set up a partition between men and women. The Nashot Hakotel still worship in the women’s section of the main part of the Kotel, still resort to subterfuge to bring in a sefer Torah, and still are greeted with violent opposition from Haredim.

I believe that both the Israeli Masorti Movement and the Nashot Hakotel are shooting themselves in the foot by associating themselves with the Reform Movement, both its American mothership and its satellite in Israel. The Masorti Movement in Israel is doctrinally closer to Orthodox Judaism than it is to Reform Judaism. There is a commitment to binding halacha, and most of its members are observant of Shabbat and Kashrut (though admittedly its rabbis’ rulings are often more lenient than those of Orthodox rabbis).

Reform Judaism, on the other hand, makes Shabbat and Kashrut optional. It replaces the mitzvot [commandments] of the Torah as codified into halacha with a collection of platitudes that many observers note are identical to liberal – lately, “progressive” – American (or left-wing Israeli) politics.

The observance of mitzvot  because they are mitzvot and not because of their social utility is the essence of Judaism, more important than any set of beliefs. This is entirely absent from Reform Judaism, and I think this in itself is enough to support the position that Reform Judaism is a different religion from Orthodox or even Masorti Judaism.

The Reform Movement in America, from its beginning, was anti-Zionist. After the founding of the state, and more so after Israel’s victory in the 1967 war, it became more pro-Israel; but in recent years – because of its close association with the Left both in America and Israel, it has moved farther and farther in the other direction. The American movement’s “Reform Zionism” consists of an arrogant and somewhat ignorant attempt to change Israeli politics and society to fit an American conception of virtuousness.

The ordinary Israeli sees Reform Judaism for what it is, which is a politically left-leaning, spiritually vacuous, non-Jewish religion. But it is the 800-pound gorilla of the non-Orthodox world, with money, clout, and people that it uses to project its influence here in Israel, where in my opinion it does not belong. Both the women and the Masortim thought they could help their cause by hitching a ride with them.

But they were wrong. It has not helped the Nashot Hakotel, who wish to be able to pray according to halacha, to be associated with a group that does not believe in halacha. And it does not help the Masorti movement, which wants to be accepted as a fully legitimate branch of Judaism, to be associated with a group that does not practice Judaism.

Posted in Israeli Society | 2 Comments

Obama’s Third Term

Posted on March 3, 2022 by Victor Rosenthal

While our attention here in Israel is on Ukraine, the US and Iran are preparing to come to some kind of nuclear agreement. Or not. I’ve been wrong about a number of things lately – I never thought Putin would do more than lop off the Donbas region from Ukraine – and I might be wrong about this too, but the Biden Administration’s desire to have something to brag about seems strong enough to swallow anything the Iranians throw at them at the last minute.

Any deal will have minimal effect on Iran’s ability to make and deploy nuclear weapons. What the signing will do is provide an immediate financial boost to Iran, which can be used both for its nuclear project and the support of its terrorist partners in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq; and it will place Israel in the position of the “rogue” that violates international order if she attacks Iran.

And if there is no deal? I presume that some sanctions would remain for some time. But they will not have any material effect on Iran’s project.

Incidentally, the effect that serious sanctions and actions to isolate a bad actor can have are evident in Russia, whose economy has already been severely wounded by even a few days of economic warfare by the West. It’s a pity that similarly harsh measures were never taken against Iran.

I think there will be a deal, because both sides want it: the Iranians, because they will give up little or nothing, and receive a lot. And the Biden Administration, because appeasing Iran is part of its long-term Middle East policy. Let’s look at that.

Prior to 1973, US policy was not particularly friendly to Israel, primarily because of competition with the Soviet Union for influence with the oil-rich Arab countries. But during the Yom Kippur War, President Nixon, worried that the Soviet-aligned Arabs might win – or that Israel might use her nuclear weapons – airlifted weapons to Israel and then asked Congress to provide billions in aid to pay for them. In response, the Arab-led oil cartel, OPEC, declared an embargo on oil deliveries to countries that supported Israel, including the US. The embargo was only in effect for five months, but caused a huge spike in the price of oil whose shock waves affected almost every part of the world economy. Many countries whose Mideast policy had been neutral or pro-Israel began to tilt toward the Arabs as a result. In the US, oil companies took a public stance calling for a more “even-handed” (i.e., less pro-Israel) policy.

In an attempt to woo them away from the Soviets, Nixon and Kissinger promised Arab leaders in 1974-5 that they would work to “reduce [Israel’s] size to historic [pre-1967] proportions.” This has been US policy ever since. Beginning with Jimmy Carter’s Camp David Accords that gave the Sinai back to Egypt, there have been numerous American-led initiatives to do just that.

Presidents Reagan, GHW Bush, Clinton, GW Bush, and Trump all thought that the solution to the conflict between Israel and the Arabs lay in a territorial compromise with some kind of Palestinian entity. And all of them understood that Israel’s security had to be preserved. But Barack Obama was different.

Obama was the second American president, after Jimmy Carter, who was clearly anti-Israel. His sympathy with the Palestinian movement was clear from remarks that he made when he was running for the Senate back in 2003, from the speech he made in Cairo shortly after he took office, in which he compared “Palestinian [suffering] in pursuit of a homeland” to the Holocaust, and to the pain and humiliation of slavery and segregation felt by black Americans.

Obama often claimed to support the Jewish state, and pointed to the 10-year commitment his administration made to a $38bn program of military aid. But the money is spent in America, where it buys the most expensive weapons in the world, developed on a cost-plus basis. Obama eliminated the provision that allowed some of the aid to be spent on purchases from Israel’s own defense industries. The aid program serves America’s interests and damages Israel’s. It addicts Israel to expensive American weapons, weakens Israel’s defense industries, and gives the US too much leverage over Israel’s actions.  Israel would be better off without it.

A list of all of Obama’s actions that were damaging to Israel would stretch from January 2009, when he ordered Israel to end its ground invasion of Gaza before inauguration day, to his final spiteful act as a lame duck president, when he ordered his UN ambassador to abstain on the anti-Israel UNSC resolution 2334 (the last time this happened was during Carter’s presidency). His contemptuous treatment of Israel’s then Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu – he instructed an aide to refer to the former combat soldier as “a chickenshit” to a reporter – tells us everything about his attitude.

But the most dangerous initiative of his administration was, of course, the JCPOA, the original Iran deal of 2015. At the time it was clear that it did not prevent, or even significantly slow, Iran’s progress. It couldn’t be enforced. It weakened a UN resolution forbidding Iran from developing nuclear-capable ballistic missiles. And it actually legitimized Iran’s having nuclear weapons after a few years. We should remember that under the non-proliferation treaty that Iran signed, it agreed to never develop such weapons.

It’s hard to see what American interest the deal served then, and even harder now. It will give Biden something to brag about, and it will be yet another shot at former president Trump. But where is the benefit from increased funding for terrorism, strengthening America’s greatest enemy in the Mideast, and beginning a round of nuclear proliferation in the volatile region? Where is the benefit for the US and the rest of the West from enabling the establishment of an Iranian caliphate in the region?

This is just one of the administration’s actions that are difficult to understand. Recently, it effectively killed a proposed natural gas pipeline from Israel to Europe through Cyprus and Greece. Now, with Russia threatening to cut gas supplies to Europe, this looks even more stupid.

Last month, the US cut military aid to Egypt by some $130m out of $300m. The stated reason is that they are not satisfied with al-Sisi’s plan to improve the human rights situation in Egypt. At the same time, the Iran deal will free up billions which Iran can use to continue supporting terrorist groups targeting Egypt. In case you’ve forgotten, Obama supported Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Morsi over Mubarak.

Shortly after taking office, the administration removed the Yemenite Houthi rebels from the list of terrorist organizations. On the same day, they attacked a Saudi airport.

Why? The answer is that the Biden Administration is Obama’s third term. Its foreign policy team, and especially those responsible for negotiations with Iran, are made up almost entirely of former Obama Administration people. Although I can’t prove it, I believe that Obama, Ben Rhodes, Susan Rice, and others are pulling the strings.

And these people share a bizarre ideology. They see the world through a lens that combines leftism, Islamism, and a naïve third-worldism. They see Islamism as the most authentic political movement in the Middle East, and so they support the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, as well as Iranian control of Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. Among their goals are the replacement of Israel – which they see as an outpost of Western colonialism – by a Palestinian state. I believe they see the possibility of a strong, modernizing Israeli-Egyptian-Saudi bloc as dangerous to Islam, and will try to prevent it from arising.

Try as I might, I can’t see how this fits in with American interests.

Posted in American politics, Iran, US-Israel Relations | 4 Comments

Will Putin Shoot the Hostages? (Updated 1 March)

Posted on February 27, 2022 by Victor Rosenthal

For the last few days it’s been impossible for me to think about anything other than the war in Ukraine:

  • Full-scale warfare in Europe. Europe! I know I’m showing my “white” bias, because after all, millions have died in vicious conflicts in places like Nigeria or Somalia; but still, this isn’t supposed to happen in the civilized world (no, Nigeria and Somalia aren’t civilized).
  • The heroism of Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who has remained in the capital of his besieged country, knowing that Russian special forces operators are looking for him, and who told US officials who had offered to evacuate him from the country, “the fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.”
  • The 16 Ukrainian defenders of tiny Snake Island in the Black Sea, who refused to surrender to a Russian warship, responding “go f- yourself,” before they were all killed. [Update: this appears to not be true].
  • Ukrainians sending women and children to the borders while giving weapons to men (and some women) up to the age of 60, to fight in the streets.
  • Vladimir Putin’s crazy attempt at justifying the invasion in which he cites protecting Russian-speaking Ukrainians against “genocide,” and “denazification” of the country.

The Russian army, which expected to make short work of the relatively tiny Ukrainian military (the Russian military budget at $45bn is ten times that of Ukraine), has bogged down, and as yet has been unable to conquer Kyiv, the capital. There are numerous reasons, some of them structural problems in the Russian military, logistical problems, and strategic and tactical mistakes; but I think the main cause for its failure is the difference between the attitude of a soldier fighting to defend his home and family, and one who is sent somewhere to kill people with whom he has no quarrel, and possibly to lose his own life for reasons that are unclear to him.

At this point, several thousand Russians and a few hundred Ukrainians are said to have been killed in the fighting. The Russians have aimed precision-guided weapons at military targets, and it seems that most civilian casualties are unintentional. But this may not continue. The Russians do not have large stocks of precision weapons, and it is reported that they are now bringing up less accurate weapons which – as we know well here in Israel – are likely to cause many more deaths and injuries among civilians.

In addition, in a very worrisome development, launchers that are capable of firing rockets with thermobaric (fuel-air explosive) warheads as well as other weapons whose use is guaranteed to cause mass casualties, have been seen near the Ukrainian border. The Russians used them in urban areas of Chechnya with devastating effect. Short of nuclear or chemical-biological warfare, these may be the most frightening of weapons.

The financial burden of the war for Russia is astronomical, and has already made itself felt in the Russian economy, none too strong to begin with. Serious sanctions will make it even harder. Supplies of weapons may run low (I don’t know how far to trust this guy, but his analysis suggests big problems for the Russians). Even in Russia, where dissent is severely punished, there have been large antiwar demonstrations. All this indicates that the war will be unsustainable over time. Putin must have a quick victory. And this is where the greatest peril lies.

Vladimir Putin has never shown great compassion to his enemies. The Second Chechen War and continuing conflict in the North Caucasus were characterized by extreme brutality (on both sides, it’s true). Numerous political opponents of Putin, as well as journalists and activists, have been murdered, sometimes poisoned. It is not unthinkable that if he is unable win quickly enough, he will move to a strategy of deliberately targeting civilians in order to force a surrender. In a sense, the Russian army is holding the population – at least, those who haven’t been able to flee – hostage. And if Putin doesn’t get what he wants, he’ll start shooting hostages.

This whole affair has been a series of surprises, at least for me. I didn’t even expect the Russians to invade – I thought Putin would demand some concessions and back off. But perhaps because he sensed that the West would not or could not stop him, he went for the whole enchilada, which apparently includes the installation of a puppet government over all Ukraine.

What’s next? Putin, as I said last week, is clearly a disciple of Sun Tzu, who advised that one should always “build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across.” So I hope that he will provide a way out that will end the conflict with as little bloodshed as possible, and certainly not force it to devolve into mass murder, as it very well might.

The whole world is watching, as they say, and nations are learning lessons. Israel and other small countries are learning to be wary of Russia, and not to expect your Western allies to come to your aid if you need them. I’m sure Zelenskiy found it instructive when Germany responded to his request for military aid with 5,000 helmets (but to be fair, just yesterday the embarrassed Germans agreed to send anti-tank and antiaircraft weapons, probably too late to matter).

China is watching too. And what China sees is that while might may not make right, nobody is going to stop you from taking what you want if you are strong enough. With that in mind, note that China is holding a “training exercise” in the South China Sea starting today. You may recall that Putin’s buildup on the borders of Ukraine was also called an “exercise” at first.

Remember back in 1991, when the Soviet Empire was falling apart, and everyone thought that we were about to enter a new age in which the enlightened, humanitarian West, under American leadership, would bring about an age of peace, prosperity, and social progress?

Whatever happened to that?

Posted in War | 2 Comments