Concentrate on the signal, ignore the noise

Posted on May 5, 2017 by Victor Rosenthal

The latest UNESCO resolution on “Occupied Palestine” is both nothing and something.

It is nothing because it changes nothing. It cannot render “null and void” Israel’s possession of Jerusalem or its status as our capital city (echoing Hamas’ new document of principles, p.11). It cannot make ma’arat hamachpela or kever rachel  “Palestinian” sites. And it cannot make UNESCO something rather than the nothing it has become, because its passage of a series of similar resolutions shows that it is a creature of anti-Israel politics rather than an organization to promote international cooperation.

On the other hand, the resolution adds to the massive accumulation of documents, maps, slogans, manifestos and resolutions in UN agencies, churches, and universities – none of which in themselves change anything – that declare that we, the Jewish people in their sovereign state, are nothing. A historian of the 30th century might come upon this pile of documents and believe that there is a country called “Palestine” that is “occupied,” although there would be a far smaller collection of sources testifying to the existence of a state called “Israel.” They might wonder how nothing can occupy something.

Although millions of Arabs, other Muslims, Europeans, Ha’aretz writers, and other enemies of Israel have been so far unable to dislodge the tenacious grip of the Jewish people from their land by force or the combination of force and guile called “diplomacy,” they have been able to produce thousands of tons of paper attesting to the proposition that we don’t exist, and to the extent that we do, we oughtn’t to.

When it comes to mass production of “content,” we can’t compete. There is a UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, as well as a Division for Palestinian Rights which maintains the United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine. And that’s just the UN. Think about the thousands of journalists and academics around the world who at this very moment are writing articles and publishing papers that explain how everything from Palestinian honor killings to American police shooting black people is Israel’s fault.

News coverage from world media is abysmal. Nobody expects good treatment from Al Jazeera, owned by our friend the Emir of Qatar; and of course the New York Times is terrible, possibly thanks to its historic discomfort with the fact of its Jewish ownership. Reuters and AP are also very problematic. I could go on, but then I’d have to mention my favorite, America’s National Public Radio.

Don’t forget the NGOs, both the international ones like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, and the Israeli ones like B’tselem, Breaking the Silence, ad infinitum. All of them get much of their money – millions of dollars annually – from entities hostile to Israel, and the funders get what they pay for: countless reports and testimonies accusing Israel of war crimes and oppression of Palestinian Arabs.

What can we do? There are just a few million of us, and there are more than a billion of them. How can we possibly keep up with and counteract the flow of words, memes, columns, Facebook posts, movies and TV programs, and every other imaginable expression of the simple idea that motivates them: Jews out!

Perhaps we don’t need to. All human understanding requires discrimination. We receive a flood of data through our senses, some of it relevant to our survival, some of it interesting in some way, and some of it worthless. Our job is to pick out the important stuff, the “signal,” and reject the “noise.” If we can’t do that, we flail around, unable to take the actions necessary for our survival. What applies to individuals also applies to states. I’ve been saying for years that we have to fight harder to win the information war, but maybe I’ve been wrong all along. Maybe the object of the campaign against us is to upset us, to distract us – to hide the signal in a plethora of noise. If that is true, then the less we play this game, the less damage it will do.

Here are some ideas:

Let’s start by kicking the UN out of Jerusalem, as Minister of Culture and Sport Miri Regev suggested yesterday. The UN has been squatting in Jerusalem’s Armon Hanatziv neighborhood since 1967, engaging in illegal construction and anti-Israel activities. This is a perfect time to teach the UN who is actually sovereign in Jerusalem (hint: it isn’t them and it isn’t the non-state of “Palestine”). The less we have to do with the UN, the less noise they introduce into our channel.

Then we can continue by modifying the NGO Transparency Law to give it some real teeth. An NGO that violates the law is fined a measly $7,500, a drop in the bucket for an organization like Breaking the Silence with an annual income (2015) of $1.3 million. Personally, I would like to see all foreign funding of political organizations banned, period. If an Israeli NGO can’t survive on Israeli contributions, then maybe it doesn’t need to survive. Shut down their noise output!

Israel worries too much about all these words on all this paper. There is a serious lack of housing in and around Jerusalem. That’s the signal. We should ignore the noise and build some more. The UN will condemn Israel, the NGOs will have fits, the NY Times will write a critical editorial, but what else will be new? We could even use some of that land the UN is squatting on.

Israel must control the land area of Judea and Samaria and its airspace for simple geographic reasons. Any “solution” needs to be one that recognizes this. Another signal. Why do we waste time and energy and make dangerous concessions like freeing prisoners for the sake of an agreement to give up control of this land? Why do we let the noise obscure the signal?

Some decades ago I believed that we were headed toward world government. Like it did in Blackhawk Comics, the UN would police the world, and international forces would crush evildoers before they got started. Nations would wither away (well, maybe not the USA!), and the great systems of capitalism and communism would evolve toward each other, ultimately to reconcile. Nationalism, being irrational, would also die out (it didn’t occur to me to wonder about the Zionism I strongly supported), to be replaced with peaceful coexistence.

In hindsight, it’s obvious that this vision ignores basic facts about human nature which (thank goodness) prevented it from coming to pass. Today the Soviet Union is gone and the US is struggling to survive, perhaps as divided as it was prior to the Civil War. The international institutions that were to have given rise to the utopian world government are dying. The EU is on its last legs and the UN has passed from marginal usefulness to almost total parasitism, a parasite that its hosts can’t bring themselves to kill. The Blackhawk Squadron will not take off again to save the world.

The world is changing, getting less rational, more dangerous and more fragmented. Nobody will give artificial respiration to weak nations in a world dominated by Putins, Xi Jinpings and (maybe) Trumps. Israel won’t be protected by international organizations or laws, even if they were not subverted politically and turned against us. And it can’t depend on the US, which has its own problems that will only  get worse.

What will matter in the future, and already matter today, are facts on the ground and the ability to deter aggression. This is the real “signal.” The posturing of international diplomacy is just part of the noise that is intended to obscure it.

Posted in 'Peace' Process, Europe and Israel, Jew Hatred, Media, The UN | 1 Comment

Historical/cultural appropriation and reality inversion

Posted on May 1, 2017 by Victor Rosenthal

Imitation may really be the sincerest form of flattery. We Zionists, therefore, should be flattered that our deadly enemies have claimed our history and our land for themselves.

The enemies of the Jewish state and the Jewish people have been trying to reverse history and re-disperse the Jewish people. They employ increasingly sophisticated means, including war, terrorism, and lately a combination of these with a carefully planned and executed diplomatic and cognitive assault aimed at Israel’s supporters and Israelis themselves.

The cognitive part of the attack on our state and people is intended to delegitimize our claim to be the indigenous people of the land of Israel, and to replace us with a fictitious people, the “Palestinians,” who actually are a group of heterogeneous Arabs who have little common history prior to the 20th century.

Nevertheless, the story is that Jews are actually Europeans (this doesn’t account for the half of Israelis whose ancestors did not live in Europe, but nobody cares), and that the Arab inhabitants of the land of Israel have been here for hundreds, even thousands, of years. Jewish history and provenance in the land of Israel are denied, and “Palestinians” are falsely cast as victims of oppression, expulsion and genocide thus appropriating the historical experience of the Jewish people.

Denial of Jewish provenance is pervasive. Yasser Arafat said that there was no Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, and his successor Mahmoud Abbas joined him, despite massive archaeological and historical evidence for the existence of both the first and second Temples. UNESCO, prompted by Arab members, passed a resolution in 2016 referring to the Temple Mount only as “Al Aqsa Mosque/Haram al Sharif,” thus attempting to erase Jewish connections to the site. Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat claimed to be “the proud son of the Canaanites who were there 5,500 years before Joshua bin Nun burned down the town of Jericho,” but he is actually descended from Hashemites who lived in Arabia before coming to Israel “many decades ago, but not centuries nor millennia.” Erekat is actually an old-timer among Palestinian Arabs, because many (if not most) of them are descended from migrants who came to Israel in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Jewish history, the story of a people dispossessed from its land treated cruelly in exile, and triumphally reestablishing sovereignty in its historic homeland, seems to the Palestinian Arabs to be a powerful and appealing narrative, so they appropriate it and fit it to their purposes.

Palestinian “history” is a compressed version of Jewish history, with its expulsions and massacres. The nakba, the establishment of the Jewish state which resulted in some 650,000 Arabs fleeing their homes, is presented as a deliberate mass expulsion, an ethnic cleansing at gunpoint. According to historian Benny Morris, probably the most respected authority on the subject, only a small number of Arabs were actually evacuated at gunpoint, and most fled the violence of war or the collapse of Arab society after community leaders left. There was no “master plan” as Palestinian supporters often allege, to ethnically cleanse the land of Arabs. Needless to say, accusations of “genocide” need not be dignified by a response; Arab populations have multiplied several times in Israel after 1948 and in Judea/Samaria/Gaza after 1967.

The process also includes the inversion of reality, in which the Jews are accused of doing to the Palestinians what the Palestinians have done, or wish to do, to them. Israel is accused of ethnic cleansing, targeting children and noncombatants, committing terrorism, establishing an apartheid regime, and racism. But in fact it is the PLO, Hamas and Hezbollah who deliberately target civilians and children, and who are proud to announce that when ‘Palestine’ is declared, no Jews will live in it. Israeli self-defense is called “terrorism,” and Hamas and PLO media report the arrests of actual terrorists as “kidnappings.” Palestinian terrorists, who – like the biblical Amalek – always choose the softest of targets, refer to their exploits as military operations, even when the objective is a school bus.

More than just misrepresenting history and current events, our enemies engage in systematic cultural theft. “Jesus was a Palestinian,” they say, a literally absurd statement – could he have been a Muslim, seven centuries before Mohammad, was he not a Jew, were the inhabitants of Judea the ancestors of the Arabs that call themselves “Palestinians” and not of today’s Jews? All of these things are nonsensical, but yet the proposition resonates.

Another kind of reality inversion is “moral equivalency,” in which the actions of both sides are considered comparable, and the death of a suicide bomber is supposed to be as tragic as those of her victims.

Today is Israel’s memorial day for the victims of war and terrorism, and last night saw a particularly offensive manifestation of moral equivalency, in which the Palestinian narrative was internalized by traumatized Jewish survivors of Arab violence. An organization of “former Israeli soldiers and Palestinian militants” called “Combatants for Peace” held an “Alternative Memorial Day” observance:

The Israeli-Palestinian Memorial Day ceremony, which has been held on the eve of Memorial Day for the last eleven consecutive years, comes to remind us that war is not an act of fate but one of human choice. This ceremony is the largest annual event held by the Combatants for Peace movement. On this particularly difficult day we call upon both sides to acknowledge the pain and the aspirations of those living on the other side of the fence and for each of us to strive to prevent the next war. Perhaps during next year’s Memorial Day, additional losses will not have to reckoned with. At the ceremony, Israeli and Palestinian bereaved families speak about their personal pain.

Combatants for Peace receives significant funding from Germany, Switzerland and Belgium, among other foreign sources. According to NGO Monitor, “Combatants for Peace activities reflect a strong affiliation with the Palestinian agenda and narrative, placing most of the blame for the conflict on ‘the occupation’.”

While I don’t doubt that the Palestinian mother whose child was shot to death while trying to stab a random Jew or while throwing a firebomb feels a pain that is similar to that of the Jewish mother of a child that was stabbed or burned in such an attack, the idea that both the victim and the perpetrator deserve to be honored on memorial day is obscene. Apparently some Jewish Israelis felt it was obscene enough to try to disrupt the events; and while I oppose disruption of peaceful speech no matter how stupid and offensive, I can certainly see their point.

The accumulated weight of UNESCO decisions, Arab propaganda, and yes – the subversive actions of (mostly) well-meaning Israelis – weakens the state both from within and without. The Palestinian narrative seems unbelievable to those of us who have even a slight acquaintance with Jewish history, but many people believe it, even in supposedly advanced countries.

It’s ironic that the same people that accuse us of cultural appropriation of falafel are the greatest historical/cultural thieves of all.

Posted in Information war, Israel and Palestinian Arabs, The UN | 1 Comment

Supersessionism, new and old

Posted on April 28, 2017 by Victor Rosenthal

Dr. Richard Landes has written a great deal about honor-shame cultures, like the Arab culture. In an honor-shame culture, what’s important is not how you see yourself, but how others see you. Loss of honor in such a culture is disastrous and can lead to suicide or murder – as in the case of so-called “honor killings” carried out to recover the honor of a family after a perceived act of sexual delinquency.

Modern Westerners are usually less concerned with honor and shame. Especially in America, it is laudable, even heroic, to do the right thing no matter what others think. This would make no sense in an honor-shame culture.

In the West, the operative concepts are usually morality and guilt, which are independent of what others think. Landes explains the difference:

…for guilt, it’s the awareness of the deed and its meaning, for shame, it’s whether others know. In some countries in the world, it’s not a question of whether you’re corrupt or not (everyone is, everyone knows), but just if you get caught. How many teenagers apologize for getting caught? Some adulterers have no sense of wrongdoing, as long as no one else knows. On some level everyone is subject to these concerns.

While honor-shame cultures have moral codes, however, their vulnerability to the fear of shame can readily lead to a jettisoning of any moral concerns. After all, the limbic dread of shame – its disastrous psychological and practical impact on them – kicks in in times of humiliation and fear.

Guilt is expiated by compensating the victim of an evil act and vowing to never commit the offense again (in Jewish terminology, doing tshuvah). Shame only requires that the awareness of the crime in the public consciousness be cancelled out.

But the honor-shame dynamic still does exist to some extent in the West, and Landes finds it in the European obsession with Israel. In traditional Christian supersessionim, the Church replaces the Jews as God’s people.  Landes refers to a different “supersessionist narrative,” in which the Israelis replace the Nazis and the “Palestinians” become the Jews:

When Europeans (or Christians) adopt the Palestinian replacement narrative, when the universalization of the Holocaust leads to silence about its prime victim, the driver of the megadeath industry, when academics and politicians engage in “holocaust abuse” by replacing the (old) Jewish victim, with the (new) Palestinian one, and denouncing Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians, they reveal that they are driven not by Holocaust guilt, but Holocaust shame, and the result is the exact opposite of what one might/should expect. Instead of making sure they don’t participate in another genocide against the same people their foreathers had so grievously treated only a couple of generations ago – Nie Weider! [sic] – they adopt the narrative of those who would “finish the job.”

Young Europeans especially feel shame rather than guilt. After all, they weren’t even born when their grandfathers committed the crimes that they are constantly pressed to remember and atone for. They aren’t guilty of anything. But still, who wants to be known as a descendant of mass murderers or part of the nation that committed the greatest genocide in history?

This new supersessionist narrative works by canceling shame. If the Jews are Nazis, Israel’s crimes replace and supersede those of the Nazis and their collaborators in the public consciousness. Europeans and especially Germans have struggled with their feelings since the war, and here is a way to finally lift the burden!

Landes’ discussion is thought-provoking. And it occurred to me that it explains something that has been puzzling me about the behavior of Germany today for some time.

Since the war, Germany has had what is called a “special relationship” with Israel. Germany has paid reparations to the state of Israel and to Holocaust survivors there and gives Israel aid in the form of large discounts on purchases of military items like submarines. There is close security cooperation. Germany has often voted against anti-Israel initiatives in the UN, and for several years, it even gave Israel the maximum number of points in the Eurovision contest, regardless of the quality of our entry. There are extensive contacts in the areas of trade, science, education and culture. Israel and Germany have numerous sister cities.

And yet, the German government both by itself and through the EU is by far the largest donor to Israeli NGOs that support BDS, anti-Zionism, anti-Israel lawfare and even terrorism. The activity of foreign-funded anti-state NGOs in Israel is on a massive scale involving millions of Euros a year, and constitutes a form of cognitive warfare against the Jewish state. Just yesterday, PM Netanyahu canceled a meeting with the German foreign minister after he met with representatives of two particularly subversive NGOs, B’tselem and Breaking the Silence. German money, as Tuvia Tenenbom wrote in his book “Catch the Jew” is everywhere in Israel, even funding pro-Palestinian movies.

How can we explain this seeming contradiction? Do they want to support us or to help our enemies kill us? Landes’ analysis suggests an answer. If he’s right and the Germans today are primarily motivated by shame, then it makes sense that they would do as much as possible in public to counteract the perception that they are the heirs of the murderous Nazis. On the other hand, their shame drives them to work privately at the same time to transfer the responsibility to Israel, to make the Jewish state into the new Third Reich. And as a matter of fact, German funding for anti-state NGOs in Israel is highly non-transparent. While Germany is a public friend of Israel, in private it helps our enemies drive their knives into our collective back.

In a way, we’re stuck. We don’t want the world to forget the horrors of the Holocaust, but the more we remind them, the more ashamed, and thus angry, they become. My own view is that we should stop trying to get sympathy for what was done to us 70-odd years ago, and concentrate on gaining respect for forcefully defending ourselves today.

Posted in Europe and Israel, Jew Hatred | 1 Comment

Leaving the shadow of the Diaspora

Posted on April 24, 2017 by Victor Rosenthal

Today at 10 AM I went up to the roof of my apartment building to listen to the siren commemorating the victims of the Holocaust. At times like this I usually think about my great aunts and uncles who were murdered by the Nazis, most of them in a very personal way, hunted down and shot – because like me, my wife, my children and grandchildren, they were Jews.

But today I had something else on my mind. The Holocaust was a large scale industrial pogrom, but it wasn’t the first or last pogrom. The humiliation, oppression, and ultimate murder of the Jews of Europe in the first half of the 20th century is very present to the descendants of those who survived it, but Jews were victimized almost everywhere and in almost any era: in Europe, in the Middle East (until the Muslims finally succeeded in getting rid of them), in Africa. While there were few if any “pogroms” in North America, there have been anti-Jewish riots and lynchings.

Jewish history for the past 2000 years or so has been a story of Jews moving around in search of a place where they could live in relative safety and make a living for themselves. Sometimes, when conditions were good for more than a short time, we read about a “golden age,” like Spain around 900-1000 CE or the USA from the end of WWII to the present. At some other not-so-golden times and places Jews were stripped of their possessions, expelled from communities and even whole countries, forcibly converted or murdered. Almost everywhere there were legal or social strictures placed on Jews that disadvantaged them relative to the Christian or Muslim majorities in whose midst they lived.

Like any cohesive social group, the Jewish people changed and evolved culturally as a result of their experience. Strategies for survival were developed, and ones that worked were reinforced. “Jewish” ways of coping with adverse social and political situations came into being. These strategies were based on being a despised minority that was relatively powerless compared to the majority and to the ruling regime.

One strategy that did not work was direct violent resistance to the oppressors. The non-Jewish majority was far more numerous and the regime had a monopoly on weapons. When violent resistance did occur, like the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, it was more a last-ditch response to an impossible situation, a desire to go down fighting, not a strategy that was expected to extricate the Jews from their predicament.

Another, more practical strategy was to make alliances – with important elements in the regime if possible, or with other oppressed minorities. There were tactical approaches, like paying ransom to release captives or bribing officials, that often were successful in the short run. But there were problems: rulers change unpredictably; and often the powerful classes and other minorities alike shared the disdain for Jews that characterized the masses. Where there were wealthy Jews, they were often seen as a resource that could be squeezed for money when needed. Ultimately, there is never enough money to pay off a blackmailer.

Some conceived Zionism as a way to break out of this permanent insecurity. A state with a Jewish majority and a Jewish government wouldn’t have pogroms, they saw. The police and the army would be on our side. There wouldn’t be discriminatory laws against Jews. We wouldn’t need to obsequiously crawl to some prince or emir that hates us and pretend to love him in return in order to stay alive.

Once there was a sovereign Jewish state, the best tactics to ensure survival would change. We still need allies, but there are better ways to release captives held by our enemies than paying ransom. A sovereign state can have an army to defend it; it would no longer be necessary to beg or buy sufferance from those who hate us.

Unfortunately, despite the success of the Zionist movement in establishing a sovereign Jewish state, there are Jews in Israel who haven’t gotten the message. They have remained wedded to attitudes, strategies and tactics that are appropriate for a diasporic minority but not helpful, even dangerous, when adopted by a state that wants to preserve sovereignty.

Politician Naftali Bennett used the slogan “don’t apologize” in his last campaign. He released a remarkably funny – but effective – video in which a “nebbish” (played by Bennett in a false beard) apologizes for things that are not his fault. Watch it here:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFGWJ1vIf44[/youtube]

Exaggerated? Not much. A sovereign state does not need to apologize for defending itself, or for building homes for its people in land which belongs to it, according to its reasonable interpretation of international law.

Despite the fact that he is often called “hard-line” or “right-wing,” PM Netanyahu is still sometimes afflicted with diasporic thinking. He is not embarrassed to say that he is trying to reach an agreement with the Trump Administration about building in Judea and Samaria. Now while the US may be unhappy with Israel’s policy in this area, as a sovereign state there is only one position for Israel to take: how we build on our land is our business and nobody else’s.

And there is the way Israeli negotiating positions toward the PLO/PA have shifted more and more toward the Palestinians since Oslo, despite the fact that our “partners” have made no significant concessions during the last two decades, and have indeed hardened their positions in many areas. Instead of using our considerable strength to pressure our enemies – a possibility that did not exist in the Diaspora – we prefer to try to buy their good will. But all we get in return for our generosity and restraint is contempt.

Consider our relations with Hamas in Gaza. While they build rockets and dig tunnels to attack us, we supply electricity to run the machinery that helps them do it. There have even been suggestions from the IDF and government ministers that Israel should help Hamas build a seaport and an airport, in return for a promise of peace.

It is often said that one of the most important lessons of the Holocaust is that when your enemies threaten to kill you, you should take them seriously. The PLO and Hamas certainly fit this description, and yet we have consistently tried to solve the problem they pose by offering to buy their tolerance.

In a few days we’ll mark 69 years since the founding of the State of Israel. We’ve made an incredible amount of progress demographically, economically, militarily, scientifically and socially. But we haven’t seemed to be able to get out from under the shadow of our prior Diaspora existence. Maybe we should try to do that in time for our 70th anniversary!

Posted in Israeli Politics, Zionism | 2 Comments

Israel must put terrorist murderers to death

Posted on April 21, 2017 by Victor Rosenthal

This isn’t the first time I’ve written this, and it won’t be the last unless something changes.

Marwan Barghouti is in the news again, calling for a hunger strike to “resist” the “abuse” of Palestinians imprisoned in Israel. The New York Times also made news by publishing an op-ed by Barghouti with a note that he is a “Palestinian leader and parliamentarian,” but failing to include the fact that he was imprisoned after a conviction for five terrorist murders. He was accused of being involved in many more, but the state chose to prosecute him only for the ones for which the evidence was strongest. After all, five life sentences should be enough to keep him off the street, shouldn’t they?

Israelis can be excused for being skeptical. After all, 16 of them weren’t enough to keep Ahlam Tamimi, mastermind of the 2002 Sbarro Pizzaria bombing, behind bars (she was released in 2011 as part of the ransom for kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit). Tamimi has a flourishing career as a broadcaster in Jordan, which has refused her extradition to the US (some of her victims were US citizens). Yet again in 2013 Israel agreed to release 104 prisoners, most of whom were convicted of murder, “in order to move toward renewed peace negotiations.” Some 78 were released before the doomed negotiations fell apart.

Although the Knesset passed a law in 2014 establishing a life sentence without possibility of parole in less than 40 years and without eligibility for release for diplomatic purposes, the pressure that can be placed on Israeli officials when a person, especially a young soldier, is in the hands of the enemy can be immense. In any case, the law doesn’t apply to terrorists already in prison, nor to military courts where many cases which occur in Judea and Samaria must be tried. I am not aware of any terrorist that has yet received this kind of sentence.

Barghouti and Tamimi are popular Palestinian heroes, because nothing makes a bigger Palestinian hero than killing Jews. There is agitation from the Israeli Left and foreign circles to release Barghouti, who is considered a possible “moderate” Palestinian political leader and even (and this is insane) “the Palestinian Nelson Mandela.”

The only thing Barghouti shares with Mandela is the fact that he is in prison, something that could also be said of Charles Manson, and nobody calls him the American Mandela. But I could easily imagine circumstances under which Barghouti (unlike Manson) would be released.

There should be no question of releasing Barghouti and no need to try to extradite Tamimi. These options should have been foreclosed from the start. Both justice and our national interest demand that these murderers and others like them should be dead.

Let’s look at some of the reasons that Israel should implement a speedy and sure death penalty for terrorist murder.

  1. Fewer terrorists means less terror. As I’ve said above, life sentences are often cut short. Many of the prisoners who were released went back to terrorism, including some that murdered again. At least 6 Israelis have been killed since 2014 by prisoners who were released in the 2011 deal that freed Ahlam Tamimi. They would be alive today if their murderers had received the death penalty. Laws to limit prisoner exchanges are unlikely to be enforced when the next soldier or child is kidnapped.
  2. The presence of high-profile terrorists in prison encourages attempts to kidnap Israelis in order to free them.
  3. It is a deterrent. A terrorist knows that if he survives his attack, he will be imprisoned under good conditions with other security prisoners, he can earn academic degrees, and his family will be compensated. He might even be released early. Yes, some terrorists are suicidal but many are not. A death penalty, if it is swift and sure (as it is not, for example, in the US) does deter other potential terrorists.
  4. How can we ask soldiers and police to risk their lives trying to capture terrorists when they know they will receive de facto light sentences? And how can we punish them if, out of frustration, they kill a terrorist that they could have captured alive?
  5. Honor and deterrence demand that Israel kill terrorist murderers. This is possibly the most important consideration of all. In Arab cultures, a clan that does not retaliate for the killing of its members loses its honor and its power of deterrence. Even if the folks in North Tel Aviv think that we are too civilized to kill our enemies, the Palestinians are certain that it’s because we are too weak, as a culture, to do so. They take this as a sign that their struggle is succeeding and are encouraged to continue it.

There will be objections. What about mistakes? Death is so final. But in the case of terrorist murderers, the evidence is often very strong – they are often caught quite literally red-handed. So there is no reason we can’t insist on a very high standard of proof before imposing the death penalty.

Executions, it is objected, create martyrs. But an imprisoned Barghouti or Tamimi is a martyr already, a living one. In life they continue to work against us, probably more effectively than if they were only names on Palestinian schools, streets and soccer fields. Dead martyrs are no worse than living ones.

But, they say, most civilized countries don’t have death penalties. Yes, but most civilized countries haven’t faced (until recently, anyway) the sheer volume of terrorism that we have.

Israel actually has a death penalty on the books, which was applied in Adolf Eichmann’s case. When the Fogel family was brutally murdered in 2011, prosecutors said they would seek the death penalty, but in the end did not do so. A law requiring the death penalty for murder by terrorism was introduced after the last election by Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beytenu party, but it did not pass. It should have. Jewish law would probably approve of a death penalty for especially heinous terrorist acts, with a high standard of proof. For example, Barghouti, Tamimi and the Fogel murderers might qualify.

Why has Israel drawn back, even in cases of murder as horrible as the Fogel case, in which five members of a family, including a three-month old baby, were slaughtered by terrorists who were proud of their handiwork? I think the reason is that – as in so many other cases – Israelis feel the need to appease the non-Jewish world, to meet the (supposed) ethical standards of “enlightened,” post-Christian European society.

But that’s an attitude appropriate to a subject people living under foreign rule, not a sovereign state.

Posted in Israeli Society, Terrorism | 1 Comment

No hope for slanderers

Posted on April 17, 2017 by Victor Rosenthal

…ולמלשינים אל תהי תקווה וכל הרשעה כרגע יאבדו

“Let there be no hope for slanderers (מלשינים, transliterated “malshinim”) and may all wickedness perish in an instant…” [tr. Artscroll with minor changes]

That is the beginning of the twelfth blessing of the shemoneh esreh (the eighteen blessings), the central prayer said three times daily by Orthodox Jews.

This blessing (yes, it’s a strange thing to call it) was added to the daily prayers in the synagogues of the first century CE. The Romans who ruled Judea at the time were suspicious and sometimes repressive. After the Bar Kochba revolt (134 CE), the emperor Hadrian even forbade the reading of the Torah. In any event, the problems posed by “slanderers” led the rabbis in the last part of the 1st century to add it.

The word malshin comes from the word for tongue, and refers to a specific kind of slander: when a Jew goes to the authorities (e.g., the Romans) and either tells damaging lies about the Jews, or informs them that the Jews are breaking the rules, like studying Torah when it was forbidden. In modern Hebrew, it has a broader meaning: a malshin is a stool pigeon, a rat, an informer.

Wherever Jews lived in the Diaspora there were always malshinim. Some thought that the establishment of the state of Israel would end Jew-hatred forever, because Jews would no longer be forced to live among non-Jews and be ruled by non-Jewish regimes. How could there be a pogrom in a Jewish state? Malshinim would not exist. Who would listen to anti-Jewish slanders? Who would have the power to act on them?

As we know, it didn’t turn out that way. Jew-hatred didn’t go away where Jews lived together with non-Jews, and it even remained in places where there were no Jews at all, both where they had been murdered or driven out or even where there had never been Jews. And – more importantly in this context – Jew-hatred among more educated populations raised itself to a higher level of abstraction: while hating individual Jews conflicted with taboos against “bigotry,” no such taboo limited hatred of the Jewish state itself, which soared and continues to soar to new heights.

The new kind of Jew-hatred includes many of the memes and themes that characterized the old kind, but instead of the Romans and the Czars, we have Europe, the US State Department, and the UN and its myriad organizations; instead of drunken mobs incited to loot, burn, murder and rape while the Czar’s police stand idly by, we have terrorist militias that fire barrages of rockets at us while the great powers and the UN stand by and even pass resolutions blaming Israel for provoking the violence.

But in one area, absolutely nothing has changed since the year 100, and that is the prevalence and behavior of the Jewish malshinim, the Jews that betray their own people by bearing tales to the non-Jewish authorities.

Could there be a better example of malshinim than the organization that calls itself “Breaking the Silence,” which collects unverifiable, exaggerated or false stories of misconduct by IDF soldiers and travels the world telling them to credulous audiences, already primed to believe the worst about the Jewish state?

It provides material for lawsuits against the IDF, the state and individual soldiers; and it makes it necessary for the IDF to take greater and greater precautions against such lawfare – to a degree that no other nation at war has ever done. As a result, targets are not hit and objectives not obtained.

It paints Israel and the IDF as deliberately brutal, oppressive and evil. It chips away at international sympathy for Israel, so that when it is attacked (as it is, over and over again), there will be reasons to take the side of its enemies.

Breaking the Silence is just one of many such groups. They all receive millions of Euros each year from European countries which are enemies of Israel (they are less violent than the militias that fire rockets at our children, but they enable the violence and war that their proxies execute). Breaking the Silence and the others take money to help the militias and terrorists kill their neighbors. They are worse than whores, worse than kapos. They are Jews, paid to slander the Jewish state. Traitors. Malshinim.

Recently I watched an interview with Tuvia Tenenbom (video, 57 min), who traveled through 28 states talking to random Americans, including about how they feel about Jews and Israel. Tenenbom said,

In state after state, temple after temple, what I saw and what I witnessed was a nightmare. You see rabbis, or so-called rabbis, leaders, supposed leaders, standing at a podium and all they can tell to their listeners is that Israel is an apartheid state and that Judaism is racism. That’s what they preach. …

When you see some anti-Jewish thing, if you dig deep and put a magnifying lens to see who’s behind it, over and over and over you find a Jew, and that’s frightening.

These, too, are the malshinim of today.

At the beginning of the post, I only quoted part of the blessing. It continues:

… and may all Your enemies be cut off (יכרתו) speedily. May You speedily uproot, smash, cast down, and humble the wanton sinners – speedily and in our days. Blessed are You, Hashem, who breaks enemies and humbles wanton sinners.

Amen.

Posted in American Jews, Information war, Israeli Society, Jew Hatred | 4 Comments

Celebrating liberation in Gush Etzion

Posted on April 14, 2017 by Victor Rosenthal

In September of this year, Israel plans to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem and the Golan heights. The main event will be held at Kibbutz Kfar Etzion, in the Gush Etzion area of Judea, south and slightly west of Jerusalem.

Zahava Galon, the leader of the Meretz party, which represents approximately 4% of Israeli voters with its 5 Knesset seats, and Chemi Shalev, writing in the left-wing Ha’aretz newspaper expressed their outrage that anyone would celebrate what they consider an oppressive and evil occupation of “Palestinian” land, and that Israel would add insult to injury by holding the ceremony in what they insist on calling the “West Bank.”

I know it’s a little thing and that most of my readers already know this, but I can’t say it too often: it was called Judea and Samaria from biblical times until 1948 when Jordan occupied it, ethnically cleansed it of Jews, and renamed it the “West Bank.” We really ought to stop calling it that.

Let’s talk a little about the Gush Etzion area, and specifically Kibbutz Kfar Etzion. Here is a summary of its early years by Ami Isseroff, z”l:

The Etzion Bloc, or Gush Etzion as it is called in Hebrew, is located on the main road from the south to Jerusalem, northwest of Hebron. The Etzion bloc was settled and resettled three times, on land purchased by the Jews, beginning in 1927. Each time, residents were forced to abandon their homes in the face of Arab violence. The final saga of the Etzion bloc included two separate massacres and a prolonged and stubborn defense against hopeless odds. The bloc was finally overrun by soldiers of the British armed and officered Jordan Legion, who were responsible for the final massacre of surrendered defenders, a war crime.

The first settlement in this area was called Migdal Eder, built on land purchased from local Arabs by the Zichron David Company. It was founded in 1927. The pioneers included orthodox Yemenite Jews. During the Arab riots of 1929, Migdal Eder settlers were evacuated to the Russian Orthodox monastery and thence to the Arab village of Beit Umar, from which they were evacuated to Jerusalem by British mandate police. The British made no attempt to guard the settlement or safeguard property, and it was completely destroyed.

Additional lands were purchased by the El Hahar Company, which founded a kibbutz called Kfar Etzion in 1934. Like Migdal Eder, Kfar Etzion was abandoned during the Arab violence of 1936-1939 and destroyed by the Palestinian Arabs.

A third settlement attempt was made beginning in 1942 under the auspices of the Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemet). Kfar Etzion was re-founded in the Spring of 1943. In October 1945, a second kibbutz, Massuot Yitzchak, was added. Its members were Holocaust survivors from Eastern and Central Europe. A third Kibbutz, Ein Tzurim, was founded in 1946 by Israeli members of the Bnei Akiva religious Zionist movement. All three kibbutzim belonged to the religious Zionist movement, but in February 1947, a fourth kibbutz, Revadim, was established by the Marxist Hashomer Hatzair Youth Movement.

On May 13, 1948, the area was overrun by the Jordanian army. The remaining defenders of Kfar Etzion surrendered to the Jordanian Legion, who together with Arab irregulars, massacred some 128 (all but five) of them. The defenders of the other three kibbutzim surrendered in the presence of the International Red Cross, and were taken to Jordan as prisoners of war.

After Israel liberated the Gush in 1967, Kfar Etzion was rebuilt yet again. The other three, Revadim, Ein Tzurim and Massuot Yitzchak were reestablished within the Green Line shortly after the original kibbutzim were destroyed. I lived in Revadim in 1980-82 and worked in the musach (garage), where my boss told me about being forced to repair Jordanian military vehicles as a war prisoner.

There are many stories of heroism around the area, including the “lamed hay” (thirty-five), members of the Palmach (an elite force part of the Hagana) who were massacred trying to bring supplies through hostile Arab villages to the kibbutzim of the Gush.

So the complaints about holding a celebration in the “Palestinian West Bank” ring false to me. The land upon which Kfar Etzion stands was purchased dearly, with Jewish money and not a little Jewish blood.

It is true, as the kapos of +972 Magazine write, that the area of today’s Gush Etzion Regional Council is larger than that of the original land purchased in the 1920s and 30s. But they accept – as they did in the case of the settlement of Amona – the fanciful ownership claims of Arabs without verification, and do not accept Israel’s right to adjudicate land as state land.

Their uncritical acceptance of Arab claims is why they object to any celebration of the liberation of Judea and Samaria (they are quiet about the Golan and about Gaza, for different reasons), no matter where it is held. They believe that all land outside of the 1949 lines belongs to the Palestinians, simply because the Palestinians and their supporters say so, and despite the fact that the armistice agreements explicitly declare that the Green Line is not a political boundary.

They will tell you over and over that it is forbidden to acquire territory by war, as Israel did in 1967, but apparently do not object to Jordan’s conquest and annexation of Judea and Samaria in 1948 – areas that had been designated in the Mandate as the site of a future Jewish national home.

They will ignore the geostrategic imperative that says that our state cannot be defended without the high ground and the Jordan Valley. They will forget or ignore the fact that the hills and deserts of Judea and Samaria are the place where our people became a people. They will talk about the need of the newly-created “Palestinian people” for self-determination, but abandon the Jewish people.

Legal and political arguments may go on forever, but what will ultimately determine the ownership of the land will be who lives in it – who settles it and controls it. The original settlers of Gush Etzion, who put their bodies on the line for the land understood that.

The strategic and spiritual value of these lands is more important today than ever. Celebrating their liberation is appropriate, because they both make our country defensible and give us something important to defend, the historical heartland of the Jewish people.

And what better place to celebrate it than Kfar Etzion?

Posted in Israel and Palestinian Arabs, Israeli Politics, War, Zionism | 1 Comment

Dawa

Posted on April 10, 2017 by Victor Rosenthal

A few connected things you might want to know about:

The student senate of Tufts University in Massachusetts passed  a resolution to divest from companies doing business with the “Israeli Occupation.” The vote was held last night, the day before Erev Pesach, when most Jewish students would have gone home for the holiday. Not that a resolution from the Tufts Student Senate would mean anything whatever day they chose to pass it, but still.

Feminist author Phyllis Chesler was scheduled to participate in a panel on honor killings at the King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Arkansas this week. Dr. Chesler, a psychotherapist and author of 16 books and countless professional and popular articles, is a world-recognized expert on the subject. She is also, however a strong supporter of Israel, even (gasp) a Zionist, so after protests by three professors, some threats and some vandalism she was disinvited.

In Egypt, hours after an explosion killed 27 Coptic Christians at a church in the town of Tanta, a suicide bomber exploded at St. Marks Cathedral in Alexandria, murdering another 17 people and narrowly missing the leader of Coptic Christianity, Pope Tawadros II.

As Kurt Vonnegut wrote, so it goes.

And so it will go in America (it is already starting in Europe and of course has been here in Israel for more than a hundred years), if Americans don’t pay attention to what Ayaan Hirsi Ali tells us: (WSJ subscription required),

Dawa, Ms. Hirsi Ali explains, is “conducted right under our noses in Europe, and in America. It aims to convert non-Muslims to political Islam and also to push existing Muslims in a more extreme direction.” The ultimate goal is “to destroy the political institutions of a free society and replace them with Shariah.” It is a “never-ending process,” she says, and then checks herself: “It ends when an Islamic utopia is achieved. Shariah everywhere!”

Ms. Hirsi Ali contends that the West has made a colossal mistake by its obsession with “terror” in the years since 9/11. “In focusing only on acts of violence,” she says, “we’ve ignored the Islamist ideology underlying those acts. By not fighting a war of ideas against political Islam—or ‘Islamism’—and against those who spread that ideology in our midst, we’ve committed a blunder.” …

Dawa, Islamic psychological warfare, is a multifaceted persuasion technique which includes infiltration of institutions, propaganda, silencing opponents, threats, and of course violence and terrorism.

Ms. Hirsi Ali wants us to get away from this game of jihadi Whac-A-Mole and confront “the enemy that is in plain sight—the activists, the Islamists, who have access to all the Western institutions of socialization.” She chuckles here: “That’s a horrible phrase . . . ‘institutions of socialization’ . . . but they’re there, in families, in schools, in universities, prisons, in the military as chaplains. And we can’t allow them to pursue their aims unchecked.”

America needs to be on full alert against political Islam because “its program is fundamentally incompatible with the U.S. Constitution”—with religious pluralism, the equality of men and women, and other fundamental rights, including the toleration of different sexual orientations. “When we say the Islamists are homophobic,” she observes, “we don’t mean that they don’t like gay marriage. We mean that they want gays put to death.”

Hirsi Ali, as you may remember was also the subject of an academic dis-invitation, this one from receiving an honorary degree from Brandeis University. She has a 24-hour armed guard, because every radical Islamist in the world wants to kill her. They really want to keep her message unheard.

Here in Israel, there is a daily, concrete threat of murder from Islamic jihadists. There isn’t much Dawa activity aimed at Jews here, who mostly know their enemies. But the West is a different story.

When you in the comfortable (but not as comfortable as it used to be) American Diaspora celebrate your freedom at your Passover seder, remember that there are those that want to end it. Not just for you, but for all Americans.

Happy Pesach!

Posted in Academia, American society, Islam, Terrorism | 1 Comment