Sun Tzu, Putin, and the Iran Deal

Posted on February 24, 2022 by Victor Rosenthal

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.

Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

As I write, there are Russian tanks in Donbas. Does that mean that we are on the verge of a new European war, as US President Biden suggests? I doubt it. I believe that Vladimir Putin is a student of Sun Tzu. He knows that Ukrainian leaders know that they can’t stand against Russia without outside help, that most of Europe can’t fight, and the few countries that can – won’t. He knows that he has been storing up foreign currency and working to make Russia more self-sufficient for several years to insulate Russia from the financial weapons that will be deployed against her. Above all he knows that America, divided, exhausted, fragile, neurotic, and led by an old man far out of his depth, does not have the will to act strongly enough to stop him.

I date the beginning of the collapse of the US as a world power to 9/11. American political and cultural elites all bought into the idea that this was not a skirmish in the struggle between Islamic and Christian civilizations that has been ongoing for at least a millennium, but rather a “War on Terror,” where the terrorists had “perverted” Islam. “Islam is peace,” pronounced George W. Bush a week later, when Ground Zero and the Pentagon were still smoldering. To this day, we have not learned to know our enemy.

Shortly thereafter, the US sent troops to Afghanistan after Osama Bin Laden. Unfortunately, they did not send enough men, and depended on local Afghans to do much of the fighting.  They also decided to trust their Pakistani “allies” to cover the back door to Tora Bora. As a result, Bin Laden escaped and was not captured until 2011. But American involvement in Afghanistan continued until Biden oversaw the embarrassing rout of remaining Americans in August 2021.

In February 2003, the US demonstrated its military might when it attacked Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, scaring the hell out of the Iranian regime which, because of its secret nuclear program, expected to be next. American troops captured Baghdad less than a month later. But the military victory was squandered by the remarkably ignorant attempt to remake Iraq into a western-style democracy and the suppression of the Sunni minority that had controlled Iraq under Saddam. The war devolved into an insurgency in which the insurgents were supplied and bankrolled by Iran and Syria. Most Americans left Iraq in December 2021, although a small number remain. Meanwhile, Iranian-controlled militias have solidified their control of much of the country.

These wars cost trillions of dollars and numerous lives, and planted a debt bomb in the American economy that is only beginning to explode today. They demonstrated the truth of Sun Tzu’s belief that sheer military superiority is not enough. “There is no instance of a nation benefiting from prolonged warfare,” he said, and the prolongation of these wars – which were begun with inadequately defined or impossible goals (e.g., establishing democracy in Iraq), has greatly weakened the nation, militarily, economically, psychologically, and politically.

But not only has the real strength of the US declined in recent years, its image as a superpower has been shattered by a series of unnecessary errors. Notable was Barack Obama’s failure to follow through on his threat to punish Bashar al-Assad for Syria’s cruel use of chemical weapons on civilians in 2013. Another misadventure was the original Iran deal, signed in 2015, which did not provide for adequate inspection of nuclear sites, did not limit – even weakened previous limits – on ballistic missile development, and which essentially granted Iran the right to develop nuclear weapons ten years after its signing. It was a signal to virtually everyone (except Obama’s sycophants) that America had chosen the path of appeasement. And there is no need to dwell on the message sent by the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Putin has been watching, and learning. And so has the Chinese leadership, which has studied Sun Tzu if anyone has, and if Putin succeeds, will be encouraged even more to move on Taiwan.

Now the Biden Administration is about to sign another deal with the Iranian regime, and if preliminary reports are to be believed, it will be even weaker and more dangerous than the first. The fact that the American collapse in Vienna is happening at the same time that the crisis in Ukraine is developing is likely to make US negotiators, under the pro-Iranian Robert Malley, even more anxious to give the Iranians everything they want and get it over with.

This is another unnecessary loss for America, which may someday even be a target for the weapons it is allowing the Iranian rogue regime to have. Last month, three US negotiators quit because of Malley’s “soft negotiating stance.” It’s hard to understand why US officials have chosen to surrender here. Where is the American interest in increased worldwide terrorism, the expansion of Iran in the Mideast, and the message of weakness sent to US rivals everywhere?

The deal doesn’t make sense. So what is behind it?

In order to answer that question, we need to know who is behind it, because it’s highly doubtful that Biden or Tony Blinken is determining foreign policy in this administration. And here there is only speculation. My informed guess is that there is an influential group including Malley as well as former Obama Administration officials – Barack Obama himself, Ben Rhodes, Susan Rice, and others – that are guiding the administration’s Mideast policy. Their plan grows out of an idea first voiced in the 2006 Iraq Study Report (which was partly authored by Rhodes. See my discussion here).

The original idea was to reduce pressure on US troops in Iraq by buying off Iran and Syria so they would stop supporting the insurgents that were killing US soldiers with Iranian IEDs. The payoff would be the (possibly fatal) weakening of Israel, which would have been forced to give the Golan Heights to Syria, and to withdraw from Judea and Samaria, where a Palestinian state would be established. Obama, who was closely aligned with the Palestinian cause, adopted many of the ideas in the 2006 document, probably via his advisor Rhodes.

I think that this group now views with alarm the possibility of the rise of a new power bloc in the Middle East, composed of Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and others. Such a bloc would be very powerful, much more so than even a nuclear Iran, and resistant to control. I also think they see (correctly) that it would mean the end of the Palestinian dream of “return” – and the end of the Jewish state – to which Obama and Malley are ideologically committed. By strengthening Iran, they hope to drive a wedge between the members of this newly coalescing bloc, and return Israel to its isolated status in the region.

Needless to say, this group is acting against American interests. An Israeli-Sunni bloc would almost certainly align with the US, providing intelligence and support for Western interests in the Mideast. On the other hand, since the 1979 revolution, Iran has viewed the US as the “Great Satan” that is their most important enemy, even more so than Israel, the “Little Satan.” Iran is far from America, but its terrorist subsidiary, Hezbollah has increasingly stronger branches in Latin America, where it partners with drug cartels. Given the porous southern border, the potential for terrorism inside the US is great.

I think we can sum up what’s wrong with this policy with one more aphorism. This one is not by Sun Tzu, but it certainly could have been:

He who fights his friends instead of his enemies is guaranteed to lose.

Posted in American politics, American society, China, Iran, Middle East politics, War | 4 Comments

Will there be a Magic Carpet for Ukrainian Jews?

Posted on February 20, 2022 by Victor Rosenthal

This  morning’s paper discusses the plans being made for the possible aliya of the roughly 250,000 Ukrainians who are eligible for Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return. Several government ministries and the army are making preparations to bring them to Israel, provide identity documents, places of temporary residence, and financial aid for them, if it should happen that war breaks out in Ukraine and many of them want to come.

This recalled previous mass immigrations to Israel since the founding of the state: the “displaced persons” of Europe, many of them survivors of Nazi concentration camps; the refugees expelled from Arab countries after 1948; the Eastern and Central European Jews who no longer had homes in Europe; the Yemenite Jews brought home in 1949 by Operation Magic Carpet; the Jews from the institutionally anti-Jewish Soviet Union; and the continuing operations to rescue the Jews of Ethiopia.

In addition to those waves of aliya there is a continuous stream of immigrants arriving from various other places such as South America, Western Europe (especially France), and the US and Canada. The flow waxes and wanes along with economic and political changes, and of course antisemitism. In recent years, Ukraine has accounted for the second largest number of olim (after Russia).

Israel’s Law of Return says that any Jew or the child or grandchild of a Jew or their spouses, can come to Israel and be granted Israeli citizenship. Exceptions are made for someone who “is engaged in an activity against the Jewish people,” criminals, those who are a danger to “public health or security of the state,” and “a person who has been a Jew and has voluntarily changed his religion.”

And who is a Jew? The law says one who is “a person who was born of a Jewish mother or has become converted to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion.” As everyone knows, the question of conversion is a hot potato, with the religious establishment insisting that only an Orthodox conversion – and indeed, only some Orthodox conversions – are acceptable, while the Interior Ministry, which controls granting citizenship, accepts non-Orthodox conversions outside of Israel.

Well, sometimes it does. And sometimes not, such as in the case of Jared Armstong, who converted to Judaism in the US with a Conservative rabbi. Armstrong wanted to come to Israel and play basketball for the Hapoel Haifa team, and his application was rejected on the grounds that “he was converting only to play on the team …[and] his conversion classes were held via Zoom.” In general, applicants are required to show that they are part of a recognized Jewish community for some period of time, and have studied Judaism for hundreds of hours in order to establish that their conversion is sincere. The case of Armstrong was notable because the American rabbi who converted him accused the Ministry of rejecting the application because Armstrong is black (which I strongly doubt).

There have been other controversies. The Abayudaya of Uganda are a community of some 2000 people who have practiced some form of Judaism for about 100 years. They observe kashrut, Shabbat, and Jewish holidays; they were converted by Conservative rabbis beginning in 2002, while one small community even underwent Orthodox conversion by Modern Orthodox Rabbi Shlomo Riskin in 2016. One member of the community, Gershom Sizomu, studied at a Conservative seminary in the US and was ordained as a rabbi. But in 2018 the Interior Ministry decided that the Abayudaya are not a “recognized Jewish community” and therefore conversions there are not recognized.

Recently, the Interior Ministry has made new rules that complicate things for Jews who want to make aliya. They are being asked to prove that they actually intend to live in Israel, and not simply get a free flight here, obtain a passport and financial benefits, and then move on. In some cases these are Jews from the former Soviet Union (FSU) who want to move to the US or Europe, Americans who want the passport to enable them to more easily visit family in Israel despite covid restrictions, or even criminals. The phenomenon of “passport aliya” is expensive for Israel – some 40% of immigrants from the FSU in 2018-2019 left “shortly after their arrival” according to an investigation by the Ma’ariv newspaper.

None of this has anything to do with marriage, divorce, and burial for Jews in Israel, which are under the authority of the Haredi-dominated Rabbinate, which only accepts conversions from selected Orthodox rabbis. So it is common, especially after the large aliya from the former Soviet Union, where documentation of Jewish ancestry usually does not exist, that someone is deemed eligible for Israeli citizenship but still cannot be married, divorced, or buried in a Jewish cemetery in Israel.

So what about the Ukrainian Jews? Those that want to do so have the right to make aliya like any other Jew. Is it appropriate for Israel to arrange a mass aliya as was done for Iraqi, Yemenite, and Ethiopian Jews who were in mortal danger because they were Jewish? I think there is no choice but to bring every Jew that asks, even though the time pressure is such that it will be impossible to carry out careful vetting to determine if they are eligible or likely to stay. One can argue that those who truly wanted to live in Israel would have already come, since – unlike the Soviet period – today there are no “prisoners of Zion,” but the law requires that any Jew has a right to become an Israeli with the few exceptions mentioned above.

Mass aliya from Ukraine will undoubtedly be fraught with problems. Even in normal circumstances it’s hard to determine who is eligible for aliya. Some years ago I recall several immigrants from the FSU who were arrested for violent antisemitic acts here in Israel! It won’t surprise me if, after a mass aliyah of Ukrainian Jews, many, if not most, of them either move back to Ukraine after the crisis is over, or move on to other countries.

But we have no choice but to offer refuge to them. It’s both the law and the right thing to do.

Posted in The Diaspora | Comments Off on Will there be a Magic Carpet for Ukrainian Jews?

Some Hard Facts

Posted on February 17, 2022 by Victor Rosenthal

There are such things as hard facts. A hard fact is something that is true, not dependent on point of view, ideology, culture, religious belief, or politics. I know there is a post-modern trend to deny that they exist, but frankly it is insane, and anyone who thinks that way will not survive very long.

The laws of physics are hard facts. So are the strategic facts of geography, like the physical characteristics of Eretz Yisrael, which demand that its eastern border encompass the slope of the Jordan Valley, and that the hills of Judea and Samaria and the Golan Heights must be under Israeli control. These are the facts that make the division of the land that is so beloved by peace processors impossible.

But there are also social, historical laws. I think that these too can be hard facts. Humans have free will and “great men” (or women) sometimes influence the course of history, but in the long term, what happens is determined by the aggregate behavior of people, creatures in the primate family who are, after all, much more like chimpanzees than angels.

So now we come to the conflict between the Jews and the Arabs in Eretz Yisrael. What do the laws that govern human behavior tell us about the future of our land?

It should be clear that the situation is unstable. The prevalent ideology amongst the Arabs (the “Palestinian narrative”) is that Jewish sovereignty is an abomination. This is both a religious (Islamic) and cultural (honor-shame) issue. The various Arab political factions all share this belief, although they espouse different strategies for turning Eretz Yisrael into an Arab-ruled Arab-majority state.

As time goes by, the Arabs in Gaza, Judea/Samaria, and even pre-1967 Israel have all become more confirmed in their beliefs, more radical in their preferred solutions, and more convinced that the goal is achievable.

The areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas have been a laboratory for observing the effects of prolonged and pervasive conditioning to hate. Arab children learn in their schools and media (and every other institution of their society) that Jews are both subhuman and evil. They are encouraged to kill and rewarded for acts of incredible viciousness. A teenager who can plunge a knife into the neck of a Jewish baby or the back of a grandmother (both of these have happened) is no longer a normal human being, but has been transformed into a monster. One wonders why Amnesty International, which is prepared to accuse Israel of “crimes against humanity” for such things as distinguishing between citizens and non-citizens, has failed to document this fiendish system as one of the greatest crimes against humanity in history, and to call for the prosecution of the criminals that operate it.

But what about Israel’s Arab citizens, who were not educated by Hitlerites, and who – until recently – it seemed were becoming more prepared to accept Jewish sovereignty and to work alongside the Jews for their common benefit as Israelis? Unfortunately, the trend is in the other direction, as Israelis found out to their shock last May, when during a military confrontation with Gaza provoked by Hamas rocket barrages, their Arab neighbors turned on them – in a way that is sickeningly familiar to those who know the history of diaspora Jewry – attacked them, set their houses, businesses, and vehicles on fire, and in essence tried to drive them out of their homes. An echo, if you will, of what happened in Hevron in 1929, in Baghdad in 1941, and in Tzfat in 1517, 1834, 1929, 1936, and who knows how many more times. Precisely what the establishment of a Jewish state was supposed to preclude occurred, despite the police, the IDF, and our F-35s and nuclear weapons.

What happened? The conventional explanation is that Arabs in Israel are economically disadvantaged and that their frustration burst out into violence. The historian Efraim Karsh argues that in fact the opposite is the case:

Just as Hajj Amin Husseini and Yasser Arafat immersed their hapless subjects in disastrous conflicts that culminated in their collective undoing and continued statelessness in total disregard of the massive material gains attending Arab-Jewish coexistence, so Israel’s Arab leaders used their constituents’ vast socioeconomic progress over the past decades as a vehicle of radicalization rather than moderation.

Perhaps because of the influence of Marxism in Israeli political culture, Israeli leaders from Ben Gurion on have believed that if the economic condition of the Arabs were improved, their alienation from the state would decrease (we continue to make this mistake on other fronts, as in the idea that improving the Gaza economy can make war less likely. But aid injected into it flows directly to rockets and tunnels).

While Israeli Arabs are well-represented in professions (especially the medical field), nevertheless the ideology that drives pogromists into the streets with firebombs permeates their culture. The journalist Nadav Shragai recently observed that the ideological themes that are associated with violence by Arabs outside of pre-1967 Israel, preoccupation with the Nakba and an obsessive belief in the ultimate “return” of the descendants of the Arab refugees of 1948, are becoming more prevalent among Israeli Arabs. He wrote,

Rioting high school students from Lod made it clear that “the ‘occupation’ of 1967 does not interest them at all, only a return to their homes from before 1948.” Lod resident Aya Zeinati said that she “repeatedly explains to her children that they are not from Haifa,” but from a village “which was destroyed by the Zionists,” and that “they are going to go back there.” The imam of the Great Mosque in Lod, Sheikh Yusuf Albaz, who was arrested for incitement to riot, declared that Israel is not his country. The imam of El-Ramal Mosque in Acre, Sheikh Mahmoud Madi, referred to “our cities in internal Palestine” and estimated that the collapse of the Zionist entity was imminent. In Kafr Kanna, Sheikh Kamal Khatib, deputy head of the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, who was arrested for participating in the riots, said that “even if [the Jews] thought that the Palestinian elders had died and the young had forgotten, the elders died only after they had taught their sons that this was Palestine, and left them a key, a bill of sale, a deed, and the love of the homeland.”

Would it have been possible to prevent these developments? I think not. The alienation of Israeli Arabs grows out of the Palestinian narrative, and not out of their objective condition as a minority in Israeli society. Nothing the government can do with programs, incentives, subsidies, anti-discrimination laws, or even the (very necessary) suppression of organized and violent crime in the Arab sector can affect this.

Coming back to human behavior, we have two tribes, physically and genetically similar, but in terms of ideas – memetically – opposed. Neither side is especially comfortable with the other, but the Palestinian narrative makes the position of the Arab side not just uncomfortable, but intolerable. And it can’t be fixed by any arrangement that doesn’t end Jewish sovereignty, or indeed, any Jewish ownership of the land that the narrative insists belongs only to Palestinian Arabs. These tribes cannot coexist.

Westerners tend to think that all problems have compromise solutions, that there is always a way to talk things out, and that nothing is black and white. But that isn’t always true. Some games are zero-sum. Sometimes there has to be a winner and a loser. And in this case, the loser loses everything, include the right to live here on the land that both sides claim.

This is a distressing, even heart-rending, situation for those who appreciate both cultures. But if we aren’t prepared to meet it head on – to face the hard fact of it and act correctly – then we will be the ones who lose everything.

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

What Does Zionism Really Mean?

Posted on February 13, 2022 by Victor Rosenthal

Israeli politics is conventionally described as a contest between Left and Right. The Left favors withdrawal from the territories conquered in 1967 and the Right wants to hold onto them. The Left believes that the Palestinian Arabs can be “peace partners” and the Right does not. The Left wants more government involvement in the economy and more expenditures on social programs, and the Right prefers a free market and fewer social programs. The Left wants religious pluralism, civil marriage, and public transport on Shabbat, while the Right opposes these things. And so on.

Like most generalizations, there is some truth in this, some exceptions, and a great deal of imprecision. But there is an issue that is more important than any of the above, and which delineates the deepest ideological chasm that divides Israelis.

It is nothing less than the question of Zionism, pro or con.

Most Jewish Israelis will tell you that they are Zionists because they favor the continued existence of Israel, the Jewish state. But that isn’t really sufficient, because the kind of state that they support is all over the map. I want to be more specific about the meaning of Zionism today: I say it is the belief that the State of Israel is the state of and for the Jewish people (the extent to which this includes those who live in the diaspora varies), and not a “state of its citizens.”

Our Declaration of Independence established a Jewish and democratic state. It is not a trivial thing for it to be both of these, given that 20% of its population is not Jewish. But how one deals with the issues that arise as a result determines where one falls on the Zionism axis. Former President of Israel’s Supreme Court Aharon Barak prioritized democracy over Jewishness to the point that he in essence factored out Jewishness. He wrote,

The content of the phrase “Jewish state” will be determined by the level of abstraction which shall be given it. In my opinion, one should give this phrase meaning on a high level of abstraction, which will unite all members of society and find the common among them. The level of abstraction should be so high, until it becomes identical to the democratic nature of the state.

At the same time, he considers himself a dedicated Zionist, having once insisted,

My story is a Zionist tale and it is a story of human dignity, of human rights. I learned a double lesson: one lesson is Zionism – the existence of the state of Israel. If we had had a country then, it (the Holocaust) would not have happened. Therefore this country is dear to me and imperative to me. The security of this country is as important to me as it is to all those Israelis who are more right-winged [sic] than I. The existence of this country is the key to the existence of the Jewish people. And therefore I am not a post-Zionist.

But I have also learned another lesson: the Germans tried to turn out [sic] humanity to ashes. My top priority is to [sic] the rights of every human and the rights of every minority. The dignity of every man born under God is very very dear to me.

With all due respect, Barak is wrong. Zionism is more than caring about the security of the country. I agree that the existence of the state is crucial to the survival of the Jewish people. But in order for that to be true, it must be a Jewish state and not just a democratic one that protects minority rights and happens to have a Jewish majority.

There were many democratic states committed to human rights during the Holocaust, and they did not save the six million. The USA protected the rights of its Jewish minority as well or better than any other nation, and it did not prevent an intermarriage rate of 70%. If Barak had his way, and the Jewishness of the State of Israel was reduced to no more than its “democratic nature,” then she could not continue to be either the physical refuge for the Jewish people, or their spiritual haven.

This is the ideological line that, more than any other, divides Jews, in the diaspora as well as in Israel, much more significantly than their views about peace negotiations. On one side you have those like Barak who prioritize democracy and equality for all, while on the other are those like MK Betzalel Smotrich, who once told Israeli Arabs that “It’s not your national state. You can live here as individual citizens with individual rights if you accept Israel as a Jewish state.” Politically, it is often expressed by whether someone supports Israel’s Nation-State Law, which is an attempt to explicate in concrete terms the ways in which she is a Jewish state. I suggest that everyone read it. It’s short, and helps answer the question posed by the title of this post.

The law’s most controversial part is its statement that “The exercise of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish People.” That implies that Israel is not and will not become a binational state, or even a state of its citizens. It specifically mentions the ingathering of (Jewish) exiles and the Jewish settlement of the land as national values. It states that “Jerusalem, complete and united” is Israel’s capital. Such things as the national symbols, the Jewish holidays and calendar, the Hebrew language are also included.

Ideology as expressed in law can have very real practical implications. If Israel became first and foremost a democratic state whose “top priority is the rights of every human and the rights of every minority,” in Aharon Barak’s words, what would justify keeping the Law of Return for Jews and not for Arabs? Why wouldn’t we make Nakba day a national holiday?

I wonder how many who are quick to call Smotrich a racist or fascist or who think the Nation-State Law should be repealed have thought about the implications of giving up on the idea that Israel is a Jewish state – in more than the accidental sense of having a Jewish majority?

Posted in Israeli Politics, Post-Zionism, Zionism | 1 Comment

Special: Don’t Appease the Wokeness Crocodile

Posted on February 11, 2022 by Victor Rosenthal

I virtually never publish guest posts. But this one was so good, perfectly puncturing the bubble of stupidity surrounding the non-question “are Jews white?” that has given rise to tens of thousands of mostly nonsensical words, that I couldn’t resist. – vr

Don’t Appease the Wokeness Crocodile

By Rachel Peck

Jews today are threatened by a dangerous animal: the Wokeness Crocodile.

The Wokeness Crocodile is a strange beast that feeds on a dangerous, immoral proposition: that whites are automatically guilty of racism, and that Jews are white and, therefore, also guilty. And the only response of many Jews – especially progressive ones – is to try to prove that Jews are not white.

They hope that this will convince the crocodile to spare them.

They’re wrong.

For example, Jewish students at Brooklyn College were recently pressured into saying that they were white and therefore should be excluded from discussions about social justice. Those who objected were told to get their whiteness in check, or to be quiet because they were white and privileged. Jewish leaders who went to bat for them missed the point.

Brandeis Center attorney Denise Katz-Prober argued that “Jews should not be relegated to a category of white, privileged oppressors.” Katz-Prober noted further that the students’ complaint follows another filed against Stanford University in October, over the placing of Jewish faculty and staff in “segregated ‘whiteness accountability’” discussion groups, against their objections.

The problem isn’t that Jews are “mistakenly” thought of as white; many of us are, in fact, white. The problem is relegating anybody, whatever their color (or any other immutable characteristic) to a category that is definitionally negative, and holding all individuals in any group accountable for the bad actions of some members of the group, whether past or present. We used to call that racism and it was morally abhorrent. It was evil when applied to blacks in this country, and it is evil when applied to whites or any group today. Martin Luther King, Jr, would be appalled.

Whoopi Goldberg was suspended from The View so she could “reflect” on her recent words about the meaning of the Holocaust. Her boss is also missing the point. In the rightful hue and cry over minimizing Nazi racism against the Jews, the import of Goldberg’s dismissive words, “This is White people doing it to White people, so this is ‘y’all go fight amongst yourselves’” was lost. What she was saying was that genocide is only bad when whites do it to people of color. Which is another way of saying, “Sorry, Jews…and Armenians, Ukrainians, Cambodians, Tutsis, Bosnians, Uyghurs…

Both Judaism and the American way of fairness explicitly say that we are not to be judged by the deeds of others, nor punished for their sins. As the prophet Ezekiel wrote thousands of years ago, “The soul who sins is the one who will die. The son will not share the guilt of the father, nor will the father share the guilt of the son.” And as King said, we should be judged not by the color of our skin, but by the content of our character.

Rather than appeasing the crocodile, Jews should be attacking it. Instead, we are scurrying down a blind alley and abandoning the only principles that can truly protect us and other groups who face discrimination and hatred: the American belief in equality under the law, and the Jewish belief that all humans are made in the image of G-d (b’tzelem elohim) and therefore of equal worth. But instead of standing for traditional Jewish and American values of justice, Jews are trying to prove that we’re not really members of a supposedly evil group. Dear Wokeness Crocodile, go after them, not us! As Winston Smith screams in George Orwell’s 1984, Do it to Julia! Not me! Not me! Do it to Julia!

Instead of protesting segregated accountability groups or categorizing broad groups of people as oppressors, some Jews are begging to be let into the victims’ club. But this strategy is wrong. It is an un-Jewish ideology that says you have original sin because of an accident of your birth, and that being a victim is somehow a ticket to acceptance by others. Moreover, thinking of yourself as a victim is not a strategy for survival. During thousands of years of oppression, persecution, and murder, we survived by being strong and sticking to our values: justice and the inherent worth of every human being.

If those values worked then, they will work now. And they just might save us all from the crocodile.

Rachel Peck is a writer and editor, and president of Jewish Editorial Services (https://jewisheditorialservices.com/).

Posted in Jew Hatred, Wokeness | 1 Comment

Amnesty and its Israeli Collaborators

Posted on February 10, 2022 by Victor Rosenthal

The recent Amnesty International report which accuses Israel of apartheid and crimes against humanity is demonstrably dishonest, tendentious, and so lacking in context to be unworthy of serious consideration. Indeed, it has even been called “a paradigmatic example of anti-semitism [sic].” But this will not prevent its use as a weapon in the ongoing diplomatic and legal war being waged against Israel in the UN. As Anne Herzberg of NGO Monitor wrote,

These groups [Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem]—through their personal connections and singular influence at the U.N. Human Rights Council, and the acquiescence of Europe—instead will simply get U.N. Special Rapporteur Michael Lynk and the Navi Pillay-headed Commission of Inquiry [COI] to uncritically adopt their claims and mark them with the U.N. stamp of approval in the next few months. Unsurprisingly and in keeping with his history of anti-Israel activism (as well as in violation of U.N. rules), although he is ostensibly currently conducting an independent and objective investigation of apartheid, Lynk promoted the group’s report on Twitter. There is no doubt that the COI will act in a similar fashion.

Here are a few of Amnesty’s dozens of recommendations (p. 272ff.): Israel must repeal its nation-state law, “relocate” Jewish residents from areas outside 1949 armistice lines, cancel evictions of Arabs (for nonpayment of rent) and change the law so that “Palestinians” are not subject to “forced eviction,” grant recognition to all “unrecognized villages” in the Negev (i.e., legalize squatting on state land), remove all restrictions on freedom of movement of people and goods into and out of the Gaza strip, punish officials and military personnel for their “violations of international law” and “crimes against humanity,” and – last but not least:

Recognize the right of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return to homes where they or their families once lived in Israel or the OPT, and to receive restitution and compensation and other effective remedies for the loss of their land and property.

It should be clear from the above that Amnesty’s objective is no less than the end of Israel as a Jewish state, and its replacement by an Arab-majority state. Nevertheless, we can expect in short order UN resolutions calling for sanctions on Israel and attempts to prosecute Israeli officials and IDF officers in accordance with Amnesty’s recommendations.

The accusations contained in the report constitute a große Lüge, a “big lie.” They are “supported,” in a parody of scholarship, by citations from their own previous reports, from anti-Israel UN agencies like the notorious Human Rights Commission, from documents provided by the so-called “State of Palestine,” from interviews with Palestinians, from the work of anti-Israel academics, and of course from numerous NGOs, including those that were recently outlawed in Israel because of their links with the terrorist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Amnesty is the largest player in the world-wide “human rights” industry. The organization operates in numerous countries and has an overall budget of close to $US 300 million. It started out in the 1960s with a pro-Western orientation, perhaps receiving funds secretly from the British government and the CIA. At some point it became more critical of the West; in 2011, it called for George Bush to be prosecuted over the treatment of 9/11 detainees. In recent years, it has focused disproportionately on alleged human rights abuses by Israel, perhaps as a result of hiring a number of anti-Israel activists for key positions. Agnes Callamard, Amnesty’s secretary-general since March 2021, recently had to disavow a tweet she made in 2013, idiotically accusing Israel of poisoning Yasser Arafat.

But Amnesty’s biased researchers had significant help on the ground. The Zionist group Im Tirtzu (disclosure: I’m a member and donor) analyzed the Amnesty report and found that 77% of the citations from various NGOs in the report came from 16 Israeli organizations, which are heavily funded by foreign money, mostly from the EU and its constituent governments. They are the usual suspects; B’Tselem, Adalah, Ir Amim, HaMoked, Peace Now, and others. Over the past 10 years, these groups have raked in more than half a billion shekels ($US 171 million) from the European Union and its constituent governments. B’Tselem alone got more than 62 million shekels ($US 19 million).

This is a huge sum and should be a scandal of major proportions. These organizations, despite having almost no support among Israel’s Jewish population, are able to exert great pressure in the legal and political realms. They have petitioned the Supreme Court to dismantle communities built over the Green Line, to prevent the demolition of the homes of convicted terrorists, to prevent the deportation of illegal residents, and so on. They seem to have good access to the Israeli media, as illustrated by the recent B’Tselem and Peace Now campaign to mainstream the idea that there is an outbreak of “settler violence.” But most importantly, they produce a steady flow of accusations against Israel to the international media and to foreign governments.

Whenever there is a military conflict, they swing into action to provide respectability to the propaganda from Israel’s enemies; and they provide the fodder for international condemnations of Israel, as happened in 2009 with the Goldstone Report. Much of the material they supply is simply a repetition of claims made by the PA and Hamas, which achieve credibility through the “halo effect” created by their passing through a supposedly disinterested NGO.

Why does the EU pay to maintain subversive anti-state organizations in Israel? Some of the officials involved may actually believe that they are advancing the cause of human rights. On a few occasions, when the connection to terrorism has been blatant, the EU or a government has suspended funding for a particular group. But they appear to be fine with the idea of supporting the Palestinian cause, the dissolution of the Jewish state, at least when no guns or bombs are directly and immediately involved. I believe that there is a deep feeling in Europe, possibly going back long before there was a Palestinian cause (or even Palestinians), that the world would be better off without Jews or, even more so, their state. Antisemitism has somehow morphed into humanism.

And why does Israel permit her enemies to support a subversive fifth column inside the state? I don’t know. Big money corrupts. Maybe enough Israeli politicians have personal connections to these NGOs, and they or friends and family benefit from them, and that’s why the laws that have been passed to regulate foreign money are weak and toothless. Maybe now, after the damage has been done, the Knesset will take action.

The Amnesty report is just another libel against the Jewish people, like the medieval blood libels and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. There is little that the State of Israel can do to silence its external enemies. But it does not have to allow them to pay her home-grown quislings to do their dirty work.

Posted in Diplomatic warfare, Europe and Israel, Israel and Palestinian Arabs, Jew Hatred, Post-Zionism, The UN | 1 Comment

The Bullies of Liberal Judaism

Posted on February 6, 2022 by Victor Rosenthal

Surprise!  Liberal American Jewry feels “betrayed” by the Bennett-Lapid government.

Here they had such high hopes that if Israel would just get rid of “hard-line right-winger” Netanyahu, then the Jewish state would behave herself. After all, not only is Netanyahu out, but the new government under Naftali Bennett includes left-wing parties Meretz and Labor, and even an Arab Islamist party. And yet, we are still acting like a sovereign state, and a democratic one that must respond to the demands of an electorate, at that! Israel still fails to understand, it seems, that Rick Jacobs of the Union for Reform Judaism in the USA knows what’s good for us better than we do.

So what are they “outraged” about? One thing is the government’s perceived lack of action against “ongoing settler violence” against Arabs and foreign and Israeli left-wing provocateurs (sorry, “activists”). The first thing to know is that there isn’t an “epidemic of settler violence” as the campaign being waged by several foreign-funded anti-state NGOs like B’Tselem is alleging. Actually there have been fewer arrests in recent months for such things as “price-tag” attacks, in which Jews damage Arab property as a response to terrorism – and this is not because the government has decided to go easy on them.

While unprovoked attacks by Jews on Arabs or their property do occur, some of the more recent high-profile incidents have turned out to be selectively reported cases in which Jewish residents were initially attacked by Arabs, and then defended themselves. There have also been situations in which Jews did go out and throw stones at Arabs in an attempt to retaliate for the continuous, sometimes deadly, Arab terrorism directed against them. Taking the law into one’s own hands is a crime in a well-organized, adequately policed, society; but these Jews complain that the authorities do not protect them and do not go after the perpetrators. They say that they have no other way to deter them.

Anyway, the situation is more complicated than it seems to those like Rick Jacobs and friends in America, who give total credibility to reports in anti-Israel media, which in turn have accepted without question the biased and even manufactured accounts of anti-Israel NGOs. They vilify “settlers” as part of their obsession with “the occupation” as the root of the conflict between Israel and the Arabs; as if an Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria would bring peace! Just like it did in Gaza, right?

Most Jewish Israelis, who have considerably better understanding of their adversaries than Rick Jacobs, do not believe this, and since the Oslo debacle, have elected politicians that do not believe it. Even center-left Foreign Minister Yair Lapid admits that a “two-state solution” is impossible with our present Palestinian counterparts (I would go farther and say that geographical considerations guarantee that it will never be possible for Israel to be secure without control of Judea, Samaria, and the Jordan Valley). What is strange to me is that Jacobs and others believe that they a) know better and b) have a right to make demands on Israel, when Israelis themselves democratically (and overwhelmingly) express an opposite view.

Then there is another issue that infuriates the liberal Jewish denominations: the fact that the government has not kept its word about advancing the compromise agreement to develop an “egalitarian area” at the Kotel (Western Wall) where it would be possible for men and women to worship together without a separation barrier. There is already an egalitarian plaza south of the main Kotel, which is divided into men’s and women’s areas. But it is in bad repair, the entrance is hard to find and is separate from the main entrance. A compromise was reached during Binyamin Netanyahu’s PM-ship which called for a new egalitarian area to be created, and a committee established to govern the operation of the Kotel that would include representatives of Israeli non-Orthodox movements. Although the Haredi parties in Netanyahu’s government initially agreed to it, Haredi media raised a hue and cry which resulted in the parties refusing to go along, and Netanyahu understandably chose not to let his government fall over this issue.

The new government promised to implement the compromise, but even though the Haredi parties are no longer in the government, the implied recognition of non-Orthodox strains of Judaism was too much for some of the members of his coalition. In order to understand why, we need to look at the sociology of Judaism in Israel.

More than half of Israelis do not define themselves as “religious.” But only some of these are anti-religious. Many of them don’t regularly go to synagogue, and are lax in their observance of Shabbat and kashrut; but they feel strongly about their Jewishness. And while they are not themselves Orthodox, they see Judaism as Orthodoxy. For them, “the synagogue that they do not go to can only be Orthodox.” The non-Orthodox movements in Israel represent only a few percent of Israelis, and many of them are English-speaking immigrants. Reform and Conservative Judaism have flourished in North America, to a great extent because they don’t require a knowledge of Hebrew and basic literacy in Jewish texts. In Israel, where Hebrew is spoken, the Bible is taught even in secular schools, and most of the state’s holidays are Jewish holidays, many do not see the point of “Judaism lite.” There is also the fact that the non-Orthodox movements are associated with the political Left, which turns off the non-leftist majority.

Enough members of Bennett’s coalition did not want to be associated with what is presented as giving in to pressure from the tiny minority of reformim that Bennett decided that it was not worth going into battle over. There are far more important issues for the coalition to fight over, even if this is hard for Rick Jacobs to understand.

Although it seems obvious from here, Israel is not in North America. Holocaust survivors used to be common here, and the majority of our population are either former refugees from Arab countries, Eastern Europe, and Africa, or their children. The Reform and Conservative movements came out of the dialectic between traditional Judaism and the Enlightenment in Western Europe; this is not the background of most Israelis.

Israelis did not grow up in a country with vast oceans to the east and west and friendly nations to the north and south. Americans and Canadians haven’t seen war on their continent for around 150 years, and their children are no longer drafted into the military. Israelis have been “mugged by reality” as a result of several “big” wars, post-Oslo terror, the Second Intifada, the Hamas takeover of Gaza and subsequent rocket attacks, the Knife Intifada, and so on.

The liberal Jewish movements of North America think they can bully Israel into compliance with their political and religious dictates without understanding the source of our politics or our religious traditions. That can’t succeed. All it can do is create ill-feelings, and play into the hands of our deadly enemies.

Posted in American Jews, US-Israel Relations | 4 Comments

Standing Together

Posted on February 3, 2022 by Victor Rosenthal

I still follow the rabbi of the largest (Reform) synagogue in the small California city where I lived before returning to Israel some 8 years ago. Yesterday, I saw that he wrote on his Facebook page that he and his institution, and I presume others of good will, “stand together,” against racial, religious, and anti-LGBTQ+ hatred, and “against all those who seek to divide us…all those who make people into ‘others.’”

He wrote this in response to a news report that several historically black colleges had received bomb threats for the past two days.

I don’t mean to suggest that he is insincere about deploring various forms of prejudice, but could there be an emptier gesture? I was tempted to suggest that if he really wanted to take action, he should send a busload of congregants to the nearest historically black college where they could spend the day checking dumpsters and bus shelters for bombs, as I recall doing during my army reserve duty.

Meanwhile, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), in a perversion of its name and mandate, has established what Amb. Alan Baker calls “a permanent inquisition” against the State of Israel.  With a large staff and budget, this “Commission of Inquiry” will proceed to demonize and delegitimize the one Jewish state. Even for the UN, such a one-sided “inquiry” is unprecedented, and its outcome will be used to justify prosecutions, sanctions and perhaps even expulsion from the international body for the Jew Among Nations.

I did not see that the rabbi mentioned this on his Facebook page. Again I was tempted to ask what he thought about it, since one of the first acts of the Biden Administration, for which at least 80% of his congregation voted, was to rejoin the UNHRC.

I also did not see any mention of Amnesty International’s vicious, antisemitic smear of Israel as an apartheid state, which will certainly be used as “evidence” by the UNHRC in its indictment of Israel. Amnesty’s report calls for the arrest and prosecution of Israel’s leaders whom it deems guilty of “crimes against humanity” [!] and sanctions against the country and any other countries that support it. It manages to almost entirely leave out the hundred-year long war against the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel that has been waged by Palestinian and other Arabs and their supporters (with the help of the Nazis, the Soviet KGB, and other interested parties). Even the Union for Reform Judaism, to my surprise, found the Amnesty report scandalous.

If there were ever a group that suffered from being made “others,” it would be the Jewish people. In addition to Israel’s confrontational enemies like Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, and the grass-roots antisemitism that appears to be popping up everywhere lately, there is also an organized and heavily funded international campaign against the Jewish state. Participants include the UN, the EU, and their allies in the so-called human rights industry, like Amnesty. If you read the Amnesty report, you will see that they will not be satisfied with anything less than the replacement of Israel with an Arab state. Anything else would deny the “human rights” of the millions of descendants of 1948 refugees. What would happen then to the Jewish people, inside and outside of Israel?

American Jews, some 90% of whom are non-Orthodox, make up the second largest Jewish community in the world (Israel recently surpassed it for the top spot). If they would “stand together” as the rabbi suggests, and present a unified political front to defend the Jewish state, it would be a powerful counterforce to the international conspiracy – there is no other word – against the State of Israel.

But unfortunately, they seem to care much more about every other identifiable group – blacks, LGBTQ+ people, Muslims, and even Palestinian Arabs. When will we see the liberal Jewish establishment demand that its constituency “stand together” … for Israel?

Posted in American Jews, Jew Hatred, The UN | 3 Comments