On observing the nakba

Posted on May 15, 2016 by Victor Rosenthal

Many of you have seen the traffic coming to a stop on Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance day and Memorial Day, with drivers getting out of their cars and pedestrians standing stock still, at attention while a siren sounds for two minutes. It never ceases to move me to tears, no matter how many times I’ve experienced it. Ordinary Israelis understand quite well why their independence is important and what it still costs them.

If you’ve seen videos of the event, you may have noticed a few vehicles that don’t stop. These are primarily Arabs. After all, it’s not their grandparents who were murdered by the Nazis (the father of Palestinian nationalism, al-Husseini, was a Nazi himself), and the last people they would want to honor are the soldiers who died to keep the Arabs from finishing al-Husseini and Hitler’s program. Indeed, today the Arabs of Judea and Samaria will sound  a siren of their own to commemorate “nakba day,” the day they failed to prevent Jewish sovereignty from returning to the Land of Israel.

The experience of Holocaust Remembrance Day, Memorial Day and Independence Day, which all come within the space of a week, always affects me profoundly, creating feelings of love for the Jewish people and pride at what we have accomplished. I don’t have the slightest twinge of regret for what my people had to do to get their independence, and what we continue to do to keep it. And I don’t think there is a place in the state of Israel for the observance of the nakba, the catastrophic failure of our enemies to kill or re-disperse us.

Some Jewish Israelis, like the one that wrote this, disagree.

God, I love this country – and I am not ashamed to be a Jewish citizen of Israel… and yet… and yet… I think about others… the nearly 23% citizens of Israel who did not look toward Zion, who were already here when we returned home, the people who cut their teeth on stories of banishment, of exile so like ours, only done by us to them during one of the most tumultuous periods in modern history… a time when we, too, uprooted were building a home. A time when they, firmly rooted, had to flee. …

Yes, we need a homeland. And yes, I’m glad we have returned home. And I’m not going anywhere, nor are my kids — but until both people [sic] who share this land can celebrate and mourn their narratives together, I find no reason to celebrate wholly. For truly, being strong means allowing space for others. For truly, if we are to be worthy of our ancient hope, we must respect the yearnings of others, too. For truly, we are not free until both peoples celebrate and mourn side by side, and hold both truths as one.

The author of the above, Sarah Tuttle-Singer, has an overdeveloped ability to empathize with others (many of these others would as soon kill her and her children as look at them), but she is also making a fundamental mistake about the nature of the Jewish state. She is ignoring the fact that it is a Jewish state.

I’m sure she would deny that. But what is the meaning of the concept? In order to understand, we need to reflect on the beginnings of Zionism and why the state came into being. There are many threads here, but the central one is that in order for the Jewish people to be free of oppression they must live in a state that belongs to them. It isn’t enough to live under a tolerant regime among mostly tolerant people, like the US, or even in a place with a Jewish majority. There needs to be a nation-state of the Jewish people, belonging to the Jewish people, where Jews provide the labor and defend the state, where Jews make the rules and enforce them. Where Jews hold title to the land.

Yes, our Declaration of Independence proclaims a Jewish and democratic state. But it makes no sense to understand ‘democracy’ in such a way as to negate Jewishness. To suggest otherwise is to deny the validity of the Zionist idea and its insistence on a state that belongs to the Jewish people. Without Zionism, Israel would be just like any other democracy. It would be like the US, perhaps Tuttle-Singer’s paradigm of a democracy. She forgets that Israel is not aspiring to be a multicultural democracy like the US.

Unlike the planned ‘Palestinian’ state, the Jewish state affords civil rights to its minority residents. But it would be self-contradictory for it to give them the right to negate the Jewish nature of the state. And that is exactly the program of Palestinian nationalists among the Arab citizens of Israel.

The nakba story is a story about the land belonging to a ‘Palestinian people’ and how that land was stolen from them. It is not only historically false, it is designed to provide a justification for the violent destruction of the Jewish state. It is not a ‘truth’, as Tuttle-Singer seems to think, which is as valid as the Zionist narrative.

The ‘Palestinians’ who don’t have a language or religion of their own, or a historical tradition in the land going back more than a couple of hundred years – for most of them, far less than this – didn’t start developing a peoplehood until they were faced with the possibility of Jewish sovereignty. Their ‘exile’ was mostly self-imposed, and their rejection of our sovereignty was the primary reason for it. Their actions, both before and after the founding of the state have been profoundly immoral, even murderous. And we are supposed to “celebrate” together with them? Respect their “yearnings” (to kick us out of our land)?

This is our country, the nation-state of the Jewish people. If our Arab citizens enjoy living here and taking advantage of the safety, stability, liberty and functioning economy of the Jewish state – so different from the chaos, oppression and poverty of most Arab states – we will treat them as equal citizens under the law.

We can’t stop them from believing fairy tales. But we don’t have to embrace a narrative that contradicts our own national existence. Who would?

Posted in Israeli Arabs, Zionism | 1 Comment

Israel’s dangerous addiction

Posted on May 13, 2016 by Victor Rosenthal

On this 68th anniversary of the independence of the modern Jewish nation-state, my thoughts naturally turn to the question of how long we will be able to keep that independence, purchased at such great cost.

It’s not an issue that occupies citizens of most other states to the same degree. Although the US has major problems in several areas, I don’t hear Americans talking about losing their independence. They settled that back in the 18th century.

For us, it is never settled, despite international law and despite our successful defense of our homeland. Most of the world does not think that the Jewish people should have an independent state, in many cases because they don’t agree that there is a Jewish people (on the other hand, a ‘Palestinian’ people makes sense to them, or at least they pretend it does).

There is more than one way a sovereign nation can lose its independence. It can be conquered in war, as happened to Carthage in the 2nd century BCE, its people killed, enslaved or dispersed, its wealth carried off and its land sown with salt. It can be invaded and then made into a colony or satellite, its people allowed to live but without self-determination, as happened to the Eastern European satellites of the Soviet Union after WWII. And it can allow its decisions to be influenced by a more powerful state or states, little by little giving up its independent volition to economic and political pressure, until it finds itself so dependent on its ‘patron’ that it has lost the ability to control its destiny.

Israel is threatened militarily today primarily by Iran and its proxies. It would be wrong to minimize the direct threat to our existence that they represent, and our government and the IDF do take it seriously and prepare for conflict.

But we are also at risk of a ‘soft conquest’ by another enemy, this one an alliance of supposedly friendly nations, led by one massively powerful country that is considered our greatest friend and supporter. And our leaders seem blind to this danger.

How does a soft conquest work? Here are some of the tactics:

  1. Create economic dependence by damaging the target’s relationships with rival partners.
  2. Create military dependence either directly by ‘protecting’ the target or indirectly by locking it in to you as a sole supplier of arms, ammunition or spare parts.
  3. Strengthen its enemies and weaken the target’s own self-defense abilities so that it will have to depend upon you when threatened.
  4. Take advantage of conflicts the target is involved in to demand further concessions that will weaken it. Prevent it from decisively defeating its enemies.
  5. Support politicians in the target who are friendly to you financially, and hint that if they come to power the relationship between the countries will improve. Attack less compliant politicians in the media, blame them for problems, and suggest that unless they are replaced you will lose patience and downgrade the relationship. Influence local elections.
  6. Support organizations working to destabilize the target and create internal and external conflict. The more problems it has, the more easily you can replace its government with a puppet regime; until then, the more leverage you will have with the existing government.
  7. Influence other nations to withdraw support from the target to increase their dependence on you.
  8. Work to weaken popular support for the target in your own country, so that when you apply pressure or withdraw support from the target, objections will be minimized.
  9. Support enemies of the target in your own country. They will do much of the work for you.

Does this sound familiar? It should, since every one of these tactics is or has been employed against Israel by the Obama Administration and its European allies.

Israel’s addiction to US aid is dangerous to our independence. One of the interesting things about our army is that it has perhaps the least hawkish General Staff in the world. Army brass have recently called for turning over security control in parts of Judea/Samaria to the PA and for increased aid to Gaza. In 2012, PM Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Ehud Barak wanted to launch an attack on the Iranian nuclear program, something the US was dead set against. The top generals were opposed. They may or may not have had good arguments, but I’m sure they were aware that going against the US might get the IDF’s budget brutally slashed. It is not surprising that they often tend to agree with the American point of view.

The US attempts to control Israeli military strategy with its aid. Money is available (at least it has been until now) for defensive weapons like Iron Dome, but not for the bunker busters or tanker aircraft that would enable an attack on Iran. The F-35 fighter aircraft presents a whole collection of problems, with performance and range issues, software/hardware bugs and dependence on US-based computer system. There are concerns that its non-transparent software might hide a backdoor that would allow the US to keep track of what Israel does with the planes or even force the abortion of a mission that the US didn’t like. Israel would prefer to buy more F-15s, but the Pentagon is saying that it is the F-35 or nothing.

I rarely hear mainstream Israeli politicians, either in the government or the opposition, taking the position that our dependence on the US is a bad thing or that the US is not wholeheartedly supportive of Israel. The opposition, in fact, generally claims that insofar as the relationship is less than perfect, it is the government’s fault for being insufficiently compliant on issues like settlements. And the government says that things have never been better, even while the US president’s spokesperson calls our PM “a chickenshit.”

Perhaps in private they understand the situation better, perhaps not. But the correct assessment must be that while Iran and Hezbollah pose a direct military threat, the US administration and Europe are also dangerous, even though their hostility is not expressed in the form of missiles aimed at us.

If this sounds like exaggeration to you, consider the effects on Israel of the release of billions of dollars to Iran, the inability to enforce the limitations on Iran’s nuclear program, and the acquiescence by the administration to almost any Iranian behavior in order to keep them from abrogating the entire (unsigned) deal. Are the Western powers’ actions more or less dangerous to Israel than Hamas?

The American people, by and large, are our friends. But this administration is decidedly not on our side, and we don’t know what the American political future will bring.

We can’t entirely prevent diplomatic pressure and attempts at subversion from our ‘friends’, and we can’t stop them from empowering our overt enemies. But we can reduce their leverage on us by maximizing our independence.

If defense against Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah is our top priority, then independence must also be near the top. We are investing 160 million shekels in a system to detect Hamas tunnels, but how much are we investing to become independent from US military assistance?

It’s always a temptation to put off dealing with long-term, complicated problems when you are facing immediate dangers. Try telling a combat soldier that if he doesn’t stop smoking, he’ll ultimately die from it. But Israel’s addiction to US aid can also be fatal in the long run.

Time for us to kick the habit.

Posted in US-Israel Relations | 4 Comments

Sacrifice and independence

Posted on May 9, 2016 by Victor Rosenthal

Wednesday is Israel’s day of remembrance for fallen soldiers. More than 23,000 military personnel have died in Israel’s wars (including military actions before the founding of the state), and about 4,000 civilians have been killed as a result of war and terrorism.

This is the real, concrete cost of maintaining a Jewish state. Proportionate to population, it is about the same as the number of Americans who died in all of America’s wars since 1775, including the Civil War and the two World Wars.

These Israelis died for one reason: the Arab/Muslim rejection of Jewish sovereignty.

Not ‘the occupation’. Not the settlements. Not the checkpoints or the security barrier. The simple fact that they do not accept that any of this land can be governed by Jews. They didn’t accept it in 1920 when it only was a possibility, they didn’t accept it in 1947 when the UN proposed it, and they didn’t accept it in 1948 when the Jews declared it. They do not accept it today, and there is no reason to think they will accept it in the foreseeable future. And their expression of this rejection has always been violent.

Those who struggle to find a ‘solution’ that includes the continued existence of a Jewish state will not find a partner on the Arab side. Some of the Arabs will agree to accept partial victories as steps toward a final, total victory and some won’t. But none will agree to end the conflict while there is still a Jewish state standing.

Just ask a ‘Palestinian’. There have been numerous polls that have done just that, and overwhelming majorities say that the Jewish state is illegitimate and support ‘resistance’, which means terrorism against Jewish soldiers and civilians. In a poll taken in December 2015, “67% support and 31% oppose use of knives in the current confrontations with Israel. But about three quarters (73%) oppose the participation of young school girls in the stabbing attacks and a quarter supports it.”

In other words, most Palestinians think it’s fine to stab Jews in the street, but ‘only’ one in four thinks that schoolgirls should be encouraged to do so!

Israel has responded to attacks with military force. There’s no other way to respond to rocket barrages and terror tunnels, but Israel has been sharply criticized. Israel has responded to terror attacks by killing terrorists before, during and after they succeed in killing our citizens. There is no other way, but Israel is  criticized.  Israel built a security barrier, a fence like ones that have been constructed by countless nations, to keep murderous terrorists out, and of course Israel is criticized.

It turns out that anything we do to protect ourselves is too much. In 2014, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay argued that even our Iron Dome missile defense system is too much – because we have it and Hamas does not!

After the more or less 100 years that the Arabs have been trying to prevent and destroy Jewish sovereignty, and most of the time the rest of the world has been at best indifferent, a kind of cultural weariness has set in. It manifests itself on the Left as a desire – expressed so nicely by Ehud Olmert – to stop winning and, I presume, lose a little for a change. On the Right the attitude is “we won’t take it anymore,” and a terrorist that tries to stab Jews should not survive the attempt, even if he is already ‘neutralized’.

The latter impulse motivated a young soldier, Elor Azaria, now on trial for manslaughter, to put a bullet into the head of a wounded terrorist who had just stabbed his friend. I suspect that it was the former that caused Maj. Gen. Yair Golan, Deputy Chief of Staff, to suggest that incidents such as that of Azaria and the terrorist remind him of Nazi Germany.

A comparison between Israel and Nazi Germany is so beyond inappropriate that just because of this it is used as a ‘big lie’ by anti-Israel propagandists. Ironically, Azaria’s act did no damage to the State of Israel and maybe even added to its deterrent against terrorism, while Golan’s exceptionally stupid remark played directly into the international campaign to delegitimize Israel and hamstring her ability to defend herself.

Despite the fact that Azaria probably disobeyed orders and should not have shot the terrorist, the majority of Israelis support him and do not wish to see him punished. Most Israelis, with the exception of the baying-at-the-moon-extreme leftists who write for Ha’aretz, were horrified by Golan’s statement (made on Holocaust Memorial Day, of all days).

After 100 years, some things should be clear:

  1. Peace can only come from strength and deterrence, not from concessions which are seen as weakness and only open the door to more demands.
  2. Your enemies want to kill you and force is the only way to stop them.
  3. Nobody will do your fighting for you; and,
  4. You can’t even count on their support when you are attacked.
  5. You can’t reason with people whose bread is buttered by commerce with your enemies.
  6. Even a good general can be a political imbecile.
  7. Give ordinary soldiers a break; you might need them someday.

On Wednesday we remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice, most of them ordinary soldiers. The day after that we celebrate our independence. The connection should be obvious.

Posted in War | 1 Comment

How to bring peace to Gaza

Posted on May 6, 2016 by Victor Rosenthal

Hamas continues to prepare for war. It’s a matter of when, not if.

In the news this week was a report that Israel foiled an attempt to smuggle tons of ammonium chloride into Gaza. It can be used for rockets (in the production of ammonium perchlorate, an oxidizer used in rocket fuel), but it also might be used to make explosive materials for warheads, suicide belts, and more.

It’s also speculated that Israel’s recent breakthrough in tunnel detection technology might cause Hamas to accelerate its timetable and strike soon, in order to use the already-built tunnels before they are uncovered and lost.

All this makes me think about the overall problem of Hamas and how to deal with it. The simplest approach, crushing it with military force, has the major disadvantage of placing Israel in the position of needing to govern and provide services for the hostile population on the day after. The IDF would need to dedicate a great deal of manpower to creating a true army of occupation, which doubtless would immediately be faced with a violent insurgency.

The operation would also cause a great number of civilian deaths and destruction of property in Gaza, as well as casualties to IDF troops and danger to our own population in Hamas’ increasingly expanding rocket range. It would be spun as yet another ‘disproportionate’ act.

On the other hand, the present alternative of ‘mowing the grass’ every few years has similar risks, along with the possibility of a coordinated attack from Hamas and Hezbollah and a multi-front war.

But there is another strategy that we might adopt which could achieve the desired objective of eliminating the threat with few or zero civilian or military casualties, and without the need to take control of the population. Unfortunately, it is highly unlikely that Israel will choose it, and the reason is instructive.

So here is the strategy: Israel informs Hamas that if it does not turn over all of its weapons and ammunition with the exception of small arms needed for normal police operations, disband its army, provide a complete map of its tunnel system and the locations of its rocket launchers and command and control centers, we will impose a real siege on Gaza (as opposed to the limitations on military-use imports they call a siege).

We will turn off electricity, water, internet and phone service, and close the border crossings to the trucks that bring supplies.

All Hamas would need do to end the siege would be to demonstrate adherence to a timetable for meeting our demands that we will provide. It can keep its war-criminal leaders and control of the territory. In fact, if it did follow the timetable, many restrictions that are now in place (like on building materials) could be lifted.

If Hamas agrees, nobody in Gaza needs to miss one meal or one episode of Arab Idol. If it does not agree, then any resultant suffering will be entirely its fault.

This is a completely peaceful way of ending the dispute. It is a program to improve the lives of Gazans (and Israelis), and increase stability in the region. Not only that, but there is no intention to interfere with Palestinian self-rule, just to stop their aggression.

Given the fact that Israel has the military capability to turn Gaza into a depopulated wasteland, this peaceful alternative to war should be welcomed in the halls of the UN, the EU and the White House, where peace is worshipped above all.

But if we were to do this there would be howls of protest from the ‘civilized’ world (and also the less civilized part). “Collective punishment! What about the children?” And so on. Ban Ki Moon and Barack Obama would demand an immediate end to the barbaric policy. The pages of Ha’aretz would be splashed with the furious words of Amira Hass and Gideon Levy.

The 1907 Hague regulations state that “No general penalty, pecuniary or otherwise, shall be inflicted upon the population on account of the acts of individuals for which they cannot be regarded as jointly and severally responsible.” A good argument can be made that the residents of Gaza, who overwhelmingly voted for Hamas in the last Palestinian election, are “jointly and severally responsible.”

Sieges have been a part of warfare since ancient times, although usually the results of a successful one have been tragic for the losers. In 1948, Arab forces, including the British-commanded Arab Legion, blockaded Jerusalem, cutting off supplies of food and ultimately water. The Jews of the Old City were under siege (and sniper fire) for months, until they surrendered on May 29 and were expelled from their homes. They would have been massacred by local Arabs if the Legion’s British officers hadn’t prevented it. During the 19-year illegal occupation that followed, the Jordanians repurposed synagogues as stables and desecrated Jewish graves, using headstones to pave urinals. There were no war crimes prosecutions against the Arabs.

Since then moral sensibilities have changed even further, in such a way as to empower those defined as ‘oppressed’ to violate accepted laws of war (such as the prohibition on deliberate attacks on civilians and the use of human shields), while forcing supposed ‘oppressors’ to hew to ever more strict standards of behavior. The playing field has been tilted against the West in favor of those who assume the mantle of the colonized, oppressed, “people of color.”

No group has done this better than the “Palestinians.” Nowhere has this phenomenon been more striking than in relation to Israel’s repetitive wars against terrorist militias. So it is hard to imagine that the hypocrites of the West would sit still for Israel’s use of the siege tactic against Hamas. The next round of warfare with Hamas seems unavoidable.

It’s ironic that a system intended to reduce the suffering of noncombatants in war will have the effect of making it worse.

Posted in War | 3 Comments

How Western ideology empowers the jihad

Posted on May 2, 2016 by Victor Rosenthal

The US military made news recently when it adopted the Israeli tactic of ‘roof knocking’ – detonating a small explosion above a building that is about to be bombed in order to give civilians that may be present a warning to evacuate – in its operations against the Islamic State.

Israel used the roof-knock technique to reduce civilian casualties in several recent wars, beginning with Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in 2008-9.

One of the tactics that the radical Islamist enemies of the West have adopted as part of the paradigm of asymmetric warfare that they are waging is to use their own civilian populations as human shields. Hamas launches its rockets from school courtyards, and Hezbollah has constructed a massive, dispersed rocket-launching facility embedded in the Shiite villages of southern Lebanon. If Israel has to neutralize this, it’s likely that many Lebanese will be killed.

The human shield tactic is effective because Western military and political leaders are highly sensitive to the charge of unnecessarily hurting civilians in warfare.

There are both practical and ideological reasons for this. In Israel’s case there are possible economic and diplomatic consequences when it is accused of disproportionate response, including cutoff of essential supplies in wartime. But that isn’t true of the US. Nobody will boycott the US or force it to give Texas back to Mexico, and it manufactures its own munitions.

Western populations empathize strongly with “innocent victims.” The effect is even stronger when those who empathize are not threatened; so Europeans (or American presidents) who don’t have to face Hamas and Hezbollah rockets can be highly critical of Israel’s attempts to defend herself.

There are two important things to note: 1) this is a relatively recent development, historically speaking; and 2) this practical/moral/political pressure in the West to behave in a particular way actually enables its enemies to effectively wage asymmetric war against it.

The change in Western sensibility occurred sometime after WWII. Not only were both sides relatively insensitive to collateral damage, the Allies even pursued a policy of strategic bombing of non-military targets both to reduce the enemy’s economic capability but also to sap his “will to resist.” Dresden, Hamburg and other German cities were targets of firebombing that killed tens of thousands.

But one raid on Tokyo stands out, even compared to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On March 9-10, 1945, 1,665 tons of napalm-loaded bombs were dropped on the city, creating a massive conflagration that reduced about 16 square miles and 100,000 people to ashes.

It is hard to imagine any Western nation in almost any circumstance today even contemplating such an operation.

What changed?

The answer is “a lot of things,” some of them obvious and others more subtle.

Nationalism was blamed for the series of European wars that culminated in WWII, and was emphatically rejected in favor of a universalist ethic in which all humans are seen as part of one human race. It was recognized that every person had human rights that should be respected, even in time of war. But at the same time the collective rights of national groups were deemphasized. National rights in the West were considered dangerous.

At the same time, the great colonial empires began to break up. During the colonial period, there was an assumption of cultural superiority. With the dissolution of the empires, this too went away, replaced with cultural relativism and feelings of guilt for the mistreatment suffered by the former colonial subjects.

The American civil rights movement spotlighted racism as a fundamental evil. But people began to conflate any form of tribal feeling with racism.

At this point, the ideological process took a more dangerous and destructive turn, via postcolonialism. The appeal of universalist ideals and human rights and the rejection of racism was initially limited to the first-world nations. Somewhat later they penetrated to the less-developed world, but along the way underwent a transformation in which the language used to express important concepts was radically redefined. In the world of postcolonialism, only oppressed peoples have rights and only oppressors are capable of being racists.

‘Racism’ now means the oppression of ‘People Of Color’ by ‘whites’ (the actual skin color of the people involved is irrelevant, and placement into these groups is purely ideological).

Violence by whites against POC, (even, in the case of Israel, self-defense) is called ‘terrorism’.

Violence by POC against whites is called ‘resistance’ and, by misinterpretation of the UN charter, is said to be a human right.

Although nationalism and tribalism among Westerners has been condemned as the main cause of war, postcolonialism gives POC the right of self-determination as peoples.

This revolutionary logic is taught in Western universities. What has happened has been a kind of ideological disarmament by Western national groups. In effect, there has been a military disarmament as well, because the use of force by the West against POC is considered a violation of their human rights that is not balanced by any collective right that we possess.

The Israeli-Arab conflict is the paradigm case of this. The Palestinian Arabs do not recognize the Jews as a people, but do insist that there is a ‘Palestinian people’. They call Arabs killing Jews with knives, rocks or firebombs ‘nonviolent resistance’ and say that even armed attacks are justified resistance. They describe any action by Israel to protect herself – border controls, the security barrier – as a violation of their human rights, while the state of Israel has no collective right to exist.

In recent years, although the great power struggle between Russia and the West remains in an attenuated form, a new source of conflict has appeared: the decentralized Islamic jihad, aimed to expand dar al Islam at the expense of the rest of the world.

Much has been written about possible reasons for the newfound aggressiveness of Muslims in confronting the West. But the explanation is not to be found in any new Islamic doctrines.

Islam was always expansionist and confrontational. What has changed is us. In the past, the West didn’t hesitate to employ its vast military superiority when confronting a less-capable adversary. This was understood by everyone. The forces of jihad were deterred from attacking us.

But now, like Israel, the West finds itself concerned that using our power would abrogate the essential human rights of its adversaries – defined as People of Color –  while ‘white’ nations have no rights. We are allowed to protect individuals, but not nations or cultures. Defined as the ‘racist oppressor’, we have no right to object to their racism, while they are permitted to ‘resist oppression’ with violence.

As a result, the jihad continues to press forward on multiple fronts and the West retreats, paralyzed by its ideology and unable to use its power.

Posted in Islam, War | 1 Comment

A Jewish state in a hostile world

Posted on April 29, 2016 by Victor Rosenthal

The relationship of Israel to the UN has always been difficult. Over the years, the organization has both reflected worldwide anti-Jewish prejudice and provided a focus for intervention against Israel’s interests.

UN General Assembly resolution 3379 which in 1975 declared Zionism “a form of racism and racial discrimination” was finally repealed sixteen years later thanks to the efforts of US Senator Daniel P. Moynahan, Assistant Secretary of State John Bolton and President George H. W. Bush, a president not generally considered particularly pro-Israel.

According to Dr. Yohanon Manor, the Israeli government didn’t take the resolution seriously for almost a decade, thinking that the “farfetched, aberrant, and shameful” declaration would fade from significance because of its “sheer inanity.” However, it was reiterated time and again in international fora and used to justify discrimination against Israel, Jews and Jewish organizations.

It should have been obvious at the time that this was something larger than just a maneuver by the Soviets to appease their Arab clients. It tapped deeply into the same dark forces which have lately gathered strength throughout the world. Manor quotes a member of the Israeli delegation, Judge Hadassah Ben Ito, who described the mood of its proponents after passage:

It was not only an excitement. The hatred was crawling on the floor. People embraced as if they had won the biggest victory of their lives…. We felt like pariahs. It is not only a sentimental reflection…. We should know that it was not just another resolution of the United Nations. Somebody like myself, who has never really felt personally attacked by, or maligned by an act of anti-Semitism, really felt it physically while sitting there.

There is a familiar feeling that comes over one while reading this. The expression of joyous Jew-hatred described by Ben Ito is well-known to anyone who has been at an anti-Israel demonstration, and observed the exaltation of the activists as they scream their slogans. Perhaps the UN delegates felt the same dopamine rush that SJP members do today when they disrupt an event featuring an Israeli speaker.

Although the resolution was finally rescinded, little changed at the UN, where Israel is the member state everyone loves to hate. Recently, the Security Council reacted with horrified alarm to the ‘menace’ of Israel’s intention to hold on to the Golan Heights, thus keeping it out of the hands of Da’esh or the Butcher of Damascus. In a normal world, one would expect thanks rather than condemnation.

Although the US traditionally protected Israel against the worst excesses of the UN, this appears to be changing, with the Obama Administration in its last year threatening to use the UN to force Israel to make concessions to the PA.

During the Cold War, American policymakers could choose to support Israel as a way to counterbalance the Soviet influence among the Arab states, or to placate the Arabs by opposing Israel. State Department Arabists always pushed for the latter policy, while most American Jews – and Christian Zionists like Harry Truman – preferred the former and made their preference felt.

Now the world looks very different, with the US and Russia apparently competing for the favor of Iran, the rising power in the Mideast.

The US State Department is as anti-Israel as ever. But it has been joined by an even more fiercely ideological White House, which, it seems to me, not only shares the desire of State to reverse the outcome of the 1967 war, but (although the President and his advisors will not say it publicly) would not cry if the Jewish state disappeared altogether.

There is little to hold back the anti-Israel forces in the US. A vestige of the Cold War imperative to oppose the expansion of Russian influence still exists, although it is far less pressing than in the days of the USSR. The US Congress is divided, and – as shown by the Iran deal – unable or unwilling to limit the President’s actions in the foreign sphere. Israel has become a partisan issue, and US Jews are divided as well.

The ‘Zionism is racism’ declaration, as a General Assembly resolution, was not binding and didn’t directly affect Israel. Despite this, it did a lot of damage as a justification for anti-Israel and anti-Jewish actions by other organizations. In Manor’s words, it “[gave] anti-Semitism international sanction.”

But the Security Council can pass binding resolutions, impose economic sanctions or even call for military action (as happened in the Korean War). It could, for example, put its imprimatur on a Syrian peace deal that includes stripping Israel of the strategic Golan Heights, and then sanction Israel if it did not withdraw, blaming Israel for sabotaging  the peace. Obama would certainly want to take credit for such a deal and would not prevent it.

Next to Iran/Hezbollah, the biggest threat facing Israel is the reduction of strategic depth and empowerment of the ‘Palestinians’ by the diplomatic ‘peace process’ imposed by the US, Europe and the UN. This will soon begin with a French-introduced  resolution which will declare settlements illegal and set parameters for talks between Israel and the PA/PLO. Administration spokespersons have refused to say whether the US would veto such a resolution, and it seems likely that the United States will at least demand serious concessions to the ‘peace process’ as a quid pro quo.

Israel’s special problem in international diplomacy is that in addition to the normal computations of national interest, there are irrational religious, ideological and racial/ethnic considerations that motivate states to act against us. The elation exhibited by the UN delegates after the passage of an anti-Zionist resolution is one manifestation of this. Another is the blatant double standard applied to Israel, especially by ‘enlightened’ Europeans, on such subjects as occupation (of territory that is ours according to international law), acquisition of territory by force (in a defensive war), proportionate response (more so than any other Western military), security measures (against terrorism) and countless other things.

As time goes by, Israel will less and less be able to depend on the weakening West. Our survival will be based on political agility and our ability to make alliances wherever possible, especially with states like Russia and China, which hold veto power in the Security Council, but also temporary accommodations with declared enemies like Saudi Arabia or Erdoğan’s Turkey.

The best strategy to deal with irrational prejudice is to act from strength, and to demand respect if we can’t have friendship. Today Israel has considerable economic, technological and military clout, which it should not hesitate to use in its foreign relations.

Being the world’s only Jewish state brings with it unique problems and stresses, but independence, Jewish self-determination and, above all, the realization of the dream for which our ancestors prayed daily for thousands of years, more than justifies the cost.

Posted in Jew Hatred, The UN, US-Israel Relations, Zionism | 2 Comments

The answer to globalized Jew-hatred

Posted on April 25, 2016 by Victor Rosenthal

It’s a truism these days that traditional Jew-hatred has moved up one level of abstraction and turned into psychopathic Israel-hatred. Indeed, excessive concern over the question “is anti-Zionism antisemitism?” usually indicates that the questioner is guilty of both. There’s nothing surprising about this: in this day of globalization of trade and communications, Jew-hatred has globalized as well.

The centuries of dealing with Jew-hatred have made us familiar with various strategies for self-defense, although before we had a state and an army there weren’t many effective ones.

One of our perennial favorites was to appeal to the local prince or emir either by flattery, argument or bribery to try to get him to protect us against the pogromists that were always ready to loot, rape and murder in Jewish neighborhoods. This strategy sometimes worked temporarily, but sooner or later a friendly official would be replaced by one who “did not know Joseph” or a bribed one would raise his price to more than we could pay.

There is another strategy, which is to give nothing and fight our tormentors. Unfortunately the odds were usually so lopsided – as in the case of Bar Kochba or the Warsaw Ghetto – that although we kept our honor, we lost our lives.

Note that our enemies today do not even give us the choice to die on our feet or live on our knees: they want us to kneel so they can cut our heads off.

Zionism was, among other things, an attempt to give us the option of not only fighting, but winning. It has been the most successful strategy of all to protect our people. Zionism’s answer to Jew-hatred was to change the odds, to fight the British colonialists and the pro-Nazi Arabs at the same time in order to create a Jewish state with a Jewish army that would not have to beg for or buy its survival.

Great sacrifices were made to this end. When it became clear that neither the British nor the Arabs were prepared to let us have the homeland that the world had promised us, the Zionists of both the Left and the Right fought and died for it. The odds were not in our favor, but the Jews had the will to win – why shouldn’t they, when they felt their backs against the walls of Hitler’s gas chambers?

As everyone knows, the Jewish state was established and beat back several additional attempts to destroy it. Israel now has a powerful army, one of the best air forces in the world, and a nuclear deterrent, even a second-strike capability. We have changed the odds.

But our enemies in the West and the Muslim world changed their strategy as well. They realized that they couldn’t get rid of the Jews by frontal attack, at least not today. So they launched a broad diplomatic and psychological campaign, aiming to weaken the Jewish state to the point that it could ultimately be overrun. The Arabs, the West and the Soviets with their international Left fellow-travelers all participated. Today it is a global enterprise in which everyone does their part.

The American State Department has fought against the Jewish state since its inception. Today it works tirelessly (usually with help from the president and his administration) to reverse the outcome of the 1967 war and return Israel to the indefensible borders of 1949. It also refuses to accept the Jewish ownership of any part of Jerusalem. The Obama Administration has followed a policy to strengthen Iran in the region at the expense of Israel and other former US allies.

The PLO, for its part, works in accordance with its “phased plan” initially developed in the 1970s to establish an Arab-controlled enclave in the land of Israel which can serve as a base for terrorism and ultimately an additional front in a regional war. It cooperates with the UN – an organization that is supported by the US and Europe – to present itself as the representative of an oppressed ‘Palestinian people’ who claim to be the real owners of the land of Israel. Also financed by the US and Europe, the PLO mounts a continuous series of diplomatic initiatives against Israel and incites and supports terrorism against Jews, although it somehow manages to maintain that it is not responsible for it.

The European Union and individual European governments (especially Germany and the insufferable Scandinavians) pump massive amounts of money into the PLO and anti-state NGOs staffed with Jewish Israeli traitors and international anti-Zionist activists. They cooperate with the PLO’s diplomatic initiatives and psychological warfare operations designed to demonize and delegitimize Israel. The NGOs, since the 2001 “anti-racism” conference in Durban, South Africa, have succeeded in promulgating the wildly incorrect – but powerful – myth that Israel practices apartheid and commits ‘genocide’ against the ‘Palestinians’.

Arab petrodollar-funded academics established anti-Zionist Mideast Studies departments in American Universities, while Arab and Muslim immigrants in the US supply the foot-soldiers of an increasingly militant anti-Israel campus activism.

Hamas, which could not exist without ‘refugee’ aid from UNRWA, the UN’s special ‘Palestinian-only’ refugee agency, initiates periodic wars against Israel which terrorize the population and serve as jumping-off points for worldwide anti-Israel activism. It also mobilizes Sunni Islamic opposition and motivates suicide bombers.

Finally, Iran, previously considered a ‘rogue state’ but now increasingly a partner to the US and Europe, provides money and weapons to the Lebanese Hezbollah organization, a global terrorist enterprise which comprises a very serious military threat – today, the most dangerous one that Israel faces – on its northern border.

It is remarkable how practically the entire world can cooperate against Zionism, when it is unable to cooperate on almost anything else!

The psychological campaign has been particularly effective, both in enlisting people outside of Israel, many of whom have never met an actual Jew, and in sowing doubt among and weakening the will of Israeli Jews.

As a result, almost any military action by Israel, no matter how serious the provocation, is immediately denounced by the world media as “disproportionate” or worse. Western governments, especially the US, take action to restrain Israel.

A small but very vocal minority of Israelis has internalized the anti-Zionist ideas of our enemies. This minority has members in important positions in the media, the judiciary and even the army, and can have a disproportionate influence on the government’s decisions. Together with the coordinated international pressure that has been detailed above, the result is to paralyze our government and make it unable to take strong action against foes like Hamas and Hezbollah. It is apparently unable to declare the PLO an enemy, or even to stop providing logistical support (food, water, electricity and until recently, cement) to Hamas at the same time that Hamas prepares for war against Israel.

It does take action against Jewish nationalists, whose activities – despite an all-out effort to pin a case of arson/murder on them – appear to be limited to small-time assaults and vandalism. It punishes a simple soldier for killing an incapacitated terrorist who had just attempted to murder a Jew. In this way, it believes it will show the world that Israel is a just and humane society.

Such attempts are less likely to succeed even than the hasbara which promotes Israel as an enlightened state and a popular destination for gay tourism. It is the international equivalent of a Jewish community trying to beg or buy safety from the local princes. It is a Diaspora response, not a Zionist response.

Israel’s public behavior needs to change. Our officials need to understand that neither the Arabs nor the West accept the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East. They did not accept it in 1948, they do not today and they will not tomorrow. This is not based on a rational calculation of interests; it is a result of deeply felt anti-Zionism, which is globalized Jew-hatred. Our adoption of Western humanist values to an even greater degree than the West itself is never enough for them; and the Arabs rightly hold us in contempt.

Therefore there is no point in trying to hold off the pressure from the US and Europe by making concessions to the Arabs, on the grounds that these minor retreats aren’t dangerous and will make us look good. We cannot ‘look good’ to those who hate us, and the demands for concessions will never end.

There is no point in behaving humanely to those who would behave toward us as the Islamic State does in Syria, if we let down our guard. There is no point in giving up our honor as the owners of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount in order to keep the Arabs quiet. And there will be no point in not using artillery and air power, including even tactical nuclear weapons if appropriate, to shut down the missiles from southern Lebanon.

Zionism indeed changes the odds and makes it possible for the Jewish people to stand up and fight, and to win. But to realize the change we must use the power of our state and our army.

The world will not understand the need for a Jewish state, no matter how we behave. But it can be made to understand that there is one and that it will fight fiercely and without quarter against anyone that tries to destroy it.

Posted in Jew Hatred, Zionism | 1 Comment

To thine own people be true, Israel

Posted on April 22, 2016 by Victor Rosenthal

I read in today’s [Wednesday] newspaper that Israel will be building a sophisticated barrier along the border with Gaza. Sensors, underground walls and who knows what secret systems to detect tunneling and infiltration. The cost is estimated in billions of shekels (a shekel today is about US$ 0.26). We are continuing to develop and deploy a multi-tiered antimissile defense that also will cost billions.

Meanwhile, the US State Department, Germany, the EU and the Arab League all insist that the Golan heights belong to the non-country of Syria. “No state can claim the right to annex another state’s territory just like that,” say the Germans, while they advocate ‘Palestine’ doing exactly that.

In the US, Joe Biden spoke to the anti-Zionist J Street organization and expressed his “overwhelming frustration” with Israel’s government, and called for the Left to return to power in Israel. Such respect for democracy he has.

And of course the inimitable Bernie Sanders continues to call Israel’s responses to attacks from Gaza “disproportionate.”

In the opinion of the West, Israel can defend itself as long as its defensive measures aren’t too effective, like the security barrier in Judea and Samaria, and as long as they are completely passive, like Iron Dome. It is not permissible for Israel to kill any Arabs in the process; even wounded terrorists must be protected and given medical treatment. It doesn’t matter if no other country has a better record of reducing collateral damage in any recent conflict – any civilian casualties are grounds for condemnation.

The West believes that no strategic considerations such as the fact that the Golan, the Jordan Valley and the high ground of Judea and Samaria are essential for Israel’s defense can override the desires of the ‘Palestinians’ for a state, or the ‘rights’ of the Butcher of Damascus, Hezbollah, IS or whoever will rule the remnants of Syria. On the other hand, it does not accept Israel’s rights under international law.

The West agrees that exploding buses are bad. But it blames them on Israel controlling territory that she shouldn’t, security measures inconvenient for the Arabs and disproportionate responses. If we stop doing these things, it suggests that there will be no more terrorism.

This position is either extremely stupid or hypocritical. In the case of Bernie Sanders, I vote for stupid; but the State Department, Germany and the EU (and others that I haven’t mentioned) are hypocrites: they say they believe we have a right to self-defense, while aware that what they want is for Israel to be unable to defend herself.

Are the Arabs our worst enemies? Possibly not. Arguably, the West has done more damage to Israel’s chances for survival by diplomatic pressure for concessions and by financing the PA, Hamas (via UNRWA) and countless anti-Zionist NGOs and UN agencies, than Palestinian terrorists with their suicide belts. Think about that.

Israel’s response has been to play along.

We agree to ‘negotiate’ with the PLO – the terrorist organization that has killed more Israeli Jews since its inception than any other – over serious proposals to give them control over vital strategic locations, our holiest places and half our capital. Luckily for us, they have always demanded too much.

We say that we want a ‘two-state solution’ and hint that we will expel hundreds of thousands of Jews from their homes in return for a paper promise from ‘leaders’ who may not be in power next week, and don’t insist on our rights under international law.

We commit to massive expenditures in passive defense, Iron Domes above and below ground, in order to avoid carrying out the simplest and most effective procedure for self-defense: crushing our enemies.

We fight limited wars – that is, wars that are limited to pushing our enemies back but never destroying them – and then we give them time and, in the case of Hamas, even supply them so they can rebuild their offensive capabilities for the next round.

We punish our young soldiers severely for killing the enemy in time of war, and then expect them to keep coming back for more victory-limited wars.

We do all these things because we want to be a member of the Western ‘enlightened’ club, the same one that is presently being eaten alive by Islam in Europe and threatened by political insanity in North America, instead of the Middle Eastern nation that we are.

Israel’s Jewish population comes from Africa and Asia, the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and many other places. A bit fewer than half of us are descended from people who lived in Muslim countries until relatively recently. Why should we expect to be like Norway, Belgium or the US? Israel must define herself as a sovereign, independent Jewish and democratic nation, and explicate those terms in the light of the history and future of the Jewish people, not as dictated by Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders.

And we don’t need to imitate the US – or, God forbid, Europe.

Posted in Israeli Society, War | 2 Comments