How to end the intifada — for good

Posted on November 6, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal
Chart posted on Facebook showing where to best stab a Jew

Chart posted on Facebook showing where to best stab a Jew

Although the perpetrators of the recent terrorist incidents are mostly young people not associated with terror organizations whose actions are not explicitly ordered by the Palestinian Arab leadership, they are nevertheless part of a planned campaign that is orchestrated by that leadership. The strings are pulled effectively by way of social media, with no direct link between the ‘commanders’ and the ‘soldiers’. This is one of the reasons that it is so difficult to interdict the terrorists before they strike.

A recent bulletin of the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center tells us that

The current wave of violence and terrorism is part of the overall “popular resistance” strategy adopted by the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Fatah at the Sixth Fatah Conference in August 2009. It is manifested by rising and falling levels of popular terrorism. The current wave (which is unique in some aspects) is one of the most serious. Its popular terrorism includes riots, throwing stones and Molotov cocktails, and stabbing and vehicular attacks which are supported and condoned by the PA. The current wave of Palestinian terrorism, like those before it, has included several shooting attacks, which are not included in the modus operandi of the “popular resistance,” but the PA does not condemn them, and in effect supports them.

The long-term objective of the Arab leadership is to foment violence and chaos in Israel so as to interfere with her ability to defend herself against external threats and also to provide an excuse for intervention by the ‘international community’ to force Israel to make territorial and other concessions to the PLO and to Hamas. A weakened and attenuated Israel, they believe, will ultimately suffer a defeat in a regional conflict severe enough to cause enough of the population to flee so that the state will disintegrate and they can take over.

Although Hamas and the PLO will fight each other for control, they have consistently cooperated in the endeavor to disrupt the Jewish state. This is nothing more than an updated version of the PLO’s ‘phased plan’ of 1974.

This intifada is different from the last one because control over the violence is almost entirely decentralized:

In most instances [the terrorist] carries out the attack by himself following a spontaneous personal decision without instructions from any organization or leadership. He does not follow an Islamist ideology (some of the terrorists lived fairly secular lives) and does not belong to a terrorist organization, although he feeds off the incitement to terrorism and anti-Israel hatred disseminated by the various terrorist organizations. …

The Palestinian terrorist who carries out an attack in Israel is motivated by Palestinian nationalism, and for the past six years he has been deeply influenced by reports of popular terrorism. He has also been influenced by events on the Temple Mount and by the false slogan “Al-Aqsa mosque is in danger.” He is personally and socially frustrated and feeds off the anti-Israel hatred and incitement on the social networks (mainly Facebook).

Indeed, Micah Lakin Avni, whose father Richard Lakin was murdered in Jerusalem last month, has called it “The Facebook Intifada,” and called for action by social media providers to stop the use of their networks for incitement. They are used for promulgation of lies about Israeli actions (“al-Aqsa is in danger,” “executing Palestinians and planting knives on them”), encouraging terrorism, giving practical advice on ways to kill, and honoring those who have perpetrated terrorist acts – especially ‘martyrs’.

Social media are used directly by the PLO/PA, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and others, but also by individuals. Some of the pages quite explicitly incite murder.

In addition, the presentation of videos and descriptions of terror attacks after they occur, especially including accusations of deliberate murder of Palestinians and other humiliations, builds on previous incidents to infuriate susceptible young people and encourage them to go out and commit attacks of their own.

Of course there are other means of communication but social media have been a game-changer, making it possible for our enemies to order up a more pervasive violent upheaval than ever in the past, to recruit people ready to die for the cause, to make it almost impossible for Israeli security forces to stop them, and to provide a continuous stimulus to perpetuate the violence for an unlimited time.

It seems then that there are two points at which we can attack this: the leadership that provides the top-down impetus and justification for it, and the social media that create the positive feedback loop that keeps the intifada alive.

Israeli officials, particularly in the army, have argued that the PA/PLO and Hamas are better alive than dead: they would be replaced by something worse; Israel would then have to take over the governance of the Arabs; the army would have to deal with insurgencies like those in Iraq and Syria; and nobody wants to do reserve duty in the territories. I think current events show that it is becoming harder to justify this position.

After Oslo, the PLO systematically eliminated any Arab leaders who would admit that they favored coexistence with the Jewish state. And since Oslo, the PA/PLO has been ‘educating’ its children for martyrdom (and needless to say, Hamas is doing the same thing). We are paying the price today, as members of the empathy-free Oslo generation have come of age with the ability to plunge a knife into the back of an 80-year old Jewish grandmother or stab a 2-year old toddler, feel good about their ‘accomplishments’, and be considered heroes in their society.

At the same time, the diplomatic and legal war against the state of Israel waged by the PLO/PA, which quite successfully plays off the latent (and not-so-latent) Jew hatred in Europe and the American Left, is beginning to bear fruit. The EU is about to take the first steps toward boycotting Israeli products, and the Obama Administration is simultaneously getting ready for a new round of badgering Israel, while threatening to not veto a French resolution in the UN Security Council declaring all settlements illegal and calling for the creation of ‘Palestine’ beyond the 1949 lines.

Further, in the event of a conventional military conflict with Hezbollah or Iran, the possibility of the PA “security forces” opening an additional front is a real possibility.

These considerations suggest that the PA has outlived its usefulness, and the vicious PLO – which cynically violated its promise to be a peace partner from day one of Oslo – should be eliminated for once and for all.

It is also absurd for Israel to accept Hamas control of Gaza, whereby its leaders devote all available resources to preparing for the next war, which needs to be fought and re-fought every several years. So far we’ve been lucky that they haven’t succeeded in tunneling into a nearby kibbutz, and that none of their rockets has struck a skyscraper in Tel Aviv, but it’s stupid to let them keep trying.

It is not unthinkable that within a few years Israel could find herself fighting Hamas, Hezbollah, the PA, Iran and the Islamic State at the same time!

This is not to say that the tanks should roll tonight. A great deal of creative thinking and planning has to take place first. The experience of Iraq and Libya shows what happens when a regime, no matter how evil or dysfunctional, is destroyed without sufficient consideration for what will replace it.

The other pressure point to stop the bleeding is the social networks. Facebook is now the target of a class-action suit to force it to remove hateful and inciting pages, which they have been resistant to do. This may or may not be effective, but in any case will take time.

There are technical solutions to stop incitement, although it would not be cost-free for the networks. But if they don’t cooperate, there are also ways to block them – Iran and China have done so to some degree – and I’m sure that the corporations that are raking in cash from their operations among affluent Israelis (both Jews and Arabs) would listen to a credible threat from the Israeli government that they might be blocked.

The effects of decades of education for hate will not be erased in a short time, even if the PA/PLO and Hamas are taken down, but the spigot of social media incitement can be shut off relatively quickly.

Let’s interdict the flow of incitement immediately, as aggressively as we act against weapons shipments to Hezbollah. And we should begin the process of undoing the Oslo mistake as soon as possible.

Posted in Israel and Palestinian Arabs, Terrorism, War | 1 Comment

Jewish grandmothers should not be targets

Posted on November 3, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal

Rehovot is not spiritual Jerusalem or fashionable and exciting Tel Aviv. It is a place where mostly middle-income people live and go to work. It’s well within the 1949 armistice lines, and not right next to any large Arab towns. The recent wave of violence hasn’t reached us… yet.

Rehovot has one of the lowest crime rates (Hebrew link) of the 25 largest cities in Israel. Normally we feel quite safe walking in the streets at any time of the day or night.

It stopped feeling normal yesterday when a 19-year old Arab terrorist came all the way from Hebron to Rishon Letzion, a slightly larger town about 5 miles northwest of Rehovot, and stabbed three people, wounding two of them seriously, including an 80-year old grandmother. A little while after that, a 71-year old man was stabbed and seriously injured in Netanya.

In true Amalekite tradition, the Arabs strike at the weakest and slowest of Jews.

Residents of Jerusalem or Judea/Samaria, who have suffered multiple attacks almost every day for several weeks, may sneer at me, but I insisted on accompanying my wife today as she made the rounds of fabric and notions stores, searching for materials to make her granddaughter a leotard. Armed with pepper spray – originally bought for camping in California mountain lion country – and dimly remembered army training (“don’t daydream on guard duty”), I scrutinized everyone we passed on the street, people getting off buses, and vehicles that might suddenly veer onto the sidewalk. Because Jewish grandmothers are targets.

Most Palestinian Arabs approve of these attacks. Teenagers or young adults – who seem to have carried out the majority of recent stabbing attacks – tend to be less empathetic toward others, especially older people. When they are told over and over that Jews are at once powerful demons who hate Palestinians and want to kill them, and subhuman descendants of apes and pigs, it makes it easy to stick their knives into us without hesitation. Many expect rewards in paradise if they are killed during an ‘operation’.

The Palestinians will tell you that these attacks are not actually ‘violence’ – that knives, firebombs, screwdrivers and boulders are weapons of ‘popular resistance’, which is to be encouraged. According to them the Jews are European colonialists who have no connection to the land, where there never was a Jewish temple. And according to them, the UN Charter permits an ‘occupied people’ to engage in ‘resistance’ and since all Israelis are ‘occupiers’, they are all targets, including the grandmothers. They are full of crap on all counts.

When will it stop? I don’t see it stopping ever, unless Israel does something entirely different. The Arabs are convinced that since we are European colonialists, enough pressure will make us go ‘home’. Given their beliefs, concessions will only encourage them to engage in more ‘resistance’. Why should they stop doing what works?

What I recommend is that, in addition to the needed protective measures, we start making ‘resistance’ unprofitable, both for Palestinian Arabs individually and collectively, and for their leadership. If their governing authority continues to incite terrorism, then we should cut off its financing. If Palestinians working in Israel are affected by ‘sudden jihad syndrome’, then it should become harder for them to work here. If a Palestinian tries to stab someone, he should not survive.

In the meantime, I’m going to add to my pepper spray arsenal. Jewish grandparents should be able to walk the streets of the Jewish state without being murdered.

Posted in Terrorism | Comments Off on Jewish grandmothers should not be targets

The Israeli Left’s ongoing reality show

Posted on November 1, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal

The thing about the Israeli Left is that they only talk to each other, so they are shocked, shocked, when a remark that seems to them totally normal strikes regular people as beyond the pale.

Take the recent Facebook post by Orna ben Dor. In case you don’t recognize the name, she is a filmmaker, TV director and writer whose accomplishments include directing three seasons of me’usharot, the Israeli version of the American reality show “Real Housewives” (video here, if you can stand it).

Here’s what she wrote (my translation):

Now he’s [Netanyahu] also Economics Minister and we do nothing. Gripe a little, get a little depressed, get stabbed a little, get very disgusted, but do nothing. A kind of limpness. A lack of faith in ourselves. Tell me, when Hitler came to power did the “good Germans” also gripe, but continue with their daily routine?

It sounds a lot like she’s comparing our Prime Minister to Hitler, doesn’t it, as well as blaming him for the recent wave of Arab stabbing attacks. No wonder it made the front page of the pro-Netanyahu newspaper Israel Hayom, and why the members of Netanyahu’s Likud party are furious.

Ben Dor responded that she was misunderstood, that what she meant was not that Netanyahu was like Hitler, but that Israelis were like the Germans of Hitler’s day. Well, yes. That too. Israelis love to be called ‘good Germans’. But not only that.

Words have meanings and impact. Words can be weapons, and she used them that way. Now she is complaining that “Netanyahu’s soldiers” are “pursuing” her. She is complaining that the headline on the story in Israel Hayom (“This isn’t incitement? Director ben Dor compared Netanyahu to Hitler”) gave a “distorted impression” of what she said. You read her post; you can decide for yourself.

This week Israelis are marking the assassination of PM Yitzhak Rabin, twenty years ago. Yesterday there was a big rally in Tel Aviv. Among the speakers was Bill Clinton, and even Barack Obama sent a recorded message calling, as usual, for Israel to “make compromises and take risks.”

One of the themes of the rally was the danger of internal strife and incitement, like that which preceded the assassination of Rabin, including the distribution of pictures of Rabin in a Nazi uniform. President Reuven Rivlin said,

And to those who silence, who threaten, who raise clenched fists, who create pictures of SS [uniforms], to those who threaten MKs, judges, ministers and prime ministers, I want to say today: We are not afraid of you.

Since the assassination, the Left has spared no vitriol in blaming the Right, and especially Netanyahu, for it. This is despite the fact that the famous picture of Rabin as an SS officer was created and distributed by Avishai Raviv, an agent provocateur working for the Shabak (Israel’s internal security service) in order to discredit right-wing opponents of Oslo.

Comparisons with Nazis were always a Big Deal in Israel, and even more so since the Rabin assassination. An editor for YNet (the news website associated with the Yediot Aharonot newspaper) was recently fired for posting a picture of Netanyahu in a Nazi uniform on his personal Facebook page.

The interesting part of the ben Dor controversy is the way she appears to be completely clueless about why people are so upset about her comments.

Her combination of viciousness and lack of comprehension marks the latest in a series of similar incidents in which the ‘creative’ and media elite of Israel have exposed themselves as both stupid and bigots. There was the famous remark by entertainer Dudu Topaz in 1981 that Likud voters were “chachachim” (a vulgar name for Mizrachim), and author and artist Yair Garbuz’s reference to “kissers of amulets, idol-worshippers and people who bow down and prostrate themselves on the graves of saints” this March. Shortly thereafter, poet and actress Alona Kimchi said Likud voters were “f-ing neanderthals” who should “take cyanide.” In June, actor/director Oded Kotler called them “straw and cud munching cattle.”

The pattern repeats over and over. The very people who claim that Netanyahu and his supporters are anti-democratic, racist, ideological sheep exhibit precisely those characteristics themselves. And the more their political camp recedes into irrelevance, the angrier they get. They’re entitled to be angry if they want.  But what they are doing is libeling and inciting.

Posted in Israeli Politics | 3 Comments

If you live in the Middle East, act like it

Posted on October 30, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal

Yesterday, international talks on the ‘crisis’ (funny word, since it’s been going on for several years) in Syria were scheduled to start in Vienna.

Participating will be at least Russia, the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Iran. CNN reports that “18 nations, plus the European Union, were invited to the meeting.”

I don’t need to tell you which particular nation, which just happens to border on Syria, which has been hit recently by ordinance fired from Syria, and which has a great stake in the outcome of events there, was not invited.

As everyone knows, in the 1990-91 Gulf War, Israel was not invited to join the coalition against Saddam Hussein. In fact, she was very strongly ‘invited’ (by the US) not to retaliate when Scud missiles from Iraq struck her cities.

And in June 2012,

… the Global Counterterrorism Forum’s inaugural meeting was held in Turkey. Launched last year by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as a “multilateral counterterrorism body,” it includes 29 countries, many of them from the Arab world. It aims to “build the international architecture for dealing with 21st century terrorism,” according to US authorities.

Israel, of course, was not among the 29 countries, despite being both the world’s top target for terrorism and the most accomplished at dealing with it.

I won’t detail the problems Israel has had in the UN, including not being allowed to join the Asia-Pacific regional group, as should have happened in 1948. She finally managed to get into the Western and Other group in 2000, making her at long last eligible to put forward candidates for various UN bodies.

Similar boycotting goes on in the world of sports, academics, and other less important areas.

These snubs are a result of various Muslim countries throwing childish fits and refusing to participate in anything together with Israel. The grown-up world has gotten used to appeasing and enabling this behavior, which is based on anti-Jewish hatred.

I think that part of the reason this continues is Israel’s fault.

Israel, which is actually a Middle Eastern country both by geography and the fact that about half its population is of recent Middle Eastern origin (and the rest are less-recently so) likes to pretend that it is a Western nation, like, say, Belgium or Canada. So it tries to act in a responsible, diplomatic and polite way in the international arena. This is not the way to get what you want in the shark pool that is world politics.

Take Iran or Russia for example. Both are much weaker militarily and economically than the US. Yet they ride roughshod over US and Western interests.

When Israel behaved “childishly,” like when it obtained (or didn’t obtain) nuclear weapons against the interests of the great powers, when it bombed nuclear reactors in Iraq and Syria, and when it interdicted weapons shipments to Hezbollah, it was successful in achieving its objectives. When it tried to act like a grownup – as in agreeing to allow the UN to prevent Hezbollah’s rearmament after the Second Lebanon War, it fails.

This applies both to actions and to rhetoric. Israel is insufficiently aggressive in both realms. We are too worried about what the West will say. A certain degree of ‘childishness’, unpredictability, even rogue behavior is not a bad thing. Ask Vladimir Putin.

In the case of the Syria talks, Israel should demand, loudly, to be included. If the US or anyone would prefer not, then they should be forced to publicly explain just why they are taking this racist (because that is what it is) position.

The editors of Ha’aretz and the tiny elite that they serve don’t think Israel ought to be a Middle Eastern country. They would pick it up and fly it to Canada if they could. But it is, and it should act like one.

Shabbat shalom to everyone!

Posted in Middle East politics | 2 Comments

Is Zionism colonialism or indigenous self-determination?

Posted on October 30, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal

The World Zionist Congress met last week for the 37th time since it was founded by Theodor Herzl in 1897. Like many Jewish institutions today, it has become a battleground for the Right and Left. But what happened at the meeting put into clear focus that the struggle is really between Zionism and … something else.

An organization called LAVI introduced a resolution (the English version is here) calling for the recognition of the Jewish people as an indigenous nation:

The bill declared that “the Jewish people is a Semitic people, indigenous to the Land of Israel and seeking international recognition of its indigenous status” …

The proposal argued that “Israel’s contrived Western identity” was not only handing ammunition to its enemies to falsely label Zionism as a “colonialist” project, but that it was also placing an artificial barrier preventing peace between Israel and its other “Semitic” neighbors.

It included a statement that it “does not negate the indigenous status of any other people.” Nevertheless, it barely passed, by a vote of 51% of the delegates.

I believe that the essence of Zionism is the assertion that the Jews are an indigenous people to the land of Israel, with indigenous rights (sometimes called aboriginal rights) in the land. In fact, the Jewish people are one of the oldest documented indigenous peoples, with a unique language, culture, religion and history tied directly to the land of Israel.

The resolution refers to the struggle of the Jews to return to the land after displacement by “Roman imperialism,” but it could also have mentioned the conflict between the Jews and the Arab imperialists of the seventh century or the Jordanian and Egyptian ones that invaded the land in 1948.

A moment’s reflection should suffice to show that the narrative by which the Jews suddenly appeared in 1880 or 1948 to dispossess a flourishing ‘Palestinian’ people is nonsense. Jews have been physically present here to some extent since biblical times, and they are the paradigm case of ‘a people’ in history. ‘Palestinians’, on the other hand, are Arabs who are mostly descended from recent arrivals from Arabia, Syria, Egypt, and Transjordan. Their specifically ‘Palestinian’ culture developed very recently, in opposition to what they see as the threat of Jewish (non-Arab and non-Muslim) sovereignty. They didn’t even call themselves ‘Palestinians’ until the 1960s; and prior to 1948, ‘Palestinian’ meant ‘Palestinian Jew’.

The Arabs know that Zionism rests on Jewish peoplehood, and on the connection of the Jewish people to the land – our indigenousness. They know that their moral case to displace us is based on the argument that they are a long-term indigenous people and we are European colonialists. Thus they insist there is no Jewish people, only a religion. Thus they attempt to erase Jewish history in the land – by arrogating Jewish holy sites to themselves and by physically destroying archaeological evidence of the ancient Jewish presence. Their claims may appear ludicrous, but they have been successful in persuading large numbers of people.

But the insistence on our indigenous rights is more than just a response to the Arab attempt to invert reality. It is an answer to the most basic questions that can be asked about Zionism: Why does there need to be a Jewish state? Why not a democratic state of its citizens? And why does it need to be here?

The answers are provided, ironically, by the UN, in its Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted in 2007, which asserts the right of self-determination as well as the rights to maintain the culture, institutions, religion, and language for indigenous peoples. It grants them the right to live in peace and security, and to not be subjected to genocide or expulsion from their native lands. It calls for them to have free access to their religious sites, and for them to be free from incitement to racial hatred against them.

Zionism is the principle, justified by historical experience, that these rights can be guaranteed for the Jewish people only in a state under Jewish sovereignty.

So why was there so much opposition to the passage of this resolution? After all, it was the World Zionist Congress.

The opposition came from delegates associated with the Union for Reform Judaism (the largest faction among the American delegates), the Conservative Movement, and especially a ‘progressive’ group called Hatikvah which included representatives of J Street, the New Israel Fund, Ameinu, Americans for Peace Now, and numerous other left-of-center factions.

Writing on LAVI’s Facebook page, founder LAVI delegate Jonathan Kadoch asked,

The fact that so many self-defined Zionists … not only opposed this resolution but also fought for a revote after narrowly losing only causes us to wonder about the fundamental assumptions upon which they are operating. Do they genuinely want to see themselves as white colonialists rather than as Semites?

Why indeed? My suspicion is that the ones farther to the left (like Americans for Peace Now and Ameinu) are ideologically married to the idea that the Jews are colonists and the Arabs indigenous. To believe anything else would violate their post-colonialist conceptual scheme, which would be too cognitively dissonant for them. More moderate delegates may have felt that an assertion that that Jews have a right or connection to the land that Arabs don’t would damage the holy “two-state solution” that they are eternally seeking. Maybe some simply don’t want to make the Arabs more frustrated and furious than they already are.

I shouldn’t be too hard on the liberal ‘Zionists’ of the WZC, though, because Israel’s own government is schizophrenic about its Zionism. While the government is not talking about indigenousness, they are considering a “Jewish state law” (temporarily on hold) which will add to the Basic Laws – Israel’s substitute for an actual constitution – some kind of statement that while all citizens have civil and political rights, the Jewish people have ‘national rights’. This is intended to balance the ‘Jewish’ and ‘democratic’ characteristics of the state that are mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. There is already a Basic Law about democracy, but none about Jewishness.

The same kind of people that think that the Jewish people have indigenous rights also tend to think they have ‘national’ ones, rights to symbols like the national anthem and flag, and the primary national language. A “Basic Law: The Jewish State” might also legitimize a Law of Return for Jews without requiring one for Arabs, justify efforts to increase Jewish aliyah, to teach Tanach and Jewish History in schools, to support synagogues with public funds, and more. It would, its backers hope, prevent concern for Arab rights to erode Jewish ones.

Various formulations of such a law have been proposed, and the Left despises all of them, because in their post-Zionist hearts they don’t believe that Jews and Arabs should be unequal in any way. They might oppose transitioning from a Jewish state with an Arab minority to a ‘state of its citizens’ for practical reasons, but it is a matter of pride for them to at least pretend to be ethnically blind. They don’t see any special reason that Israel should not be like Western Europe or the US in that respect (apparently they haven’t looked at Sweden lately).

One way or another, Israel will have to face the question of whether it will continue to be an expression of the Zionist ideal or try to become a tiny Sweden. I think the answer to which of these is more likely to survive and thrive is obvious.

Update [30 Oct 1226 IST]: The quotation from LAVI’s Facebook page was corrected to refer to Jonathan Kadoch, a delegate from the US. It had been incorrectly attributed to Ilan Roth.

Posted in Zionism | Comments Off on Is Zionism colonialism or indigenous self-determination?

When do we stop ignoring the information war?

Posted on October 26, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal

Despite the vicious and brutal nature of the violent uprising that is under way in Israel now, the rest of the world is either silent or approving. The implication seems to be “they are getting what they deserved.” How did this happen?

This was written by an Israeli graduate student studying at Oxford:

When conversations regarding Israel do ensue, they deal with the disproportionate use of power during the 2014 war in Gaza, the high death toll among Palestinians (statistics which many British students with whom I have spoken can quote), the violent behavior of settlers towards Palestinians documented in videos that have gone viral in the UK as elsewhere, the checkpoints, the economic ruin of the Gaza strip and the continued refusal of Israel to recognize Palestinian independence. There are students who can recite without difficulty Prime Minister Netanyahu’s comment on Israel’s election day about the need to counter ‘droves’ of Arab Israelis on their way to vote. …

Despite immense efforts, Oxford scholars do not regard Israel as a high tech nation, a gay tourist destination or a model for modern democracy. They remain unconvinced by Prime Minister Netanyahu’s assertions that Israel is the bastion of Western norms, the forefront in the struggle over terror. Nor do they prescribe [sic] to Israel’s moral relativism according to which the world must denounce Saudi Arabia and Bashar Assad before it denounces Israel. In the eyes of Oxford’s students, injustice elsewhere is not a defense for injustice in Israel.

To this international community, Israel is synonymous with bigotry, violence, hate and the oppression of human rights. It is the global spread of this notion that reveals that no public diplomacy campaign, no sophisticated national slogan and no infographic shared online by StandWithUs can counter the impact of the images that arose from Gaza in 2008, and 2012 and 2014, or those that currently emerge from Jerusalem.

His own political leanings and the fact that this was published in Ha’aretz are unimportant. The picture he paints is confirmed by other observers in universities in the UK and the US; you could hear the same things at Berkeley or the University of Toronto. It almost seems as though the more prestigious the institution, the worse they think of Israel. The students at these universities are future leaders of the West in politics, business, law and every other field.

Anyone who knows the truth knows that the ‘evidence’ cited for Israel’s alleged depravity is nonsense. The actual death toll of the last Gaza war was about half the number the students will cite (which came from Hamas sources) and most of those were Hamas fighters; the absurdity that Israel supplies Hamas with food, water, medicines and electricity while it targets Israeli towns with a blitz of rockets is ignored; as is the basic fact that the ‘independence’ sought by the Arabs is the death or dispersal of the hated Jews from their homeland.

The objective of the demonization and delegitimization campaign is to support diplomatic and legal warfare against the state, to damage her attempts to defend herself and to prevent her from realizing political benefit even from military victories. Military strength by itself is not enough to prevent political defeat.

How did Israel allow herself, with all of her alleged intellectual muscle, to get into this situation? How could there have been such a massive failure to tell our story – our true story to the world? Can it be turned around?

Israel is failing at hasbara for two main reasons:

First, the state suffers from a massive oversupply of homegrown critics, who attack it with as much or more vigor than outsiders. I think if we had a way to measure the pro- and anti-Israel output of our media, academics and cultural figures, we would find that the negative far outweighs the positive. Naturally when an Israeli criticizes Israel, a listener is prepared to credit what he says much more than when it comes from an outsider. Anti-Israel Israelis are helped in this by the large fraction of Diaspora Jews who, for whatever reason, are always found among Israel’s most vehement critics. There is no comparable phenomenon among Arabs and Muslims, who maintain admirable message discipline.

Not only is this pervasive self-deprecation damaging to our image, it may be responsible for the fact that we don’t even try to project a positive one.

Second, like the whore in Catch-22 who hits Captain Orr over the head repeatedly with her shoe, our critics are getting paid to beat us up. Molding the way the world thinks about a subject isn’t cheap, and our enemies haven’t spared the expense. Here are just some ways anti-Israel dollars from governments and wealthy individuals (George Soros) are effectively employed as information weapons:

  • Direct grants are made to universities to endow chairs and whole departments who naturally share their point of view about Israel. Anti-Israel scholars like Ilan Pappé and Steven Salaita are helped to get positions despite academic incompetence.
  • Public figures – e.g., Jimmy Carter – receive contributions to their personal foundations and huge speaker’s fees to espouse their positions.
  • Front organizations – e.g., J Street, Jewish Voice for Peace – are created and funded to channel particular types of anti-Israel expression. These sometimes work to infiltrate other groups not normally concerned with the conflict to support BDS, pass anti-Israel resolutions, and so forth.
  • Worldwide satellite channels like Al-Jazeera receive massive governmental support (there are thousands, in many languages, many from Middle Eastern countries).
  • Contributions are made to the major ‘human-rights’ NGOs, like HRW and Amnesty International, which provide the raw material for anti-Israel UN reports and resolutions.
  • Money is funneled to smaller NGOs inside Israel like Breaking the Silence, B’tselem, and others. They give legitimacy to accusations of racism and war crimes, engage in ‘lawfare’, and spread the anti-Israel message far and wide.
  • Last, but not least, the huge financial resources of the UN are employed to create and disseminate anti-Israel propaganda (e.g., the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People).

And what does Israel have? Its poorly funded Foreign Affairs Ministry, many of whose officials disagree with government policy. There is no Ministry of Information, and no government-supported worldwide satellite channel. Israel’s academic establishment is permeated by radicals who, when they go abroad (and are not boycotted – an irony which is wasted on them), present papers attacking the state of Israel. International Jewish solidarity, despite what the antisemites think, is a joke.

No wonder we are losing the information war – we are barely fighting it!

Of course Israel does not have the financial resources that its enemies do. Saudi Arabia has been spending millions to buy influence in the US and Europe for decades. Qatar, a tiny country with the world’s third largest reserves of natural gas and its highest per capita income, was able to launch and support al-Jazeera in a way that few countries could.

But Israel has leveraged technology and brainpower before to overcome its lack of resources. Maybe Israel can’t make grants of $20 million each to Harvard and Georgetown as the Saudis did a few years ago, but it could license potentially lucrative patents to universities in lieu of cash.

Israel could also take steps to shut down the flow of money to anti-state NGOs at home, and even clean up the sewers of extremism that some academic departments in our universities have become. We can act more aggressively against provocateurs – both Israelis and foreigners – that create incidents for propaganda purposes. The Ha’aretz newspaper – or rather, its English website, because few Israelis read the paper – is an anti-Israel organ of major significance outside of Israel. I don’t advocate limiting freedom of the press, but maybe there is some way to neutralize or counteract Ha’aretz.

A satellite channel in English and Arabic isn’t impossible. There is a natural attraction to what is considered challenging to authority; if done intelligently and with scrupulous regard for truth, I think it could be successful. Israeli musical talent alone is world-class.

Enemy propaganda gets a boost from pre-existing anti-Jewish attitudes. If we did a better job in presenting Jewish belief and history (and I don’t mean belaboring our Holocaust victimhood) then we might defuse some of it.

Every once in a while there is a flurry of activity (the oft-derided “Brand Israel” initiative is an example). Unfortunately it’s not as simple as blowing a few hundred thousand shekels on fancy consultants. A beginning would be to create a well-funded Ministry of Information which would deal only with these issues. We need to study what our enemies are doing, and turn it around. It may take years. But it will never happen if we don’t start.

Posted in Academia, Information war | 7 Comments

Hope is the enemy

Posted on October 25, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal

It is 24 days since the murder of Eitam and Na’ama Henkin, the event which is considered the beginning of the ongoing “stabbing (shooting, burning, running over) intifada.”

Last night there was a demonstration in Tel Aviv organized by the “Peace Now” movement. Several thousand people demanded that Netanyahu resign and carried banners calling for a “diplomatic solution” with the Palestinian Arabs.

Several thousand? Once the Left could get tens of thousands to join its protests. But only the terminally blockheaded (and John Kerry) still think that the murder wave has anything to do with “the occupation” or the presence or absence of a ‘peace process’ or settlements in Judea and Samaria or economic deprivation.

It isn’t possible to tell Israelis to deny what they see with their own eyes, and sometimes feel with their own violated or burned flesh.

There are too many counterarguments to the Left’s position. The terror that Jews have experienced in the land of Israel began before the state was founded, continued during the years that that there was no occupation and no settlements, got worse when the ‘peace process’ brought the evil seeds of PLO terror back from Tunis, exploded into suicide-bombing violence when Israel tried to give up 95% of the territories in the framework of a peace agreement, and brought thousands of rockets down on our heads when we unilaterally withdrew from Gaza.

Today’s stabbers and burners and murder drivers come from the highest levels of Palestinian Arab society. No deprivation here.

The knives and guns speak to us, as does the incitement on social media, where Arabs are shown how to cut grooves into their knives and put poison on them in order to make them more deadly. Nothing is as eloquent as the way they ram their cars into Jews at bus stops and then get out to hack at them with meat cleavers, the way Arab bystanders spit at and kick a Jewish woman bleeding from the knife still stuck in her back, the way they throw firebombs into the laps of Jewish children strapped into their car seats.

They aren’t shy about telling us what they want, both by word and deed. What could be clearer? They are telling us, get out, Jew. Their religion, their politics, their ethnic-racial hatred all want us gone or dead. To them we are a different species, like the cats and dogs and farm animals that they casually mistreat.

The Left and our pretend-allies-but-really-enemies abroad keep trying to ‘make sense’ of it, usually by picking on something that we are doing that is causing them to be so ‘frustrated’. They are losing hope, we are told. If we would give them their hope back they would stop killing us – as if concessions ever had any effect except encouraging more terrorism!

For the benefit of those who are still trying to ‘make sense of it’, what is going on is intertribal aggression, common in the primate world and something that has characterized humans for tens of thousands of years. Nothing encapsulates this basic motivator more than Islamic jihad, and there is also a non-religious ideological jihad. Both of these are in play among the Arabs today. And historically, what tribe is more commonly hated than the Jews?

Hope is the enemy, as Jabotinsky pointed out. The more they hope they can get rid of us, the harder they will try. If we want to live with them, we must take away their hope of driving us out. Or, to paraphrase Kahane, screw living with them: drive them out first.

In other words, the Left’s proposals are exactly the opposite of what is needed if we are to survive in our homeland. This is the explanation of the ‘paradoxical’ fact that the more concessions we make, the more terrorism we get. It isn’t paradoxical at all.

We don’t need a ‘process’ to give them hope, we need to destroy their hope. We don’t need to try to calm the waters with restraint, we need to meet their terrorism with the strongest possible hand.

Demolish the houses of terrorists, build in Judea and Samaria, kick the inciters out of the Knesset, and shoot the stabbers. Loosen rules of engagement for soldiers and police. Take back the Temple Mount. Disproportionate force and collective punishment are good. Negotiations are bad, until we are in a position to dictate terms of surrender.

We’re at war with a particularly cruel and implacable enemy. This should be the lesson we learn from the past 24 days, though we should have learned it long ago. Wars are won by both defeating the enemy in battle and making (what’s left of) him understand that he has absolutely no reason to go on fighting.

War is hell, as Sherman said. True. But it wasn’t our choice. Let’s get on with it and get it over with.

Posted in Terrorism, War | 4 Comments

The world’s hate affair with the Jewish people

Posted on October 23, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal

Several Arab members of UNESCO recently proposed (on behalf of the Palestinian Arabs) that the Western Wall be declared a part of the al-Aqsa complex and therefore a Muslim holy site. The vote was supposed to take place Wednesday, but the proposal was withdrawn at the last moment, presumably as a result of US pressure.

Like most UN bodies, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization has an automatic anti-Israel majority. So if it had come to a vote, the proposal certainly would have passed, despite being a ludicrous inversion of history (as it is, UNESCO decided that Rachel’s Tomb and the Cave of the Patriarchs are Muslim sites).

This is the way things are at the UN, where a resolution that the world is flat and the Moon made of cheese would pass if it somehow could be presented as pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel.

The UN was established after WWII in order to provide a way to prevent war and to keep humankind on the path of progress. There are a lot of reasons that it hasn’t worked out; one of these is that the founders apparently didn’t envision the rise of the non-aligned bloc consisting of mostly Muslim countries, many of which were fragments of former colonial entities, that would not be responsive to the desires of the great powers.

It’s interesting the way the Palestinian issue, of all the possible grievances – including others involving Arabs or Muslims – that the UN could deal with, has managed to capture so much of the UN’s time, resources and personnel. No other issue has as many committees, working groups, divisions, or “special rapporteurs” devoted to it; and no other issue by far is the subject of as many reports and resolutions of the UN’s multifarious fora and agencies. And of course nothing soaks up as much money. This is despite the numerous wars and genocides that have occurred since the UN’s founding which the UN has been unable to prevent.

It has gotten to the point that the UN is so dysfunctional that it no longer has a reason to exist. I have on several occasions suggested that those agencies which still provide useful functions (possibly WHO, ITU, and a few others) and haven’t become simply branches of the Palestinian cause be spun off as independent entities and the UN abolished. This would save billions of dollars, probably promote peace, and improve the parking situation in Manhattan immeasurably.

But it has occurred to me that the UN is only one example of a more general phenomenon: that of Palestinism invading and occupying almost any kind of institution, monopolizing its resources, and preventing it from fulfilling its originally intended function. Instead, affected organizations pass BDS resolutions, sponsor anti-Israel events and speakers, support bogus ‘research’ and ‘academic’ studies, and in general engage in pro-Palestinian anti-Israel political advocacy.

Consider, for example, the Presbyterian Church (USA) and other liberal religious groups, the American Studies Association, student governments, various trade unions and political parties – the list is endless. Even the Jewish community is not immune, with Palestinism – in the form of Ameinu, J Street, Jewish Voice for Peace, Open Hillel, the New Israel Fund, and others – injecting itself into organizations like the Jewish Federations and JCRCs, campus Hillel groups, and even the World Zionist Congress (which includes representatives of some of the left-wing groups listed above).

But simple counterexamples can be found to the idea that the “pro-Palestinians” are actually motivated by support for Palestinian Arabs. For example, Bashar al-Assad has starved and murdered hundreds of them in ‘refugee camps’ in Syria; and now they are being attacked by ISIS. Little, if anything, has been done by the world – or by any of the above-mentioned Palestinian cheerleaders – to help them. In 1991, some 200,000 Palestinian workers were persecuted and expelled from Kuwait, an action which in the words of Steven Rosen, was “largely ignored by the international community with neither the U.N. Security Council nor the General Assembly doing anything to assist the newly displaced refugees and punish their ethnic cleanser.”

I don’t think I have to explain this. The truth is that the impetus for the spread of the Palestinian movement in so many venues does not truly come from sympathy with Palestinian Arabs, except in one respect: their national project to destroy Israel.

The international community’s love affair with the Palestinian Arabs is actually a “hate affair” with their enemy, the state of Israel. I’m sure that if anti-Zionist Martians were to land on Earth tomorrow, they would be immediately welcomed at the UN and on many university campuses. This is the only way to explain why the devotees of human rights at the Presbyterian Church (USA) have settled on Israel to boycott rather than, for example, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and other countries that so egregiously violate human rights.

But we need to take the analysis one step further. What is it about Israel, among all nations, that makes it such a hate magnet? I can tell you that it is a wonderful country, which goes far out of its way – even to the point of endangering its existence – to do the right thing for minorities, especially including Arabs.

No, the problem is not that Israel is objectively deserving of hate. It is because Israel is a Jewish state, and there is nothing that gets the world’s goat more than the despised Jew being successful and thriving. Pharaoh didn’t trust us and made us slaves in around 1800 BCE, the English expelled us in 1290 and the Spanish in 1492. Whenever the Jews start doing too well, the nations start to worry and act against them.

That’s why Jews were kicked out of country after country, why Hitler and Stalin murdered them, and why students at Berkeley – even Jewish students – flock to join Students for Justice in Palestine. Today, thanks to the Internet and Al-Jazeera, Jew-hatred has been globalized.

The Western attitude has little to do with ‘Palestine’ and Palestinian Arabs. It is all about Israel and Israeli Jews. The West doesn’t want to see us strong and vigorous; our good economy, high birthrate and scientific and cultural achievements are a reproach to them. They prefer the Palestinian Arabs with their cruelty, intolerance and misogyny, perhaps because they can feel superior to them.

If nations had psychologists, this behavior would be considered so irrational as to imply a mental disorder.

The world’s support – via European NGOs, unrelenting American pressure for concessions, Iranian rockets, UN money, and media and academic pogromists everywhere – has had the effect of enabling, excusing and even justifying the extreme savagery of today’s “knife intifada,” in which the Arabs are daily expressing a degree of Jew-hatred unmatched since the Nazi era. Only their lack of means and our armed strength prevents another genocide. The Palestinian Arabs hold the knives, but the world cheers them from the sidelines.

How should Israel act in such an environment of irrational hate?

  1. Defeat our enemies. Nobody will help, but on the other hand, if we act decisively (and quickly) nobody will intervene effectively either. Stop trying to fight wars without hurting anyone.
  2. Humor the neurotic West, but do not become entangled in its initiatives.
  3. Don’t talk about how moral and just we are, or how great our contributions to society. This makes them hate us more.
  4. Make them respect us or even fear us if possible. We will not get their love.
  5. Don’t explain too much and don’t apologize.
  6. Reduce our participation in international organizations to the minimum possible. They only work against us.
  7. Try to improve relations with pragmatic regimes like Russia, China, India and Eastern European countries. Nothing can be done with Western Europe and the US.
  8. Understand that we can’t be as open, liberal and democratic as we might like. But we mustn’t compromise on the Jewish nature of the state, because if we lose it, we lose the state in its entirety.

We are about to enter a very difficult period of history, the proverbial ‘interesting times’. The rules will be different from those that sustained the Jewish people for the last 2000 years. We’ll survive only if we can adapt.

Posted in Israel and Palestinian Arabs, Jew Hatred, The UN | 2 Comments