In the Middle East, the nice guy finishes last

Posted on June 19, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal

A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. — Mark Twain

…in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility. … the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. — Adolf Hitler

From the 1960s, inversion of truth and reality has been one the most favored propaganda methods of Israel’s adversaries. One of its most frequent expressions has been the accusation that the Jewish people, victims of the Nazis, have now become the new Nazis, aggressors and oppressors of the Palestinian Arabs. — Dr. Joel Fishman (2007)

The big lie and concomitant reality inversion has been a fabulously successful propaganda strategy for our enemies. One common inversion is to accuse Israel of the very crimes and intentions of their Arab enemies. So Zionism is equated to racism, Israel is accused of being an apartheid state, and Israelis are said to be trying to commit ‘genocide’ against the Palestinian Arabs.

And of course there is my personal favorite, “the IDF deliberately targets children,” an accusation reminiscent of the medieval blood libels:

If there ever was an inversion, this is it. No better example can be given than the recent murder of five members of the Fogel family, where one of the perpetrators returned to the house to kill a crying baby, and one said that they would have killed two other children if they had known they were present. There was the recent murder of a child when an antitank missile was fired directly at a yellow school bus.  And there have been any number of ‘actions’ like the Ma’alot massacre, the Bus of Blood, the attack on the nursery at Misgav Am, etc., in which the victims were primarily children. — Vic Rosenthal (2011)

There are several reasons this technique works so well. As Mark Twain noted, it’s easy and quick to spread a lie; but refuting one effectively requires time and research, which in itself can be challenged. The paradigm case of the lie that won’t die is the accusation that IDF soldiers shot young Mohammad al-Dura in 2000, as ‘documented’ by the original ‘Pallywood’ video. Even after it was definitively proven that fire from the Israeli position could not have hit al-Dura, it remains a worldwide article of faith that this is the correct interpretation.

Hitler, who incidentally was accusing the Jews of lying in the quoted passage — and thus inverting reality — seems to have understood the technique well. In addition to the credibility a lie gets from its audaciousness, he observed that even when a lie has been refuted, “traces” remain, perhaps a propensity to believe similar lies.

There is also the “when there’s smoke, there’s fire” effect. Anti-Israel propagandists don’t just tell one lie, they tell hundreds. When one is refuted, others pop up. Someone who isn’t aware of the strategy might easily think “there has to be something behind all this.” There is, but it is an orchestrated campaign of lies.

And then we have what I call the “divorce court fallacy.” If the two sides have diametrically opposed positions, an observer is tempted to think that the truth must lie somewhere in the middle. But this is not the case if one side is audaciously lying and the other is telling the truth (or close to it).

All of these explanations in part account for the success of the big lie, but there is one other factor that is particularly important when the big lies are being told about the Jews and their state: the antisemitic prejudice that lurks just below the surface in so many minds, not excluding Jewish ones. A recent example of this phenomenon was the failure of NPR interviewer Diane Rehm and her producer to notice the absurdity of the suggestion that Sen. Bernie Sanders was a “dual citizen” of the US and Israel, or that the websites on which they ‘checked’ it were less than reliable.

One approach that Israel’s supporters have employed is to respond reactively and try to refute the lies, sometimes — as in the case of al-Dura — with too little and too late. This is necessary, but not sufficient. As we’ve seen, the big lie technique is resistant to the defensive approach. Sometimes attempts at refutation only help spread the original libel.

Another has been to ignore them, and to divert attention to the attractive aspects of the country, the economy, science and technology, liberalism, democracy, beaches, music, etc. While there is nothing wrong with doing this, it is also completely ineffective against the dark, poisonous weaponized falsehoods disseminated against us.

Much better to go on the offensive. To attack our enemies as the true murderers of children, the aspirants to the title of the greatest killers of Jews since Hitler, the oppressors of women and gays, the invaders and thieves, the ones whose ‘culture’ consists of incitement and whose heroes are terrorists.

We’ve been far too tolerant of the presumptive needs of the Palestinian Arabs, who actually have only one overriding want, which is that we will disappear and leave the land to them.

Let’s explain to the world that there was no ‘Palestinian’ civilization here, ever; that the ‘Palestinians’ suddenly turned nationalistic when it became the best way to oppose the Jews; that the Palestinian leadership worked with the Nazis and reveres them still; and that the culture they’ve built since the days of al-Husseini is sick and evil.

The Palestinian Arabs do not respect our culture, they do not respect our history, and they do not respect the truth. They don’t give a centimeter on their absurd demands, and they don’t stop inciting their youth to murder. Why should we show respect to them?

This isn’t a job for bloggers. It isn’t even for arbitrary members of the Knesset or particular newspaper writers. It should be made clear to the world that this is the official position of the Israeli government and Prime Minister.

Are we afraid that the Europeans will boycott us if we tell the truth? I have news: the only way to get them to not boycott us will be to give up and die. Then some of them, perhaps, will feel sorry for us as they do for the murdered victims of the Holocaust (although, truth be told, a considerable number of Europeans believe that the fewer Jews, the better).

Are we afraid of Barack Obama, a true believer in the Palestinian cause? What will he do, help Iran get nuclear weapons? Are we afraid of the UN? Will they issue another report to buttress the big lies of of our enemies?

In addition to taking an offensive role in the military and diplomatic spheres, we should take it in propaganda as well. Being the nice guy of the Middle East hasn’t worked for us. It’s time to stop.

Posted in Information war | 1 Comment

Israel hits back in infowar

Posted on June 16, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal
Near Israel/Gaza border, July 18, 2014

Near Israel/Gaza border, July 18, 2014

Israel’s government seems to finally be waking up to the fact that it can’t allow our name to be blackened without challenge. In response to the anticipated release of the latest collection of blood libels from the UN ‘Human Rights’ Commission, the so-called Schabas report on the recent war in Gaza, the government has released a preemptive rebuttal, detailing the war crimes committed by Hamas and Israel’s response, including the remarkable effort exerted to reduce civilian casualties in urban warfare.

It is a detailed, 277-page legal brief which very few people will read. But the facts it contains directly refute accusations made by the practitioners of the big lie technique, the Hamas-NGO-UN-media axis. For example,

the IDF’s preliminary  analysis  has  determined  that  2,125  Palestinians  were  killed  during  the  2014  Gaza Conflict.    Of  these  fatalities,  the  IDF  estimates  that  at  least  936  (44%  of  the  total)  were  actually militants  and  that  761  (36%  of  the  total)  were  civilians;  efforts  are  still  underway  to  classify  the additional 428 (20% of the total), all males aged 16-50.

In other words, the 36% civilian casualties is probably an upper limit on the true percentage, since a large number of the unclassified males were probably also Hamas fighters.

Considering that a) the war was fought in densely populated areas, b) Hamas deliberately launched many of their 4,500 rockets from schools, mosques and residential neighborhoods, and c) Hamas deliberately limited civilian attempts to leave areas that the IDF had warned were going to be attacked, a 0.8:1 ratio of civilian to military casualties is unprecedented in modern warfare. Here are some ratios from other conflicts:

WWII — between 1.5:1 and 2:1
Korean war — 2:1
Vietnam — 2:1
First Chechen War — 10:1
NATO intervention in Yugoslavia — probably between 1:1 and 4:1

But you don’t have to take Israel’s word for it. An international team of military experts from Australia, Britain, Colombia, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the US investigated the war and agreed:

We examined the circumstances that led to the tragic conflict last summer and are in no doubt that this was not a war that Israel wanted. In reality Israel sought to avoid the conflict and exercised great restraint over a period of months before the war when its citizens were targeted by sporadic rocket attacks from Gaza. Once the war had begun, Israel made repeated efforts to terminate the fighting. The war that Israel was eventually compelled to fight against Hamas and other Gaza extremists was a legitimate war, necessary to defend its citizens and its territory against sustained attack from beyond its borders. …

The Israel Defence Force employed a series of precautionary measures to reduce civilian casualties. Each of our own armies is of course committed to protecting civilian life during combat. But none of us is aware of any army that takes such extensive measures as did the IDF last summer to protect the lives of the civilian population in such circumstances.

The credentials of the team are impressive, and their conclusions unequivocal: Israel was viciously attacked by an enemy that violated international law as a matter of course, and defended itself while taking extraordinary measures to protect civilians.

None of this will deter the UN, which at some point in its history since 1945 became a single-purpose machine to attack the Jewish state. But at least our government has finally dropped the idea that the truth will be victorious by itself without any help.

It’s good that the government cares about the portrayal of our recent actions. But what about our history and the foundations of our legitimacy? As long as we don’t directly challenge the Palestinian narrative that we are interlopers who displaced them from the land they had lived on for generations, outsiders can be excused for asking why we don’t compromise and give them, if not all of our country, at least half of it.

In addition to aggressively promulgating the truth about the IDF’s behavior in the Gaza war, we — our government — should be asserting forcefully that we are the indigenous people of this land, and the ‘Palestinians’, who are mostly descended from recent migrants from Syria and Egypt, have sold the phony story of their peoplehood as part of their plan to dispossess us.

And along with our moral rights, we should defend our legal right to the land, the right that was asserted by the international community (before it became corrupted by petrodollars and fear of terrorism) in the Mandate for Palestine. We should remind Obama of this when he insists that we should cede that part of our land east of the Green Line, because the Palestinians ‘deserve’ a state. If they are so deserving, they are as much deserving of Maryland as they are of the historic homeland of the Jewish people.

The government has also said that it is going to fight back against BDS. Let’s do it, and while we’re at it, let’s shut off the foreign funding from the EU, European governments and church groups, and the American New Israel Fund that support the Israeli NGOs that are promoting it. Lord knows there are enough good causes in Europe and America that they could support.

And then there is the somewhat touchy subject that has recently come up in which Israeli artists receive public grants for subversive ‘art’, like movies that present the point of view of an Arab terrorist that murdered a soldier. No need to limit speech, but we shouldn’t have to pay for anti-state propaganda.

It’s a good start that the government isn’t going to sit back and let our army be defamed. Now let’s fight the rest of the battles of the never-ending information war.

Posted in Information war, The UN, War | 2 Comments

Is Israel a democracy?

Posted on June 12, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal

Israel’s Declaration of Independence calls for a Jewish and democratic state. This is creatively ambiguous because very few people agree on precisely what each of these characteristics entails, although they have very strong opinions. This isn’t a theoretical discussion; both of these concepts have a direct bearing on Israel’s policies, in particular the question of a “Jewish State Law” and the possible annexation of all or part of Judea and Samaria. Today I’m interested in the ‘democratic’ part.

As everyone knows, the ancient Greeks gave us the word δημοκρατία, democracy. What they had in Athens, of course, wasn’t terribly appealing by modern standards, since only free males had the right to vote (and there were plenty of slaves). Here is a modern definition of democracy:

1. A political system for choosing and replacing the government through free and fair elections.
2. The active participation of the people, as citizens, in politics and civic life.
3. Protection of the human rights of all citizens.
4. A rule of law, in which the laws and procedures apply equally to all citizens.

Significantly, this definition, and most others, refer to ‘citizens’ as the beneficiaries of democratic governance. But who is a citizen? Some things are clear: as in the case of Athens, a definition of citizenship which excludes women is not acceptable. An extreme view is that anyone who resides within the borders of a polity is automatically a citizen of it, regardless of any other considerations (how he or she came to be there, etc.)

Although some immigration activists in the US would like to see this criterion adopted, it has not been and probably will not be anywhere in the world. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948, says that “everyone has a right to a nationality,” but not that a state needs to offer one to anyone who lives within its boundaries.

In Saudi Arabia, a citizen must either have lived in ‘Saudi land’ before 1914 and not have taken non-Ottoman citizenship, have a Saudi father, or apply for naturalization. In the US, anyone who is born on US soil receives citizenship automatically, but otherwise must undergo naturalization. In Germany, those residents who do not have at least one German parent must apply for citizenship (but there are exceptions for children born in Germany of long-time residents).

Under some conditions states can revoke citizenship. In Canada, a dual citizen who is convicted of treason, espionage or membership in a group engaged in armed conflict with Canada can lose his Canadian citizenship. In the US, naturalized citizens can have their citizenship revoked for various reasons, including membership in a subversive organization or refusal to testify before Congress. This has happened more than a few times.

Today it is considered wrong to grant or deny citizenship on the basis of race, religion or ethnicity, although some Arab countries require all citizens to be Muslims. Prior to 1965, the US had immigration quotas based on national origin; but these were considered unacceptable and replaced by a system based on family unification, skills, etc. with per-country caps. Nevertheless, many countries (e.g., Greece) are adjusting their citizenship laws to deal with the reality of ‘irregular’ population migrations.

What happens when a country annexes territory? When Israel extended its authority to eastern Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, Israeli citizenship was offered to existing residents. Those who didn’t accept it were granted residency, along with the right to vote in local (but not national) elections. When Russia annexed Crimea, it offered Russian citizenship to the inhabitants — and let them know that after a month anyone that refused it would be barred from government jobs. In 1950, Jordan gave most Arab residents of Judea and Samaria (the Jewish ones had been expelled during the conquest) Jordanian citizenship, although lately it has been revoking the citizenship of ‘Palestinian refugees’ whom the ruling Hashemites see as a demographic threat.

What would happen if Israel annexed all or part of Judea and Samaria? One thing that’s certain is that Israel would not refuse to grant citizenship to anyone on the basis of ethnicity or religion. But as we’ve seen, it would not be exceptional to limit full citizenship on the basis of other criteria, such as criminal convictions or membership in terrorist organizations, or to require a process of naturalization.

Would it be ‘democratic’? When we talk about democracy, it’s important to understand that it is a more limited concept than fairness or even human rights in general. Strictly speaking, democracy resides in the relationship of a state to its citizens, and therefore the process for obtaining citizenship doesn’t bear on the democratic nature of the state. Of course, fairness demands that the process not be based on irrelevant factors like skin color or gender. But — just like screening airline passengers — it is not necessarily unfair to allow security considerations to affect decisions to grant citizenship or not.

Viewed in this light, much of the tension between Jewishness and democracy in Israel evaporates. The Law of Return, a prime target for those who claim that a Jewish state can’t be democratic, is a criterion for immigration which does not apply to those who are already citizens — and there are no states in the world that don’t assert the right to make rules about immigration. The expressions of national identity that are essential to a Jewish state — the flag, national anthem, holidays, etc. — may be disliked by minority citizens, but they do not affect their participation in the democratic process. And it’s quite a stretch to argue that there is a basic human right to an approved national anthem.

Israel, by any reasonable definition, is a democracy. It will remain one if a Jewish State Law is passed, and even if it annexes all or part of Judea and Samaria without granting citizenship to all their inhabitants.

This is not the dream of the post-nationalist, post-Zionist, post-everything Left which believes that the Hatikvah is ‘racist’ and that economic migrants from Africa and ‘Palestinians’ who have never lived in Palestine have as much right to be citizens of the one tiny Jewish state as the descendents of Jacob. But it may be the reality that will sustain the democratic Jewish state.

Posted in Israel and Palestinian Arabs, Israeli Society | 1 Comment

Comparing occupations

Posted on June 9, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal
Flag of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico

Flag of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico

Israel is constantly being told that its control of Judea/Samaria is illegal and undemocratic. We are told that if we continue to hold this territory without making all the inhabitants citizens of Israel, then we are an apartheid state, which all decent people should shun, boycott, divest from and sanction.

But what if I told you (as I was reminded yesterday by a correspondent) that there is another country that occupies territories which it (mostly) gained through conquest, and whose 4,065,516 inhabitants do not have a vote in the legislature and cannot vote for the president, but who still have to obey laws passed by the legislature, pay taxes, and be subject to military conscription?

The largest of these occupied territories has a nationalist movement, had an insurrection put down by force, and even engaged in terrorism against its occupier for nationalistic reasons.

Of course I am talking about the United States and its five inhabited ‘territories’, the largest of which is Puerto Rico.

Unlike the US, which invaded and seized Puerto Rico (along with Guam, Cuba and the Philippines) from Spain during the aggressive Spanish-American war, Israel has a legitimate right to Judea and Samaria based on the Palestine Mandate. Its victory in the defensive war of 1967 overthrew the illegal occupation of the area by Jordan, which invaded it in 1948.

Puerto Ricans elect a governor, local officials, and a representative to Congress who can take part in debates, but can not vote on the floor (although he can vote in committees). Since 1952, it has been a ‘commonwealth’ like several states. Needless to say, Puerto Rico does not have an army, and does not dedicate about 30% of its budget to support six branches of its ‘security services’, as the Palestinian Authority does.

I am not suggesting that creating an Arab entity with ‘territorial’ status in part of Judea and Samaria would be practical. It works for Puerto Rico because its inhabitants are in general interested in their day-to-day welfare, and not in destroying the United States and killing or driving out its non-Puerto-Rican inhabitants (in a recent referendum, some Puerto Ricans voted for statehood, others to continue territorial status, and about 5% for independence). They are not subjected to a barrage of incitement to hate and kill from their official media.

A good argument can be made that this situation is unfair and that Puerto Rico should properly become a state of the union or be granted independence. But despite the fact that American possession of Puerto Rico does not have the legitimacy, or the historical or security justification that Israel’s control of Judea and Samaria does, there isn’t worldwide outrage against the ‘apartheid’ US for refusing to grant Puerto Ricans their full rights.

I think this illustrates several things. One is that a political structure that is less than a sovereign state, in which the inhabitants have fewer rights than they would in such a state, can exist without being a moral abomination. And it also shows the absurdity of the idea that the Palestinian Arabs should be granted more rights than, for example, Puerto Ricans because they are unapologetically committed to violent terrorism.

Just another way to see that all the fuss is not about the lack of a Palestinian state, but rather the existence of a Jewish one.

Posted in Israel and Palestinian Arabs | Comments Off on Comparing occupations

Restating the problem

Posted on June 7, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal
One of the many incarnations of the 'peace process'. This meeting was in the summer of 2013.

One of the many incarnations of the ‘peace process’. This meeting was in the summer of 2013.

The peace processors, with US president Obama in the lead, never seem to give up. The reason for their lack of success is simple: they are trying to do something impossible: satisfy Arab aspirations without destroying Israel.

Why do they keep trying? One main reason is that the single body that above all should convince them that it’s impossible — the government of Israel — tells them it’s not.

It isn’t that nothing can be done. It’s that the peace processors are stating the problem in a way that doesn’t admit a solution. “The Palestinians deserve a state [in Judea/Samaria],” says Obama, so we have to find a way to get them one that doesn’t leave Tel Aviv under rocket fire.

Nope. There isn’t a way to do that. Let’s start with a clean slate and restate the problem in a different way that might make it easier to solve, or at least ameliorate.

Problem: the Arab world and Iran want to destroy Israel, and disperse, murder or make dhimmis of its Jewish population. This has been true since 1948, but today it is compounded by the chaos in the Arab Middle East and the collapse of the Pax Americana.

If this is the problem we are trying to solve, one of the first things we notice is that Israel must retain control of Judea and Samaria. A withdrawal, accompanied by the transfer of hundreds of thousands of Jews, is absolutely the worst thing that we could do under present circumstances, from the standpoint of security as well as the social and spiritual health of the nation.

But as everyone from the President of the US to the President of Israel will immediately tell you, Israel can’t absorb all those Arabs and still remain a Jewish and democratic state. Something has to give.

OK, fine. I accept that we can’t simply annex the territories and give all the Arabs citizenship (even if there were a significant Jewish majority, there would still be a big enough Arab minority to change the nature of the state), and it seems that we can’t not give them citizenship. This is also a difficult problem. But unlike the idea of a Palestinian state alongside a secure Israel, it’s not insoluble.

We don’t have to figure out how to give up Judea and Samaria and keep our state — we just need to find a way to reduce the hostile Arab population while keeping Judea and Samaria.

Before everyone accuses me of being a Nazi, keep in mind that the peace processors envision the removal, transfer, expulsion, eviction, forced relocation or whatever you want to call it of hundreds of thousands of Jews who presently live in the territories, because they accept the vicious racism of the Palestinian Arab leadership who will not have Jews living in their state. Who are Nazis now?

The situation is asymmetrical. About 20% of Israel’s population today is Arabs. There are tensions, but the Jews are not demanding to throw the Arabs out. So given that it is the Arabs who can’t abide Jews and not the reverse, why is the solution to transfer the Jews away from the Arabs and not vice versa? Why should the Jews pay the price for Arab ethnic hatred?

Let me ask my question in another form: Why is the solution to the problem that they hate us and want to kill us that we should leave our homes and in the process make it easier for them to kill us?

No, I don’t have a plan. I don’t know where the Arabs could go, or alternatively how they could reconcile themselves to living in a Jewish state, or how an autonomous-but-not-sovereign state in some part of the territories would work. There are lots of possible plans. But there are also lots of smart people who have been working to create ‘Palestine’. Let them work on alternatives.

I do know that we won’t get either security or justice by implementing yet another forced transfer of Jews in order to create a racist, apartheid, terror-enabling Arab state in our historic homeland.

Posted in 'Peace' Process, Israel and Palestinian Arabs | 1 Comment

Obama’s ABC for ending the Jewish state

Posted on June 5, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal

This past week Barack Obama laid bare the pincer maneuver he is executing against Israel. As he explained it in an interview with Ilana Dayan on Israeli TV, he intends to squeeze Israel between a nuclear Iran and a terrorist base next door to Tel Aviv.

The precise nature of the Iranian threat is important for understanding Obama’s strategy. Although one can’t completely discount the possibility, Iranian officials have been relatively honest when they say that they don’t intend to nuke us: they would prefer to see us wiped off the map conventionally by their non-state proxies. The bomb will primarily be used to threaten the Sunni states and as a deterrent against Israel’s option to (in the words of the previous Saudi king), cut off the head of the Iranian snake.

Thus, a) providing Iran with its nuclear backstop, while b) empowering the PLO and Hamas, and c) increasing Israel’s vulnerability to terrorism and conventional attack by reducing its strategic depth, is the perfect three-point strategy for finally achieving the goal that Yasser Arafat dedicated his life to, ending the Jewish state.

Obama told Dayan that Israel is behaving immorally in its actions toward the Palestinian Arabs, that he sees it as his personal duty to change this, that PM Netanyahu’s negotiating positions are unrealistic and disingenuous, and that he intends to change the traditional American position: the US will no longer insist on a bilateral agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, but will support a UN-imposed Palestinian state.

It is interesting that the Palestinian issue is so important to him, that he feels the need to help Palestinian children so deeply, when (for example) there is ongoing rape, abuse and murder of children on a massive scale in much of Africa.

It is interesting that he can brush aside Netanyahu’s reasonable conditions — for security and the need for a commitment to end the conflict — but that maximalist Palestinian demands are treated as non-negotiable.

And his remarks about the Iran deal are interesting too. For the first time, he admits that the military option is off the table:

I can, I think, demonstrate — not based on any hope, but on facts and evidence and analysis — that the best way to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon is a verifiable, tough agreement.  A military solution will not fix it, even if the United States participates. It would temporarily slow down an Iranian nuclear program, but it will not eliminate it.

So much for leverage! The deal that he is making is apparently neither tough nor verifiable, as the French Foreign Minister has recently noted, not to mention Israel’s PM. It won’t stop Iran or even slow her progress very much. What it will do is to criminalize an Israeli attack while ending sanctions and freeing up tens of billions of frozen Iranian dollars to fund its aggression.

While military action won’t rule out the possibility that some day Iran could reconstruct its program, there are persuasive arguments that it could delay it for a good long time — and who knows what might happen in the interim?

Obama isn’t prepared to take that chance. His alliance with the expanding Shiite caliphate is too important, which is also why he made a joke of American red lines to protect Iranian lackey Bashar al-Assad.

While he will do whatever it takes to help the “Palestinian youth in Ramallah who feels [his] possibilities constrained by the status quo,” he is able to abandon the Syrian child choking his chlorine-gas filled lungs out, or even the barrel-bombed Palestinians in Yarmouk.

But if it isn’t children and it isn’t Palestinians, it isn’t Shiites either. After all, he is still miffed at Abdel Fattah el-Sisi for overthrowing the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt. Now what could the Ikhwan possibly have in common with the Iranian mullahs? Not much, except the desire to destroy Israel.

The enemy of Obama’s enemy is his friend, and he seems determined to make friends of all of Israel’s enemies, even if they turn out, like Iran and the Brotherhood, to be deadly enemies of the United States too.

Irrational? Perhaps, but not surprising. It’s the same irrational current that drives academics and liberal church groups to say “you have to start somewhere” when asked why, with all of the real oppression and occupation in the world, they choose Israel to boycott. It’s the same force that caused Hitler to divert Reichsbahn trains to carry Jews to death camps instead of supplies to his beleaguered troops at Stalingrad.

In another recent interview, Obama made the silly and ahistorical statement that antisemitism doesn’t cause national leaders to make irrational decisions when stakes are high.

Clearly untrue. But maybe the truth would have hit too close to home?

Posted in 'Peace' Process, Iran, US-Israel Relations | 1 Comment

Bibi, close the door

Posted on June 1, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal

“I think that anyone who is going to establish a Palestinian state today and evacuate lands is giving attack grounds to the radical Islam [sic] against the state of Israel,” he said in a video interview published Monday on the NRG site.

“Anyone who ignores this is sticking his head in the sand. The left does this time and time again,” Netanyahu said. “We are realistic and understand.”

Netanyahu was then asked specifically whether he meant that a Palestinian state would not be established if he were reelected prime minister. He answered, “Correct.”  — Washington Post, March 16, 2015

But after US president Obama criticized him and threatened to punish Israel at the UN, PM Netanyahu either (depending on whom you ask) backed down or clarified his statement:

“I haven’t changed my policy,” Netanyahu insisted. “I never retracted my speech at Bar-Ilan University six years ago calling for a demilitarized Palestinian state that recognizes a Jewish state.”

“What has changed is the reality,” he continued. “[Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas] the Palestinian leader refuses to recognize the Jewish state and has made a pact with Hamas that calls for the destruction of the Jewish state, and every territory that is vacated today in the Middle East is taken up by Islamist forces. We want that to change so that we can realize a vision of real, sustained peace. I don’t want a one-state solution. I want a sustainable, peaceful two-state solution, but for that, circumstances have to change.”

The circumstances he refers to were spelled out convincingly here by Martin Sherman. Netanyahu is well aware of them, but he continues to leave the 2-state door open — and that is a serious mistake.

“Circumstances” are not going to change, except for the worse. The nationalism of the PLO or the Islamic supremacism of Hamas are not going to suddenly become compatible with a Jewish state in the Middle East. The twin tides of Sunni Islamism and Iranian expansionism are not going to recede in the near future.

Nevertheless, Obama and the ‘international community’ continue to pressure Israel to make more and more concessions to the PLO and Hamas in order to bring about the impossible agreement that will supposedly satisfy the Arabs and preserve our security. And they can point to the official policy of the Israeli government as justification!

There is also the question of the Jewish people’s rights to the land — not all the land, but any of it. There is no legal significance to the 1949 armistice line. If you don’t think that Israel is legitimately in possession of Judea and Samaria, then the same argument can be applied to Tel Aviv (and this is exactly what the PLO and Hamas say).

As one writer pointed out to me the other day, how can advocates for Israel oppose a policy that our PM apparently favors? How can we expect foreign governments to be supportive of our right to the land when our own government is not?

I would like to hear PM Netanyahu say something like this:

If there is to be a ‘solution’ to the current situation, it will not be found by encouraging the Arabs to believe that they will be handed a ticket to replace Israel with an Arab state, but rather by accepting the legitimacy and necessity of Israeli control of these areas while finding a way to meet the real needs of the Arab residents within that framework.

Yes, this puts plenty of ‘daylight’ between us the Obama Administration and the Europeans, but it has the advantage of not being hypocritical.

Don’t kid yourself: US and European officials are not that stupid. They understand what the Arabs want and why we aren’t going to give it to them. But we allow them to pretend that they are actually our allies while they work to undercut us and exacerbate, rather than ameliorate, the conflict.

In my last post I pointed out that Jew-hatred is made worse when Jews don’t fight back. We simply invite their contempt when we try — dishonestly — to placate them.

The argument is made that we have to go along with the US/European program because they will punish us if we don’t. But the real question is whether it is better to let them do their worst at once in response to an honest statement of our position, or to let them ramp up the punishment little by little, all the while extracting security-damaging concessions that we can’t easily take back.

When in doubt, tell the truth.

Posted in 'Peace' Process, Israel and Palestinian Arabs | 3 Comments

Principles for responding to Jew-hatred

Posted on May 29, 2015 by Victor Rosenthal

A large amount of intellectual energy can be expended on trying to expose the roots of Jew-hatred. For example, there is the argument that former barbarians resent Judaism for injecting a voice of morality into their consciences.

Could be. But the prescription to try to inculcate Jewish ethics into the descendents of Baal- or Bacchus-worshipers isn’t likely to work. There is another much simpler remedy for Jew-hatred, which doesn’t require understanding the root causes, and depends only on one fundamental principle of human behavior.

It is this: humans behave best toward other humans when they respect them, and old-fashioned fear is part of respect.

When does Jew-hatred wax most strongly? When Jews try to be conciliatory. When does it wane? When Jews fight back.

The image of Israel in the West was at its best in 1948, when the Jews threw out the British colonialists and defeated the genocidal Arab armies. It wasn’t bad in 1967, either, when Israel destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground and rolled back its enemies in six days. It was at its worst after the near-defeat of 1973, and in the period after the Oslo accords when Israel made concession after concession to the Arabs.

Nobody likes a loser, and nobody likes a victim. This is true for fist-fights on the playground as well as the military battlefield. Weakness doesn’t make others want to help you, it makes them pile on.

Nobody cares about explanations, excuses, or appeals to ethics. Oh, they say they do, but in their hearts they don’t. In their hearts they want to be on the winning side. In their hearts they don’t want the scary guys to be angry at them. If someone calls you a dirty Jew, hit him — don’t explain that Jews have good hygiene habits.

If you want to get respect, you need to respond to provocations disproportionately, even with a degree of irrationality. According to Hunter S. Thompson, this is why the Hell’s Angels were such good brawlers. Draw red lines and stick to them, but go overboard once in a while.

And you should never apologize to Jew-haters. Apologize to your wife if you forget her flowers on Shabbat, but don’t apologize to the Turks when their murderous goons get in the way of your soldiers defending themselves. Apologies demonstrate weakness, which makes your enemies bolder.

When dealing with Jew-hatred on a worldwide scale, it is essential for there to be a Jewish state, with an army and the resources to defend itself and Jewish communities throughout the world. To a degree it’s possible for non-Jews to live in a Jewish state, but nothing can be allowed to compromise its reason for being: to nurture and protect the Jewish people.

Here is an unfortunate fact: many of the elites in the West really don’t like the idea of a Jewish state. They think it was a mistake. They don’t like nationalism in general, and especially Jewish nationalism. They think it is unfair to non-Jews that live in it or nearby. And they are afraid of its enemies. So they try to weaken it.

We aren’t going to be able to change their attitudes, so we should concentrate on keeping our state despite them.

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