The Oslo Syndrome

Bill Clinton's Anti-Israel Screed

2011-11-08T12:05:00.003-05:00

First published on FrontPageMagazine.com

In late September, former President Bill Clinton made the outrageous assertion that the absence of Arab-Israeli peace is primarily the fault of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. While focusing his attack on Netanyahu and insisting other Israeli prime ministers were more prepared for peace, Clinton’s declaration - and additional, related, claims indicting elements of the Israeli population - are, in fact, a defamatory hit on the Jewish state.

This is most obvious in his exonerating Palestinian leaders from any responsibility for the absence of peace. On the contrary, he characterizes Palestinian president Abbas and his government as prepared to establish a genuine peace and only lacking an Israeli partner. Clinton is silent on Abbas’ refusal to recognize Israel as the national home of the Jewish people - even as Netanyahu has explicitly stated his preparedness to see a Palestinian Arab state created alongside Israel. Clinton is silent about Abbas’ repeated praise of Palestinian suicide bombers and other mass murderers of Israelis and his holding them up as role models for all Palestinians.

Clinton says nothing of Abbas and the Palestinian Authority’s persistent use of their media, mosques and schools to deny any Jewish connection to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, to insist that the Jews are merely usurpers who have no legitimate claim to a presence in any part of "Palestine," and to urge Palestinians to dedicate themselves to Israel’s destruction. Clinton ignores Abbas’s insistence that he and his government will never give up the so-called "right of return," the flooding of Israel with descendants of refugees from the 1947-48 war and transformation of Israel into yet another Arab Muslim state.

So determined is Clinton to close his ears and eyes to Palestinian declarations and actions and his mind to Palestinian intentions that he actually states at one point in his September screed: "For reasons that even after all these years I still don’t know for sure, Arafat turned down the deal I put together [in 2000 at Camp David and subsequent meetings] that [then prime minister] Barak accepted." Of course, it’s obvious why Arafat turned down the Camp David proposals, made no counter-offers, and instead launched his terror war. Both Barak and Clinton insisted that any agreement be explicitly recognized by all parties as permanently ending the conflict, and Arafat was unprepared to do so, to even present the appearance of foregoing future claims on Israeli territory and ultimately achieving annihilation of the Jewish state.

Abbas has demonstrated - in his determined avoidance of negotiations with Netanyahu, and in his rejecting of former Prime Minister Olmert’s proposals in 2008, again without presenting a counter-offer - that he is no more prepared to come to an end-of-conflict agreement than his predecessor and friend Arafat. Only the willfully self-deluding or incorrigibly biased could think otherwise.

In contrast to Abbas’s policy of circumventing negotiations and seeking to advance Palestinian statehood without dealing with Israel - via, for example, UN recognition - Netanyahu has taken unprecedented steps to promote negotiations. This includes his ten-month suspension of construction in settlements. Previous prime ministers, including Yitzhak Rabin, had explicitly rejected any such suspension, and a cessation of construction was never part of the Oslo agreements or a precondition to any previous Israeli-Palestinian or other Israeli-Arab negotiations. Abbas’s response to Netanyahu’s move was to continue his refusal to talk until shortly before the ten-month suspension expired, then to demand an extension as a condition for continuing the talks. Clinton is silent about all of this.

Clinton contrasts Netanyahu to Rabin and insists he wishes to see Rabin’s vision of peace realized. In a New York Times op-ed commemorating the fifteenth anniversary of the prime minister’s assassination and entitled "Finish Rabin’s Work" (November 3, 2010), the former president declares, "Since his death, not a week has gone by that I have not missed him. I loved him... I continue to believe that, had he lived, within three years we would have had a comprehensive agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians... Rabin’s spirit continues to light the path, but we must all decide to take it."

But, in fact, Clinton has betrayed Rabin’s path. Rabin, like the authors of UN Security Council Resolution 242 - still the foundation stone of Israeli-Arab peace negotiations - recognized that Israel’s pre-1967 armistice lines left the nation too vulnerable to future aggression. He insisted Israel must retain a significant portion of the West Bank to block traditional invasion routes and to protect both Jerusalem and the low-lying coastal plain, the latter home to some 70% of the nation’s population. In his last speech in the Knesset before his assassination, Rabin declared:

"The borders of the State of Israel, during the permanent solution, will be beyond the lines which existed before the Six Day War. We will not return to the 4 June 1967 lines.

"And these are the main changes, not all of them, which we envision and want in the permanent solution:

"A. First and foremost, united Jerusalem, which will include both Ma'ale Adumim and Givat Ze'ev -- as the capital of Israel, under Israeli sovereignty, while preserving the rights of the members of the other faiths, Christianity and Islam, to freedom of access and freedom of worship in their holy places, according to the customs of their faiths.

"B. The security border of the State of Israel will be located in the Jordan Valley, in the broadest meaning of that term.

"C. Changes which will include the addition of Gush Etzion, Efrat, Beitar and other communities, most of which are in the area east of what was the ‘Green Line,' prior to the Six Day War.

"D. The establishment of blocs of settlements in Judea and Samaria..."

Netanyahu’s vision of defensible borders for Israel essentially conforms to the parameters laid out by Rabin. But Clinton rejects those parameters and promotes Israel’s return to the indefensible pre-1967 lines. In the same article in which he urges continuing along Rabin’s path, he endorses a very different vision: "Because of the terms accepted in late 2000 by Prime Minister Ehud Barak, supported in greater detail by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert [and involving an accord based largely on the 1967 lines], and approved by President Mahmoud Abbas... everyone knows what a final agreement would look like." (In reality, Abbas did not accept Olmert’s offer.)

While Rabin believed Israel could gain in the Oslo negotiations agreement to the defensible borders Israel requires, there were many in his government, and in the population more broadly, who convinced themselves Israel no longer needed defensible borders. They ignored what Arafat and the PA were saying to their own people, in their media, mosques and schools, about their ultimate goal remaining Israel’s destruction. They ignored as well the involvement of Arafat and his minions in the dramatic increase in terror that marked the initial years of Oslo. They ignored the threats beyond Arafat and the PA. They convinced themselves that Israel did not require defensible borders because in the coming era of "peace" there would be nobody against whom they would need to defend themselves.

Those who embraced these Oslo-era delusions included many current and former high-ranking IDF officers, among them - to no small degree - Ehud Barak. Barak had earlier initiated and presided over Israel’s full withdrawal from its long-held "security zone" in southern Lebanon. One could muster good arguments in favor of Israel’s withdrawal, but what is noteworthy is that Barak failed to secure the handover of Israeli positions close to the border to UN or other international forces, even though there were opportunities to arrange such a handover. He allowed Hezbollah to move into those positions. He did so apparently convinced that - as various Israeli leaders claimed at the time, based on little but wishful thinking - with Israel’s full withdrawal Hezbollah would dismantle its military wing and become a purely political party focused on competing in the Lebanese political arena.

Barak’s territorial concessions at Camp David were a dramatic departure from Rabin’s vision and also from all earlier Labor Party platforms concerning territorial compromise. President Clinton responded positively to Barak’s position and, in the face of Arafat’s rejection, advocated additional Israeli concessions. The self-destructive delusions that underlay many Israelis’ embrace of the Oslo process and pursuit of an imaginary peace via dangerous concessions were of Israel’s own making and cannot be blamed on Clinton. But he can be faulted for his willingness to play Dr. Kevorkian to those Israelis’ suicidal delusions.

The terror war launched by Arafat in the wake of Camp David left, in the ensuing several years, close to a thousand Israelis dead and thousands more horribly maimed. The carnage choreographed by the nation’s "peace partner" awakened many Israelis from their Oslo reveries. The events that have followed from Israel’s complete withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 - the dramatic increase in attacks on Israel from Gazan territory, and still further escalation in rocket and mortar bombardment and other assaults following Hamas’s seizing control of Gaza - have led yet more Israelis to abandon their long-held wishful fantasies. The 2006 war with Lebanon triggered by murderous Hezbollah incursions also figured in an awakening for some.

Yet there are Israelis who remain convinced - despite all evidence to the contrary; despite everything the other side says and does - that sufficient Israeli concessions will win peace, indeed a peace that will render defensible borders unnecessary. Ehud Olmert is among them. In 2005, as vice prime minister, Olmert assured Israelis that the impending withdrawal from Gaza would result in a dramatic decrease in the violence emanating from Gaza. In 2008, apparently unfazed by his prognostic deficiencies vis-a-vis Gaza, he offered Abbas even more concessions regarding the West Bank and Jerusalem than Barak had offered Arafat. Abbas, contrary to Clinton’s gloss, turned his back on them, again not wanting to enter into any accord, whatever the Israeli concessions, that entailed Palestinian agreement to an end of the conflict.

Clinton, too, has not been moved by events since 2000 to change his views on the desirability of Israel’s returning essentially to its pre-1967 armistice lines. What accounts for his persistent cavalier attitude regarding Israel’s security, and his rejection of Rabin’s parameters for defensible borders, even as he repeats his devotion to Rabin’s vision and urges continuation on Rabin’s path?

Part of the answer may be that those Israelis he is closest to are among the ever-dwindling minority that remains enamored of the delusions of Oslo. The American Jews he is closest to seem also to be largely dedicated believers in those delusions.

In addition, ego appears to play a prominent role in Clinton’s stance. In his September comments in which he, absurdly, tars Netanyahu as the obstacle to peace, he refers to the proposals made in 2000 and rejected by Arafat - as "my deal" and "the deal I put together." His continued pushing for an agreement along the lines offered then seems to reflect in part his wish to see consummation of a deal he can construe as a jewel of his legacy.

But that deal, as is obvious now to a great majority of Israelis, would entail unacceptable, unconscionable existential risks for the Jewish state. Clinton ignores this reality, whitewashes Palestinian rejectionism and ongoing dedication to Israel’s destruction, labels Netanyahu and those Israelis who share his concerns as the barrier to a settlement of the conflict, and dismisses Israel’s need for and right to defensible borders. His doing so demonstrates that, for all his averments to the contrary, he is no friend of Rabin, and no true friend of Israel.

Palestinians Promote Genocide; NYTimes Silent

2011-09-16T12:05:00.003-04:00

First published in FrontPageMagazine.com

If Palestinian leaders indoctrinate their people to pursue genocide and the New York Times doesn’t report it, is the indoctrination nevertheless of consequence?

In a recent poll of Palestinian opinion - conducted by Stanley Greenberg, leading pollster for the Democratic party, in conjunction with the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion, and sponsored by the Israel Project - 73% agreed with a quote from the Hamas charter on the need to kill all Jews.

Those who get their news on the Arab-Israeli conflict from the Times would likely be surprised and befuddled by this result. Alternatively, they might attribute it to hostility generated by Palestinians living with elements of self-government but, at least in the West Bank, that self-governance significantly short of full independence from Israel. Of course, the latter view makes little sense. Those who embrace it would very probably not expect, for example, that 73% of Tibetans wish to murder all Chinese, or 73% of the people of Darfur desire to kill all Sudanese Arabs; yet these groups live under infinitely more onerous conditions than the Palestinians of the West Bank or Gaza.

In addition, the same poll revealed that only 34% of Palestinians questioned would accept the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel as a permanent solution to the conflict. Presumably, if the "occupation" were the source of Palestinians’ genocidal hostility, they would view attaining an independent state as the arrangement that would assuage that hostility. No doubt the people of Tibet and Darfur, as well as dozens of other populations around the world living under genuine occupation, would be delighted to be offered independence. Rather, 66% of Palestinians said that a two-state arrangement might be a starting point but that the Palestinian goal should be the annihilation of Israel.

In fact, Palestinian dedication to Israel’s destruction, and indeed to the annihilation of the Jews, would be of little surprise to anyone who has bothered to follow the agenda set by Palestinian leaders since Israel’s creation. Insistence on its destruction pre-dated Israel’s presence in the West Bank and Gaza, and calls for killing of all Jews is not only part of the Hamas charter. It has, for example, been a fixture of Palestinian Authority indoctrination - at times in cooperation with Hamas - virtually since creation of the Palestinian Authority in 1994 and subsequent PA control over a large network of media, mosques and schools.

Yet, as central as the promotion of genocide is to Palestinian indoctrination, evasion of the issue is no less central to Times misrepresentation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. If there is any allusion to it in the Times, it is almost invariably to minimize its significance and even to ridicule Israeli concern about it.

Emblematic is a story by Times reporter William Orme published in October, 2000, shortly after Yasir Arafat had rejected Israeli concessions offered at Camp David, had likewise dismissed President Clinton’s additional proposed concessions, had offered no counter-proposals, and instead had launched his terror war against Israel. On October 13, the day after the lynching of two Israeli reservists in Ramallah, the official Palestinian Authority television station broadcast a sermon by Sheik Ahmad Halabaya in which the sheik declared:

"Whether Likud or Labor, Jews are Jews... They are the terrorists. They are the ones who must be butchered and killed, as Allah the almighty said: Fight them; Allah will torture them at your hands, and will humiliate them... Have no mercy on the Jews, no matter where they are, in any country. Fight them, wherever you are. Wherever you meet them, kill them. Whereverr you are, kill those Jews and those Americans who are like them..."
Halabaya, in this official Palestinian Authority broadcast, also asserted that all of Israel properly belongs to the Arabs.

Orme, in his Times article published eleven days later, notes Israeli complaints of the PA’s using its official media for incitement, and his tone is clearly dismissive of Israel’s position. He writes at one point, "Israelis cite as one egregious example a televised sermon that defended the killing of two soldiers. ‘Whether Likud or Labor, Jews are Jews,’ proclaimed Sheik Ahmad Abu Halabaya in a live broadcast from a Gaza City mosque the day after the killings." That is all Orme says of the sermon; nothing about Halabaya’s exhortations to butcher Jews wherever one finds them, nothing about his assertions that all of Israel belongs to the Arabs, nothing about his invoking of Allah as calling for the torture and murder of the Jews.

Orme’s intent was obviously to make the Israeli complaints look unfounded and ridiculous.

In June, 2001, New York’s two Senators at the time, Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton, sent a letter to President Bush lauding his efforts to achieve an Israeli-Palestinian cease-fire but noting that, "Unless the Palestinians take unequivocal steps to stop the rhetoric of hate emanating from official Palestinian Authority (PA) statements, media organizations and textbooks in Palestinian schools, any peace agreement will have little meaning... For nearly ten years, while Mr. Arafat and the Palestinian leadership were speaking the language of peace with Israel and the West, they were continuing their calls for the destruction of Israel to the Palestinian people and the Arab world."

The Senators included in their letter illustrations of Palestinian incitement and hate-mongering. Among them were a statement from a PA minister, made a few months before the outbreak of hostilities, that Oslo was merely a first step toward Israel’s destruction; an article in an official PA newspaper calling for the killing of Jews wherever they are found; and citations from Palestinian school texts declaring that "there is no alternative to destroying Israel" and proposing that the Jews had been brought to "our land" in order to be annihilated. But the New York Times could still not bring itself to cover the issue of genocidal Palestinian incitement, or of Palestinian incitement more broadly.

The same is true now. The PA declares Israel illegitimate. It denies any historical connection between Jews and the land and insists Jews are simply usurpers in Palestinian lands. It teaches Palestinian children they must dedicate themselves to Israel’s destruction. It lauds murderers of Jews as models whom Palestinian children should aspire to emulate. It promotes the murder of all Jews. Often, PA president Mahmoud Abbas participates directly in this incitement.

And the indoctrination has consequences. As a generation of young Palestinians has grown up knowing only the PA’s education curriculum, and PA media and mosque incitement has shaped broader Palestinian opinion for almost two decades, the indoctrination has rendered the possibility of genuine peace only more remote. The recent poll cited above illustrates this inevitable reality.

(All of which was, in fact, predictable. In the context of Jordan’s having renounced any claims to the West Bank in the late 1980's, Yitzhak Rabin began promoting the idea of a UN-overseen election in the territories for leaders from within the territories who would then negotiate a peace with Israel. He continued to do so through the months immediately following his becoming prime minister in 1992. Rabin recognized that such leaders would almost certainly be much more amenable to genuine peace than Arafat and those around him in Fatah and the PLO. But while there was significant interest in the proposal among Palestinians in the territories, potential candidates were intimidated by PLO threats. In addition, foreign leaders, and many within Rabin’s own Labor Party, insisted he deal only with Arafat as a "peace partner"; and Rabin ultimately accepted the disastrous Oslo path.)

But if Palestinian incitement to Jew-hatred and genocide has consequences, so, too, does the Times’ consistent failure to cover that incitement. It distorts Times readers’ understanding of the nature of the Palestinian-Israeli, and broader Arab-Israeli, conflict. In addition, as the Times remains in some respects America’s newspaper of record whose stances are regurgitated by myriad other news outlets, it inculcates belief in those distortions in a much wider audience.

But apparently that’s the Times’ intention. The explanation for its failure to cover Palestinian incitement to Jew-hatred and genocide is unwillingness to publish truths that undermine its editorial bias. That bias is, essentially, that genuine peace can be achieved by sufficient Israeli territorial concessions, and that Israel’s making those concessions does not entail exposing the Jewish state to unacceptable threats. This is the line pursued in Times editorials, in the articles of the paper’s op-ed writers, and even in news stories.

For example, in an August 7, 2011, editorial entitled "Palestinians and the U.N.," the paper expresses "sympathy for [Palestinian] yearning and... frustration. For years, they have been promised a negotiated solution... and they are still empty-handed." The editorial calls on the United States and "its partners" to "put a map on the table, with a timeline for concluding negotiations," supports that map being based "on pre-1967 borders with mutually agreed land swaps," (in fact, there were no pre-1967 borders, only armistice lines, and the Times itself has corrected this error on multiple occasions in the past but apparently still cannot resist repeating it for its rhetorical value) and ridicules Prime Minister Netanyahu and others who characterize those lines as "indefensible."

Nowhere in the editorial is there any reference to the obstacles to peace presented by Palestinian leaders’ refusal to accept Israel’s legitimacy within any borders and their persistent incitement to the state’s destruction. Of course, the editorial is silent on the Palestinian promotion of the extermination of Jews.

The same basic biases were recently repeated in another Times editorial on September 11, entitled "Palestinian Statehood." In this piece, the editors indict the United States, Israel and Europe for failing to offer Abbas enough to dissuade him from seeking recognition of a Palestinian state at the UN. Standing truth on its head - ignoring that it has been Abbas who has consistently refused to negotiate, except briefly near the end of Israel’s ten-month construction freeze in the West Bank, and has instead waited for the Obama administration to deliver Israeli concessions as a condition for negotiations - The Times editors, in their ascription of fault, assert, "We put the greater onus on Mr. Netanyahu, who has used any excuse to thwart peace efforts."

Once more the editors declare that "The United States and its Quartet partners... should put a map and a deal on the table, with a timeline for concluding negotiations... The core element: a Palestinian state based on pre-1967 borders [sic] with mutually agreed land swaps..."

Predictably, there is again no acknowledgment in the editorial of the obstacles to peace presented by Palestinian leaders’ refusal to accept Israel’s legitimacy within any borders and their incessant incitement to the state’s destruction. Of course, there’s once more no reference to Palestinian promotion of the extermination of Jews.

For Thomas Friedman, the Times perennial op-ed "expert" on Middle East affairs, Palestinian incitement, including the incitement to genocide, is likewise a non-issue. The major issue is, and has always been, the settlements. More recently, as in a June 18, 2011, op-ed, Friedman has embraced the mantra of a return to the 1967 "borders" (as he characterizes the cease-fire lines in the op-ed) with "mutually agreed border adjustments." In the piece, entitled "What to Do With Lemons," Friedman proposes a new UN resolution which, in some respects copying the 1947 General Assembly Resolution 181 that called for partition of Mandate Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, would repeat this formula but specify, in Friedman’s words, "the dividing line should be based on the 1967 borders..." Friedman insists such a new General Assembly resolution would satisfy the basic desires of both sides. As is typical for Friedman, the Palestinians have no desire to destroy Israel and annihilate its inhabitants as well as other Jews. That part of reality would sour the lemonade he brilliantly fantasizes - has for decades brilliantly fantasized - creating out of Middle East lemons.

Nicholas Kristof is the Times op-ed writer who likewise opines extensively on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, invariably to bash Israel. In fact, there is virtually no form of anti-Israel disinformation - whether concerning supposed Israeli withholding of electricity or water from Palestinians, or stealing Palestinian land, or destroying Palestinian homes - that Kristof has not parroted.

In an August 3, 2011, op-ed entitled "Seeking Balance on the Mideast," Kristof attacks Israel for various perceived transgressions, including its military campaign against Hamas in Gaza in 2008 in response to incessant Hamas rocket and mortar fire into Israel. Kristof also excoriates the House of Representatives for overwhelmingly passing a resolution at the time supporting "Israel’s right to defend itself." He likewise condemns the House for passing a similarly overwhelming resolution urging the Obama administration to block Palestinian attempts to seek recognition of statehood at the UN and also threatening to cut off funding to the Palestinians if they go forward with the UN gambit.

Nowhere in Kristof’s writing attacking Israel is there any acknowledgment of Palestinian promotion of Israel’s destruction and of the mass murder of Jews.

Much of Kristof’s August op-ed is devoted to championing J Street - the new, heavily left-leaning, Saudi- and Soros-funded, self-styled "pro-Israel" organization - and its leader, Jeremy Ben-Ami. To Kristof, J Street and Ben-Ami, whom he quotes repeatedly, are welcome alternatives to the established pro-Israel community. But Ben-Ami responded to the Israeli incursion into Gaza by drawing a moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas and essentially condemning Israel’s action. And he has dismissed Israeli concerns about Palestinian aspirations to Israel’s destruction and Palestinian promotion of genocide as paranoid, as representing the persistent echoes of past genocidal assaults on Jews. For example, he observed - in a New York Times interview, "… there’s their grandmother’s voice in their ear; it’s the emotional side and the communal history…"

Kristof is, of course, the writer awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his many op-eds documenting and decrying the genocide in Darfur and the world’s failure to stop the slaughter. But it is noteworthy that a key factor in the impunity with which the Arab government of Sudan has been able to pursue its campaign of rape and mass murder in Darfur has been the support it receives from the rest of the Arab world, and yet on this Kristof has been essentially silent. (A review in April, 2006, of his Times articles on Darfur revealed that he had published some 40 op-eds on the subject to that point, many of them blaming various international parties for contributing to the genocide. But he had broken his silence on the role of the Arab world in only five sentences in the penultimate of the long list of articles, and even that piece was focused elsewhere, on China's shameful role in Darfur.)

Nor in any of his many op-ed’s about Darfur since then has Kristof covered the wider Arab role. In March, 2009, Sudanese president Omar Hassan al-Bashir was indicted for genocide in Darfur by the International Criminal Court. Some weeks later, al-Bashir flew to the meeting of the Arab League then being held in Doha, Qatar, and won unanimous support from League members against the ICC indictment. PA President Abbas declared, "We must also take a decisive stance of solidarity alongside fraternal Sudan and President Omar al-Bashir." Hamas, whose terrorists attend training camps in Sudan overseen by the same people responsible for the butchery in Darfur, had organized a large pro-Sudan demonstration in Gaza shortly after the indictment, and Hamas leader Moussa Abu Marzouk had flown to Khartoum to show his backing of al-Bashir.

Also in March, 2009, Kristof wrote two op-eds about the indictment, Sudan’s crimes in Darfur, and the world’s need to do more. But in those articles, and in the weeks and months that followed, he was silent on the Arab role, the spectacle in Doha, and support for the genocide provided by the PA and Hamas. Apparently, Kristof’s anti-Israel animus, and his determination to ignore the genocidal agenda of the Palestinians, is so strong that he is willing to overlook Palestinian and broader Arab backing of genocide in Darfur rather than even broach the theme of genocidal sentiments among Israel’s enemies.

The Times news pages have largely become an extension of the editorial section and this is certainly true regarding Israel. The Times bureau chief in Jerusalem, Ethan Bronner, has filed innumerable articles in which the story line is essentially Palestinian grievances against alleged Israeli oppression, with no context given that would offer a counter-perspective. For example, a July 28, 2011, piece entitled, "Where Politics Are Complex, Simple Joys at the Beach," tells of most Palestinians in the West Bank having no opportunity to visit Mediterranean beaches because they are blocked from entering Israel, and of the efforts of an Israeli women’s group to smuggle Palestinian women into the country for beach outings. Only in the thirteenth paragraph of the story is there any allusion to the reality that virtually from 1967, when Israel first gained control of the West Bank, until 1994, when Arafat’s entry into the territories as per the early Oslo agreements was accompanied by an unprecedented wave of anti-Israel terror, Palestinians from the West Bank typically moved freely in Israel, including to its beaches. The terror assaults that followed Oslo led to periodic closures of pre-1967 Israel to most Palestinians, and this exclusion became more systematic and consistent after Arafat launched his terror war in 2000 that killed about a thousand Israelis and maimed thousands more in the ensuing few years.

Given that Bronner routinely gives his frequent "human interest" stories regarding Israel and the Palestinians such a biased tilt, it is hardly surprising that, in his years as the Times Jerusalem bureau chief, he has written virtually nothing on Palestinian, including PA, incitement - in media, mosques and schools - to the destruction of Israel and extermination of the Jews.

In a November, 2001, retrospective on World War II coverage, Max Frankel, former Times executive editor, offered a mea culpa for the paper’s under-reporting of the Nazis’ genocidal policies and actions regarding the Jews. Frankel called it "the century’s bitterest journalistic failure." Much has changed at the Times since World War II. What was then a generally left of center editorial stance has shifted much further to the Left; and what was largely a focus on objective reporting in news stories has transformed into much more advocacy journalism and a blurring of the distinction between news pages and editorial pages. But one constant between then and now has been the Times’ consistent reluctance, and general failure, to cover genocidal threats to Jews.

And both the threats, and the Times’ failure to cover them, are of consequence.

Obama's Neville Chamberlain Speech

2011-05-23T12:00:00.000-04:00

First published on FrontPageMagazine.com

In his May 19 speech on the Middle East, President Obama, in a matter of minutes, abandoned Security Council Resolution 242, which for more than four decades had been the cornerstone of diplomacy in pursuit of Arab-Israeli peace; likewise abandoned the Roadmap, adopted in 2003 by the so-called Quartet (the U.S., UN, EU and Russia) as a blueprint for resolving, more specifically, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; committed his Administration to pushing Israel back to indefensible borders; and essentially adopted as Administration policy Mahmoud Abbas’s variation on Arafat’s "Plan of Phases" for Israel’s destruction.

The cumulative impact of Obama’s declarations is to chart a course for Israel comparable to that charted for Czechoslovakia in 1938 when Neville Chamberlain endorsed Hitler’s demands of that country.

"We believe," declared the President, in just one of his statements undermining Israel, "the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines."

Resolution 242, adopted unanimously by the Security Council a few months after the 1967 war, calls for establishment between Israel and its neighbors of "secure and recognized boundaries." The resolution does not call for Israel to return to the pre-war armistice lines, and the resolution's authors asserted that this omission was intentional, that those lines were an invitation to further aggression against Israel and the future borders ought to be elsewhere.

Lord Caradon, Britain's ambassador to the UN at the time and the person who introduced Resolution 242 in the Security Council, told a Lebanese newspaper in 1974:

"It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions were undesirable and artificial. After all, they were just the places where the soldiers of each side happened to be on the day the fighting stopped in 1948. They were just armistice lines. That's why we didn't demand that the Israelis return to them, and I think we were right not to..."
　
Lyndon Johnson, then President, stated that Israel's retreat to its former lines would be "not a prescription for peace but for renewed hostilities"; and he advocated new "recognized boundaries" that would provide "security against terror, destruction, and war."

Subsequent presidents have endorsed Israel’s need for "defensible borders," and Prime Minister Netanyahu’s comments at the White House on May 20, to the effect that Israel is indefensible within the pre-1967 armistice lines and cannot return to those lines, are more consistent with traditional American policy than is Obama’s new stance. In addition, Congress has likewise backed Israel’s right to defensible borders. For example, an April, 2004, letter from the United States to Israel stipulating that the nation was not expected to return to the pre-1967 lines but, rather, was entitled to "defensible borders," had the endorsement of a bipartisan consensus in both houses of Congress.

Israel’s vulnerability within the pre-1967 lines goes beyond its being reduced to a nine-mile width at its center, as mentioned by Netanyahu. Those boundaries also mean forces on the other side would control the hills that totally dominate Israel’s coastal plain, home to 70% of its people.

Despite this longstanding American support for new, defensible boundaries for Israel, and the obvious threats represented by the pre-1967 lines, there are some who insist on characterizing Netanyahu’s strong opposition to a return to those lines as reflecting his being "right-wing." But Yitzhak Rabin, Labor prime minister in the first years of the Oslo process, articulated Netanyahu’s position in even stronger terms. In his last speech in the Knesset, shortly before his assassination in November, 1995, Rabin declared:

"The borders of the State of Israel, during the permanent solution, will be beyond the lines which existed before the Six Day War. We will not return to the 4 June 1967lines.

"And these are the main changes, not all of them, which we envision and want in the permanent solution:

"A. First and foremost, united Jerusalem, which will include both Ma'ale Adumim and Givat Ze'ev -- as the capital of Israel, under Israeli sovereignty, while preserving the rights of the members of the other faiths, Christianity and Islam, to freedom of access and freedom of worship in their holy places, according to the customs of their faiths.

"B. The security border of the State of Israel will be located in the Jordan Valley, in the broadest meaning of that term.

"C. Changes which will include the addition of Gush Etzion, Efrat, Beitar and other communities, most of which are in the area east of what was the ‘Green Line,' prior to the Six Day War.

"D. The establishment of blocs of settlements in Judea and Samaria..."

Obama, in promoting Israel’s retreat to the pre-1967 lines, did throw in the sop of a reference to "mutual agreed [territorial] swaps." The meaninglessness of this with regard to Israel’s self-defense is illustrated by Obama’s reference in the preceding sentence to "permanent Palestinian borders with Israel, Jordan, and Egypt..." Here he dismisses the necessity of Israel retaining control of the Jordan Valley, without which hostile forces east of the Jordan would have easy access - whether for invasion or for smuggling arms - to those heights that, again, render the vast majority of Israelis ready prey for attack, both by regular forces and by terrorist rockets and mortars such as those that currently target Israeli communities near Gaza. Obama reinforced this element of his undermining Israel’s self-defense by calling as well for "the full and phased withdrawal of Israeli military forces," rejecting even some limited Israeli military presence in the Jordan Valley.

On the territorial front, as if this were not enough of an assault on Israel, Obama threw in that the Palestinians have the right to - in keeping with Palestinian demands - a "contiguous" state. But there can be no contiguity between Gaza and the West Bank without splitting Israel in two, and the President had nothing to say about Israeli contiguity.

Beyond demanding suicidal territorial concessions from Israel, the President then insists that these concessions, and the accompanying "security arrangements" with the "non-militarized [Palestinian] state" - a largely meaningless, unenforceable flourish, as the Oslo experience dramatically demonstrated - should be spelled out in detail before two other key issues, "the future of Jerusalem" and "the fate of Palestinian refugees" are addressed. But, of course, the President has already defined the Administration’s stand on the future of Jerusalem in his call for Israel’s return to the pre-1967 armistice lines. And Israel is to surrender its essential bargaining chip, the extent of its territorial concessions, before the Palestinian demand for the so-called "right of return," the plan to flood and overwhelm Israel with descendants of refugees from the 1947-48 war, is even addressed. Moreover, there is nothing in Obama’s speech calling for the Palestinians to give up this path to Israel’s dissolution.

The insistence on both pushing Israel back to the pre-1967 boundaries and establishing the territorial dimension of an agreement before other issues are addressed, as well as the President's refraining from taking issue with the "right of return," reflect his embracing demands made by the Palestinians while ignoring consideration of the untenable situation in which they place Israel.

The president's agenda also entails an abandonment of the Roadmap. For example, in the Roadmap territorial issues only begin to be addressed in Phase II, and then only in terms of creating provisional borders and testing Palestinian intent and preparedness for statehood before there are any steps toward definition of permanent borders. On the other hand, in Phase I, indeed at its very outset, the "Palestinian leadership issues unequivocal statement reiterating Israel’s right to exist in peace and security and calling for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire to end armed activity and all acts of violence against Israelis anywhere. All official Palestinian institutions end incitement against Israel."

Obama does acknowledge as a problem that Israelis live "with the fear that their children could be blown up on a bus or by rockets fired at their homes, as well as the pain of knowing that other children in the region are taught to hate them." But he has little further to say about Palestinian terror - beyond the vague references to security arrangements - and nothing more to say about incitement. That Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority uses its media, mosques and schools to indoctrinate Palestinians into believing that Jews have no historical or legal connection to the land but are mere usurpers whose presence must be extirpated; that those who massacre Israelis are heroes who must be emulated - a line of hate-indoctrination upon which Abbas himself seems particularly fond of elaborating; and that it is the obligation of Palestinian children to dedicate themselves to Israel’s destruction; are not, to our President, particularly troubling issues warranting immediate and focused attention.

With regard to Hamas, Obama does ask rhetorically, "How can one negotiate with a party unwilling to recognize your right to exist?" But Hamas is not simply a "rejectionist party" or a "terrorist entity" as designated by the United States. It is an explicitly genocidal organization, declaring in its charter its dedication to the murder of all Jews; and its leaders continually assert their fealty to their charter and their undying commitment to its program. Hamas’s incitement to the eradication of the Jews is a violation of Article 3 of the 1948 UN genocide convention; a violation which the contracting parties, including the United States, have undertaken to punish.

But some leaders of Hamas have also indicated that, to advance their ultimate goal, they are willing to pursue a temporary ceasefire and go along with negotiations aimed at getting Israel to withdraw to the pre-1967 lines. And President Obama has signaled that if they adopt and maintain this mask for some while, desisting from trumpeting their ultimate intent, he is prepared to ignore their genocidal agenda and join with them in pushing for an indefensible Israel.

Of course, Fatah is now forming a national unity government with Hamas, which, in addition to Abbas and the PA’s anti-Israel and anti-Jewish incitement, would presumably raise further questions about the PA’s reliability as a peace partner. So, too, one might imagine, would its ongoing promotion of the "Plan of Phases" for Israel’s destruction. But President Obama’s program, while violating Resolution 242 and the Roadmap, actually adheres to the agenda put forth by Arafat and Abbas to advance the "Plan of Phases."

At the time of the initiation of the Oslo accords, on the evening of the famous signing and handshake on the White House lawn in September, 1993, Yasir Arafat appeared on Jordanian television and explained to his constituency and wider Arab audience that they should understand Oslo in terms of the Plan of Phases, formulated in 1974. The Plan called for the Palestine Liberation Organization to acquire whatever territory it could by negotiations, then use that land as a base from which it would pursue its ultimate objective of Israel's destruction. Arafat repeated this understanding of Oslo many times thereafter.

Consistent with this strategy, Arafat was more than willing to take control of any territory ceded by Israel via the Oslo process while making in return commitments - particularly regarding ending terror and incitement - on which he consistently reneged and avoiding signing onto any limitation of future Palestinian territorial claims. When, under pressure from President Clinton, he reluctantly entered "final status" talks with Clinton and Prime Minister Ehud Barak at Camp David in July 2000, Arafat rejected all the concessions offered by Barak and Clinton and refused to put forward counter-proposals. He was unwilling to accede to any accord, whatever the territorial and other concessions made by Israel, because an "end-of-conflict" agreement was now expected of him in return and he was not interested in ending the conflict and foregoing future, additional, Palestinian demands.

Around the same time, Arafat spoke of declaring a state unilaterally, as a way, again, of establishing "Palestine" without signing away future claims against Israel. Clinton made it clear the U.S. would not support such a unilateral move and, not least because of U.S. pressure, European states conveyed the same message.

Abbas, a longtime associate of Arafat and member of the Fatah and PLO leadership, has largely followed Arafat's course. He has not actively pursued a terror campaign - and he was critical of the terror war launched by Arafat after Camp David - but he made clear at the time, and in statements since then, that his opposition to the manner in which Arafat used terror was purely tactical. He felt it did not serve to advance the Palestinians' ultimate goals. Abbas has also made clear that those goals, for him, are the same as for Arafat. He has refused to recognize Israel's legitimacy as the Jewish state, the expression of the right of national self-determination accorded other peoples, even though the original UN resolution on the division of Mandate Palestine west of the Jordan called for the establishment of a Jewish and an Arab state. He has refused to consider any compromise regarding Palestinian insistence on the "right of return." And he has given no indication of any willingness to agree to a final status accord.

Abbas has stated he intends to seek in the coming fall United Nations recognition of a Palestinian state demarcated by the pre-1967 lines, and he has already requested and obtained such recognition from various nations. This strategy once more reflects Arafat's policy of seeking to gain a state in the territories without conceding future claims against Israel; that is, without foreswearing future phases in the Plan of Phases.

But Obama’s program, laid out on May 19, likewise promises Abbas a state, indeed a state along the pre-1967 lines, without obliging him to give up insistence on the "right of return" or to sign an "end of conflict" agreement and foreswear future, additional claims against Israel.

Apologists for Obama point to his statements in the speech advising the Palestinians against turning away from negotiations with Israel and focusing instead on winning backing for their demands at the United Nations and elsewhere. (Obama actually implies in the speech that it is Israel’s continuing building in the "settlements" that drove the Palestinians to abandon negotiations. But Israel has not deviated from limits on building agreed upon with previous administrations, and negotiations with both Arafat and Abbas had proceeded without a total freeze. In addition, when Netanyahu did impose a ten-month freeze, Abbas waited until close to its expiration before resuming talks and then refused to continue them unless the freeze was extended. He clearly did not want to maintain negotiations and used Obama’s pressing for a total freeze as an excuse to refuse talks.) These apologists imply that the President had to move toward Palestinian positions in order to entice Abbas to follow his advice and refrain from actions at the UN that would hurt Israel.

But any UN action would hurt Israel only to the extent that Obama allowed it to do so. No General Assembly vote trumps Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 (passed near the end of the 1973 Yom Kippur War and calling both for implementation of 242 and for negotiations between the parties to advance the peace envisioned in 242). Obama could respond to any General Assembly move by emphasizing the United States looks upon the provisions of the two Security Council resolutions as the basis of movement towards resolution of the conflict and rejects any effort to circumvent their provisions. He could also pressure our allies, including in Europe, to take a similar stance.

In the Security Council, he could, of course, respond to any effort to recognize a Palestinian state at this point by using our veto power, and he indicated in his speech that he would do so. But he could also, again, pressure our allies in the Security Council to do the same. He could, as well, exert similar pressure on the Europeans against any move by them to grant recognition on a bilateral basis of a Palestinian state with borders defined by the pre-1967 lines. As noted, President Clinton effectively dissuaded the Europeans from responding positively when Arafat, after Camp David, sought support for unilateral declaration of a state. But President Obama shows no signs of sharing Clinton’s determination to prevent the Palestinian leadership from advancing their quest for statehood while they reject negotiated compromises and persist in pursuing Israel’s dissolution and absorption of its lands into a Palestinian state.

While Israel and its friends and supporters were so troubled by Obama’s dismissal of Israel’s need for, and right to, defensible borders, Obama’s speech was greeted with much enthusiasm by European states, led by the Munich Three - England, France, and Germany - who had colluded at Munich in the dissolution of Czechoslavakia in 1938. The Munich Three have in recent months been calling for precisely what Obama has now delivered: embrace of Palestinian demands for statehood based on the pre-1967 lines.

They, and many other European states, have, in fact, long indicated their preparedness to sacrifice Israel’s well-being and very existence in the service of advancing their Arab oil interests and appeasing the wider Arab and Muslim world, particularly the Islamist elements, as well as their own domestic, significantly radicalized, Muslim constituencies.

Of course, they justify their anti-Israel policies by characterizing all the territory beyond the pre-1967 lines as occupied Palestinian land, with Israel as the unconscionable occupier, whereas, in fact, these areas have never been part of a Palestinian entity and, under Resolutions 242 and 338, they are - except for the areas already ceded by Israel under Oslo - disputed lands whose ultimate disposition is to be determined by negotiations.

Obama, too, has demonstrated, and openly acknowledged, his eagerness to appease Arab and broader Muslim sentiment, particularly radical sentiment. (He has not been as forthcoming to such Muslim populations as the people of Darfur or those seeking freedom from tyranny in Iran and Syria, and has, in fact, cut U.S. funding to pro-democracy groups in Arab and other Muslim nations.) He showed once more in his recent speech that he, too, is prepared to sacrifice Israel’s interests to do so.

Czechoslovakia in 1938 was also a small nation and a rare democracy in its region, and was perceived by Britain and France as standing in the way of peace with a rising hostile, militant power. So Britain and France colluded with Germany in stripping the nation of the Sudetenland, mountainous, fortifiable territory necessary for the defense of the rest of the country. Now it is Israel - according to the President, and the chorus of like-minded European leaders, an obstacle to improved relations with those who wish the West ill - that would be stripped of the ability to defend itself.

Obama does aver that "our commitment to Israel’s security is unshakeable." But Britain and France also offered solemn promises that, should Germany violate the Munich agreement and move against what remained of Czechoslovakia, they would come to the rump nation’s defense. Yet when, less than six months after Munich, Hitler conquered the rest of Czechoslovakia, Britain and France did nothing.

When the likely Hamas-dominated Palestinian government is shelling Israeli coastal towns; and making additional territorial demands of Israel, such as annexing areas with significant Arab populations; and pursuing an intensified terror campaign in Israeli cities to which it will now have readier access; does anyone truly expect Obama to live up to his pledges of defending Israel? Indeed, no such defense will be possible, even for a president more predisposed to providing it.

As not only Obama’s recent speech but the tenor of his diplomacy regarding Israel since the beginning of his Administration clearly indicates, the only real question is whether Israel is prepared to play Czechoslovakia to Obama’s Chamberlain. Current indications are that it is not.

But this is of only limited comfort in the face of Obama policies that, at best, are likely to lead to more challenging of an Israel seen as vulnerable in the face of diminishing support from an American administration that is in any case perceived as weak; more challenging of Israel in the form of more violence, more war, and more carnage.

The Munich Three Target Israel

2011-04-27T12:00:00.002-04:00

First published on FrontPageMagazine.com

In 1938, the leaders of Britain, France and Germany met in Munich to decide the fate of Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia was not invited. The three conferees agreed to strip the targeted nation of the Sudetenland, whose population consisted largely of ethnic Germans, and transfer that territory to German control. This deprived the victim state not simply of land but of those areas - mountainous, fortifiable - necessary for Czechoslovakia to be able to defend itself.

Today, the same three nations are doing the same vis-a-vis Israel. They are discarding UN Security Council Resolution 242, passed unanimously in the wake of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and since then the cornerstone for all Middle East negotiations. They are ignoring the language of the resolution and the explicit declarations of its authors that Israel should not be forced to return to the pre-1967 armistice lines; that those lines left defense of the country too precarious and should be replaced by "secure and recognized boundaries" to be negotiated by Israel and its neighbors.

Lord Caradon, Britain’s ambassador to the UN at the time and the person who introduced Resolution 242 in the Security Council, told a Lebanese newspaper in 1974: "It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions were undesirable and artificial. After all, they were just the places where the soldiers of each side happened to be on the day the fighting stopped in 1948. They were just armistice lines. That’s why we didn’t demand that the Israelis return to them, and I think we were right not to..." Arthur Goldberg, the American UN ambassador, made much the same point, stating that the reference to "secure and recognized boundaries" intentionally pointed to the parties negotiating new lines entailing a less than complete Israeli withdrawal and that "Israel’s prior frontiers had proved notably insecure." Lyndon Johnson, then President, declared Israel’s retreat to its former lines would be "not a prescription for peace but for renewed hostilities." He advocated new "recognized boundaries" that would provide "security against terror, destruction, and war."

Subsequent American presidents have reiterated Israel’s right to defensible borders.

The dangers for Israel of a return to the pre-1967 cease-fire lines are evident from even minimal consideration of the region’s topography. Such a withdrawal would not only reduce the nation to a width of nine miles at its center but would entail Israel’s handing over to people who continue to call for her ultimate dissolution control of hill country entirely dominating the coastal plane that is home to some 70% of Israel’s population.

It would also give potential hostile forces beyond the Jordan River untrammeled access to those heights.

This was what the drafters of Security Council Resolution 242 sought to preclude. And this is what the Munich Three now choose to ignore by calling upon the Quartet or the UN to abandon the emphasis on negotiations between the parties and to present a plan of its own based on Israeli retreat to the pre-1967 lines.

In the wake of the 1938 Munich agreement, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared, of course, that the parties had achieved "peace in our time." But Britain and France also offered solemn promises that, should Germany unexpectedly violate the agreement and move against what remained of Czechoslovakia, they would come to the rump nation’s defense.

Less than six months after Munich, Hitler conquered the rest of Czechoslovakia. Britain and France did nothing.

Now we have Britain, France and Germany swearing their dedication to Israel’s security and well-being, even as they meet, with Israel uninvited, and seek to strip her of defensible borders, and even as they have, in fact, neither the will nor the capacity to help defend Israel from the existential threats to which they would subject her.

What they do have the capacity to do - adhere to their obligations under Resolution 242, support a division of the West Bank that would entail Israel retaining defensible borders while allowing the vast majority of Palestinians to pursue a separate political course - they refuse to do.

There are other things Britain, France and Germany could do to advance genuine peace. They could work for an end to the genocidal incitement against Israel, and Jews more generally, purveyed by both Hamas and Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority. But instead they not only typically ignore Palestinian incitement but actually fund it, both in their individual contributions to the Palestinians and in their bankrolling of the Palestinians through the European Union. Some of these funds go directly to organs of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish incitement.

Germany could also curb its lucrative role in financing the Iranian regime, whose stated objective is Israel’s annihilation. But it has refused to do so.

In some respects the moral bankruptcy of today’s betrayal of Israel exceeds that of the betrayal of Czechoslovakia in 1938. Then, for example, Hitler vowed the Sudetenland would be his last territorial claim in Europe. There was at least this figleaf, however flimsy, for believing the Munich agreement might mean peace and rump Czechoslovakia might survive. In contrast, no Palestinian leader pretends an Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines would mean an end to Palestinian claims against Israel. All insist on a "right of return" to pre-1967 Israel for refugees of the 1947-48 war and their descendants; an objective that amounts to the dismantling of the Jewish state. And all Palestinian parties continue to indoctrinate their constituents, including their children, to believe Israel has no right to exist and to dedicate themselves to her destruction.

The United States has acted to postpone the planned April meeting of the Quartet, where the Munich Three were hoping to see the emphasis on bilateral, Israeli-Palestinian, negotiations, and on Security Council Resolution 242, formally abandoned in favor of an international plan based on Israeli retreat to the pre-1967 lines. But they may pursue the same objective at a future Quartet meeting. In addition, the Palestinians are threatening to seek UN recognition of a Palestinian state with borders defined by the pre-1967 boundaries, a course that likewise converges with the Munich Three’s agenda.

Churchill said of Chamberlain after Munich, "He was given a choice between war and dishonor. He chose dishonor and he will have war anyway."

The Munich Three had a choice between adhering to the central international agreement regarding resolution of the conflict and pushing Abbas to resume negotiations on the basis of that agreement or betraying their international commitments, betraying Israel, and almost certainly subjecting the region to more war and carnage. To their dishonor, they have chosen the latter.

Israeli Settlements, Jewish Boycotts, and "The Tent"

2011-04-24T12:00:00.001-04:00

First published on AmericanThinker.com

Should Jewish groups that boycott settlements be included within the tent of American Jewish organizations that join together to -- among other communal objectives -- defend Israel against assaults on her legitimacy and right to exist?

An answer was offered recently by Martin Raffel, senior vice president of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the national umbrella organization of local Jewish Community Relations Councils across the country. Raffel also wears another hat. Last fall, the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America created the Israel Action Network and charged it with "stand[ing] up against anti-Israel initiatives... and actively promot[ing] a fair and balanced picture of the Middle East among key constituencies." Raffel serves as the IAN's project director. A few weeks ago, Raffel opined:

"...[W]hat to think about Zionists on the political left who have demonstrated consistent concern for Israel's security, support Israel's inalienable right to exist as a Jewish democratic state, and consider Israel to be the eternal home of the Jewish people -- but have decided to express their opposition to specific policies of the Israeli government by refraining from participating in events taking place in the West Bank or purchasing goods produced there? I vigorously would argue that such actions are counter-productive in advancing the cause of peace based on two states that they espouse, a goal that we share. But this is not sufficient cause to place them outside the tent."

Raffel's formulation is a bit disingenuous in that the groups in question do not merely "refrain from participating" in events in the West Bank or from purchasing goods produced there. Rather, they actively exhort the public to join their boycott. If this were not so, few would be aware of their stance, and the question of letting them in or keeping them outside the tent would not arise.

In addition, while Raffel characterizes those he has in mind as having "demonstrated consistent concern for Israel's security," how is he measuring this? The statement assumes that boycotting West Bank communities can be congruent with defending Israel's long-term well-being.

It is clear why some would like to believe this without examining the question too closely.

Israel is under siege by people calling for her dissolution. This goes beyond the genocidal agenda promoted in the media, mosques and schools of much of the Arab world, including those of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. It extends to delegitimization of the Jewish state, and a propaganda assault aimed at her demise, in major media, on university campuses, and elsewhere across Europe and, to a lesser but still troubling extent, in the United States as well. At the same time, many others, including leaders of European governments and our own President, declare their dedication to Israel's well-being but -- against overwhelming evidence to the contrary -- insist that the settlements are the major obstacle to peace, and that if only Israel would abandon the settlement project and retreat essentially to the pre-1967 armistice lines the door to peace would open.

Under these circumstances, some in the Jewish community are inexorably drawn to embrace the position of the latter camp without looking too closely at its dangerous anti-Israel distortions. One reason is the allure of wishful thinking that this camp's stance entails: the false promise that peace can be had if Israel would only make sufficient concessions. Another reason is that those who are open-eyed and honest about Israel's predicament, who recognize and publicly declare it is Arab refusal to reconcile to Israel's existence, and not the settlements, that is the crux of the conflict, are widely smeared and reviled for their candor. The prospect of espousing that candor and being subject to such attack is too disconcerting for many Jews. In addition, some convince themselves that by signing on to the "settlements are the key" camp they are not only joining a more popular, and therefore more comfortable, constituency but are also strengthening a stance that is a viable counterweight to the exterminationist camp -- to those dedicated to Israel's destruction.

Throughout Jewish history, under whatever conditions of assault, there have inevitably been some Jews who embrace elements of their adversary's indictments, however bigoted and divorced from reality, in the hope that by doing so and pushing accommodating reforms they will mollify enough of the attackers and win relief.

But to assess properly whether vocal opposition to and boycott of settlements are indeed consistent with support of Israel, community leaders, and community members more generally who are truly dedicated to the Jewish state's well-being and survival, must look beyond what is comfortable -- what is popular opinion in various media and political circles in Europe and America -- and consider the reality on the ground. One must consider the origins of the settlements and their current significance in the context of Israel's well-being and in the search for a genuine, sustainable peace.

The cornerstone of the quest for Arab-Israeli peace is UN Security Council Resolution 242, unanimously adopted a few months after the 1967 war. The resolution calls for negotiations between Israel and its Arab neighbors and for "secure and recognized boundaries" to be agreed upon through such negotiations. The resolution does not call for Israel to return to the pre-war armistice lines, and the resolution's authors stated that this omission was intentional, that those lines were an invitation to further aggression against Israel and the future borders ought to be elsewhere. Lord Caradon, Britain's ambassador to the UN at the time and the person who introduced Resolution 242 in the Security Council, told a Lebanese newspaper in 1974:

"It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions were undesirable and artificial. After all, they were just the places where the soldiers of each side happened to be on the day the fighting stopped in 1948. They were just armistice lines. That's why we didn't demand that the Israelis return to them, and I think we were right not to..."

Lyndon Johnson, then President, stated that Israel's retreat to its former lines would be "not a prescription for peace but for renewed hostilities"; and he advocated new "recognized boundaries" that would provide "security against terror, destruction, and war."

The Israeli government at the time informally defined areas of the captured territory that it believed were vital for the country to retain in order to diminish the nation's earlier strategic vulnerability. These included the sparsely populated Jordan Valley, the main invasion route for hostile forces coming from the east; the heights dominating the valley as well as the heights overlooking the coastal plain, home to the great majority of Israel's population; and an enlarged Jerusalem together with its environs, in order to render the city more defensible.

The stance of the Labor Party, which led Israel for the decade following the 1967 war, was to push for an agreement that would have Israel keep these vital strategic areas while returning the balance of the West Bank, including areas home to the vast majority of the territory's Arab population, to Arab control.

The Labor government also embarked on construction of settlements in those areas it believed crucial for Israel to retain, in order to establish facts on the ground to reinforce Israel's claim to those areas. In a few instances, it also allowed reestablishment of a Jewish presence in locations of historic, religious importance to Jews. For example, it permitted the rebirth of a Jewish community in Hebron, which had been Judenrein since the Arab massacre of many of the town's Jews in 1929. Some political leaders who endorsed Labor's views on division of the territory nevertheless supported several such communities outside the boundaries of what they regarded as essential for defensible borders. They did so because they believed that, just as Arabs constituted what was then close to 20% of Israel's population, some Jews should be allowed to live in areas that would revert to Arab sovereignty, particularly areas of historic and religious significance to Jews.

The right-of-center Likud won control of the government in 1977 and for the next fifteen years either led the government or was equal or senior partner in governments of national unity. Likud party policy towards the West Bank eventually evolved into a plan for Arab autonomy under Israeli sovereignty, and Likud sponsored expansion of the settlement project both within and beyond the areas construed by Labor as necessary for defensible borders. But even during the years of Likud ascendancy, the great majority of Israelis, including much -- evidence suggests a majority -- of Likud's constituency, supported a division of the territory along the lines advocated by Labor.

In the 1992 election campaign, Labor, and its leader, Yitzhak Rabin, ran on a traditional party platform that emphasized the necessity of Israel retaining key strategic areas in the territories. At times, Rabin distinguished between security settlements and "ideological" settlements, suggesting the latter -- largely established under Likud -- were in areas not vital to the defense of the nation. But he repeatedly returned to the importance of Israel's retaining the former in the context of maintaining defensible borders. In his last speech in the Knesset, shortly before his assassination in November, 1995, Rabin declared:

"The borders of the State of Israel, during the permanent solution, will be beyond the lines which existed before the Six Day War. We will not return to the 4 June 1967lines.

"And these are the main changes, not all of them, which we envision and want in the permanent solution:

"A. First and foremost, united Jerusalem, which will include both Ma'ale Adumim and Givat Ze'ev -- as the capital of Israel, under Israeli sovereignty, while preserving the rights of the members of the other faiths, Christianity and Islam, to freedom of access and freedom of worship in their holy places, according to the customs of their faiths.

"B. The security border of the State of Israel will be located in the Jordan Valley, in the broadest meaning of that term.

"C. Changes which will include the addition of Gush Etzion, Efrat, Beitar and other communities, most of which are in the area east of what was the ‘Green Line,' prior to the Six Day War.

"D. The establishment of blocs of settlements in Judea and Samaria..."

If a significant number of Israelis were, during the Oslo years, less convinced of the need for defensible borders, those numbers have dramatically shrunk during the last decade, as Israel has been painfully reminded of the strategic realities of its predicament. The terror war launched by Arafat, after his rejection of concessions made by Ehud Barak at Camp David and further concessions proposed by President Clinton -- a war that cost Israel about a thousand dead and thousands more maimed -- woke many from their delusional slumber. Of those that continued deluded, more were finally forced to reconsider their wishful thinking in the wake of the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza and the aggression that has been the fruit of that territorial concession.

In any case, what grounds are there for considering Israel's strategic predicament, and its need for defensible borders, to be significantly different from what they were when Security Council Resolution 242 was written and unanimously adopted? Has the topography of the region changed? Does Hamas's call, in its charter and in its mosques and media and schools, for the murder of all Jews, reflect a more benign political environment? Or does Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority -- with its similar use of media, mosques and schools to denigrate all Israelis and Jews, to deny Jewish historic connection to any part of what was Mandate Palestine, to characterize Jews as usurpers whose presence must be expunged, and to glorify terrorist killers of Jews as models whom Palestinians should strive to emulate to rid the land of the Jewish state -- reflect some hopeful change that makes the need for defensible borders less vital? And what of the current upheaval in the Arab world, the turmoil in Egypt, the challenges to Jordan's government, the strengthening of Hezbollah in Lebanon? Is any of this to be construed as diminishing the importance of defensible borders?

Given the obvious threats, does anyone genuinely concerned with Israel's well-being believe there is any substitute for Israel's continued control of strategically vital areas? A UN presence? We've seen the fecklessness of UN troops around the world, not least on Israel's borders with its neighbors -- from the UN's abandonment of its peacekeeping role along the Egyptian-Israeli border during the lead-up to the 1967 war, to the failure of the UN's force in Lebanon to fulfill its mission of preventing the rearming of Hezb'allah in Lebanon and reestablishment of Hezb'allah's strongholds in Lebanon's south. Precedent likewise weighs strongly against any other foreign presence being more promising and not, rather, presenting its own dangers to Israel's well-being and survival.

In view of all this, what does it mean to condemn and boycott settlements? In essence, those who do so support forcing Israel back to the pre-1967 cease-fire lines while offering no realistic plan for how the nation could defend itself within those lines. In fact, they do not even acknowledge the strategic threat.

Consider, for example, J Street, its stance on settlements, and its moral bankruptcy regarding the threats confronting Israel. While asserting it "will not participate in targeted boycott or divestment initiatives," the organization also "note[s] positively that some promoting BDS tactics are trying to narrow the scope of boycotts or divestment initiatives to oppose simply the occupation and not Israel itself." In addition, "We oppose the occupation of the West Bank and the expansion and entrenchment of settlements there. We also oppose encroachment on Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem which must be part of a future Palestinian capital if a two-state outcome is to be achieved." Clearly, J Street's agenda is to promote Israel's withdrawal virtually to the pre-1967 lines.

And on the issue of how Israel is to defend itself within those lines? J Street essentially denies there is a threat. It recently opposed a Congressional letter calling on President Obama to take stern steps against Palestinian incitement to violence in the wake of the Itamar massacre. J Street complained that the letter was too one-sided as it failed, for example, to address Israeli incitement. But, of course, there is nothing comparable on the Israeli side to the Palestinian Authority's rejection -- in its media, mosques and schools -- of Israel's right to exist and its indoctrination of Palestinians to the cause of killing Israelis and destroying their state. The J Street call for evenhandedness is simply an effort to trivialize and dismiss the problem of Palestinian incitement.

J Street similarly seeks to trivialize and dismiss the physical threats to Israel presented by its enemies and, in addition, to indict those who take the threats seriously. Such people are ridiculed as paranoiacs mentally scarred by past assaults on the Jews and simply projecting that past onto a relatively benign present. J Street has opposed stronger sanctions against Iran, and the organization's leader, Jeremy Ben-Ami, has characterized as irrational anyone who would construe the threat presented by Hamas or Hezb'allah or Iran so great as to justify a military response. Ben-Ami went on to observe, in a New York Times interview, "... there's their grandmother's voice in their ear; it's the emotional side and the communal history..."

Israel faces genocidal enemies, nations and groups openly dedicated to its annihilation. The country has a right to defend itself and to retain the capacity to do so. Yet there are Jews and Jewish organizations demanding concessions from Israel that would compromise its defense. They call for pressures to force it to accept such concessions, condemn the nation for resisting, and do so without addressing the threats faced by the nation. There are Jewish individuals and groups that ignore the threats, and the long and continuing history of assaults upon Israel by her neighbors, and cast Israel's insistence upon defensible borders as land grabs, as rejection of peace, as colonial expansionism. Such people are defaming the Jewish state and making common cause with those who would destroy her.

For organizations genuinely dedicated to Israel's well-being to welcome such individuals and groups - caricatures and travesties of pro-Israel efforts - within the tent of Israel's supporters, to lend them that legitimacy, is a betrayal of the cause of the Jewish state's survival and security.

Abbas and the 'Plan of Stages'

2011-04-06T12:00:00.001-04:00

First published in The Jewish Press

Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas has refused to resume negotiations with Israel. His, and the PA's, alternative course goes beyond their recent attempt to gain United Nations Security Council condemnation of Israeli settlements, or their plan to pursue a condemnation of settlements in the UN General Assembly next fall. Abbas is also threatening to seek recognition from the UN of Palestinian statehood within borders defined by the pre-1967 cease-fire lines. He has, in addition, sought, and won, such recognition from various nations around the world, particularly in South America but elsewhere as well.

Abbas's path reflects, in fact, the perennial Palestinian objective of Israel's dissolution and the longstanding Palestinian strategy for achieving that goal. The Palestinian leadership has for decades striven to gain recognition, and territory, without acknowledging Israel's right to exist as the national homeland of the Jewish people and without giving up the pursuit of Israel's annihilation.

At the time of the initiation of the Oslo accords, on the evening of the famous signing and handshake on the White House lawn in September 1993, Yasir Arafat appeared on Jordanian television and explained to his constituency and wider Arab audience that they should understand Oslo in terms of the Palestine National Council's 1974 decision. This was a reference to the so-called Plan of Phases, formulated that year. The Plan called for the Palestine Liberation Organization to acquire whatever territory it could by negotiations, then use that land as a base from which it would pursue its ultimate goal of Israel's destruction. Arafat repeated this understanding of Oslo many times thereafter.

Consistent with this strategy, Arafat was more than willing to take control of any territory ceded by Israel via the Oslo process while making in return commitments - particularly regarding ending terror and incitement - on which he consistently reneged and avoiding signing onto any limitation of future Palestinian territorial claims. When, under pressure from President Clinton, he reluctantly entered "final status" talks with Clinton and Prime Minister Ehud Barak at Camp David in July 2000, Arafat rejected all the concessions offered by Barak and Clinton and refused to put forward counter-proposals. He was unwilling to accede to any accord, whatever the territorial and other concessions made by Israel, because an "end-of-conflict" agreement was now expected of him in return and he was not interested in ending the conflict and forgoing future, additional, Palestinian demands.

Around the same time, Arafat spoke of declaring a state unilaterally, as a way, again, of establishing "Palestine" without signing away future claims against Israel. Clinton made it clear the U.S. would not support such a unilateral move and, not least because of U.S. pressure, European states conveyed the same message.

When, after Camp David, Arafat launched his terror war against Israel, he did so once more with the intention of establishing a de facto state without signing a final peace accord. He had some hope of seizing additional territory via his terror campaign, but he also seems to have hoped the violence he triggered - particularly if it led to an incident that entailed significant loss of civilian lives on the Palestinian side - would win him greater world sympathy and an increased willingness by European and other nations to recognize a unilaterally declared state.

Short of this, he would try to parlay the carnage into international intervention and the introduction of an international force in the territories to "protect" the Palestinians. Such a force would inevitably provide a shield behind which Arafat could continue to pursue his terror attacks, would severely compromise Israel's ability to respond to the terror, and would in effect give Arafat his de facto state without his having signed a final status agreement.

Abbas, a longtime associate of Arafat and member of the Fatah and PLO leadership, has largely followed Arafat's course. He has not actively pursued a terror campaign - and he was critical of the terror war launched by Arafat - but he made clear at the time, and in statements since then, that his opposition to the manner in which Arafat used terror was purely tactical. He felt it did not serve to advance the Palestinians' ultimate goals.

Abbas has also made clear that those goals, for him, are the same as for Arafat.

He has refused to recognize Israel's legitimacy as the Jewish state, the expression of the right of national self-determination accorded other peoples, even though the original UN resolution on the division of Mandate Palestine west of the Jordan called for the establishment of a Jewish and an Arab state.

He has refused to consider any compromise regarding Palestinian insistence on a so-called right of return: the right of Palestinians to settle en masse inside whatever remains of Israel rather than have Palestinians settle in the new state created for them - a swamping of Israel that would, in effect, entail the dissolution of the state.

And he has given no indication of any willingness to agree to a final status accord.

Some have argued that Abbas would be inclined to be more forthcoming than Arafat but is inhibited by his political weakness, by the fact that his Fatah cadres and the wider Palestinian public are unprepared for reconciliation with Israel and for any compromise of demands that serve the goal of Israel's ultimate destruction. But Abbas has followed Arafat in using the mosques, media and schools under his control to militate against any peaceful resolution of the conflict. The message conveyed by all three is that Jews have no historical connection to any part of Palestine, that they are mere usurpers whose presence must be expunged, and that it is the duty of every Palestinian to pursue that goal.

In addition, Abbas has personally praised terrorists who have killed Israelis as the ideal that all Palestinians should strive to emulate and has explicitly endorsed efforts to delegitimize Israel and its right to exist within any borders.

Media reports some weeks ago of newly revealed documents showing supposed concessions by the PA in negotiations in 2008 with the Olmert administration do not change this picture.The contents of the documents are actually consistent with longstanding, widely known statements by PA leaders hinting at a willingness to entertain some limited land swaps and offering virtually no concessions on the "right of return." In addition, while the PA under Abbas has at times spoken of accepting such territorial positions, it has never actually signed off on any agreement with Israel. Arafat's negotiators, too, at times made conciliatory sounds and poured over maps as though seriously contemplating reaching compromises, but Arafat ultimately always balked and demanded more. At times the conciliatory feints were primarily for Israeli consumption, at times they were aimed more at placating the Americans. (Secretary of State Rice was present at some of the discussions documented in the recently released materials.) There is no reason to believe that the 2008 talks represented anything different from those earlier kabuki dances.

And those 2008 talks took place against a background of increasing and incessant rocket and mortar attacks against Israel from Gaza, and it was clear Israel would soon have to respond to this assault with an incursion into Gaza aimed at ending it. Abbas was very much interested in Israel's destroying Hamas in Gaza and handing Gaza over to the PA. A further motive for hinting at possible compromises, at least on territorial issues, may well have been a wish to have Israel believe it had a "partner" in the PA and therefore be more willing to expend Israeli lives to install the PA in Gaza rather than engaging in a more limited operation to try to end Gazan rocket fire and other terror attacks.

Also noteworthy was the nature of Abbas's outrage over the leaking of the documents. He not only argued that some claims of PA concessions were exaggerated, but tried to disown even the more modest hints at compromise actually contained in the documents. In fact, even though there have been suggestions of his entertaining such moves in the past, Abbas does not want to be seen by the Palestinian public as genuinely considering any compromises. This is consistent with his continuing the indoctrination of Palestinians, including Palestinian children, against accepting anything short of tactical steps that do not impinge on the ultimate objective of Israel's destruction and its replacement by a Palestinian Muslim state from the Jordan to the Mediterranean.

Abbas believes he's in a much better position than was Arafat to realize Arafat's dream of establishing a state on virtually all of the West Bank and Gaza and doing so without signing an agreement that would preclude the ongoing pursuit of Israel's demise; that is, in taking a major step towards completing the Plan of Phases. His belief is grounded largely in his perception of President Obama as an ally in this program.

As incisively conveyed by the Washington Post's Jackson Diehl following a May 2009 interview with Abbas shortly before the PA leader's first meeting with Obama, Abbas was convinced there was nothing he needed to do but to wait until the president delivered the Israelis for him.

Obama had already made a total Israeli settlement freeze - something to which no previous Israeli government had ever agreed and which had never been demanded by the Palestinians as a condition for earlier talks - the central issue in his stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He had done so while asking nothing of Abbas - nothing vis-à-vis ending incitement and preparing his population for reconciliation with Israel; nothing regarding recognizing Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people, even as both Abbas and Obama expected Israel to recognize, and help in establishing, a nation-state for the Palestinians; nothing on ending the demand for a "right of return" aimed at destroying Israel demographically.

Some have suggested that Obama's stance on settlements forced Abbas to balk at negotiations, since he could hardly be seen as asking for less than an American president. But even after Netanyahu had begun implementing a ten-month freeze on building, Abbas waited until shortly before the end of the freeze to agree to negotiations - and then made an extension of the freeze a condition for his continuing negotiations. So in this particular case, Abbas merely used Obama's stance as a convenient excuse for pursuing his long-defined objective of avoiding all negotiated concessions that might impinge on future demands.

That objective is the motivation as well for Abbas's seeking recognition of Palestinian demands in other forums: pushing for a UN Security Council condemnation of all "settlement" activity; likely seeking the same next fall in the General Assembly and perhaps seeking as well recognition of a Palestinian state demarcated by the pre-1967 cease-fire lines; requesting and obtaining from various nations such recognition of a Palestinian state along the pre-1967 lines. Again, all these steps reflect Arafat's policy of gaining a state in the territories without conceding future claims against Israel; that is, without foreswearing future phases in the Plan of Phases.

That Abbas's aggressiveness and success in these other forums have far exceeded Arafat's achievements once more owes much to President Obama. While the U.S. vetoed the Security Council resolution on settlements, it did so while vigorously condemning settlement activity, falling short of calling them "illegal" but coming closer to doing so than any U.S. president other than Jimmy Carter (the only one who has so characterized settlements) - and continuing to present settlements as the central issue in the conflict.

The fact that nations such as France, Britain and Germany voted for the Security Council resolution, and that many nations in South America and elsewhere have recognized "Palestine" with territories marked by the pre-1967 armistice lines, reflects the failure of the Obama administration to replicate President Clinton's strong stance against such moves and firm insistence that the U.S. would support only resolution of the conflict through bilateral negotiations.

That Latin American nations have led the way in signing on to the Palestinian program may also reflect the Obama administration's weak policies in South and Central America, the rise of Venezuela's dictator Hugo Chavez as the "strong horse" in the region, Obama's seeking to ingratiate himself with, rather than challenge, Chavez and the South and Central American leaders allied with him, and Obama's undercutting of democratic allies in the region such as Columbia and Honduras.

Indeed, the Obama administration has made virtually no effort to dissuade South and Central American nations from recognizing "Palestine." It has not forcefully pointed out that such recognition undermines the emphasis on bilateral negotiations as the key to an enduring agreement, and has not even put its full weight behind the centrality of bilateral negotiations. In contrast, Chavez and his backers, like their Iranian allies, have been strong advocates of all anti-Israel gestures.

There is little evidence of anything inhibiting Abbas's strategy from winning additional victories, and even less evidence of the Obama administration doing anything to counter that strategy. On the contrary, even in the midst of all the recent upheaval in the Arab world, with the possible emergence of Islamist forces gaining control of vast new territories and presenting, in conjunction with Iran, Syria, Hamas and Hizbullah, a much amplified threat to Israel, the Obama administration continues to increase the pressure on Israel for territorial and other concessions in the service of "peace."

There is also little evidence that any facts on the ground, any reality, can shift Obama from his rigid, ideologically-driven position on the Arab-Israeli conflict. The real, thus far unanswered, question is whether Israel is prepared to play Czechoslovakia to Obama's Neville Chamberlain.

Self-Reflection and Self-Blame; Israel and Obama

2011-03-20T12:00:00.002-04:00

First published on AmericanThinker.com

Much has been written about President Obama's reported statement to a Jewish group earlier this month that Israelis should search their souls concerning the quest for peace. In this offensive comment and related remarks, Obama once more put the onus on Israel for the absence of movement towards a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while he characterized Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas as eager for a fair deal.

In fact, Abbas has used the mosques, media and schools under his control to militate against any genuine peace. The message conveyed by all three is that Jews have no historical connection to any part of Palestine, that they are mere usurpers whose presence must be expunged, and that it is the duty of every Palestinian to pursue that goal. In addition, Abbas has personally praised terrorists who have killed Israelis as the ideal all Palestinians should strive to emulate and has explicitly endorsed efforts to delegitimize Israel and its right to exist within any borders.

But Obama's hostility to Israel appears impervious to all such realities. Perhaps this should not be surprising, as his jaundiced view of America's traditional role in world affairs is hardly more responsive to counter-evidence. Thus, he pursues the reining in of American leadership, and the reaching out to those who wish America ill, even as his doing so entails, among other travesties, allowing Muammar Gaddafi to slaughter most of his way back to full control of Libya; promising carrots to Sudan's Omar al-Bashir despite the continuing genocide in Darfur; and doing nothing meaningful to help the bloodied people of Iran throw off the totalitarian yoke of their nation's theocracy.

Obama's insulting call for Israeli soul-searching reminded many of a similarly hostile statement in July, 2009, in which he urged Israelis to do some "serious self-reflection." But commentary on Obama's "advice," both then and now, has generally failed to note that, for many Israelis, the last decade has, in fact, been one of intense soul-searching and self-reflection.

This introspection, for most, has been a radical departure from a decade earlier, when these same people had largely abandoned serious consideration of the realities of Israel's predicament. They had done so primarily out of exhaustion with the unending Arab siege of their nation.

For the more than forty years from the nation's founding until the early 1990's, Israelis had envisioned their Arab neighbors ultimately reconciling themselves to the Jewish state's existence and agreeing to peace. They had pinned their hopes on various imagined scenarios.

From the time the League of Nations, in 1922, mandated the creation, in former Ottoman Empire territories, of two large Arab states as well as -- in the Jews' ancestral homeland -- reestablishment of the Jewish national home, the Arab world had rejected the latter project and local Arabs had repeatedly resorted to bloody attacks on Jews living in the Mandate region assigned them. Nevertheless, after Israel's creation, many Israelis anticipated the Arab world would accept the Jewish state as a fait accompli.

When this failed to materialize, many, recalling recurrent British incitement of Arab attacks on the Jews both before and during the 1947-48 war, theorized that Arab hostility was fueled largely by colonial manipulation. They therefore expected it would dissipate when Britain retreated from the region.

When this too failed to occur, optimism shifted to the thesis that the Arab war against Israel was propelled by the machinations of conservative Arab monarchs and would end as they were replaced by new, reformist leaders. Indeed, many Israelis saw the 1952 coup in Egypt that catapulted Gamel Abdel Nasser to power as a harbinger of peace. This also, of course, proved dramatically wrong. It was then argued that hostility to Israel was fed by pan-Arabism and so would inevitably ease as the various Arab nations redirected their attention to their own people and their internal development. Others suggested Arab enmity was encouraged and sustained by Arab despots of various stripes but would disappear with what they believed to be the impending democratization of the Arab world.

But the Arab siege continued, accompanied by recurrent acts of anti-Israel terror. In 1967, the siege reached a new level of intensity as Egypt mustered a huge force on Israel's border, declared the time had come for Israel's destruction, and enlisted other Arab states in its planned offensive.

When Israel won the ensuing war in dramatic fashion and captured large swathes of Arab territory, many Israelis then anticipated that the Arabs would agree to peace in order to recover lost lands. But instead the Arab nations soon unanimously endorsed the "three no's": no recognition, no negotiation, no peace.

Then in the late 1970's, Egypt, under Anwar Sadat, broke ranks with the rest of the Arab world and agreed to a negotiated peace. Israelis now anticipated that this presaged a widening circle of Arab-Israeli accommodation. But Egypt was ostracized by all other Arab states for its accord with Israel. In addition, Egypt refused to implement the approximately two dozen agreements on normalization of trade and other relations that were part of the treaty with Israel. Instead, it fashioned a "cold peace" that has entailed, for example, ongoing intense defamation of Israel in state-controlled media and an actual increase of anti-Semitic propaganda in Egyptian print and broadcast outlets.

As the continuation of the Arab siege, and recurrent disappointment in hopes for a change in Arab attitudes, wore away anticipation of a soon-to-be-realized genuine peace, a significant portion of the Israeli public, including the majority of the nation's elites, chose to turn its gaze from the reality of Arab enmity. It averted its eyes as well from the reality of Arab hostility - then as now -- towards every minority, religious or ethnic, living within what Muslim Arabs consider as properly their exclusive domains. This has included, for example, rejection of, and attacks upon, the Christian blacks of southern Sudan and Christians across the Arab world, the Muslim blacks of Darfur, the Berbers of Algeria and the Kurds in Syria and Iraq.

Large numbers of Israelis chose to look away from such unpleasant realities and instead embrace delusions of Israeli control over the nation's predicament vis-a-vis its neighbors. They embraced the delusion, despite all the evidence against it, that Arab hatred was actually due to past Israeli missteps and fault and that if Israel would only make sufficient amends, especially retreat to the pre-1967 armistice lines, then Arab hostility would be assuaged and peace would ensue. They insisted that Israel would then not need to concern itself with defensible borders as, in the context of peace, there would be nothing to defend against.

They abandoned all serious self-reflection and rushed en masse to endorse the Oslo agreements and embrace arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat and his cadres as their "peace partners." On the September, 1993, evening after the signing of the initial Oslo accords on the White House lawn, Arafat declared in a broadcast to his Palestinian constituents and to the wider Arab world that they should understand Oslo as the first step in implementing the PLO's 1974 plan. This was a reference to the "plan of phases," which called for taking whatever land could be gained by negotiations and using that territory as a base for pursuing Israel's annihilation. But Israel's Oslo enthusiasts ignored Arafat's speech and celebrated the outbreak of "peace."

In the ensuing months, and more particularly after Arafat's arrival in the territories, Israel suffered the worst level of terror attacks it had ever endured. Arafat openly praised those responsible for the terror. The Palestinian Authority, then as now, used its media, mosques and schools to declare Israel's existence illegitimate, teach Palestinian children they must devote themselves to the nation's destruction, and prepare the entire Palestinian population for incessant war against Israel. Still, half of Israel ignored all this and continued to focus its gaze on its rosy delusions.

Some Oslo devotees did, during the Oslo years, revert to serious reflection and soul-searching on Israel's predicament and the harm the nation had done itself. In 1997, senior Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit, a former Oslo enthusiast, wrote,

"In the early 90's... we, the enlightened Israelis, were infected with a messianic craze... All of a sudden, we believed that... the end of the old Middle East was near. The end of history, the end of wars, the end of the conflict... We fooled ourselves with illusions. We were bedazzled into committing a collective act of messianic drunkenness."

But Shavit's opening his eyes was then a rare act among Oslo's true believers, and he was vilified by other "enlightened Israelis."

It was only in 2000, when Arafat and his associates rejected Israel's dramatic concessions at Camp David, rejected as well President Clinton's bridging proposals, refused to offer any counter-proposals and instead launched their terror war against Israel, that Oslo enthusiasts in large numbers began to engage in serious self-reflection and free themselves from their erstwhile delusions. The numbers of the disabused grew as the terror war increased in viciousness, claiming more victims on buses, in restaurants, in markets and outside schools.

Still more who had resisted serious reflection on Israel's situation began to abandon their delusions when Israel unilaterally evacuated all its citizens and soldiers from Gaza and got in return intensified rocket and mortar attacks onto Israeli towns and villages near the Gaza border.

Today, the great majority of Israelis understand they have no "peace partner." They understand the agenda of Hamas, which explicitly declares in its charter, in its media, in its mosques, in its schools, its dedication not only to the annihilation of Israel but to the murder of all Jews, and which daily seeks to translate its words into acts. They understand that so-called "moderate" Mahmoud Abbas, while talking of peace to foreign audiences, makes clear to his own people that he and his Fatah movement will likewise not reconcile themselves to Israel's existence.

There are, however, still many Israelis who cling to their Oslo era delusions, people who still insist that sufficient Israeli concessions will somehow transform the Middle East and who persist in misconstruing defamatory self-blame as serious self-reflection. Among them are the much diminished ranks of Peace Now.

But then, President Obama, too, mistakes defamatory self-blame for serious self-reflection, as illustrated in his serial apologies for American behavior and in those myriad policies predicated on his jaundiced view of America; policies, again, adhered to despite all evidence of their disastrous consequences.

Israel's shift to serious self-reflection, to looking open-eyed at the nation's predicament, did not come cheaply. Nearly 1,500 lives have been lost to the anti-Israel terror enabled by Oslo. With the American population some fifty times that of Israel, a proportional loss would be 75,000 dead. Let us hope President Obama's path from apologetics, and from the hubris of ignoring the world's grim realities, to genuine soul-searching and self-reflection does not entail America's paying such a dear price.

Israeli Academia: The Rot Spreads

2011-02-02T17:52:00.001-05:00

The new year has produced yet another boycott of Israelis by Israeli illuminati. In this case 150-plus academics signed a petition calling for a boycott of the Ariel University Center of Samaria (formerly the College of Judea and Samaria).

This latest boycott petition by Israeli academics is, however, different in one respect. According to its initiator, Nir Gov, a scientist at the Weizmann Institute, over a third of the signatories are drawn from natural and physical science faculties, moving beyond the humanities and social science departments that have traditionally been the major source of slanted, defamatory attacks on the Jewish state.

Gov noted this with apparent pride. But the fact that successful scientists, who almost invariably have taken exquisite care to assure the accuracy of their experimental results before publishing them, would sign onto a distorted, biased assault on Israel, actually represents a further slippage in the moral integrity of significant elements of Israeli academia.

Gov’s petition includes invocation of the smear of Israeli “apartheid”; specifically, a declaration that Ariel reflects a “policy of apartheid.” Of course, apartheid in South Africa was a race-based system aimed at keeping all of the territory on which black South Africans lived under control of the white government while withholding from blacks genuine citizenship rights. In contrast, Israelis, while wanting to negotiate new, defensible borders as called for by the authors of UN Security Council resolution 242 in the wake of the 1967 war, overwhelmingly support an agreement which would entail the vast majority of Palestinians pursuing their own political course in lands ceded by Israel. In fact, proposals for such an arrangement, and even for ceding more territory than is consistent with Israel’s preserving defensible borders, have repeatedly been made by Israeli governments and invariably rejected by Palestinian leaders.

The petition, again parroting standard anti-Israel tropes, characterizes Ariel as an “illegal settlement” and its existence a violation of “international law and the Geneva Convention.”

While states and international bodies generally hostile to Israel have embraced such characterizations of Ariel and other Israeli communities beyond the 1949 armistice lines, various experts on international law, and groups referencing expert opinion, have refuted these claims.

For example, Eugene Rostow, a former dean of Yale Law School, a leading interpreter of international law, an undersecretary of state for political affairs in the American State Department, and an author of Resolution 242, argued that, under the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine and under article 80 (the so-called “Palestine article”) of the United Nations Charter, Jews have a right to settle in any of the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. The settlements are therefore neither illegal nor a violation of the Geneva Convention.

Only when there is an agreement in which Israel explicitly cedes territory and foregoes the presence of Israeli communities in that territory will parts of the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean be legally closed to Israeli settlement. Indeed, Israel has foregone settlement in areas A and B as defined by the September, 1995, Oslo II interim agreement, the former area ceded to full Palestinian control, the latter to Palestinian civilian and Israeli security control. Israel has done so even as the Palestinians have violated their own obligations under Oslo II.

Rostow wrote more specifically some years after the 1967 war, “Israel has an unassailable right to establish settlements in the West Bank.”

Other experts have pointed out that the Geneva Convention refers to forced transfer of civilian populations and, as the settlements entail voluntary movement, the Convention is irrelevant for this reason as well.

Based on the relevant international documents and expert legal opinion, the U.S. State Department, for example, does not view the Geneva Convention as applicable to Israeli settlements. In addition, U.S. administrations, with the exception of that of Jimmy Carter, have consistently regarded settlements as legal even as some have criticized them as complicating the search for peace.

The academic signatories of the recent anti-Ariel petition once more mimic Israel’s critics by suggesting that settlements such as Ariel are rendering peace impossible. But the claim that border issues and settlements are obstacles to peace flies in the face of repeated experience over the decades, and not least in the last decade, with Israel’s Arab interlocutors. The Palestinian leadership has consistently declared and demonstrated that no territorial concessions could induce it to sign onto an “end of conflict” agreement, give up demands for a “right of return” intended to transform Israel into yet another Arab entity, recognize Israel as a Jewish state, or indeed recognize the legitimacy of any Jewish sovereignty in the area. Moreover, it has consistently used its media, mosques and schools to indoctrinate Palestinians into believing that all Jewish claims are illegitimate, a falsification of history, a violation of international law, and a usurpation of Arab and Muslim rights, and that it is the obligation of Palestinians to dedicate themselves to Israel’s annihilation.

Within humanities and social science departments of Israeli universities, the all-too-common abandonment of education and its replacement with anti-Zionist and “post-Zionist” indoctrination built on false and defamatory claims, is well documented and widely recognized. An incident such as Teddy Katz receiving a grade of 97 from Haifa University’s history department for his masters thesis, submitted in 1998, falsely claiming that Israeli soldiers massacred Arabs in the village of Tantura during the 1947-1949 war, is just one of the more notorious examples of this phenomenon.

But the involvement of large numbers of natural and physical science faculty members in the recent petition - their categorical endorsement of claims against Israel that are either bogus or, at best, dubious and open to incisive counter-argument - represents more than simply a numerical expansion of those Israeli university departments touched by a debauching of academic integrity.

Petition organizer Gov is a member of Weizmann’s Chemical Physics department and appears to have enjoyed quite a successful career. Another petition signatory and fellow department member Itamar Procaccia has won particular prominence in his field, having been honored with the Israel Prize for his professional achievements.

But success in a field such as theirs requires an academic rigor far beyond that expected in humanities and social science departments, even those that still adhere to basic standards of integrity. No serious scholar involved in research in chemical physics would allow a paper to go out with his name on it unless the experimental results being reported upon - whether his own or those of graduate students or post-docs working in his laboratory - were checked and rechecked, the experiments repeated and the resulting data vetted again and again. In addition, papers reporting on the scholar’s research would claim nothing beyond what the confirmed experiments demonstrate. If the scholar chose to include in a publication possible implications of his experimental results, or to speculate more widely on the significance of his data, he would clearly label such inclusions simply possibilities and speculations.

Yet here in this recent petition we have individuals like Gov and Procaccia, who almost certainly take rigorous care in the research with which they associate their names, signing on to categorical claims that are factually shoddy and demonstrably biased regarding such matters as the legality of settlements, the relevance of the Geneva Conventions, the possibilities of genuine peace and the place of settlements in the quest for peace. In addition, the research about which they are so meticulous is likely abstruse and hardly applicable to people’s immediate well-being, while the petition claims about which they are so cavalier are exploited by Israel’s enemies and have very practical, deleterious consequences for the state and its people.

And so, as reflected in this recent petition, the defamation of Israel by Israeli academics has not only won new faculty recruits but has engaged those whose training and professional practices ought to render them more immune to endorsing biased and defamatory claims. The rot not only widens but deepens.

Promoting a Genocidal “Peace”

2010-04-16T12:00:00.004-04:00

First published on FrontPageMagazine.com

Indoctrination to genocidal anti-Semitism is epidemic among Palestinians and in Arab and other Muslim states. “Peace” plans that do not recognize this as the major obstacle to genuine peace, but rather push steps which ignore it, inexorably lead to more violence and are doomed to fail. Even worse, by their silence on this issue they pander to and help promote such deadly hate-mongering.

Demonization not only of Israel’s Jews but of all Jews, and calls for their mass murder, are a staple of Palestinian institutions, those controlled by Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority as well as those of Hamas.

Hamas’s charter quotes a Hadith in which Allah declares that the Day of Judgement will not come until the Jews are all killed and even the stones and trees will help in murdering them. The charter adds that Hamas “aspires to the realization of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take.”

Hamas systematically employs its media, mosques and schools to convey the same message. Its schools and children’s television programming teach their young audience the virtues of killing Jews.

The Palestinian Authority hardly lags behind its Islamist rivals in peddling genocidal Jew-hatred. PA media depict Jews as a cancer that must be excised and, like Hamas, insist it is a religious duty to do so. PA indoctrination includes delineations of the nature of Jews that entail virtually every hoary anti-Semitic caricature. While PA leaders such as Mahmoud Abbas talk of “peace” to Western leaders and media, they use their vehicles of incitement to instill in Palestinians not only commitment to annihilating Israel but also dedication to extirpating the Jews.

For example, a recent official Palestinian Authority Friday sermon, broadcast on PA TV and translated by The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), had the preacher declaring: “The Jews are the enemies of Allah and His messenger… the enemies of humanity in general… Our mutual enmity with the Jews is a matter of faith more than an issue pertaining to occupation and land… The prophet Muhammad said: ‘You will fight the Jews, and you will kill them…’”

In the wider Arab world, even in countries allied to the United States, the same message is incessantly promoted. A recurrent feature of Saudi government television is of clerics or other authority figures demonizing Jews, often with the speaker having children present to whom they are imparting their Jew-hating wisdom.

Even in countries with which Israel is officially at peace, such as Egypt, variations on the same theme are prominent in government-controlled media. Egyptian television and government newspapers have, for example, featured clerical and academic authorities confirming the Jews do indeed use the blood of non-Jews in their recipes for Passover matzoh.

Robert Wistrich, a leading authority on the history of anti-Semitism and author of the recently published book on the subject, A Lethal Obsession, has written:

“In the Middle East, [anti-Semitism] has taken on a particularly dangerous, toxic and potentially genocidal aura of hatred, closely linked to the ‘mission’ of holy war or jihad against the West and the Jews…

“The scale and extremism of the [anti-Semitic] literature and commentary available in Arab or Muslim newspapers, journals, magazines, caricatures, on Islamist websites, on the Middle Eastern radio and TV news, in documentaries, films, and educational materials, is comparable only to that of Nazi Germany at its worst.”

Also noteworthy is that, aside from the exacerbations introduced by the rise of Islamist groups in recent decades, similar anti-Jewish depredations permeated much of the Arab world before the 1967 war and Israel’s presence in the West Bank and Gaza, and even before Israel’s founding.

What has been the Western response to this promotion of genocidal Jew-hatred? Largely silence. In the Palestinian arena, the indoctrination has actually been paid for in part by the European Union and individual European states, the United Nations and even American government funds.

But no less morally obscene is the virtual absence of any acknowledgment of this hate indoctrination from all discussions of “peace.” There are, here and there, some bland references to ending “incitement,” but no evident outrage over the level and nature of the incitement or discussion of what must be done – or the time it will take – to reverse the impact of decades of hate-inculcation.

Nor is there any recognition of Israel’s need to be able to defend itself from the onslaught that it has faced in the past and will inevitably face in the future as a result of this indoctrination. The need for Israel to have defensible borders – recognized in 1967 by the authors of UN Security Council Resolution 242 in the wake of the Six Day War, and by various U.S. presidents in the ensuing decades – gets scant recognition from today’s self-styled promoters of peace, even as the intensity and impact of Palestinian and broader Arab genocidal Jew-hatred has only grown.

Territory beyond the pre-1967 cease-fire line that Israel has every right under 242 and under international law to claim for the purpose of national defense, territories that should, given their legal status, be depicted as “disputed,” are declared “Palestinian” by Western politicians and media.

Israel’s claims are dismissed as illegitimate land-grabs and the threats against her are ignored.

Those interested in a genuine peace would recognize that true peace is a long way off and will never be achieved as long as Israel’s enemies continue to indoctrinate their people in genocidal anti-Semitism. They would draw public attention to this obscenity and to its obstruction of possible movement toward a real peace. And they would seek in the interim lesser, and less murder-enabling, goals entailing a separation of Palestinians from Israel to the degree commensurate with Israel’s retaining strategic territories necessary for its defense; goals that, for example, would not put Israel’s major population centers within range of the type of assaults that have followed upon Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza.

Genuine peace-seekers would aspire to arrangements that enable Palestinians to pursue their own, separate political course without rendering Israel more vulnerable to those whose agenda is the annihilation of its people.

Promoters of anything less, of any plan that is silent about the hate-indoctrination and the existential threat it represents to Israel, or gives it no more than a passing nod of acknowledgment as a problem, are not pursuing peace. Promoters of any formula that talks of “peace” as reachable in short order and dismisses Israel’s need for defensible borders are not agents of serious attempts to attain peace. Whether such formulas emanate from gentile or Jew, from the EU, or individual European states, or the UN, or the Quartet, or the State Department or the White House, or are advanced by Israel’s Meretz party, or the devotees of Peace Now, or the beneficiaries of the New Israel Fund, or the groupies of J Street – their promoters are in reality silent appeasers and accommodators, and not infrequently abettors, of those who are both propagandizing for and actively aspiring to another genocide of the Jews.

Auto-Genocide Jewish Style

2009-12-24T12:00:00.000-05:00

First published on FrontPageMagazine.com

Demonization not only of Israel’s Jews but of all Jews, and calls for their mass murder, are a staple of media, mosques and schools throughout most of the Arab world and in some non-Arab Muslim countries such as Iran. Jews are portrayed as vermin or as satanic beings, the source of all human ills, ritual murderers of Muslim and Christian children, evil-doers fit only for extermination.

Yet, as in virtually every past situation when incitement against Jews and attacks on them have intensified, some Jews have rushed to volubly defend the Jews’ attackers. They have become supporters and cheerleaders even for those most committed to translating their Jew-hatred into action.

Hamas’s charter quotes a Hadith in which Allah declares that the Day of Judgement will not come until the Jews are all killed and even the stones and trees will help in murdering them. The charter adds that Hamas “aspires to the realization of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take.” Hamas has, of course, perpetrated innumerable terrorist attacks targeting Israeli civilians, including suicide bombings and rocket and mortar barrages, and Hamas children’s television instructs its young audience to kill Jews.

Yet Jewish member of Britain’s Parliament Gerald Kaufman has affectionately compared Hamas to Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto. American Sara Roy, a “researcher” at Harvard’s Center for Middle East Studies and a perennial figure on the Israel-bashing lecture circuit, has waxed rhapsodic about the supposed “evolution in [Hamas's] political thinking… [and] its position on a two-state solution” and defends the organization’s administration of Gaza. This as Hamas seeks to impose Sharia law across Gaza and repeatedly proclaims its unswerving commitment to its anti-Israel and anti-Jewish agenda.

Hezbollah head Hassan Nasrallah has declared that “If [the Jews] all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide,” and Hezbollah has in fact gone after them worldwide, as in its 1994 bombing of the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires that claimed 87 lives. But none of this has constrained Noam Chomsky from visiting with Nasrallah and other Hezbollah leaders, praising the organization and advocating its arming. Norman Finkelstein has likewise met with Hezbollah leaders and offered encomiums to the group. Emoted Finkelstein at one point, “I say this without fear: for those who believe in freedom and dignity, we are all Hezbollah now.”

Iran’s Achmadinejad has, of course, repeatedly asserted there was no Holocaust while promising to visit a future Holocaust on Israel. He has virulently attacked “the Jews” and ratcheted up Iran’s support in money, weapons and training to Hamas and Hezbollah. Yet Achmadinejad’s Iran, too, has its Jewish supporters, who cast the Iranian theocracy as Israel’s victim. This is not limited to the usual culprits such as Chomsky. For example, the voice of the blog “Tikun Olam” (which has now widely come to mean somehow healing the world by attacking and seeking to undermine the Jewish state), one Richard Silverstein, declared, regarding Iran’s nuclear threat, “Of course, the Iranians do not have an ICBM to carry such a warhead. Nor do they have a nuclear weapon. But these are mere technicalities when it comes to frightening the world into adopting the Israeli government’s priorities and interests.”

Noteworthy is that many of those who embrace today’s would-be exterminators of the Jews make a point of advertising that they are themselves children of Holocaust survivors. Examples are Finkelstein and Sara Roy. In their twisted thinking, they trumpet their parents’ history as though it somehow confers on them a special right to back forces that aspire to another Holocaust.

A variation on outright Jewish support for purveyors of genocidal Jew-hatred is the spectacle of Jews who downplay the threat and indict those taking it seriously. The latter are ridiculed as paranoiacs mentally scarred by past assaults on the Jews and simply projecting that past onto a relatively benign present. The leader of the new American Jewish lobby “J Street” (which has opposed stronger sanctions against Iran), Jeremy Ben-Ami, characterized as irrational anyone who would construe the threat presented by Hamas or Hezbullah or Iran as so great as to justify a military response. Ben-Ami went on to observe, in a New York Times interview, “… there’s their grandmother’s voice in their ear; it’s the emotional side and the communal history…”

Some Israelis promote the same line. Hebrew University political scientist Yaron Ezrahi has virtually made a career of purveying this comprehension of reality. Ezrahi has suggested that the perception of existential threats reflects in large part less actual dangers than a warped world view embraced by some Jews and “founded on a long memory of persecution, genocide, and a bitter struggle for survival…”

Many more Jews could be mentioned who support those openly calling for the Jews’ annihilation, and still more who downplay the threat and caricature concerned voices. Hardly less unsavory are the myriad Jews who attack Israel’s policies as the source of all the nation’s difficulties, insist that “peace” can be had if only Israel would reform itself and make sufficient concessions, militantly advocate such a course and say nothing of the genocidal agenda of the nation’s enemies or of their aggressive indoctrinating of additional cadres dedicated to enacting that agenda.

M.J. Rosenberg, erstwhile director of Israel Policy Forum’s Washington Policy Center, has written multiple articles on, for example, Israel and Hamas. He has invariably used them to excoriate Israel and complain about the Jewish state and the U.S. not being more forthcoming to the Palestinian Jihadists – as in “The U.S. should be extending carrots to Hamas” – and has never addressed Hamas’s explicit and continually reasserted commitment to the extermination of Israel and the Jews. He has acknowledged Hamas’s involvement in terror and its opposition to Israel’s existence but has uniformly done so in the context of criticizing Israeli policies.

Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iranian mullahs and others of Israel’s enemies have not hidden their objective. As has been the case whenever Jews have been under threat, there is no shortage of those from the community who side with the aggressors, or dismiss the threat and demean anyone taking it seriously, or rationalize the threat, cast fellow Jews as instigating it and demand their reform. All, shamefully, lend succor and cover to the would-be annihilators.

Israeli Settlements: Reality Vs. Hype

2009-07-29T12:00:00.004-04:00

First published in the Jewish Press

The Obama administration's high-profile focus on Israeli settlements and demand for a total freeze of construction beyond the pre-1967 armistice line have delighted many around the world, some of whom may even believe that settlements are the major obstacle to peace. But such views, like the administration's slant on the issue, are based on false premises and oft-repeated misinformation.

Essential, and typically misrepresented, truths about the settlements include facts concerning their origins and history, their status in international law, the status of the land on which they've been built, their place in Israeli-Palestinian agreements, their significance in the context of the search for peace, and the stances taken by various American administrations regarding them.

In the wake of the 1967 Six-Day War, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 242, calling for Israeli withdrawal from captured lands but also - rather than full withdrawal - negotiation of "secure and recognized boundaries." The framers of 242 acknowledged that the pre-war lines put Israel at perpetual risk. They supported Israel retaining some areas.

Lord Caradon, then Britain's UN ambassador, introduced Resolution 242. He told a Lebanese interviewer years later, "It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions were undesirable and artificial. After all, they were just the places where the soldiers on each side happened to be on the day the fighting stopped in 1948. They were just armistice lines. That's why we didn't demand that the Israelis return to them, and I think we were right not to "

Shortly after the war, President Lyndon Johnson said Israel's retreat to its former lines would be "not a prescription for peace but for renewed hostilities." He advocated new boundaries that provided "security against terror, destruction, and war."

Media and governments unsympathetic to Israel commonly misrepresent 242. In the summer of 2000, when Israel, the Palestinian Authority and President Clinton met at Camp David in an attempt to forge a final status agreement, The New York Times on three different occasions claimed 242 called for Israel to retreat to the pre-1967 lines. Each time it also published a correction, but only after the third correction did it finally desist from distorting the resolution.

Media and governments also typically refer to the entire West Bank as "occupied" or "Palestinian" territory, although it is formally neither. Since, under the terms of 242, and according to the UN charter, Arabs and Israelis both have claims on the land that are to be reconciled by negotiation, the area is more properly designated "disputed" territory.

In fact, there is a broad consensus in Israel for forgoing claims to much of the territory while insisting on certain essential adjustments. Virtually from the end of the 1967 fighting, Israel has sought to address particular strategic vulnerabilities: the nation's nine-mile width; the security of Jerusalem; the domination of Israel's population centers, on the coastal plain, by heights beyond the pre-war lines; and the strategic necessity of controlling the Jordan Valley.

At the same time, Israel recognized the advisability of separating itself from the Arab population on the West Bank, and its defining of vital strategic areas emphasized locations away from Arab population centers. Moreover, areas of most critical strategic importance were also, typically, sparsely populated.

(Nor, contrary to Israel's detractors, have Israeli leaders thought in terms of ceding Arab population centers as isolated "cantons." Most Israelis have appreciated the importance of contiguity for ceded areas, not least because contiguity would facilitate viable separation. Also noteworthy is that a unified Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank would require a secure connecting route across Israel, yet few of those complaining of a "cantonized" Palestinian entity seem concerned that such a corridor would entail Israel compromising its own territorial contiguity.)

Labor governments that led Israel through the first decade after the 1967 war sought to reinforce Israel's claim to vital strategic areas by establishing "facts on the ground" in the form of settlements built on unoccupied public, or "state," land. Subsequent Likud-led governments diverged from this pattern by also creating settlements close to Arab population centers, typically in places of Jewish religious and historical significance. Labor leaders, including Yitzhak Rabin, responded by distinguishing between necessary security settlements and "ideological" settlements.

In none of Israel's prior agreements with Palestinian or other Arab parties - including the Oslo-era accords - did Israel accede to a cessation of all growth in Jewish communities beyond the pre-1967 armistice lines. On the issue of retaining defensible borders, Rabin, for example, in his last speech to the Knesset before his assassination, reaffirmed the necessity of Israel remaining in control of the Jordan Valley "in the widest sense," meaning control as well over the heights dominating the valley.

The 2003 "road map" put forward under the auspices of the Quartet (the U.S., Russia, the European Union and the UN) does call, as part of Phase I, for a complete cessation of settlement growth. But the road map, while endorsed by the Israeli cabinet, has never been officially accepted by the Palestinian Authority.

Moreover, Phase I also requires extensive steps "at the outset" by the PA. These include security measures aimed particularly at ending all anti-Israel terrorism and dismantling terrorist infrastructures and independent militias; institution-building intended to establish a "strong parliamentary democracy"; and an end to anti-Israel incitement.

There has, of course, been virtually no movement by the Palestinians on any of these steps. On the contrary, Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah continues, just like Hamas, to promote anti-Israel terror, employ its media, mosques and schools to attack Israel's legitimacy and call for its destruction, and praise terrorist "martyrs." Indeed, Abbas himself has refused to endorse Israel's legitimacy, demands a Palestinian "right of return" that would transform Israel into yet another Arab-dominated state in the region, and continues to honor those who died attacking Israeli civilians.

In addition, President Bush, in his April 2004 letter to Prime Minister Sharon, called for "secure, defensible borders" for Israel and stated that "In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949, and all previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution have reached the same conclusion."

While the latter statement may differ in wording from those of earlier presidents, other presidents as well have endorsed the necessity of defensible borders for Israel and Israel's retention of some territory beyond the 1949 armistice lines.

There is presently sharp debate between the Netanyahu and Obama administrations on whether the Bush administration agreed to Israeli growth within the boundaries of major settlements even in the context of the road map, with some U.S. officials involved in the relevant deliberations agreeing with the Israeli stance. In any case, there is no debate about the Bush letter, and virtually all settlement growth in the years since that communication has been within the large settlement blocs that Bush as well as most of his predecessors envisioned being retained by Israel. In addition, Israel has not enlarged the boundaries of those settlements or established new settlements.

A separate question is that of the legality of the settlements under international law. While it has been popular, particularly in the Muslim world and in Europe, to simply call the settlements illegal, there is much in international law, including the UN charter, that weighs in the other direction.

Numerous experts on international law have also attested to the legality of the settlements. For example, Eugene Rostow, former dean of Yale Law School and undersecretary of state, wrote in 1991, "The Jewish right of settlement... west of the Jordan River, that is, in Israel, the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip... has never been terminated and cannot be terminated except by a recognized peace between Israel and its neighbors..."

It was largely because of the weight of evidence on their legality that all American presidents except for Jimmy Carter and perhaps Barack Obama (who has used the term "illegitimate") have refrained from characterizing the settlements as illegal. Earlier presidents have rather criticized them as unhelpful, or as obstacles to a negotiated agreement, in view of Arab objections to them.

The heyday of settlements being viewed as a major obstacle to "peace" was during the years leading up to Oslo and then during the Oslo era, when Israel's peace movement aggressively advanced the argument that the dispute with Israel's neighbors was essentially one of borders and if Israel would only retreat to its pre-1967 lines peace would follow. This was the peace movement's thesis even as all Palestinian parties continued to make clear, in words - at least their words in Arabic - and actions, that their goal remained Israel's annihilation.

Since Arafat's rejection of Israeli concessions at the Camp David meetings in 2000 and at Taba, his dismissal of President Clinton's bridging proposals, his refusal to offer counter-proposals and his launching instead a terror war against Israel, most Israelis have been disabused of the delusions of the peace movement. If their views were not changed by Arafat's war, they were swayed by the aftermath of Israel's total withdrawal from Gaza, when the response by the other side was increased smuggling of arms into Gaza and the launching of thousands of rockets and mortars from Gaza into Israel.

The great majority of Israelis now agree with the necessity of the nation's retaining defensible borders and are supportive of settlements in strategically vital areas. One response by the true believers in the peace camp has been to shift their attack on the settlements from emphasis on their being obstacles to peace to claims of their having been built largely on privately owned Palestinian land - rather than exclusively on public or state land, as all Israeli governments have asserted - and being illegal for this reason. But these claims are no less fraudulent and bogus than Peace Now's earlier assertions that Israeli withdrawal was the key to Arab-Israeli peace.

For example, Peace Now declared that 85 percent of Ma'ale Adumim, the largest of Israel's West Bank settlements, had been privately owned Palestinian land. When challenged with the relevant documentation, Peace Now amended its claim to 0.5 percent, acknowledging a 17,000 percent overstatement. Even this claim of 0.5 percent is highly dubious.

In another instance, Peace Now asserted that more than 70 percent of the settlement of Revava was built on privately owned Arab land. When challenged, it modified its claim to 22 percent. The settlement sued Peace Now, insisting Revava was built entirely on state lands. The court ruled in favor of the settlement, and Peace Now and the two authors of its report on Revava had to pay a 20,000-shekel fine and publish a retraction of their false claim in major Israeli newspapers.

Another point often mustered against the settlements is that they represent an attempt to influence the outcome of negotiations on ultimate borders. This is certainly true; the settlement policy initiated by the Labor-dominated government in the wake of the 1967 war sought to influence the results of negotiations by strengthening Israel's claim to key areas.

Again, the legitimacy of Israel's claim to border revisions is recognized in Security Council Resolution 242 and was explicitly asserted by the resolution's authors. But, in addition, diplomatic declarations that condemn settlement activity or insist on its ending because it prejudices future negotiations disregard another central issue: The Palestinians have also engaged in settlement activity in disputed areas - construction likewise intended to influence negotiations.

Especially after creation of the Palestinian Authority, the Palestinian leadership aggressively promoted building in empty areas between the 1949 armistice line and nearby Israeli security settlements, seeking to cut settlements off from pre-1967 Israel. The Arabs also undertook aggressive construction in empty areas in and near Jerusalem, trying to prevent Israel from establishing and sustaining a presence that would enable it to defend the city as it had not been able to do when Jerusalem was attacked in 1948 and in the opening of the 1967 war.

This Arab construction was not propelled by demographic need. Tracts of housing built in previously empty regions, much of it financed by Saudi money funneled through the Palestinian Authority, remained largely unoccupied; they were erected to stake political claims. Palestinian leaders responsible for the Jerusalem area, such as Faisal Husseini and Ziad Abu Ziad, spoke of directing construction to isolate Jewish neighborhoods. In January, 2002, Natan Sharansky, then minister of housing, reported "at least 40,000" housing units had been built with Saudi money for political purposes.

Who has criticized this Arab construction as prejudicing future negotiations?

The strategic imperatives that figured in the formulation of Resolution 242 are still relevant. The topography of the region has not changed, nor have the threats to Israel from its neighbors diminished.

Even if Hamas were not continuing to prepare for the next round in its terror war, even if the Mahmoud Abbas and his associates were not ambiguous at best in their acceptance of Israel, even if the language of genocide and acts of terror were put aside for some extended period, Israel would require defensible borders as it seeks to survive in a neighborhood that will continue to be dangerous.

Those who demand an end to Israeli construction intended to attain viable borders serve more to guarantee future violence than to advance the quest for a sustainable cessation of hostilities and, ultimately, a durable peace.

Genocidal Linkage

2009-07-17T12:00:00.000-04:00

First published on FrontPageMagazine.com

The world’s media have given scant coverage lately to the ongoing genocide in Darfur, and - despite extensive reporting on Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict - they have likewise offered little on the continuing campaign of genocidal incitement against Israel by her enemies. While seeming very separate issues, the two campaigns, and the choice by media and world leaders largely to ignore both, are, in fact, connected.

On one level, of course, the connection is obvious. Israel-hatred is spearheaded by the Arab world; in virtually every Arab nation, demonizing and delegitimizing of Israel, and often of Jews, is a staple of government-controlled media, schools and mosques. This is true even of the Arab states with which Israel is formally at peace. At the same time, the Arab world is the chief support of fellow Arab leader Omar Hassan al-Bashir and his Sudanese regime's genocidal assault on the Muslim blacks of Darfur. Illustrative was the Arab League’s unanimous, effusive embrace and defense of al-Bashir at its meeting in Doha, Qatar, in March, shortly after his indictment by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Tunisian human rights activist Mohammed Bechri several years ago argued that to understand Arab support for the genocide in Darfur, one has to recognize the "twin fascisms" - Bechri’s term - that dominate the Arab world: Islamism and Pan-Arabism. The first rejects the legitimacy of any non-Muslim group within what the Arabs perceive as their proper domain; the latter takes the same view towards any non-Arab group. The genocidal rhetoric, and efforts at mass murder, directed at Israel, and the genocidal assault on the Muslim but non-Arab people of Darfur follow from this mindset. (Bechri’s "twin fascisms" also account for the besiegement of Christians across the Arab world and backing for Sudan’s murder of some two million Christian and animist blacks in the south of the country. They help explain as well broad Arab support for the mass murder of Kurds - a Muslim but non-Arab people - in Iraq by Saddam Hussein and for the besiegement of the Kurds of Syria and the Berbers - another non-Arab Muslim group - in Algeria.)

But the connection between animosity towards Israel and coldness towards the victims in Darfur extends beyond the Arab world. It embraces, for example, all those European leaders who bend their consciences to accommodate Arab power - in oil, money and strategic territories - and who may pay lip service to recognizing the murderous incitement and related threats faced by Israel or to deploring the crimes suffered by Darfur but refuse to take serious steps to curb either.

Nor are American leaders entirely free of similar predilections. President Bush (43) was certainly sympathetic to Israel’s predicament. But he sought to assuage Arab opinion by pushing for rapid movement towards a Palestinian state and endorsing Machmoud Abbas as Israel’s "peace" partner, even as Abbas refused to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state, consistently praised anti-Israel terror and stood fast in demanding a "right of return" that would turn Israel into yet another Arab-dominated entity. (On Darfur, the "moderate" Abbas responded to the ICC indictment by declaring, "We must also take a decisive stance of solidarity alongside fraternal Sudan and President Omar al-Bashir.") Regarding Darfur, President Bush led the way in condemning Sudan’s campaign of mass murder and rape and first calling it a genocide. But - already attacked for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - he was not prepared to act aggressively against a third Muslim nation, even though doing so would have been aimed at saving hundreds of thousands of Muslim lives.

President Obama has adopted winning over Arab and broader Muslim opinion as a foreign policy priority and he has shown little interest in according more than verbal acknowledgment to the threats facing Israel. At the same time, those in the Muslim world whose good opinion he is most seeking to win are not the Muslims of Darfur but rather Darfur’s oppressors and their supporters. Some of President Obama’s ardent backers have expressed dismay, and have been openly critical of him, for what they see as his reneging on campaign pledges to put Darfur at the top of his agenda. (For example, Kirsten Powers, "Bam’s Darfur Sins," in the New York Post, May 11, 2009). But given his focus on appeasing Muslims hostile to America, his inaction on Darfur should not surprise.

In major Western media as well, deference to Arab opinion vis-a-vis Israel has generally been accompanied by silence on the central role of the Arab world in providing support for Sudan’s actions in Darfur. While the Arab League’s embrace in Doha of Sudanese President al-Bashir was widely reported, few major outlets offered editorial criticism of the Arab stance - The Washington Post being a notable exception. The New York Times, which for decades has used both "news stories" and editorials to argue that Israeli concessions are the key to peace and has refused to cover the genocidal incitement against Israel and Jews endemic in Palestinian and broader Arab media, mosques and schools, offered no editorial opinion on the Doha meeting.

Several years ago, the Times’ Nicholas Kristof won a Pulitzer Prize for his op-ed coverage of the slaughter in Darfur. Kristof is a constant critic of Israel and, like his bosses, avoids the issue of rejection of Israel’s legitimacy, and promotion of genocidal hatred towards the Jewish state, by its Arab neighbors. In a similar vein, for all his extensive writing on Darfur, he generally avoided the Arab role in supporting the genocide. In some forty op-eds on Darfur published between March, 2004, and April, 2006, shortly after he won the Pulitzer, Kristof devoted only five sentences to Arab backing of the Sudanese regime, and that in an article focused on China’s shameful complicity in Darfur.

But if all this not is very surprising, there are also more curious aspects to the convergence of animosity, often of murderous dimensions, towards Israel and sympathy for, or at least indulgence of, those who perpetrate the genocide in Darfur.

For example, while Egypt has not overtly broken with the unanimous Arab League support for al-Bashir, Egyptian President Mubarak chose not to attend the Doha conference, and he and some other Arab leaders have been worried about the Islamist Sudanese regime’s close ties to Iran and to Iran’s radical Arab allies, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas. Yet a number of Western leaders, who advocate "dialogue" with Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas, prefer to ignore their genocidal agenda towards Israel and their leading role in aiding Sudan’s genocidal government - in effect, outpacing Egyptian backing of al-Bashir by soft-pedaling the role in Sudan of those most supportive of al-Bashir’s murderous regime.

Iran has long given extensive financial assistance to the Sudanese government, has provided its forces with weapons and training and has underwritten Chinese provision of arms to al-Bashir. Sudan, again with Iran serving as financier and mid-wife, has also been a training ground for Hamas, fostering as well an ongoing cross-fertilization between Hamas and the militias responsible for the Darfur genocide. Hezbollah and Syria have likewise been in the forefront of Sudan’s supporters and enablers.

Following the International Criminal Court’s action against al-Bashir, a delegation of his radical allies quickly arrived in Khartoum in a show of solidarity with their indicted brother. It included the speaker of Iran’s parliament, Ali Larijani, Hamas leader Moussa Abu Marzouk, Syrian parliament speaker Mahmoud al-Abrash and an official of Hezbollah. Hamas also sponsored a large pro-Sudan march in Gaza.

But inevitably, Khartoum’s allies’ contributions to the Darfur genocide, like their promotion of genocide vis-a-vis Israel, are ignored by those eager for diplomatic engagement with them.

Also in early March, around the time of the ICC indictment, the British Foreign Office, led by Foreign Secretary David Miliband, announced its agreement to talks with Hezbollah. More recently, European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana and French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner have met with Hezbollah representatives. Hezbollah head Nasrallah’s commitment to the murder of all Jews - as in his 2002 statement that "if [the Jews] all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide" (in the past Hezbollah has gone after them as far afield as in Argentina) - was hardly something Miliband and the Foreign Office, or the Quai D’Orsay, or Solana and the European Union, or those British and continental media sympathetic to Hezbollah, were about to note. Nor were they going to note Hezbollah’s support for Sudan’s policies in Darfur.

Similarly, those many European leaders promoting engagement with Hamas typically avoid acknowledging Hamas’s call in its charter for the slaughter of all Jews, its teaching Palestinian children - in its schools and on children’s television - that Jews are eternal enemies of Islam and must be annihilated, and its other purveying of genocidal Jew-hatred. In April, the Dutch Labor party demanded that the European Union sanction Israel if it refuses to accept Hamas as a negotiating partner. Dutch Labor party leaders and like-minded European politicians, in their efforts to push acceptance of Hamas, soft-pedal its aims regarding Israelis and Jews and likewise say little about Hamas’s support of and contributions to Sudan’s genocidal assault on the blacks of Darfur.

European media that are hostile to Israel also virtually ignore Hamas’s genocidal policies and actions regarding both Israel and Darfur. British news outlets such as The Guardian and The Independent, which had barely covered years of Hamas rocket and mortar attacks on Israeli communities, or Hamas use of civilians and civilian facilities as shields for its attacks, but excoriated Israel when it responded with its assault on Hamas beginning in December, 2008, are likewise essentially silent regarding Hamas’s promotion of mass murder in Israel and support for mass murder in Darfur. The same is true for myriad news outlets on the Continent.

Most American political leaders have shunned Hamas for its commitment - in words and deeds - to Israel’s destruction and for its genocidal agenda. (There are some notable exceptions such as Jimmy Carter, who has met with Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal and urged including Hamas in "peace" talks.) But many American media organizations, particularly those, like the New York Times, most committed to portraying Israeli policy as the major obstacle to peace, have followed their European counterparts in saying little of Hamas’s genocidal policies regarding Jews or of its support for Sudan’s genocidal policies in Darfur.

One might expect Western university campuses, often in the forefront of humanitarian activism, to take the lead in rallying opposition to the genocide in Darfur and in demanding intervention to stop the killing. But the current fashion on campuses both in Europe and the United States, driven by Muslim and far Left student organizations and their faculty sympathizers, is intense hostility to Israel, and this has served to preclude attention either to murderous Arab incitement against Jews or to broad Arab complicity - and more particularly that of organizations such as Hezbollah and Hamas - in the Darfur genocide. When campus political discourse favors standing truth on its head, as in the University of California-Irvine’s recent week-long program entitled, "Israel: The Politics of Genocide," which essentially entailed speaker after speaker accusing Israel of genocidal actions against the Palestinians, there is hardly inclination to challenge those, including Palestinian organizations, genuinely pursuing genocide, whether targeting Jews or the population of Darfur.

Even people whom one might expect to identify most closely with the victims of the Darfur genocide often do nothing, or limit their actions to words, or actually lend support to the perpetrators, in large part because of pro-Arab sympathies or hostility to Israel. Congress has one Muslim black representative, Minnesota’s Keith Ellison, and Ellison has at times spoken out against the Darfur genocide. In April, for example, he joined a protest at the Sudanese embassy in Washington and was arrested along with other demonstrators. But Ellison has consistently supported pro-Hamas groups in America. He also aggressively embraced the Hamas line in last winter’s Gaza War in terms of alleged civilian casualties and Israeli misdeeds while remaining silent on Hamas use of civilians and civilian facilities as shields for attacks on Israel. Ellison has likewise never publicly addressed Hamas’s alliance with Sudan and its backing of Sudanese policies in Darfur. Alignment with those arrayed against Israel seems to trump criticism of those arrayed against Darfur for the Minnesota congressman.

Pulitzer Prize-winning African-American writer Alice Walker, like Ellison, visited Gaza after the recent hostilities, followed the Hamas line on events there, and was silent on the thousands of Hamas rocket and mortar attacks against Israel as well as on the Islamist organization’s use of civilian shields as a strategic weapon in its war to destroy the Jewish state. Before arriving in Gaza, Walker pronounced, sanctimoniously and apparently without intended irony, that "I love children and I feel that the Palestinian child is just as precious as the African-American child, or the Jewish child." Neither while a guest of Hamas in Gaza nor at any other time has she publicly objected to the organization’s use of Palestinian children as human shields, or to its declared objective of killing all Jews, including Jewish children, or to its intentional targeting of children in terror attacks. Nor has she taken issue with Hamas’s support for Sudan’s mass murder of the children of Darfur.

No less perverse has been the stance of some Jewish organizations. In general, Jewish groups, and Jewish individuals, have taken to heart the injunction "never again" vis-a-vis any acts of genocide and have played a leading role in speaking out against the mass murder in Darfur and urging intervention to stop the slaughter. Their role has led Arab and other apologists for the Sudanese regime to complain that the claims of massacres in Darfur are a "Zionist plot."

But some far Left Jewish institutions and organizations, both in Israel and America, in their eagerness to promote the thesis that sufficient Israeli concessions will win peace, choose to ignore the indoctrination to Israel’s destruction and to genocide that pervades Palestinian and broader Arab media, mosques and schools. Whether they do so out of wishful thinking, not wanting to recognize the annihilationist agenda of Israel’s neighbors, or do so to ingratiate themselves with anti-Israel circles in the West, the refusal to address the genocidal intent of Israel’s enemies leads inevitably to these groups downplaying as well the role of Israel’s enemies in supporting Sudan’s crimes in Darfur.

For example, the editors of Israel’s far Left Haaretz, the newspaper of Israel’s elites, have repeatedly called for Israel to negotiate with Hamas and declared that Israel’s refusal to do so and make sufficient concessions is prolonging the Israeli-Arab conflict. In keeping with this line, Haaretz’s editors rarely address Hamas’s charter and downplay the organization’s other declarations calling for the extermination not only of Israel but of all Jews. Consistent with this whitewashing of Hamas, Haaretz’s editors have had little to say about its support for the genocide in Darfur. Indeed, consistent with its failure to address murderous delegitimization and demonization of Israel in the Arab world more broadly, Haaretz has also had little to say of Muslim Arabs’ targeting of other minorities living amongst them, including the Muslim blacks of Darfur.

The same perverse pattern can be seen among various left-leaning Jewish American groups and their followers. "J Street" was established by people who construe other Jewish American organizations as too hardline in their approach to the Israeli-Arab conflict. It advocates exclusive focus on negotiations, and it lobbies for greater American engagement in pushing for rapid agreement on a "peace" accord. During last winter's Gaza War, J Street's stance was one of even-handedness, emphasizing that "neither Israel nor Palestinians have a monopoly on right or wrong" and that there are "elements of truth on both sides." J Street's tack entails largely ignoring realities that run counter to its promotion of moral equivalence. It essentially ignores the incitement to Israel's destruction and mass murder of its people that is a fixture of Palestinian media, mosques and schools, and, more particularly, the agenda of a religious obligation to annihilate all Jews that is promoted by Gaza's Hamas government. Of course, J Street is likewise silent on Hamas's support for Sudan's genocidal assault on the people of Darfur.

Israel Policy Forum, which advocates positions similar to J Street's, has long called for including Hamas in the "peace" process. In an April, 2008, article entitled "Finding a Way to Bring Hamas In," IPF leaders Seymour Reich and Geoffrey Lewis argued that the fact of Hamas being "the most violent actor" renders all the more crucial its not being left out of negotiations. In April, 2009, IPF welcomed a softening of the American position on Hamas whereby the Obama administration is no longer requiring Hamas to recognize Israel, renounce violence and abide by previous agreements before it would deal with and extend aid to a joint PA-Hamas government. Israel Policy Forum, in its lobbying for engagement with Hamas, is another group that avoids noting Hamas's genocidal agenda vis-a-vis Israel and Jews generally, and predictably does the same vis-a-vis the organization's backing of Sudan's genocide in Darfur.

There is little reason to believe that the leaders and supporters of J Street, Israel Policy Forum and other Jewish organizations that share their political predilections are any less appalled by the genocide in Darfur than Jews generally, including those who have led efforts to spur intervention aimed at ending the suffering in Darfur. But it is a peculiar, rather unwholesome, reality of Jewish communal life that there are some Jewish organizations and their supporters that can be counted on to be outspoken in condemning genocidal policies promoted by any entity, whatever its targeted group, unless that entity happens also to promote genocidal assaults on Jews.

In any case, the delusion by some Jews that sufficient concessions will appease Israel's enemies and critics, and the consequent embrace of an unethical silence on the genocidal aims - whether in Israel or Darfur - of her enemies, can be added to the other factors noted as contributing to the same outcome. The major force driving genocidal agendas toward Israel and Darfur is, again, Arab supremacism. It is abetted in the wider world by power politics, as well as by, in many quarters, a twisted ideological allegiance whose credo requires that hostility to the Jewish state and consequent sympathy for, or prettifying of, those dedicated to her destruction trumps sympathy for Darfur and criticism of those participating in its people's annihilation. The overall result is that powerful links between murderous hatred towards Israel and support for, or at least accommodation of, genocide in Darfur are a fixture of today's geopolitics and go largely unchallenged.

Is Israel Doomed?

2009-01-23T12:00:00.001-05:00

First published on FrontPageMagazine.com

Israel's enemies assert that its destruction is inevitable, and those who would destroy her are cheered on by many in the West. At the same time, Western mainstream media, particularly in Europe but also major media outlets in America, do puff pieces on Israel's genocidal adversaries, slant the news to conform to her enemies' propaganda, and support the delegimitization of the Jewish state.

The Gaza War, and the response to it across the world, have underscored the threats to the state's survival, Israel's often maladaptive and self-defeating reactions, and what is required of the state to counter those who challenge her existence.

The Threats

There are obviously those eager for Israel's demise. Since the Jewish state's creation, the Arab world has wanted it to disappear and this has not changed. Promotion of Arab supremacism, which accords little if any rights to non-Muslim or non-Arab groups in what the Arabs deem their proper domain, extends beyond Israel to abuse of Christians throughout that world as well as of Muslim but non-Arab peoples such as the Kurds of Iraq and Syria, the Muslim blacks of Darfur, the Berbers of Algeria. That abuse has repeatedly reached the level of genocidal campaigns, as reflected not only in the slaughter in Darfur, but also in the murder of some two hundred thousand Kurds in Iraq and some two million Christian and animist blacks in southern Sudan.

In terms of genocidal incitement against minority populations, none is as graphic and incessant as that purveyed in Arab media, mosques and schools - even in countries with which Israel is formally at peace - against the Jews and Israel. The existence of Israel is seen as an intolerable distortion of the proper order of things, according to which Jews should either be dead or, at best, subjugated members of society existing at the sufferance of their Arab betters.

In recent decades, enlistment in this genocidal hatred has widened to encompass many in the broader Muslim world. Obviously, the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the installation of a clerical regime that has sought to expand its influence by taking the lead in promoting Israel's destruction, has presented the Jewish state with a grave new threat. In terms of broader enmity in the Muslim world, however, the greatest factor has been aggressive Saudi export of Wahhabi fundamentalism, its preaching of virulent Jew-hatred (and hatred of other non-Muslims), and its ever increasing influence not only in once tolerant Islamic nations but also in Muslim communities in Europe, the Americas and elsewhere.

To the degree that some in the Arab world, such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, feel threatened by Iran, its alliance with Syria, and their protege organizations such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories, those states have interests which converge with Israel's. But this offers only very limited relief from the surrounding hostility Israel faces. Noteworthy in this regard is that Saudi Arabia and Egypt, as well as Jordan, continue to promote Jew-hatred in their media and schools, the Saudis continue to finance many Islamist groups even as they fear and sanction others, and any constraint on Saudi hostility towards Israel inspired by fear of Iran would certainly be reversed were the Iranian threat to "moderate" Arab regimes to disappear.

In terms of Israel's Palestinian Arab neighbors, the PLO, and its dominant party Fatah, under Arafat and since his death, have been and continue to be committed to Israel's ultimate destruction. So, too, of course, are Hamas and the other Islamist parties. Whatever true moderates exist among the Palestinians have no political voice or influence.

In addition to the animosity of the Arab world, Israel is faced with much hostile sentiment in Europe, fed by traditional anti-Semitism, by leftist anti-Americanism and association of Israel with America, by perverse, ahistorical leftist twisting of the Israeli-Arab conflict into Israeli colonialists brutalizing the supposedly indigenous population, and by the European media being house organs for anti-Israel bigotry of all these pedigrees. The growing threat of radical Islam to European states, particularly as manifested within those states' immigrant Muslim populations, has in some quarters led to greater sympathy with Israel's predicament. But elsewhere, especially among the cadres of the Left, which include most of the media, this threat has had the opposite impact and inspired a wishful thinking that all would be well, Islamist hostility would be appeased, if only Israel would make sufficient amends or simply disappear.

Nor is America immune to these distortions of reality. As the Muslim population in the United States has grown, and as it has become more radicalized, largely by Saudi promotion of Wahhabi extremism, an alliance has emerged between the far Left in this country and the forces of genocidal Islamism. Their recent joint demonstrations against Israel have included explicitly anti-Semitic "cheers," such as calls for "Jews to the ovens." Regrettably, even less extreme elements of the Left, such as some within the so-called "liberal" churches, have signed on as fellow travelers with this alliance for Israel's defamation, delegitimization and ultimate demise.

Israel is also attacked, and its very existence challenged, in the United Nations, an institution that has largely become the monster it was created to fight. The UN Human Rights Council, whose present members include such paragons of domestic civil rights as Cuba, Saudi Arabia, China, Malaysia and Bangladesh, routinely excoriates Israel in terms that single out the Jewish national liberation movement as uniquely illegitimate. The UNWRA, which for six decades has been responsible for Palestinian refugees and their families, promotes genocide under the flag of the UN. UNWRA schools teach the glories of suicide bombing and martyrdom in the effort to destroy Israel, employ members of terrorist organizations on its staff, including as teachers, and serve as a conduit for recruiting children into terrorist cadres.

In addition to all these challenges to her existence, Israel faces a domestic enemy. This extends beyond those within the Israeli Arab community who identify with Israel's external enemies. In the face of living under constant siege, some among Israel's Jewish citizens, particularly within the nation's elites, choose to distance themselves from the national predicament. They choose to find fault with the state and side with her defamers and would-be destroyers, embracing her adversaries' indictments. They urge, at a minimum, territorial and other concessions to placate Israel's enemies, even at the cost of rendering the state more vulnerable, and some even argue for the dissolution of the state to mollify her enemies. Predictably, they cast their doing so not as a desire to separate themselves from their embattled fellow citizens or to appease those who would annihilate them but as embracing a higher morality.

The same hypocrisy is seen among many Diaspora Jews, who likewise endorse the indictments of those who would destroy Israel, join in defamation and delegitimization of the state, and do so while averring only the highest ethical motives. A list of American and European Jews of this ilk would fill many pages.

The widespread and implacable hatred faced by Israel is seen by some, and often characterized in the media, as virtually insurmountable. So too, according to various voices in the media, is the translation of this hatred into physical attack. If Israel has been able to prevail in the past in conventional wars, the present and growing challenge of unconventional assault - at one extreme, with weapons of mass destruction, most threateningly an Iranian nuclear arsenal; at the other extreme, incessant terror entailing rocket and mortar attacks from terrorist forces imbedded within dense civilian populations - may be, it is suggested, beyond solution.

In addition, Israel also confronts the challenge not only of the enmity of its neighbors but of their fertility as well. Palestinian population growth ranks among the highest in the world, fertility among Arab citizens of Israel is also high, and together, it is often argued, Israel faces a demographic challenge that it has no means of countering while preserving itself as both the Jewish state and a democracy.

Managing and Mismanaging the Threats

But despite all these various, serious challenges, Israel's fate remains largely in its own hands. Israel has peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan because it convinced both states that, however much its leaders or its citizens might like to see Israel gone, the price of pursuing that goal is prohibitive. There is no peace with Syria, but Syria has long refrained from direct hostile action against Israel for the same reason of not wanting to pay the likely price.

Some argue that Islamist states and parties cannot be dissuaded by such calculations because they are driven by religious zeal and are prepared to pay any price, and imply that such adversaries therefore cannot be defeated. But this thesis has not been tested.

Such regimes are immune neither to annihilation- that is, a weakening to the point where others in their societies are able to seize control from them - nor to a battering to the extent that, even if they retain control, they are rendered unable to act, at least for an extended time, on their genocidal agenda. The biggest challenge to Israel is an Iran close to achieving nuclear arms, and - while ending Iran's nuclear program by other means would be preferable - even this challenge is not without military answers.

In terms of smaller players such as Iranian proxies Hezbollah and Hamas, military dissuasion had hardly been tried prior to the current war in Gaza.

Israel, under Ehud Barak, left southern Lebanon in 2000 without assuring that Hezbollah would not fill the void there. Barak and many other Israelis were convinced that, in any case, Hezbollah would not pursue the war across the border. Despite many subsequent episodes of Hezbollah cross-border terror, including the murder of Israeli soldiers and civilians, Israel downplayed the threat and offered no serious response. When it did respond, in 2006, it was unprepared to do so. It then ended its campaign and acquiesced to creation of a UN force in southern Lebanon that has done nothing, despite its mandate, to prevent Hezbollah from reconstituting and greatly expanding its rocket and missile arsenal and from reestablishing itself in areas which are supposed to be prohibited to it.

Some in Israel now argue that the nation nevertheless inflicted enough damage in 2006 that Hezbollah is hesitant to restart hostilities. But it is far from clear whether Hezbollah is cowed or simply biding its time or awaiting marching orders from Tehran.

Vis-a-vis Gaza, many Israeli leaders, most notably its present prime minister, deluded themselves into believing that Israel's full evacuation of its communities and military from the territory in 2005 would be followed by quiet and would be a step towards a more general peace. The evacuation was followed instead by more rocket and mortar fire targeting Israeli towns and villages, and this assault dramatically increased when Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007. Israel's abandonment of the Philadelphi corridor in the context of its general withdrawal opened the way to large-scale smuggling of ever more powerful rockets and missiles and other armaments into Gaza, yet Israel barely responded to either the rocket and mortar attacks or the smuggling.

Now it has responded and has done so in an impressive manner. It has not destroyed Hamas, but it is far from clear that the organization's destruction at this point is desirable. Of course, the impact of weakening the organization has yet to be seen. If Hamas continues to fire its rockets, mortars and missiles, Israel can resume its attack and weaken it further. Israel's most significant mistake may be not retaking the Philadelphi corridor, as it is highly unlikely that Egypt is prepared to stop weapons smuggling into Gaza or that any role given to third parties such as European observers would do the job.

But if Israel will respond to further smuggling by seizing the corridor, then this issue too can be addressed. Israel should adopt a zero tolerance policy with regard both to smuggling of weaponry into Gaza and attacks from Gaza. If it has the will to do so, it certainly has the means to enforce such a policy.

Similarly, while Hezbollah offers greater challenges, renewed hostilities on the Lebanese front too are manageable, if Israel has the will to address them effectively.

In fact, what has exacerbated actual problems, and created an impression of some of those problems being intractable, has largely been Israel's failure over the last fifteen years to address the challenges it faces. Too many Israelis became psychologically exhausted by the siege and deluded themselves into thinking they could end it if they only made sufficient concessions. In the Oslo debacle, they brought people dedicated to their destruction into the territories as "peace partners," armed them, closed their eyes to their "peace partners'" engagement in genocidal incitement and vicious, wholesale terror, and convinced themselves that their dead were "sacrifices for peace."

Only when they pushed for an "end of conflict" final agreement, and Arafat, despite Israel's offering to return virtually to the pre-1967 ceasefire lines, launched a full-scale terror war, did Israel begin to wake from its delusions. Yet, while it largely pacified the West Bank, it still repeated self-destructive policies in its tolerance of terror from Lebanon and from Gaza.

In addition, Israeli policies and rhetoric concerning the West Bank likewise continue to reflect dangerous delusions. A national goal of reaching an arrangement in the West Bank that entails Israel's retaining defensible borders, including the areas where almost all the so-called "settlers" live, while separating itself from the vast majority of Palestinians, would be understandable and reasonable. What is neither understandable nor reasonable is the belief that Israel can forego defensible borders and can hand ceded areas to Mahmoud Abbas's PA and have peace.

Nor is there merit to alarmist arguments that Israel must play the supplicant and hand the territories to whomever will take them, however hostile the recipient, because of the demographic challenges to the state; that it moreover must forego retaining defensible borders because doing so would also mean adding Arab citizens in numbers that would undermine the state demographically. The latter is factually untrue; Israel could pursue defensible lines while still separating itself from the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs. Most of the areas it needs to retain are, in fact, sparsely populated. And it need not be the supplicant to find a recipient, however hostile, to take what it would cede. Various models have been presented by sensible, strategically astute, Israeli thinkers of ways to move forward to ultimate separation from areas of dense Palestinian Arab population without compromising the security of the state.

Self-defeating Israeli actions over the last two decades have entailed more than the grave errors in policy decisions. They have gone beyond Israel's embrace of "peace partners" who had no interest in peace and the adoption of delusions that, despite what the other side says and does, sufficient concessions and self-reform and demonstrations of good will would inevitably win relief from ongoing besiegement. Likewise of profound negative consequence has been Israel's failure to make its case forcefully to the world. This too has been largely motivated by the desire to propitiate its enemies, to see salvation in concessions and self-reform and to ignore the nature and the dimensions of the threat.

And so the nation's leaders, and its foreign service bureaucrats, have failed to point out and protest strongly Palestinian and wider Arab indoctrination, in media, mosques, and schools, to Jew-hatred and genocide. They have failed to emphasize, as they should indefatigably, in every forum in which the nature of the conflict is distorted and Israel is pressed for concessions, that there can be no peace as long as the Palestinian Authority and Hamas and virtually every other Palestinian group and the Arab world more broadly aspire to Israel's ultimate destruction and promote this goal among their people and educate their young to it.

The government, including the foreign service, are too often mute when confronted with the most bigoted and unconscionable anti-Israel libels, distortions of reality, by Arab spokespeople or media factotums or others, even though their silence in the face of defamatory lies, or their weak and almost apologetic rebuttals, serve only to lend credence to the defamations and legitimacy to their purveyors.

The repeated emphasis by Israeli spokespeople during the Gaza War of the provocations that triggered Israel's actions, of the months and years of rocket and mortar assault from Gaza on Israeli towns and villages, the repeated assertion of the obvious point that no other sovereign state would tolerate such assault or refrain from responding forcefully, has been a step forward from past performance. Likewise, the response to misinformation and disinformation during the war - the shift, for example, from knee-jerk apologies in the face of claims of indiscriminate force to investigation of the claims and a fact-based answer supported by video and other evidence - is certainly an improvement on what has been the typical handling of such situations during previous hostilities. But there is still far to go in Israel's responsibly making its case. It has yet to publicly challenge, with a force appropriate to the animus of Israel's accusers, the routine slanderous assaults by Palestinian and other Arab leaders, by NGO's, by UN officials, by various political figures on the world stage, and by so many in the media.

To argue that Israel's fate is essentially in her own hands, in the hands of her people, is hardly to make light of the problems Israel faces. But as long as the great majority of Israelis do not succumb to the bigotry of their enemies and their enemies' fellow travelers, domestic and worldwide, as long as they remain steadfast in the conviction of the rightness of their cause - a rightness evident to any informed and fairminded observer - then, just as they have overcome dire threats in the past and indeed built a society whose achievements have been far beyond the wildest dreams of the nation's founders, the odds are well in their favor of continuing to meet whatever challenges confront them.

'Territorial Addiction' And Academic Debasement

2008-12-24T12:00:00.002-05:00

First published in The Jewish Press

The core of the Arab-Israeli problem is Israel's "territorial addiction." So declares a December 3 Haaretz article by one Alex Sinclair.

As to the solution, Sinclair does not quite echo Haaretz's former executive editor David Landau, who urged Condoleezza Rice a year ago to "rape" Israel. Rather, he advocates a friendly but forceful stand by President-elect Obama to break Israel of its addiction - promoting, in the jargon of addiction treatment (although Sinclair doesn't use the term), less violent-sounding "tough love" instead of rape.

Implicit in Sinclair's metaphor is the conviction that Israel has no legitimate or rational claim to any part of the territories and that its seeking to retain a presence there is entirely pathological.Not for him the perspective of the authors of UN Security Council Resolution 242, passed in the wake of the 1967 war and subsequently the starting point for all Arab-Israeli negotiations. That document calls for Israel not to return to its pre-1967 lines but rather to negotiate "secure and recognized boundaries" with its neighbors - and Resolution 242's authors explicitly declared their conviction that it would be a grievous error to push Israel back to its former lines.

Lord Caradon, Britain's ambassador to the United Nations at the time and the person who introduced the resolution in the Security Council, observed some years later:

It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions were undesirable and artificial. After all, they were just the places where the soldiers of each side happened to be on the day the fighting stopped in 1948. They were just armistice lines. That's why we didn't demand that the Israelis return to them, and I think we were right not to...

The American ambassador to the UN at the time concurred, noting that "Israel's prior frontiers had proved to be notably insecure."

And President Lyndon Johnson, shortly after the 1967 war, declared that Israel's return to its former lines would be "not a prescription for peace but for renewed hostilities." Johnson advocated new "recognized boundaries" that would provide "security against terror, destruction, and war."

A number of subsequent presidents have reiterated Johnson's position on borders and several have done so in even stronger terms regarding Israel's need to retain some of the areas captured in 1967.

Also in the wake of the 1967 war, a memorandum written by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff stated: "From a strictly military point of view, Israel would require the retention of some Arab territory to provide militarily defensible borders."

But Sinclair, in his cavalier attitude toward Israel's security, does not merely take issue with differing views; he doesn't even acknowledge them. On the contrary, he presents no evidence to rebut those views or to bolster his own position. Instead, he offers his "territorial addiction" metaphor as though it were established truth and devotes his entire piece to expanding on the metaphor.

Thus, he lists the recommended interventions that an addict's friends and family can employ to win their loved one from his or her addiction, including interventions which the addict might resist. And he declares that these actions should be a model for Obama's policies toward Israel

"Obama must tell us [after indicting Israel for its 'addiction,' Sinclair inexplicably shifts to referring to Israel as 'us'] in clear terms how harmful our activities and behavior are to ourselves, to our friends, and to those around us. He must tell us what we need to do and what will no longer be tolerated. And he must help us carry out that program."

The absence of argument, the heavy-handed elaboration, the sheer mindlessness of the piece, is even more amazing in that Sinclair is a teacher. He is identified in Haaretz as "a lecturer in Jewish education at the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies, and an adjunct assistant professor of Jewish education at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America."

There was a time when the essence of pedagogy was training students in how to think and write critically; how to formulate an argument and muster evidence in its defense. It entailed weaning students away from believing it sufficient simply to state one's conviction, perhaps metaphorically, and then expound on the implications of the conviction until reaching some requisite number of words.

Jews are known for often being in the forefront of developments in academia. Recent decades have seen a notable debasement in standards in the social sciences, humanities, and pedagogy. Alex Sinclair's Haaretz piece on Israel's "territorial addiction" suggests that some Jews in the area of Jewish Studies are pioneering new frontiers of academic debasement.

Creating a Desert and Calling it "Peace"

2008-10-24T12:00:00.003-04:00

First published on FrontPageMagazine.com

Among deluded policies that enjoy the status of accepted wisdom, few have had the staying power of the American foreign policy establishment's slant on the Arab-Israeli conflict. The mantras on the path to Middle East peace routinely emanating from the State Department, its foreign service alumni, and private organizations, as well as government figures that tend to follow the lead of State, bear little relation to reality.

A recent addition to the literature in this vein is Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace, authored by Daniel C. Kurtzer and Scott B. Lasensky - the former himself, of course, a foreign service alumnus and seemingly the main shaper of the volume. Kurtzer is also a chief foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama.

The authors were assisted by other members of what is identified as "the United States Institute of Peace's Study Group on Arab-Israeli Peacemaking." The Study Group solicited input as well from more than a hundred interviewees, both American and Middle East nationals, with many of the Americans having State Department backgrounds.

The breathtaking muddy-mindedness of the volume's assertions regarding the conflict provides yet more grist for the foreign policy establishment's critics. It also provides more grounds for concern, particularly as Kurtzer and Lasensky's warped perspective on the path to "peace" and "security" is not offered simply as an academic exercise, nor even as a prediction of how Israeli-Arab relations will likely unfold.

Rather, it is presented as a blueprint for definitive positions that the U.S. ought to adopt and, in effect, impose on Israel. The authors assert, for example, "Washington needs to formalize and add permanence to U.S. positions on the core endgame issues of Jerusalem, refugees, security, and territory..."

Even more worrisome, Kurtzer is apparently slated to move beyond his advisory role into a senior appointment should Obama become president.

It is not that the wrongheaded claims in Kurtzer and Lasensky's book are new. On the contrary, all have been heard and seen many times before. What is special is the sheer number of them collected in one place, distilled down to their irrational essence, and presented as reflecting the collective wisdom not only of the authors but of several dozen prominent "experts."

The major premise of the book is that Arab-Israeli peace has not been achieved largely because of American diplomatic fumbling. The book's focus is on pointing out supposed American missteps and recommending fixes for the perceived problems of American efforts. The authors declare, "Opportunities were squandered, potential breakthroughs missed, and meaningful advances stalled unnecessarily."

Among the explicitly stated assumptions on which they base their argument is the belief that U.S. diplomacy must focus on the Arab-Israeli conflict because it stands in the way of America building alliances with Middle East nations around other issues. Additional unsupported claims are that there is currently a broader regional acceptance of Israel, making resolution of the conflict more achievable; that the majority of Palestinians endorse a two-state solution; that addressing the conflict will boost Arab moderates vis-a-vis extremists (with Saudi Arabia cited as an example of this); and that Israel's giving up the Golan to Syria, dismantling the settlements and returning essentially to its pre-1967 armistice lines would not directly affect the nation's security and so the U.S. should push for such Israeli moves.

But none of the authors' key premises and formulations stands up to even minimal scrutiny.

Does the Arab-Israeli conflict and support for Israel interfere with America building alliances with Middle East nations around other issues? To the contrary, if, for example, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states feel threatened by Iran and see gain in allying with the United States to address the threat, they are hardly going to be deterred from doing so by American support for the Jewish state and the fact that Israeli-Palestinian peace has not been achieved. For Arab leaders, their own interests have always trumped concerns about the Palestinians.

No doubt the authors heard from many of their Arab interviewees, and those among their American contributors who support Arab positions, that the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict is an obstacle to closer cooperation. But it has always been a tack of Arab leaders to deflect pressures from the U.S. on their own policies by insisting that until America pressures Israel into meeting Palestinian demands it will remain impossible for them to cooperate fully with the U.S.

The authors imply that, in fact, public opinion does impede Arab leaders from drawing closer to the U.S., and that assuaging this hostility by brokering a settlement would serve American interests. They fault past administrations for not paying more attention to the role of domestic opinion in shaping Arab policies. For example, "The Bush 43 administration... tend[ed] to turn a blind eye toward domestic constraints on the Arab side."

But anti-U.S. opinion in countries such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt stems in no small measure from America's support for those governments, not simply from American support for Israel. In addition, rabid anti-Israel sentiment is something which Arab governments - both American "allies" and enemies - stoke, not least to distract their populations from domestic ills. Anti-Israel vitriol and anti-Semitic canards are a staple of the media, mosques and schools in virtually every Arab country. This is true even in states with which Israel is formally at peace.

There is no reason to believe that regimes which find promotion of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish rhetoric so useful are prepared to give it up, even in the context of a "peace" agreement. The authors indirectly acknowledge this when they declare that a settlement would deprive such regimes of their ability to "exploit" the issue. But, of course, there is no way to stop their exploiting the issue. Even if an agreement were reached between Israel and a Palestinian government, those regimes that find demonization of Israel and the Jews useful would simply condemn Israel's Palestinian partners for betraying the Arab or Muslim cause and continue their anti-Israel propaganda as before.

But, Kurtzer and Lasensky assure their readers, there is currently a "broader regional acceptance of Israel." They reference Saudi Arabia's 2002 plan regarding the conflict, and its endorsement by other Arab states, as evidence of this.

One would think that Saudi Arabia's continued purveying of media, educational and religious materials calling for the mass murder of Jews and annihilation of Israel would give the authors some pause in their bald declaration of Saudi "acceptance" of the Jewish state. Most observers attribute the 2002 Saudi move as prompted by a wish to counter anti-Saudi opinion in the U.S. in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and Saudis accounting for 15 of the 19 perpetrators. In any case, the Saudi initiative insists on Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines and acquiescence to other Palestinian demands as a prelude to Arab states offering a vaguely defined "recognition."

The Saudis need not worry; there is no evidence that any amount of Israeli acquiescence to the various demands put forth by the Palestinians would lead the latter to agree to genuine peace. On the contrary, all Palestinian parties, including Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah and its main rival, Hamas, use their media, mosques and schools to indoctrinate their populations in the belief that the Jews have no legitimate claim to any part of "Palestine," that they are satanic usurpers, and that they and their state must be destroyed.

The authors' claim that, "Public opinion polls in... the Palestinian territories continue to show majority support for a two-state solution that ends the conflict." But this assertion is as divorced from reality as most of their other formulations regarding the conflict. There has, for example, never been a poll of Palestinian opinion in which even 20% of those questioned were prepared to give up the "right of return," the demand that all those who left pre-1967 Israel during the 1947-48 war, together with their descendants, be admitted to the state. If those polled say they would accept a two-state solution, it is clearly only under the condition that both states will be Arab.

The authors never even mention the "right of return" issue.

The absence of any serious consideration of Palestinian aims is likewise characteristic of the authors' discussion of the Oslo years. Oslo is depicted essentially as a very promising step towards genuine peace but one the Clinton administration did not effectively exploit. (E.g.: "Clinton invested heavily in Arab-Israeli peacemaking... But his policies contributed to significant diplomatic failures, and the policy process was often dysfunctional...") The authors make a passing reference to "incitement" by Arafat and the Palestinian Authority but never question whether the Palestinian leadership was actually interested in peace.

There is much to suggest it was not, including a broadcast by Arafat on the very night of the famous handshake on the White House lawn at the signing of the first Oslo agreements, in September, 1993. Speaking from Washington on Jordanian television, Arafat informed Palestinians that they should understand Oslo in terms of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO)'s 1974 program. This was a reference to the so-called "plan of phases," according to which the PLO would seek to acquire whatever territory it could gain by negotiation and use that territory as a base for pursuing Israel's annihilation. Arafat referred to the "plan of phases" at least a dozen times within a month of signing the initial Oslo accords, and this "explanation" of Oslo became standard fare for him and his lieutenants. Arafat and those around him also routinely compared Oslo to the Treaty of Hudaibiya, which Mohammed had signed in 628 and abandoned when his forces grew strong enough to overwhelm his adversaries.

Anti-Israel and anti-Jewish incitement likewise became staples of PA media, mosques and schools.

If the authors make only passing reference to incitement by Arafat and his PA, they ignore entirely their involvement in anti-Israel terror.

Shlomo Ben-Ami was an ardent Oslo enthusiast. When Arafat launched his terror war, after the July, 2000 Camp David negotiations, Ben-Ami, then Israel's foreign minister, still hoped for an agreement and led the effort to achieve an accord via additional Israeli concessions. Some months later, even Ben-Ami acknowledged that Arafat was only pretending to endorse a two-state solution but, in fact, still "doesn't accept Israel's legitimacy."

Ben-Ami subsequently elaborated on his new insight: "For Arafat, Oslo was a sort of huge camouflage act behind which he was exercising political pressure and terror in varying proportion in order to undermine the very idea of two states for two peoples."

But no such insight is exhibited by the authors of Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace. They do not even admit the possibility of one side not being interested in peace.

To the degree that they acknowledge Palestinian policies inimical to peace, Kurtzer and Lasensky, ever clinging to their thesis that all would be well were American diplomacy properly deployed and that this must involve more pressure on Israel, entangle themselves in knotty and dangerous self-contradictions.

For example, at one point they assert that the Clinton Administration was "too soft on Arafat and the Palestinian leadership when it came to incitement..." In fact, when Benjamin Netanyahu became prime minister, in May, 1996, he insisted on "reciprocity," which would entail no more Israeli concessions, territorial or otherwise, until the Palestinians adhered to the commitments they had already made, particularly regarding ending incitement and terror; and the U.S. formally accepted Netanyahu's principle of "reciprocity." But Kurtzer and Lasensky elsewhere laud Clinton for pressuring Netanyahu - at the October, 1998, Wye summit - into making additional concessions despite the PA's failure to desist from either incitement or terror, and they fault the President for not sustaining his "activist approach" at Wye.

Just as the authors refuse to address the Palestinian leadership's objectives because to do so would undermine their basic thesis, so too they fail to consider seriously challenges to Israel's security and the question of defensible borders for Israel.

They make bald and nonsensical assertions to the effect that settlements are purely discretionary for Israel and bear no relation to Israeli security, that in fact settlements weaken Israel's security. They imply Israel could return essentially to its pre-1967 armistice lines without incurring any serious security risk. They do not try to defend these claims but rather present them as obvious truths. They then suggest that a president should be "willing to push back" against Israel on matters "that do not directly relate to security" - which means to the authors, of course, the U.S. should pressure the Jewish state to dismantle the settlements and withdraw to the pre-1967 lines, since this would entail, in their view, no security risk.

Compare such assertions to the stance of the authors of UN Security Council Resolution 242, which remains the starting point for all Israeli-Arab negotiations. Resolution 242, passed in the fall of 1967, declared that Israel should return captured land and withdraw to "secure and recognized" boundaries in exchange for peace, but it did not call for Israel to cede all the captured territory. On the contrary, the authors of Resolution 242 stated explicitly that they believed Israel should not retreat to its former lines. Lord Caradon, Britain's ambassador to the United Nations at the time and the person who introduced the resolution in the Security Council, observed some years later: "It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions were undesirable and artificial. After all, they were just the places where the soldiers of each side happened to be on the day the fighting stopped in 1948. They were just armistice lines.
That's why we didn't demand that the Israelis return to them, and I think we were right not to..."

The American ambassador to the UN at the time concurred, noting that "Israel's prior frontiers had proved to be notably insecure." And President Lyndon Johnson, shortly after the war, declared that Israel's return to its former lines would be "not a prescription for peace but for renewed hostilities." Johnson advocated new "recognized boundaries " that would provide "security against terror, destruction, and war."

A number of subsequent presidents have reiterated Johnson's position on borders and several have done so in even stronger terms regarding Israel's need to retain some of the areas captured in 1967.

Also in the wake of the war, a memorandum written by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff stated: "From a strictly military point of view, Israel would require the retention of some Arab territory to provide militarily defensible borders."

Israel's left-of-center Labor party, which governed for the first decade after the 1967 war and has been a partner in most subsequent governments, adopted a policy of seeking to retain key strategic regions, most of them sparsely populated - such as the Jordan Valley, the heights overlooking the valley, some strategic heights dominating the coastal plain that is home to the bulk of Israel's population, and areas around Jerusalem crucial to the defense of the city - while ceding the rest to Arab sovereignty, including those regions where the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs lives.

To reinforce Israel's claim to areas Labor sought to retain, the government pursued a policy of establishing "facts on the ground," the so-called "settlement" communities, in those areas.

The strategic challenges facing Israel have not diminished since 1967, and the geography and topography of the region have not changed. What was true then concerning the need for defensible borders, and the dimensions of those borders, is no less true today. Nor, for example, did Yitzhak Rabin think otherwise when he initiated the Oslo process and endorsed the creation of a politically separate Palestinian entity alongside Israel. Rabin, in his last Knesset appearance prior to his assassination, stated, "We will not return to the lines of June 4, 1967 - the security border defending the State of Israel will be in the Jordan Valley, in the widest sense of that concept."

The vast majority of "settlers" live in areas that are strategically vital for Israel to retain. That they live there, that facts were established on the ground, does make it more difficult for those who are hostile to or cavalier about Israel's security to push Israeli retreat to the 1948 armistice lines, and in this regard the "settlements" very much do contribute to Israel's security.

Kurtzer and Lasensky just as irresponsibly ignore Israel's basic strategic verities in their dealing with the Golan Heights as in their assertions about the West Bank. The authors declare that a Golan agreement ought to follow the model of disposition of the Sinai in the Israeli-Egyptian peace accord. But strategically the situations have few similarities. Sinai is a demilitarized hundred-mile wide buffer zone, almost entirely desert, with a mountainous spine and restricted areas of passage between east and west. Egyptian build-up for a ground assault across the desert would give Israel much warning of an attack, and the topography allows for a robust Israeli response. In addition, an American-led force guarding key mountain passes adds another layer of protection and has been able to operate essentially unharassed for more than three decades.

The Golan is a much smaller area and an elevated plateau that entirely dominates northern Israel. Syrian forces would need to withdraw far beyond Damascus for an agreement to match the demilitarization and provide the warning time Israel has in the Sinai; something to which no Syrian government would agree. In addition, any international force on the Golan would be much more vulnerable both to harassment and to being overrun in Arab-initiated hostilities than is the American-led force in Sinai.

Just how cavalier Kurtzer and Lasensky are about Israel's security is indicated not only by their failing to offer any serious discussion of the strategic challenges the country faces and what is required to address them but also by their suggestion that U.S. assurances of support ought to render Israel more willing to take risks for peace. One reality of Israel's strategic situation is that, no matter how sincere America might be in its commitment to Israel's security, the Jewish state's strategic predicament is such that any assault by its neighbors which it is unable to fend off by itself would destroy the nation long before American power could be brought to bear.

But not only are American "guarantees" to a weakened Israel impractical; they would not even be offered for very long. The more vulnerable Israel is rendered by territorial and related strategic concessions in the pursuit of peace, the more its strategic alliance with the U.S. is likely to unravel. This is because the U.S., however much its people may sympathize with the Jewish state, will not want to be in a position of coming to the aid of a vulnerable and failing Israel - to have to fight Arab and perhaps other Muslim nations, potentially including "allies," and to do so under conditions in which the objective of the confrontation is lost and the U.S. will then be seen as having been bested.

Americans sympathized with Israel from 1948 to 1967 but the U.S. only embraced Israel as a strategic ally after the 1967 war, when the Jewish state had proved its capacity to defend itself. Israel stripping itself of that capacity will render it a strategic liability to the United States and so will also inevitably entail losing its alliance with America.

Rather than pushing Israel to take "risks" for "peace," risks that might prove fatal, the more promising model for Arab-Israeli negotiations would be American-Soviet negotiations during the Cold War.

Agreements then were premised on decreasing risks, not increasing them. Missile accords were aimed at reducing inventories and at implementing intrusive inspections to verify compliance.

Decreased Israeli presence in populated Palestinian areas need not necessarily be coupled with a regime of intrusive inspections to address potential Palestinian acquisition of rockets and other weapons aimed at targeting Israeli population centers. But it ought at a minimum be coupled with Israel's preservation of defensive lines from which it could mount robust responses to violations of accords, with those accords entailing provisions explicitly granting Israel rights to such intervention.

As a Palestinian leadership emerges - unlike any current Palestinian leaders - that demonstrates a genuine desire for co-existence and builds up civil institutions necessary to construct and sustain a Palestinian society at peace, Israel could gradually withdraw its defensive lines back to permanent positions. Those positions should entail both separation from the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs and retention for Israel of defensible borders.

But, again, serious assessment of Israel's strategic needs and of the path to a genuine, enforceable peace do not figure in Kurtzer and Lasensky's arguments. Their arguments are focused rather on active American diplomacy pushing for a false peace through pressuring Israel into dangerous concessions in order to appease Israel's hostile neighbors.

One can anticipate - in an Obama administration with Kurtzer holding a senior foreign policy position - Israelis either forced to comply or sanctioned for not doing so, and then a level of unprecedented violence with Israel's very survival at risk.

No one concerned about Israel's well-being should underestimate the threat represented by Kurtzer and Lasensky's mind-set and that of their like-thinking contributors to Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace.

Partisanship and Protest

2008-09-26T12:00:00.000-04:00

First published on FrontPageMagazine.com

Those American Jewish groups and individuals who pushed for disinviting Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin from a rally protesting Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s appearance at the UN effectively put partisan considerations above the effort to demonstrate wide and substantive American condemnation of the Holocaust-denying, genocide-promoting Iranian leader and his regime.

This blot on a segment of the American Jewish community unfortunately has a pedigree: earlier instances, including during the Holocaust, in which some community leaders have, at critical junctures, given greater weight to party allegiances than to countering genocidal regimes pursuing the annihilation of Jews.

It was hardly unreasonable that the Jewish organizations putting together the anti-Ahmadinejad rally would want to have leading figures from both major political parties speak at the event. But their plan went awry when Senator Hilary Clinton, on learning that Governor Palin would also be attending, withdrew from participation.

Whatever Clinton’s reasons, her spokesperson’s claim that she took the step because the rally had become "a partisan political event" was perplexing, to say the least. The intent of the organizers, consistent with the arrangements prior to Clinton’s withdrawal, was clearly for a show of bi-partisan agreement regarding Ahmadinejad - in this instance, by the presence of the most prominent woman in each major party.

But stranger still than the explanation offered by Senator Clinton’s office was the response of some American Jewish organizations. Perhaps one should not be surprised that the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC), an entity that exists to promote Jewish support for the Democrat Party, defended Clinton’s position. But, given the gravity of the issue at hand - protesting the leader of a regime that openly calls for the destruction of Israel, a regime that has in recent decades been the chief sponsor of anti-Jewish terror worldwide, and is aggressively pursuing the means to annihilate the Jewish state - the NJDC might at least be expected to do nothing to undermine the anti-Ahmadinejad rally. This would include not compromising the organizers seeking high-profile bi-partisan representation.

The NJDC, using its excellent party connections, could have urged that another leading Democrat attend, perhaps even the presidential or vice-presidential candidate. Instead, in a statement released by its chairman, Marc R. Stanley, the NJDC called upon the rally organizers to "withdraw the invitation to Governor Sarah Palin," essentially giving priority to a partisan agenda - blocking the participation of the Republican vice-presidential candidate - over the goal of presenting the strongest possible statement of condemnation regarding a genocidal regime.

A number of other Jewish organizational figures echoed the NJDC’s demands and the rally sponsors bowed to their pressure and acquiesced in disinviting Governor Palin and abandoning the goal of prominent bi-partisan participation.

Earlier precedents, even during War World II, for the warped priorities demonstrated by the NJDC and those other groups and individuals have sadly been all too common.

In November, 1942, information was released to the American media that some two million European Jews had been killed by the Nazis in what appeared to be a plan of total annihilation. American Jewish leaders sought to publicize the catastrophe and, with the help of prominent non-Jews, urged the government to take a number of steps that, if implemented, could have saved at least hundreds of thousands lives. But the government, in particular the State Department, consistently rejected and obstructed all rescue plans, and appeals to President Roosevelt to reverse Administration policy and initiate rescue efforts were to no avail.

The Jewish leadership continued to lobby the government for a change of direction but refrained from strong public condemnations of Administration policy. In part, this reflected fear of triggering an anti-Semitic backlash, at a time when anti-Semitism was a ubiquitous fact of life in America. But the leadership’s reticence also reflected the loyalty of many Jewish leaders to Roosevelt and an unwillingness to confront publicly his refusal to aid Europe’s Jews.

Government obstruction did not only entail refusing entry of Jews to America. State also blocked efforts to get Jews out of Europe to safe havens elsewhere.

The most obvious place of refuge would have been Mandate Palestine, which, after World War I and dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, was controlled by Britain under a League of Nations Mandate calling for recreation of a Jewish homeland in the Jews’ ancestral home.

Britain, from its receipt of the Mandate, repeatedly sought to undermine its provisions, most notably by blocking Jewish immigration. In the late 1930's, as Jews were desperate to leave Europe, Britain imposed even more draconian limits on Jewish access to the Mandate.

The attitude of the British Foreign Office towards Europe’s Jews, even after learning of the Nazi extermination program, was reflected in communications with the State Department opposing rescue efforts and referring repeatedly to, in the words of one memo, "the difficulties of disposing of any considerable number of Jews should they be rescued."

State Department policy converged with that of the Foreign Office, and appeals to Roosevelt continued to fall on deaf ears. When some leading figures in the Treasury Department, all non-Jews, learned of State’s policies of obstructing rescue, they were so appalled that they prepared for the Treasury Secretary a monograph entitled, "Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews," and urged his confronting the President with the report.

Roosevelt finally took some positive steps when faced with movement in Congress towards passage of a bi-partisan Rescue Resolution that would establish a rescue commission and support its operation in North Africa and neutral European nations. The Congressional measure was inspired by efforts of a group of Jews working outside the mainstream leadership, more aggressively publicizing Administration obstruction and actively seeking bi-partisan Congressional backing.

With Congressional action looming, Roosevelt, in early 1944, created the War Refugee Board (WRB) to pursue rescue measures. While the Administration essentially refused to fund the Board - it operated mainly with private funding - and impeded its work in other ways, the dedicated staffs of the Board’s offices succeeded in facilitating the rescue of some 200,000 Jews.

But many in the mainstream Jewish leadership opposed the more aggressive confronting of the Administration that led to creation of the Board. They did so, again, both out of fear of stimulating anti-Semitism and out of misplaced partisan loyalties.

A notable example of the latter occurred in June, 1944. The Republican National Convention, meeting that month, included a strong pro-Zionist plank in its platform for the upcoming election and criticized Roosevelt for not pressing Britain to open Mandate Palestine to Jewish refugees.

Rabbi Stephen Wise, the preeminent figure in the American Jewish leadership, had led mainstream efforts to promote rescue and had seen first-hand both the endless and pervasive obstructionism of the State Department and Roosevelt’s indifference and refusal to intervene. He could have used the Republican stance as an opportunity to press Roosevelt to match the Republican position and forge a bi-partisan policy of pushing Britain, then totally dependent on the United States, for a change in policy.

Instead, Wise wrote to Roosevelt condemning as "unjust" the "reference to you in the Palestine Resolution by the Republican National Convention" and assuring him American Jews would share his view. Even in the face of the annihilation of European Jews, Wise could not put the desperate need to focus on all possible avenues of rescue above his partisan allegiance to the President.

Today, the president of Iran at once insists the Holocaust never happened and promotes perpetration of another Holocaust through the destruction of Israel. That, despite Ahmadinejad's declarations and the policies of his government, some Jewish leaders, out of partisan considerations, still undermine efforts to confront in the strongest possible ways a regime promising a new genocide, is beyond shameful.

Peace Now: A Thirty-Year Fraud

2008-09-05T12:00:00.002-04:00

First published on FrontPageMagazine.com, September 05, 2008

For thirty years, the leftist Israeli organization Peace Now has been promoting the thesis that sufficient Israeli concessions would win the Jewish state peace from its Arab neighbors and that Israel’s refusal to make the needed concessions, primarily dismantling the settlements and returning to its pre-1967 armistice lines, are the main obstacle to that desired denouement. Peace Now has been arguing this line both at home and around the world and has attracted fervent overseas followers and media kudos for its stance.

Earlier this year, as it celebrated its three-decade anniversary, the organization was found by the Israeli government to have violated Israeli law by using money ostensibly intended for an educational non-profit entity to fund instead political activities. According to The Jerusalem Post, the government finding meant, among other consequences, that the organization's American supporters would no longer be able to claim their donations as tax-deductible. Subsequent media reports have indicated additional, related malfeasance by Peace Now.

But Peace Now's fraudulent casting of itself as an "educational" entity is not the fraud referred to in the above title. That reference is, rather, to the political program pushed by the organization over the past three decades.

Peace Now came into being in the spring of 1978, about nine months after Menahem Begin had become Israel's prime minister and ended the Labor Zionist monopoly on control of the government.

Labor's tenure had included the first ten years of Israel's post-Six Day War control over the West Bank and Gaza, the Sinai and the Golan Heights. Labor's policy with regard to ultimate disposition of the West Bank had been to pursue a division of the territory that would entail retaining key strategic areas while ceding to Arab control those regions that were home to the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs.

UN Security Council Resolution 242, passed in the fall of 1967, declared that Israel should return captured land and withdraw to "secure and recognized" boundaries in exchange for peace, but it did not call for Israel to cede all the captured territory. On the contrary, the authors of Resolution 242 stated explicitly that they believed Israel should not retreat to its former lines.

Lord Caradon, Britain's ambassador to the United Nations at the time and the person who introduced the resolution in the Security Council, observed some years later: "It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions were undesirable and artificial. After all, they were just the places where the soldiers of each side happened to be on the day the fighting stopped in 1948. They were just armistice lines. That's why we didn't demand that the Israelis return to them, and I think we were right not to..."

The American ambassador to the UN at the time concurred, pointing out that "Israel's prior frontiers had proved to be notably insecure." And President Lyndon Johnson, shortly after the war, declared that Israel's return to its former lines would be "not a prescription for peace but for renewed hostilities." Johnson advocated new "recognized boundaries " that would provide "security against terror, destruction, and war."

The division of the West Bank envisioned by Labor entailed Israel holding onto such key strategic regions - most of them sparsely populated - as the Jordan Valley, the heights overlooking the valley, some strategic heights dominating the coastal plain that is home to the bulk of Israel's population, areas around Jerusalem crucial to the defense of the city, and the Etzion bloc, while ceding the rest to Arab sovereignty. To reinforce Israel's claim to areas Labor sought to retain, the government pursued a policy of establishing "facts on the ground," the so-called "settlement" communities, in those areas.

The Likud government elected in 1977 viewed the West Bank differently. Likud leaders questioned surrendering any of the region, given its significance as the cradle of Jewish history and faith, and they also disputed the states’s ability to defend itself should major segments of the area fall to the control of potentially hostile forces. Likud supported the establishment of Jewish communities beyond the regions which Labor sought to retain, most notably in places of historical and religious significance. (In fact, Labor, too, had allowed the creation of some such communities.)

In the context of the Israeli-Egyptian peace accord which Likud Prime Minister Begin reached with Anwar Sadat in 1978, Israel agreed to negotiate an interim autonomy plan for the West Bank and Gaza, with autonomy succeeded by a permanent status arrangement to be hammered out by the parties during the interim period. Israel and Egypt subsequently engaged in a dialogue on setting up the autonomy plan. But the talks were condemned by all other Arab parties and ultimately ended without progress. However, Likud's official policy became pursuit of Arab autonomy in the West Bank under Israeli sovereignty.

In fact, the differences between Labor and Likud supporters on disposition of the West Bank were not as dramatic as their parties’ ostensible positions suggested. Most notably, a division of the region along the lines proposed by Labor had the backing of a wide majority of Israelis, including many Likud voters. In addition, a 1984 poll asked those who favored Likud's vision of autonomy for the area under Israeli sovereignty whether, were autonomy impossible, they would prefer annexation or Labor-style territorial compromise. Fifty-two percent chose the latter; only 10 percent endorsed annexation.

But while both major parties, along with the authors of Security Council Resolution 242, believed that Israel had to retain parts of the territories for its defense, and a large majority of Israelis supported pursuit of a compromise based on principles of maximal retention of strategic areas and maximal return of Palestinian Arab population to Arab sovereignty, the founders of Peace Now viewed the situation very differently.

The organization's inception in the spring of 1978 was in the context of demonstrations against what its adherents perceived as Begin's not moving fast enough or being forthcoming enough in his negotiations with Sadat. But the organization formulated tenets concerning the Arab-Israeli conflict and disposition of the territories that transcended the Israeli-Egyptian talks.

As related by Mordechai Bar-On, himself an early member of Peace Now and author of the definitive book on the Israeli peace movement, In Pursuit of Peace (1996), those tenets included:

"The security of Israel depends on peace, not on territories...

"The government should reach peace with Egypt based on the principle of 'territories for peace' as determined by UN resolution 242...

"Israel should stop all settlement in the occupied territories. Settlements are an impediment to peace and push the Arabs away from the negotiating table."

There are a number of particularly notable aspects to these tenets. The government was, of course, negotiating on the basis of territories for peace, in keeping with UN Security Council Resolution 242. Why then did Peace Now make a point of this, unless it was really insisting that all territories be given up. That this was, in fact, the case is reinforced by the first item, which offers a false dichotomy. Indeed, the thinking in Labor since 1967, and of the authors of Resolution 242, had been that peace required some retention of territory by Israel and that a return to the pre-1967 lines would be incompatible with peace. Similarly, settlements had been established by Labor because it deemed retaining the settled areas vital to achieving an enforceable peace. Peace Now was articulating a blanket condemnation of settlements, which placed it at odds with Labor's strategic assessments and longstanding Labor policy.

The Peace Now conviction that Israel’s Arab adversaries were now receptive to peace and Israel need only make sufficient concessions was not prompted by the recent opening of talks with Egypt. In fact, Egypt was vehemently condemned and ostracized by all other Arab states for its negotiations with Israel. The rest of the Arab League continued to adhere to the principles embraced in Khartoum in the wake of the 1967 war: "no negotiations, no recognition, no peace."

The impetus to the Peace Now stance was essentially exhaustion with the ongoing Arab war against Israel and wishful thinking. Those attracted to the organization were people unwilling to reconcile themselves to the reality that Israel’s Arab adversaries were in control of deciding whether there would be peace, and that, with few exceptions, their decision, as demonstrated in words and deeds, was against Israel’s existence. The members of Peace Now instead embraced the delusion, and promoted to the wider Israeli and global public the fraud, that control of the situation was really in Israel's hands and that sufficient concessions would inexorably win peace.

Peace Now's inverting of reality is dramatically illustrated by Bar-On in his introduction to his history of the Peace Movement. He declares that it is "a moral obligation - for Israel to resolve the hundred-year conflict with its Arab neighbors." The statement is remarkable for its lack of qualification. It does not say that it is Israel's moral obligation to be alert and responsive to changes of sentiment on the other side and possible opportunities for diminishing or resolving the conflict, or even that Israel must not only react to such potential opportunities but must actively explore for them and seek to promote them. Rather, it implies that Israel is capable by its own actions of bringing about peace and that if the conflict remains unresolved it is because Israel has failed to meet its moral obligation.

Many figures in Peace Now pointed to the situation of the Palestinians in the administered territories as their reason for supporting the organization. Certainly, the Palestinian Arabs were living in ongoing political limbo, governed by a foreign state. (This was so even though a substantial portion of the bureaucrats in the territories were the same people who had held those positions under the Jordanians and who remained on Jordan's payroll. And Jordanian law continued in effect in the territories.) While Labor's position was that Israel had no choice but to await an Arab interlocutor - Jordan, in its view - who would negotiate peace with Israel in exchange for those areas the state could cede, many Peace Now advocates argued that the situation of governing an alien population was so corrosive to Israeli society that its continuation was intolerable.

But even if there was merit to assertions that controlling Palestinian Arabs with no political resolution in sight had negative ramifications for Israeli society, that of course was irrelevant to Peace Now's other, bogus claims that peace with Israel's neighbors could be won by dismantling the settlements and offering to return essentially to the pre-1967 cease-fire lines.

Consider how differently events would have unfolded, particularly over the last fifteen years, if those so concerned about disengaging from the Palestinians had not promoted Peace Now's fraudulent assertions and agenda. Imagine if, instead, perhaps under the banner of "Separation Now," they had argued that, yes, Israel had to retain defensible borders but, even though any political and military vacuum would almost inevitably be filled by hostile forces who would use evacuated territory as a base from which to attack Israel, it was nevertheless in Israel's interest - given the corrosive effects of the status quo - to withdraw unilaterally to those defensible borders and separate from the great majority of Palestinians.

Of course, others would have argued that those advocating such a move were underestimating the toll a terror war waged from ceded areas would take on Israel. Not only would many people be killed, but vital national infrastructure would be vulnerable and damaged, the economy would suffer, immigration would diminish and emigration increase, and the nation would be put at profound risk.

But at least there would then have been a national debate based on the realities of Israel's situation. Instead, under the banner of Peace Now, there ensued the apotheosis of a political agenda based on delusional, fraudulent distortions of reality, distortions that led directly to the Oslo debacle and all the bloody disasters that have flowed from Oslo.

Peace Now's conviction of an Arab side readily offering peace if Israel would only make sufficient concessions ultimately degenerated into seeing in Yasser Arafat and his PLO the partner for its envisioned peace, and nothing Arafat and his cadres did could shake the organization from this conviction.

For example, Peace Now embraced the declarations of the Palestine National Conference (PNC) meeting in Algiers in November, 1988, as the PLO definitively offering an olive branch to Israel, when in fact this was hardly the case.

At the meeting, the PNC declared the establishment of the State of Palestine with Arafat as its President. It also proclaimed that it was doing so on the basis of UN Resolution 181. This was the General Assembly resolution in 1947 that called for the creation of two states in the Mandate, one Jewish and one Arab, and that the Palestinian Arabs had rejected at the time. Resolution 181 entailed for Israel territories that were much less, and much less viable, than Israel's pre-1967 domain. (In its regrouping and responding to the war waged against it in 1947-48 by the Palestinian Arabs and subsequently by the surrounding Arab states, Israel had gained control of additional land.) It was hardly a basis for negotiation now. But many involved with the Peace Movement hailed the PNC's Algiers declaration as implicitly recognizing Israel's right to exist.

When, in the following month, Arafat, with obvious reluctance, acquiesced to American demands that he state unambiguously a renunciation of terrorism, a recognition of UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, and acknowledgment of Israel's right to exist with peace and security, those within the Peace Movement embraced his doing so as additional proof of the rightness of their views and confirmation that a new era had indeed dawned.

Were these steps by the Palestinian leadership worthy of note? Of course. Did it make sense for Israel to try to discern their significance? Again, of course. It was obviously in Israel's interest to learn if these moves represented a genuine new agenda, with new objectives, for the PLO. Or were they simply made in the context of the "plan of phases" (the agenda, articulated by the organization in 1974, of acquiring whatever territory could be gained by negotiations and then using that territory as a base from which to pursue Israel’s destruction)? Were they merely steps to win legitimacy and recognition by the United States without any intention of altering the PLO's revanchist and annihilationist goals? Or - a third possibility - were they something in between, perhaps representing a power struggle within the organization concerning which of two directions it should follow?

But for the true believers of Peace Now, such questions, if considered at all, were quickly dismissed. In their eagerness to interpret evidence in conformity with their desires, they could see these events as only meaning that the PLO had indeed decided to pursue genuine peace and now all that was required was a reciprocal Israeli response. As the organization declared shortly after the PNC's Algiers conference: "In Algiers the PLO abandoned the path of rejection and the Palestinian Charter and adopted the path of political compromise..."

Counter-evidence included statements by PLO leaders, in communications with their constituents, of the organization's continued dedication to the PLO covenant and its focus on Israel's annihilation. But this was disregarded.

An example of such statements was the declaration by senior PLO member Ahmad Sidqi Dajani on November 22, 1988 that, "We in the PLO make a clear distinction between covenants and political programs, whereby the former determine the permanent strategic line while the latter are tactical by nature. We would like some of our brothers to take note of this difference, that is, of our continued adherence to the Palestinian National Covenant." Another example was the comments of Arafat's second in command, Abu Iyad, some days later: "The borders of our state noted [by the PNC Algiers declaration] represent only a part of our national aspirations. We will strive to expand them so as to realize our ambition for the entire territory of Palestine."

Similarly ignored by the true believers were Arafat's own assurances to his people of his steadfast allegiance to the "plan of phases," and evidence of continuing PLO involvement in terrorist attacks on Israel.

Bar-On, in his 470-page history of the Peace Movement, much of it devoted to the peregrinations of the PLO, never even mentions Arafat's "plan of phases." Bar-On apparently did not want it to exist and so he simply ignored it.

Peace Now’s predilection to fraudulent recasting of realities can be seen again in the organization’s response to Arafat’s embrace of Saddam Hussein following his invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and to the Palestinians’ wide endorsement of Arafat’s stance and of Saddam’s threat to "burn half of Israel." Some within the Peace Movement, invested in their own comprehension of Palestinian attitudes and aspirations, were, in Bar-On’s words, "profoundly disturbed and confused" by this rallying to Saddam.

But Peace Now was undeterred from casting Israel as the obstacle to peace and Arafat as a ready partner if Israel would only treat him as such. The organization was soon attacking the government for its negative reaction to Arafat and the Palestinians’ allying with Saddam. It accused the government of seeking "to manipulate the political mistakes which the Palestinians and the PLO have made in order to advance" its own, insufficiently forthcoming, policies.

Notable also in this statement is, of course, the whitewashing characterization of the actions of the PLO and its supporters as "political mistakes." It is a depiction reflecting Peace Now’s wish to blur the Palestinians’ eagerness for a Saddam-led war of annihilation against Israel into something less threatening and more in keeping with what the "peace" camp wanted to be the aspirations of the other side. "Political mistakes" suggested Arafat and his followers were in fact seeking a resolution of the conflict along the lines proposed by the Peace Movement but were simply going about pursuing it in the wrong way.

Another illustration of Peace Now’s willful distortion of reality was its depiction of its Palestinian interlocutors, particularly those who were connected to the PLO but were not officially part of it and so did not fall under Israel’s ban at the time on Israeli contacts with the organization. Most notable among these interlocutors was Faisal Husseini.

Speaking to an Arab audience in November, 1992, Husseini declared: "We have not conceded and will not surrender any of the existing commitments that have existed for more than 70 years...We have within our Palestinian and united Arab society the ability to deal with divided Israeli society...We must force Israeli society to cooperate... with our Arab society, and eventually to gradually dissolve the 'Zionist entity.'" He expressed similar sentiments on other occasions and, after the initiation of Oslo, he characterized the Oslo accords as the Palestinians’ Trojan Horse, its means of penetrating the Jewish state in advance of destroying it.

In contrast, Bar-On, speaking of the period during which Hussein gave the speech just quoted, states, "A new generation of Palestinian leaders was emerging... Younger people like...Faisal Husseini...Most of the peace groups on the Israeli side maintained contacts with these new leaders and tried to persuade Israelis that these Palestinians could be partners in negotiations."

As for those Israelis who were not persuaded, who took Arafat and his followers at their word when they declared their goal remained Israel’s annihilation, and who interpreted continued PLO involvement in anti-Israel terror as likewise weighing against its interest in genuine peace, the true believers of Peace Now had a ready explanation. Those benighted Israelis lacked sophistication, were insufficiently educated and often devoted to a narrow-minded religious traditionalism. Consequently, they were as yet unable to get past their biases, to look beyond the superficial and to recognize the Palestinian leadership’s genuine desire for peace.

Bar-On, for example, notes that the Sephardic Jewish community in Israel tended to be more distrustful of Arab intentions and adds that this seemed, in surveys, to be related to educational level and level of religious traditionalism. He also makes the point that segments of the Ashkenazi community that were less educated and more traditional were likewise more distrustful of the possibilities for genuine peace than were Israel's elites. Bar-On concludes: "Higher learning, it is believed, exposes individuals to a wider variety of opinions, trains them in new analytical and flexible modes of thought, and enables them to relate to issues in a less emotional and more self-critical way, which leads to greater tolerance and understanding of the 'other' and of the complexity of the issues."

Entirely missed by the "peace" activists in this comprehension was, of course, the narrow-mindedness of their own assumption that their interlocutors, and the Palestinians generally, must think as they do and subscribe to their values and perspectives. This assumption is another facet of their investment in the delusion, and their promotion of the fraud, that Israeli action will determine Arab action and that Israeli reform and concessions will inevitably yield the wished-for Arab response.

Another tool used by the Peace Movement to promote its fraudulent agenda was Israel’s so-called New History. This refers to the largely bogus revisionist history that emerged mainly in the latter 1980's and whose purveyors generally advanced the thesis that Israel’s founding and early history, in particular its War of Independence, involved more egregious anti-Arab actions than had heretofore been acknowledged.

The subtext, often explicitly declared in the work of the "new historians," is that if Israelis would only recognize their culpability, see themselves as bearing much responsibility for Arab hostility, and make the proper amends and concessions, then peace would be readily attainable.

Many works have exposed the falseness of the theses advanced by the new historians. (A particularly incisive volume in this vein is Ephraim Karsh’s Fabricating Israeli History.)

This extends to the lie in new historian claims of basing their arguments on newly released archives and so presenting a more informed view of the events they discuss. In fact, the sources cited by the new historians are typically long available ones, and what is most new in their presentations are their tortured use of those sources.

One problem among the new historians noted by critics is their general failure to make significant use of available Arab sources and their presentation of Arab decision-making in very two-dimensional terms. Some critics have attributed this to these authors often not having sufficient command of Arabic. But a more basic explanation for the two-dimensional depiction of Arab decision-making is that this is consistent with the political intent of the new historians. Casting Arab actions as simply straightforward and predictable responses to Israeli actions rhetorically advances the thesis that Arab hostility should be understood as a consequence of Israeli provocations and that sufficient Israeli amends and concessions will inexorably elicit a positive response from Israel’s Arab neighbors.

Another complementary development that has likewise been embraced, like the New History, by many within the Peace Movement, including within the ranks of Peace Now, has been what is widely characterized as "post-Zionism." The adherents of "post-Zionism" have essentially argued that the Jewish accoutrements of the Jewish state, even Israel’s overt self-characterization as a Jewish state, are offensive to Arab sensibilities and that more or less jettisoning these elements of national identity are among the self-reforms Israel should undertake to win the peace readily available for sufficient concessions.

Advocates of post-Zionism have often cast their agenda of reforms as in the interest of "universalist" and "democratic" ideals. But others have explicitly declared that their enthusiasm for de-Judaizing Israel lay in the desire to appease its Arab adversaries. For example, shortly after the start of the Oslo process, David Grossman, one of the prominent Israeli literati associated with Peace Now, opined that, to see the process through to its fruition in peace, Israelis must concede to the Arabs not only geographic territories but territories of the soul. They must surrender their belief that it is of overriding importance for the Jewish people to have the military capacity to defend itself in its own land; the belief that the Holocaust was further evidence of the necessity of this; and the belief that the willingness of Israelis to sacrifice for the defense of the country, and to want to take an active role in that defense, is a virtue. They must also give up the belief that the creation of Israel represents a national return for the Jews from a long and too often horrifyingly painful exile. They must yield even their belief in the value of Jewish peoplehood.

In this statement about the need for such concessions in the service of "peace," Grossman takes steps toward setting aside the lie that his and others’ advocacy of these steps simply reflects a high-minded devotion to "universalist" and "democratic" principles. But the statement still, of course, perpetuates another lie, the fraudulent assertion - based on exhaustion with the siege and a desperate and overwhelming desire for its end - that the right self-abnegations by Israel, the right mix of territorial and spiritual retreat, can win Israel the peace it desires no matter how much the objective evidence of words and deeds by the other side indicates otherwise.

The Oslo accords marked the pinnacle of the Peace Now agenda. Israel embraced Arafat and his PLO as its peace partner and began the process of handing him control of Gaza and West Bank territories. Peace Now celebrated the accords and was silent in the face of declarations and actions by the Palestinian leadership that suggested an intention other than peace.

For example, on the very night of the famous Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House lawn in September, 1993, Arafat appeared on Jordanian television and told Palestinians and the wider Arab world that they should understand Oslo in terms of the PLO’s 1974 progam; that is, the "plan of phases." Arafat repeated his characterization of Oslo as the first phase in the "plan of phases" at least a dozen times within the first month of signing the initial accords, and he and his lieutenants did so many times thereafter. Arafat also repeatedly compared Oslo to the Treaty of Hudaibiya, which Mohammed had signed in 628 and abandoned when his forces became strong enough to overwhelm his adversaries.

Peace Now's ignoring of such declarations was matched by its silence when Palestinian media, mosques and schools, under PLO control, incited their audiences, worshipers and students to hate Jews and dedicate themselves to Israel’s destruction. If Peace Now’s representatives broke their silence on Palestinian incitement, it was mainly to attack and condemn those Israelis who invoked such incitement as evidence that Israel’s partners were not interested in peace.

Peace Now’s silence also extended to the terror that ensued upon the initiation of Oslo and to evidence of Arafat’s involvement in the terror. In the 22 months from Arafat’s arrival in the territories, in July, 1994, to the fall of the Labor-Meretz government that had initiated Oslo, in May, 1996, more than 150 lives were lost to anti-Israel terror. This far exceeded the toll in any comparable period in Israel’s history up to then. But Peace Now and its representatives continued to insist that Arafat and his PLO were offering Israel peace and that all that was needed were sufficient Israeli concessions.

The terror was the major factor in Israel’s electing Bibi Netanyahu prime minister in the May, 1996 balloting. Netanyahu declared that Israel would make no further concessions until Arafat’s Palestinian Authority lived up to its earlier commitments to end anti-Israel incitement and terror as well as fight other Palestinian organizations engaged in terror. The Peace Movement's response to this stance was to characterize Netanyahu as obstructing progress towards "peace."

Haaretz commentator Ari Shavit, writing a year and a half into Netanyahu’s tenure, in an article entitled "Why We Hate Him," observed:

"There is a deeper motive for the hatred we feel for Benjamin Netanyahu... In the early '90's...we [Shavit had himself been an Oslo enthusiast], the enlightened Israelis, were infected with a messianic craze... All of a sudden, we believed that... the end of the old Middle East was near. The end of history, the end of wars, the end of the conflict...

"Hatred of Netanyahu enables us to conveniently forget that before the bubble burst, we acted like fools. We fooled ourselves with illusions. We were bedazzled into committing a collective act of messianic drunkenness. Hatred of Netanyahu also gives us a chance to forget that it was not the rise of Netanyahu that brought on the paralysis of Oslo but the paralysis of Oslo that brought on the rise of Netanyahu. The hatred permits us to keep harboring the notion that everything is really much more simple, that if we only pull back, if we only recognize Palestinian statehood... we would be able [once again] to breathe in that exhilarating, heady aroma of the end of history, the end of wars, the end of the conflict."

But Shavit’s was a rare voice in the "peace" camp. As for Peace Now, it continued to insist that Israel had ready partners and that the obstacle to genuine peace was Israel’s failure to make sufficient concessions.

Peace Now continued to hew to this fraudulent stance even in the wake of the July, 2000, Camp David negotiations and Arafat’s subsequent launch of a wide-scale terror war against Israel.

At the talks, Ehud Barak, then prime minister, offered territorial concessions far beyond what commentators had thought any government would be willing to cede. More importantly, his offer far exceeded what virtually all military observers believed prudent, given Israel's strategic challenges. According to Dennis Ross, the Clinton Administration's chief negotiator for the Arab-Israeli conflict and a key participant at Camp David, Barak was prepared to transfer to Palestinian sovereignty some 91% of the West Bank as well as all of Gaza. This included all but a small sliver of the Jordan Valley and other territory long deemed by both Labor and Likud as vital to Israel's security and survival. In addition, Barak agreed to give some pre-1967 Israeli territory to the Palestinians. Israel also offered to cede parts of Jerusalem and even compromise its sovereignty in the Old City, including on the Temple Mount.

The summit continued for two weeks. But, despite the dimensions of the Israeli offer and intense pressure from President Clinton, Arafat rejected the Israeli proposals. He did so without making any counter-offer on the territorial issues.

In addition, Arafat demanded at the summit that Israel accede to the Palestinians' so-called "right of return," the claimed "right" of all Palestinian refugees from the 1947-48 war and their descendants not only to move to the nascent Palestinian state in ceded territories but to "return" to "homes" within Israel's pre-1967 lines. The admission of millions of Arabs to Israel would, of course, grossly alter the demographics of the state and is, in effect, a formula for the dismantling of Israel as the Jewish national home, the fulfillment of Jewish national self-determination.

There is much evidence that Arafat did not go to Camp David with a view to actually negotiating with Barak. He knew Barak was determined to arrive at an end-of-conflict settlement, and Arafat had no intention of agreeing to this, no matter what Israeli concessions Barak offered. As Efraim Karsh has noted, "Had Barak not insisted on an end to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Arafat would have readily cashed in his concessions in return for further ambiguous pledges regarding a Palestinian-Israeli 'peace.' Yet there was absolutely no way for Arafat to [agree to a resolution of the conflict short of] the destruction of the state of Israel..."

Even Shlomo Ben-Ami, Barak's foreign minister, a leader of Israel's negotiating team at the Taba talks at the end of 2000 and still at that late date a fervent believer that sufficient Israeli concessions could win peace, conceded in June, 2001, that Arafat was only pretending to endorse a two-state solution but in fact still "doesn't accept the legitimacy" of Israel. A few months later, Ben-Ami elaborated on his new insight: "For Arafat, Oslo was a sort of huge camouflage act behind which he was exercising political pressure and terror in varying proportion in order to undermine the very idea of two states for two peoples."

But even in the wake of Arafat’s launching and continued prosecuting of his terror war, Peace Now persisted in promoting its fraudulent claims that the obstacle to peace was Israel’s wanting to hold onto some at least of the settlements and its refusal to make sufficient concessions.

To this day, and despite the ongoing incitement to Israel’s annihilation by the media, mosques and schools of Mahmoud Abbas’s PA as well as by those of the Palestinian Islamist parties, most notably Hamas; and despite the terror launched both by elements of Abbas’s PA and the Islamist parties; and despite the refusal of all Palestinian parties to acknowledge the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state; Peace Now continues to insist that the obstacle to peace is the settlements.

And, of course, despite UN Security Council Resolution 242 and despite all the strategic threats facing Israel, Peace Now continues to reject Israel’s having any legitimate claim on any part of the territories.

And it continues to compound its fraudulent assertion of a readily available peace with additional false claims, such as Israel’s supposed taking of privately owned Palestinian land for settlements. (For example, not long ago Peace Now asserted that 86.4% of Maale Adumim, the largest of the settlement communities, was built on privately owned Arab land. When challenged with land ownership records, it conceded that perhaps about half of one percent (0.54%) of the community’s land was privately owned by Arabs. Even this figure is highly questionable.)

Peace Now has promoted its fraudulent claims at great cost to Israel, including a cost in lives. But this has apparently been of little concern to the organization’s enthusiasts, an ugly truth that has not gone unnoticed by some in Israel. When, in the early months of his terror war, Arafat had his cadres particularly target settlers, Ari Shavit observed: "On almost a daily basis, Israeli citizens who live beyond the Green Line are being murdered by the historic allies of the Israeli peace movement, yet the movement is silent... It is a blood-chilling silence and it raises the question whether... what has been presented here as the hallowed value of universalism was not in fact only an extremely particularist value that was intended to serve the specific needs of a specific cult of enlightened human beings."

It was and is a cult that worships at the altar of self-delusion and wishful thinking and that, intoxicated with its airy visions of "peace," was and is prepared to sacrifice anyone who challenges it, no matter what evidence, what realities, he or she invokes in that challenge. It was and is a cult that has demonstrated it is willing to sacrifice even the security of the nation on the altar of its delusions and its delusion-driven, fraudulent claims.

That was Peace Now at its inception and it is Peace Now at 30.

The Secret to Olmert's Political Survival

2008-07-30T12:00:00.001-04:00

First published in The Jewish Press

An overwhelming majority of Israelis view Ehud Olmert as an incompetent prime minister and want him gone. This has been the case for the last two years, since his gross mishandling of the Second Lebanon War. Unhappiness with him has only been compounded by his refusal to take responsibility for his failures.

In addition, Olmert is the subject of multiple corruption investigations. Despite mounting evidence against him on numerous fronts, he acknowledges no wrongdoing in this realm as well. Meanwhile, his legal problems draw more and more of his attention away from duties of state. Why, in the face of all this, is he allowed to remain in office?

Olmert continues as prime minister even as Israel is confronted with dire threats that he either refuses to address or addresses only to exacerbate. Among the latter is his cease-fire with Hamas, undertaken against the advice of Israel's military and intelligence services, an agreement that only enables the terrorist rulers of Gaza to increase their military strength and their capacity to attack Israeli communities.

Another example is his recent engagement with Syria, a step that has helped that nation break out of its isolation, with Syrian President Assad feted in Paris and pursued as a sought-after guest by other European governments. Olmert's gambit has undermined the American policy of imposing a price on the Syrian regime for its support of terror in Lebanon and Iraq and against Israel, and has compromised Israel's own vital interests vis-a-vis Syria.

Among dangerous national problems the prime minister has simply refused to address are the glaringly obvious vulnerabilities of the home front even as attacks persist in the south and war clouds gather in the north. Similarly ignored have been key recommendations of the Winograd Commission that investigated Israel's management of the 2006 war, such as its call for an urgent restructuring of the National Security Council.

Olmert continues to embrace Mahmoud Abbas as the voice of moderation in the Palestinian camp and has failed to address the realities that give the lie to his characterization of Abbas as Israel's "peace partner." Palestinian Authority media under Abbas's control continue to vilify Israel and Jews and promote violent confrontation. PA schools and media persist in indoctrinating children to dedicate themselves to martyrdom in the fight against Israel. The danger posed by this ongoing incitement is obvious, but Olmert has not deemed it worthy of public criticism or challenge.

In response to Israel's recent exchange with Hizbullah that entailed the release of Samir Kuntar, whose claim to fame is his killing of a four-year-old Israeli girl by smashing her skull with his rifle butt, Abbas extended congratulations to Kuntar and his family.

Abbas also lauded one of the terrorists whose bodies were handed over by Israel in the exchange, a Palestinian woman whose "heroic" deed was taking part in an attack that killed 36 Israeli civilians, including 13 children, many of whom were burned to death on a blown-up bus. According to Abbas, the woman, Dalal Mughrabi, should be honored for carrying out "one of the most courageous operations in Israel"; and he declared that "we want to turn Dalal's funeral into a national wedding, a major celebration.... She will always be remembered as a symbol for the Palestinian women's struggle." This, too, failed to rouse Olmert to any criticism of his "peace partner."

Olmert is likewise silent regarding the demonization of Israel and Jews in Egyptian media; instead he praises Egypt for its role as a "moderating" force. Egypt's ongoing failure to stem the smuggling of arms to Hamas in Gaza, attested to by Israeli military and intelligence services, similarly elicits no criticism or challenge from the prime minister.

learly, part of the explanation for Olmert's continuing in office lies in a coalition whose Knesset members put their personal interests, their fear of losing their seats in a new election, above the well-being of the nation.

But the problem goes far beyond the Knesset. In fact, Olmert would have Knesset backing whatever policies he pursued, as the self-interest of the MKs who support him would be the same in any case and would assure their backing.

In contrast, a wider perversion of the political system has not only allowed a man with such failures and faults to stay in office but has actually encouraged his pursuit of disastrous policies. For example, his dealings with Hamas, his agreement to a self-defeating cease-fire, and his grossly counter-productive courting of Syria's Assad, likewise at the cost of future national suffering, as well as his silence regarding incitement in PA media and Egyptian media, were not fashioned by political conviction - the man appears to have none - but by what he perceives as mollifying those who are in a position to challenge his premiership in the face of his incompetence and apparent corruption.

That wider perversion lies largely in corruption elsewhere in the Israeli body politic; in particular, a corrupt judiciary and criminal justice system and corruption in major elements of the media. The corruption in these institutions is not primarily material and venal, as that of which the prime minister is suspected, but ideological: a misuse of judicial and police powers, and an abuse of media responsibility, for political ends. But it is no less dangerous to the Jewish state for being less venal.

Among Israeli media outlets, the government-controlled electronic media have always been left-leaning and have consistently slanted the news to conform to a leftist political bias. During the Oslo years, for example, they routinely failed to report evidence of Arafat's involvement in anti-Israel terror or the persistent calls for the murder of Israelis and ultimate destruction of the Jewish state that were then, too, an omnipresent fixture of Palestinian Authority media, mosques and schools. Israeli concessions were reported and lauded; any questioning of those concessions was either ignored or noted only to be denigrated.

The same bias has prevailed in major elements of the privately owned media. At a conference in Moscow last fall, David Landau, then-managing editor of Haaretz, the newspaper of Israel's elites, openly acknowledged, indeed seemed to brag, that his paper muted its coverage of corruption charges against political figures such as Olmert and former prime minister Sharon when those leaders were pursuing policies Haaretz deemed to be advancing the "peace process." One does not have to be a political genius in Israel to know what political steps play to the prevailing media bias.

A similar bias permeates Israel's judiciary and criminal justice system, with, for example, different investigatory and prosecutory criteria applied according to the target's political views. This has always been a problem in Israel but has seemingly become more blatant since the initiation of Oslo.

One particularly noteworthy expression of this bias was the heavy-handed use of prosecutorial mechanisms and of the police to suppress protests, demonstrations, even political organizational meetings, of those opposed to the Oslo accords. Such abuse of power became even more marked in the wake of Yitzhak Rabin's assassination in November 1995. Indeed, the government sought to tar the entire opposition with responsibility for the assassination and to treat Oslo's critics accordingly.

Certainly, some on the Left were troubled by this pattern. For example, Hillel Halkin, a longtime Labor sympathizer, wrote two months after Rabin's death: "Since the assassination there have been signs that the Labor government has embarked on a worrisome policy of using rarely invoked anti-'incitement-to-rebellion' laws in order to intimidate forms of protest and criticism that would be permitted, or at least considered less severe legal offenses, in most democratic countries." But this was a rare statement for voices in the Labor camp.

Nor did the terror war launched by Arafat in September 2000, and increased public disenchantment with what the Oslo-era delusions of the Israeli Left had wrought, translate into any lessening of the predilection to use the law and the tools of police and prosecutors in prejudicial ways against those on the political Right. Thus, in the summer of 2005, in advance of the dismantling of the Jewish communities/settlements in Gaza as well as four on the West Bank, the government created an entirely new and extraordinary body of prosecutorial procedures to deal with anti-evacuation demonstrators and resisters.

Among the novel guidelines was an order that cases brought against those accused of threatening a civil servant in the course of the expulsions "cannot be closed by the investigating unit because of lack of evidence or lack of public interest, but only with permission from the state prosecutor."

In an April 2007 hearing for a senior reserve officer who had tried to resist his expulsion from Kfar Yam in Gaza, Judge Drora Beit-Or, deputy president of the Be'er Sheva Magistrates Court, acknowledged, "We dealt differently with the cases from the Disengagement. We [in Be'er Sheva] dealt with many cases including minors and threats. Most of the defendants were first time offenders and all [cases] received special treatment." This included the months-long imprisonment of teenagers who had committed no crime and had no previous criminal record.

The discriminatory use of the criminal justice system to target leading opposition political figures was likewise a recurrent fixture of Labor Zionist governance that seemed to reach new levels of intensity in the context of Labor's promotion and defense of the Oslo process. Notable in this regard was the aggressive prosecutorial pursuit of Benjamin Netanyahu, after he had left office, for his allegedly having engaged in illegal activities around contracting work done at his private residence while he was prime minister and also his reportedly having kept gifts received while in office that properly belonged to the state.

In contrast, pursuit of then-president Ezer Weizman for allegedly having received large payoffs to advance left-wing political goals - with the amounts involved being significantly greater than those entailed in the allegations against Netanyahu - was much less vigorous.

The blatant political use of prosecutorial actions prompted Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz to address the matter in a letter to Haaretz in August, 2000. Dershowitz noted "Israel's long history of prosecuting, often unsuccessfully, some prominent public officials, while foregoing prosecution of others." He went on: "Even those who want to see Benjamin Netanyahu prosecuted appear to acknowledge that if the same test that was applied to Ezer Weizman were to be applied to Netanyahu, there would be no prosecution"; and he warned: "It would be discriminatory in the extreme to apply a less demanding evidentiary and prosecutorial standard for Netanyahu than has been applied to other political figures in the past. Any less demanding standards would reasonably raise the specter of political partisanship and discrimination."

We have yet to see how the most recent charges raised against Olmert are handled by the criminal justice system. But the prime minister would have many precedents to draw upon if he surmised that making concessions to the nation's enemies may well win him more sympathetic treatment.

Similar politicization of governmental bodies that ought to be free of partisan bias has infected other institutions of Israeli public life in a manner that has rewarded Olmert for pursuing accommodation of Israel's enemies and contributed to his continuing in power despite the real dangers his premiership poses to the nation's well-being.

In the face of sharp public criticism concerning the government's handling of the 2006 war, the Cabinet appointed a five-member commission of inquiry to investigate and report on the war's management. The Winograd Commission, named after its chairman, issued its final report in January 2008. While the document, like the commission's interim findings presented nine months earlier, is harshly critical of the government for its conduct of the war, the final report surprised many observers by not explicitly assigning personal blame to the prime minister or recommending what ought to be the consequences for him.

When asked, a short time after the report's release, why it did not call for Olmert's resignation, one commission member, Yehezkel Dror, a professor emeritus of political science at Hebrew University, responded: "If we think that the prime minister will advance the peace process, it is a serious consideration. What do you prefer, a government with Olmert and Barak, or new elections that will put Netanyahu in power?"

Professor Dror apparently recognized no problem in his political preferences influencing his work on a commission whose investigations and conclusions should have transcended partisan political considerations.

Dror has since come to regret his stance. Writing in the Forward on July 2, under the title "A Severe Verdict That Didn't Go Far Enough," he observed, "The prime minister misdirected the war, showing a serious lack of strategic thinking. Most of the blame [for the war's failures] lies with the government, and particularly with the prime minister."

Dror added, "I expected the Cabinet would resign or be dismissed after the interim report appeared.The prime minister, however, did not resign, nor was he forced to leave. I do not think this would have happened in any other parliamentary democracy. The peace initiatives, as they unfold with time, however important, seem in part to be airy improvisation, if not outright spin, lacking deep, long-term, realistic grand-strategic thinking by the prime minister based on professional political-security staff work. The prime minister stands accused of unseemly personal behavior. He is preoccupied with political survival and is distrusted by the vast majority of the public.

"Is the Winograd Commission to blame for the present sorry state of affairs? In part, speaking about my own role, the answer is yes. I regret that I did not insist on making an explicit institutional recommendation that, because of his grand failures, the prime minister should not continue to serve. This recommendation is all the more urgent and valid in light of developments since publication of our final report."

Dror's public admission of error is commendable. It also renders him virtually unique among those in Israel who have allowed partisanship to guide their behavior in positions of public service and public trust that should be above partisan bias.

But his admission is based essentially on his having seen the dangerous consequences of his error and Olmert's remaining in office. Dror does not acknowledge the larger reality that damage to the state will inevitably follow from the rot of politicizing institutions that ought to transcend narrow political considerations, even if that damage is, at least in the short term, often less dramatic than the dire straits into which Israel has been placed by Olmert's continuing on as prime minister.

Arab Belligerence, Israeli Self-Abasement

2008-02-09T12:00:00.004-05:00

First published in The Jewish Press

"... Hand in hand, arm in arm, we will protect your land, Palestine...
"The land is Arab in history and identity
"Palestine is Arab in history and identity...
"From Jerusalem and Acre, from Haifa and Jericho and Gaza and Ramallah
"From Bethlehem and Jaffa, from Beersheva and Ramla,
"From Nablus to the Galilee, from Tiberias to Hebron."

These lines, translated by Palestinian Media Watch, are some lyrics of a song played many times daily on Fatah-TV, the television outlet of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s party, beginning about six weeks before the Annapolis conference in late November.

The song, in declaring Israeli cities, and by implication all of Israel, to be properly "Arab" and "Palestinian," repeats the message drummed out incessantly by Palestinian Authority media, mosques and schools, whether under the presidency of Yasir Arafat or Abbas.

That message asserts Jews have no historical connection with the land of Israel, are merely alien usurpers, that their state and their presence in the land is a crime, and that it is the duty of every Palestinian to kill or expel the intruders and destroy their state.

For almost an entire generation of Palestinians, exposure to media, mosques and schools has meant indoctrination in these claims.

Surely, an Israeli leader meeting with Palestinian counterparts has no higher responsibility than to challenge them publicly on their sponsorship of hate-education and incitement. It is the Israeli government’s duty to unmask the murderous hypocrisy of Palestinian leaders talking "two-state solution" and "mutual recognition" in speeches to Western audiences while militating for a single, Arab, state in all the land when talking in Arabic, through their organs of indoctrination, to their own people.

One would expect an Israeli leader to recognize the obvious: that only by bringing the pressure of public exposure to bear on Palestinian promotion of hatred and mass murder can there be any possibility of curbing the incitement.

Only if Palestinian leaders are prepared to encourage reconciliation rather than a war of extermination in their messages to their people can there be any hope of movement toward genuine peace.

And yet Israeli leaders are virtually silent. In his speech at Annapolis, Prime Minister Olmert demanded "an end to the terror, incitement and hatred." But he named no party as responsible for incitement, referred to President Abbas only as "my friend" and said nothing of indoctrination by Abbas’s own party organs, indoctrination that is hardly a sign of "friendship" but serves rather to assure a future of more war, not peace.

Not once did Olmert say what must be said, something of the order of: "President Abbas, we would like nothing more than to be able to negotiate with you a settlement that assures peace and prosperity for both our peoples as they go their separate political ways. But that goal will remain beyond reach as long as you continue to urge on your people to pursue our annihilation."

Similarly, much was made by Israeli officials of the attendance at Annapolis of Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal, as though this were an indication of Saudi movement toward recognition of Israel’s legitimacy. In his speech in Maryland, Olmert said of the Saudis only, "I value [the 2002 Saudi] initiative, acknowledge its importance and highly appreciate its contribution."

But Saudi government media are likewise filled with demonization of Jews in the crudest terms, with children praised for parroting anti-Jewish aspersions and Saudi audiences taught the necessity of expunging Israel. Why did not one Israeli leader at Annapolis state the obvious to those Saudis present: that, again, there cannot be peace when you are indoctrinating your people, including your children, to believe that Jews are evil, an infestation that must be eradicated?

Why did Foreign Minister Livni choose to criticize the Arab potentates at Annapolis primarily for their refusal to shake her hand? Why did she choose to address the personal insult, and its indirect slap at Israel, but did not see fit to challenge them on the more profound and dangerous insult of those leaders inciting their publics to rejection and murderous hatred of Jews?

Likewise, Egypt was once more cast by Israel’s representatives as a model peace partner. Olmert declared, "The peace signed between Israel and Egypt... is a solid foundation of stability and hope in our region. This peace is an example and a model of the relations which we can build with Arab states."

Yet since the signing of the Camp David peace accords between Israel and Egypt nearly three decades ago, the government in Cairo has increased the anti-Israel and indeed anti-Semitic message of its official media. For example, earlier this year Israel’s peace partner broadcast on government-controlled television an interview with a "scholar" who affirmed that Jews do indeed use the blood of gentile children in the preparation of Passover matzah.

Some months prior to the broadcast, an article written by the chief Mufti of Egypt and published in Egypt’s major government newspaper, Al-Ahram, made the same assertion. Is it not obvious that Israeli leaders have both a moral and pragmatic obligation not to let such vile demonization of Jews pass when they meet with Egyptian officials?

The pattern of Israeli leaders skirting this essential issue, or alluding to it only in broad generalities while holding no one responsible for anti-Israel and anti-Jewish indoctrination, was repeated by Foreign Minister Livni in her speech at December’s Paris Donors Conference organized to raise funds for the Palestinians.

On the same day as the Paris conference and the following day, the IDF struck at terrorist groups in Gaza involved in rocket and mortar attacks into Israel. Abbas, through his spokesman, condemned the Israeli strikes, which reportedly killed eleven terrorists, as a "terrible crime." Terms he has used to characterize similar actions by Israel over the past two years include "heinous massacre," "crime against humanity," and "barbarous slaughter."

While criticizing Hamas and other Gaza groups, particularly to Western audiences, for their incessant bombardment of Israel, his message to his own people is largely vilification of Israeli responses against those perpetrating the cross-border terror and virtual silence about the terrorist provocations.

Why has not the Israeli prime minister or foreign minister publicly confronted Abbas and told him it is hard to take seriously his condemnations of anti-Israel terror and commitment to end it, or his insistence that he desires genuine peace, when he is telling his fellow Palestinians essentially that those targeted by Israel for their cross-border attacks are innocent victims of Israeli aggression?

Does Israel’s becoming a normal state mean today’s Israeli leaders simply accepting their people’s defamation and denigration, letting the inflammatory rhetoric pass in silence, out of gratitude for Arab leaders deigning to sit in the same room with them? Does it mean emulating the behavior of Jewish leaders when Jews were at best tolerated inferiors in Europe and the Arab world?

Beyond the demonization, the anti-Jewish indoctrination, the words, are the deeds. In the days leading up to Annapolis, members of Abbas’s police plotted to kill Prime Minister Olmert and succeeded in murdering an Israeli in a drive-by shooting. Egyptian forces continued to allow Hamas to smuggle arms and explosives into Gaza and to send its members for terrorist training in Iran and return to ply their new-learned skills against the Jewish state. And the Saudis continued to both finance Islamist forces targeting Israel and boycott the Jewish state, even though they pledged to end the boycott as a condition for their being admitted in 2005 to the World Trade Organization. But nothing of this passed the lips of Israel’s leaders at Annapolis.

To the contrary, Olmert’s administration reportedly withheld from the media, until after the Maryland meeting, the news that the drive-by killing a few days earlier was the work of PA police. Israel’s leaders were apparently concerned that revealing the truth about the murderers would spoil the atmosphere in Annapolis.

In a similar vein, according to recent news accounts, the Olmert government has refused, despite the urging of the IDF, to share with key members of Congress videotapes of Egyptian forces helping Hamas terrorists cross into Gaza and smuggle arms and explosives across the Sinai-Gaza border. Israeli leaders are said to be worried about offending Egypt. They have embraced this stance even though such Egyptian collusion with Hamas is a violation of numerous agreements between Egypt and Israel and greatly increases the threats to Israel.

In late December, Foreign Minister Livni, who had come under sharp criticism for Israel’s withholding the tapes from Congress, finally made a public statement criticizing Egyptian failure to stop Hamas smuggling as "dismal and problematic." But Livni did not point out that Egypt’s behavior is a contravention of its Camp David treaty obligations to Israel as well as of specific agreements that accompanied Israel’s permitting additional Egyptian forces along the Gaza border for policing duties.

Nor did she note that the Egyptian violations represent a grave danger to Israel. Rather, she explained the problem with Egypt’s behavior as its "detract[ing] from the ability of the pragmatic forces in the Gaza Strip and Judea and Samaria [her ludicrous characterization of Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party] to control the territory."

When Egyptian officials subsequently slammed Livni for not knowing what she was talking about, and even accused Israel of fabricating the tapes showing Egyptian forces aiding Hamas smuggling, the Israeli response was, once more, virtual silence.

Such behavior by Israeli leaders, particularly silence in the face of Arab defamation and incitement, is nothing new. Illustrative are the responses of Defense Minister Ehud Barak to various events during his premiership.

In the Austrian elections of October 1999, Joerg Haider’s far right Freedom Party did unexpectedly well, and Barak expressed concern and called for a struggle against fascism and neo-Nazism. Four months later, when Austria’s president agreed to the formation of a coalition government that would include Haider’s party, Israel recalled its ambassador from Vienna.

During these same months, Syria’s state-controlled media ran several stories with anti-Semitic themes. One such, in late November, regurgitated the blood libel, the claim that Jews use the blood of gentiles for their religious rituals, which was also the theme of a popular book by Syria’s defense minister, Mustafa Tlas (The Matzah of Zion, 1984). Two months later, in late January, 2000, an editorial in Syria’s leading newspaper, Tishreen, a mouthpiece for the Assad regime, focused on denial of the Holocaust while insisting that Israeli policies are worse than those of the Nazis.

By any measure, Arab anti-Semitism is a much greater threat to Israel, and to Jews generally, than the Freedom Party in Austria. Yet Barak remained silent on the Syrian libels. His most notable comments regarding the Syrian government during this period was his characterization of Syrian strongman Hafez al-Assad as "a courageous leader."

Israeli writer Yossi Klein Halevi, contrasting Barak’s responses to events in Austria and in Syria, observed: "[Barak] is afraid of reminding the Israeli public about the nature of the regime to which he proposes yielding the strategic Golan Heights in exchange for a peace likely to be as trustworthy as Tishreen’s sense of history."

Obviously, many Israeli leaders delude themselves into believing that the defamation, the incitement, the hate-indoctrination are not really all that important. They prefer to believe that Israel can negotiate agreements and that peace can ensue despite Arab governments teaching their people that their faith and their honor oblige them to pursue defeat of the Jews and the annihilation of their state.

These Israeli leaders choose to construe the proper path, in the interest of pursuing peace, to be gratitude for any sign of recognition from the Arab side, and avoidance of broaching unpleasant facts when speaking with Arab interlocutors, especially in public, even as those interlocutors almost invariably slander Israel on such occasions.

How absurd, and dangerous, that there are Israeli leaders who choose to believe, despite everything the other side says, and does, and inculcates in its young, that sufficient Israeli concessions will turn reality on its head and win "peace."

How absurd, and self-destructive, that they refuse to acknowledge the truth that presently, and for the foreseeable future, the Palestinians and most of the Arab world are not prepared to recognize Israel’s legitimacy and give it genuine peace, whatever Israel’s concessions. Indeed, the Arab world does not recognize the rights of any minorities within its midst, whether religious or ethnic.

Genocidal campaigns that have taken the lives of two million Christian and animist blacks in the southern Sudan and tens of thousands of Muslim blacks in Darfur and some two hundred thousand Kurds – a Muslim but non-Arab people – in Iraq, have all proceeded with broad support from Arab regimes and their populations. So, too, has the suppression of the language and culture of Berbers in Algeria and Kurds in Syria.

The Arab world is not about to make an exception for, of all people, the Jews, recognizing their right to a state in however small a part of that vast territory – stretching from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf – that Muslim Arabs consider exclusively theirs.

Israel cannot oblige the Arabs to give it peace. To be sure, this truth is unpleasant. But it does not serve Israel’s interests to pretend the reality is otherwise.

It does not advance the nation’s well being when its leaders genuflect to the other side’s hypocritical expressions of interest in peace, averments made mainly for the sake of Western consumption and indeed to increase Western pressure on Israel.

Rather, it serves the state to have its leaders explicitly acknowledge, and confront, Arab demonization, incitement, and hate-indoctrination – that is, Arab dedication to the opposite of peace.

One might retort that insisting on recognition of unpleasant truths will not serve to moderate Arab policies.

But only by doing so can Israel convey to the world the true challenges posed by its enemies – challenges that preclude for the present any possibility of genuine peace. Only by doing so can it cast the light of public scrutiny on the steps necessary from the other side if there is to be movement toward an end to the conflict. And only by doing so will Israel be acting like a normal nation.

Memo to Condi: The Middle East Isn't Birmingham

2008-01-23T12:00:00.000-05:00

First published on FrontPageMagazine.com

She's done it again. In the run-up to the president's recent Middle East trip, Secretary of State Rice repeated to an interviewer from Israel's Channel 10 her comparison of Palestinians confronted with Israeli checkpoints to blacks facing Jim Crow restrictions in the Alabama of her youth.

In the past, Ms. Rice has also identified "hopelessness" as the spur to violence both among Palestinians and among those African-Americans who abandoned peaceful protest. She has seen similarities as well between Palestinian leaders seeking a Palestinian state and America's founding fathers fighting for independence from Britain.

Rice did preface her comments to Channel 10 with an acknowledgment that "sometimes one has to be careful about analogies" - this perhaps in response to criticism she's drawn for previously invoking such comparisons. She also repeated that she had lost a childhood friend, a young girl, in a church bombing in Birmingham and so can "understand a little bit" what it's like for Israeli mothers fearing their children might fall victim to a terrorist bomb.

Even a superficial look at Palestinian history, the declarations of Palestinian leaders and political organizations and the rhetoric of Palestinian media, mosque sermons and school texts, demonstrates that the Palestinian goal has been not equality - a state alongside Israel - but supremacy, a Muslim Arab state replacing Israel. This goal predated Israel's presence in the West Bank and Gaza, and its violent pursuit has led to Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks, not vice versa.

In addition, of course, America's founding fathers never sought the annihilation of Great Britain, never demeaned the British people as inferior beings unworthy of a state or even of life, and never urged American children to dedicate themselves to the murder of British civilians, as Palestinian parties, including that of Mahmoud Abbas, have done vis-a-vis Israel and its citizens.

Those who have pointed out the many problems in Secretary Rice's analogies between the situation of the Palestinians and her own childhood experiences have typically suggested that her error lies in uncritically applying too widely the personal precedent of African-American experience in the segregated South. But one can argue that the problem lies rather in her not applying that precedent widely enough.

Secretary Rice would arrive at a far truer comprehension of the Palestinian-Israeli, and broader Arab-Israeli, conflict, and the obstacles to its resolution, if she turned the prism of her childhood experience toward, and identified with, for example, the 2,000,000 Christian and animist blacks of the southern Sudan killed by Muslim Arab governments of Sudan in a decades-old on-and-off-again war of extermination, a war executed with broad support of the wider Arab world. Deeper understanding would derive as well from applying her personal experience to, and empathizing with, the hundreds of thousands of Darfur blacks likewise murdered by the Arab government of Sudan, and the 200,000 Kurds - another Muslim but non-Arab people - murdered by Saddam Hussein in the first stages of a campaign of extermination, again with broad support in the Arab world. Identification with the plight of the Kurds of Syria and the Berbers of Algeria - another Muslim but non-Arab people - subjected to discrimination and the suppression of their language and culture by the Arab governments of their respective states, would also cast illuminating light for the Secretary of State on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

For, as has been pointed out by genuine reformist voices in the Arab world, that world is dominated by a murderous intolerance of virtually all minorities in its midst, whether religious, racial or ethnic. It is not about to make an exception for the Jews and recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state, whatever its borders.

Were Secretary Rice to apply her own childhood experiences of intolerance to an understanding of this broader reality, the precedent of those experiences could be usefully applied to fathoming the bias and hatred that drive the Palestinian and wider Arab war against Israel and its people and that stand in the way of movement toward peace. Her personal experiences could then be an asset rather than impediment in the fashioning of American policy - a policy whose objective would be interim steps to decrease the risks of violence until such time as changes within the Arab world allow for movement toward genuine peace.

Anti-Israel Bias and Rape

2008-01-10T12:00:00.001-05:00

First published in the Hebrew weekly, Makor Rishon

Rape has been in the news in Israel recently; or, more precisely, the absence of rape.

One story involves a Hebrew University doctoral candidate who has looked at the non-occurrence of IDF rapes of Palestinian women in the territories - a phenomenon which the naive observer might well regard as a good thing - and has attributed it to self-serving, nationalistic motives. Another story concerns David Landau, editor of Haaretz, who apparently feels the Americans have not been forceful enough in pushing upon Israel their vision of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement. In a meeting with Condoleeza Rice, Landau told the Secretary of State Israel needs to be "raped" by the United States; that indeed it "wants to be raped."

Both episodes, beyond their strange perversity, illustrate the intense anti-Israel bias that animates significant segments of Israeli Jewish society. In this regard, it is noteworthy that the theme of rape figures in both, as attitudes towards rape provide insight into an essential characteristic of bigotry.

Much has been written about the frequency with which women who are raped are blamed for the crime committed against them. This is hardly limited to the Arab or broader Muslim world, where a raped woman may be indicted and punished for her "crime" and even faces murder by family members whom she has allegedly "shamed." In the West as well, rape victims are often regarded as responsible for what befell them.

Various rationales, each with their own psychological motivations, figure in this blaming of the female victim. But one recurrent theme is a predilection to regard the woman as having likely been somehow seductive, teasing, conveying signals of interest, inviting the attention of her assailant, ultimately having invited his assault.

Assumptions in this vein are widely, and rightly, regarded as reflecting intense misogyny, or bias against women. The perspective underlying the assumption is that men are perhaps sexually forward but basically decent human beings not out to hurt anybody while women are deceptive, full of wiles and capable of leading men down paths they would not otherwise go.

Such lines of thought capture a central and defining characteristic of bigotry: taking a biased, jaundiced view of all occurrences involving the target of the bigotry and choosing to explain those occurrences in a manner consistent with the bias.

The same dynamic can be seen in, for example, anti-Jewish bigotry. To the anti-Semite, if Jews are attacked and physically abused in horrific ways, they must have somehow invited the attack, because non-Jews are essentially decent people who would not do such things unless severely provoked while Jews are unsavory, wily, scheming types who try the patience of others in a manner that triggers extreme responses. Similarly, if a Jew is generous towards others, to the anti-Semite it must be because he anticipates some ultimate material gain in his generosity, as it is in the nature of others but not of Jews to be genuinely generous.

And so it is with anti-Israel bigots, whether gentiles or Jews. If Israeli soldiers don’t rape Palestinian women, it cannot be because the culture in which they were reared, and the code of ethical conduct inculcated by the IDF, condemn such abuses in the strongest terms. No; there must be an unsavory, reprehensible explanation for the soldiers’ behavior.

Hebrew University doctoral candidate Tal Nitzan surmises in her paper that the absence of rape is due to Palestinian women being dehumanized in the eyes of Israeli soldiers. (Are we to conclude then that, for example, Sudanese militia raping the women of Darfur are doing so because they are more inclined to see Darfurian women as fellow human beings?) She also speculates that Israeli soldiers refrain from rape out of demographic concerns, as - she theorizes - the offspring of rape would likely be raised as Palestinians and the soldiers are fearful of adding to Palestinian numbers.Arutz Sheva’s Hillel Fendel, in an interview with Dr. Zali Gurevitch, head of the Hebrew University professors’ committee that recommended publication of Nitzan’s paper, asked, "Can’t it just be that Israeli soldiers come from a culture that very much condemns rape? And why not mention the much-touted ‘purity of arms,’ i.e., the high moral conduct [promoted by] the Israeli Army?"

Gurevitch, who apparently shares Nitzan’s biases, gave the nonsensical reply that observers do not have the right to demand a particular explanation to a given phenomenon. Of course, Fendel wasn’t demanding that explanation but simply questioning why it wasn’t even considered in the paper? Why neglect laudatory explanations and entertain only unsavory, reprehensible ones?

But , again, that is the nature of bigotry, including anti-Israel bigotry.Haaretz editor Landau’s urging America to "rape" Israel is a variation on the same theme. Landau fervently believes that Israel’s presence in the territories is the essence of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and that Israeli withdrawal would yield peace. It is not simply that he chooses to ignore all the evidence to the contrary; Landau’s view is that there can be no legitimate basis for any other perspective.

Israelis who have resisted returning to the pre-1967 borders do so largely because they give credence to the declarations of Palestinian leaders - in Palestinian media, mosques and school texts - that Israel has no right to exist and must be expunged and that it is the duty of every Palestinian to pursue this goal. These Israelis also agree with the authors of UN Security Council resolution 242 that the pre-1967 borders were too precarious and invited aggression against Israel. They oppose full withdrawal also in part because they have been exposed to the terror war waged against them by their neighbors and they have seen how previous territorial concessions have made their situation more, rather than less, precarious. But Landau - in his bias against those who disagree with him, which is the majority of Israelis - chooses to regard such resistance to full withdrawal as explicable only by scurrilous, reprehensible motives.

Landau’s bigotry has led him to believe Israelis incapable of measured, humane weighing of evidence and reasonable decision-making. He has openly acknowledged that he slants news coverage in Haaretz to lead the benighted public in the direction he desires and, in a similar vein, he would like to see outside forces push Israelis in the same direction. In particular, he would like to see the United States use its might to this end.

Like the misogynist who can only see the rape victim as a seductress who invited rape, Landau regards Israel as an unsavory, wily entity that similarly invites attack. Not only does it need to be "raped" by the United States, but, he assured Condoleeza Rice, it "wants to be raped."

To explain with any precision why Landau chose to use "rape" to capture his vision of the American pressure he desires to see applied to Israel, and why he told the Secretary of State it was his "wet dream" to address this matter with her, would require some extensive understanding of his personal history and predilections, and how they have shaped his fantasy life.

But Landau’s choice of words convey transparently enough aspects of his pathology: his delusions regarding the threats faced by Israel, his pathological animus against those Israelis who recognize the threats and disagree with him, and his sexualized violent fantasies of having his own political views imposed on his fellow Israelis. That, as editor of Haaretz, he daily translates this pathology into anti-Israel propaganda disseminated around the world, should be of concern to everyone interested in the well-being of the Jewish state.

The Spiritual Sickness of Avraham Burg

2007-07-11T12:00:00.000-04:00

First published in The Jewish Press

“Brutal and imperialist, confrontational and insular. A shallow place, thuggish, lacking spiritual inspiration.” That is how Ari Shavit, in his long interview with Avraham Burg published in Haaretz’s June 8 Friday Magazine, describes the characterization of Israel in Burg’s new book, Defeating Hitler. It also captures Burg’s dark, cartoonish depiction of Israel in the interview.

Burg’s indictments range from criticism of what he claims has been Israel’s moral turpitude since the 1967 war to broader attacks against the Zionist enterprise.

Shavit writes, “I was outraged by the [new] book,” and, in the interview, he challenges Burg on many points. Burg responds with a smug certitude about his denigration of Israel. But his retorts to Shavit are almost invariably non-answers and most often incoherent or bizarre and nonsensical.

Examples of the latter in Burg’s anti-Israel litany are manifold.

When, for instance, Shavit questions Burg’s romanticizing of Jewish life in the Diaspora and, more particularly, his “describ[ing] a thousand wonderful years of German Jewry” prior to the Holocaust, Burg - whose father fled Dresden - defends his stance. The reality of those “thousand wonderful years” includes the vast slaughter of German Jews in 1096, at the start of the First Crusade; subsequent mass murders that accompanied later crusades; the annihilation of myriad Jewish communities in the fourteenth century in the context of Jews being blamed for the Black Death; and many lesser slaughters. It includes the Jewish presence in German territories being reduced for centuries to small, remnant enclaves, as those not murdered migrated eastward and provided the foundations of what made Poland, at the start of the modern era, home to perhaps 40% of all the world’s surviving Jews. But such realities apparently mean nothing to Burg as he hails the wonders of the Diaspora, especially in Germany, and denigrates life in Israel.

In the same vein, and similarly bizarre, Burg praises contemporary Europe as a worthy alternative to Israel for Jews. In a period when attacks on Jews have reached a level not seen since World War II and Jew-hatred has won a new constituency across the political and economic gamut in Europe, Burg declares, “I see the European Union as a biblical utopia... It is amazing. It is completely Jewish.”

The details of Burg’s indictments of Israel are likewise nonsensical flourishes. He insists that Israel is a paranoid state, seeing Hitler everywhere, and dismisses any genuine threats as either overblown or manageable by Israel’s adopting more pacifist and less distrustful policies. To the extent that he acknowledges, at Shavit’s prodding, a threat from Iran, he criticizes Israeli policy toward Iran as too militant and solitary: “Would it not be more right if we didn’t deal with the problem on our own, but rather as part of a world alignment...?” But, of course, in reality hardly a day goes by without some Israeli officials declaring that the genocide-promoting Iranian theocracy is not just Israel’s problem but the world’s and should be dealt with by the international community acting in unison.

When, to Burg’s declaring Israel “dead spiritually,” Shavit points out that, on the contrary, “It has energy and vibrancy and diversity and productivity,” Burg has no coherent response. Equally mindless are Burg’s claims that the Jews of Israel have withdrawn from the wider world, when in reality Israel is more engaged worldwide in positive, charitable, life-promoting efforts certainly than any other country of its size and more so than the great majority of larger nations.

One can often hear in Burg’s biased claims against Israel echoes of other voices. For example, he is hardly unique when he attacks the Law of Return as representative of Israel’s supposed racism or, in Burg’s own words, as “the mirror image of Hitler.” The mean-spirited absurdity of such a claim, especially from someone who worships Europe, should be obvious. European states that give similar immigration and citizenship preference to those with ethnic ties to the dominant population include Denmark, Italy, Germany, Greece, Poland and Ireland among others. In addition, as Amnon Rubinstein has pointed out with regard to Germany, “In spite of the existence of the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Court for Human Rights, Germany has never been called upon to annul its own ‘Law of Return’ on grounds that it harms the universal principle of equality...” Moreover, the legitimacy of state policies of preferential repatriation was affirmed by the Council of Europe in 2001.

But part of the explanation for why Burg is so comfortable with claims against Israel that are divorced from reality is that the details he offers are secondary to him, mere corollaries to an underlying thesis that he embraces as an act of faith. It is a thesis that has a long pedigree, predating the 1967 war and even the founding of the state: The claim by some Jews that the Zionist enterprise is an affront to genuine Jewish spirituality; that it entails an abandonment of that spirituality for the narrow, materialistic, coarse path of nationalism. Or, in Burg’s words, “Israeliness has only a body; it doesn’t have a soul.”

Burg, like others who promote this thesis, seeks to claim for himself a spiritual superiority, a high standard of ethical conduct by which he measures Israel and finds it falling woefully short. Yet his words and actions reveal something very different - what can perhaps best be characterized as an anti-spiritual idolatry.

This is not meant as a reference to Burg’s materialistic excesses, to what Shavit describes as his “problematic” business dealings or to his suing the Jewish Agency - after he had left his post there - for the right to have the perpetual services of a chauffeured limousine paid for by the agency; behavior which - as Shavit points out - “the judge found disgraceful.” (Burg’s response to Shavit’s raising such issues is to attack Israel’s current steps toward clamping down on corruption as “McCarthyism” and to insist that “I am at harmony with myself.”)

No; it is Burg’s embrace of that dark, dishonest and hypocritical, anti-Israel thesis that represents an “anti-spiritual idolatry.” It is anti–spiritual because, while it talks of ethical, moral precepts, it abandons any such principles in its judging of Israel and of the wider world; and it is idolatrous because it ultimately derives its faux morality from the claims and demands of Israel’s, and the Jews’, enemies.

Again, Burg’s thesis has a long, dark pedigree.

Its origins lie in Europe’s besiegement of its Jews and in maladaptive Jewish responses. Within populations under chronic siege, some will inevitably embrace the indictments of their attackers in the hope that by doing so and reforming accordingly they will appease their enemies and win relief. The history of Diaspora Jewry is replete with episodes of Jews taking to heart the defamations of their tormenters. Indeed, there has probably never been an accusation against Jews - however bigoted and absurd - that has not had its Jewish endorsers.

At the dawn of the modern period, as the issue of granting civic rights to Jews was broached in the states of central and western Europe, every objection raised by those opposed to such rights found its Jewish supporters.

One notable objection was that the Jews constituted a separate nation and this in itself rendered them unfit for being given equal rights in their nations of residence. Many Jews embraced this attack and sought to divest themselves and their fellow Jews of whatever smacked of “nationhood.” In the early nineteenth century, for example, as reformist Jewish congregations were founded in the German states, many sought to strip the liturgy of all references to longings for Jerusalem and for Zion, to demonstrate that Jews were now simply a religious community and no longer a nation.

Those within besieged communities who choose to endorse the indictments of their attackers usually do not acknowledge they are doing so to appease their enemies. Rather, like Avraham Burg, they cast their stance as somehow an ethically superior one. Consistent with this, those who sought to strip Jewish identity of any accouterments of nationhood insisted that Judaism had evolved beyond a narrow, national agenda and now comprised solely a universal spiritual message and mission. From this perspective, the insistence by some Jews that the community had a claim to its national patrimony as well as to its patrimony of faith was derided as narrowminded and anachronistic.

The rise of Zionism led many Jews in the West, including in the German-speaking states and among German Jews in America, to fear that a resurgent Jewish nationalism would threaten all the civic gains they had made in their respective countries. And so - once more choosing to give a moral cast to their fears - they, again like Burg, decried Zionism as morally reprehensible. Even among German Jews who supported the Zionist movement, many did so with the proviso that the Zionist agenda must be one of creating a “cultural” or “spiritual” center that would abet Judaism’s pursuit of its universal ethical mission and that it not entail nation-building.

The perversity to which this led can be seen in the response of some German Jews in the Yishuv to Arab attacks in the 1920's and during the Arab Revolt of 1936-39. They blamed the attacks on what they insisted was the misguided pursuit of a Jewish state and demanded abandonment of that goal.

As the Nazi assault on the Jews grew steadily worse, and as Britain raised ever greater obstacles to Jewish immigration to the League of Nations-sanctioned Jewish National Home, Ben-Gurion struggled with shaping a policy that would gain the Jewish leadership in the Yishuv greater control over immigration. As he stated in 1937, his concern was “Through which [option] can we get in the shortest possible time the most Jews in Palestine?”

But some Jews in the Yishuv, particularly the circle of German Jewish academics around Martin Buber, reared in Germany on anti-Jewish attacks against the alien Jewish “nation” and on the supposed ethical superiority of renouncing that nationhood, chose to savage Ben-Gurion for his nation-building efforts and to denounce the promotion of large-scale immigration as serving the “immoral” cause of nation-building.

Indeed, two months after Hitler’s invasion of Poland, as German cadres were already slaughtering Jews by the thousands, Buber wrote in Haaretz that “[The Zionists are] performing the acts of Hitler in the land of Israel, for they want to serve Hitler’s god [i.e., nationalism] after he has been given a Hebrew name.” As to immigration, Buber insisted that the Arabs be given a veto over any additional admission of Jews to Mandate Palestine.

Buber and those who shared his views sought to cast their stance as the moral, ethical one. But what was moral about the abandonment of European Jewry? What was ethical about Buber’s circle in effect setting up the Grand Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, as the proper arbiter of whether or not Jews should be rescued from Europe?

Their stance reflected a rejection of the moral imperative to save lives in favor of an anti-moral, anti-spiritual idolatry born of the embrace of bigoted, anti-Jewish indictments; it was an idolatry that gave greater weight to supplication of the Grand Mufti than to the obligation to help those being slaughtered.

This is the pedigree of arguments that the Jewish spirituality of the Diaspora has been abandoned for the Zionist dross of nationhood. It is the pedigree of Burg’s all but equating Israel with Nazism.

In its striving to appease the haters and to cast doing so as morally superior, it illustrates the psychology of all those who respond to the persistence of the Arab siege by blaming Israel and insisting Israeli reform will win relief. It illuminates what drives those who choose to pretend that the siege began in 1967 and returning to the pre-1967 armistice lines will win peace. It casts light on the perversity of those who refuse to listen to what Israel’s enemies declare are their goals, who insist on contorting those goals into something more benign, and who pronounce that to do otherwise is being obdurate and disrespectful of the other side.

It provides a paradigm for those whose answer to the genocidal enmity directed at Israel is to turn away from the legitimacy of Israel’s cause, indeed from the Jews’ right to national self-determination, a right routinely extended to, and thought ethically sacrosanct for, others.

It is the pedigree of those who choose to embrace not any consistently applied measure of ethical behavior to judge Israel, but rather to judge her by parroting the indictments of those who would destroy her. It is the pedigree of those whose “ethics” are derived from the demands of Yasir Arafat and Bashar Assad and Ismail Haniyeh and the potentates of Saudi Arabia and their myriad supporters in Europe.

This is the moral pedigree, the idol-worshiping hypocrisy, of a self-satisfied, spiritually hollow, Avraham Burg.

The Latest from the Land of Oz

2007-05-03T11:23:00.000-04:00

Amos Oz never tires of finding ways to blame Israel for the absence of Arab-Israeli peace, no matter how clearly the voices on the other side, in Palestinian and broader Arab media, mosques, and schools, declare that their idea of peace is the annihilation of Israel and the destruction of its people. Nor does he tire of grossly rewriting history to serve his blame-Israel narrative.

His latest article in this vein appeared on the Yediot Achronot website on April 29 under the title "Israel Partly at Fault." Among the unconscionable falsehoods Oz tosses out in the piece is the statement that, "On the Israeli side there is a fixed tendency to increasingly reject the 'core issues'of the conflict: Refugees. Jerusalem. Borders. Settlements. This rejection was perhaps what led to
the failure of the Oslo Accords."

Was Oz away, visiting some other planet, during, for example, the Camp David summit in the summer of 2000, when Israel offered to uproot the great majority of settlements, return virtually to the pre-1967 armistice lines, divide Jerusalem, and give pre-1967 Israeli territory to the Palestinians to compensate for the five percent or so of the West Bank that it would retain? Was he still off somewhere, beyond the reach of the media, when Israel sweetened the deal even further a few months later, at the Taba talks? Has no one told him either of the Israeli proposals
or of the Palestinians' rejections? Or perhaps he knew at one time but has since forgotten that the Palestinians responded to Israel's offers by launching a terror war.

Even on the refugee issue, Israel apparently made some concessions during the talks in 2000, offering to take in tens of thousands of 1948 refugees and their descendants. But Oz is so desperate to blame Israel, to define some step that, if only Israel could bring itself to take, would resolve the conflict, that he ignores all this. His focus in this latest piece is the refugee issue, and he agrees that there can be no "right of return," that Palestinian demands for such a "right" are a formula for transforming Israel into another Arab state.

But, he argues, Israel has been too averse to discussing the problem, and if it would only bring itself to acknowledge some fault for the plight of the refugees, some partial responsibility, and preparedness to help resolve the problem in ways short of "return," then its doing so, Oz avers, "is likely to send an emotional shockwave through the Palestinian side. It will serve as an emotional breakthrough of sorts that will significantly facilitate the continuation of talks." What talks? And to what end? His argument is at once absurd and dishonest.

It is absurd, of course, because the Palestinians do not want resolution of the issue in any manner other than "return" and have made that clear in innumerable ways, including in the incessant message proffered by all their instruments of indoctrination.

It is dishonest in that Israel has on numerous occasions expressed the very preparedness to help that Oz is urging. In addition, while Oz suggests Israel has always refused to acknowledge any expulsion of Palestinians during the 1947-48 war, mainstream Israeli historians have written at least since the late 1950's about instances of expulsion - most notably from Arab towns and villages that were part of the Arab blockade of Jerusalem - which in their totality perhaps accounted for ten to fifteen percent of the refugees. (What is rarely written of in glosses on the
war and the expulsion of civilians is the fact that, of Jews living in areas that came under Arab control, 100% were killed or expelled and none remained at the fighting's end. In contrast, within Israeli territory, there remained at war's end an Arab community of more than 120,000, constituting about 16% of Israel's total population. That community has since grown to number over a million.)

Oz could send copies of those acknowledgments to every Palestinian household, and could no doubt even arrange to read the relevant passages aloud on Israel state television and have their contents endorsed by leading Israeli officials. But his doing so would not, unfortunately, serve as any "breakthrough."

Indeed, no step by Israel, short of national suicide, can provide a "breakthrough" that would open the way to ending the conflict. But Amos Oz refuses to acknowledge that essential truth, and prefers instead to conjure up fantastical indictments of Israel and delusional assertions that, but for this or that Israeli fault, all would be well. It is a monomania, an idee fixe, that for Oz appears beyond cure.

From Khartoum: Palestinian Leader Promises America's Annihilation

2007-04-29T14:19:00.000-04:00

In a sermon broadcast April 13, 2007, on state-controlled Sudan TV, the Acting Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, Sheikh Ahmad Bahr, declared to his audience, "You will be victorious on the face of this planet. You are the masters of the world on the face of this planet... You will be victorious while America and Israel will be annihilated, Allah willing... They are cowards, who are eager for life, while we are eager for death for the sake of Allah. That is why America's nose was rubbed in the mud in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Somalia, and everywhere...

"America will be annihilated, while Islam will remain...

"Oh Allah, vanquish the Jews and their supporters. Oh Allah, vanquish the Americans and their supporters. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them all, down to the very last one..." (Translation by MEMRI - the Middle East Media Research Institute.)

This is typical of the religious hate-indoctrination that has been a fixture in Palestinian mosques and government-broadcast sermons under both Fatah and HAMAS governments since the founding of the Palestinian Authority.

Nor are the close ties between a genocidal Palestinian leadership and the genocidal Arab government of Sudan a new phenomenon.

Western media, governments, and human rights advocates that have taken up the cause of Darfur and the campaign of mass murder and rape pursued there in recent years have addressed the Darfur crisis as sui generis, essentially unrelated to other events in the region. But as with the persistent genocidal Sudanese campaign against the Christian and animist blacks of the south of the country that has killed some two million over several decades, the Sudanese government has enjoyed the support of the wider Arab world, including the Palestinian leadership. Its policies in Darfur are part of that world's wider tolerance for and promotion of mass murder of perceived enemies.

Whether the target is Israelis and other Jews, or Americans, or the Muslim blacks of Darfur, failure to recognize the broader reality, the incessant indoctrination to mass murder endemic in the Arab world, will continue to compromise development of policies for effectively responding to the threats such indoctrination poses.

The Empty Rage of Jewish 'Progressives'

2007-04-18T12:00:00.001-04:00

First published in The Jewish Press

The storm of vituperation unleashed against Alvin Rosenfeld in response to his monograph "'Progressive’ Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism" (published in December 2006 by the American Jewish Committee) continues unabated.

What is noteworthy about the attacks on Rosenfeld is how uniformly dishonest they have been in distorting his thesis and then condemning him on the basis of their false renderings of what he actually said.

Rosenfeld directs his critique essentially at those Jews who, in their verbal assaults on Israel, meet what Natan Sharansky several years ago set out as three criteria for when criticism of Israel becomes anti-Jewish bias: when it entails demonization of Israel - that is, condemnations based on accusations that grossly distort reality; when it damns Israel by a standard not applied to any other nation; and when it seeks to delegitimize the Jewish state.

Rosenfeld, of course, in discussing those he criticizes, quotes their statements that are the basis of his concerns. They are consistently statements that meet Sharansky’s criteria.
Yet his critics uniformly and dishonestly insist Rosenfeld is seeking to stifle all criticism of Israel. Lettie Cottin Pogrebin, for example, in the April 2007 issue of Moment, acknowledges that Rosenfeld distinguishes between legitimate criticism of Israeli policies and demonization and delegitimization of the state, but insists his doing so is "a hollow disclaimer."

Pogrebin interprets his using the word "progressive" for many of those he critiques as somehow sinister and evidence of his broad attack on any criticism of Israel, even though he makes clear that he is simply invoking his targets’ own self-description as "progressives."

Pogrebin then undermines her thesis by seeking to defend the likes of historian Tony Judt, playwright Tony Kushner, poet Adrienne Rich and columnist Richard Cohen, whom she characterizes as "respected cultural figures."

Are we truly obliged to respect Tony Judt when he calls for the dissolution of Israel or makes the breathtakingly nonsensical claim that, as a nation based on an ethnic/religious identity, Israel is an anachronism? (Where has he been as, for example, more than a dozen new nation states, based on ethnic/religious identities, have been created in the last fifteen years, with the support of liberal opinion in the West, following the demise of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia?)

Why is Adrienne Rich worthy of respect and not censure when she declares that Zionism "needs to dissolve before twenty-first century realities"? Or Tony Kushner when he insists, "I have a problem with the idea of a Jewish state. It would have been better if it never happened." By what standard should Richard Cohen be given a pass when he calls Israel’s creation a "mistake"?

Pogrebin rounds off her supposed demonstration of Rosenfeld’s ill will toward all progressive Jewish thought on Israel by noting that, in his discussion of Kushner and Alisa Solomon’s edited essay collection, Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, he fails to discuss, or "disappears" - her term - those essays more tolerant of Israel.

In this disingenuous sleight-of-hand, she first makes the false claim that Rosenfeld is attacking all "progressive" criticism of Israel and then indicts him for not fully covering the range of that criticism. Again, Rosenfeld’s topic here is Jewish demonization and delegitimization of Israel, including in some of the essays in this collection. There is no reason for him to discuss the other papers.

In addition, let us imagine for a moment a collection of essays in which some contributors demonized and delegitimized any other state and called for its dissolution, singling out some non-Jewish ethnic group as not fit for that national self-determination accorded others as a right. Would Pogrebin defend such a collection by arguing that not all the essays contained defamatory and bigoted material?

In complaining that Rosenfeld is trying to silence Jews who disagree with him, Pogrebin at one point compares him to Brandeis donors who withdrew their support from the university after it invited Jimmy Carter to speak. She construes this as an intolerable attempt to silence the ex-president.

But Brandeis originally invited Carter to debate Alan Dershowitz and Carter refused, insisting he would only appear if he had the stage entirely to himself. Some Brandeis faculty and students demanded the university acquiesce to Carter’s terms and it did so, to the disgust of a number of Brandeis contributors. That Pogrebin interprets this yielding to exclusion of Dershowitz from a direct debate as somehow serving the free exchange of ideas is a breathtaking reversal of reality all too common among pontificating self-styled "progressives."

Pogrebin’s major points are echoed, with some further elaboration, by Rabbi Arthur Waskow in a long April 9 posting on Arianna Huffington’s website, huffingtonpost.com . (The biographical tag accompanying Waskow’s piece identifies him rather grandiosely as "director of The Shalom Center, a prophetic voice in Jewish, multireligious, and American life for peace, justice, community and healing of the earth.")

Waskow never actually names Rosenfeld in his attack on the monograph. Rather, his target is the American Jewish Committee and he uses criticism of the monograph - which he labels "inane and vicious" - as the starting point for a broad assault on the AJC. The organization, he insists, has fallen from its once commendable path to a point where its "only test of Jewish value is whether one wholeheartedly and singlemindedly supports the policies of the Jewish state," and he interprets Rosenfeld’s work as reflecting this agenda.

Thus Waskow, too, dishonestly recasts criticism of those who demonize and delegitimize Israel and promote its dissolution as an attempt to smear anyone who might take exception to particular Israeli policies.

Among those whose criticism by Rosenfeld Waskow finds especially offensive are - as with Pogrebin - Tony Kushner, Adrienne Rich and Tony Judt. Waskow, also like Pogrebin, seems to believe these people’s "cultural" contributions make criticism of them particularly unconscionable.

Waskow does not directly address any of the points made by Rosenfeld regarding these and other individuals. Nevertheless, he declares that the AJC has "slandered" them. How, for example, quoting Judt and Rich’s own words in which they call for Israel’s dissolution could constitute slandering them is something he does not bother to explain.

Waskow does, however, discuss at length what he values as those cultural contributions that, he seems to believe, have rendered various people beyond reproach. In waxing rhapsodic about the writings of Adrienne Rich, he declares, "Her prolific work is infused with the Jewish value of Tikkun Olam (‘repairing the world’)."

Of course, having chosen not to cite or even note Rich’s statements in which she insists that the Jewish struggle for national self-determination is intolerable and that the Jewish state must be dissolved, Waskow chooses also not to elaborate on how advocacy of Israel's destruction is congruent with tikkun olam.

Historian Daniel Boyarin is another writer Waskow defends without quoting any of his defamatory attacks on Israel and the Zionist enterprise. Boyarin too insists that Jewish national self-determination is unacceptable; he argues that Jews should instead pursue "self-deterritorialization." Moreover, they should be content with a "subaltern" status. (He does not make clear if his model for the status Jews should embrace is that of early Christian formulas for Jewish subordination or Muslim prescriptions for Jewish dhimmitude.)

But Waskow recites what he sees as Boyarin’s cultural contributions as though they somehow - as with Waskow’s gloss on Adrienne Rich - place him beyond reproach. Must we really excuse Boyarin’s delegitimizing of Israel and calls for its dismantling because, as Waskow assures us, Boyarin "has contributed extraordinary scholarly studies of sexuality in the Talmud"?

Waskow declares that he personally would like to see "peace between a renewed Palestine and a renewed Israel - still, and hopefully always, a state with a special connection to the Jewish people." Without defining more precisely his vision of such a state, he does acknowledge that, in wishing it to have a special connection with the Jewish people, "I disagree with Kushner, Rich... Boyarin and Judt."

But in his heated attack on the Rosenfeld/AJCommittee monograph, and on the AJC more broadly, Waskow makes clear that he is so enamored of the wider political predilections he shares with these people that he is willing to overlook their making common cause with those who would destroy the Jewish state. His is a very idiosyncratic comprehension indeed of "repairing the world."

If Pogrebin and Waskow are rather pedestrian in their attack on Rosenfeld’s monograph, plowing the same zigzag furrows as other critics, Shaul Magid - a colleague of Rosenfeld’s at Indiana University - offers a somewhat distinctive emphasis in his indictment, published in the April 2007, edition of Zeek (which describes itself as "A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture").

Magid complains that Rosenfeld is trying to make Zionism "the sine qua non of Jewish identity and legitimacy." Magid’s Rosenfeld is seeking, in effect, to delegitimize any comprehension of Judaism and Jewish identity not centered on Israel. This point, repeated by Magid in various permutations, sets truth on its head. Rosenfeld’s argument is with those Jews who are trying to delegitimize - largely through demonization, gross distortions of fact, and calls for Israel’s dissolution - fellow Jews who support the Zionist enterprise and believe that Jews have at least as much right as any other group to national self-determination.

Rosenfeld says nothing of Jews who may be indifferent to the existence of Israel; he does condemn those who insist Jews have no claim to a state or argue, on the basis of false accusations, that Jews have forfeited that right.

The perversity of Magid’s criticism is perhaps most clearly demonstrated when he declares that "a major flaw in [Rosenfeld’s] essay is that he never substantiates the crucial linkage... between supporting Israel and Jewish survival."

Magid never clarifies why such a linkage is "crucial," but clearly in his own thinking justification for Israel’s existence, and for criticism of Jews who argue against its existence, can only rest on the Jewish state’s being necessary for Jewish survival.

Would Magid, or those Jewish detractors of Israel that Rosenfeld criticizes and Magid defends, say this about any other nation? What if a movement arose arguing that the Muslim riots in France in recent years were caused by French mistreatment of its Muslim minority and that, as a consequence of France’s misbehavior and Muslim discontent, the French state should be dissolved; would Magid defend that objective with the claim that, after all, the French people would survive despite the dissolution of their state?

In the context of any other nation, the argument is extremist and nonsensical. But for some, including more than a few Jews, among them Magid, it is perfectly legitimate when it is directed at Israel.

Magid’s final defense of those Rosenfeld criticizes is that "I am quite certain all or most of [them] are in fact concerned about preserving Jews and Judaism in their own way." That may be true but it is also irrelevant.

Consider how Magid’s argument has circled around on itself. It began by insisting - falsely - that Rosenfeld was, in effect, seeking to excommunicate Jews who were not pro-Israel. When, in a rebuttal essay in the same edition of Zeek, Paul Bogdanor pointed out once again that Rosenfeld was not criticizing those unsupportive of Israel but those Jews who joined in the defamation, demonization and delegitimization of the state, Magid, given the last word by Zeek, ignored Bogdanor’s argument and continued to insist Rosenfeld and his supporters were trying to extrude all critics of Israel from the Jewish community. But by the end of his essay he is defending true extruders - those in the Jewish community who are seeking to cut off Israel and its supporters. His defense is that they are doing so out of concern "about preserving Jews and Judaism in their own way."

Again, that may be true. It has, in fact, been a recurrent pattern in Jewish history that, in the face of anti-Jewish assault, segments of the community have sought to label other Jews, usually Jews on the other side of some political or religious or class divide, as the true targets of the hatred. They would indict those Jewish others, parroting the anti-Semitic bill of indictment, and would believe that they were doing so in the interest of ending the attack and "preserving Jews and Judaism in their own way."

In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, some German Jews blamed eastern European Jews for anti-Semitism; secular and reformist Jews blamed traditionally religious Jews; and socialist Jews blamed the Jewish bourgeoisie, often doing so in terms that mimicked anti-Semites. They no doubt often believed their embracing anti-Semitic indictments in this manner was in the interest of "preserving Jews and Judaism in their own way," which meant essentially preserving themselves as they wishfully hoped the haters would tolerate their sort of Jew.

And so today there are Jews who believe that Israel’s existence is a threat to Jews worldwide and, rather than blame the haters of Israel, they seek, in a perversion of all decency, to "preserv[e] Jews and Judaism in their own way" by joining the haters in their attack and defaming, delegitimizing and promoting dissolution of the Jewish state.

Whatever the rationales offered by Magid and those similarly disposed, embracing the arguments and agenda of those who would destroy the Jewish state is indeed itself a form of "the new anti-Semitism," as Rosenfeld so cogently demonstrates.

Seven Pillars of Middle East Reality

2007-04-10T00:00:00.002-04:00

First published in FrontPageMagazine.com

A theme of virtually every New York Times editorial touching on the Arab-Israeli conflict is knee-jerk criticism of the Bush Administration and/or Israel for not taking steps that could promote "peace." On April 7, the Times editors defended House Speaker Pelosi’s Syrian jaunt and referred to the administration’s "failed policies" and its alleged refusal to test whether talking to Syria "might help... revive efforts to negotiate peace." A March 26 editorial on Condoleeza Rice’s latest visit to the region complained of the administration having squandered six years in diplomatic inaction, supposedly because it did not realize the importance of a "just, negotiated peace between Israel and the Palestinians" and the need for Washington to "help jump-start the process." The editors also advised Rice to pursue talks with Palestinians "willing to discuss peace" - whatever that means - "no matter what Israel’s objections."

A February 21 editorial on Rice’s previous Middle East trip accused her of missing what "just might have been a moment for breaking the stalemate..." Israel’s dereliction, meanwhile, was its failure to take steps that would have "increased the chances for progress..."

For many politicians and diplomats as well, the accepted wisdom is that Arab "moderates," and perhaps even some in the radical Arab camp, are ready for peace with Israel and that, despite the rise of Hamas, sufficiently intense diplomatic engagement can resolve the conflict. This popular line ignores fundamental Middle East realities:

Arab leaders have no interest in genuine peace with Israel. They do not fear Israel, knowing she will not attack them unless herself threatened, and they see no great advantages to peace. Rather, both anti-Western regimes, particularly Syria, and so-called "moderate" states see gain in using anti-Israel, as well as anti-American, hate-mongering to divert their publics from domestic ills. This is true even of Egypt and Jordan, states officially at "peace" with Israel. In Egypt, government-controlled media now purvey more rabid anti-Israel and anti-Semitic propaganda than before the Camp David accords.

The revival of the 2002 Saudi "peace" initiative at the recent Riyadh summit hardly indicates some new Arab direction. The summit insisted its plan was a "take it or leave it" proposition and called for Israel to return to the pre-1967 armistice lines and honor a Palestinian "right of return" - a formula for remaking Israel into another Arab state - after which the Arabs would reciprocate with vague steps toward recognition and an end of the conflict. Even some Arab commentators, such as Mamoun Fandy writing in the London Arabic daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, noted that the Saudi plan does not reflect serious interest in peace with Israel.

Israeli-Arab peace will come on the Arabs' timetable. The Arabs, more than 300 million strong as compared to Israel's five million Jews, are by far the region's dominant force. Israel may deter or defeat Arab attacks, but it cannot, either by concessions or other steps, force peace on the Arabs.

All minorities living within the Arab world are under siege. Tunisian human rights activist Muhammad Bechri has traced this to the "twin fascisms" - his term - that dominate the Arab world, Islamism and pan-Arabism. The first promotes murderous intolerance of religious minorities. It helps explain why Christians are under siege across the Arab world and why Sudan enjoyed broad Arab support as it killed some two million non-Muslim blacks in the south of the country. Pan-Arabism translates into endorsement of murderous policies toward Muslim but non-Arab groups and accounts for Arab support for Saddam Hussein as he slaughtered 200,000 Kurds in northern Iraq, as well as backing for Sudanese policies toward the Muslim but black population of Darfur.

The Arab world is not about to make an exception for the Jews. This broad intolerance of minorities is further evidence of how unlikely it is the Arab world will accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state in its midst any time soon.

Arab regimes also demonize non-Muslim and non-Arab peoples living beyond the Arab world. In both ostensible Western "allies" and hostile states, denigration and demonization of the non-Muslim world, and particularly of the Christian West and the United States, are common in government-controlled media, schools and mosques. Such attacks not only deflect attention from domestic ills but are also used either to bolster a regime's radical agenda or help assuage radicalized opposition elements of the population.

The concern of so-called "moderate" regimes with the threat posed by radical forces in the region has not altered these realities. Saudi Arabia, for example, has been worried about the Iranian Shi'ite theocracy since its birth in 1979, but the Saudi response has been more aggressive export of its own radical, Wahhabi, Islamism, with its intolerance of non-believers and its attacks particularly on Christians and Jews. This lavishly funded campaign has seen the rise of schools and mosques promoting Wahhabi Islam throughout the Muslim world, Europe and the United States.

In recent years, the Saudi regime, having been awakened to the threat at home, has cracked down on anti-government radicals within its borders. But it continues to export its own radicalism.

Those who urge an American return to Realpolitik in Middle East policy are promoting a delusion. There is a superficial logic to arguing that the United States should support cooperative dictatorial regimes, and try to win over uncooperative ones, and that to push for democratic reforms is likely to lead instead to empowerment of radical dictatorships hostile to America. But just as Pearl Harbor shut down the American isolationist camp, 9/11 should have shut down the Realpolitik camp. The 9/11 hijackers and their key leaders were mainly from American "allies" Saudi Arabia and Egypt and were indoctrinated to hate America both through the state-supported religious and cultural education given them by these "friends" of America and through the teachings of the regimes' domestic opponents. To urge ongoing unqualified embrace of such regimes and silence in the face of their hate-mongering is to invite new disasters.

America’s chattering classes may cling to their old delusions about the Middle East, but for policy-makers to do so is an indulgence the nation cannot afford.

More New York Times Anti-Israel Bias

2007-03-20T13:00:00.000-04:00

First published on FrontPageMag.com

On March 8, Hamas's Al-Aqsa TV broadcast an interview with the two kindergarten-age children of Rim Al-Riyashi, a Palestinian woman who had blown herself up in a suicide attack several years ago, killing four Israelis. The interviewer prods Doha and Muhammad to celebrate their "jihad-fighting" mother's "martyrdom."

Indoctrinating children to celebrate the murder of Israelis, even when the cost is losing the dearest of family members, has been a campaign of Palestinian media, mosques and schools since the inception of the Palestinian Authority in 1994. But you would never know it by reading the New York Times. On the contrary, America's so-called "newspaper of record" consistently excludes this far-reaching obstacle to ending the Arab-Israeli conflict.

A particularly egregious example of evasion and distortion is a page one March 12 article, running nearly 3200 words, by the Times' Jerusalem bureau chief, Steven Erlanger. The bias is obvious in the title: "Years of Strife and Lost Hope Scar Young Palestinian Lives."

Today's Palestinian children are more violent, we're told, and more eager to die as martyrs than were their predecessors not because of constant indoctrination to seek martyrdom in pursuit of Israel's destruction. Rather, these young souls have simply been scarred and twisted by the unending conflict and, with it, "a loss of hope."

The caption under the oversized front page photo, of a Palestinian boy with a slingshot, conveys the same theme: "Parents fear the atmosphere of despair has made their children more accepting of violence."

One would think that, in a 75-paragraph story on the culture of violence among Palestinian youth, the Times might break its long silence about Palestinian inculcation of hate. But all Erlanger offers is, in paragraph 11: "Many Israelis agree that the current generation of young Palestinians has been thoroughly radicalized, but say that is the product of Palestinian political and religious leaders who have sanctioned and promoted violence and terrorism against Israel."

That's it.

Israelis "say" Palestinians have "sanctioned and promoted violence and terrorism."

The veteran correspondent can, it seems, find no quotes from the innumerable, easily accessible examples of hate-mongering and instead casts the matter as - Israeli opinion. Television broadcasts purveying bigotry and the glories of "martyrdom" to Palestinian children are readily available from the Middle East Media Research Institute, but hold no sway with Erlanger. And presumably Senator Hillary Clinton's recent press conference with Itamar Marcus, director of Palestinian Media Watch, decrying anti-Israel and anti-Jewish prejudice and incitement to violence in Palestinian school texts, was much ado about nothing.

Erlanger's reducing the issue to merely something that "many Israelis... say" is reminiscent of the notorious Times article by William Orme published in October, 2000, shortly after Arafat had launched his terror war and a Palestinian mob had lynched two Israeli soldiers. Orme noted Israeli complaints of incitement by Palestinian Authority media and wrote, "Israelis cite as one egregious example a televised sermon that defended the killing of the two soldiers. 'Whether Likud or Labor, Jews are Jews,' proclaimed Sheik Ahmad Abu Halabaya in a live [official PA television] broadcast from a Gaza City mosque the day after the killings."

Omitted by Orme was Halabaya's further comments: "[The Jews] are the ones who must be butchered and killed, as Allah the almighty said: Fight them; Allah will torture them at your hands, and will humiliate them... Have no mercy on the Jews, no matter where they are, in any country. Fight them, wherever you are. Wherever you meet them, kill them. Wherever you are, kill those Jews and those Americans who are like them..."

But to reveal the pervasiveness and genocidal import of Palestinian hate indoctrination would undercut the slant on the conflict that animates virtually all Times news coverage and editorializing. That slant can be seen in Erlanger's repeated insistence that the problem lies in "this generation [of Palestinians having] lost faith in political solutions" and his tracing this loss of faith to the collapse of the Oslo process in 2000.

In fact, since the founding of the Palestinian Authority, its officials have peddled, particularly to Palestinian children, the message that all of "Palestine," from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, properly belongs to them, that the Jews are merely usurpers in the land with no legitimate claim to any of it, and that the young must dedicate their lives to extruding the Jews and destroying the Zionist state.

It is impossible to understand the violence and commitment to martyrdom of Palestinian youth without looking at this incessant indoctrination. But you cannot look at it, or even know of its existence, if your source for Middle East coverage is the agenda-driven New York Times.

Diaspora Jews Embracing the Indictments of Their Enemies

2007-02-01T12:00:00.000-05:00

Originally published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

Jews embracing as truth the indictments of their enemies has been a fixture of Jewish life throughout the history of the Diaspora. It became even more widespread with the weakening of Jewish communal institutions in recent centuries in the context of the emergence of modern nation-states.
Segments of populations under chronic siege commonly take to heart the indictments of their besiegers, however bigoted and outrageous. They hope that by doing so and reforming accordingly they can assuage the hostility of their tormentors and win relief.
The paradigm on the level of individual psychology is the psychodynamics of abused children. Such children almost invariably blame themselves for their predicament, ascribe it to their being "bad," and nurture fantasies that by becoming "good" they can mollify their abusers and end their torment.
The embrace by members of an abused community of the indictments of their abusers is obviously both debilitating and dangerous. It is debilitating insofar as it entails perceiving oneself and one's community as tainted and reprehensible. And as the history and indeed current predicament of world Jewry amply illustrate, it is dangerous when it diverts the individual's, and community's, gaze from genuine external peril, and from essential defensive measures, to focus instead on self-reform.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as the issue of extending citizenship rights to Jews was first being considered in the states of Central Europe, those opposed to granting such rights pointed to characteristics of the Jews that ostensibly rendered them unfit. Whatever such indictment was offered of the Jews, however bigoted or outrageous, some within the Jewish community invariably endorsed the charges.

For example, it was claimed that Yiddish was a crude, bastardized, unwholesome language that reflected the degenerate nature of the Jews and illustrated their unfitness for citizenship rights. Many Jewish leaders and members of the Jewish cultural elite embraced this assessment of Yiddish and condemned it as, in the words of one such figure, "a language of stammerers, corrupt and deformed, repulsive to those who are able to speak in a correct and orderly manner."1 He also remarked, "I am afraid that this jargon has contributed more than a little to the immorality of the common man."2

Jews were also criticized at the time for being primarily engaged in trade. It was interpreted as another mark of their degeneracy and inappropriateness for citizenship, and this too won the endorsement of some Jews. Indeed, a major effort of the maskilim - the devotees of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment - was to encourage and even force Jews to cast off their supposedly reprehensible endeavors and take up more wholesome occupations like farming and the crafts. This, it was thought, would make them more worthy of acceptance by their neighbors.

In the course of the nineteenth century, Jews in substantial numbers abandoned Yiddish as their primary language to speak, for example, "good" German. Significant segments of the community also succeeded in leaving behind the commercial occupations of their fathers to become poets, composers, philosophers, and intellectuals of various other stripes.

Many leading voices in the surrounding society then argued that Jews might gain command of the German language, or master German poetic or musical forms or the subtleties of German philosophy, but still were doing so with alien Jewish minds and sensibilities. Such voices maintained that Jews were still unable to apply their learning to true aesthetic or intellectual creativity but instead were subverting what they had learned to some lesser, alien end. Even this indictment was embraced by some in the Jewish community, who insisted that Jews were indeed being too pushy in their cultural endeavors and that most who took part in these were, in fact, introducing alien and lesser "Jewish" elements that were coarsening German culture.3

All these instances of Jewish absorption of anti-Jewish indictments were propelled by Jews' desires to propitiate their attackers, and they all reflected delusions of propitiation. It is common within besieged communities - whether minorities marginalized, denigrated, and perhaps attacked by the surrounding society or small states under chronic siege by their neighbors - that some members of the community will take to heart the indictments of the assailants, however absurd and biased. The hope is that by doing so and reforming to address the indictments, they can win relief.

The Paradigm of Abused Children

The paradigm on the level of individual psychology is the response of children subjected to chronic abuse. Such children almost invariably blame themselves for their suffering. Although this has most often been ascribed to children's naїveté, their taking at face value accusations of blame, the deeper explanation lies in the existential predicament of such children. They can, on the one hand, acknowledge that they are being unfairly victimized and are powerless to change their situation, and reconcile themselves to its hopelessness. Or they can blame themselves, interpret their predicament as a consequence of their being "bad," and endure the self-criticism that this perspective entails but thereby sustain a fantasy of control. In such a fantasy, by becoming "good" they will elicit more benign behavior from their tormentors and win relief. Children almost invariably seek to avoid hopelessness at all costs, and adults do the same.

The embrace by members of an abused community of the indictments of their abusers is obviously both debilitating and potentially dangerous. It is debilitating insofar as it entails perceiving oneself and one's community as tainted and reprehensible. And it is dangerous in those instances where it diverts the individual's, and the community's, gaze from genuine external peril, and from essential defensive measures, to focus instead on self-reform.

But communities are not entirely helpless in the face of the psychological depredations of chronic assault. Communal institutions, if strong enough and possessing sufficient moral suasion, can be effective in conveying a countervailing message. Such a message will emphasize that there is an essential integrity and goodness to the community, that the attacks of its enemies are unfair, and that ultimately the community will move beyond current travails to enjoy better fortune.

On the level of the abused-child paradigm, a similar role can be played by a caring adult, a grandparent perhaps, who conveys to the child that he or she does not deserve ill-treatment, that the "bad" party is the abuser, and that ultimately the child will escape current tribulations and go on to a better life. Such an adult may not be able to help end the child's current difficulties but can help arm him or her against all the debilitating psychological consequences of the child's embracing the tack of self-blame and propitiation.

In the history of the Diaspora, it has been a virtually constant phenomenon that some Jews embrace the indictments of the Jews' tormentors. But the emergence of modernity and the modern nation-state was accompanied by a dramatic weakening of Jewish communal institutions. This entailed a weakening of the countervailing messages those institutions offered and left Jews significantly more vulnerable to the psychological corrosiveness of surrounding communities' anti-Jewish depredations.

Another noteworthy aspect of this phenomenon is that those who take to heart the indictments of the Jews' tormentors typically cast their stance not as an effort to assuage anti-Jewish attitudes but rather as reflecting some higher moral or ethical position. For example, those who criticized Jewish involvement in commerce typically argued that there was indeed something intrinsically reprehensible in commercial endeavors and morally superior in other types of employment.

Similarly, in response to claims by anti-Jewish voices that the Jews were only interested in their own wellbeing, pursuing solely their own parochial agendas, Jews often aggressively sought to avoid focusing on the needs of the Jewish community, even as the community suffered disabilities that were unique to it. Such Jews sought instead to enlist in broader causes, and cast their doing so not as attempting to assuage those who accused them of parochialism but rather as a righteous emphasis on broader social needs.

In a related vein, another indictment by people who sought to deny Jews citizenship rights was that the Jews were a separate nation and so should not be absorbed as equal citizens. One Jewish response to this occurred within reformist congregations that were founded by Jewish communities in the German states. These congregations, among other accommodations, often sought to expunge longings for Jerusalem and a return to Eretz Israel from the Jewish liturgy as a means of demonstrating that Judaism entailed a purely religious and not national identity. Those who advocated such reforms did not cast their doing so as an effort to appease anti-Jewish opinion but rather as representing a progression of the Jewish faith toward an exclusively universal ethical message and mission. In such a context, any longing for Return was seen as narrow-minded and atavistic.

Again, this reflects a pattern discernible in abused children's interpretation of their predicament as being caused by their own behavior. Such children's images of becoming "good" are clearly driven by fantasies of pleasing their abusers in a manner that will win relief. However, they typically comprehend what constitutes their being "bad" and what it would mean to reform and become "good" as representing transcendently meaningful ethical and moral choices.

Categorical Thinking

One can argue that attempts by minorities to accommodate the wider society can and do at times succeed in winning them greater acceptance. This is true; for example, Jewish exertions to give up Yiddish and master normative German could be perceived as having been a pragmatic step. But that is very different from endorsing the derogation of Yiddish as intrinsically primitive, inferior, and corrupting. Such endorsements were founded on the desire to believe that Jews were regarded with distaste and loathing and treated as inferior because they spoke an inferior language and had been coarsened by it. Becoming linguistically equal to their neighbors, then, would assure their being treated as equal - a wish-driven delusion.

Similarly, it was not unreasonable that Prussian Jews, at the time of Prussia's struggle against Napoleon, might look to demonstrations of patriotism as positive, pragmatic steps toward winning the acceptance of the surrounding society. But note the more wishfully definitive expectations contained in a call to arms issued by two leaders of the Berlin Jewish community, Eduard Kley and Siegfried Gunsburg: "There upon the battlefield of honor...where all work for a single goal: for their fatherland...there also will the barriers of prejudice come tumbling down.... Hand in hand with your fellow soldiers you will complete the great work; they will not deny you the name of brother, for you will have earned it."4

From 1813 to 1815, seventy-two soldiers from the small Prussian Jewish population won the iron cross; fifty-five Prussian Jewish officers died at Waterloo.5 Nevertheless, as has so frequently happened, the Jews in post-Napoleonic Prussia faced hostile political and social forces that transcended anything they as a community did or did not do.

These last examples reflect a propensity for "categorical" thinking - that is, choosing to think in absolute, categorical terms about what may be simply pragmatic steps that could or could not have salutary consequences. Such a predilection is driven by the desperate desire for acceptance and a consequent wishful thinking that acceptance could inexorably be won by the right communal policies. The same mindset can be seen in other stances as well.

For example, Central European liberals - some on the basis of principle, others for pragmatic reasons - were generally more receptive to the extension of rights to Jews than were more conservative elements. But many Jews, in aligning themselves with liberal groups, chose to construe this sympathy not as at least partly driven by a convergence of political interests that could change in the future. Instead, in their desperation for support and for opportunities to diminish Jewish vulnerability by linking their fate to broader, and more powerful, social identities, they wishfully construed the link with liberal parties as having transcendent significance and endurance. Likewise, they chose to see the liberals as the force that was certain to shape the future.

Gabriel Riesser was a leading German Jewish liberal activist in the mid-nineteenth century and almost unique among Jewish political activists at the time in his vocal and energetic pursuit of the cause of Jewish legal equality. In addition to those Jews who responded to anti-Jewish indictments by embracing them at face value and urging Jewish reform, some Jews reacted, of course, by choosing to separate themselves from the tainted identity of "Jew." Still others even took the further step of joining the Jews' tormentors as a way of more definitively casting off the taint. It was common for Jews who entered politics in the German states to take one of these latter paths.

Riesser, for his part, eschewed any position that would appear too parochially Jewish and wishfully linked the Jews' fate to presumably sympathetic broader forces. Thus, he repeatedly articulated stances that subsumed the problem of Jewish disabilities to more general political and nationalist matters and that put unbounded faith in liberal support. Riesser declared at one point: "Give me Jewish equality in one hand and the realization of the beautiful dream of Germany's political unification [primarily a liberal objective at the time] in the other...and I will unhesitantly choose the latter, for I am convinced that unification also encompasses equality."6

The extent to which many Jews chose to idealize the connection with German liberals and the fruits of Jewish self-effacement is captured in an exchange between Riesser and the conservative German academic and theologian H. E. G. Paulus. Paulus argued that as long as Jews adhered to their religion they constituted a separate nation and were entitled to be protected subjects in Germany but not full citizens. Paulus also suggested that the Jewish push for full integration as Germans would end in their expulsion or even extermination. Riesser responded that German unification would inexorably be built on liberal Enlightenment principles of justice and equality and so would inevitably entail the granting of full equality to the Jews.7

The issue is not that Riesser proved so catastrophically wrong. It was not impossible that events could have unfolded very differently and more in keeping with his hopes. The point is his willful, self-deluding certainty, despite much countervailing evidence, that the right Jewish alliances and self-effacements would inevitably yield the results he desired.

Identification with the Left

Jews' categorical identification with parties of the Left became commonplace throughout Central and Western Europe. It was driven both by a desire to eschew what might be condemned as Jewish particularism and by wishful thinking that embedding Jewish aspirations in larger movements could assure Jewish wellbeing. For some, this identification went beyond liberal parties to socialist and communist groups.

In Western Europe, many of those Jews who embraced socialism did so because they had become disenchanted with the liberal parties, which provided, for example, no bulwark against de facto discrimination and the rise of anti-Semitic political parties in the wake of German unification. Some Jews hoped that in immersing Jewish concerns in the struggle of other disadvantaged groups, particularly the working class, and in seeking a more radical restructuring of society, they might win relief from persisting Jewish disabilities. Some hoped in particular that by Jews distancing themselves from the bourgeoisie and the excoriated Jewish link with the middle class, many of their enemies would be mollified. Other Jews in Western Europe embraced parties of the far Left in an effort to divest themselves of a Jewish identity entirely, assuming the alternative identity of champion of the working class.

In Eastern Europe, which at this time meant most notably czarist Russia, Jews retained more of a national consciousness and more robust communal institutions than elsewhere. Hence, in response to czarist depredations, Jews formed parties of the Left that were specifically Jewish, in contrast to Jewish socialists elsewhere who were more typically inclined to break with the Jewish community. But in Russia as elsewhere, Jews who affiliated with the socialist parties commonly took to heart anti-Jewish assaults on the Jewish bourgeoisie. They tended to view both the Jewish middle class and traditionally religious Jews as the true targets of Jew-haters and their own path as at once progressive and future-oriented and an escape from the shadow of anti-Semitism.

Throughout Europe, those Jews who supported socialism while retaining a sense of Jewish identity nevertheless tended to ignore or even give some credence to the intense anti-Jewish rhetoric that was almost everywhere an element of socialist cant. As for Jews who embraced socialism as an alternative identity and sought to shed any link to the Jewish community, they often endorsed anti-Jewish socialist rhetoric.

Supporting the Democrats

European Jewish immigrants to America, both from Central Europe and from those eastern areas where the vast majority of Jewish immigrants originated, brought their political predilections with them. Although in the first decades of the twentieth century this translated into some support for American socialist parties, with the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt Jews became overwhelmingly aligned with the Democratic Party.

Both pragmatism and principle figured in this embrace of the Democrats. At a time of intense anti-Semitism in America, starting in the post-World War I years and exacerbated by the socially corrosive effects of the Depression, Jews suffered expressions of bias that affected their basic capacity to function in the society. As historian and rabbi Arthur Hertzberg noted of this period, "Almost no Jew could make a free, personal decision about his education and career. At every turn, the fact of his Jewishness meant that many, if not most, options were simply not available to him." The public employment and other programs Roosevelt introduced as part of the New Deal were largely open to Jews at all levels and broke the prevailing blackballing of Jews.

In addition, the Jewish predilection to seek to immerse Jewish objectives in broader social agendas, and to pursue alliances of the disadvantaged as a means of winning greater acceptance, converged with Roosevelt's building of his grand Democratic alliance of the disadvantaged.

At the same time, one can see operative during these years delusional elements similar to those at work in Jewish communities in Europe and reflective of Jewish vulnerability and Jewish embrace of anti-Jewish canards. These include a fear of appearing to pursue "parochial" interests, a casting of eschewing such a course as actually reflecting a higher, ethical commitment to broader social agendas, a wishful thinking that inclined Jews to construe pragmatic and possibly transient alliances as representing transcendent and enduring convergences of interests and goals, and a consequent debilitating blindness to changes in the political landscape and slowness to respond to them

With the rise of the Nazis in Germany, and even with the revelation, in late 1942, of the Nazis' program to exterminate all of Europe's Jews, these elements of Jewish political life in America compromised the American Jewish community's response. To be sure, effectively promoting the rescue of Jews from Europe faced great hurdles related to prevailing anti- Jewish attitudes and, more particularly, the hostility of the State Department. Yet it was primarily through the efforts of a small group of Jews acting outside the mainstream leadership that the Roosevelt administration was finally prevailed upon to create the War Refugee Board in early 1944. These Jewish activists were the so-called "Bergson group" led by Hillel Kook, a Revisionist Zionist emissary in the United States at the time who adopted the pseudonym Peter H. Bergson. The War Refugee Board succeeded, despite persistent administration obstruction, in contributing to the rescue of perhaps two hundred thousand Jews.

Although the Jewish leadership did try to promote rescue, its exertions were compromised both by fear of an anti-Jewish backlash and by loyalty to Roosevelt.

Some in the mainstream leadership worried about Jewish advocacy of rescue being seen as Jewish parochialism and lack of patriotism in a time of war. This concern, however, was often cast as reflecting not fear of anti-Semitic responses but a morally correct eschewing of particularist objectives. (It was very often non-Jews who led the way in asserting that the Nazi assault on the Jews was not just a Jewish issue but a crime against humanity.) For example, throughout the Nazi era the American Jewish leadership avoided campaigning for increasing Jewish immigration to the United States for fear of an anti-Jewish backlash.

Roosevelt's Indifference to Jewish Plight

In addition, key elements of the Jewish leadership were averse to criticizing Roosevelt, even though it was very clear that he could have saved large numbers of people at minimal political cost to himself and that he was at best indifferent to the plight of Europe's Jews. Simply insisting that the State Department stop erecting additional barriers to the issuing of visas and to the use of visas that had already been issued, and that it allow Jews to immigrate at least to the extent allowed by immigration quotas, would likely have saved several hundred thousand people; but Roosevelt refused to do so. At times he even parroted Nazi anti-Jewish assertions.

For example, at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, while discussing possible projects for resettling rescued Jews in North Africa (projects subsequently torpedoed, mainly by the United States), Roosevelt suggested restricting the number of relocated Jews allowed to practice the professions. This "would further eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore towards the Jews in Germany, namely that while they represented a small part of the population, over 50 percent of the lawyers, doctors, school teachers, college professors, etc. in Germany were Jews."9 The figure for Jewish involvement in these occupations is, of course, wildly exaggerated.

Caught up in categorical thinking about who was with them and who was not, it was very difficult for many Jews to look objectively at Roosevelt. They essentially refused to acknowledge that the leader who had forged the alliance of the underprivileged, whose administration employed Jews at all levels in a manner that contrasted dramatically to the obstacles to employment Jews routinely encountered in the wider society, was not interested in offering succor to the Jews of Europe being murdered by the thousands daily in a program of total annihilation.

Rabbi Stephen Wise, leader of the American Jewish community and its efforts to promote rescue, defended Roosevelt even as he repeatedly encountered the administration's obstructionism. "[Roosevelt] is still our friend, even though he does not move as expeditiously as we would wish," he declared,10 and he took to task Jewish critics of the president. In June 1944, the Republican National Convention put a strong pro-Zionist plank in its platform for the upcoming election and criticized Roosevelt for not pressing Britain to open Mandate Palestine to Jewish refugees. In reaction, Wise wrote to Roosevelt, "As an American Jew and Zionist, I am deeply ashamed of the reference to you in the Palestine Resolution adopted by the Republican National Convention. It is utterly unjust, and you may be sure that American Jews will come to understand how unjust it is."11

This loyalty to Roosevelt also led the Jewish leadership to limit its engaging of the president's political foes in efforts to promote rescue. In contrast, the small group outside the leadership that did succeed in bringing about the creation of the War Refugee Board did not hesitate to work with sympathetic Republicans, and doing so was a key factor in its success.

US Anti-Semitism Diminishes

In the years after World War II, anti-Semitism in America dramatically diminished. Yet American Jews, according to polls, continued to believe otherwise. A 1990 survey of affiliated Jews showed that some 75 percent considered anti-Semitism a serious problem in America.12 Perhaps for this reason elements of the community have continued to display psychological stigmata associated with besieged groups, such as the taking to heart of anti-Jewish canards.

American Jews also believe anti-Semitism is more rife among American conservatives than liberals, even though actual surveys of American opinion regarding Jews do not support this assumption.13 This is linked with that tendency to categorical thinking about political "allies," a wish to see protection in immersing Jewish interests in larger groups, particularly alliances of the disadvantaged, and a consequent difficulty recognizing that perceived allies may not see things the way one imagines and wishes. American Jews have, in fact, largely redefined the Jewish vocation, or Jewish identity, to focus mostly on alliances with or in support of the disadvantaged, alliances around so-called "social justice" issues. A 1988 survey by the Los Angeles Times found that when Jews were asked which among three facets of Jewish identity they most valued, many more chose the pursuit of social justice and equality (50 percent) than either Israel (20 percent) or religion (20 percent).14

Although support for Israel could be seen as a particularist issue that the American Jewish community has energetically embraced, such support is made easier by the fact that Americans have generally been sympathetic to the Jewish state. Sometimes Israel has come under greater criticism, particularly in the American media, and has been a target on American campuses and in so-called "liberal" churches. In such situations, it appears that segments of the Jewish community, particularly those whose political predilections make them sympathetic to the biases of the media, the campuses, or the "liberal" churches, have been more inclined to voice similar criticisms of the Jewish state.

A notable related phenomenon is that even though support for Israel has in recent years been significantly stronger among Republicans than Democrats, American Jews remain overwhelmingly Democrat. Illustrative of the former point is a poll of American opinion conducted in August, during the Israel-Hizballah war, by the Pew Research Center. To a question presenting various choices of what should be America's position on the war, 54 percent of Republican respondents favored supporting Israel and 5 percent preferred criticizing it. In contrast, 31 percent of Democrats chose support for Israel, 11 percent criticism. To a question of who was most responsible for the war, 55 percent of Republicans answered Hizballah, 9 percent Israel. Among Democrats, 33 percent said Hizballah, 15 percent Israel.

Regarding the political affiliation of American Jews, in October 2006 the American Jewish Committee released its "Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion" reflecting polling from late September to mid-October. It turned out that 54 percent of American Jews identified themselves as Democrats and 15 percent as Republicans (29 percent as Independents). In the 2004 presidential election about three-quarters of American Jews voted for the Democratic candidate, and in the recent congressional elections at least that percentage again voted for Democrats.

For those who, in the face of collective memories of anti-Jewish depredations, have hollowed out their "Jewish" identity to reduce it largely to a political commitment to the Left imagined as some righteous alliance of the traditionally targeted and disadvantaged, current political predilections are not likely to change. For those whose Jewish identity is richer and in whom the dissonance between Jewish wellbeing and old political assumptions might arouse some inner tension, that tension could result in a shift in traditional political allegiances.

But in America, as in Israel itself, the besiegement of the Jewish state will continue to generate among significant segments of the Jewish community an impulse - as in the abused child - to take indictments by Israel's enemies to heart, and to urge Jewish self-reform and amends in the hope of thereby winning relief. Such reactions will continue to compromise Jewish wellbeing and even undermine Israel's survival.

Notes

1. Moses Mendelssohn, cited in Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 102.

2. Cited in Michael Meyer, The Origins of the Modern Jew (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967), 44.

3. Perhaps the best-known expositor of this view was the Austrian Jewish writer Karl Kraus. See, e.g., Harry Zohn, Karl Kraus (New York: Twayne, 1971).

4. Ibid., 139.

5. Ibid.

6. Cited in Shmuel Ettinger, "The Modern Period," in H. H. Ben-Sasson, ed., A History of the Jewish People (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 830.

7. "Gabriel Riesser," Encyclopedia Judaica, Vol.14, 166-69, at 167.

8. Cited in Barry Rubin, Assimilation and Its Discontents (New York: Times Books, 1995), 86.

9. Cited in Deborah Lipstadt, Beyond Belief (New York: Free Press, 1986), 47-48.

10. Cited in Rafael Medoff, The Deafening Silence (New York: Shapolsky, 1987), 113.

11. Ibid., 178.

12. Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, Jews and the New American Scene (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 69.

13. Ibid., 152.

14. Ibid, 54, 134.

D.C. Fails the Genocide Test

2006-12-05T12:00:00.000-05:00

First published on FrontPageMag.com

Even in today's extraordinarily polarized political climate, there is one stance regarding international affairs on which all the nation's political camps would presumably agree: Genocide is bad.

Yet American responses both to genocidal assaults on vulnerable groups in recent decades and to current threats of genocide suggest that the new political directions ascendant in Washington, with the Democratic victory in Congressional elections and the rise of the Iraq Study Group, do not bode well for those who are today targeted for mass murder.

Saddam Hussein's genocidal campaign against the Kurds, which reached its height in 1988 and took the lives of some 200,000 Iraqi Kurds, hardly dampened the enthusiasm of the Bush I administration, elected in November, 1988, for cultivating close ties to Saddam and abetting his military build-up. The pursuit of that policy, which included turning a blind eye to the illegal diversion of United States Commodity Credit Corporation funds to Iraqi military purchases, was led by the State Department under Secretary of State James Baker, now co-chair of the Iraq Study Group.

The embrace of Saddam ended only with the Iraqi dictator's invasion of Kuwait. Following the first Gulf War and Iraq's expulsion from Kuwait, President George H.W. Bush famously encouraged the Kurds in the north of Iraq and the Shia in the south to rise up and overthrow the Saddam regime. He then abandoned them when they did so, allowing Saddam to slaughter tens of thousands in both populations. Key figures in shaping this policy were Secretary of State Baker and then Deputy National Security Advisor Robert Gates, a recent member of the Iraq Study Group and now nominee to succeed the vilified Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense.

The indifference both to the slaughter of the Kurds in 1988 and to the massacre of Kurds and Shia in 1991 was defended as Realpolitik. The reintroduction of Realpolitik, and demise of the current President Bush's pro-democracy agenda, is now being eagerly promoted by those looking to the Congressional Democrats and to the Iraq Study Group for a change of direction in Middle East policies.

Also in the service of alleged Realpolitik are suggestions emanating from the Iraq Study Group and some leading Democrats that the nation ought to engage in dialogue with Iran and seek its "help" in trying to stabilize Iraq, abandoning the administration's efforts to isolate the Iranian theocrats. The Administration has, of course, tried at various points since 2003 to deal directly with Iran concerning Iraq. An example was current U.S. ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad’s meetings with Iranian officials about a year ago. Such contacts resulted in Iranian undertakings and subsequent reneging on those undertakings, as the regime has persisted in arming client Shia militias and others in Iraq for attacks both on Sunni civilians and American and British forces.

This experience has understandably dampened Administration enthusiasm for further engagement with Iran over Iraq. Other factors are the Iranian regime's dedication to the annihilation of Israel, declared explicitly again and again by President Ahmadinejad, and Iran's less explicit but nevertheless well-established determination to produce nuclear weapons to advance its genocidal objectives.

Repeated diplomatic efforts by the international community have failed to moderate these policies, and this record has driven the Administration’s seeking to isolate the Iranian regime and impose a partial trade boycott against it.

The Secretary Council’s failure to enact the embargo measures it threatened if Iran did not end its uranium enrichment program by last August 31 has reinforced the Iranian mullahs’ conviction of the toothlessness of the American tiger and emboldened it in its genocidal agenda. Adoption of the alternative path of "engagement" now being promoted by the rising stars in Washington will only serve to advance that agenda further.

Iran's proxy army in Lebanon, Hezbollah, which launched this past summer's war by shelling Israeli towns and killing and kidnapping Israeli soldiers, has stated its genocidal agenda even more explicitly than its sponsor. While some who call for the destruction of Israel try to claim that this is somehow different from supporting the mass murder of Jews, Hezbollah head Hassan Nasrallah is more straightforward. He told Beirut's Daily Star in 2002, "If they (Jews) all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide." Hezbollah, has, however, also demonstrated its willingness to take the trouble, as when, according to Argentine authorities, it carried out, under Iranian sponsorship, the bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994, killing 85 people.

Yet Nasrallah's genocidal intent does not particularly faze some who have won new powers in today's Washington. Michigan Democrat John Dingell, slated to be chairman of the Energy and Commerce committee in the next Congress, stated in a Detroit television interview during this summer's war, "I don't take sides for or against Hezbollah; I don't take sides for or against Israel."

Dingell’s view was not shared by many of his House colleagues. Also during the war, House resolution 921 supporting Israel in its fight against Hezbollah passed by a vote of 410 for, 8 against. But six of the 8 were Democrats, with three - Dingell, John Conyers and Nick Rahall - slated for committee chairmanships in the new Congress.

Syria, Hezbollah’s co-sponsor and key supplier of the rocket arsenal with which Nasrallah targeted Israel’s civilian populations, is, like Iran, being touted by the Iraq Study Group for "engagement" as a potential partner in stabilizing Iraq.

The Palestinians’ governing party, Hamas, emulates Hezbollah in not hiding its genocidal aim. And while Machmoud Abbas's Fatah party colleagues are more circumspect in statements in English, the media, mosques and schools that Fatah has controlled since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority have likewise promoted the message of Israel's illegitimacy and the goal of its annihilation. Yet leading Democrats like Carl Levin, soon to be chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, have consistently faulted the Administration for not pressing for peace talks, even as no party is offering Israel genuine peace.

There have always been those in the Administration, particularly in the State Department, who have wanted to push Israel for concessions as a way to win greater Arab support for Administration policies. Now those voices will be joined by the chorus of some Congressional Democrats eager to see "peace talks" and "movement," even if it will inevitably be movement in the wrong direction, and Iraq Study Group members who want to press Israel as a quid pro quo for Syrian and broader Arab "help" in Iraq.

Recent weeks have also seen a reappearance on the policy stage of people who, during the Oslo years, were indifferent to Yasir Arafat's collusion in anti-Israel terror and his incessant incitement to pursuit of the Jewish state’s ultimate destruction. When Arafat arrived in the territories, in July, 1994, he was instrumental in unleashing, over the next 22 months, the most intense terror assault Israel had ever experienced to that point, with more than 150 dead.

One result was the election, in May, 1996, of Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister. Netanyahu insisted there would be no more territorial concessions to Arafat until he lived up to his earlier Oslo commitments to end incitement, stop PLO involvement in terror and dismantle the Islamist terror organizations. In response, Netanyahu was attacked by Secretary of Defense designate Gates, who declared, in a 1998 New York Times op-ed, that those interested in "peace" must "not kowtow to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's obstructionism."

One line of criticism from Democrats and from Bush 41 "realists" against the current Bush Administration’s foreign policy is the complaint that the President has failed to work with the international community, most notably the United Nations, in addressing - particularly, but not exclusively - Iraq. John Kerry, as Democratic nominee for the Presidency in 2004, declared that American policy in the Middle East ought to be molded by international consensus and cooperation with the UN.

But with regard to genocide, the United Nations has largely become the monster it was created to fight. It has failed to address campaigns of mass murder and actually contributed to such horrors. In the Balkans, in 1993, the UN created a "safe haven" for Bosnian Muslims in the town of Srebrenica, leading thousands of Muslim refugees to flock to the town. But when challenged by Bosnian Serb troops, the Dutch UN forces in Srebrenica, with the support of UN authorities, abandoned the Muslims. Some 8,000 males were subsequently rounded up and slaughtered by the Serbs.

In Rwanda, members of the UN peacekeeping force (UNAMIR - UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda) essentially looked on as 800,000 ethnic Tutsis were murdered. For example, some 2,000 civilians sought shelter in a school protected by Belgian UNAMIR troops. But five days into the massacres the soldiers abandoned their wards and most of the 2,000 were butchered. Sixteen days into the killing, the Security Council voted to withdraw about 90% of the UNAMIR force from Rwanda. The murders went on for another twelve weeks.

The UN’s now defunct Commission on Human Rights consistently failed to address acts of genocide. This included what has been perhaps the worst episode of genocide since World War II, the Arab government in Khartoum's slaughter, over several decades, of some two million Christian and animist blacks in southern Sudan. The Commission likewise ignored Sudan’s ongoing genocidal campaign against the Muslim but black population of Darfur in eastern Sudan. Instead, it saw fit to elect Sudan to membership on the Commission, along with Saudi Arabia, the nation most prolific in disseminating religious and "educational" material promoting group hatred and demonization.

The Commission did sponsor, in September, 2001, a "World Conference Against Racism" in Durban, South Africa. But the conference degenerated into an orgy of anti-Jewish hatemongering of an order unseen since the Nazi Nuremberg rallies of the nineteen-thirties. A chief theme was demands for the annihilation of Israel.

The Commission has recently been replaced by the UN Human Rights Council, but the new body is following the same anti-human rights agenda as its predecessor.

Yet looking to internationalist bodies to solve the world’s conflicts has attained new heights of popularity on at least the ideological Left of the Democratic party, and enthusiasm for ascribing moral and political authority to the UN is substantial in the new Congress.

Another view popular among pacifists and internationalists within the Democratic party is that, whatever our differences with other states, and irrespective of those states’ policies, there is intrinsic virtue to talking to them, seeking accommodations of some sort, and avoiding armed conflict at all costs. In recent years, Democratic criticism of the Bush II Administration has often taken the form of complaining that an insufficient role has been given in policy-making to the State Department, where the stock in trade is "diplomacy," or talking to the leaders of other nations however much blood is on their hands. Republican champions of Realpolitik likewise support dealing with whatever the powers that be, and pursuing pragmatic agreements without looking too closely at the internal policies of our "partners."

These shared predilections are often cast as highly moral, because war is, of course, bad and talking is good.

But most genocides are carried out within states, and the victims are not typically sovereign groups that are part of the UN or party to the talk-fests and the deal-making.

Those whose highest moral imperative is to sit down, negotiate, and split differences have good reason to be cheered by recent developments in Washington. But those who are the targets of campaigns promoting mass murder and extermination have more reason than ever to be afraid.

Deluded in the IDF?

2006-11-06T00:04:00.000-05:00

A Jerusalem Post article of October 5 ("IDF: West Bank Terror Could Re-emerge," by Yaakov Katz)claimed that senior defense officials are warning about an eventual escalation in terror emanating from Hamas and Islamic Jihad cells in the West Bank in the face of "the lack of diplomatic progress."

While the article contains no direct quotes to this effect from any senior officers, the implication is that upper echelons of the IDF view "diplomatic progress" as an alternative to Israel's being subjected to a terror offensive.

No doubt during the Oslo years promotions to the highest positions in the IDF were made in part on the basis of political views. And, despite all that has transpired, the delusions of Oslo still have a tenacious hold on some Israelis. But, especially since Arafat launched his terror war in September, 2000, the nation should surely have moved well beyond the point where anyone in a position of authority in the IDF would still fail to grasp basic realities.

There are, of course, no Palestinian interlocutors for diplomatic progress that would improve Israel's security, and any territorial concessions in the foreseeable future will simply provide the terror organizations with better strategic positions from which to launch their attacks.

As the war with Hezbollah this summer underscored, Israel cannot afford the luxury of delusional misconceptions about the objectives of its enemies and the strategic threats they represent.

Times Editors Still Flacking for Hamas

2006-11-05T23:54:00.000-05:00

The editors of the New York Times, virtually always willing to ignore or dismiss genocidal rhetoric directed at Jews, do so again in an editorial entitled, "Out of the Mouths of Aides" (September 30, 2006). They advise the Bush administration that, "while words are important," it should turn a blind eye to calls for Israel's destruction conveyed in media, mosques and schools by the Palestinians' Hamas government (and by Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party as well). "[Secretary of
State] Rice needs to make clear to the Palestinians that... she is less concerned with rhetoric than the ability and willingness of any Palestinian government to halt, rather than abet, all attacks on Israel."

The Administration should also, we are told, press Israel to desist from targeting those Palestinians involved in such attacks. In effect, Hamas should be allowed to indoctrinate its constituents and build up its forces during a cease-fire. It should be permitted to prepare for what most Palestinians, according to polls, aspire to: an emulation of Hezbollah's war strategy during the past summer's conflict. Israel, meanwhile, should be pressed to do nothing to forestall
Hamas's war plans.

Why advise such a course, which potentially represents an existential threat to Israel? The editors' rationale is endorsement of the statement by one of Secretary Rice's State Department aides to the effect that, "some sense of progress on the Arab-Israeli dispute is 'just a sine qua non' for getting moderate Arabs and Europeans to cooperate on Iran and the region's many other dangerous problems."

The absurdity of this claim should be obvious even at the Times. "Moderate" Arabs will cooperate on Iran only if they feel sufficiently threatened by that country, in which case they will do so no matter what is happening on the Israeli-Palestinian front. If they don't feel very threatened by Iran, they won't cooperate - again, no matter what is going on between the Israelis and Palestinians. Similarly, if the Europeans see Iran more as a business opportunity than a strategic threat, they will be uncooperative no matter how hard the United States presses Israel on concessions to the Palestinians.

If either the "moderate" Arabs or Europeans suggest that movement on the Israeli-Palestinian front is a precondition for their cooperation on Iran, they do so because focusing on Israel and the Palestinians is an easy evasion of steps against Iran and plays well domestically. Only those ill-disposed to Israel, whether State Department apparatchiks or Times editors, would take such suggestions at face value.

But the tack clearly appeals to the Times, as it allows the paper's editors to skewer two favorite targets at once - the Bush administration and Israel.

The Times' hypocrisy is amplified by another piece of advice proffered in the editorial. "Ms. Rice should be willing to go to Damascus... to tell President Bashar al-Assad that relations can improve if he restrains his clients Hamas and Hezbollah. The Europeans... should make the same trip to warn of real punishments should he refuse."

Can anyone imagine the Times' editors actually supporting "real punishments" of Syria? Have they urged such punishment of Iran now that that country has made a mockery of the August 31 deadline set by the Security Council for stopping uranium enrichment?

Reference to such steps is merely a figleaf for the Times' once more advocating a policy of reaching out to Syria, as well as to Fatah and Hamas; once more urging stale and inevitably sterile and destructive exercises in diplomacy as an end in itself; and once more criticizing the Administration for its refusal to take that path.

Haaretz: As Deluded as Ever

2006-08-26T14:08:00.000-04:00

Various commentators have attributed the IDF's difficulties in the recent war against Hezbollah in large part to cutbacks in training both for conventional wars and for the particular challenges faced in Lebanon. Some have also noted that these cutbacks were related to the dedication of men, training and materiel to the struggle against Palestinian terrorism emanating from the territories.

A recent Haaretz editorial, entitled "Save the IDF" (August 23), also notes this negative effect of the focus on operations in the territories upon broader IDF preparedness and suggests an old/new solution: A peace agreement with the Palestinians.

The advice is old because, of course, Haaretz has long argued that the main obstacle to peace is Israel's refusal to leave the territories and if the nation would only change this stance it would find a ready partner in the Palestinians.

It is "new" because it has been heard less in recent years, for obvious reasons. The Oslo era was wracked by terror, culminating in Arafat's rejection of Israel's preparedness to withdraw virtually to the pre-1967 lines and his launching of a full-scale terror war. Following Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza last year, the Palestinians elected a Hamas government that openly acknowledges its objective is Israel's destruction and has conducted incessant rocket attacks into Israel from "liberated" Gaza. These realities have disabused most Israelis of the delusions of Oslo. It is a distinct minority that has learned nothing and remains enamored of those delusions.

Few have said over the last month that the problem is Israel's refusal to negotiate with Hamas and if only the nation would do so and give the territories to these elected representatives of the Palestinians then all would be well. The IDF would no longer need to worry about Palestinian terror, and its ranks could focus on training for the threats posed by Israel's "real" enemies.

But Haaretz's editors remain among those few. They have learned nothing. They close their ears to what Hamas says and their eyes to what it does and complain that "there has as yet been no attempt to talk with the new Palestinian government." They argue that "security is obtained through peace agreements," continue to fault Israeli presence in the territories for Palestinian hostility and the absence of a peace, and argue that this must change because the IDF "must prepare to face real enemies, not enemies of our own creation."

In several editorials published during the war, the newspaper suggested the fight with Hezbollah represented an existential challenge and had to be won. A reader could almost have been lulled into believing that Haaretz's editors were suddenly prepared to look honestly at Israel's situation, rather than through the distorting, indeed blinding, lens of their narrow Israel-indicting ideology. But such a reader would have been wrong.

As the editorial “Save the IDF” illustrates, the editors' eagerness to see potential "peace partners" in those committed to Israel's destruction, and "obstacles to peace" in those who recognize the threats facing the nation and refuse to sacrifice Israel's capacity to defend itself, has not waned. Nor, apparently, has their preparedness to see Israel's defenses further compromised and much more Israeli blood spilled in blind, Oslo-like pursuit of delusions of peace.

Times' Nicholas Kristof Advises Israel

2006-07-26T11:48:00.000-04:00

The New York Times' Nicholas Kristof, in a July 23 op-ed ("Spanish Lesson for Israel"), wags his rhetorical finger at Israel for its military response to Hezbollah's killing and kidnapping of Israeli soldiers. He urges an alternative approach.

Israel, Kristof lectures, should emulate Britain and Spain in their dealings respectively with the IRA and Basque separatists and take a "softer approach" of negotiations and political accommodation.

The point Kristof misses but others recognize as essential is, of course, that the IRA's political goal has been separation of northern Ireland from Great Britain, not Britain's annihilation. Similarly, the Basque ETA movement has sought independence for Spain's Basque region, not the destruction of Spain. In contrast, both Hezbollah and Hamas have stated openly and emphatically on innumerable occasions that their aim is establishment of Islamic control over all the land of an
eradicated Israel.

Nor is it insignificant to many people not employed by the New York Times that all during the Oslo years Yasir Arafat and his Palestinian Authority were likewise assuring their constituency that their goal remained Israel's destruction and that Palestinians should understand Oslo diplomacy as the PLO's means to that end.

But just as the New York Times downplayed the Nazis' genocide of the Jews during World War II, it has consistently chosen over the years to downplay or ignore entirely the explicitly declared genocidal intent of groups like Hezbollah, Hamas and Fatah and their indoctrination of their constituencies to dedicate themselves to the goal of Israel's extermination. This has been true both on editorial and opinion pages and in news stories.

It is a dereliction of journalistic responsibility that, with rare exception, the Times continues to regard examination and exposure of these groups' doctrinal declarations and objectives unfit to print.

More Times "Despair" Nonsense

2006-06-16T12:00:00.000-04:00

While the three prisoners who recently killed themselves at Guantanamo apparently left suicide notes, one can argue that what motivated them cannot be known with any precision. But the New York Times, in a June 12 editorial ("The Deaths at Gitmo") claims to know: "It was the inevitable result of creating a netherworld of despair..." the Times explains, before going on to excoriate the Administration once more for its treatment of Guantanamo detainees.

The editorial later quotes Guantanamo camp commander Rear Admiral Harry Harris Jr. on the deaths: "I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us." Harris went on to say, the Times informs us, that the inmates "have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own." Wagging its editorial pen at Harris, the Times editors conclude: "These comments reveal a profound disassociation from humanity."

But, of course, it is the Times editors who demonstrate a profound disassociation, from reality. The invoking of "despair" is a sacrosanct concept, catechismal, in the Times' belief system. If the Arab world is caught up in Islamo-fascist frenzy, it is because of political and economic tribulations that U.S. policy has ignored, creating cadres of embittered and impoverished who, in their despair, are easy prey for extremist mullahs; and the answer is for America to change its wrongheaded ways. If Palestinian terrorists blow up Israeli children at a pizzeria or on a school bus, it is not because their leaders incite them in their media, mosques and schools to pursue Israel's destruction and promote suicide bombing as a powerful weapon for undermining the morale and resistance of the Israelis. No, it is because of Palestinian "despair" that must be assuaged with ever more Israeli concessions.

Never mind that there never has been a correlation between, for example, impoverishment and enthusiasm for Islamo-fascist jihad. The Times wishes to rationalize the threat and to believe that if only America, and Israel, would show sufficient sensitivity and make sufficient concessions all would be well. But despair was not responsible for the popularity of totalitarian ideologies in the last century, or for people's willingness to die to advance those ideologies, and it is not responsible for the Islamic version now holding such sway in the Arab world or Islamo-fascism's ready "martyrs."

Admiral Harris offers a measured, informed and rational explanation for what likely prompted the Guantanamo suicides. But don't expect to have that acknowledged, or even characterized as other than sacrilege, in a Times editorial.

Darfur, Arab Genocide and The New York Times

2006-05-19T12:00:00.000-04:00

First published on FrontPageMagazine.com

In contrast to the several very dubious high-profile choices of the Pulitzer committee for this year's awards, Nicholas Kristof's prize in recognition of his coverage for the New York Times of the Sudanese government's genocidal campaign against the people of Darfur seems uncontroversial and well deserved. But Kristof, and the Times' editors, have consistently failed to cover a key element of the story.

A recurrent theme in Kristof's articles is the world's failure to do enough to end the slaughter in Darfur, and he particularly targets President Bush for criticism. He has on occasion also mentioned the "international community" and has referred by name to several nations and world leaders other than the President that could do more. But a key factor in the impunity with which the Arab government of Sudan has been able to pursue its campaign of rape and mass murder in Darfur has been the virtually universal support it receives from the rest of the Arab world, and on this Kristof has been essentially silent. (He did break this silence in five sentences in the penultimate of some 40 op-eds addressing Darfur that he published from March, 2004 through April, 2006; but that article is focused on China's shameful role in Darfur.)

Other Arab nations not only defend Sudan's government but actively lobby for it in world bodies and have successfully enlisted fellow Muslim states and additional allies to do the same. The travesty of Sudan being elected to the United Nations' human rights commission is just one demonstration of that support. Blocking of greater UN efforts to aid the people of Darfur is another.

The impact of this support goes beyond international bodies. Many nations are reluctant to confront the Arab world in its backing of Sudan, and this has been a major factor in European foot-dragging on the Darfur issue. Even American policy is sensitive to Arab opinion and potential problems with being seen as attacking another Arab regime as the nation continues to pursue the difficult struggle in Iraq.

But this crucial factor in the world's response to the Darfur crisis has, with the one recent exception noted, been absent from Kristof's reporting. The extent and impact of Arab support for Sudan's crimes in Darfur are also absent from the rest of the Times.

When the Arab League held its annual summit in Khartoum in late March, the Times published two stories on the proceedings. Neither made any mention of Darfur and no editorial addressed the significance, or questioned the propriety, of Arab foreign ministers choosing Sudan's capital as their venue. A Times editorial on Darfur published on April 13 ("Fiddling While Darfur Burns") takes the United Nations to task for "dawdling" and complains of UN Security Council members "China, Qatar, Ghana and Tanzania, that continue to give diplomatic cover to Sudan," but says nothing of the cover given by the Arab League and its membership.

This silence on the Arab world's support for Sudan's genocidal regime is part of a broader picture. While the Times did provide some coverage of Saddam Hussein's murder of up to 200,000 Kurds in the late 1980's, it again ignored the theme of broad Arab support for Saddam's program of Arabizing northern Iraq. The Times largely failed to cover Sudan's on and off again genocidal campaign against Christian and animist blacks in the south of the country that claimed about two million lives, and of course ignored as well Arab support for Sudan's policies in the south.

The Times prides itself in being a "liberal" newspaper, but it has also consistently ignored liberal voices in the Arab world that have sought to address that world's genocidal attitudes toward religious and ethnic minorities in its midst.

Tunisian human rights activist Muhammed Bechri, writing in December, 2004, noted that, "A deafening silence [has been] observed throughout the Arab world on the horrendous crime being committed by [its] fellow Arabs in Sudan." Bechri goes on: "the Arab silence [can] only be explained once we understand the true nature of the twin fascisms of Islamism and pan-Arabism that continue to wreak havoc on Arab land," the former inculcating murderous attitudes and promoting genocidal policies toward non-Muslims, the latter doing the same with regard to Muslim but non-Arab populations in the Arab world - such as the Kurds and the blacks of Darfur.

Bechri also observes that popular support in the Arab world for its twin fascisms is bolstered by "the fact that the voices of the Arab human rights community remain of little influence due to lack of access to the official media." He could have added that those voices and their perspectives also lack access to key Western media, including the New York Times.

In addition to ignoring the significance of broad Arab opinion on acts of genocide within the Arab world, the Times has also largely failed to cover related stories, such as the pressures on Christian communities in virtually all Arab states and the flight of Christians from those nations, and the forced Arabization campaign that has been waged for decades against the large Berber community - Muslim, but not Arab - of Algeria.

Another related story untold by the Times is the murderous, indeed genocidal, hatred of Jews promoted for decades by Arab regimes, both religious and secular, in media, mosques and schools.

Bernard Lewis, the West's premier scholar of Middle East studies, wrote in 1986, regarding Jew-hatred in the Arab world, "The volume of anti-Semitic books and articles published, the size and number of editions and impressions, the eminence and authority of those who write, publish, and sponsor them, their place in school and college curricula, their role in the mass media, would all seem to suggest that classical anti-Semitism is an essential part of Arab intellectual life at the present time –– almost as much as happened in Nazi Germany."

But again, despite the Times' extensive coverage, in news reports and editorials, of Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict, the newspaper is virtually silent on this aspect of the story.

No doubt this reflects Times biases on the subject. The Times prefers to depict the conflict as mainly a dispute over territory, with Israeli territorial concessions the key to resolution. Acknowledging the genocidal attitudes toward Jews rampant in the Arab world and promoted by Arab governments would cast doubt on this depiction.

Indeed, covering the murderous Arab attitudes, and sympathy for genocidal campaigns, toward other ethnic and religious minorities living amidst the Arab world - minorities that do not enjoy sovereignty or even autonomy and are not engaged in border disputes with surrounding Arab populations - would render even less plausible the Times' slanting of the Israeli-Arab conflict, and this very likely figures in the Times' failure to cover those other stories.

With regard to Israel, the Times not only ignores Arab hate-mongering but ridicules Israel for making an issue of it. In October, 2000, for example, a month after Arafat launched a terror war against Israel, the official Palestinian Authority television station broadcast a sermon by Sheik Ahmed Halabaya in which the sheik declared:

"Whether Likud or Labor, Jews are Jews... They are terrorists. They are the ones who must be butchered and killed, as Allah the almighty says: Fight them; Allah will torture them at your hands, and will humiliate them... Have no mercy on the Jews, no matter where they are, in any country. Fight them, wherever you are. Wherever you meet them, kill them. Wherever you are, kill those Jews, and those Americans who are like them..."

In an article published eleven days later, Times reporter William Orme notes Israeli claims of the PA's using its official media for incitement, and the slant of his story is clearly to make Israel's complaints look unfounded and ridiculous. He writes at one point: "Israelis cite as one egregious example a televised sermon... 'Whether Likud or Labor, Jews are Jews,' proclaimed Sheik Ahmad Abu Halabaya... " That is all Orme says of the sermon; nothing about Halabaya's exhortations to butcher Jews wherever one finds them, nothing about his assertions that all of Israel belongs to the Arabs, nothing about his invoking of Allah as calling for the torture and murder of Jews.

Again, it is very likely that the Times' sins of omission regarding Arab incitement of murder and genocide toward Jews, its distortion of this crucial element of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the service of its own slant on the crux of the conflict and the path to resolution, has figured in its silence on murderous Arab attitudes toward other religious and ethnic minorities in the Middle East and north Africa. To report honestly on those attitudes and their practical consequences would inevitably call into doubt the paper's editorial views regarding Israel and the Palestinians.

But, in any case, that silence on Arab attitudes does cast its shadow over coverage of other conflicts in the Arab world, distorting representation of the nature and dynamics of those conflicts. More particularly, it taints the Times' reporting and editorializing on the genocide in Darfur, including Nicholas Kristof's Pulitzer prize-winning coverage.

Hamas's Inevitable Israeli Apologists

2006-05-10T12:00:00.000-04:00

First published in the Jewish Press.

The election of Hamas to governance of the Palestinian territories was met with general dismay in the West and broad declarations of a boycott against the organization until it recognizes Israel’s right to exist and conclusively abandons its terror war against the Jewish state.

Yet many in Israel, and Israel’s supporters elsewhere, worried that Western governments would soon begin to ignore Hamas’s genocidal rhetoric, its support for ongoing terror and dedication to Israel’s annihilation, and would seek to establish relations with the Hamas government and provide it international aid. Russia’s prompt reaching out to the Hamas leadership only reinforced such concerns.

The anticipated Western compromises with principle have not been long in coming. In recent days, for example, Norway announced that Hamas representatives would be visiting Oslo and meeting with government officials, and France’s President Chirac insisted the international community must pay the salary of the Hamas-led Palestinian regime’s employees.

Those interested in Israel’s welfare should be no less worried about inevitable concessions to Hamas from another direction –– voices in Israel that will seek to rationalize Hamas, downplay its genocidal agenda and its threat, and promote Israeli contacts with the new Palestinian government.

Indeed, some Israelis were doing so preemptively in anticipation of Hamas’s election victory. In late January, days before the vote, left-wing journalist Uri Avnery rhapsodized about pleasant contacts with Hamas supporters, urged negotiations with Hamas, saw no good reason to avoid such talks, and blamed Israel for blocking the path to peace.

Shimon Peres has suggested that the only pre-condition for negotiations should be Hamas’s refraining from violence.

If the past is any guide, Israeli voices both calling for talks with Hamas and blaming Israel for the absence of progress toward peace will grow more numerous and shrill. Moreover, they will inevitably advocate for accommodation of Hamas not only in Israel but in Europe and America as well. And they will convince some there to follow their course, while they will be used by others abroad –– individuals, groups and governments –– to justify those others’ own inclinations to appease Hamas.

This will be so no matter how tenaciously Hamas adheres to its annihilationist agenda. Indeed, no attackers of Israel, however genocidal their rhetoric or however aggressively they have translated their rhetoric into bloody assaults, have failed to win themselves Israeli apologists. (Thus, for example, the recent inauguration of a Center for Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University was picketed by some TAU faculty who defended the Iranian regime and protested its being tarred as radical, anti-Semitic and terror-supporting.)

For, as is almost inevitable within chronically besieged communities, the very fear the attackers instill and their constancy in pushing the attack virtually guarantee that some among the besieged, in their desperation for relief, will seek to rationalize the threat, insist the enemy can be reasoned with, and promote accommodation and concessions that they delude themselves into believing will end the threat.

This has been a recurrent phenomenon in the history of the Jewish Diaspora, and it has been a constant in Israel in the face of the persistent Arab siege.

Israeli apologists for Hamas have existed for as long as the organization has been engaged in anti-Israel terror. Pro-Hamas apologetics were somewhat muted during the Oslo years, but only because those Israelis supportive of Oslo –– including members of Israel’s pro-Oslo governments –– were eager to whitewash Yasir Arafat and his Palestinian Authority. They sought to cast Hamas and Islamic Jihad as the anti-peace camp determined to sabotage Oslo through violence, in contrast to Arafat’s supposed dedication to compromise and peace.

Oslo-era governments and their followers pushed this line even though they were fully aware of Arafat’s collusion with Hamas in its terror campaign, his open praise of Hamas and its martyrs, and his encouraging of Palestinian youth –– in PA media, schools and mosques –– to emulate those martyrs’ path.

But even during the Oslo period, Hamas had its Israeli defenders. For example, the late Ehud Sprinzak, then a professor of political science at Hebrew University, wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post in October 1997 titled “How Israel Misjudges Hamas and Its Terrorism.” Sprinzak explained that Hamas’s suicide bombings were simply a response to “humiliating Israeli actions,” cited approvingly Hamas statements to this effect, and criticized Israeli leaders for seeking to “demonize” Hamas. Sprinzak was silent about Hamas’s explicitly declared objective of pursuing to the end Israel’s destruction, a reality he preferred to ignore.

Hamas will no doubt remain true to its genocidal agenda and continue to promote and pursue Israel’s extermination. With no less certainty, some Israelis will engage in apologetics for those who want to destroy Israel, and their op-eds will appear not only in Israeli media but in the The Washington Post and New York Times as well.

Disengagement Delusion

2006-05-01T12:00:00.000-04:00

In his article, "Disengagement delusion," Frank Gaffney discusses delusional elements in the Israeli leadership's claims regarding the gains to be had through further unilateral withdrawals. He also talks of analogous delusional thinking among those in America who are calling for American withdrawal from Iraq. Gaffney cites The Oslo Syndrome as offering an incisive explanation for such delusions

Today, even more than is usually the case, Israel is the Free World's "canary in the mine shaft." Its voters are poised to vote for a policy approach their American counterparts are being tempted to embrace in the months ahead. Call it the "disengagement delusion."
Read the whole thing here.

Dennis Ross: Failed Former Point Person

2006-02-15T12:00:00.000-05:00

In an interview with Deborah Solomon of the New York Times (February 6, 2006), America's former chief Middle East negotiator Dennis Ross blames Hamas's victory in the recent Palestinian elections on the Bush administration's failure to be more fully engaged in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to have a point person such as himself:

"Some people see the Israeli pullout from Gaza last summer as the turning point in all this, because the local economy collapsed and left Palestinians feeling as if no one was in charge. The expectations were that life would get better. Well, it got worse. It became completely lawless and the jobs disintegrated as well. You needed someone to spearhead the pledging of assistance and the delivery of assistance. The U.S. could have done that. But we didn't have a point person."

Lest we forget, consider these points about Ross's tenure as point person, which entailed his playing a substantive role in shaping Clinton Administration policy during the Oslo years:

• Hamas's victory was in part a reaction against the corruption brought to the territories by Arafat and the Palestinian Authority. The Clinton Administration, with Ross as point man, never forcefully pushed for Palestinian reform and an end to corruption. It essentially supported Israeli policies that contributed to PA malfeasance - such as Israel's depositing tax receipts due the Palestinians under Oslo directly to Arafat's personal accounts, some 2 billion dollars, rather than to any accountable recipient. In addition, when Israel occasionally balked at the transfers in the wake of terrorist attacks, the U.S. Administration, with its point man Ross, pressed for their resumption.

• The Administration, with Ross as point man, never aggressively pushed for a sustained PA crackdown on Hamas terror or for the PA's dismantling of Hamas's terror infrastructure, as required by Oslo. It never, for example, made such steps a requirement for continued American aid.

• The PA promoted, in its media, mosques and schools, hatred of Israel and the message that Jews have no legitimate claim to any part of the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean and their state should be destroyed. Arafat and his confederates routinely praised those who carried out terrorist acts, including Hamas's "martyrs," and urged Palestinian youth to emulate them. The Clinton Administration, with Ross as point man, never seriously pushed for an end to PA incitement, as called for in Oslo. As with its weakness regarding terror, it never made the cessation of incitement a condition for additional American aid.

• In 1996, in the wake of an unprecedented wave of anti-Israel terror following Arafat's arrival in the territories, Israel elected Benjamin Netanyahu prime minister. Netanyahu insisted there would be no further Israeli concessions until Arafat and the PA lived up to those earlier Oslo agreements obliging them to halt terror, dismantle the infrastructures of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and end incitement in PA media, mosques and schools. The U.S. Administration, with Ross as point man, rather than supporting Netanyahu, instead consistently pressured Israel to undertake additional concessions despite the Palestinians' failure to change their pattern of noncompliance with the anti-terror and anti-incitement clauses of the Oslo accords.

Given that record, as we consider Hamas's election victory, we can also be confident that things would be still worse had President Bush emulated his predecessor in utilizing the services of a point person such as Dennis Ross.

The New York Times Does Hamas

2006-02-08T12:00:00.000-05:00

First published in the Jewish Press.

Even in an editorial ostensibly critical of Hamas ("Hamas at the Helm," February 2), The New York Times seems equally interested in once more whitewashing the Palestinian Authority. According to the Times, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has failed to rein in Palestinian terror in part "because his ruling Fatah Party has been unable to tell Hamas what to do." But Fatah’s own Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades have been a major source of terror, which suggests there is more to Abbas’s failure than simply the recalcitrance of Hamas. However, the Times editors are silent on the activities of Fatah-linked militias.

In the same vein, the editorial concludes: "No ruling government should strap bomb belts to its young people and send them onto buses and into restaurants to kill others."

But of course Yasir Arafat and his Palestinian Authority were doing exactly that incessantly from the time they launched their terror war against Israel in September 2000, and the Times consistently chose not to chastise the Palestinian leadership as much as to harangue Israel for its balking at continuing negotiations with Arafat and for responding – in the editors’ assessment – too harshly to Palestinian terror.

Echoes of that chiding also appear in the February 2 editorial, with a reference to Israel’s having supposedly "laid waste to Nablus and other Palestinian cities after the intifada began in 2000."

Yes, Israel sent its military into Nablus and other cities to uproot terrorist bases and demolish structures in which bombs were built and bombers trained. Its main incursion came in the wake of the Passover massacre in Netanya in March 2002 that killed 30, and in Nablus alone the IDF found and destroyed more than 20 bomb factories. But to describe Israeli operations as having "laid waste" to Palestinian cities is a characterization as divorced from reality as the notorious claims of a "Jenin massacre" that never happened.

The Times editors also criticize Israel for initially refusing to hand over millions in tax and customs receipts to the Palestinians; the editors insist that contributing to the coffers of a government that will soon be led by people openly dedicated to Israel’s destruction should be of less concern to the Jewish state than irritating its adversaries and thereby "pouring gas over an inflamed situation."

The Times also suggests that the Quartet should not cut off aid to the Palestinians as that would "undoubtedly serve to push the Palestinians further into the arms of Iran." Apparently, Israelis are to draw comfort that the bombs and missiles aimed at them are paid for in part by Israeli transfers of tax receipts or Quartet subsidies rather than by Iranian financing of Palestinian terror.

The Times editors hint at another rationale for continued engagement and financing of the Palestinians; an expectation that having to govern could well oblige Hamas to moderate its terror. "It is one thing to send suicide bombers to kill innocent people in Tel Aviv cafes when you are a fringe, radical group. It is quite another thing to launch attacks at civilians when you control the government."

Of course, we heard this incisive line of argument when Hitler came to power, and when Khomeini seized power in Iran. (And controlling the government did not keep Arafat and Fatah from sending suicide bombers to Tel Aviv; but, again, The Times averted its gaze from that.)

It transpires, however, that Hamas doesn’t actually need to give up terror to satisfy the Times editors. "The problem is," they declare, "[Hamas] refuses to say the words."

The New York Times has shown Hamas the way. If only it would moderate its statements in English, and limit to Arabic its calls for Israel’s destruction and its commitment to terror, if only it would emulate Arafat and Fatah and the Palestinian Authority in this way, the editors of The New York Times could declare Hamas, too, a fit partner for "peace" and once more focus its editorial barbs at Israel for failing to make the concessions that would serve to grasp the imagined Palestinian hand of peace extended to the Jewish state.

'Honest' Hamas

2006-02-03T22:50:00.000-05:00

The eagerness of some Western leaders to offer rationalizations for Hamas's victory in the Palestinian elections, to deal with the terrorist group, and to find "moderates" in its ranks even as Hamas reiterates its dedication to terror in the pursuit of Israel's destruction has reminded various observers of the "Oslo Syndrome." Diana West cites the syndrome in her excellent February 3 Washington Times column "'Honest' Hamas".

There comes a point, sometimes, when logic is denied, reason is abandoned, and that vital connection to reality is severed. Once upon a time, we called this a nervous breakdown and prescribed a rest cure. Now, we call it a press conference and take notes.
Read the whole thing here.

Oslo Cheerleader Retires

2005-12-04T16:34:00.000-05:00

Yossi Sarid, veteran stalwart of the Israeli Left and former head of the Meretz Party, announced on December 1 that he is retiring from politics. Sarid, a supporter of dealing with Arafat long before Oslo, came to typify those Israelis who closed their eyes to the agenda of Israel's enemies, chose to blame fellow Jews for Arab incitement and terror, and saw concessions aimed at mollifying the nation's adversaries as the answer to existential threats. But initial announcements of his retirement in Israeli media said virtually nothing about his Oslo-era legacy.

Representative of that legacy was Sarid's response to the unprecedented terror assault that followed Arafat's arrival in the territories in 1994. Arafat refused to meet his Oslo obligations to crack down on the Islamist terror groups, enlisted Palestinian media, mosques and schools to promote hatred of Jews and rejection of Israel, praised the Islamists and their "martyrs" and urged other Palestinians to emulate them. Yet the leaders of Israel's ruling Labor-Meretz coalition continued to insist that Arafat was a genuine "peace partner."

Apologetics for Arafat, encouraged by Arafat's own statements and those of his supporters, included the argument that Arafat could not yet fulfill his Oslo obligations regarding incitement and terror because he had not yet shown his people the fruits of peace and so did not have public backing for a different, more pacific, course. Sarid was among those who took this nonsensical thesis one step further and insisted that the proper response to the increased Palestinian terror was more rapid Israeli concessions, allegedly to give Arafat the credibility he needed finally to end his incitement and public support for terror and begin implementing his Oslo commitments.

Israel did persist in its concessions, and, as was obviously predictable, the Palestinians interpreted this as demonstrating the utility of the terror campaign, waged now at virtually no cost to them but only rewards, and the terror increased.Unfortunately, we can see some of the same tortured logic today, as Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian president now for about one year, has refused to take steps against Palestinian terror and its perpetrators and has done very little to diminish PA incitement to terror and Israel's ultimate destruction. His apologists in Israel and the United States repeat his own assertions that he is too weak to fulfill his obligations regarding incitement and terror and, in the spirit of Yossi Sarid, urge Israeli concessions to allegedly strengthen Abbas's hand and allow him to act more forcefully.

An illustration of this was the Rafah agreement pushed into effect by Secretary of State Rice, which opened the border between Egypt and Gaza with no effective controls against infiltration of terrorists and their armaments. In its wake, terrorist leaders have entered Gaza and an upsurge in anti-Israel violence seems inevitable.

FrontPageMagazine Interview

2005-11-25T00:00:00.000-05:00

By Jamie Glazov

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Kenneth Levin, a clinical instructor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, a Princeton-trained historian, and a commentator on Israeli politics. He is the author of the new book The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege.

FP: Dr. Levin, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Levin: Thank you.

FP: What inspired you to write this book?

Levin: It was obvious to me at the start, as it was to many others, that the Oslo agreements could only lead to disaster. I said as much in a Jerusalem Post op.ed. a few days before the 1993 signing of the first accords on the White House lawn. That there was something very deluded about the thinking of Israel’s leaders and their pro-Oslo constituency became more evident as Oslo proceeded. Arafat and his Palestinian Authority immediately used their media, mosques and schools to promote hatred of Israel and violence against Jews and continued to make clear their objective remained Israel’s destruction. The level of terrorism increased to unprecedented dimensions. Yet Israel responded with more concessions.

Read More.