Jacob's Voice

Parsing Obama’s Speech

Algemeiner (March 28, 2013)

Anyone inclined to fantasize prospects for an Israeli-Palestinian agreement because President Obama inspired students with his Jerusalem speech might take a deep breath and remember recent history. Especially once popular Israeli journalist and TV commentator Ehud Ya’ari enthusiastically declared that Obama was “a new Clinton.”

Intended as laudatory, the Clinton comparison might better be taken as a cautionary warning. It is now almost twenty years since the famous handshake on the White House lawn with a beaming President Clinton embracing Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat. A year later Rabin and Arafat were honored with the Nobel Peace Prize, while Clinton was widely praised as a noble peacemaker.

But within less than a decade the Oslo accord had unraveled. Israelis riding buses and dining in restaurants were blown up in hideous attacks by Palestinian suicide bombers. After Arafat launched the second intifada, more than seven hundred Israeli civilians were murdered in terrorist attacks.

Fast forward to Obama in Jerusalem. Rather than address the Knesset, where he could be heckled by Israeli law-makers duly skeptical of American presidents bearing olive branches, he chose the more welcoming audience of Israeli university students. Not, to be sure, from every university. Students from Israel’s newest academic institution, located in the flourishing settlement of Ariel, were not welcome.

But in a sharp departure from his Cairo speech in 2009, when Obama relied on the Holocaust to validate Israeli claims to their homeland, he seemed to have learned that “next year in Jerusalem” expressed quite ancient yearnings. He cited “faith in God and the Torah,” “centuries of suffering and exile,” “a longing to return home” and “freedom in your own land” as the historic, religious and ideological underpinnings of Jewish statehood.

Then he addressed the generation of young Israelis who yearn for peace now. “Given the demographics west of the Jordan River,” he asserted, “the only way for Israel to endure and thrive as a Jewish and democratic state is through the realization of an independent and viable Palestine.”

That, however, is a false equation. Jews comprise two-thirds of the population between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. There is no ticking demographic time bomb. With or without a Palestinian state Israel will remain both Jewish and democratic. But given the dangers currently lurking on its borders with Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and Egypt, the last thing it needs is a West Bank Palestinian state likely to be instantly gobbled up by Hamas or Hezbollah.

Obama implored Israelis to recognize “the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and justice.” Citing “the foreign army” that occupies “Palestinian” land (actually the Jewish biblical homeland); “settler violence” (invariably in response to Palestinian attacks); and the unfairness that “a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of her own” (only because her leaders, as Abba Eban memorably observed, have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity for peace), he affirmed that “Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their own land.”

If that phrase sounds familiar, it should. In The Jewish State (1896), Theodor Herzl wrote: “We shall live at last as free men on our own soil.” Obama parroted the Palestinian inclination to frame their national aspirations in Zionist language.

Perhaps because Israelis (for good reason) expected little from Obama, they seemed enraptured by his speech. The headline in Israel’s largest daily newspaper, Yediot Ahronot, proclaimed that “Israel is in Love.” An Israeli engineering student was delighted that “President Obama talked to me” and to students who merely want “to live our lives in peace and to prosper.” The president, a law student claimed, had infused young Israelis “with spirit and hope.” Another appreciative listener noted that his “inspiring idealistic vision” was “bravely related to the immorality of the continuing Israeli occupation.” A business student understood that the president “wanted us, the younger generation, to pressure our government in order to make peace with the Palestinians.”

“Political leaders,” Obama observed, “will never take risks if the people do not push them.” Netanyahu can be pushed. Elected prime minister in 1996 as a sharp critic of the Oslo accords, he capitulated to American pressure to expand their scope. He agreed to the confinement of Jews living in the ancient biblical city of Hebron to a tiny ghetto, with the power of the Israeli army to protect them severely limited. His abject apology (not coincidentally, just before Obama left Israel) to Turkish President Erdogen for the Mavi Marmara episode, when Israeli naval commandos were attacked at sea while enforcing the Gaza blockade, reveals his pliability under pressure.

Obama may have finally recognized the ancient and enduring attachment of the Jewish people to their biblical homeland. But his hostility to the Jews who live there was palpable. Naftali Bennett, Netanyahu’s new right-wing Cabinet minister, responded pointedly: “There is no occupation in one’s own land.” Settlement, after all, has always inspired Zionist dreams and defined Israeli reality.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bon Voyage: President Obama in Israel

Algemeiner (March 14, 2013)

In anticipation of President Obama’s forthcoming visit to Israel The New York Times published three “Op-Ed” columns in a single day (March 13) assessing the dim prospects for Middle East peace – and, to be sure – holding Israel responsible. Even if “Op-Ed” refers only to location (adjacent to the editorial page) rather than to policy (deviating from the editorial position), this was an unusual, but hardly random, concentration of journalistic firepower.

 With his characteristic airy detachment, columnist Thomas Friedman seemed to applaud Obama’s belated realization that given current realities on the ground, “benign neglect” toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is preferable to active intervention. After all, as Friedman correctly notes, “the most destabilizing conflict in the region is the civil war between Shiites and Sunnis,” not the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Furthermore, the obstacles to an Israeli-Palestinian peace are, at least at the moment, insurmountable. Why? Because Israeli settlers and Hamas rockets make it so. Note the moral equivalence.

 

Nonetheless, Friedman prepared questions for the President to ask Israeli officials – but not Palestinians in Ramallah. How can “your relentless settlement drive” fail to undermine Israel as “a Jewish democracy” and further “delegitimize” Israel worldwide? Shouldn’t Israel “be constantly testing and testing whether there is a Palestinian partner for a secure peace” – as though Israel had not repeatedly done that ever since the Oslo Accords were drafted. Finally (“as a friend”), Friedman wanted to know whether Israel even has a long-term strategy for peace.

 

Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit pointedly declared the “Old Peace” of Oslo to be dead. Waves of Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, Yasir Arafat’s refusal to accept generous Israeli peace terms at the Camp David summit in 2000, and destruction during the Arab Spring of the “corrupt yet stable tyrannies” (especially Egypt) that had supported peace with Israel.

 

But Shavit is optimistic about the prospects for a “New Peace.” The Arab awakening, in conjunction with the “social justice protest movement” that emerged in Israel in 2011, promises “a pragmatic, gradual process” leading to peace based on mutual respect. The burden, to be sure, is on Israel, which must implement a “real” settlement freeze. Settlers, he recently wrote in Haaretz, “occupy Israel.”

 

Columbia professor Rashid Khalidi wants President Obama to guide a peace process that any Palestinian would applaud: an end to Israel’s “intransigence,“ “illegal” settlements, “apartheid-style wall,” and “ghettoization” of Palestinians, with a government “hellbent on territorial expansion.” The Israeli “occupation” must end, and settlements must be removed. What Palestinians must do is not mentioned.

 

From quite different perspectives Friedman, Shavit and Khalidi reach the shared conclusion that surely pleases Times editors: the absence of peace is entirely Israel’s fault. And, no surprise, Jewish settlers are primarily responsible. Not a word about the Palestinian terrorism that led to the “apartheid-style wall” separating Israel from the West Bank. Nor about Israel’s 10-month settlement freeze two years ago that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas pointedly ignored. Nor about the vast Hezbollah accumulation of rockets in south Lebanon that probably exceeds what Hamas has stored in Gaza. Nor about the absurd claim, echoed by Khalidi, that “5 million” Palestinians live “in a state of subjugation or exile” for which Israel implicitly bears responsibility.

 

It is highly unlikely that the Times would publish three op-eds in a decade, no less in a single day, that even mention, no less defend, the right of “close settlement” west of the Jordan River enjoyed by Jews ever since the League of Nations approved the Mandate for Palestine nearly a century ago. That right has never been repealed. Or that UN Resolution 242 following the Six-Day War called upon Israel to withdraw its military forces from “territories,” not from “the” territories or “all” the territories that it had gained from Arab aggression. Or, even in passing, that there already is a state (named Jordan), with a Palestinian population majority, in Palestine as originally defined by the League of Nations. Or that settlement in the Land of Israel is what Zionism has always meant. The Times might even permit recognition that the largest Jewish settlement in the Middle East, endlessly calumnied, is the State of Israel.

Wailing at the Western Wall

For nearly twenty-five years an organization known as Women of the Wall has struggled, in the words of its mission statement, “to achieve the social and legal recognition of our right, as women, to wear prayer shawls, pray, and read from the Torah collectively and out loud at the Western Wall.”

Their challenge to guidelines set by the Ministry of Religious Authority, the government agency charged with supervision of Jewish holy sites, has periodically roiled Israeli society. A decade ago the Supreme Court upheld the right claimed by Women of the Wall to pray and read from Torah in the women’s section of the Western Wall plaza.

Within a year, however, unrelenting ultra-Orthodox opposition prompted the Court to reconsider. In a 5-4 decision it upheld the government prohibition on women wearing tallitot or tefillin, or reading Torah, in the public (but gender divided) plaza adjacent to the Wall. The Court required the government to provide a suitable alternative site where such religious observance, and mixed gender prayer, would be permitted. That site, around the corner of the Western Wall, was an ancient gateway to the Temple Mount known since the mid-19^th century as Robinson’s Arch.

A fragile status quo emerged. For Rosh Hodesh services at the beginning of the new month, Women of the Wall convene for public prayer in the Western Wall plaza. But for the Torah service they are required to move to Robinson’s Arch, where they can wear tallitot and tefillin and pray with men. In recent years, under the leadership of Anat Hoffman, Women of the Wall have challenged this arrangement. Members have been arrested and fined for wearing a tallit under their coat, holding a Torah, singing out loud, and “disturbing public order.”

Ms. Hoffman, raised in Israel as a self-described “totally secular Jew,” discovered Judaism as a student at UCLA where she attended the Westwood Free Minyan, known for its liberalism and feminism. She returned to Israel determined to become ”a religious-pluralism activist.” After serving on the City Council of Jerusalem she focused her activism on the Orthodox monopoly on religion in the Israeli public sphere. The Western Wall, she declared, “is way too important to be left to the Israelis.” As Hoffman conceded: “This did not evolve here in Israel, this is an import from abroad.”

In October Hoffman was arrested at the Wall for audibly reciting the Shema prayer while wearing a tallit. In an interview she disclosed that police “checked me naked, completely, without my underwear… . They put me in a cell without a bed, with three other prisoners including a prostitute and a car thief… . I laid on the floor covered with my tallit.” News of her arrest and mistreatment provoked furious condemnation by Jewish liberals, especially women, who pounced on the opportunity to denounce religious Orthodoxy and gender discrimination – and castigate Israel - in one fell swoop.

Enter The New York Times, whose Jewish problem is at least as old as its Sulzberger family ownership and whose discomfort with Israel dates virtually from the birth of the Jewish state. During the last week in December the Times twice devoted its lead “International” story to women’s prayer at the Western Wall. Both articles were written by its new Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren, whose identification with Women of the Wall was palpable.

She described a “tearful” Bonna Devora Haberman, an immigrant from Canada and one of the organization’s founders, who was enraged when a police officer tried to prevent her from carrying a tallit in her knapsack on her way to pray at the Wall. (A photo of her encounter by the veteran Times photographer in Israel, doubtlessly arranged in advance, accompanied the story.) A California student “wept” when asked to relinquish the tallit woven by her mother for her bat mitzvah.

In both Rudoren articles diaspora “outrage” over religious restrictions on women was linked to Israeli settlement policy (which the Times relentlessly opposes) as a primary source of increasing American Jewish disaffection with the Jewish state. But even Zionism, to say nothing of religious Orthodoxy and Jewish settlements, has long been a problem for liberal American Jews.

A century ago, upon becoming the leader of the American Zionist movement, Louis D. Brandeis (confessing “I am very ignorant of things Jewish”) insisted upon the compatibility of Zionism with American liberalism. Anything less would provoke dreaded allegations of divided loyalty. Ever since, American Jews have demanded that Zionism express American liberal values with a Hebrew accent.

Gender equality is, of course, a worthy goal. So, too, is religious freedom, which surely includes the freedom of worship even for ultra-Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem. Religion and gender can be a volatile mix, not only in Judaism (as any Muslim could testify). Jewish women who encounter problems worshipping as they wish at the Western Wall might try praying in the nearby Al-Aqsa Mosque. Now there would be a story worthy of exaggerated press coverage.

Irony: the Women of the Wall web page features a brief video of several women entering the nearby police station after their recent refusal to comply with the rules for prayer. They ignored the mezuzah on the doorframe. The only woman who touched it reverently was the policewoman.

 

   

Middle Eastern Tunnel Vision

The Algemeiner(December 7, 2012)

Imagine: until the Holland Tunnel was completed in 1927 New York and New Jersey had not been contiguous (defined in Webster’s as “have contact with”). Who knew?

The current Middle Eastern equivalent, generating worldwide outrage, is the projected loss of “contiguity” between the northern and southern West Bank if Israel proceeds with its recently disclosed plan to develop the hilltop area known as E1, between Jerusalem and Maale Adumim to the east. If implemented, furious critics allege, it would bisect the West Bank and doom any prospect of Palestinian statehood.

The Israeli plan has been endlessly excoriated since its announcement following the recent General Assembly vote to admit “Palestine” as a “non-member observer state”. The New York Times, in particular, has been relentless.In a front-page article (December 1), Jodi Rudoren proclaimed the plan a “surprise” that came as a “shock,” revealing Israel’s intention to wage “diplomatic war” over the future of the West Bank.

That was only the beginning. In a subsequent editorial (December 4) the Times lacerated Prime Minister Netanyahu (but not Palestinian Authority President Abbas) for a plan that could “doom the chances for a two-state solution” (which the Palestinians have rejected ever since the UN partition proposal of 1947). The E1 plan was “particularly disturbing” because it “would split the northern and southern parts of the West Bank.” Contiguity would be forever shattered.

The barrage increased a day later. Thomas Friedman ominously warned that “a huge bloc of settlements in the heart of the West Bank” (3000 housing units had been mentioned) would “sever any possibility of a contiguous Palestinian state.” Even Maureen Dowd, not known for her Middle East expertise, inserted in her column about Hilary Clinton a denunciation of Israel for its “brazen and counterproductive action.”

But the “contiguity” complaint is a sham, no matter how frequently it is reiterated. Haven’t critics heard of tunnels? Two centuries ago the Swiss built a 10-mile-long railroad tunnel through the Alps. Israel has a network of highway tunnels in the mountainous Haifa area. Hamas in Gaza is renowned for its tunnel links to Sinai. One need not be a rocket scientist (pun intended) to anticipate that development of E1 will include a tunnel to connect the northern and southern West Bank – also known as Judea and Samaria, the biblical homeland of the Jewish people, where 350,000 Israelis now live.

Critics also need a history lesson. The E1 area, comprising 4.6 square miles of Israeli state-owned land, belongs to Maale Adumim. E1 land is located inside Area C where, under the Oslo II Accords, Israel retains zoning and planning powers. Every prime minister since Yitzhak Rabin has supported its development. If there is any threat to contiguity, wrote Nadav Shagrai in Haaretz (2009), it comes from continuing illegal construction on E1 land by both Palestinians and Bedouin.

The contiguity indictment complements the endlessly reiterated, but also false, allegation that Israeli settlements not only doom Palestinian statehood but also violate international law. Israel has legal claims dating back to 1922, when the League of Nations guaranteed to Jews the right of “close settlement” west of the Jordan River. This right was preserved under Article 80 of the United Nations Charter.

Jewish settlement since Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War does not violate international law because no foreign entity previously held legal sovereignty over the West Bank. Nor did Israel coercively “transfer” anyone to that territory, prohibited by the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949). Settlers have merely followed the precedent set by generations of Zionist pioneers.

The looming crisis is not E1 but Israel’s increasingly precarious security situation. To be sure, Operation “Defensive Pillar” effectively shut down, at least for the moment, the decade-long rain of Hamas rockets. But Hamas, whose charter calls for the obliteration of Israel, has already begun to rebuild the tunnels that facilitate the flow of Iranian weapons into Gaza.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah is generously supplied with even more destructive Iranian missiles. Its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has vowed “open war until the elimination of Israel and until the death of the last Jew on earth.” Given Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s threat to eliminate Israel “from the pages of history,” the menace to Israel from the east, especially given recent signs of political instability in Jordan, should not be taken lightly.

These geopolitical dangers are downplayed, if not ignored, by Israel’s critics. Currently obsessed by a tiny tract of land east of Jerusalem, years away from development, which can be traversed through a tunnel or bypassed by a highway, they incessantly berate and delegitimize Israel for settlements that under international law it has every right to build.

As one Israeli succinctly described the current squabble: “We will build and the world will scream.” That noise is the predictable side effect of tunnel vision.

Israel Returns Fire

American Thinker(December 3, 2012)

 One day after the United Nations General Assembly recognized “Palestine” as a “nonmember observer state” – a status that it shares only with the Vatican - an actual state responded. The Netanyahu government quickly fired a shot across the bow of the Palestinian Authority for its decision to court the United Nations rather than negotiate with Israel, announcing that it is authorizing the construction of 3000 housing units in East Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). Even more brazenly, it intends to proceed with plans for zoning and development in a barren area known as E-1, between Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim to the east, on the road to Jericho.

Like Captain Renault in “Casablanca,” liberal pundits were “shocked, shocked” to realize that the words of  Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in the General Assembly and the votes of its members could so quickly be trumped by the Israeli government. According to The New York Times (in page 1 coverage that read like an editorial), Israel’s response was a “surprise” that came as a “shock.” It indicated the determination of the Jewish state to wage “diplomatic war” over the future of 4.6 square miles of barren landscape with nothing on it but a police station and some Bedouin shepherds.

There is no denying the strategic importance of E-1. Its development would create a seamless corridor between Israel’s capital and Ma’ale Adumim, a hilltop community in the Judean desert inhabited by nearly 30,000 Israelis. That would effectively divide the West Bank, with Ramallah and the north linked to Bethlehem and the south only by a highway. Two days after the UN decision, the Israeli Cabinet unanimously rejected it: “The Jewish People have a natural, historical and legal right to its homeland with its eternal capital Jerusalem,” while Israel “has rights and claims to areas that are under dispute in the Land of Israel.”

Indeed it does. Millennia of Jewish history in the ancient homeland prompted the League of Nations, ninety years ago, to assure Jews the right of “close settlement” in the land west of the Jordan River. That right has never been rescinded. It could have been overridden in 1947, when the United Nations voted to partition what remained of Palestine after the East Bank had become Jordan. But the Arab nations refused to permit a Jewish (or, indeed, Palestinian) state, however tiny, to exist in their midst.

Perhaps the time has finally come for Israel to claim in full its settlement rights in Judea and Samaria under international law. Ample justification has been provided by legal experts Eugene V. Rostow (who helped to draft Security Council Resolution 242 after the Six-Day War), Stephen Schwebel (for nineteen years a judge on the International Court of Justice), and scholars Julius Stone and Howard Grief, among others.

To be sure their arguments are not likely to persuade Israel’s liberal critics. Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg recently accused Israel of “colonizing” the West Bank “in destructive, and self-destructive, ways.” The appropriate Palestinian remedy, he suggested, was not UN recognition but a demand for the right of occupied Palestinians to vote in Israeli elections. That, presumably, would force Israel to recognize Palestinian statehood in the West Bank. But Palestinian “shortsightedness,” he conceded, would once again be likely to yield to Israeli “intransigence.”

CNN pundit Fareed Zakaria, praising Goldberg’s absurd “one-state” proposal, urged Palestinians to develop “a strategy that is geared more directly at persuading, convincing, cajoling – or perhaps even pushing” Israel to make the necessary concessions for Palestinian statehood. That should not be too difficult. As Prime Minister Netanyahu declared in his opening remarks to the Cabinet meeting: “There will be no Palestinian State until Israel is recognized as a Jewish State, alongside a resolution to end the conflict.”

Israel’s E-1 development proposal is a necessary reminder to Palestinians, and to the international agencies, media and academic experts, and “human rights” organizations that support their cause and defame Israel at every opportunity. It properly asserts, on a tiny geographical scale, the legitimate claims of the State of Israel – grounded in Jewish history, international law, and Zionist settlement, - to the Land of Israel. It also is a reminder that Palestinian statelessness is a direct consequence of sixty-five years of Palestinian obduracy.

The E-1 plan, which the United States has blocked for nearly two decades, may turn out to be little more than an Israeli warning to Abbas for attempting another end-run around direct negotiations. But continued Palestinian intransigence, ratified by the UN, could prompt Israel to develop the crucial space between Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim. That would facilitate the geographical unity of biblical Judea and Samaria with the Jewish state. Settling the land of Israel, after all, is what has defined Zionism for more than a century.

 

 

 

 

Palestinian Sound and Fury

The Algemeiner(November 29, 2012)

Today, November 29^th, marked the 65^th anniversary of UN Resolution 181, calling for the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab (not “Palestinian”) states. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, desperately trying to reclaim the limelight from Hamas after its fanciful claim of a Gaza “victory,” was expected to request his consolation prize from the General Assembly, welcoming the Palestinians as a non-member observer state, with the Vatican as its solitary partner.

But a General Assembly vote would be a hollow gesture. While it might be considered a promotion from the mere observer status the Palestinians have held since 1974, it is a nebulous title nowhere mentioned in the UN Charter. Any attempt to revive the authority of UN Resolution 181, wrote international law expert Julius Stone more than three decades ago, is “an undertaking even more miraculous than would be the revival of the dead.” But Abbas needed to say more to bolster the deflated image of the Palestinian Authority.

As Arab delegates enthusiastically cheered Abbas, they might have recalled their own role in dooming Palestinian statehood. In 1947 Zionists exulted over Resolution 181, the fulfillment of the 2000-year-old dream of the Jewish people to return to their ancient homeland and rebuild their shattered nation, even within truncated, porous, and precarious borders.

But Arab states showed no regard for a “Palestinian” people deserving a state of their own. They launched an invasion to eradicate the fledgling Jewish state and carve up the territory to suit their own wishes. King Abdullah of Jordan seized land from Palestine that became known as the “West Bank” while Egypt gobbled up Gaza.

Nineteen years later, confronting another looming attack from Arab states, Israel won a stunning victory in six days. Jerusalem and the biblical homeland were once again theirs. By now, 350,000 Israelis live in Judea and Samaria, as they have every right to do under international law that eighty years ago, under the auspices of the League of Nations, assured Jews the right of “close settlement” west of the Jordan River.

Ever since, Palestinians “never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity” (as Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban memorably quipped). Rejecting any possibility for their own statehood that required recognition of the State of Israel, they have preferred to lament the Naqba, the 1948 tragedy of their defeat and dispersion, rather than become state-builders.

 Mahmoud Abbas’s General Assembly speech was mostly familiar boilerplate. Recognition of Palestine would represent “a victory for truth, freedom, justice, law, and international legitimacy.” All blame rests upon Israel, for its “colonial military occupation of the land of the Palestinian people” and its “brutality and racial discrimination.” The only unexpected insertion was his announcement that he had submitted an application for the admission of Palestine as a “full member.” But that requires unanimous Security Council approval, which the United States is unlikely to support.

The young men in Ramallah who gleefully display signs proclaiming “The State of Palestine” are likely to discover that little has changed. Words in New York are not facts on the ground until the Palestinian Authority negotiates an agreement with Israel that recognizes the existence and borders of the Jewish state. The lurking presence of Hamas, still pledged to the annihilation of Israel, will not be easily ignored. Perhaps Abbas should make peace with Hamas before he negotiates with Israel.

If Palestinians settle for non-member observer state status “Palestine” can pursue legal action against Israel in the International Criminal Court. But Israel, like the United States a decade ago, recognized the ideological and political bias of the ICC and withdrew from its jurisdiction.

The lingering question is whether the Palestinians can heal their own internal divisions and finally, after 65 years, accept the reality of Israel. Can they finally relinquish their identity theft from Jewish history and develop an independent Palestinian identity?

Ever since 1948 Palestinians have constructed their identity on the foundation of Jewish history, archeology, texts, holy sites and, of course, land. Ironically, even as Israel was targeted for incessant Palestinian terrorist attacks Zionist state building inspired Palestinian emulation. November 29^th hardly was a random choice by the Palestinian Authority. It is, after all, the day when Israelis celebrate international recognition of their right to establish a Jewish state in the Land of Israel – not in the land of Palestine.

Ehud Barak’s Tangled Legacy

The Algemeiner (November 28, 2012)

  Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak - heroic military commander, failed politician, and bane of Jewish settlers – has announced his intention to resign from public office after the January election. Having severed his roots in the Labor Party, and with his tiny Independence Party unlikely to win enough votes to return him to the Knesset, Barak chose to call it a career – maybe.

Renowned as Israel’s most decorated soldier, Barak achieved military distinction as head of the Special Forces unit Sayeret Matkal that conducted commando attacks against terrorists during the 1970s. In its most stunningly successful raid, leaders of the PLO and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine were tracked down and killed in Beirut in retaliation for the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. (The film “Munich” captured the heroic audacity of the mission.)

Barak’s subsequent service as military chief of staff proved to be his launching pad to politics in 1995, when he became Prime Minister Rabin’s Minister of Internal Affairs. Three months later, after Rabin’s assassination, he became Minister of Foreign Affairs, then leader of the Labor Party and, in 1999, he defeated incumbent Benjamin Netanyahu to become Prime Minister.

But Barak, like Rabin before him and his successor Ariel Sharon, demonstrated that military victories do not guarantee political success. Indeed, his brief term in office – the shortest of any Israeli prime minister – was a dismal failure. Ending Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon, he opened the way for Hezbollah to become entrenched on its northern border, where it remains. Reiterating the standard left-wing trope that if Israel retained the territories that it won in the Six-Day War it would become either a bi-national or apartheid state, Barak chased peace negotiations with Yasir Arafat’s PLO.

Imagining that Palestinians were prepared for “a durable and lasting peace” with Israel, Barak participated in the Camp David summit fiasco, where Arafat rejected his astonishing offer to divide Jerusalem and relinquish 92% of biblical Judea and Samaria. One year later, after the eruption of the Second Intifada, Barak was resoundingly defeated by Ariel Sharon.

As Defense Minister (since 2007), Barak approved the destruction of Syria’s nuclear reactor, presided over Operation Cast Lead, and authorized the recent assassination of Hamas military leader Ahmed Jabari. But his evident animosity to settlers repeatedly turned Jews against Jews. He supported Netanyahu’s capitulation to President Obama with a ten-month settlement freeze, even urging a two-month extension to further appease the President. Under Israeli law the Defense Minister must sign permits for Jews to purchase property in Judea and Samaria. In an interview earlier this year he boasted: “Not a single new settlement has been built in the last three years since this government is in power.”

Barak’s unrelenting hostility to settlers, and his determination to override their legal rights of property ownership, was most evident in Hebron. He repeatedly stymied efforts to rebuild the ancient Jewish community that was brutally destroyed during the Arab pogrom of 1929. As Prime Minister he had refused to issue building permits that his predecessor had authorized. As Defense Minister, he twice mobilized the army and police to evict residents from apartments on land purchased by a Jew in 1807. Referring to Hebron Jews as “cancerous tumors,” he pledged to “uproot this evil from our midst.” 

 In 2008, months after Jewish families moved into a building purchased from a willing Palestinian seller, the Defense Minister fulfilled his promise. Despite a video of the transaction that showed the seller receiving and counting his money, a cassette recording of his confirmation of the sale to a friend, and affirmation of the legality of the purchase by police investigators, Barak remained adamant.

Convinced that the presence of Jews in Hebron represented “attempts by small groups of radicals to undermine the authority of the state,” he ordered hundreds of soldiers and border police to storm the building and evict its residents. Two months ago a Jerusalem court finally upheld the legality of the purchase and ordered the government to return the property to its rightful Jewish owners.

At the moment Ehud Barak’s illustrious career in military and public life seems to be nearing its end. But come January, once the election results are in, a call from Prime Minister Netanyahu to return to the Defense Ministry just might be irresistible. Israeli politics has more encores than a rock concert.

 

Who Won?

New York Sun(November 27, 2012)

Who won the Gaza war? According to the prevailing media narrative, besieged innocents in Gaza bravely withstood the withering weeklong Israeli rocket barrage until Egyptian President Morsi mediated a cease-fire. End of story, except for the largely unnoticed detail that under Morsi, leader of the Muslim Brotherhood before his recent ascent to power, Egypt has been the major conduit for Iranian weapons into Gaza.

For more than a decade southern Israel has been under incessant attack. In Sderot, 24,000 Israelis, predominantly immigrant families from Morocco and the Soviet Union, have lived in constant danger and unrelenting fear. Air-raid sirens punctuated their lives, providing less than half a minute to seek safety in bomb shelters. It is little wonder that nearly three-quarters of the population suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Despite Operation Cast Lead, launched by Israel four years ago to halt the steady rain of missiles and rockets from Gaza, Hamas was undeterred. This year alone, more than 7000 rockets fell on southern Israel, until Prime Minister Netanyahu finally decided to respond. Hamas weapon sites, as always embedded in civilian neighborhoods, were bombed. But tens of thousands of Israeli soldiers, positioned at the border, were not ordered to attack even as rockets fell on Ashdod, Ashkelon, Beer Sheva and the outskirts of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

Israel, according to Intelligence Minister Dan Meridor, had applied force “in a very moderate and measured way.” That offered little solace to Israeli civilians, who have every reason to expect, based upon past experience, that the current lull is only temporary. By a 49-31% margin, according to a Ma’ariv poll, Israelis preferred to continue the military operation rather than accept a cease-fire. By not fighting to win, Israel enabled Hamas to lead Gazans in celebration of their “great victory for the people of Palestine.”

Journalists who for years had paid no attention to besieged Israelis were mesmerized by the fortitude of Gazans. Three CNN reporters in Gaza, led by Anderson Cooper, provided constant updates on the suffering of Gazans but little was said about the role of Hamas in provoking the conflict. Christiane Amanpour conducted a fawning interview with Hamas Prime Minister Ismael Haniya, enabling him to stipulate “peace terms” that would return Israel to its vulnerable pre-1967 borders. In Israel there was only Wolf Blitzer, who underplayed rather than underscored the human toll from incessant Hamas attacks.

Jodi Rudoren, the new Jerusalem bureau chief of The New York Times, was mesmerized by the “Pride and Sacrifice” of Gazans in celebrating the disaster provoked by their leaders. No absurd claim – not even “for the first time, the Israelis are hiding, not us” - eluded her gullibility. After the fighting ended she remained ensconced in Gaza and provided a platform for a wealthy businessman and cactus grower who could not explain to his puzzled children “why Israel attacks us.” Neither, it seemed, could Rudoren.

Netanayhu’s refusal to launch a ground attack contributed significantly to the plausibility of Hamas’s “victory” preening. Hamas played its cards well, gaining undisputable supremacy over the Palestinian Authority with its militancy, holding out long enough to generate pressure for Israel to desist before attaining its objectives, and securing Egypt and Turkey as its patrons.

After the cease-fire Israel eased restrictions on Gaza fishermen and farmers, while Hamas continued to receive military supplies from Iran. Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar explained: “We have a right to take money and weapons from Iran. They give to us for the sake of God.”  

Netanyahu’s strategy of buying time has its benefits – and perils – for Israel. It can be argued, as critics on the left reflexively proclaim, that Israel must either be prepared to negotiate peace with Hamas or endure renewed missile attacks. But since Hamas has yet to relinquish its expressed determination to destroy Israel, and shows no sign of doing so, that remains a beguiling fantasy. Any hope that Egypt might continue to be a peace broker may have been dashed on the reality of renewed street protest in Cairo over President Morsi’s declared intention to undermine judicial authority.

Ever since 1948 Israel’s security has depended upon its ability to win wars, not please its peace advocates or appease its enemies. Now as then, Israel is surrounded by Muslims who remain determined to destroy the Jewish state within any boundaries. For Israelis to have faith in their government, it must be prepared to protect them, even if that requires deployment of the Israel Defense Forces. That may be the enduring lesson of Operation Pillar of Defense if – as seems likely - the pillar once again crumbles.

 

                 

 

Land for Peace - or War?

American Thinker (November 20, 2012)

The final casualty in the current Gaza war may be the endlessly repeated mantra: “Land for Peace.” For forty-five years, ever since its stunning victory in the Six-Day War, Israel has confronted insistent demands to return the conquered Sinai to Egypt, the Golan Heights to Syria, and relinquish its own biblical homeland in Judea and Samaria for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.

The peace treaty between Israel and Egypt in 1979 marked the first step toward implementing that beguiling vision. Then, in 2005, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon withdrew the Israeli civilian and military presence from Gaza, the 25-mile long strip that runs along the Mediterranean coast between Egypt (which occupied it between 1949 and 1967) and Israel.

Eight thousand Israelis were removed from their homes, which – along with their synagogues – were dismantled or demolished. Only the innovative and productive greenhouses were left behind to benefit the local Arab residents, who immediately destroyed them. Two years later Hamas became the ruling authority in Gaza and the rest, we might say, is tragedy.           

Recent events in Gaza demonstrate the folly of pursuing the mirage of “land for peace,” which Hamas has now effectively demolished. After a year in which 700 missiles terrorized civilians in nearby Negev communities, Israel finally had enough. With unprovoked rocket attacks increasing, it launched Operation “Pillar of Defense,” conducting a precision air strike that killed Ahmed Al-Jaabari, commander of the Hamas military, and targeted its underground launching sites. Those who had celebrated the American assassination of Osama bin-Laden could hardly complain.

Within days, more Hamas missiles and rockets – more than 1000 by Monday - had landed in and around Beer Sheva and Ashkelon and, for the first time, the environs of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Israel’s Iron Dome interceptions reduced civilian casualties, but Israeli lives remained precarious. It became evident that Hamas enjoyed an abundant supply network for sophisticated weapons and technology that originated in Iran and then made their way through Sudan and Egypt, across the Sinai and through tunnels to Gaza, where Hamas, guided by Iranian experts, prepared them for launching.

As Israeli soldiers readied for a military invasion to destroy Gaza weapons caches, predictable outrage arose from the usual sources. Even as Hamas rockets were falling, tolerance for Israel’s justified response to unprovoked attacks on its civilians began to fray. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called upon Israel – not Hamas – to exercise “maximum restraint.”

All too predictably, Israel – which failed dismally to make its case to world opinion for Operation Cast Lead four years ago – now was castigated for making it too effectively. Atlantic writer Jeffrey Goldberg decried the “Hamasization of Israel’s public relations campaign.” It included the viral Facebook graphic “What Would You Do?” showing the Statue of Liberty, Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower under missile attack. While Hamas launched rockets into Israel, Israel was lacerated for its “tacky” bombardment of social media and reliance upon Twitter hashtags (#Pillar of Defense) to challenge its critics.

Not surprisingly, The New York Times editorialized (November 15) its august displeasure with the Israeli response. To be sure, it conceded, “no country should have to endure the rocket attacks that Israel has endured from militants in Gaza.” But then it chastized Israel for responding in ways that could not advance its “long-term interests,” provoked “new waves of condemnation” from Arab states, and diverted attention from the far more serious danger of Iranian nuclear weapons (which the Times had previously criticized Israel for threatening to destroy). Enumerating what Israel “could have” done to please Times editors, it cited the necessity of “serious negotiations” with the Palestinian Authority (which has rejected any negotiations for more than a year) for “a durable peace agreement.” That, of course, would require the relinquishment of even more land for (less) “peace.”

Left-wing American and Israeli groups such as J-Street and Americans for Peace Now relentlessly proclaim the necessity of a “two-state solution,” while endlessly castigating Jewish settlers as “obstacles to peace.” But with a Palestinian/Hamas state on Israel’s eastern and western borders, Hezbollah to the north in Lebanon, and Iran looming ever more menacingly to the east just beyond an increasingly unstable Jordan, Israel’s security would be in dire jeopardy.

Given these grim realities, now on full display in Gaza, “Land for Peace” is nothing but a recipe for the annihilation of Israel.

 

 

Netanyahu’s Settlement Jungle

American Thinker(October 28, 2012)

The issue of Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, the biblical homeland of the Jewish people, continues to roil Israeli politics. According to worldwide conventional wisdom, settlements built since the Six-Day War on land that previously had been known as Jordan’s West Bank violate fundamental principles of international law.

But conventional wisdom, according to the recent report of an Israeli commission chaired by retired Supreme Court Justice Edmond Levy, is wrong. “According to international law,” the report concluded, Israelis enjoy “the legal right to settle in Judea and Samaria and the establishment of settlements cannot in and of itself be considered illegal.”

Prime Minister Netanyahu’s announced intention to seek ministerial approval for the Levy Report instantly stirred the wrath of those on the political left, who dismissed it as “a transparent elections scheme” and accused the government of planning “an infestation of illegal settlements to annex territories.” Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned that government adoption would cause “diplomatic damage to Israel and deepen its isolation in the world.” (Barak’s palpable hostility to settlers was demonstrated when he ordered the forcible eviction of Jews from property they legally owned in Hebron, an order recently overturned in court.)  But Alan Baker, one of the authors of the Levy Report and former legal adviser for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, dismissed Barak’s reasoning as “nonsense.”

The Obama administration, ever eager to soothe Muslim sensibilities, also was not pleased. A State Department spokesman declared that the United States rejects “the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity.” UN Ambassador Susan Rice reiterated that the United States would not recognize Israel’s settlement claims.

Yet the Levy Commission had merely reiterated a ninety-year-old principle of international law. The League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, adopted in 1922, recognized “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine” and guaranteed their right of “close settlement.” Even after British Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill partitioned Palestine to provide Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia with his own East Bank kingdom, Jews retained the internationally guaranteed legal right of “close settlement” west of the Jordan River. That right has never been rescinded.

Settlement critics invariably cite Article 49 of the Geneva Convention (1949), prohibiting the “forcible transfers” by an Occupying Power of its civilian population to occupied territory “for political and racial reasons.” Article 49 was inspired by the brutal population transfers conducted by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II. Israel has never forcibly transferred anyone to a settlement. Indeed, settlements were voluntarily established, over government objections and threats of expulsion. International law expert Julius Stone decried attempts to portray it as “an obligation on the State of Israel to ensure (by force if necessary) that these areas, despite their millennial association with Jewish life, shall be forever judenrein.”

After the Six-Day War, UN Security Council Resolution 242 permitted Israel to administer its newly acquired territory until “a just and lasting peace in the Middle East” is achieved. Even then, Israel would only be required to withdraw its armed forces “from territories” — not from “the territories” or “all the territories.” Resolution 242 imposed no restriction on Jewish settlement west of the Jordan River, guaranteed under the Palestine Mandate forty-five years earlier.           

Legions of settlement critics have asserted that under international law Israel is a “belligerent occupier,” without sovereignty over territories whose future must be decided by international agreement. But the Levy Commission rejected that argument, concluding that because no state had territorial sovereignty over the West Bank in 1967 (Jordan’s occupation after 1949 was not recognized as conferring sovereignty), Israel cannot be considered a “belligerent occupier.” Accordingly, Jews enjoy the legal right to live there.

Learning of Netanyahu’s plan, a Palestinian Authority representative insisted: “We will not sign any peace agreement if there is a [single] settlement on Palestinian land.” That, however, raises another interesting question: Where is “Palestinian” land? Archeological discoveries – coins, pottery, seals, inscriptions (many bearing the name YHWH, the Israelite God) – confirm a sovereign Jewish presence in the Land of Israel for one thousand years preceding the Common Era. Indeed, Roman coins bearing the words “Judea Capta,” minted after the capture of Judea and the destruction of the Second Temple, poignantly testify to the loss of Jewish national sovereignty that would endure for nearly nineteen hundred years. By contrast, no evidence of an identifiable (or self-identified) “Palestinian” people predates the twentieth century.

Despite Netanyahu’s proclaimed intention to seek Cabinet approval for the Levy Report, the Prime Minister quickly backed down after Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein, yielding to pressure from Kadima Party chairman Shaul Mofaz, indicated his own strong opposition to consideration of the Report until after the election. Once again, Netanyahu – playing both sides of the issue for maximum political advantage - yielded to pressure from settlement opponents. If he wins reelection in February he might try to remember that the largest Jewish settlement in the Middle East, routinely delegitimized in the international arena, is the State of Israel.