For the Sake of Zion

The West Bank Robber

2012-01-11T08:48:00.000-08:00

The day after Israel’s iconic journalist Yair Lapid announced he was quitting his lucrative job at Channel 2 to run for Knesset, former soccer star Eric Cantona declared he was throwing his hat into the ring for France’s upcoming presidential election. While Cantona is only running for PR purposes and will probably gather 1% of the votes, Lapid is expected to conquer 15 of the Knesset’s 120 seats and thus to be the next government’s kingmaker.

Besides his anticlerical views (which he inherited from his late father Tommy, himself a journalist turned politician), Yair Lapid has no platform. The fact that in Israel a prospective politician does not need a clear platform in order to become major player in the Knesset goes to show what is wrong with Israel’s voting system. Israel has no district elections for the Knesset. The entire country itself constitutes a single district. Voters don’t select district representatives but political parties whose number of seats in the Knesset is proportional to the amount of votes received by the parties at the polls (which is why this voting system is known as “proportional representation”). Because Israel has no district elections, providing viable solutions to constituents’ daily lives is not a criterion for gathering support. Rather, the most critical ingredient for getting voters’ attention is simply fame (hence did Noam Shalit, the father of Israel’s most famous kidnapped soldier, also announce this week that he would run for Knesset).

Yair Lapid’s meteoric rise in the polls is yet another confirmation that Israel should replace proportional representation with majority representation based on district elections. Rather than cowardly trying to prevent Lapid from running for Knesset with a tailored-made law that would impose a one-year cooling-off period to journalists who decide to go into politics, our lawmakers should better reform a voting system that encourages populism and eschews accountability.

But the “Lapid Effect” also confirms the parochialism of the Israeli electorate and the hypocrisy of the Israeli Left.

Why, after all, vote for a “Lapid Party” that would merely be the repetition of past failures? Israel has had many “centrist” parties that attempted to challenge both Likud and Labor: “Dash” in 1977, the Center Party in 1999, “Shinui” in 2003, and even Kadima in 2006. None of those parties lasted, because they did not provide an ideological and practical alternative to the authentic divide between Right and Left –a divide that stems from two opposite readings of human nature, as well as of man’s ability to change reality.

As for the Left’s warm welcome of Lapid’s decision, it goes to show what the Left in Israel really cares about. After all, Lapid is no peacenik and no socialist. He is even an avowed Zionist. A Tel-Aviv bourgeois, Lapid is economically conservative. Though he favors withdrawing from the West Bank, he no longer believes that doing so will bring peace. In a column he wrote for Yediot Aharonot on June 13, 2006, Lapid admitted that the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza had nothing to do with peace or with demography. Rather, its purpose was “to teach the settlers a lesson.”

So if Lapid does not believe in peace, in socialism, and in multiculturalism, why is the Left so excited about the power he would likely wield in the Knesset? Because what the Israeli Left really cares about is not peace, nor socialism or multiculturalism. What it really cares about is getting out of the West Bank. And Yair Lapid may help attain that goal. This is why Yediot Aharonot columnist Sima Kadmon wrote on January 9 that “Lapid must be the man who will manage to put an end to the prominence that the Right has enjoyed for too long.” The same way that Tommy Lapid’s 15 MKs enabled Sharon to “teach a lesson” to the Jews of Gaza, the Israeli Left hopes that Yair Lapid’s expected 15 MKs will force (or enable) Israel’s next Prime Minister to “teach a lesson” to the Jews of Judea and Samaria.

As the Hebrew saying goes: “We’ve seen that movie before.” And there is a reason why the Israeli Left wants to watch the movie again. Rather than becoming a politician, Yair Lapid would in fact turn into a film actor –just like Eric Cantona after he left Manchester United.

Tom, Gideon, Yossi and Amira

2011-12-21T05:27:00.000-08:00

Tom Friedman’s recent column “Newt, Mitt, Bibi and Vladimir” (New York Times, 13 December) makes two points: a. Alleged friends of Israel such as Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney are blind to the fact that Israel is sinking into the Dark Ages because of the mad-cap policies of Netanyahu and Lieberman; b. The critical voices of Tom Friedman and Gideon Levy are unfairly rebuked as “anti-Israel” when, in truth, those voices are the only ones today that are trying to save Israel from itself, out of foresight and true love. There is also a subliminal message in the title of Friedman’s article: The world’s Axis of Evil is composed of the two Republican frontrunners, of Israel’s Prime Minister, and of Russia’s President-for-Life.

What ignited Friedman’s op-ed was Newt Gingrich’s claim that the Palestinians are an “invented” people. Friedman calls Gingrich’s claim “a new low.” So for Friedman stating the truth constitutes a “low” (for Hillary Clinton it’s simply “unhelpful”). What, exactly, did Gingrich say? That there never was a sovereign country called “Palestine,” and that the Arabs who lived in the South-East of the Ottoman Empire were known as Arabs and not as “Palestinians.” These two facts are undisputable. Now, were the Palestinians “invented”? Yes, they were.

During the Ottoman rule in the Middle East (from 1516 to 1918), there was no “Palestine” but “sanjaks” (i.e. administrative divisions): The Sanjak of Acre, the Sanjak of Nablus, and the Sanjak of Jerusalem. Arabs who lived in those “sanjaks” were a disconnected bunch of tribes who had little in common. There was not “Palestinian” culture, language, religion or national identity separate from that of the wider Arab nation.

The name “Palestine” appeared in the 20th century when Britain established its rule on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire (the British revived the Latin word “Palestina” coined by the Romans to replace the name “Judea” with one remindful of the Philistines –the Jews’ historical foes). All people living in the British Mandate were “Palestinians,” including the Jews. The Jerusalem Post used to be called The Palestine Post, and it is only after Israel’s independence that the Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra became the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.

In February 1919, the first Congress of Muslim-Christian Associations met to consider the future of the territories formerly ruled by the Ottoman Empire. The Congress declared: “We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria as it has never been separated from it at any time.” Arab leader Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi told the British Peel Commission in 1937: “There is no such country as Palestine. ‘Palestine’ is a term the Zionists invented. There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria. ‘Palestine’ is alien to us. It is the Zionists who introduced it.” The respected Arab scholar Philip Hitti testified before the Anglo-American Committee in 1946 that there never was such thing as “Palestine” in history.

The United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) wrote in its September 1947 report that that Palestinian nationalism was a new phenomenon. Indeed, UNSCOP recommended the partition of the British Mandate between a Jewish state and an Arab state (not a “Palestinian state”). PLO Spokesman Ahmad Shuqeiri told the UN Security Council in 1956 that Palestine was nothing more than southern Syria. The head of the Military Operations Department of the PLO, Zuheir Muhsein, declared on March 31, 1977: “There are no differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. We are all part of one nation. It is only for political reasons that we carefully underline our Palestinian identity... Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity serves only tactical purposes. The founding of a Palestinian state is a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel.”

Palestinism is a reaction to Zionism. If the Zionist movement had not existed, no one would ever have heard of a Palestinian people. In 1925, for example, the new British High Commissioner for Palestine, Sir Herbert Plumer, attended a sport contest at the end of which both God Save the Queen and Hatikvah were played. Arab representatives protested to Plumer about the playing of the Jewish national anthem. Since Plumer was in favor of a strict status quo between Jews and Arabs, he apologized for his faux pas and promised that next time the Arab anthem would be played as well. At that point, the Arab leaders had to admit it: they didn’t have a “Palestinian Arab anthem.” Well, you’d better start working on one, Plumer said.

So Gingrich is right. The fact that stating the truth about the Middle East has become an act of pyromania goes to show that intellectual terrorism does indeed work. But it also goes to show that the “Guardians of Middle East Truth” (such as Tom Friedman, Gideon Levy, Yossi Beilin, and Amira Hass) have double standards.

Thomas Friedman did not express any outrage when Shlomo Sand published his book The Invention of the Jewish People (nor did Hillary Clinton protest that it is “unhelpful” to claim that the Jewish people was invented). Claiming that the Palestinian people was invented is a “low” and is “unhelpful” but claiming the same about the Jews is an act of academic courage.

Friedman wrote that the standing ovations Netanyahu got at the US Congress in May 2011 “were bought and paid for by the Israel lobby” (an accusation for which New Jersey Representative Steve Rothman demanded an apology). Why, then, didn’t Freidman write that the likely boycott Netanyahu would face at the University of Wisconsin is bought by the Saudi lobby? Why does this logics only apply to Israel? If the Jewish lobby is so strong and so wealthy, how come it has not bought yet the support of University campuses in America? Like Walt and Mersheimer, Friedman cannot think of a reason for the pro-Israel stance of the US Congress other than “Jewish money.” But, like them, he would not venture to say that the pro-Arab discourse on American campuses has anything to do with the millions of dollars donated by Saudi Arabia. Only Jewish money is capable of perverting the American mind.

Finally, Friedman’s description of Israel’s alleged descent into fascism is either hypocritical or ignorant (or both). In his article, Friedman only quotes the New Israel Fund, Haaretz, and the Financial Times as his sources of information. With such pluralistic sources, Friedman surely knows what’s happening in Israel: Gideon Levy quotes Thomas Friedman, and Thomas Friedman quotes Gideon Levy. It’s the vicious circle of circular logics.

Friedman quotes the Financial Times to grant credit to his claims, but the Times’ article is full of inaccurate facts and of slanderous accusations. First, there is no law in Israel that allows Israeli communities to exclude Arab families. Second, the “boycott law” does not impose penalties on Israelis advocating a boycott of products from West Bank Jewish settlements. The law merely enables victims of boycotts to fill a civil suit for their economic loss. The law has nothing to do with settlements: a non-kosher butcher from Tel-Aviv, for example, is now able to sue a rabbi calling for the boycott of his store. Third, the purpose of recent proposals to reform the nomination process of Justices is to put an end to the Supreme Court’s cooptation system, which generates ideological uniformity and bars non-liberal Judges from the Court. In Israel, Supreme Court Judges are nominated by a committee in which the Judiciary has a veto. One of the proposals is to let the Knesset approve the nomination of Judges at the Supreme Court (“Political oversight!” cries Friedman). In America, Supreme Court Justices are appointed by the President and approved by Congress –but that’s not “political oversight.”

Friedman ends his article by claiming that more than a few Israelis are asking “who are we?” (he knows, because Gideon, Yossi and Amira told him). I wonder if Tom Friedman ever asks himself who he is. But I have the answer for him: a hypocrite.

Hilarious Hillary

2011-12-10T11:34:00.000-08:00

Hillary Clinton recently expressed concern about the future of Israeli democracy because the Knesset is considering curtailing foreign governments’ funding for Israeli NGOs, and because some rabbis in Israel say they want men and women to seat separately on buses. Does Hillary realize how hypocritical she is? In the United States, NGOs that receive money from foreign governments are considered foreign agents. And why is separate sitting between men and women on “haredi” buses a threat to democracy in Israel but not in New York (a common practice in Clinton’s home state)?

Less than six months ago (in July 2011), the FBI arrested Syed Ghulam Nabi Fai, a US citizen accused by the US Department of Justice of not informing the US government that he was in the pay of Pakistan while lobbying for the Kashmir cause and donating funds to Congressmen. Fai, who is director of the Washington-based NGO Kashmiri American Council (KAC), allegedly received millions of dollars for the KAC over the last two decades. Fai is accused of a decades-long scheme with one purpose – to hide Pakistan’s involvement behind his efforts to influence the US government’s position on Kashmir. His handlers in Pakistan allegedly funneled millions through the Kashmir Center to contribute to US elected officials, fund high-profile conferences, and pay for other efforts that promoted the Kashmiri cause to decision-makers in Washington. If found guilty, Fai could face up to five years in prison.

US law states that any American citizen or organization that receives money from foreign governments must register as a foreign agent. The foreign agent must report all its income and spending, and the Attorney General can demand, at any time, the list of the agent’s donors. Many Israeli NGOs receive money from foreign governments in order to influence the policy of Israel’s government. In the United States, such NGOs would have to register as foreign agents, and their books would be scrutinized by the Government. Why is the United States, a super-power no longer threatened by communism, entitled to take self-protecting measures from political NGOs funded by foreign governments, but not Israel, a tiny country that faces existential threats?

Clinton is making a fool of herself because she is buying into the propaganda of the English version of Ha’aretz. This radical newspaper read by 1% of the Israeli population (it prints 70,000 copies a day for a population of 7 million) is the Bible of foreign journalists and diplomats –the very people who write about Israel and who report to their capitals. Clinton is not the only victim of the “Ha’aretz effect.” A few months ago, President Sarkozy said that a state cannot be Jewish just like a table cannot be Catholic. He was repeating almost word by word what Amos Oz regularly writes in Ha’aretz.

Ha’aretz has been writing that it is undemocratic to curtail foreign governments’ funding for Israeli NGOs bent on influencing the policies of Israel’s government; that only in autocracies and in third world countries do the executive and legislative branches have a say on the appointment of Supreme Court Justices; and that fining journalists for lying intentionally is contrary to the freedom of speech. Ha’aretz knows that it is writing nonsense, but its ideological agenda comes before the truth. Hillary Clinton obviously knows that in her country Supreme Court Judges are appointed by the President and that organizations that receive funding from foreign governments have to register as foreign agents. Is Clinton simply being hypocritical, or is she orchestrating a campaign against the Netanyahu Government, just like her husband did when he was President?

The second possibility does make sense, since Tzipi Livni was quick to come to Hillary Clinton’s defense. Livni justified Clinton’s statements despite the fact that Clinton went as far as to compare Israel to Iran –or maybe because of it: after all, Livni is about to lose her job as Kadima’s Chair to the Iranian-born Shaul Mofaz. The problem with reciting the content of Ha’aretz and of The New York Times is that it makes you look smart in front Ha’aretz and New York Times readers (the kind of people who attend the Saban Forum), but it also makes you look like a fool in front of the rest of the world.

The fact that Livni expressed support for Clinton’s obnoxious and cretinous comments goes to show that Clinton and Livni deserve each other. But it also goes to show that both Israel and America deserve better.

Israel’s Purloined Letter

2011-11-26T12:50:00.000-08:00

Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Purloined Letter” provides the perfect allegory to understand why so many people get so fooled for so long. A letter said to contain compromising information has been stolen by a brilliant thief. The police meticulously search the thief’s home, using even microscopes, but to no avail. How did the thief fool the police? By displaying the letter instead of hiding it. It is precisely because the police expected the letter to be hidden that it couldn’t see it.

For decades, many people in Israel have been wondering why right-wing governments are generally unable to implement their policies and often end-up adopting the rhetoric of the Left. Witness the fact, for example, that Netanyahu has officially endorsed the establishment of a Palestinian state against his own party’s platform, that his government might be toppled in a few months if it complies with the High Court of Justice’s injunction to dismantle outposts, and that some Likud ministers and MKs are speaking in unison with the Left on the need to preserve the cooptation system that guaranties the Supreme Court’s ideological uniformity.

The answer to this riddle was provided by Tel-Aviv Law Professor Menachem Mautner in his book “Law and Culture in Israel at the Threshold of the Twenty-First Century” (Tel-Aviv University Press, 2008): The Israeli Left lost its monopoly on power with the electoral victory of the Right in 1977, and it has successfully tried to keep its influence via the judicial system, academia and the media. At the Supreme Court, Judges are selected and appointed by Judges, and they have granted to themselves the right to repeal laws deemed “unconstitutional” (regardless of the fact that Israel has no constitution). Hence the “judicial activism” epitomized by Justice Aharon Barak: if the majority does not legislate according to the will and worldview of the “enlightened ones” (to use Barak’s own words), then laws must be repealed by self-appointed judges who know better.

In academia, it is virtually impossible for conservative-minded academics to get tenure in the social sciences and in the humanities outside of Bar-Ilan University. As for “dissident” journalists, there is hardly a payroll to be found outside of Makor Rishon and, more recently, of Israel Hayom. The recent legislation advanced by the Right and condemned by the Left (e.g. on boycott, on the funding of NGOs, on the appointment of Supreme Court Justices, or on defamation) suggests that the Israeli Right has finally noticed where the “purloined letter” was displayed, and is taking action to rule according to the will of its voters. But this is only half-true.

For a start, some of the legislation recently initiated by the Right is counter-productive. The fact that boycotters can now be sued for financial damage was meant to deter the Left from taking part in the BDS campaign and from boycotting settlements. But according to the same law, Ben-Gurion University (BGU) can now sue the student movement Im Tirtzu for asking BGU’s donors to keep their money away from this university until its Political Science Department respects pluralism. Likewise, the new legislation meant to increase six fold fines for defamation is more of a threat to a small and conservative newspaper like Makor Rishon than to a powerful and liberal newspaper like Yediot Aharonot. As for the law limiting foreign government funding for Israeli NGOs, it will certainly hurt the likes of Shalom Archav and Adalah in their pockets, but it will hardly make fundraising easier for Im Tirtzu or for My Israel.

Besides shooting itself in the foot with counterproductive legislation, the Israeli Right is hopelessly absent from the intellectual arena. The Shalem Center was supposed to produce conservative thinkers but it has virtually withdrawn from Israel’s intellectual scene because of its focus on starting a new liberal arts college. Shalem is even ending the publication of Azure, Israel’s only high-quality conservative journal. The Shalem College might be successful in producing another type of intellectual leaders, but it will take a couple of decades to tell. Another Israeli conservative journal, Nativ, closed two years ago. The only conservative journal around is Hauma. Published by the Jabotinsky Institute (itself located at the Likud headquarter), Hauma has a small circulation and preaches to the convert. As for the Institute for Zionist Strategies, its research and papers are mostly kept away from the public by the media.

The Israeli Left is up in arms, but in truth it has little to worry about. Aside from doing a pretty good job at holding on in the judicial system, in academia and in the media, the Israeli Left has one asset that is both as obvious and as unnoticeable as the “purloined letter”: it intimidates the Right. Likud’s former “princes” have grown-up with an inferiority complex vis-à-vis the Left. They are petrified by Haaretz and by the accusation of not respecting “the rule of law.” They are imbued with the idea that people who read Haaretz and who live in Tel-Aviv are smarter, and that you need their seal of approval in order for your IQ to be declared above average. Haaretz has recently canonized Menachem Begin as Israel’s most impeccable democrat, but three decades ago it decried him as a warmonger, as a bigot and as a fascist. Why? To make sure that his son gets the message: continue to be a good boy and to keep your hands off the Supreme Court.

Tzipi Livni is the ultimate example of an intellectual lightweight easily intimidated by the Left. She has become to spokesperson of Haaretz not because she suddenly discovered that there are Arabs in the West Bank, but because she lacked the intellectual backbone to stand for her beliefs.

What the Israeli Right needs to do is to produce intellectuals. This is what institutions and movements such as the Jewish Statesmanship Center, Im Tirtzu, the Tikva Fund and the future Shalem College are trying to achieve. But those important initiatives are emerging nearly forty years after the electoral victory of the Right. For all its kicking and screaming, the Israeli Left can relax: surely if it took forty years for the Right to find the purloined letter, there is no reason to be hypochondriac.

Sarkozy, c’est fini

2011-11-08T14:55:00.000-08:00

French songwriter Hervé Vilard became famous overnight in 1965 with his love song “Capri, c’est fini” (Capri, it’s over). The song literally sounds like a broken record, but Vilard made a fortune out of it (he sold 2.5 million records). Could it be that disappointment is so universal a feeling that it speaks to our hearts even with the dullest melody? And would I get 2.5 million downloads on I-tunes if I were to write a song on “Sarkozy, c’est fini?” After all, there are more than 2.5 million people who are disappointed in Sarkozy. I’m no musician, though, so I shall settle for the following words.

Since “making aliyah” (immigrating, ascendency-wise) to Israel eighteen years ago, I forwent my right to vote in French elections. I no longer share the destiny of France, a country I voluntarily left. In 2007, however, I made an exception. Nicolas Sarkozy impressed me, and I made a special trip (twice) to the French consulate to give the guy my vote. Sarkozy was an outsider. The son of a Hungarian immigrant, he was raised by a Jewish grandfather and grew-up as the ugly duckling in Paris’ posh Neuilly suburb. As opposed to the rest of France’s political leadership, he was not intellectually cloned by ENA, the French elite school for government. But, mostly, he sounded sincere when he said that he intended to replace French economic dirigisme with pro-market policies, and when he spoke fondly of Israel and of America. Indeed, it seemed too good to be true –and it was.

Sarkozy turned out to be a temperamental control-freak whose economic reforms are meager and whose foreign policy record is disastrous. His “Mediterranean Union” project was a flop. Besides angering his European partners (especially Germany) for not consulting with them on his half-cooked ideas (yet expecting them to share the cost of their implementation), Sarkozy made a fool of himself. In July 2008, he threw a grand party in Paris to launch his now defunct “Mediterranean Union” with embarrassing guests such as Hosni Mubarak and Bashar Assad. Sarkozy thought that his “Mediterranean Union” would convince Turkey to give-up its EU bid, while Erdogan had already made the choice of a pan-Islamic foreign policy.

Worse, Sarkozy went out of his way to rehabilitate Muammar Kaddafi in order to sell French nuclear plants and military aircrafts to Libya. Shortly after his election, Sarkozy hosted Kaddafi in Paris and then went to Tripoli to celebrate “a strategic partnership” between France and Libya. While candidate Sarkozy gave fine speeches on France’s international role to promote human rights, President Sarkozy did business with Kaddafi (“I’m about to sign multi-billion contracts with Libya,” Sarkozy proudly declared to the French media). Except that Sarkozy underestimated the risks of doing business with an airplane blower. Kaddafi pocketed Sarkozy’s “rehabilitation certificate” but failed to deliver. Aside from being furious at Kaddafi, Sarkozy was embarrassed by the Arab revolts which revealed his government’s cozy relations with Arab dictators. He subsequently and opportunistically decided to rebrand himself as Zorro, now bombarding Kaddafi with the planes he wanted to sell him.

Sarkozy unsuccessfully tried to play the tough peace-maker vis-à-vis Russian President Medvedev when the latter bombarded South Ossetia in the summer of 2008. It is not done to try and preserve your bygone empire by using military force against independence-minded leaders, Sarkozy explained to Medvedev. Yet Sarkozy himself did just that in the former French colony of Côte d’Ivoire, where the French army toppled Laurent Gbagbo, the outvoted President who had been instrumental in undoing France’s neo-colonialism in his country.

Sarkozy’s hot-headedness and duplicity are by now music to Israel’s ears. Sarkozy has Jewish origins, and he started his political career as Mayor of Neuilly –an affluent Paris suburb with a powerful Jewish community. As Interior Minister under President Chirac, he acted firmly against anti-Semitism. His speeches were full of praise for Israel. He became friendly with Benjamin Netanyahu. His address to the Knesset in June 2007 was as good as it could get (except, that is, for the line on dividing Jerusalem).

Today, Sarkozy’s attitude toward Israel is undistinguishable from that of his predecessors: he is obnoxious and confrontational, and France’s “Arab policy” is back in full gear. In 2009, Sarkozy granted the Légion d’Honneur (France’s equivalent of the Presidential Medal of Freedom) to Charles Enderlin, the French journalist who falsely accused Israel of killing Muhamad Al-Dura, thus igniting the second Intifada as well as “revengeful” acts such as the beheading of Daniel Pearl. Sarkozy blames Netanyahu and absolves Abbas for the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate, despite Netanyahu’s gestures and despite Abbas’ refusal to negotiate. He encouraged Abbas’ statehood bid at the UN and recently voted in favor of UNESCO’s admission of “Palestine” as a full member state. He has reportedly declared that Israel’s demand to be recognized as a Jewish state by the Palestinians is “ridiculous.” In a private conversation with President Obama a couple of days ago, Sarkozy badmouthed Israel’s Prime Minister calling him a “liar” and saying he couldn’t stand him.

Sarkozy’s speech at the UN General Assembly in September 2011 was no less than idiotic. He blamed the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate on a “method problem” and yet he suggested to try again that very method in order to solve the conflict: negotiate the final status of Jerusalem, borders and settlement within a pre-set timetable. This is precisely what the Oslo process, the Road Map and the Annapolis conference unsuccessfully tried to achieve.

Most French Jews and most dual French-Israeli citizens voted for Sarkozy in 2007. Sarkozy mistakenly calculates that he can still count on their votes despite his antics, because the alternative is allegedly worse. He is mistaken. In the Socialist Party’s primaries, the rabid anti-Israel Martine Aubry was defeated by the moderate and conciliatory François Hollande. On the far-right, Marine Le Pen is at pains to prove her pro-Israel credentials and to distance herself from her anti-everything (including anti-Semitic) father.

Sarkozy has lost the Jewish vote and his likely defeat in the upcoming French elections will be well deserved. Sarkozy, c’est fini.

Protecting Israeli Democracy from the NIF

2011-10-25T05:54:00.000-07:00

Israel’s social protest died out with the opening of the school year. Earlier this month, the Israeli Government approved the recommendations of the Trachtenberg Committee, which include far-reaching measures aimed at easing the burden of the middle class and at making life in Israel more affordable. Yet it would be misleading to believe that the social unrest is behind us. In fact, the self-appointed leaders of last summer’s tent protest announced that they will renew their struggle after the High Holidays.

For a start, they rejected in toto the recommendations of the Trachtenberg Committee. Daphni Leef, who emerged as one of the movement’s iconic leaders, has declared that there would be a popular general strike on November 1st to shut down Israel’s economic activity and to topple the government. Two days before the strike, a huge demonstration is supposed to take place throughout the country as a “last warning” to the Prime Minister that he must meet the protesters’ demands. Eldad Yaniv, from the “National Left” movement, warned in Ha’aretz’s October 11 edition that the struggle will continue “until the 120 loafers [i.e. MKs] go home.”

The leaders of Israel’s social protest talk and behave as if Israel was not a democracy, and as if Israel’s government had not been elected by a large majority. They claim that most Israelis support their demand. Let them prove that in the next elections. For better or worse, democracy grants power to the people. In representative democracy, the majority runs the government for a set period of time. By trying to impose their demands on an elected government, the unelected representatives of the social protest are breaking the rules of democracy.

Israelis rightly complain about the cost of life, but in the previous elections they did not choose a government whose platform was to overspend and to turn Israel into Greece. Yet this is precisely what the unelected leaders of the social protest want to impose on our elected government. They have plenty of time (about a year-and-a-half) to convince Israelis to vote for them and their economic platform in the next elections. In the meantime, the choice of Israeli voters, as it was expressed in the previous elections, must be respected.

Not only are the leaders of the social protest breaking one of the basic rules of representative democracy, but many of them are funded by organizations (such as the New Israel Fund) whose agenda is to promote policies and values that are rejected by a majority of Israeli society. The New Israel Fund (NIF) deceives its donors by presenting itself an organization bent on promoting the rights of minorities and on helping the poor, but its true agenda is to turn Israel into a multi-ethnic (rather than Jewish) country. The NIF supports the Israeli organizations that constantly petition the High Court of Justice to repeal laws that define and preserve Israel as a Jewish state. In Court, the Government is represented by the State Attorney’s Office which has been staffed over the years by former NIF fellows who defend the petitioners rather than the Government.

The NIF’s subversive tactics consist in progressively imposing upon Israelis what they reject at the polls. It should come as no surprise that George Soros is a major NIF donor. Or that Stanley Greenberg, whose firm has done work for George Soros’ “Open Society Institute,” consulted to Ehud Barak in 1999 on how unseat Netanyahu and is now advising Eldad Yaniv with the same purpose. It should come as no surprise that Daniel Abraham, who helped George Soros set-up “J-Street,” gave money to Israel’s “tent protest” this past summer. And it should come as no surprise that Daphni Leef works for the New Israel Fund.

Promoting ideas and policies that provide an alternative to the Government is a fundamental right (and even a duty) in democracy, and this fundamental right obviously applies to Daphni Leef and to the NIF. But there is a difference between promoting a political agenda in an open society, and trying to impose such an agenda against the will of the majority via foreign funding, orchestrated strikes, and legal antics. For the sake of Israeli democracy, everything must be done so that Daphni Leef can express and promote her ideas freely, but everything must also be done to prevent her financial backers from trying to impose upon Israeli society policies and ideas that are rejected by the majority.

France’s State Television Launches Third Intifada

2011-10-06T03:00:00.000-07:00

Until Mahmoud Abbas delivered his speech at the UN General Assembly on September 23, 2011, there was some mystery about the Palestinian state applying for UN membership. Abbas did not proclaim statehood before his UN bid, so how could a state that was not proclaimed apply for membership? Abbas provided the answer to that question: the Palestinian state applying for membership was the one proclaimed by Arafat in Alger on November 15, 1988.

The proclamation of the “State of Palestine” in Alger did not specify its borders; it did not designate the former armistice lines between Israel and Jordan (often and wrongly called today “1967 borders”) as the borders of the proclaimed state. Rather, the proclamation spoke of a “State of Palestine on our Palestinian territory with its capital Jerusalem.” The proclamation’s reference to the 1947 Partition Plan might have been interpreted as a de facto acceptation of the Plan’s suggested (and moot) separation lines as the borders of the Palestinian state. Aware of this ambiguity, Arafat’s deputy, Salah Khalaf, declared in his keynote closed-session speech on November 14, 1988 that “at first [the Palestinian state] will be small … God willing, it will expand eastward, westward, northward and southward … I am interested in the liberation of Palestine, but step by step.”

On the very day Abbas delivered his speech at the UN on September 23, one of his deputies, Fatah Central Committee members Abbas Zaki, declared on Al-Jazeera that “the greater goal cannot be accomplished in one go … If Israel withdraws from Jerusalem, evacuates the 650,000 settlers and dismantles the wall, what will become of Israel? It will come to an end. If we say that we want to wipe Israel out, it’s not acceptable to say so. Don’t say these things to the world. Keep it to yourself.” Unfortunately for Abbas Zaki, it is hard to keep things to yourself at the age of the Internet, especially after you’ve admitted your true intentions on TV.

In his speech to the General Assembly, Mahmoud Abbas declared that “The goal of the
Palestinian people is the realization of their inalienable national rights in their independent State of Palestine, with East Jerusalem as its capital, on all the land of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.” On the face of it, the borders of the Palestinian state claimed by Abbas, “only” encompass the West Bank, Jerusalem, and Gaza. But the Palestinian state envisioned by Abbas will emerge next to a Jewish state that will cease to be Jewish through the implementation of the “right of return.”

For, as Abbas said in his speech, there must be a “just and agreed upon solution to the Palestine refugee issue in accordance with resolution 194” and “the time has come to end the suffering and the plight of millions of Palestine refugees in the homeland and the Diaspora, to end their displacement and to realize their rights.” The refugees “in the homeland” are the ones in the West Bank and Gaza, and what Abbas means by putting an end to their “suffering and plight” is having their descendants becoming citizens of pre-1967 Israel. The Palestinians mistakenly interpret UN General Assembly Resolution 194 as granting them a “right of return” to Israel, and Abbas explicitly referred to that resolution. So the “two-state solution” means two Arab states: a Judenrein Palestinian state, and an Arab-dominated State of Israel. “Step by step” as Khalaf said. And “keep it to yourself” as Zaki advised.

On the week of the UN speeches, I spoke almost daily on radio and TV. One of my radio debates was on France Culture, France’s highbrow radio. During that debate, I made the obvious point that the Palestinian definition of the “right of return” is incompatible with the two-state solution. While the panelists couldn’t argue with that, one of them came out with a “solution.” Huda Al Iman, who teaches International Relations at Al-Quds University, reassured me: don’t worry, she said, the “right of return” will be implemented in phases and not in one shot.

When I mentioned the plight of the 900,000 Jewish refugees expelled from Arab and Muslim countries after Israel’s independence, another panelist, Al-Quds University law professor Anwar Abu Eisheh, came up with an interesting answer. In 1974, he said, the PLO “decided” that Jewish refugees from Arab and Muslim lands should be allowed to come back to their countries of origin –which, means that Oriental Israelis (and their offspring) should settle in Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Syria, and Libya. Abu Eisheh is at least soft-spoken –unlike PLO spokesman Mahmoud Labadi who yelled at me during a debate on Voice of America: “Go back to Morocco!”

To their credit, my co-panelists were being honest: they admitted that their goal is to progressively undo Israel via demography (Jewish “return” to Arab lands, and Arab “return” to Israel). Mahmoud Abbas, by contrast, cannot be so candid about his true intentions without being dismissed by Western leaders (Remember: “Don’t say these things to the world”). In order for his ultimate goal to gain legitimacy in the free world, Abbas sells a narrative that presents the Palestinians as helpless victims, and whose only aspiration is to achieve justice by peaceful means. And, indeed, Abbas’ UN speech was a paragon of hypocrisy.

The hypocrisy started right at the beginning of the speech when Abbas congratulated South Sudan for its newly acquired independence. Two month before his speech, Abbas delivered a letter to Sudanese President Omar Hassan Al-Bashir (a man accused of genocide and of crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court) to express his opposition to South Sudan’s independence. Abbas’ state media described South Sudan’s independence as an Israeli plot to weaken the Arab world.

Abbas said that negotiations with Israel “broke down” without mentioning the fact that he had refused to negotiate with Israel despite the 10 month settlement freeze which he demanded as a precondition for negotiations. Abbas claimed that “the occupying Power also continues to undertake excavations that threaten our holy places,” but the truth is that Israel is the only country in the Middle East that preserves the integrity of other religions’ holy places, while the PA has vandalized Jewish antiquities on the Temple Mount since 1996 and has desecrated two Jewish religious sites that fell under its control (Joseph’s tomb in Nablus and the antique Jericho synagogue).

Abbas mentioned Arafat’s speech at the UN in 1974, claiming that this speech had been about the “pursuit of peace.” Ah yes. This is what Arafat said in his speech: “Zionism is an ideology that is imperialist, colonialist, racist; it is profoundly reactionary and discriminatory … The General Assembly partitioned what it had no right to divide — an indivisible homeland.” He called upon the establishment of a state of Palestine, not next to Israel but instead of it.

Abbas called the PLO “the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,” yet Hamas won the 2006 elections in the Palestinian Authority and is in full control of Gaza. Abbas said that the Palestinians will continue their “peaceful resistance” –a “peaceful resistance” of terrorist attacks that have claimed the life of thousands of Israelis. He said that the Palestinians are “armed only with their dreams” without mentioning the thousands of missiles pointed at Israel from Gaza, as well as the heavy weapons that have been illegally introduced to the West Bank since 1995. Abbas claimed, with a straight face, that his decision to unilaterally achieve statehood at the UN without a peace agreement with Israel “is a confirmation that we do not undertake unilateral steps.” He asserted that Israel’s partial presence in the West Bank “is the only occupation in the world” while, in truth, there are dozens of occupations in the world, including the occupation of Tibet by China, the occupation of Cyprus by Turkey, or the occupation of Western Sahara by Morocco.

If Abbas’ case was strong, he would not rely on so long a list of distortions. His ability to convince will be determined by the number of people who buy into his falsifications. And like his predecessor, Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas can count on a faithful ally: France’s state television France 2.

On September 30, 2000, France 2 broadcast a tragic scene that was almost certainly staged and faked: the “murder” of Muhammad al Dura by “the Jews.” The images, shot by Palestinian cameraman Talal Abu Rahmah and irresponsibly broadcast without due diligence by France 2’s Israel correspondent Charles Enderlin, became a major trigger of the “second Intifada.” Violence in Gaza and the West Bank erupted accompanied by the cries “revenge for the blood of Mohamed al Durah!” Daniel Pearl was beheaded with a picture of Mohamed al Dura behind him and with pictures of the scene spliced into the slitting of his throat.

Eleven years later, France 2 is once again signing up for the Palestinian cause –this time by actively taking part in Abbas’ propaganda. On October 3, 2011, France 2 broadcast a special report on “Palestine.” In a nutshell, it goes like this. The 1947 UN Partition Plan didn’t work out and both parties are to be blamed for it; the PA government in the West Bank is the Switzerland of the Middle East; as for Gaza, all Hamas wants is peace and whenever rockets are shot at Israel, it is only and always in retaliation to Israeli unprovoked attacks and aggressions; Israel steals the Palestinians’ water and in the Jordan Valley it turned a green land into a desert; Jewish “settlers” first came to Hebron in 1968 and since then they terrorize helpless Palestinians; the Palestinians’ “resistance” is always peaceful and harmless; the only reason why Israel still enjoys US support is because of AIPAC’s money, threats and control of US politicians and media; the 7 millions descendants of Palestinian refugees from 1948 cannot and should not be integrated in their host countries (such as Lebanon) and they have the right to return to Israel.

The scenario of France 2’s special report could have been written by Mahmoud Abbas himself. Its effects will probably not be as dramatic as those of the al Dura hoax. But the third Intifada –an Intifada of lies and propaganda- has been launched, and France 2 is once again giving it a hand.

The True Meaning of September

2011-09-20T01:03:00.000-07:00

The mounting diplomatic tension over the upcoming UN vote on Palestinian statehood is somewhat puzzling since this vote already took place twice. On December 15, 1988, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution with an overwhelming majority (104 in favor, 2 against, and 36 abstentions) calling for the establishment of a Palestinian state on the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip. The General Assembly passed a similar resolution on December 18, 2008. The new resolution expected to pass in the General Assembly will thus be redundant.

It will also be irrelevant since General Assembly resolutions are not binding in international law. They are mere recommendations. The UN Charter does not grant the General Assembly the power to establish states, and the idea that Israel owes its existence to a UN vote is a misconception. On November 29, 1947, the General Assembly endorsed the recommendation of UNSCOP (United Nations Special Committee on Palestine) to divide the British Mandate between a Jewish state and an Arab state. This was a mere recommendation that became moot as soon as it was passed since the Arab League rejected it flatly and since the Arab armies attacked the nascent Jewish state.

Nor can the General Assembly accept a new member state without the Security Council’s recommendation. Kosovo (which is recognized by 75 countries) is not a UN member because Russia is blocking its membership at the Security Council. The US Government has already announced that it will veto the admission of “Palestine” at the UN without a prior peace agreement with Israel. France and Britain, for their part, are wavering. Yet, even without a US veto, how can the Security Council accept a state that has not been declared and therefore doesn’t exist?

States need to be declared by their leaders. Were Abbas to do so, he would blatantly violate Article 31 of the Oslo Agreement ("Neither side shall initiate or take any step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip pending the outcome of the Permanent Status negotiations"). Once the Oslo Agreement is officially cancelled by the Palestinian Authority (PA), Israel will be free to act unilaterally as well (it probably will).

The PA does not meet all the legal criteria to become a state (i.e. a permanent population; a defined territory; a government; the ability to interact diplomatically with other governments). The PA’s territory is not defined; it is disputed. There never was a Palestinian state before; there never was a border between Israel and Jordan between 1949 and 1967 but a “temporary armistice line” defined as such in the Rhodes Agreements; and UN Security Council Resolution 242 does not require from Israel a withdrawal to those arbitrary and indefensible lines. Moreover, there isn’t one Palestinian government but two: a PLO government in Ramallah and a Hamas government in Gaza. This is why Abbas tried to reach a deal with Hamas, but this deal fell through.

A Palestinian statehood declaration at this point would thus be illegal, and a General Assembly resolution will be both redundant and meaningless.
And yet, the expected UN vote will have far-reaching political and moral consequence, especially if European countries decide to endorse it.

The PA Chairman complains about the absence of negotiations with Israel while he is the one who has refused to talk to Israel for the past two years. His behavior is remindful of the famous anecdote in which a man murders his parents and then asks the Judge for mercy on the ground that he is an orphan.

The true reason why Abbas has opted for unilateralism is that he has come to realize that Israel will not sign a peace agreement that includes the so-called Palestinian “right of return.” Abbas also knows that Western governments stand with Israel on that issue, because the Palestinian definition of the so-called “right of return” would turn Israel into a bi-national state with an Arab majority, while the Palestinian state will not tolerate a single Jew (Abbas explicitly said so recently). The “two-state solution” and the “right of return” are mutually exclusive.

Unilateralism will enable the Palestinians to obtain statehood (even virtually and illegally) without having to pay the price demanded by Israel and the West, i.e. making peace with Israel and abandoning the so-called “right of return.” Unilateralism, then, will perpetuate the conflict and will legitimize the idea that accepting and recognizing Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people is no longer a condition and a requirement for the establishment of a Palestinian state.

UN members who will vote in favor of the Palestinian move at the General Assembly will in effect be accomplice to the perpetuation of the conflict and to the de facto denial of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination.

Erdogan’s Dhimmi Problem

2011-09-07T02:17:00.000-07:00

Under Islamic law (“Shariah”), non-Muslims (such as Christians and Jews) are mostly free to practice their religion in private but are discriminated and treated as second-class citizens, or dhimmis. As the Quran clearly states, non-Muslims must “feel themselves subdued” (Sura 9:29). When the Jews regained their independence in 1948, they not only rebelled against “dhimmitude.” They also regained and freed, like the Spaniards after the Reconquista, a land once ruled by Islam. To Muslims, this was -and still is- a double offence.

Turkey’s Islamist Prime Minister Erdogan has taken upon himself to make Israel a “dhimmi state.” Edorgan was raised as a Sufi Muslim and was imprisoned in 1998 for singing out loud that "The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers.” While mainstream Western media are at pains to describe Turkey’s Islamist AKP Party as “moderate,” Erdogan himself declared on Kanal D TV in August 2007 that describing Islam as moderate “is offensive and an insult to our religion.” Erdogan has been embracing the presidents of Iran and Sudan. While Sudan’s president is accused of genocide by the International Criminal Court, and while Turkey has been asked to apologize for the Armenian genocide, Erdogan has declared that “No Muslim can perpetuate genocide.”

Erdogan comes from an anti-Jewish tradition. His political mentor Necmettin Erbakan was an anti-Semite. As soon as he became Prime Minister in 2003, Ergodan adopted a hostile policy toward Israel. In March 2004, Erdogan called Israel a “terrorist state” following the elimination of Ahmad Yassin. In February 2006, he received Hamas leader Khaled Mashal in Ankara. In January 2009, he publicly humiliated Shimon Peres at the Davos conference. In October 2009, the Turkish state television started airing fiction series showing Israeli soldiers intentionally murdering Palestinian children. In November 2009, Erdogan declared that he’d rather meet Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In March 2010, Erdogan claimed that the Temple Mount, Hebron and Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem were never Jewish sites.

While Erdogan’s hatred of Israel is authentic, his public outbursts at Israel are opportunistic. Those outbursts are the easiest way for him to be acclaimed as a hero by Islamists both in Turkey and around the world. The Israeli government made the right decision by refusing to behave as a “dhimmi state.” The attitude of the Obama Administration, by contrast, is irresponsible and scandalous. Instead of making Erdogan pay the price for his foreign policy choices, the Obama Administration has been hopelessly trying to appease him.

Erdogan is ultimately responsible for the death of his co-citizens aboard the “Mavi Marmara.” He is the one who sent out the jihadist organization Insani Yardim Vakfi (or IHH) to militarize Gaza and arm Hamas. Yet, President Obama called Erdogan after the Marmara incident to express “his deep condolences for the loss of life and injuries resulting from the Israeli military operation.” The Palmer Report recently released by the UN (an organization not known for its pro-Israel bias) says unambiguously that Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza was legal, that Turkey should have done more to stop the flotilla, and that Israeli soldiers were brutally attacked and had to use force in self-defense. And yet the Obama Administration is still asking Israel to apologize instead of scolding Turkey for its troublemaking.

Rather than stopping Erdogan from bullying Israel and from destabilizing the Middle East with his irresponsible policies, the Obama Administration has adopted an appeasing stance, which in turn is encouraging Erdogan who is now threatening to go to war in order to lift the siege of Gaza.

It is precisely because the Obama Administration has opted for appeasement that Israel must show steadfastness. As Churchill has said, an appeaser is someone who feeds the crocodile hoping he will be eaten last. Israel cannot afford to play that game. But steadfastness is not enough. Israel should go on the offensive by exposing Erdogan’s hypocrisy to the world.

Doing so is no rocket science. While scolding Assad for shooting at Syrian demonstrators, Erdogan ordered last month air strikes in Kurdistan, killing over 100 Kurds. While saying that Israel should accept the establishment of a Palestinian state, Erdogan is adamant not to allow an independent Kurdish state to emerge. While Erdogan urges Israel to negotiate with Hamas, he himself recently declared that Turkey “considers it a disgrace to sit down at the negotiating table with [the Greek Cypriots] at the United Nations” as Turkey just celebrated its 37 year-old occupation of Cyprus. And in 2006, after obtaining Syria’s capitulation to Turkey’s occupation and annexation of the Alexandretta Province, Erdogan offered Israel to broker a peace deal with Syria based on Israeli, not Syrian, capitulation over the Golan.

While Erdogan must be made to understand that Jews are no longer dhimmis, we Israelis have to realize that the end of dhimmitude does not only mean the end of humiliation. It also provides the ability, and perhaps even the duty, to make our enemies get a taste of their own medicine.

I Stand with Glenn Beck

2011-08-28T07:14:00.000-07:00

The UN and the so-called human rights NGOs “have become bullies and grotesque parodies of the principles they pretend to represent. They criticize free nations and spare the unfree. They denounce nations like Israel and America, who have high standards for freedom, and leave alone nations that have no freedom at all. They are nearly comical in their double-standards. Whatever moral force they once had is spent.”

If those words of truth and common sense had been pronounced by Tzipi Livni, Israel’s mainstream media would be applauding. But since those words were pronounced by Glenn Beck near the Temple Mount during his “Restoring Courage” event last week, we are told that they reflect insanity and constitute an obstacle to peace.

The American NGO “Media Matters for America,” whose declared purpose is to “correct conservative misinformation in the U.S. media,” has consistently been on Glenn Beck’s case. Among Media Matters’ backers is George Soros who, incidentally, also gives money to J-Street. Media Matters has been instrumental in getting Beck fired from Fox News.

In the US, the likes of Georges Soros are trying to silence Glenn Beck. In Israel, most journalists are at pains to describe him as a wacko who should be ignored.

Jonathan Lis from Ha’aretz called Beck’s event in Jerusalem last week a “circus” and he couldn’t hide his dismay at Beck’s decision to honor Rami Levy and the Mayor of Itamar. Rami Levy was honored because his recently-opened supermarket in Gush Etzion provides a model of coexistence between Jews and Arabs, and because he donates food both to the orphans of the Fogel family and to Muslims during Ramadan. As for the Mayor of Itamar, he was honored because it is in his town that the Fogel family was savagely murdered this past March. But since both Rami Levy’s model of coexistence and generosity and the tragedy of the Fogel family are beyond the “green line,” Ha’aretz has to treat them with scorn.

As for Tal Schneider from Israel’s business daily Globes, he called Beck an “extremist” because Beck opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state as well as the division of Jerusalem, and because he blames radical Islam for many of the world’s ills. Most Israelis oppose the division of Jerusalem. Are they also “extremists”? And was Samuel Huntington an extremist for stating that “Islam has bloody borders”?

Jonthan Lis and Tal Schneider used similar words to express their distaste of Glenn Beck. Lis wrote that “an Israeli crowd would not have identified with Beck’s messages.” As for Schneider, he wrote that “Israelis, even when they tend to be right-wing, are deterred by the extremist messages of a foreign Christian.” What Lis and Schneider mean by “Israeli” is the small social fringe that they represent: liberal, urban, and secular. But most Israelis are not WASPs (White Ashkenazi Sabra Paratroopers), and many of them actually do identify with Beck’s message. Tal Schneider has no problem with “the extremist messages of a foreign Christian” when the latter is named Jimmy Carter.

Jonathan Lis and Tal Schneider are not Glenn Beck’s only Israeli foes, of course. Those foes include strange bedfellows, such as Rabbi Yosef Shalom Eliashiv (the recognized leader of Ultra-Orthodox Lithuanian Judaism), and Yariv Oppenheimer (Director of the left-wing “Peace Now” movement). While Rabbi Eliashiv publicly expressed his opposition to Glenn Beck, Yariv Oppenheimer organized a small demonstration against him. By contrast, Rabbi Shlomo Riskin opened Beck’s event with a blessing. Rabbi Riskin’s message was, in substance, the following: Zionism is the realization of God’s promise to the Jewish people and we should welcome Glenn Beck for proclaiming this truth to the world.

And this is precisely why both Rabbi Eliashiv and Yariv Oppenheimer can’t stand Glenn Beck: they don’t believe, and they don’t want to hear, that Zionism has a religious meaning. For Eliashiv, Zionism is a revolt against God. For Oppenheimer, Zionism is worthy of support only if it has nothing to do with God.

For here is what Glenn Beck said: “My Israeli friends, I have a message: You must not lose hope. You must not lose confidence. You must have courage. And you must draw courage from the knowledge that you were led to this land by God. Not by the hand of any man, whether his name is Balfour or Truman, does Israel exist. Israel is here because the God of Abraham keeps His covenants.”

Except for the references to Balfour and Truman, this is, in substance, what Rashi says in his comment of Genesis’ first verse: that when the nations claim that the Jews stole the Land of Israel, the Jew’s only justification, ultimately, is that God created the world and granted the Land of Israel to the Jewish people. This is the bottom line, this is what Glenn Beck said, and this is what really infuriates those who reject this vision.

“Condemn me. Target me” said Beck. “I will stand with Israel.” These are words of courage, which have cost Beck, and continue to cost him, dearly. Standing with Glenn Beck, in Israel, can be costly as well. This is why so many Israeli journalists and academics, out of concern for their reputation and media approval, have been at pains to distance themselves from Beck. I am not judging them, but let me make this clear: I stand with Glenn Beck.

Is Elvis Dead?

2011-08-16T06:06:00.000-07:00

August 16th marks the anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death. Yet some of the King’s fans claim he never died and just went into hiding. The average person rightly scoffs at this science-fiction theory. But how can you ridicule those who believe that Elvis is still alive and, at the same time, continue to believe in socialism or in the Middle East peace process? Those Israeli academics and journalists who claim that both socialism and the Oslo accords can be salvaged may consider themselves to be the paramount of sophistication and rationality. In truth, however, they are no less irrational than Elvis Presley’s most wacky fans.

With Israel’s social protest movement in its fourth week, the Government has appointed a team of experts (the “Trachtenberg Commission”) to suggest ways of making life more affordable for the middle-class. High-rank academics have volunteered to help the protesters formulate their demands. Among those self-appointed consultants is Yossi Yonah, a philosophy professor at Ben-Gurion University. How exactly is Yonah qualified to argue about macroeconomics with the Trachtenberg Commission? True, the same question can be asked about Yuval Steinitz, himself a philosophy professor turned Minister of Finance. But the question is not whether philosophers can understand economics (Karl Marx had a Ph.D. in philosophy, in case you were wondering what the answer is). The question is what the presence of Yossi Yonah tells us about the true agenda of some of the movement’s leaders.

Yossi Yonah publishes mostly on “multiculturalism” and he summarized his views in an interview published in Ha’aretz in 2005 (“Brave New Multicultural World,” Ha’aretz, 14 October 2005). What is Yonah’s vision for the future of Israel? "Well” he says, “besides the naturalization of the migrant workers, it will include the annulment of the Law of Return; the cancellation of the arrangement of automatic naturalization for Jewish immigrants; and provision of a worthy solution for the Palestinian refugee problem, based on the Geneva Convention." So, you see, it’s not only about economics.

There are economic experts on the team, though, such as Prof. Avia Spivak from Ben-Gurion University. He recommends raising taxes, especially corporate taxes, which would supposedly fill public coffers –as if Israeli companies couldn’t pick-up and leave, and as if both economic theory and practice hadn’t showed that governments’ revenues decrease when taxes are too high.

Then there is Shas’ brilliant idea on how to lower the price of real-estate. Rent control, of course: the Government should tell landlords what to charge. Such policies have been tried in the past, and they’ve always had the effect of increasing the price of real estate. The reason is simple: when real-estate investors cannot charge the rent that would make their investment profitable, they stop investing in real-estate. When investments in real-estate decline, so does housing supply. And when supply goes down, prices go up.

The official narrative in Israel’s media these days is that the high cost of living and the hardships of the middle-class are the result of “ultra-liberalism” and that Israel must become a “welfare state.” The very opposite is true. Israel is not a liberal economy: it is dominated by oligopolies that strangle consumers, and by monopolies (such as the National Land Authority) that control supply. If the Israeli economy is strong and productive, it is partly thanks to the economic liberalization undertaken by Shimon Peres in 1985 and by Benjamin Netanyahu in 2003. What Israel’s economy needs is more, not less, freedom and competition.

As for adopting the welfare state model, it is ironical that our know-it-all pundits are suggesting the idea precisely when the welfare state is causing European economies to crumble. If Greece, Spain and Italy are broke, it is partly because their welfare state model was built at a time when the population was young and the economy was hardly exposed to foreign competition. With an aging population and the constraints of a globalized economy, the European welfare system has become unaffordable. Hence the pilling debts of European governments, and hence the nervousness of financial markets.

Israel’s provincial public discourse does not end there. The violence in Britain, we are told, is to be blamed on Thatcherism. The fact that Labor was in power between 1997 and 2010 is irrelevant (and anyways, a journalist told me while interviewing me live on the “Reshet Bet” radio last week, Tony Blair allied himself to George Bush, so he doesn’t count). The truth, of course, is that Margaret Thatcher saved the British economy and that if it weren’t for her reforms, Britain’s fate today would be similar to Greece’s.

If the current social protest movement in Israel finally provides the opportunity to lower the cost of living by breaking-up monopolies and cartels and by lowering taxes, it will be remembered as one of the best things that ever happened to the country. But if the movement is hijacked by armchair ideologues to implement policies that have been proven to be counter-productive, then Israel is in trouble.

Those who believe that socialism might actually work at the end and that Israel is just the right place to check the theory again are about as rational as Elvis Presley’s fans who “know” he’s alive. The Israeli hard Left should be given a chance to implement its economic theories –but only after it finds out where Elvis is hiding.

The Chienlit Revolution

2011-08-02T07:11:00.000-07:00

As French students and intellectuals were playing Robespierre and Mao on the streets of Paris in the Spring of 1968, Charles de Gaulle came out with a formula that was typical of his linguistic creativity: “La réforme oui, la chienlit non.” Journalists and commentators had to look up “chienlit” in the dictionary since nobody ever heard of that word. Chienlit was used in old French and it means “carnival mask.” What could the General possibly mean? A pun of course: divide-up the word with hyphens (“chie-en-lit”) and you get “shit-in-bed.” Ahem.

Israel was completely disconnected from “Mai 68.” France was at the height of its power and de Gaulle’s rule was unchallenged. Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist philosophy offered the perfect antidote to a bored youth. Israel’s young generation, by contrast, had just emerged victorious from the Six Day War. Fighting for their survival, and being involved in building a new country, young Israelis had no time for planning revolutions from the terrace of a café.

Aside from the “Black Panthers” in the 1970s, Israel never had a social revolt organized by the youth. Being raised in a conformist society with a uniform public discourse, and being taught to respect authority in the army, Israelis were never known for their revolutionary zeal. Add to this the challenge of making a living in a socialist economy and the stress of being in a permanent state of war, and you understand why Israel never had the equivalent of Mai 68.

So the fact that Israelis are finally taking to the streets is actually good news: It shows that Israel has become so wealthy and secure that people actually have the time and luxury to talk about changing the world with nargilas and guitars. Like the French who had never had it so good in the late 1960s, we too are having our “chienlit revolution” (“chiant,” by the way, means “boring” in French).

This is not to say, of course, that there is no economic hardship in Israel. There is poverty and there is hardship. But it is Israel’s pervasive oligopolies and unfair tax system that make it impossible for middle class families to make ends meet, let alone save money. Real estate is unaffordable because there is no offer; and there is no offer because Israel’s Land Administration abuses its monopoly. Nobody has done more than Benjamin Netanyahu break up monopolies and to lower taxes, so protesters are picking a fight with the wrong person.

Like the Mai 68 strikes, Israel’s current social protest is not led by the union movement. During Mai 68, France’s main workers’ union, CGT, tried to contain the spontaneous militancy by channeling it into a struggle for higher wages and other economic benefits. Even the Communist Party got cold feet, and Jean-Paul Sartre accused the Communists of “fearing revolution.” What rioters really wanted was the ousting of de Gaulle. Although the trade union leadership negotiated a 35% increase in the minimum wage, a 7% wage increase for other workers, and half normal pay for the time on strike, the workers occupying their factories refused to return to work. They demanded new elections.

Likewise, the main organizers of today’s protest in Israel are more interested in ousting Netanyahu than in improving the lot of struggling families. This is why the Im Tirtzu movement pulled out of the protest: it realized that protesters were looking for a fight, not for solutions.

At the end, Mai 68 was a flop. De Gaulle called for early elections and his party won the greatest victory in French parliamentary history. After the carnival, it was time to go to bed –in clean sheets.

For me, not for thee

2011-07-17T10:10:00.000-07:00

Last week (on Bastille Day), the new Republic of South Soudan became a member state of the United Nations. After being oppressed, massacred and plundered for decades by Khartoum, the people of South Sudan finally obtained the independent state they fought for. Theoretically, the Palestinians should rejoice and ask the UN why they are denied what the South Sudanese were just granted. Instead, Mahmoud Abbas delivered a letter to Sudanese President Omar Hassan Al-Bashir (a man accused of genocide and of crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court) to express his opposition to South Sudan’s independence.

It’s called self-determination for me, not for thee.

Just as Abbas was about to reap the gold medal for hypocrisy, Catherine Ashton broke a new record. After the Knesset passed a law last week that enables Israeli citizens to bring civil suits against people or organizations instigating anti-Israel boycotts, Ashton expressed public concern for freedom of speech in Israel. Which makes Ashton eligible for the gold medal of hypocrisy too, because in Europe anti-Israel boycott is a criminal offence. In France, for example, you can go to jail for three years and pay a €45,000 fine for trying to impede economic activity out of political, ethnic, or religious prejudice (Articles 225-1 and 225-2 of the “Code pénal”).

The French law is more stringent than the one recently passed by the Knesset. The new Israeli law does not criminalize boycott. It only allows "citizens to bring civil suits against persons and organizations that call for economic, cultural or academic boycotts against Israel, Israeli institutions or regions under Israeli control." So the New Israel’s Fund’s statement that the new law "criminalizes freedom of speech" is false and misleading. The new Israeli law does not criminalize boycott, let alone freedom of speech. French law, by contrast, does criminalize boycott.

US law also prohibits anti-Israel boycott. The Anti-boycott laws under the US Export Administration Act of 1979 (as amended in August 1999) prohibit American companies from furthering or supporting the boycott of Israel. The penalties imposed for each violation can be a fine of up to $50,000 or five times the value of the exports involved (whichever is greater), and imprisonment of up to five years.

It is ironical that the same people in Israel who claim that freedom of speech can suffer no infringement said the very opposite two weeks ago when the police arrested Rabbi Dov Lior. We were told at the time that freedom of speech can and should be curtailed when it borders incitement. True, there is a difference between incitement and boycott (though boycott often turns into incitement). But either freedom of speech suffers no limitation, or it does. And democracies such as the United States and France do limit freedom of speech in order to prevent incitement as well as boycott. So you are allowed to limit freedom of speech in order to prevent discrimination in America and in France, but not in Israel.

It’s called freedom of speech for me, not for thee.

No less ironical is the fact that the very same people in Israel who said after the arrest of Rabbi Lior that the law is sacrosanct are now making a point of publicly defying the law by boycotting Israeli goods produced beyond the “green line” (in France, as explained above, they could be jailed for doing that). Two weeks ago, the law was sacrosanct. Now, it is a moral duty to break it.

It’s called rule of law for thee, not for me.

So who gets the gold medal for hypocrisy? Mahmud Abbas, Catherine Ashton, or Zehava Gal-On? The contest being so tight, here is a compromise. Let’s grant French citizenship to Zehava Gal-On to deter her from discriminating between Israeli products for political reasons. Let’s have Catherine Ashton write an essay on “why civil lawsuits are more dangerous to freedom of speech than criminal prosecutions.” And let’s appoint Mahmoud Abbas as “UN Special Envoy for the Universal Implementation of the two-state solution including, inter alia, in Sudan, Libya, Lebanon, Morocco, Cyprus, Belgium, Canada, and China.”

It’s called making of fool of thee, not of me.

Boat People 2.0

2011-07-06T03:28:00.000-07:00

Is it a coincidence that the last flotilla desperately trying to reach Gaza is setting sail from Greece? While the Greek economy is imploding, Gaza’s is booming. Those angry Hellenes trying to break the blockade (and to fix their ships) look more like boat people than like freedom fighters.

Crowds are protesting daily (and violently) in Athens. The Greek government recently passed an austerity plan through parliament to get a bail-out from the EU, but the rescue plan will only temporally keep afloat a bankrupt economy incapable of paying its debts and of reforming itself. Greece is insolvent: its debts amount to 160% of its GDP. The government cannot finance its own budget deficit, and it would run out of money without help from the EU and the IMF.

Gaza, by contrast, has enjoyed a two-digit (16%) GDP growth in 2010. The New York Times recently reported that a new mall and two luxury hotels just opened in Gaza. Imports are unrestricted except, of course, for weapons and ammunition.

So those European citizens of bankrupt countries kept afloat by German and US taxpayers (via the EU and the IMF respectively) seem to have figured out that moving to Gaza is really what the “audacity of hope” was all about. In reality, of course, the “flotillas” have a sinister agenda.

One of the key organizers of the “second flotilla” to Gaza is Muhammad Sawalha, a Hamas activist living in Britain who is among the signatories of the “Istanbul Declaration.” This document states, among other things, that “the Islamic nation” has an obligation to provide weapons to the Palestinians “so that they are able to live and perform the jihad in the way of Allah Almighty.” Other flotilla organizers this year include Walid Abu al-Shewarib, a member of Hamas as well as of the German branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Amin Abu Rashid , a Hamas leader from Holland.

Hamas’ strategy to end the maritime arms embargo imposed by Israel on Gaza is simple: create a clash with the IDF, portray Hamas as the victim and Israel as a bully, and gather international support for the “liberation” of Gaza. This strategy partially worked last year (French daily Libération called Israel a “pirate state”). As the delightful “We Con the World” satire put it: “We’ll make them all believe that the Hamas is Momma Theresa… We’ll make them all believe the IDF is Jack the Ripper.”

That Hamas-Europe is organizing a flotilla to help Hamas-Gaza makes sense. They are, after all, co-workers and brothers-in-arms. It is the support of self-proclaimed progressive Jews and Western liberals for those medieval anti-Semites and misogynists that seems unexplainable. But there is an explanation.

Among the flotilla crusaders are people like Adam Shapiro and Dror Feiler. The former is a Brooklyn Jew who says he doesn’t regard himself as Jewish, who married an Arab girl, and who visited Arafat in his compound in March 2002 at the height of the PA’s terror war against Israel. The latter was raised on a Communist Kibbutz, moved to Sweden, and renounced his Israeli citizenship. If people like Shapiro and Feiler care so much about freedom and human rights, how come they don’t organize flotillas to Syria and Libya where people are being butchered by their tyrants? The answer is that Shapiro and Feiler have an obsession with Israel because Israel acts as a mirror of what they want to bury: their Jewish identity.

As for European and American leftists, Israel is a painful reminder of their failed attempt four decades ago to rid Western society of its Judeo-Christian basis. “Palestine” has become the mythical promised land of Western nihilism. Unlike the real boat people, those freedom fighters wannabes from Europe and America are not fleeing massacres and starvation. But they too hope that wandering on the sea in front of cameras will salvage them from misery.

What to do with Thomas Friedman

2011-06-23T04:16:00.000-07:00

Thomas Friedman has a way of getting attention with provocative statements and inaccurate facts. His new recipe for solving the Arab-Israeli conflict (“What to do with Lemons,” NY Times, 18 June 2011) is a case in point.

When Friedman claimed that “The World is Flat” in his 2005 book on globalization, all he meant, obviously, was to get a catchy title. The book begins with the story of Christopher Columbus, who set out to find India only to reach the Americas. Friedman claims that this proved Columbus's thesis that the world is round. Actually, proof that the world is round came later, in 1522, when the sole surviving ship from Ferdinand Magellan's fleet returned to Spain.

When it comes to the Middle East, however, Friedman’s belief that the world is flat seems to be sincere. No amount of evidence will make him budge from the dogma that the establishment of a Palestinian state along the 1949 armistice lines with bring the conflict with Israel to an end. Which is why he twists facts in order for the theory to look correct.

For a start, UN General Assembly Resolution 181 (from November 29, 1947) did not partition the British Mandate between a Jewish state and an Arab state. It only endorsed the recommendation of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP). General Assembly resolutions are not binding upon UN members. Resolution 181 became moot anyway after the Arab states rejected it and attacked Israel.

Turning Resolution 181 into a Security Council Resolution, as Friedman suggests, will accomplish nothing. Such a resolution would not be adopted under Chapter 7 of the international convention dealing with acts of aggression. It would be adopted under Chapter 6, which deals with finding a peaceful solution to international disputes via negotiations. So the Security Council would officially ask Israel and the Palestinians to negotiate. What an achievement: they’ve been doing just that, to no avail, for the past two decades.

Besides, there is already a Security Council resolution on the Arab-Israel conflict: it is Resolution 242. This Resolution does not require from Israel a withdrawal to the temporary 1949 armistice line. The future border between Israel and its Eastern neighbor is to be negotiated. When Friedman claims that “The dividing line should be based on the 1967 borders,” he not only invents a border that never existed. He also turns Resolution 242 on its head.

Aware of the fact that reverting to the 1949 armistice line is technically impossible, Friedman calls for “land swaps” that would enable “5 percent of the West Bank where 80 percent of the settlers live” to “be traded for parts of pre-1967 Israel.”

Why should there be “land swaps” when Israel is entitled, according to Resolution 242, to retain parts of the West Bank in the framework of a peace agreement? In his recent address to AIPAC on May 22, President Obama claimed that the 1967 lines with land swaps “has long been the basis for discussions among the parties, including previous U.S. administrations.” This is untrue. The only US Administration that mentioned land swaps was the Clinton Administration during the Camp David negotiations in July 2000.

Friedman concludes his op-ed by quoting Gidi Grinstein’s gloomy prediction that “September can be a confrontational zero-sum moment with potentially disastrous consequences.” Actually, Abbas is bluffing. “Palestine” was already recognized by the UN as a state in 1988. In addition, one of the conditions for state recognition in international law is to have a government. This is why Abbas tried to work out a deal with Hamas in order to put an end to the Gaza/West Bank dichotomy. With this deal falling apart, there are still two, not one, Palestinian governments.

The world is not flat, but Thomas Friedman is flat-wrong about the Middle East. “You know what they say to do with lemons?” he asks in his piece. “Make lemonade.” Well, do you know what I say to do with prima donnas whose judgment is blurred by an inflated ego? Ignore them.

Twilight of the Idols

2011-06-14T01:46:00.000-07:00

Israel’s intellectuals are worried. The Israeli Holy Trinity (Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, and David Grossman) is getting old. The Hebrew University’s Pantheon (Martin Buber, Yehuda Magnes, and Yeshayahu Leibowitz) belongs to History. Avraham Burg tries to mimic Leibowitz, but it is hard to inherit the Lithuanian brainbox when you didn’t finish college. As for Shlomo Sand, Moshe Zuckermann and Ilan Pappé, only European neo-Marxists are willing to attend their lectures and to publish their books.

“It used to be that … they would call me from Army Radio” complains Moshe Zuckermann to Ofer Aderet from Ha’aretz (“The Shrinking of the Israeli Mind,” June 7, 2011). So what happened? “The people have been silenced. They tried to strangle them –and they’ve succeeded” he says. Zuckermann doesn’t specify whom he means by “they” but Daniel Gutwein blames “market forces.” You see, explains Gutwein, “The market … ensures there is no intellectual discussion.” As for Shlomo Sand, he blames the Universities themselves: “To become a professor” he says “you have to be cautious.”

One only has to look at the political makeup of Israel’s social science faculties to wonder (or, rather, to understand) what Sand means by “cautious.” As for “market forces” being the enemy of intellectual discussion, I bet Bernard Henri-Lévy would beg to differ: he flies a private jet and yet has quite an audience both at home and abroad (including in Israel). He is mostly excused for his buffoonery because, at the end of the day, he is knowledgeable, writes well, and keeps renewing his stock.

Most Israeli intellectuals, by contrast, are provincial and fossilized. Nowhere but in Israel have I seen academics and journalists who still think that mentioning Foucault and Derrida is cool. Those people have been living off the same tired mantras for decades: the occupation is the source of all evil; religion is for retards; the advent of peace depends on Israel alone. It is not that Israelis have become “anti-intellectual” or that they have been “strangled.” It is just that they are tired of hearing the nonsense of hypocritical conformists.

One noticeable exception is Yehuda Shenhav. A sociology professor at Tel-Aviv University, Shenhav expresses unorthodox views and has no qualms about being a dissident. His last book, Bounded by the Green Line (Am Oved, 2010), exposes the intellectual hypocrisy of Israel’s Ashkenazi establishment. By blaming “the occupation” for Israel’s problems, Shenhav argues, the Zionist left is lying to itself. Shenhav goes further: the Zionist left’s obsession with “the occupation” has less to do with liberalism than with nostalgia for the secular and Ashkenazi pre-1967 Israel. But for the Palestinians (and indeed, for Shenhav himself) the “original sin” is not 1967. It is 1948.

Shenhav is no right-winger trying to demonstrate the absurdity of the Oslo paradigm. He rejects this paradigm precisely because he claims that Israel was violent and racist before 1967. While tenants of the “pre-1967 cosmology” would have us believe that the Six Day War transformed Israel from “Little House on the Prairie” to “The Terminator,” Shenhav argues that “The model created in 1948 transformed Israel, for all intents and purposes, into a racial state.” Thus does he call for a return to “pre-1948” Israel, to an acceptation of the Palestinian “right of return,” and to the establishment of a Jewish-Arab federation.

I found Shenhav’s diagnosis and prognosis appalling. Pre-1967 Israel was not a “racial” state. It was (and still is) a nation-state that grants cultural preference to the dominant nation while guarantying equal civil rights to minorities, just like other democratic nation-states such as France, Japan or Sweden. And calling for a pastoral brotherhood between a Jewish minority and an Arab majority in a loose federation simply ignores History. Jews were persecuted and mistreated second-class citizens in Arab lands. Most pre-WWII Arab national movements were fascist. The first Palestinian leader, Hadj-Amin al-Husseini, was a Nazi collaborator who was personally responsible for the Jewish pogroms in Palestine in 1929 and 1936. The establishment of Israel in 1948 was more the result than the cause of Arab animosity and violence. The fact that The Protocols of the Sages of Zion and Mein Kampf are best sellers in Arab capitals and that Palestinian media and preachers describe Jews as “sons of pigs and monkeys” does not bode well for stateless Jews in Dahr el-Islam.

But Shenhav has the merit of recognizing that “the occupation” is a delusional excuse for the absence of peace, and that it is Zionism itself that the Arabs reject.

So the choice is not between occupation and peace but between Zionism and peace. Many former believers in the “pre-1967 cosmology” realize this. Some are so attached to peace that they have become post-Zionistic. Others are so attached to Zionism that they have opted for steadfastness.

Avi Shlaim and Benny Morris are the perfect examples. Both self-proclaimed “new historians” separately published a history of the Arab-Israeli conflict shortly before the implosion of the Oslo process (The Iron Wall and Righteous Victims). Both authors welcomed the election of Ehud Barak in 1999, predicting he would soon prove their theory to be right. The very opposite happened. Shlaim reacted by rejecting Zionism, Morris by rejecting the Oslo paradigm. While Shlaim now says that “Zionism today is the real enemy of the Jews,” Morris declares that “we are doomed to live by the sword.”

Morris even compares himself to Albert Camus. "He was considered a left-winger and a person of high morals, but when he referred to the Algerian problem he placed his mother ahead of morality” Morris declared to Ari Shavit in his famous 2004 interview. And so, Morris declares: “Preserving my people is more important than universal moral concepts." Boaz Neumann, a history professor at Tel-Aviv University, has used the same metaphor and has made the same point.

“Twilight of the Idols” is not only a famous book by Friedrich Nietzsche. It is also a central tenet of Judaism. Idolatry is an abomination because the worshiper knows he is lying to himself. That some Israeli intellectuals are sobering is a sign of hope. Who knows: even the Israeli Holy Trinity might eventually recognize the Holy One.

As Clean as Thou

2011-05-29T03:37:00.000-07:00

“So now here is the question” Netanyahu cleverly asked in his masterly address to the US Congress. “If the benefits of peace with the Palestinians are so clear, why has peace eluded us?” Netanyahu’s answer to his own rhetorical question was correct: the Palestinian leadership has always refused, and continues to refuse, to sign a peace agreement that entails the acceptance and permanence of the Jewish state, regardless of its borders. Hence the PA’s rejection of the offers by Ehud Barack (in 2000) and by Ehud Olmert (in 2008) to establish a Palestinian state on virtually the entire West Bank and Gaza. Arafat and Abbas said no, because they were asked to abandon the fantasy of invading Israel with the descendants of the 1948 Arab refugees, because they refused to recognize the Jewish past of the Temple Mount, and because they would not commit to ending the conflict after reaching statehood.

So then here is another question. If Abbas refused to establish a Palestinian state within borders that were practically identical to the 1949 armistice lines, why would he accept to establish a Palestinian state on a smaller territory in order for Israel to have defensible borders? Those who claim that Israel will eventually achieve peace by keeping offering the Palestinians what they’ve rejected many times are a lively example of Einstein’s definition of insanity (“doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”). And those who expect the Palestinians to agree to a downgraded version of what they rejected in the past somehow reenact the famous spat between Winston Churchill and Lady Astor (“Winston, if you were my husband, I’d poison your tea … Nancy, if I were your husband, I would drink it”).

A standard answer to this question is that all Israel needs to do in order to achieve peace with the Palestinians is to withdraw to “the 1967 border.” There never was such a border. What existed between 1949 and 1967 was an armistice line specifically defined as “temporary” in the Rhodes Agreements upon Jordan’s insistence. This line was not a border and never was meant to become one. UN Security Council Resolution 242 was specifically worded so as not to convert the armistice line into a border. There is no legal basis for “demanding” an Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 armistice line. But besides legality, claiming that withdrawing to those lines will produce peace with the Palestinians defies logics. There was no peace before 1967, so why would rewinding History back to 1967 bring a peace that didn’t exist then?

The reason why Israel was able to extract a peace agreement (though no real peace) from Sadat by withdrawing from Sinai is that all Sadat wanted was Sinai (and, incidentally, the American financial largess that came with it). If all the Palestinians wanted were the West Bank and Gaza, the “rewind to 1967” formula would work with them as well. But since what they want is all of Palestine, previous attempts to bring them to sign a peace agreement by settling for the pre-1967 setting have failed. The PA teaches Palestinian children that Jaffa and Haifa will eventually be liberated from the Zionist invaders and that the only purpose of signing agreements with the infidels is to achieve the ultimate goal of “liberating” all of Palestine. The message is getting through. A poll conducted by Stanley Greenberg in November 2010 reveals that 60% of Palestinians see in the two-state solution a mere step to replace Israel with an exclusively Arab state.

The claim that the Palestinians have abandoned their goal of “liberating” all of Palestine ignores what they themselves keep saying (though, admittedly, in Arabic). Yesterday (May 28), Mahmud Abbas declared in Doha that he will never recognize Israel as a Jewish state, that he will never give up on the “right of return,” and that the future Palestinian state will be “clean” (or “empty,” depending on the translation) of any Israeli presence (including civilians). In such a scenario, the State of Israel would lose its Jewish majority, while the Palestinian state will be “clean” of any Jew. Jews would become a minority between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and they would be ruled by the Arab majority. If Abbas is so clear about his true intentions, and if he is so explicit about them, why is it so hard to believe him?

What would the world’s reaction be if Netanyahu declared that the State of Israel should be “clean” of any Arab? A two-state solution does not exclude the presence of minorities on both sides. India was partitioned in 1947, but there are Muslims in India and Hindus in Pakistan. This is what Netanyahu meant in his speech to Congress when he said that “in any real peace agreement that ends the conflict, some settlements will end up beyond Israel’s borders.” Contrary to what The Economist mistakenly (or mischievously) wrote, this doesn’t mean that some Jewish towns would “by implication, have to be removed” (“You can’t make everyone happy,” The Economist, May 26). It means that in a true peace there should be a Jewish minority in the Palestinian state, the same way that there is an Arab minority in the Jewish state. Either the Palestinian state is willing to tolerate a Jewish minority with equal civil rights similar to the ones enjoyed by Arabs in the State of Israel, or it is committed to ethnic cleansing. In that case, there should be a mutual population transfer, as suggested back in 1937 by the Peel Commission, between the two states.

Accepting the principle that there should be an Arab minority in the Jewish state but no Jewish minority in the Palestinian state would set an unprecedented double-standard; it would absolve the Palestinians for their intolerance towards minorities; and it would implicitly endorse the idea that the Arabs have stronger rights than the Jews over a land that both peoples claim to be theirs.

My Kingdom for a Hoax

2011-05-03T07:36:00.000-07:00

A specter is haunting Israel. As the Palestinian Authority is threatening to declare statehood in September with UN recognition, many Israelis seem to believe that the Apocalypse is near. What is approaching, however, is not a Big Bang but a Big Flop.

The creation of a Palestinian state has already been proclaimed, and the admission of this “state” to the UN has already been recommended by the General Assembly. On November 15, 1988, Yasser Arafat proclaimed in Algiers the establishment of “The State of Palestine” with Jerusalem as its capital and Arafat as its President. One month later, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution that acknowledged “the proclamation of the State of Palestine” and that replaced the PLO with “Palestine” at the UN. One hundred and four states voted in favor of the resolution, forty-four abstained, and two (the US and Israel) voted against. Since then, the UN General Assembly has passed many resolutions supporting Palestinian statehood.

UN General Assembly resolutions, however, are not binding (as opposed to Security Council resolutions). They are mere recommendations. The General Assembly does not and cannot establish states. Contrary to a widespread misconception, the UN did not establish the State of Israel. On November 29, 1947, the General Assembly only approved the recommendation of UNSCOP (the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine) to divide the British Mandate between a Jewish state and an Arab state. This approval was a non-binding opinion. What established the State of Israel were seven decades of labor and a war of Independence in which the Jews fought by themselves without any help from the UN (though with the military backing of a Soviet satellite –Czechoslovakia).

Nor can the General Assembly admit new members at the UN without the approval of the Security Council. If one of the five permanent members of the Security Council puts its veto, the “State of Palestine” will not be accepted to UN (Kosovo is not a UN member because of Russia’s veto). Hence the diplomatic efforts deployed by Israel and by the PA to lobby the Security Council’s two wavering veto-holders (Britain and France).

The difference between 1988 and 2011, of course, is that the PLO and Hamas partially control the West Bank and Gaza. Back then, the PLO was operating from Tunis and Hamas was in its infancy. Territorial control, even a partial one, makes the Palestinian “declaration of independence” more potent. The 1933 Montevideo Convention on Rights and Duties of States lays down the most widely accepted formulation of the criteria of statehood in international law: 1. A permanent population; 2. A defined territory; 3. A government; 4. A capacity to enter into relations with other states. The PA fits the bill, but with two caveats that will nurture the upcoming diplomatic struggle between Israel and the Palestinians.

Until last week, the Palestinians had two governments: a Fatah government in the West Bank and a Hamas government in Gaza. While the recent Hamas-Fatah deal officially puts an end to this duality, the new Palestinian government is made up of a terrorist organization recognized as such by the US, the EU, Canada, Australia, Japan, and Israel. The Palestinians will try to obtain the “moral laundering” of Hamas (they can count on the support of countries such as Russia, Turkey, Norway, and Switzerland), while Israel will try and convince the EU not to remove Hamas from its black list.

The second caveat has to do with territory. The “Palestinian territory” is not defined. It is disputed. Hamas openly claims all of Palestine, while Fatah will officially do with the entirety of the West Bank, of Gaza, and of East Jerusalem (a review of PA schoolbooks, TV programs, and public speeches in Arabic suggests otherwise). Mahmud Abbas’ claim that the entire West Bank “belongs” to the Palestinians lacks both historical and legal basis. The 1949 “Green Line” was a temporary armistice line between Israel and its Arab aggressors. UN Security Council Resolution 242 does not require an Israeli withdrawal to those lines. The West Bank was ruled (and annexed) by Jordan between 1949 and 1967; there never was a Palestinian state there in the past. The Palestinians are trying to obliterate these facts by arguing that their territorial claims are backed by international law. They are not. But most countries endorse the Palestinians’ territorial claims. As for the Obama Administration, it has neither endorsed nor repudiated President Bush’s letter to Ariel Sharon (from April 14, 2004), which stated inter alia that “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.”

The true purpose of the September vote is not to declare and recognize a state that has already been declared and recognized in the past. Its true purpose is to obtain three things from the international community: 1. To abandon the demand that the Palestinians renounce their claim about the “right of return” as a condition for statehood; 2. To grant legitimacy to Hamas; 3. To de-legitimize any Jewish presence beyond the “green line” (including in Jerusalem’s Old City).

While the September vote at the UN General Assembly will be legally meaningless, it will implicitly recognize the “right of return” and whitewash Hamas’ hideous ideology and crimes. As we Israelis are about to celebrate 63 years of independence, our struggle for it is far from being over.

Vive le Québec libre

2011-04-06T12:36:00.000-07:00

Last week, Montréal University (l’Université du Québec à Montréal, or UQÀM) made me feel good: After I delivered my lecture there, I was surrounded by four bodyguards that rushed me through a backdoor and then into a car that drove off speedily. What fun: I felt like a head of State kept away from the mob or like James Bond narrowly escaping a Soviet trap. Alas for my ego, the true reason for this drama is that I am Israeli.

Although I was invited to give a talk on a non-controversial issue (the geopolitics of energy), what made my presence controversial is that I am Israeli. Some students and their representatives demanded the cancellation of my invitation on the grounds that hosting an Israeli would be an affront to the University, since Israel is “committing genocide in Palestine.” The faculty did not reject the demand outright. Rather, it organized a vote on the issue (a majority of professors rejected the cancellation of my lecture).

Those students who unsuccessfully tried to prevent me from speaking at UQÀM posted around the campus a picture and a quote of mine with the purpose of discrediting me. But both the picture and the quote they picked actually made me proud. The picture (downloaded from my website) shows me in my IDF uniform. As for the quote (also taken from my website), it goes like this: “Saying that you are anti-Zionistic but not anti-Semitic is like saying that you have nothing against the Jews as long as they are vulnerable.” As a Jew, I am proud to be a reserve soldier in the IDF. And as a public speaker and author, I like it when people quote my favorite punch lines.

After I finished my talk, the “questions” from the audience were mostly hysterical (and long) tirades on the “crimes of Zionism.” One student accused me of being a “war criminal” because of my affiliation with Bar-Ilan University (I’m a fellow at BIU’s Center for International Communication). Since BIU runs a couple of programs at the Ariel Academic College, that makes me a war criminal. To which I replied that the Ariel Academic College, as opposed to the Tel-Aviv University campus (where I teach), is not built on the ruins of an Arab village, and that as opposed to my Arab colleagues in Israeli universities, I as a Jew cannot become a professor in an Arab country.

I kept going on with more embarrassing facts that made my accusers look silly. To the point, indeed, that they simply left the room –only to come back later on to scream out “Zionists, Murderers!” with loudspeakers.

“Anti-Semitism is the snobbism of the poor” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre in his Réflexions sur la question juive. Today, anti-Zionism is the snobbism of the ignorant. On many campuses, all you need in order to acquire “respectability” without knowledge is to adopt an outraged attitude on Israel.

The audience at UQÀM was not only composed of Arab inciters and native simpletons. In fact, dozens of people came to me at the end of my talk (and Q&A session) to shake my hand and say thank you. Some were Jews, many were Christians. They all said the same thing to me: “Thank you for saying the truth, thank you for restoring our pride, thank you for giving us hope.”

Those people know that their freedom is at stake. So do more and more Europeans and Americans. They realize that the intellectual terrorism, irrationality and hypocrisy that characterize the treatment of Israel in the West are ultimately a threat to the West itself.

The list of résistants is growing by the day. It includes Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper who declared recently that “those who threaten the existence of the Jewish people are a threat to all of us;” Former Spanish Prime Minister José Mariá Aznar, who says that “Israel’s struggle is our struggle;” Spanish liberal journalist Pilar Rahola, who has written that “if Israel is destroyed, our freedom, modernity and culture will be destroyed;” Italian member of parliament Fiama Nirenstein, who has declared that “the libelous accusations against Israel are an embarrassment to the world;” French Socialist senator Jean-Pierre Plancade, who implores Israel to win for the sake of his freedom; former German Social-democrat senator Thilo Sarrazin, who claims that Islam is overtaking Germany; and British journalist Melanie Philips who shows how Britain is sinking into irrationality.

When de Gaulle exclaimed « Vive le Québec libre! » from a balcony at the Montréal City Hall on July 24, 1967, he meant « freedom » from Anglo-Saxon supremacy. Today, Québec’s freedom, and indeed the freedom of the West, is once again threatened by the hatred and irrationality of which the Jews are always the first, but not last, victims in line. Now that we Jews are sovereign and free, our former oppressors expect us to prevail for their own sake. What an irony –and what a responsibility.

The Price of Madness

2011-03-16T01:08:00.000-07:00

I first heard of the murder in Itamar on Saturday night. Sickened and nauseated to the depth of my soul, I tried to keep my mind occupied by finishing the book I had been reading over the Sabbath –Stef Wertheimer’s autobiography A Man near a Machine. Wertheimer ends his book with an article of faith: by providing work to our Arab neighbors with industrial parks, we shall achieve peace.

Really? Is unemployment what pushes someone to stab with a knife an entire family, including a baby? I very much admire and respect Stef Wertheimer. Fleeing Nazi Germany in 1937, he learned his trade as an apprentice to a refugee who developed an early camera for Zeiss, an optical company. At age 26, he started a cutting-tool factory from his backyard with a borrowed lathe and a loan from a local butcher. Six decades later, the lathe in the backyard is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of metal cutting tools, which are used by car makers like General Motors and Ford. The company, ISCAR, employs 6,000 people and has 50 branches around the world. In 2006, Warren Buffet bought 80% of ISCAR for $4 billion.

As an industrialist, Wertheimer is a genius. But if he thinks that creating industrial jobs in the PA will diffuse hatred, he is dangerously mistaken.

Arab barbarism has nothing to do with statelessness or unemployment. On August 23 and 24, 1929, the Jewish community of Hebron was massacred by Arab mobs armed with clubs, knives and axes. 67 Jews were savagely murdered, and hundreds fled to Jerusalem. Photographs of this massacre display unbearable scenes: a girl struck over the head with a sword and her brain spilling out; a woman with bandaged hands; people with their eyes gouged out.

This was twenty years before Israel declared its independence and 38 years before it took control of the West Bank. Obviously, the Arab perpetuators of the Hebron massacre were not acting out of despair because of “the occupation” or because of economic hardship. When we Jews were occupied by the British, we never stabbed children in the middle of their sleep. The occupied peoples of Tibet, of Northern Cyprus or of Western Sahara have never committed such crimes either.

Nor are the murderers of the Fogel family social outcasts condemned by their people. The murder of the Fogel children and their parents was greeted with jubilation in Gaza. Carnivals were held in the streets as Hamas members handed out sweets. A society that celebrates when babies have they throat cut is sick and sickening. No less sick and sickening are those journalists who describe the victims as “settlers” and the killed baby as a “settler baby.” This language justifies the murder and blames the victims.

As for Abbas, he is a hypocrite. Just two months ago, he awarded $2,000 to the family of a terrorist who attacked IDF soldiers. Last week, the PA's official daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida announced a football tournament named after Wafa Idris, the first female Palestinian suicide bomber. Three weeks ago, Abbas’ PA TV broadcast videos glorifying the terrorist Habash Hanani, who in May 2002 entered Itamar and murdered three Israeli students. Twice (in 2008 and again this past summer), the PA named summer camps after the terrorist Dalal Mughrabi, who in 1978 led the most deadly attack in Israel's history in which 37 civilians were killed in a bus hijacking.

While European media have been mostly ignoring the Itamar massacre only to mention, en passant, some “settlers” killed by “militants” in a typical “cycle of violence,” French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé couldn’t think of a better reaction than to declare that his country is considering recognizing a “Palestinian state.” All this while the Israeli navy just caught a freighter of Iranian weapons heading toward Gaza. So what do the Palestinians get for glorifying throat-cutters and for creating an Iranian basis on Israel’s southern shore? A European declaration that the Palestinians urgently need a state. As for the Libyan victims of Gaddafi’s madness, they might get their “no-flight” zone after they’re all dead.

Which brings me back to Wertheimer. Stef’s father, Eugen, was a German soldier during World War I and he lost a leg in combat. When Hitler stripped the Jews of their German citizenship, Eugen realized that Germany was going mad. He decided to pick up and leave with his family for Palestine. In a way, his amputation saved his life: it is because he had become an invalid for Germany that he couldn’t stand the idea of being stripped of his German citizenship. Pain can make you lucid.

Will the overwhelming pain of the Itamar massacre make us lucid too? It is about time. As we approach the Purim festival we have, like every year, the opportunity to internalize the clear-cut message of the Book of Esther: that when the hatred of Jews reaches a point of no-return, the only way for us to save our lives is to make our enemies pay the price of their madness.

The Case for Psychology

2011-02-22T00:33:00.000-08:00

When Natan Sharansky published The Case for Democracy a year after the US-led invasion of Iraq, he ignited a debate about the likeliness of democracy in the Arab world. President Bush loved the book (The Economist said he was having an intellectual affair with Sharansky) and he recommended it to his aids. The idea that democracy was not incompatible with Arab culture and that its promotion would generate peace in the Middle-East neatly fitted the attempt to justify invading a country where no weapons of mass destruction could be found. But the question of whether democracy can flourish in an Arab country was both tricky and relevant at the time. With the recent upheavals in the Arab world, the answer to this question is critical.

As Israel’s Prime Minister recently observed with a well-deserved dosage of scorn, even The New York Times’ editorialists do not know what will be the outcome of the Arab revolts. Are we witnessing a repetition of 1989 Eastern Europe or of 1979 Iran? How strong is the Muslim Brotherhood? Can democracy take hold in societies with no real middle class to speak of?

Because the answer to these questions is partly speculative, the debate is mostly ideological. Liberals call upon the Google workers of the world to unite, and they accuse skeptics of being party poopers. Conservatives roll their eyes at a déjà-vu situation and accuse the Obama Administration of not having learned from Carter’s betrayal of the Shah.

While neither Sharansky, nor The New York Times or Middle East scholars can know for sure whether democracy will spread in the Arab world, lessons can be drawn from the past and reasonable guesses can be made about the future.

First, signing peace deals with autocrats is indeed a gamble. Since the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, Israel’s academics and journalists have dismissed with corporatist consistency the idea that true peace can only prevail between democracies. Although the “democratic peace” theory was originally spelled out by the liberal Immanuel Kant, our know-it-all academics would have us believe that it is actually a cheap excuse made up by the Right to prevent the otherwise inevitable advent of peace.

Second, no previous anti-autocratic revolt in Arab societies has so far ended-up in democracy. The Nassers and Gaddafis of the post-colonial era overthrew monarchs only to break records of longevity and ruthlessness. The Lebanese, who in 2005 revolted against their Iranian-backed Syrian masters, are now ruled by Hezbollah.

Third, the rare (and one-time) free elections held in Arab countries and societies have generally been won by Islamists. The Front islamique de salut (FIS) won the 1991 elections in Algeria, and Hamas won the 2006 elections in the Palestinian Authority. The same way that the European Commission considers referenda to be a type of exam with a correct and a wrong answer, the State Department seems to assume that free elections simply must be the prelude to free societies.

Fourth, the United States will not let the Egyptian army cut-and-run with the $50 billion of aid invested over three decades. It will do its utmost to keep the Egyptian army in charge while paying lip service to democratic reform. If America is too vocal in its support for democracy in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood will use this to depict liberal parties as pro-Western traitors. If America keeps a low profile while the army pushes off elections, the military regime will be accused of stealing the revolution for the sake of US interests. In both cases, the Islamists will benefit and America will be blamed.

Israel’s detractors claim that a country cannot be both Jewish a democratic. But do they think that a country can be Arab and democratic? Theoretically, it could: if national identity and the rights of minorities can be reconciled in democratic nation-states such as Japan, Sweden or Israel, why can’t they be reconciled in an Arab nation-state? It is hard to answer this question, since History has yet to produce one example of a truly democratic Arab state. Meanwhile, the Arab contention that a country cannot be both Jewish and democratic looks more like a manifestation of what psychologists call “projection.”

Sharansky concludes his book on democracy by saying that all peoples, and not only all people, are created equal. Fair enough. But both his native Russia and his adopted Middle-East strongly suggest that not all cultures have the same attitude toward democracy.

Joseph de Maistre famously dismissed the French concept of the “rights of man” with his typically aristocratic wit: “I have met in my life Frenchmen, Britons, and Russians. I have even heard, thanks to Montesquieu, about Persians. But for Man, I confess that I have never met him, and if he exists it is without my knowledge.” All people, and peoples, are and should be equal. But they are also different. The same way that the Arabs are “projecting” when they accuse Israel of not being democratic, the Americans are “projecting” when they expect the Arabs to give the “correct” answer at the ballot box.

The Sheep, the Wolf, and the Village’s Idiot

2011-01-24T12:55:00.000-08:00

The ideological divide between idealists and realists stems from two sets of assumptions about human nature and reality. Realists are wary of men’s real intentions, while idealists rely on human goodwill: the state of nature is heaven to Rousseau and hell to Hobbes because the former believes that man is naturally good and socially perverted, while the latter assumes that man is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.’ Realists and idealists also see reality from two different viewpoints: to the realist, reality is a given to which man needs to submit and adapt his will; to the idealist, reality is man-made and can therefore be subjugated to man’s will. Machiavelli teaches the Prince how to adapt to reality, while Kant implores him to change and adapt it to his ideals.

These two different sets of assumptions – Is man good or bad? Is reality stronger than human will or the other way round? – are at the core of the ideological divide between Right and Left in open societies, and this debate applies to foreign policy.

This debate is ideological precisely because one cannot prove scientifically whether man is intrinsically good or bad, and whether reality is amendable to human will. History, however, provides a useful list of examples that can help make a reasonable guess. So does the gauging of failed and successful policies. In that regard, President Obama has made a remarkable contribution (albeit inadvertently) to an age-old philosophical inquiry.

In his Cairo speech (June 2009), Barack Obama tried to sweet-talk the Muslim world into abandoning its animosity toward America. A year-and-a-half later, it would be an understatement to say that his overtures have been rebuffed. Turkey, once a close ally of the US and Israel, has become Iran’s foremost apologist. Iran continues to defy the United States by pursuing its nuclear program and by progressively overtaking Iraq and Lebanon. The Talibans are as determined as ever in Afghanistan and in Pakistan. Syria keeps deepening its ties with Iran and Hezbollah despite (or because of) America’s gestures (such as resending a US Ambassador to Damascus). And now, the pro-Western and anti-Islamist regime of Ben-Ali has been overthrown in Tunsia, while Hezbollah is about to effectively run Lebanon’s next government.

It would be admittedly unfair to focus on President’s Obama’s failure. For his confidence that Islamists would be tamed with a good speech is hardly different from Woodrow Wilson’s assumption that the League of Nations would keep German militarism in check, or from Jimmy Carter’s belief that Khomeini was a human rights activist.

Wilson, Carter and Obama crashed down to reality because they failed to recognize that some ideologies are based on the need for a sworn enemy. As Professor Emmanuel Sivan explains in his book The Clash within Islam, jihad creates a dichotomy “between Muslim and all external, heretical groups, which are fundamentally evil … Thus coexistence over time is certainly not a plausible political option.” Indeed, no amount of goodwill or elevated rhetoric can appease ideologies that make the eternal struggle against “The Enemy” a divine commend or the founding principle of collective identity.

Naïveté has a price –a price that America has been able to afford thanks to its power and geography. Israel, by contrast, has no strategic tolerance for silliness (though it certainly has a political attraction to it). A popular Israeli joke offers the ultimate answer to the realism vs. idealism debate in foreign policy: Isaiah prophesizes that one day the sheep will lie down peacefully next to the wolf; yet even when the dream comes true it will be safer to be the wolf. Especially, the joke could have added, if the sheep is being watched by the village’s idiot.

Trading Truth for Money

2011-01-06T06:54:00.000-08:00

Yesterday (Jan. 5), the Knesset decided to establish a parliamentary committee to examine international sources of funding for Israeli organizations that “aid the de-legitimization of Israel through harming IDF soldiers.” While the decision enjoyed a wide support (41 in favor, 16 against), it turned into a heated spat between the Right and the Left.

The Knesset’s decision was adopted following revelations by organizations such as NGO Monitor and Im Tirtzu that many Israeli NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) testified against Israel in the Goldstone Report; that they are involved in the issuing of arrest warrants against Israeli politicians and IDF officers in Europe; and that some of those NGOs’ funding comes from foreign governments.

Those who oppose yesterday’s decision generally make two points: a. the organizations that stand accused deal with human rights and therefore only deserve praise and protection; b. their sources of funding are already public knowledge, so there is no need to double-check them.

Both claims are half-true.

The same way that the UN “Human Rights Council” is dominated by human rights abusers, many NGOs use the “human rights” fig leaf to harass democracies at war and to whitewash murderous regimes. Why else would the Human Rights Council be presided by Thailand (since June 2010) and why else would Human Rights Watch do fundraising in Saudi Arabia (as revealed by the Wall Street Journal in July 2009)? Not all human rights organizations in Israel and in the world are a sham, of course. Some actually do care for human rights and dignity. But for many NGOs (including Israeli NGOs that are trying to get IDF officers arrested in London), using the “human rights” agenda has become a clever way of enjoying impunity for political activities that have hardly anything to do with human rights.

Claiming that the sources of funding for Israeli NGOs are already public knowledge is no less misleading. Of course, Israeli NGOs report every penny raised and spent to the Non-Profit Authority. But many funds and foundations that donate money to Israeli NGOs are themselves supported by individuals, organizations and governments whose name and identity do not appear when NGOs report their donations. The public information disclosed by Israeli NGOs on their donations does not reveal the entire money trail –a trail that often includes foreign governments. The same way that many “human rights” organizations have nothing to do with human rights, those organizations call themselves “non-governmental” while being funded by governments.

Many Israeli NGOs have simply gotten used to their sense of impunity. So have Israeli universities. Last week, for example, Ma’ariv journalist Kalman Liebskind caught Ben-Gurion University (BGU) red-handed lying to its donors.

Liebskind revealed that BGU’s French donors recently asked for explanations about reports that the University’s Political Science Department has become a uniform hub of radical politics. To which the University replied (via its representative for French speaking Europe) that many of the Department’s professors are “right-wing” and even listed them: David Newman, Danny Filc, and Renée Poznanski. Now, all three proudly define themselves as left-wingers –and for good reasons too. They’ve all signed petitions calling for Israeli soldiers not to serve in the disputed territories. Filc is a Board member of Physicians for Human Rights. David Newman is known for lambasting NGO Monitor and Im Tirtzu. One wonders if Newman, Filc and Poznanski will now sue their university for libel…

BGU’s reply contains another fantastic claim: that the Israeli Council for Higher Education is dominated by the Right, especially Shas and Israel Beitenu. In truth, however, the Council is a non-political body composed mostly of tenured professors. Claiming the Shas and Israel Beitenu are strongly represented at the Council is pure science fiction.

BGU seems to assume that its donors don’t have access to Google. Or rather, it suffers from the same syndrome than the so-called human rights NGOs: the syndrome of abusing your respectability to fool people.

As Abraham Lincoln said: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” Thanks to the Internet, most people can’t be fooled most of the time, and trading truth for money is no longer a profitable business.

The Core Fallacies

2010-12-26T05:54:00.000-08:00

Most diplomats and journalists repeat at will that Israel and the Palestinians need to address the “core issues” such as borders and refugees in order to make peace. Yet on both issues, historical and legal fallacies have become the conventional wisdom.

On borders, the conventional wisdom is that Israel must “return to the 1967 borders.” Indeed, the Palestinian Authority (PA) is asking the world to recognize a Palestinian state “within the 1967 borders.” But such “borders” never existed. The 1949 Rhodes Agreements established an armistice line between Israel and Jordan, a line that was defined as “temporary” upon Jordan’s insistence, and that had no political or legal significance so as not to prejudice future negotiations on final borders. The armistice demarcation line represented nothing more than the lines of deployment of the forces involved in the conflict on the day a ceasefire was declared. The line was demarcated on the map attached to the Rhodes Agreements with a green marker pen and hence received the name "Green Line."

UN Security Council Resolution 62 (November 16, 1948) stressed the temporary nature of the armistice lines that were to be maintained “during the transition to permanent peace in Palestine.” This meant, and still means, that future permanent borders would be negotiated in the framework of a peace agreement, and that those borders would be different from the temporary armistice lines. As Judge Steven Schwebel (former President of the International Court of Justice) explained: "The armistice agreements of 1949 expressly preserved the territorial claims of all parties and did not purport to establish definitive boundaries between them." This is why UN Security Council Resolution 242 (November 22, 1967) calls for Israel’s withdrawal “from territories” to agreed-upon and defensible boundaries –not to the temporary and indefensible armistice lines of 1949.

On refugees, the conventional wisdom is that the Palestinians’ claim is legally and historically justified but that its actual implementation would turn the two-state solution on its head. But the Palestinians’ claim on refugees is baseless both legally and historically.

The Palestinians claim that Palestinian refugees are entitled to "return" to Israel according to UN resolutions. This is untrue. The often-quoted UN General Assembly resolution 194 (December 11, 1948), like all General Assembly resolutions, is not binding in international law. General Assembly resolutions are mere recommendations. Resolution 194 states among other things that "the refugees wishing to return to their houses and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so." How would such "refugees" possibly live at peace with their neighbors today, more than sixty years after their parents and grandparents left? As Abba Eban said, "hundreds of thousands of people would be introduced into a state whose existence they oppose and whose destruction they are resolved to seek."

The Palestinians’ claim on refugees is not only legally baseless. It is also historically absurd. The 1948 Arab aggression against Israel created a double refugee problem. About 900,000 Jews were expelled from Arab and Muslim countries, while about 600,000 Arabs fled the British Mandate. For tragic as they were, these two refugee problems only represented about 3% of the world’s refugee population at the time. And while the world’s refugees were all treated by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), it is only for the Palestinians that a special UN agency was created (UNWRA). UNHCR defines a refugee is a person outside the country of his or her nationality as a result of expulsion, but UNRWA extends this definition to the refugees' descendants. Which is why the number of refugees worldwide has decreased from about 60 million in 1948 to about 17 million today, while the number of Palestinian "refugees" has increased from about 600,000 in 1948 to about seven million today.

If the UN were to abandon this double-standard, the "Palestinian refugee problem" would be easily solved. Of the 600,000 refugees from 1948, about 100,000 are still alive, and most of them are old. Israel would have no problem integrating them. Alternatively, if UNRWA's definition of a refugee was to be applied to the 25 million refugees from the partition of India in 1947, to the 15 million German refugees who fled Eastern Europe in 1945, or to the 1.5 million refugees of the 1922 conflict between Turkey and Greece, then dozens of millions of German "refugees" would have to "return" to Poland, and hundreds of millions of "refugees" would have to re-cross the border between India and Pakistan.

The Palestinians want to invade Israel with the descendants (or alleged descendants) of the 1948 Arab refugees, but they won't accept a single Jewish refugee into the Palestinian state that they want to establish. Jews have lived peacefully and uninterruptedly in Hebron for generations. The Arab pogrom of 1929 emptied Hebron of its Jews for the first time in History. But the Arabs deny the rights of the Jews whose parents were murdered in 1929 to return to their homes, while they demand that the descendants of the Arab refugees who fled because of the Arab war of aggression in 1948 return to what is Israel today. This is as absurd as it is immoral.

Which also raises the question of minorities in the framework of the "two state solution." Why should there be an Arab minority in the Jewish state and no Jewish minority in the Arab state? There are Hindus in Pakistan and Muslims in India. About 20% of Israel's citizens are Arabs, but the Palestinians will not tolerate a Jewish minority. Indeed, PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas declared to journalists in Ramallah on December 25, 2010, that there will be no room for Israelis in a Palestinian state.

Western diplomats and journalists must ask themselves why they tolerate this Arab intolerance. They must also be taken to task for laundering Palestinian propaganda. For none of the “core issues” will be solved as long as they are based on historical and legal falsifications.

The Meaning of Jewish Brotherhood

2010-12-13T07:11:00.000-08:00

Yehuda Avner’s new book, The Prime Ministers (Toby Press, 2010), is the most informative, well-written and heart-touching memoir I’ve read in years.

Avner left Britain at the age of nineteen for British Palestine right before Israel’s independence. He joined the Foreign Office and later got a job as an English speechwriter for the Prime Minister –a position he kept under Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, and Menachem Begin. He was a personal witness to those leaders’ intimacy, dilemmas, and decisions.

Levi Eshkol comes out as a character that was borrowed from an Isaac Bashevis Singer novel to lead the Jewish state, almost by accident, at its most fateful hour (“Vus rett der goy?” [What’s the goy talking about?] he asked his aid, in Yiddish, unable to make sense of President Johnson’s Texan babble as the latter was driving high-speed around his ranch).

Golda Meir emerges as down-to-earth and burnt-out grandma who successfully deployed her iron will after the terrifying setbacks of October 1973, but who would rather have been spared the hardships that life had in store for her (“I like nothing better than to sit in an armchair doing nothing” she candidly confessed to Oriana Fallaci).

Yitzhak Rabin reveals himself as a man of impeccable integrity with a strong analytical mind. Jews around the world came to admire him after the Entebbe rescue operation, though some had an awkward way of expressing their admiration (One entry in the Prime Minister’s official guestbook after a party hosted for American Jews reads thus: “I congratulate you on your extraordinary rescue feat. But as a clinical psychologist I detect in you a bashful timid reserve. Diagnostically, I would say you have a depressive personality. Its root cause is an inability to elicit love. You’re in search of a hero. Henry Kissinger wrestles with the same problem”).

As for Menachem Begin, he is the book’s hero. And indeed, he was a Jewish hero, as well as a true gentleman who, while constantly haunted by a dreadful past, was always ready to crack a good joke (“Marriage is not a word, it’s a sentence” he concluded after unsuccessfully trying to help his wife put on her shoes before landing).

The book also has an anti-hero, albeit a discreet one mentioned en passant at the beginning and at the end. He caught my attention for a reason that is relevant to us today.

Yossel Kolowitz was an Auschwitz survivor who had lost his family in the Holocaust, and a haredi Jew who was on the ship that brought Yehuda Avner to British Palestine in 1947. In the inner pocket of his long black coat were two letters –both from relatives of his who lived in Palestine and were offering him a home.

The first letter was from his ultra-Orthodox uncle from Meah Shearim who was asking him, as the sole survivor of his family, to perpetuate the Jewish people’s tradition and establish a God-fearing family in Jerusalem. The second letter was from another uncle, a member of the secular Mishmar HaEmek kibbutz. He was imploring him to join the kibbutz, to “get rid of that yeshiva garb” and become “a new Jew.” Yossel was agonizing about what to do, and the reader is left wondering what happened to him.

But Yossel Kolowitz surprisingly reappears at the end of the book. As Yehuda Avner addresses a crowd of Los Angeles Jews in November 1982, talking about his first sight of Haifa in 1947 from the deck of a ship called the Aegan Star, a man with tinted blond hair known by the audience as Jay Cole interrupts Avner claiming that he too had been on the Aegan Star. He had. It was Yossel Kolowitz.

Yossel, at the end, had opted for the socialist uncle and the kibbutz life. He married and had two sons. He served in the IDF, was wounded during the Six Day War, and decided he needed a break. He chose California, where he made a living as a plumber. Soon, his two sons joined him and made his plumbing business prosper. They too got married, but to non-Jews.

“Don’t think I’m not heartbroken. Of course I’m heartbroken” admitted Yossel to Avner. “I’m forever a survivor. So just keep your opinions to yourself, hotshot, and don’t start telling me what’s right and what’s wrong.”

We are not allowed to judge people whose travails we haven’t experienced, the Ethics of the Fathers (“Pirkei Avot”) teaches us. Surely, no one is entitled to judge Yossel Kolowitz. But there is a lesson to be learned from his personal tragedy.

In truth, Yossel had a choice between two unattractive options. Either continue to live and dress as an eighteenth century Polish Jew and stay out of the Jewish national renaissance after nearly two-thousand years of exile. Or abandon an exceptional culture and civilization, while carrying guilt feelings towards his vanished family.

Yossel had a choice between two bad options because too many Jews at the time were torn apart.

Not that the divisions between the secular and religious, Ashkenazi and Sephardic, etc. have disappeared. But it is time to get pass them. In the Bible, the hatred between Joseph and his brothers was due to a lack of respect and humility. Joseph eventually learned humility after spending twelve years in jail. And his brothers recognized the folly of their jealousy after realizing what pain they had caused to their father. Only after Joseph came to fully admit the true source of his powers, and only after his brothers had learned to love their father more than they hated their brother, could the family be re-united.

We Jews need to remember and internalize the meaning of Jewish brotherhood. For the sake of Yossel, let us learn the lesson of Joseph.

Why Do European Socialists Like Hanukah?

2010-11-30T12:22:00.000-08:00

Hanukah, as we know, commemorates a miracle. This year, I witnessed one firsthand.

I just gave a lecture in Toulouse, France, on “The Political Ideology of Israel’s De-Legitimization.” On the conference’s panels were French intellectuals and public figures who refuse to write and talk in Newspeak, such as Richard Prasquier (President of CRIF), Yvan Rioufiol (Le Figaro’s least politically correct columnist), Philippe Karsenty (a media analyst who’s been fighting, with guts and resilience, the French state TV channel France 2 on the Al-Dura blood libel), Robert Redecker (a French philosophy professor who lives under permanent police protection because of a fatwa issued against him for a critical article he once wrote on Islam), and Jacques Tarnero (a French author and filmmaker who argues that European opinion makers are trying to absolve Europe from the Holocaust by accusing Israel of behaving like its former torturers).

There was also a French Senator, Jean-Pierre Plancade. Originally a member of the French Socialist Party, he is now an independent.

Plancade ended his talk by begging the Jews to bring light to the world, and he referred to the upcoming Hanukah holiday to make his point. Coming from a politician who rose within a party that is both staunchly secular and sympathetic to the Palestinian narrative, those were striking words indeed.

Why do these people side with Israel and the Jews? Because they realize that their own freedom is threatened by Israel’s enemies. As Jacques Tarnero explained during the conference, he feels like France is going through another Dreyfus Affair: The France 2 channel knows and privately admits that it is lying about the Al-Dura Affair, but the media and the Government are circling the wagons around Charles Enderlin because Raison d’État and corporate solidarity come before the truth. Who cares if Daniel Pearl was beheaded to “avenge” the blood of Muhammad Al-Dura, and if Al-Dura has become an icon to justify the murder of Jews?

The panel I attended in Toulouse was not an isolated event. More and more Europeans are speaking out against the assault on truth and freedom, against the appeasement of Islamism, and against the demonization of Israel. Former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar says that if Israel is vanquished, the West is finished. His “Friends of Israel Initiative” is gaining new recruits by the day. German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently declared that “multiculturalism in Germany has failed” –a polite way of saying that most of Germany’s Turkish immigrants never integrated into German society. More and more political parties in Europe are gaining ground on platforms that call for a restriction of Muslim immigration and for the defense of Western values.

Merkel’s comments came in the wake of a new book that is both hugely popular and controversial: Deutschland Schafft sich ab (“Germany Does Away with Itself”) by German politician Thilo Sarrazin. Like Plancade, Sarrazin is a Socialist, a left-winger who, because he is speaking out his mind about Islam and the West, is being vilified and ostracized.

For what did Sarrazin write, after all? That Germany's immigrant Muslim population is reluctant to integrate and tends to rely more on social services than to be productive, and that the Muslim population growth may well overwhelm the German population within a couple of generations at the current rate. True, Sarrazin also made silly comments on gene and intelligence, but that’s not why he is under attack. He is under attack for addressing a topic that is unofficially but effectively banned from public discourse.

The fact that Sarrazin’s book sold out after a few days says a lot about what many Germans want to hear and about what their elites want to silence.

As Matthias Matussek from Der Spiegel wrote: "Political correctness is silencing an important debate … Sarrazin's findings on the failed integration of Turkish and Arab immigrants are beyond any doubt. He has been forced out of the Bundesbank. The SPD wants to kick him out of the party, too. Invitations previously extended to Sarrazin are being withdrawn. The culture page editors at the German weekly Die Zeit are crying foul and the editors at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung are damning Sarrazin for passages he didn't even write. But what all these technicians of exclusion fail to see is that you cannot cast away the very thing that Sarrazin embodies: the anger of people who are sick and tired—after putting a long and arduous process of Enlightenment behind them—of being confronted with pre-Enlightenment elements that are returning to the center of our society.”

Instead of trying to please Europe’s appeasers, Israel should assist Europe’s résistants. As more and more Europeans are showing courage and moral clarity, let us do what they expect from us: lead the struggle of the Maccabees and dissipate darkness with the lights of Hanukah.

Mount Scopus or Mount Olympus?

2010-11-09T01:51:00.000-08:00

On November 2nd, 2010, the Knesset’s Education Commission hosted a special hearing under the title: “The Exclusion of Zionistic Positions in Academia.” The event was chaired by MK Zevulun Orlev and attended, among others, by Education Minister Gideon Saar, by members of Knesset from various political parties, by high-ranking representatives of Israeli universities, by Israeli NGOs, and by ordinary citizens.

Two Israeli NGOs, the Institute for Zionist Strategies (IZS) and Im Tirtzu, were asked to present the main conclusions of their study on what they claim to be the growingly post-Zionistic narratives of Israel’s political science and sociology departments. In October 2010, the IZS published a 122 page document called “Post-Zionism in Academia.” Im Tirtzu, for its part, published in May 2010 a 64 page document called “Anti-Zionistic Incitement and Bias in Universities.” Both publications include an extensive review of syllabi, and both reach the conclusion that students are mostly taught a one-sided and derogatory description of nationalism in general and of Zionism in particular. Im Tirtzu’s report also includes testimonies of students about what they claim to be the one-sidedness and political intolerance of their professors, as well as a review of the political petitions signed by Israeli academics.

Instead of addressing the issues raised by the IZS and by Im Tirtzu, Israel’s academic establishment has reacted with scorn and arrogance. At the Knesset hearing, BGU Rector Prof. Zvi Hacohen interrupted the IZS’s presentation, calling it “nonsense” and claiming (without proving it) that the IZS’s paper does not meet the most basic criteria of academic research. Tel-Aviv University Rector Prof. Aharon Shai also claimed that the IZS’s paper is not a research paper (without explaining why) and added that adopting an academic ethical code (as proposed by Education Minister Gideon Saar at the beginning of the hearing) would “destroy Israeli Academia.”

Members of Knesset, for their part, were divided. Meretz MKs Haim Oron and Nitzav Horowitz claimed that the alleged political bias of Israel’s political science departments should be discussed at the Higher Education Committee (HEC) and not at the Knesset. To which Kadima MK Ronit Tirosh replied that expecting the HEC to discuss the issue is naïve at best and hypocritical at worst: since the HEC is mostly composed of University professors, it automatically circles the wagons around its peers. Tirosh, of course, could have added that, as the body that represents tax-paying citizens, the Knesset is entitled to check if the tax money it levies from citizens and transfers to universities is used to pay the salaries of professors who call for the international boycott of Israel.

Two days after the Knesset hearing, Ha’aretz came out to the defense of the universities by claiming that adopting an ethical code would harm academic freedom. Ha’aretz wrote that Gideon Saar proposed such a code as a result of the lobbying of Im Tirtzu. But, in fact, the idea of an academic ethical code for Israel was first proposed by Prof. Amnon Rubinstein, himself a renowned Israeli academic with impeccable liberal credentials. Moreover, BGU does have an ethical code (it is the only Israeli university to have one). Did BGU adopt an ethical code to “destroy Israeli Academia?”

Amnon Rubinstein advocates the adoption of an ethical code for Israeli universities in his article “Academic Freedom of Expression” to be published this month in the IDC’s journal Law and Business (a draft of the article is posted on Rubinstein’s personal website). The article addresses, among other things, the question as to whether calls from certain Israeli academics to boycott Israel are part of academic freedom of expression.

Rubinstein argues that professors enjoy a special status because their students have to listen to them and take their exams in order to succeed (certainly for mandatory classes). So professors have obligations precisely because they have privileges. Rubinstein is of the opinion that there is no appropriate legal mechanism in Israel to ensure that professors do not abuse their freedom of expression and do respect the obligations that stem from their privileges.

Thus does Rubinstein recommend the adoption of an academic ethical code in Israel in order to clearly define what constitutes and what does not constitute academic freedom of expression. In the United States, such a code was adopted in 1940 by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and it has been revised and updated ever since. The AAUP’s code states, among other things, that professors “should at all times be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, should show respect for the opinions of others.”

Those in Israel who oppose the adoption of an academic ethical code would do a service to the public debate by presenting sound arguments instead of claiming that such a code would “destroy Israeli Academia” and that Gideon Saar is a pawn of Im Tirtzu. Until they do, one will have reasonable reasons to assume that they have a problem with accuracy, restraint, and respect for the opinions of others.

Reclaiming Rabin’s Legacy

2010-10-28T03:35:00.000-07:00

How did the man who declared that he would “break the bones” of the Palestinians become the Mahatma Gandhi of the Israeli Left? Like every year, the commemoration of Yitzhak Rabin’s murder is an exercise in historical falsification and emotional intimidation. It is time to set the record straight.

Rabin grew up in the nationalistic Palmah movement. He was a pure sabra: a Jew from Sparta, not Athens, who was told to fight rather than to think. A talented officer, he followed the ideal career of the Ashkenazi ruling class: IDF Officer, Chief of Staff, Ambassador to the US, Labor MK, Prime Minister —a true WASP (White, Ashkenazi, Sabra Paratrooper).

In his two three-year stints as Prime Minister (1974-1977 and 1992-1995), Rabin was maneuvered into foreign policy decisions he had originally opposed, and in both cases he paved the way to the electoral victory of the Right. In 1975, Rabin was basically coerced by Gerald Ford and Henri Kissinger to withdraw from about 20% of the Sinai Peninsula in order for the US to convince Sadat that abandoning the Egyptian-Soviet alliance made sense. And when Rabin came back to power in 1992, he was not a leader who had “seen the light” as some would have us believe, but rather a man who was manipulated into signing a deal he rightly suspected to be risky.

Rabin wanted to organize elections in the territories to set up a local Palestinian leadership with which Israel would negotiate the interim status of the West Bank and Gaza, as outlined in the 1989 Israeli Peace Initiative. Rabin believed that a moderate, non-PLO Palestinian leadership could emerge in the territories. By contrast, Peres was of the opinion that Israel should establish direct contacts with the PLO and test the seriousness of the Palestinian leadership in Tunis.

Upon the presentation of his government to the Knesset in July 1992, Rabin declared Israel’s commitment to the strengthening of “strategic” settlements in the West Bank (“The Government will continue to enhance and strengthen Jewish settlement along the lines of confrontation, due to their importance for security, and in Greater Jerusalem”). Rabin also ruled out any negotiation over Jerusalem (“The Government is firm in its resolve that Jerusalem will not be open to negotiation;” “whoever believes that any Government of Israel can compromise on united Jerusalem fools himself. We, Israel, the Jewish people, will never negotiate the fate of Jerusalem. It is ours and ours forever”). And he warned that Israel would favor its security over its search for peace (“Security takes preference even over peace”).

After the June 1992 elections, Rabin reluctantly gave the Foreign Affairs portfolio to his rival Shimon Peres. It was agreed between Rabin and Peres that Rabin would be responsible for Israel’s relations with the United States and for the bilateral negotiations with the Palestinian delegation in Washington, and that Elyakim Rubinstein would remain head of the Israeli delegation in Washington. Peres’ role with regard to the peace process was to be confined to the BS “multilateral negotiations.” One month after the formation of his government, Rabin reluctantly agreed to nominate Yossi Beilin as Deputy Foreign Minister.

In September 1992, as Beilin was frustrated with his lack of control over the bilateral negotiations, his Norwegian counterpart Jan Egeland paid a visit to Israel and reminded Beilin about the idea of the secret channel on which he had agreed three months earlier with Yair Hirschfeld, Faisal Husseini and Terje Larsen. Beilin and Egeland agreed to start secret talks between Israel and the PLO in Oslo. Since Rabin had forbidden Peres himself to meet with Faisal Husseini, Beilin could not reasonably expect Peres to allow him to meet with PLO representatives in Oslo. Consequently, Beilin asked Hirschfeld to travel to Oslo and to start secret negotiations with the PLO. Rabin himself was unaware of these secret talks.

When Peres reported to Rabin about the Oslo channel, Rabin was not enthusiastic, and he warned Peres not to torpedo the Washington talks. However, Rabin apparently did not believe that the secret discussions in Oslo would bring substantial results, and so he let Peres go ahead.

During his elections campaign in 1992, Rabin had committed to sign an interim agreement with the Palestinians within nine months. In March 1993 (eight months after the elections), there was no prospect of an interim agreement with the Palestinians through the Washington talks. By contrast, Hirschfeld (together with Ron Pundak) had agreed on a declaration of principles with Mahmoud Abbas, and all they needed was Rabin’s green light.

In early May 1993, Peres managed to convince Rabin that the Oslo track was the Government’s last hope, and Rabin agreed to send the Director General of the Foreign Ministry, Uri Savir, to Oslo. However, a few days later, Rabin sent a letter to Peres, in which he denounced the Oslo process. Rabin claimed in his letter that the secret Oslo talks were actually undermining the peace process and that the PLO in Tunis was manipulating Israel in Oslo in order to torpedo the Washington talks.

Eventually, Rabin gave his green light to Oslo because he had been unable to reach an agreement with the Palestinians in Washington. But he did not initiate this process and he had serious reservations about it.

Rabin was an honest and decent man who cared about the well-being of his soldiers and the safety of his country. He was a talented army officer; as a political leader he was altogether uncharismatic, gauche, and pragmatic. He eventually endorsed and signed an agreement which others had conceived and negotiated without his knowledge and against his electoral platform. The fact that he paid with his life for the controversial Oslo Agreements is a tragedy, and nobody has a monopoly over the pain and shame that fell upon us in November 1995.

Turning Rabin into a born-again peacenik is a factual and historical fraud. The two gigantic doves that ornate the Rabin Center in Tel-Aviv are a mixture of esthetical bad taste and intellectual dishonesty. As we commemorate Rabin’s tragic death, let us honor his memory by respecting him for what he was rather for what he wasn’t.

Which Part of “Jewish State” Don’t You Understand?

2010-10-10T07:52:00.000-07:00

The new citizenship law recently proposed by the Government once again raises the question of why Israel should define itself as a Jewish state and what this definition means in the first place.

According to the proposed law, naturalized citizens will have to pledge their allegiance to Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state.” Imagine if France would pass a law stating that France is a French state, if Japan would pass a law stating that Japan is a Japanese state, or if Sweden would pass a law stating that Sweden is a Swedish state. This would sound both silly and unnecessary. Far from being ridiculed for stating the obvious, however, Israel is being taken to task for stating the odious.

When the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) recommended in September 1947 that the British Mandate in Palestine be divided between a Jewish state for the Jews and an Arab state for the Arabs, everyone understood that this meant each nation would have its own nation-state (though many opposed the idea). In May 1948, Israel’s Declaration of Independence clearly proclaimed the establishment of a “Jewish state” and specified that this state would both be the nation-state of the Jewish people and respect the civil rights of the country’s non-Jewish minorities.

In recent years, the very legitimacy of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people has been under attack. Sophisticated people realize that they cannot logically question the legitimacy of the Jewish nation-state without doing the same for every nation-state (indeed, most countries in the world today are nation-states). Hence their claim (itself stated in the PLO charter and recently popularized by Prof. Shlomo Sand), that the Jews do not constitute a nation but only a religion, and thus that a Jewish state is not a nation-state but a religious state. Therefore, its legitimacy can be challenged without questioning the principle of self-determination.

But who are those people to decide whether or not the Jews constitute a nation? Scholars have been debating for at least a couple of centuries about what makes a nation a nation (Ernest Renan called it “a soul, a spiritual principle”). In recent years, many attempts have been made to “deconstruct” the very concept of national identity (Benedict Anderson comes to mind). But the bottom line is that if people define themselves as a nation and are ready to fight in order to preserve their national independence or identity (whether this identity is real or “imagined” as Anderson would put it), then they obviously do constitute a nation.

How people define their national identity is also their own business. Japan’s definition is ethnic, while America’s is ideological, and France’s is cultural (though this is a hotly debated issue in France). Moreover, religion is central to the national identity of many nations. Catholicism is intrinsically linked to the national identity of Poland, Ireland, and Italy. Shinto is indissociable from Japan. The Queen of England is both Head of State and Head of the Anglican Church. Afghanistan, Iran, Mauritania and Pakistan, are all “Islamic Republics.” Surely, the fact that there is a religious dimension to the Jewish definition of national identity is no exception.

Instead of saying that Judaism does indeed constitute part of Jewish identity and that there is nothing wrong with that, many Israelis feel the need to be apologetic about the religious component of Jewish national identity and therefore suggest redefining this identity in purely secular terms. Such is the essence of Amnon Rubinstein’s recent article in Azure (“The Curious Case of Jewish Democracy,” Azure 41, Summer 2010). He suggests a purely “national-cultural reinterpretation” of Jewish identity.

Though a professed liberal, Rubinstein is suggesting something illiberal: that the state should choose, institutionalize and favor one specific definition of national identity despite the will of many citizens. A true liberal, however, would say that it is not the state’s business to define and impose a definition of its national identity over all its citizens.

Rubinstein, however, has the merit of addressing the core issue: can and should the Jews keep their national identity and rights while abandoning the traditional Jewish definition of nationhood? In the Biblical narrative, Jewish faith is intrinsically connected to Jewish identity and nationhood. Until Emancipation, Jews defined their identity in purely religious terms. Zionism tried to undo that link by redefining Jewish identity based on territory, language, and history. The problem is that it is the non-Jews who won’t take it.

The same way that Jews, as individuals, were not left alone in Europe after assimilating, Israel, as a state, was never left alone when it was established as a secular nation-state. No matter how hard the Jews tried to stop being Jewish in Europe, they were still perceived and reviled as such by the gentiles. And no matter how secular Israel was when it was established, it was opposed by the Vatican and by the Muslim world on religious grounds. Jewish “rationality” won’t rid the world of its irrationality. Even if Israel were to officially declare itself a purely secular nation-state and retreat to the armistice lines of 1949, it would still be reviled and hated (as it was before 1967) by a plethora of zealots –from devout Muslims to leftist Europeans.

This is a point that Rubinstein, with all his brilliance, does not seem to get.

It says in the Book of Deuteronomy: "And among those peoples, you shall not find any rest for the sole of your foot." Rabbi Yitzhak Arama writes in his book Akedat Yitzhak that this verse teaches us that the Jews will never be able to completely assimilate among the nations, and will never be able to forget who they are. No matter how hard Jews try to forget and to be forgotten, the nations will always remind them that they are Jewish. The Midrash (Bereshit Rabah) says there is a connection between the above verse and the one in Genesis describing the return of the dove to Noah's Arch ("And the dove did not find any rest for the sole of her foot, so she came back to the ark").

The Midrash teaches us that we can turn the curse of "There shall be no rest for the sole of your foot" into a blessing. For if the Jews had found a rest for the sole of their foot in Exile, they would never have come back to the Ark, both physically and spiritually.

The Jews came back to the ark physically. Only when they do so spiritually as well will they not only be left alone, but also be respected and admired.

Divo Giulio

2010-09-30T13:11:00.000-07:00

Former Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti used to quip that holding people in low esteem might be a sin, but at least you can hardly go wrong. In diplomacy, lying might be a sin but at least it keeps you from being ostracized.

Whoever does not lie to himself about the true causes of the Arab-Israeli conflict and about the chances of resolving it is automatically banned from polite society. Such is the fate of Avigdor Lieberman.

Western media systematically depict Lieberman’s party (Israel Beiteinu) as extreme or far-right wing, and keep claiming that his platform is based on the forced transfer of Arabs. Many journalists are simply lazy and follow the herd. But most of them, especially those who are posted in Israel, know that they are lying when they describe Lieberman the way they do.

What, exactly, is far-right wing about a party that supports the creation of a Palestinian state and that has a liberal (if not anti-clerical) social agenda (such as promoting civil unions and loosening the grip of Israel’s Orthodox rabbinate over people’s lives)? Israel Beiteinu may have a strongly patriotic rhetoric and platform (which are hardly followed by action and legislation) but, in truth, its ideology is closer to the defunct Shinui party than to the National Union. Indeed, when Tzipi Livni tried to form a coalition with Lieberman after the 2009 elections, she kept insisting (rightly) that Kadima and Israel Beiteinu have similar platforms when it comes to the Palestinian issue and to matters of state and religion. Only after she failed to cut a deal with Lieberman, did Livni join the choir by describing him as a madcap extremist.

Similarly, foreign leaders and journalist demonize Lieberman out of hypocrisy and laziness. It is because Lieberman challenges the political correctness and institutionalized lies of Western chancelleries and Arab leaders that he is blacklisted.

Take The Economist. It wrote last week (“Keep on fudging,” Sept. 23rd) that “the pre-1967 line separating Israel from the Palestinian territories should be adjusted, so long as the Palestinians get land swaps of equal size and quality” and that Benjamin Netanyahu “would do well to dump Avigdor Lieberman, the rough-edged foreign minister, whose far-right group still wants to “transfer” Arab-populated parts of Israel to a future Palestinian state.” What The Economist is saying is that Lieberman should be fired for agreeing with The Economist. For Lieberman does support land swaps. Except that he’d rather swap Jewish-populated parts of a future Palestinian state with Arab-populated parts of the State of Israel than with unpopulated lands. What’s wrong with that? Is The Economist insinuating that the presence of Arab populations is the in the to-be-swapped lands is likely to affect the “quality” of these lands?

Or take Nicolas Sarkozy, who has compared Lieberman to Jean-Marie Le Pen. When Sarkozy hosted Mahmoud Abbas at the Élysée on Monday, he wondered out loud why the seventeen year-old “peace process” between Israel and the Palestinians is still a process with no peace in sight. There must be “method” problem said Sarkozy. Of course, the problem is not methodical, but conceptual. The Palestinians are at war with Israel not because of 1967 but because of 1948. This is why there was no peace before 1967 and this is why proposals to return to the pre-1967 status-quo (with minor changes) have been rejected by Arafat (in July and December 2000) and by Abbas (in September 2008).

Lieberman’s speech at the General Assembly on Tuesday accurately analyzed the reasons for the failure of the “peace process,” effectively deconstructed the Middle-Eastern mythology, and thankfully offered a realistic way of managing the conflict. What a sinner: he said the truth. Indeed, Lieberman might as well be the antichrist himself. To quote Andreotti again: "We learn from the Gospel that when they asked Jesus what the truth was, he did not reply."

If you will it, it is no Nightmare

2010-09-23T13:24:00.000-07:00

Thus didn’t Herzl write in Altneuland: his famous punch line referred to a dream, of course. That dream came true, but so did the nightmarish sight of an intellectual tyranny.

Ever since Israel’s first Minister of Justice Pinhas Rosen called his law partner Moshe Zmora to appoint him President of the Supreme Court, the country’s ruling elites have mastered a type of nepotism that favors and reproduces intellectual uniformity. Former Chief Justice Aaron Barak made sure that Ruth Gavison wouldn’t get his job because she had dared to question his judicial activism (“She has an agenda” Barak explained –as if Barak himself didn’t have one). Similarly, Barak declared in January 2008 that the Minister of Justice’s attempts to reform the appointment of Israel’s Supreme Court could turn Israel into a third world country.

Really? Actually, Israel is the only Western democracy whose Supreme Court is not appointed by politicians. Our judges are selected by a nine-member committee comprised of two cabinet ministers (chosen by the government), one coalition and one opposition MK (chosen by the Knesset), three sitting justices (chosen by the Supreme Court President), and two lawyers (chosen by the Bar Association). So politicians occupy only four out of the nine seats. The legal establishment, with five seats, dominates the panel.

What Minister of Justice Daniel Friedmann wanted to do in 2007 was to give the political system a majority. He proposed an eleven member panel with two ministers, two MKs and two Bar Association representatives (just like today), but only two Supreme Court justices rather than three. The remaining three members would be a retired district court judge (chosen by the government), a public figure from any field except law (also chosen by the government), and an academic from a field other than law (appointed by the council of university presidents).

Aaron Barak claimed that Friedmann’s proposal would politicize the court and "set Israeli democracy back several years." Given Barak’s knowledge of other legal systems, his statement was sheer hypocrisy. In most Western democracies, the government dominates the process of nominating Judges. In the United States, the President appoints justices and the Senate confirms them. In Germany, Parliament's upper and lower houses each select half the justices. In Austria, the Government and Parliament each appoint half. In France, the President appoints nine of the fifteen justices, while the heads of the two houses of Parliament appoint three each. In Switzerland, Parliament selects the justices; in Sweden, the Government does. In Australia, Canada, Belgium and Norway, justices are appointed by the monarch but either nominated or approved by the Government. In Japan, the Government appoints the justices and voters must ratify its choices in the next election.

Are these third world countries? No, those are democracies, meaning polities whose fundamental premise is that the people should choose their rulers, and since supreme courts must occasionally rule on major political and social issues, this includes justices. Moreover, since judges interpret the law differently (which is why many verdicts are split decisions), supreme courts should properly reflect a wide spectrum of opinion. Democratic selection processes achieve this goal, since governments change frequently, and different governments tend to appoint candidates with different judicial worldviews.

A process dominated by the judiciary, in contrast, perpetuates ideological uniformity, because sitting Judges prefer candidates who share their own views. This is why Barak blocked Gavison, and this is why Israel’s Supreme Court is not representative of the country’s social fabric.

The same intellectual nepotism rules in Academia. A few months ago, Dr. Ran Baratz lost his job at the Hebrew University’s philosophy department because of his politics (he lives beyond the “Green Line,” is a fellow at the conservative Shalem Center, and is involved with the unapologetically Zionist grassroots movement “Im Tirzu”). While he received his doctorate with honors and was consistently rated the department’s best lecturer by students, he committed the “crime” of not toeing the party line.

It is precisely against this intellectual tyranny that Im Tirzu is struggling. Recently, for instance, it made public the fact that Ben-Gurion University’s political science department is basically an indoctrination machine that leaves no place for critical thinking, let alone dissent.

The reaction of Israel’s academic establishment to Im Tirzu’s resistance has been hysterical. Last in date is Prof. Zeev Sternhell’s op-ed in Ha’aretz. The Left, explains Sternhell, has been dominating academia for the past six decades, and this should remain so. Why? Because the Left promotes peace, while the Right promotes war. So being from the Right means being a warmonger. Talk about a lazy and demagogical way of trying to embarrass and intimidate your opponents. Then Sternhell goes to explain why there are new think-tanks and movements in Israel who “dare” to challenge intelligent, saintly, and well-meaning people such as himself: It is because, you see, those Israeli right-wingers never managed to produce a true intellectual. So because there is no Israeli equivalent of Raymond Aron or Milton Friedman, the Israeli Right is trying to intimidate the country’s academics via the Shalem Center and Im Tirzu.

The fact that there is hardly an Israeli equivalent of Raymond Aron or Milton Friedman is mostly true. And there is a reason for it too: Israel’s Social Sciences and Humanities departments would never let such people emerge in the first place. Ask Ran Baratz about it: you cannot get a tenured position if you are a “dissident.” Zeev Sternhell is part of the intellectual cartel that prevents people like Ran Baratz to have an academic career in the Humanities and in the Social Sciences. And then Sternhell complains about the fact that dissidents, because they are barred from academia, have the nerve to try and express themselves elsewhere.

So dissidents must be prevented from expressing themselves even outside of academia, and Sternhell knows just how to do that: by using force, he suggests. He threatens to encourage the international boycott of Israeli universities that will try to put an end to the intellectual monopoly of Sternhell and his peers. And then comes the ultimate threat to Education Minister Gideon Saar and to Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz. Incidentally, both men aspire to one day become Prime Minister –which means that they need the “approval” of the Branja. If you want that approval, warns Sternhell, say loud and clear that Im Tirzu is the enemy.

Strong will, perseverance and determination, is what will enable true pluralism to finally emerge in our Humanities and Social Science departments. If you will it, the nightmare will soon be over.