Showing posts with label Vic Rosenthal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vic Rosenthal. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 06, 2022

Weekly column by Vic Rosenthal


Summer Weather Comes to Israel

The weather has finally turned warm here. It seems like we skipped spring and went straight to summer. Along with the heat and the haze come incitement and terrorism, which will very likely develop – as it did last year at this time – into war and insurrection.

Last month saw three high-profile terror attacks inside the Green Line, in which 11 people were murdered (including Christian Arab and Druze police officers, and two Ukrainian workers). Fatah* and Hamas praised the terrorists, and as usual sweets were distributed in Gaza and weapons fired in the air to commemorate the success of the “operations.” Significantly, two of the three terrorists were Israeli Arab citizens.

The events of last year began with demonstrations at the Temple Mount in support of the Arab families in the Shimon Hatzadik (Sheikh Jarrah) neighborhood who were to be evicted for non-payment of rent (they are still there, thanks to the Israeli Supreme Court). When police entered the Mount to confiscate stockpiled weapons, violent clashes ensued. Hamas issued an “ultimatum,” and then began launching rockets at Jerusalem and other cities in Israel. Hamas and Islamic Jihad fired 4,350 rockets; 680 of them fell short, landing in Gaza and causing numerous casualties there. 12 Israeli civilians were killed by rockets, and one soldier died when his jeep was struck by an antitank weapon.

During the 12 days of war, violent clashes between police and Arabs in eastern Jerusalem continued. At the same time, an unprecedented wave of what could only be called pogroms swept over Israeli towns with mixed Jewish-Arab populations. In Lod, Ramle, Acco, Yafo, and Haifa, Jews and Jewish property were attacked:

In little more than a week, Arab rioters set 10 synagogues and 112 Jewish residences on fire, looted 386 Jewish homes and damaged another 673, and set 849 Jewish cars on fire. There were also 5,018 recorded instances of Jews being stoned. Three Jews were murdered and more than 600 were hurt. Over 300 police officers were injured in disturbances in over 90 locations across the country.

… although some commentators have push [sic] the ‘both sides’ line, no mosques were damaged, one Arab home was firebombed (by Arabs that mistook it for a Jewish home), 13 Arab homes and cars were damaged, and 41 Arab bystanders were hurt by hurled stones. There were also two attacks by Jewish extremists against Arab bystanders …


This was an attempt to start a full-fledged insurrection against the Jewish state. The police were unprepared for the scope of the violence and in many cases Jewish residents were left to fend for themselves or flee (to find their homes ransacked on their return). To many who remembered life in the diaspora, the feeling of helplessness was familiar.

This year, as Ramadan begins and Passover approaches, the situation is similar to that before the previous outbreak. Hamas and the PA have been inciting their (apparently easily suggestible) clientele with the traditional calls to “defend al-Aqsa” against Jewish desecration. Recently Foreign Minister Yair Lapid visited the Damascus Gate (Sha’ar Shechem), the site of nightly violent demonstrations, to show support for the police, who are doing their best to keep them from getting out of hand. Hamas called the visit – of the Israeli FM to a location in Israel’s capital city! – a “dangerous escalation,” and threatened unspecified “consequences.”

Several nascent terror attacks have been nipped in the bud by the actions of security forces. In one case, three terrorists on their way to carry out an attack were intercepted by the special counterterrorism unit of the border police (Yamam), who engaged in a firefight, killing the terrorists. Four of the officers were wounded, one seriously.

The policy of the government seems to be to avoid escalation, while the PA and Hamas want the opposite. It won’t take much to set it off, and the expectation is that if there is another explosion, it will be characterized by rocket attacks – possibly with more and better long-range rockets than last year – as well as terrorism from Judea and Samaria and riots by Israeli Arabs. Each time this happens there are new touches. The weather has turned hot and dry, so we can expect fires to be set in the forests around Jerusalem and the agricultural lands in the Negev.

Also each time this happens, the propaganda assault against Israel takes off: the exaggeration of casualties in Gaza (and the attribution of self-inflicted ones to the IDF), the stories about security personnel “murdering children in cold blood” (an 18-year old shot with a flaming firebomb in his hand), or the reports of “extrajudicial executions” (of terrorists on murderous rampages). We will see the usual comparisons to Nazis and perhaps now also to Russians.

American officials will take time off from appeasing Iran to demand a cease-fire, especially if it appears (as is highly unlikely) that the IDF intends to actually harm Hamas in Gaza. The PA will get a pass for its incitement, and continue to receive funds from the US and Israel to pay the terrorists that murder us. Terrorism, rioting, and anti-Jewish pogroms will be attributed to poverty and discrimination, and we’ll be told that more money needs to be invested in Gaza, the PA, and Arab towns inside the Green Line.

My personal feeling is this: let it come, and let us for once strike back like we want to win, and not just return to normalcy. What we have now isn’t normalcy, it’s attrition. They are wearing us down, in Judea and Samaria, in the Negev, in the Galilee, in the mixed towns, and around the border with Gaza. Let it come, and let us take the opportunity to begin the long, difficult process of reasserting our sovereignty – over all of the Land of Israel.
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* Fatah was founded in 1959 by Yasser Arafat and several others with the goal of “liberating Palestine.” By 1967, under the tutelage of the Soviet KGB, it became “the dominant force in Palestinian politics.” In 1969, Arafat became the chairman of the PLO, an umbrella organization of Palestinian nationalist groups. When Israeli leaders stupidly agreed to recognize the PLO as the “legitimate representative of the Palestinian people” (instead of an outlaw terrorist gang) in the Oslo Accords, the PLO became – in its incarnation as the Palestinian Authority (PA) – a quasi-government which came to rule those parts of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza (from which they were ousted by Hamas in 2007) with large Arab populations. Essentially, the PA is the PLO, which in turn is Fatah. Mahmoud Abbas, the “president” of the PA – he calls it the “State of Palestine” – is also the chairman of the PLO and the head of Fatah.

This is important, because Fatah explicitly promotes violent action against Israel, and many terrorist acts have been carried out by its operatives. Thus the acceptance of the PA as a partner in any way, or cooperation with it, or providing financial support to it – all of which Israel has done and continues to do – is equivalent to cooperation with terrorism.

 


 



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Wednesday, March 30, 2022

Weekly column by Vic Rosenthal


Last week, after a terrorist attack in Beer Sheva that took four lives, I (rhetorically) asked our leadership if they had a plan to deal with Arab terrorism, something more long-range than beefing up the police presence over Ramadan. Since then, there have been two more attacks, one in Hadera and one in Bnei Brak, bringing the total number of murder victims to eleven in one week.

The Beer Sheva terrorist was a Bedouin Arab, a citizen of Israel. The Hadera murderers were also Israeli citizens, from Umm al Fahm in the “Arab triangle” east of that city, who identified with the Islamic State. The terrorist who murdered five on Tuesday in Bnai Brak was from the Jenin area in the Palestinian Authority. He was in Israel illegally, working on a construction project. Some reports say that he was associated with Fatah, the party of PLO/PA leader Mahmoud Abbas. Diversity in terrorism.

Three of the murdered and one of the seriously injured victims were policemen. And of those, one was a Druze and another was a Christian Arab.

These terror attacks are the tip of an iceberg. Part of the rest of it showed itself last May, when during a war that was provoked by Hamas rocket attacks, we experienced a murderous uprising by Arab citizens:

In little more than a week, Arab rioters set 10 synagogues and 112 Jewish residences on fire, looted 386 Jewish homes and damaged another 673, and set 849 Jewish cars on fire. There were also 5,018 recorded instances of Jews being stoned. Three Jews were murdered and more than 600 were hurt. Over 300 police officers were injured in disturbances in over 90 locations across the country.


That wasn’t a peaceful demonstration. It wasn’t even a riot. It was a rebellion, an attempt to open a second front during a war. And it wasn’t “clashes between Arabs and Jews”:

By contrast, although some commentators have push [sic] the ‘both sides’ line, no mosques were damaged, one Arab home was firebombed (by Arabs that mistook it for a Jewish home), 13 Arab homes and cars were damaged, and 41 Arab bystanders were hurt by hurled stones. There were also two attacks by Jewish extremists against Arab bystanders, in Bat Yam and Herzliya. Bat Yam saw a large and violent demonstration by far-right Jews.


More of the iceberg, which has been growing for years while Israelis and their leaders have kept their eyes shut, has recently become visible. That is the astonishing fact that a great deal of the Negev and the Galilee have become no-go zones, controlled by Bedouin crime gangs:

Residents of the Negev (and parts of the Galilee) have felt, for years, that the government has abandoned them to the violence and crime of the Bedouin community. According to some estimates, some 100,000 acres of Israeli land have been ceded to the Bedouin—security forces will not or cannot exercise control in those areas, and the Bedouin have, some say, created a state within a state. … today the amount of weapons that the Bedouins in the Negev have right now … they have more weapons than two divisions of the IDF right now in the middle of the Negev. They smuggle weapons and drugs of more than 4 billion shekels a year between the Negev and Egypt …


Israel has very strict firearms laws. An Israeli citizen generally cannot possess a rifle, and must demonstrate a need (living in a dangerous area, a job as a security guard, etc.) to obtain a permit for a pistol. The amount of ammunition one can have is also limited. Yet the Bedouins and the criminal gangs in Israeli Arab towns are armed to the teeth with weapons stolen from the IDF, smuggled from Egypt or Lebanon, or even homemade. The murder rate among Israeli Arabs reflects this, being 12 times greater than that of Israeli Jews. Possibly the next time there is an uprising like the one last May, these guns will be turned against the Jews.

The trends are not encouraging. Our Muslim Arab citizens increasingly believe that the State of Israel is illegitimate, built on land “stolen” from them, and is a temporary edifice that will soon be liberated and replaced by an Arab state. Although it is true that only a small minority would engage in terrorism,

According to statistics published by Professor Sammy Smooha of Haifa University, 77.1 per cent of Israeli Arabs view Zionism as a colonial and racist movement, and demand that Israel be replaced with a binational state. 70.5 per cent of Israeli Arabs demand the right of return of Palestinian refugees, a move that would turn Israeli Jews into a minority. According to a 2017 study carried out by Smooha, Arab-Jewish relations have deteriorated since the previous survey done in 2015. In 2017, only 58.7 per cent of Israeli Arabs recognized Israel’s right to exist, as opposed to 65.8 per cent in 2015. In 2017, 44.6 per cent accepted Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state as opposed to 60.3 per cent in 2015. The acceptance of Israel retaining a Jewish majority declined from 42.7 per cent in 2015 to 36.2 per cent in 2017. …

The perpetrators of … violence operate in a society that is to a large extent sympathetic or supportive of their goals, if not always their methods.


The above is true not only of the “Arab in the street,” but especially so of their representatives in the Knesset and their academic intellectuals.

This situation has arisen because of a basic misperception of who we are – or rather, who we must be – in order to survive as a Jewish nation in the Middle East. The same misperception also weakens us in our relations with other nations, both our “friends” in Europe and North America, and our enemies. Israel cannot continue to survive as a “villa in the jungle,” in the words of Ehud Barak. We cannot establish a Scandinavian country here. Israel is part of the Middle East. We must put limits on who can live here and who can have political power.

In the Middle East, religion and ethnicity, tribal characteristics, are of great – no, overwhelming – importance. The idea that these can be ignored and a democratic and egalitarian state maintained here, given the demographic reality of today’s Israel, is delusional.

As everyone knows, in a non-totalitarian state, most people don’t obey laws because of fear of the police. They do so because they accept the principle that laws exist for the common good, and the legitimacy of the state that enforces them. If this were not the case, there would need to be almost as many police as citizens (as was close to the truth in communist East Germany). But most members of the Muslim Arab minority in Israel do not accept these propositions. Although we need to act with greater harshness against terrorism – a good start would be a death penalty for terrorist murder – we would need to become a police state like East Germany before we could suppress what is a genuine popular movement among one-fifth of the population. And keep in mind that this popular movement also has a great deal of external support (as well as help from the masochistic, autoantisemitic Left within the country).

We will not convince the acolytes of the Palestinian Movement to turn around and support the Jewish state. No amount of money or benefits to this segment of the population, or the participation of their representatives in the government will help (indeed, they have had the opposite effect). The only way to defeat this movement is to remove its supporters from the country. It would be good if this could be a gradual, nonviolent process effected by incentives, as suggested by Martin Sherman. But if that is impossible, then we must force them to leave.

Either we will face these facts and deal with them head-on, or we will not survive in the region.

Wednesday, March 23, 2022

Weekly column by Vic Rosenthal

What’s the Plan?


If you live in Israel, you know what happened in Beer Sheva on Tuesday. You know that a terrorist who was an Israeli citizen from one of the larger Bedouin towns that sprawl over Israel’s Negev desert, a former teacher (!) who spent four years in prison for his activities on behalf of ISIS, brutally murdered two women and two men because they were Jews living in Eretz Yisrael.
The terrorist, Mohammad Jalab Abu al-Quian, stabbed a woman at a gas station and then drove to a nearby shopping center, running over a bicycle rider on the way. He got out of his car and stabbed three more people before being shot dead by two armed citizens. Four of his victims died, and the fifth was very seriously injured. The nightmare took eight minutes.
Here are the names of those whose lives he took:

1) Laura Yitzchak, 43. Mother of 3 girls. Resident of Be’er Sheva.

2) [Rabbi] Moshe Kravitzky, 50. Father of 4. Managed a Colel Chabad soup kitchen in Be’er Sheva. Chabad Shaliach [he was the bicycle rider].

3) Doris Yahbas, 49. Mother of 3. From Moshav Gilat.

4) Menachem Menuchin Yechezkel, age 67.


As always happens, Gazans distributed sweets in honor of the successful “operation,” like it was a military triumph, instead of a vicious murder spree victimizing the softest of soft targets.

In recent weeks, there have been several attempts to murder police officers and random Jews in Jerusalem. And there are the daily cases of drivers been attacked with large rocks and firebombs.
I have a question for the Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett, his cabinet, and indeed every member of the Knesset:

What is your long range plan to deal with Palestinian Arab terrorism, both by Palestinians from the territories and Israeli Arabs?

I am not talking about your plans to increase the police presence over the Pesach and Ramadan holidays. That is the shortest of short-term plans. I am not talking about your plans to improve the economic conditions in Gaza, the PA, and the Negev, a slightly longer-term plan which will probably lead to more, not less, terrorism.

I want to know if you have any idea of what to do about the Palestinians in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, who have been so radicalized by Hamas and the PLO that teenagers are capable of murdering Jewish babies? And I want to know if you understand the dangers of the continuing Islamization and Palestinization of the Arab citizens of Israel, which was demonstrated in May 2021 by the Arab pogroms against the Jewish residents of Lod, Acco, Bat Yam, Haifa, Yafo, and Tiberias?

Lately our leadership has been concerned with the war in Ukraine and a possible influx of refugees from there, Jewish and non-Jewish. It has been concerned with the betrayal of Israel by the Biden Administration, which seems to be prepared to go to almost any length to make a deal with Iran that will provide the evil regime with a Niagara of dollars and a free pass to deploy nuclear weapons. These are not small issues.

But the war between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs has been going on for far longer than the Ukraine war, and started long before the Iranian revolution. Unless there is a massive escalation into what would become WWIII – something that I doubt will happen – the war in Ukraine will be over soon. And either Israel will find a way to deal with Iran in the next year or two, or there won’t be a State of Israel to worry about.

Some will say that more people are killed in road accidents than are victims of terror. Some will say that most Arab citizens of Israel are loyal to the state, that only a minority took part in the 2021 riots, and that the Palestinian Authority and Hamas are viewed as corrupt and dictatorial by the residents of the territories. These things are all true. But it is also true that virtually all the Arabs living in Israel and the territories share the view that the Jewish presence between the river and the sea is illegitimate and temporary. And I think that in a situation in which they see the possibility of success in ending the Jewish occupation of the land – all of it – virtually all of them would support the effort to do so.

Today there is no such possibility on the immediate horizon. But in the context of a major war with Iran and her proxies, a war that will treat our home front very harshly – and a war that I believe to be inevitable – the glimmer of possible victory might appear visible to them on the horizon. If that happens it will make the Second Intifada and the May 2021 riots look small, as the “pragmatic” Arabs, including the doctors and professors that we are so proud of as examples of successful coexistence come together in support of the Palestinian national objective: the reversal of the Nakba and the “redemption of all of Palestine.”

The problem of Palestinian Arab terrorism will not go away by itself. The incitement that feeds it, coming from the PLO, Hamas, ISIS, and Iran, is greater today than it ever was. And today it feeds itself, too, via social media.

In 1993, Israel’s leadership, under pressure from outsiders who understood the situation even less well than they did, tried to solve the problem by an attempt at reconciliation and compromise. But they were fooled. They entirely misread the Palestinians, who have never lost sight of their national goals, which definitely do not include living at peace along with a Jewish state. The consequences of that mistake have compounded themselves over the years, and today the threat is greater than ever.

Our 1993 leaders had a plan, and it failed. Very few Israelis still think that a solution can be found via reconciliation and compromise. The rational thing to do in response to failure is to develop a different plan that takes into account the lessons learned. Such a plan would have to recognize the Palestinian narrative and objective that drives terrorism. It would have to comprehend that you can’t reconcile with those who hold onto an overwhelming sense of grievance. It would have to replace the idea of compromise with one of victory.

But today’s leaders have no plan at all.

____________________________________



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Thursday, March 17, 2022




Photoshop by Judah Rosenthal


Vic Rosenthal's weekly column


The negotiations between Iran and the West are free to continue after the hiccup caused by a Russian demand for a “right to free and full trade, economic and investment cooperation and military-technical cooperation.” Either the Russians got what they wanted, or they decided to accept something less; but in any event, the rush to sign an agreement that lifts sanctions on Iran is on again.

I think it’s safe to say that everybody – Americans, Iranians, Russians, Europeans, and certainly Israelis – knows that this agreement presents only a minor impediment (if any) to the deployment of nuclear weapons by Iran. In fact, it is a get out of jail free card for the violations of the Non-Proliferation Treaty of which Iran is guilty. It is primarily a device to lift virtually all sanctions on Iran – even those that are not related to nuclear weapons – and provide an immediate windfall of tens of billions of dollars to Iran, and only secondarily a limitation on nuclear weapons development.

Numerous Israeli officials from Prime Ministers to IDF Chiefs of Staff have sat down with the Americans and explained and documented why the agreement will not prevent or significantly slow Iran’s progress toward a weapon, and how the injection of cash into Iran’s struggling economy will be used to finance weapons development, proxy warfare against Israel and the Gulf states, and terrorism around the world – including the US. What isn’t clear about “death to America,” they asked?

The Americans listened politely, but did not change direction.

It’s obvious why the Iranians are anxious to make a deal, but what the US gets out of it is not certain. Yes, President Joe Biden can reverse a Trump policy, accuse the Republicans of failure, and declare “peace in our time” while waving the new, even worse, version of Obama’s JCPOA. But I think that the main motivation is to continue a policy, going back to the 1970s, to reverse the outcome of the 1967 war.

This policy was initially justified by the “realist” argument that American alignment with Israel was counterproductive, given the larger populations of her enemies, and their possession of critical resources. Later, after 9/11, it became fashionable to believe that US support for Israel was one of the causes of terrorism against the US (after all, Osama bin Laden said so), and that Syria and Iran could be bought off from supporting the insurgency in Iraq by forcing Israel to surrender the Golan Heights and create a Palestinian state in Judea/Samaria.

With the advent of President Barack Obama, the anti-Israel policy took another turn. Obama sees the Jewish state through a postcolonialist lens. He really does believe that Israel is a settler-colonialist oppressor of indigenous Palestinians, and accepts the Palestinian narrative of dispossession. He pays lip service to Israel’s right to exist, but adoption of his policies would quickly lead to her replacement by an Arab state. His heart is with the Palestinians, whom he sees as representatives of a black and brown third world, oppressed by “white, European” Israelis.

Biden’s policymakers are either former Obama Administration officials, or others with even more radically anti-Israel views. His administration tries to avoid the kind of direct confrontation that Obama seemed to enjoy, but its policies are no better. And one of the goals of the Iran deal is to weaken Israel, make her more dependent on the US for protection against an increasingly powerful Iran, and thus make it possible to continue the process of reducing Israel to her indefensible pre-1967 borders. And it isn’t unlikely that many of those involved would be happy to see the Jewish state gone entirely.

The immediate consequence of the implementation of a new Iran deal would very likely be regional war. There are two possibilities: either Iran will develop its conventional forces and those of its proxies (with or without a nuclear umbrella) to the point that the regime feels confident to unleash them against Israel; or Israel will find its nuclear red lines crossed and preemptively attack Iran. In either case, there would be – at least – involvement of Israel, Iran, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and the Palestinian Authority. Intervention by outside powers like Russia and the US is possible. Civilian casualties on all sides would be in the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands. The possibility that nuclear weapons will be used can’t be discounted.

Bret Stephens wrote that the invasion of Ukraine was facilitated by years of Western appeasement, and slaps on the wrist for Putin and other bad actors. After he was allowed to invade Crimea, Georgia, and Eastern Ukraine; after Syria was allowed to use chemical weapons on her own people and China to crush Hong Kong’s autonomy, asks Stephens, why should Putin think he wouldn’t get away with invading Ukraine?

Iran, too, has learned that only Israel is prepared to oppose its increasing aggression against its neighbors. Europe seems to have allowed the benefits of profitable trade with Iran to distract her from being in missile range of a revolutionary Islamic republic with nuclear weapons. The US seems to see no problem with a nuclear-armed Shiite caliphate stretching all the way to the Mediterranean, and controlling all the oil and gas in the Middle East. Why shouldn’t it continue to make agreements and violate them?

But suppose that Trump’s Maximum Pressure campaign had been continued under Biden (or a reelected Trump). Suppose that it had been expanded to a full-on international boycott of everything Iranian, like has been done to (the much stronger) Russia in the past few weeks. Suppose this were combined with a campaign of sabotage, cyberattacks, assistance to local dissidents, and pinpoint military operations – and then the regime were presented with an ultimatum, not an offer of appeasement. Would it have worked? I think so. It might even have been possible to topple the regime.

Is it too late now? I’m not sure. More importantly, though, there is no will in the West to do it, and certainly no desire on the part of the Biden Administration, “led” by its senile gasbag and actually directed by unknown forces.

There is very little that Israel can do to affect the behavior of the Western appeasers, just as Czechoslovakia had no options in 1938. What’s left is to prepare for the war that will certainly follow; to develop plans – I prefer preemption – to make it as short and decisive as possible. The worst possible approach, which I fear appeals to our government, is to try to obtain guarantees from the Americans that they will act in some way to protect us.

Just ask Ukraine how good their word is!






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Wednesday, March 09, 2022

Weekly column by Vic Rosenthal


Who’s Intolerant?

The refugee crisis in Ukraine has illuminated a deep moral divide among Israelis, which I think reflects a similar division in the moral consciousness of humans everywhere. On one side we have Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked, who announced yesterday that Israel would accept all Jewish refugees – that is, all of those, according to the Law of Return, who have at least one Jewish grandparent – but that only up to 5,000 non-Jewish Ukrainian refugees would be accepted, and those would have to agree to leave after three months. There are 20,000 non-Jewish Ukrainians who are already living in Israel illegally, after overstaying tourist visas, and they will also be allowed to stay temporarily.

On the other side, we find Ha’aretz writer Zvi Bar’el who argues – in a remarkably sarcastic article – that Israel’s concern for the Jewish people is racist, and that true morality calls for us to open our doors equally to all who suffer. And that not only includes Ukrainians, but also the Eritrean and Sudanese illegal immigrants who found life hard and dangerous under kleptocratic and brutal regimes. The Supreme Court, apparently sharing Bar’el’s point of view, threw a series of monkey wrenches into the attempts to deport them. They were bused to South Tel Aviv on arrival, where they colonized the area around the main bus station. The crime rate there has soared as a result.

Bar’el also thinks we have no right to complain about the Russians invading and occupying Ukraine, because we have “occupied” Judea and Samaria. I am embarrassed that it’s necessary to explain to an educated, adult Israeli that Ukraine was an independent country that did not attack Russia, while Judea and Samaria were parts of the original Mandate that were occupied illegally and ethnically cleansed by Jordan, whose army then attacked Israel in a war intended to end her independence.

It’s obvious which side I’m on. But where I disagree with Bar’el is not, as he might say, because he loves all mankind and I am a racist who thinks Jews are better than non-Jews. Actually I too believe in human rights, justice, and equal treatment, even for cultures, like the Palestinian Arabs, whose values happen to be despicable.

Where we differ is this: I think the State of Israel is different from the great majority of countries, because it has a mission: the preservation of the physical and cultural existence of the Jewish people.

Other countries may also be ethnic nation-states like Israel, which means that they represent the realization of self-determination for a particular people. Or alternatively, they may be like the US, which in essence defines the “American People” as those who are born there or who choose to receive citizenship, with no ethnic consideration at all. But I can’t think of any state other than Israel that was born with the specific objective of preserving an endangered people. This is implied in Israel’s Declaration of Independence:

The catastrophe which recently befell the Jewish people - the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe - was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness by re-establishing in Eretz-Israel the Jewish State, which would open the gates of the homeland wide to every Jew and confer upon the Jewish people the status of a fully privileged member of the comity of nations.

This doesn’t mean that the founders (probably these are the words of Ben Gurion) thought that the Holocaust was in itself a justification for the establishment of the state; that this is not what they thought is clear from the rest of the document. But it is emblematic of the fact that Israel was established as a bulwark against the forces of antisemitism, assimilation, and cultural dilution that were erasing the Jewish people from the world.

In order to carry out her mission, the State of Israel must, minimally, maintain a Jewish majority; but she also needs to limit the expansion of non-Jewish religious and cultural influences. Israel is a very small country of 9 million people, 21% of whom are not Jewish. There are, from time to time, antisemitic outbursts right here, such as the Arab riots of May 2021 in which Jews and Jewish property were attacked. Several years ago, there were even incidents of antisemitism involving violence and swastika graffiti perpetrated by Russian-speaking antisemites!

Israel is no. 100 on the list of countries by population. Following it are Switzerland, Togo, Sierra Leone, Hong Kong, and Laos. I haven’t noticed pressure on these countries to take tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees.

I know that a large number of Israelis, often the ones that can be called the “Ashkenazi elite,” find this point of view distasteful. They say that those of us who are concerned about the erosion of the Jewish character of the state are “intolerant” of other cultures.

I suggest that they are the ones that need to exercise more tolerance, in this case for the continued existence of the one, only one, Jewish state in the world. If that upsets them so much, then rather than trying to change it into something else, they should move to any one of the countless countries that are “states of their citizens.” I see advertisements in the newspaper on a regular basis for companies that offer help in obtaining European passports. I recommend them to Zvi Bar’el and the rest of the Ha’aretz crew.






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Thursday, March 03, 2022

Weekly column by Vic Rosenthal


While our attention here in Israel is on Ukraine, the US and Iran are preparing to come to some kind of nuclear agreement. Or not. I’ve been wrong about a number of things lately – I never thought Putin would do more than lop off the Donbas region from Ukraine – and I might be wrong about this too, but the Biden Administration’s desire to have something to brag about seems strong enough to swallow anything the Iranians throw at them at the last minute.

Any deal will have minimal effect on Iran’s ability to make and deploy nuclear weapons. What the signing will do is provide an immediate financial boost to Iran, which can be used both for its nuclear project and the support of its terrorist partners in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq; and it will place Israel in the position of the “rogue” that violates international order if she attacks Iran.

And if there is no deal? I presume that some sanctions would remain for some time. But they will not have any material effect on Iran’s project.

Incidentally, the effect that serious sanctions and actions to isolate a bad actor can have are evident in Russia, whose economy has already been severely wounded by even a few days of economic warfare by the West. It’s a pity that similarly harsh measures were never taken against Iran.

I think there will be a deal, because both sides want it: the Iranians, because they will give up little or nothing, and receive a lot. And the Biden Administration, because appeasing Iran is part of its long-term Middle East policy. Let’s look at that.

Prior to 1973, US policy was not particularly friendly to Israel, primarily because of competition with the Soviet Union for influence with the oil-rich Arab countries. But during the Yom Kippur War, President Nixon, worried that the Soviet-aligned Arabs might win – or that Israel might use her nuclear weapons – airlifted weapons to Israel and then asked Congress to provide billions in aid to pay for them. In response, the Arab-led oil cartel, OPEC, declared an embargo on oil deliveries to countries that supported Israel, including the US. The embargo was only in effect for five months, but caused a huge spike in the price of oil whose shock waves affected almost every part of the world economy. Many countries whose Mideast policy had been neutral or pro-Israel began to tilt toward the Arabs as a result. In the US, oil companies took a public stance calling for a more “even-handed” (i.e., less pro-Israel) policy.

In an attempt to woo them away from the Soviets, Nixon and Kissinger promised Arab leaders in 1974-5 that they would work to “reduce [Israel’s] size to historic [pre-1967] proportions.” This has been US policy ever since. Beginning with Jimmy Carter’s Camp David Accords that gave the Sinai back to Egypt, there have been numerous American-led initiatives to do just that.

Presidents Reagan, GHW Bush, Clinton, GW Bush, and Trump all thought that the solution to the conflict between Israel and the Arabs lay in a territorial compromise with some kind of Palestinian entity. And all of them understood that Israel’s security had to be preserved. But Barack Obama was different.

Obama was the second American president, after Jimmy Carter, who was clearly anti-Israel. His sympathy with the Palestinian movement was clear from remarks that he made when he was running for the Senate back in 2003, from the speech he made in Cairo shortly after he took office, in which he compared “Palestinian [suffering] in pursuit of a homeland” to the Holocaust, and to the pain and humiliation of slavery and segregation felt by black Americans.

Obama often claimed to support the Jewish state, and pointed to the 10-year commitment his administration made to a $38bn program of military aid. But the money is spent in America, where it buys the most expensive weapons in the world, developed on a cost-plus basis. Obama eliminated the provision that allowed some of the aid to be spent on purchases from Israel’s own defense industries. The aid program serves America’s interests and damages Israel’s. It addicts Israel to expensive American weapons, weakens Israel’s defense industries, and gives the US too much leverage over Israel’s actions.  Israel would be better off without it.

A list of all of Obama’s actions that were damaging to Israel would stretch from January 2009, when he ordered Israel to end its ground invasion of Gaza before inauguration day, to his final spiteful act as a lame duck president, when he ordered his UN ambassador to abstain on the anti-Israel UNSC resolution 2334 (the last time this happened was during Carter’s presidency). His contemptuous treatment of Israel’s then Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu – he instructed an aide to refer to the former combat soldier as “a chickenshit” to a reporter – tells us everything about his attitude.

But the most dangerous initiative of his administration was, of course, the JCPOA, the original Iran deal of 2015. At the time it was clear that it did not prevent, or even significantly slow, Iran’s progress. It couldn’t be enforced. It weakened a UN resolution forbidding Iran from developing nuclear-capable ballistic missiles. And it actually legitimized Iran’s having nuclear weapons after a few years. We should remember that under the non-proliferation treaty that Iran signed, it agreed to never develop such weapons.

It’s hard to see what American interest the deal served then, and even harder now. It will give Biden something to brag about, and it will be yet another shot at former president Trump. But where is the benefit from increased funding for terrorism, strengthening America’s greatest enemy in the Mideast, and beginning a round of nuclear proliferation in the volatile region? Where is the benefit for the US and the rest of the West from enabling the establishment of an Iranian caliphate in the region?

This is just one of the administration’s actions that are difficult to understand. Recently, it effectively killed a proposed natural gas pipeline from Israel to Europe through Cyprus and Greece. Now, with Russia threatening to cut gas supplies to Europe, this looks even more stupid.

Last month, the US cut military aid to Egypt by some $130m out of $300m. The stated reason is that they are not satisfied with al-Sisi’s plan to improve the human rights situation in Egypt. At the same time, the Iran deal will free up billions which Iran can use to continue supporting terrorist groups targeting Egypt. In case you’ve forgotten, Obama supported Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Morsi over Mubarak.

Shortly after taking office, the administration removed the Yemenite Houthi rebels from the list of terrorist organizations. On the same day, they attacked a Saudi airport.

Why? The answer is that the Biden Administration is Obama’s third term. Its foreign policy team, and especially those responsible for negotiations with Iran, are made up almost entirely of former Obama Administration people. Although I can’t prove it, I believe that Obama, Ben Rhodes, Susan Rice, and others are pulling the strings.

And these people share a bizarre ideology. They see the world through a lens that combines leftism, Islamism, and a naïve third-worldism. They see Islamism as the most authentic political movement in the Middle East, and so they support the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, as well as Iranian control of Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. Among their goals are the replacement of Israel – which they see as an outpost of Western colonialism – by a Palestinian state. I believe they see the possibility of a strong, modernizing Israeli-Egyptian-Saudi bloc as dangerous to Islam, and will try to prevent it from arising.

Try as I might, I can’t see how this fits in with American interests.






Read all about it here!

Wednesday, February 23, 2022

Weekly column by Vic Rosenthal




The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.

Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

As I write, there are Russian tanks in Donbas. Does that mean that we are on the verge of a new European war, as US President Biden suggests? I doubt it. I believe that Vladimir Putin is a student of Sun Tzu. He knows that Ukrainian leaders know that they can’t stand against Russia without outside help, that most of Europe can’t fight, and the few countries that can – won’t. He knows that he has been storing up foreign currency and working to make Russia more self-sufficient for several years to insulate Russia from the financial weapons that will be deployed against her. Above all he knows that America, divided, exhausted, fragile, neurotic, and led by an old man far out of his depth, does not have the will to act strongly enough to stop him.

I date the beginning of the collapse of the US as a world power to 9/11. American political and cultural elites all bought into the idea that this was not a skirmish in the struggle between Islamic and Christian civilizations that has been ongoing for at least a millennium, but rather a “War on Terror,” where the terrorists had “perverted” Islam. “Islam is peace,” pronounced George W. Bush a week later, when Ground Zero and the Pentagon were still smoldering. To this day, we have not learned to know our enemy.

Shortly thereafter, the US sent troops to Afghanistan after Osama Bin Laden. Unfortunately, they did not send enough men, and depended on local Afghans to do much of the fighting.  They also decided to trust their Pakistani “allies” to cover the back door to Tora Bora. As a result, Bin Laden escaped and was not captured until 2011. But American involvement in Afghanistan continued until Biden oversaw the embarrassing rout of remaining Americans in August 2021.

In February 2003, the US demonstrated its military might when it attacked Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, scaring the hell out of the Iranian regime which, because of its secret nuclear program, expected to be next. American troops captured Baghdad less than a month later. But the military victory was squandered by the remarkably ignorant attempt to remake Iraq into a western-style democracy and the suppression of the Sunni minority that had controlled Iraq under Saddam. The war devolved into an insurgency in which the insurgents were supplied and bankrolled by Iran and Syria. Most Americans left Iraq in December 2021, although a small number remain. Meanwhile, Iranian-controlled militias have solidified their control of much of the country.

These wars cost trillions of dollars and numerous lives, and planted a debt bomb in the American economy that is only beginning to explode today. They demonstrated the truth of Sun Tzu’s belief that sheer military superiority is not enough. “There is no instance of a nation benefiting from prolonged warfare,” he said, and the prolongation of these wars – which were begun with inadequately defined or impossible goals (e.g., establishing democracy in Iraq), has greatly weakened the nation, militarily, economically, psychologically, and politically.

But not only has the real strength of the US declined in recent years, its image as a superpower has been shattered by a series of unnecessary errors. Notable was Barack Obama’s failure to follow through on his threat to punish Bashar al-Assad for Syria’s cruel use of chemical weapons on civilians in 2013. Another misadventure was the original Iran deal, signed in 2015, which did not provide for adequate inspection of nuclear sites, did not limit – even weakened previous limits – on ballistic missile development, and which essentially granted Iran the right to develop nuclear weapons ten years after its signing. It was a signal to virtually everyone (except Obama’s sycophants) that America had chosen the path of appeasement. And there is no need to dwell on the message sent by the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Putin has been watching, and learning. And so has the Chinese leadership, which has studied Sun Tzu if anyone has, and if Putin succeeds, will be encouraged even more to move on Taiwan.

Now the Biden Administration is about to sign another deal with the Iranian regime, and if preliminary reports are to be believed, it will be even weaker and more dangerous than the first. The fact that the American collapse in Vienna is happening at the same time that the crisis in Ukraine is developing is likely to make US negotiators, under the pro-Iranian Robert Malley, even more anxious to give the Iranians everything they want and get it over with.

This is another unnecessary loss for America, which may someday even be a target for the weapons it is allowing the Iranian rogue regime to have. Last month, three US negotiators quit because of Malley’s “soft negotiating stance.” It’s hard to understand why US officials have chosen to surrender here. Where is the American interest in increased worldwide terrorism, the expansion of Iran in the Mideast, and the message of weakness sent to US rivals everywhere?

The deal doesn’t make sense. So what is behind it?

In order to answer that question, we need to know who is behind it, because it’s highly doubtful that Biden or Tony Blinken is determining foreign policy in this administration. And here there is only speculation. My informed guess is that there is an influential group including Malley as well as former Obama Administration officials – Barack Obama himself, Ben Rhodes, Susan Rice, and others – that are guiding the administration’s Mideast policy. Their plan grows out of an idea first voiced in the 2006 Iraq Study Report (which was partly authored by Rhodes. See my discussion here).

The original idea was to reduce pressure on US troops in Iraq by buying off Iran and Syria so they would stop supporting the insurgents that were killing US soldiers with Iranian IEDs. The payoff would be the (possibly fatal) weakening of Israel, which would have been forced to give the Golan Heights to Syria, and to withdraw from Judea and Samaria, where a Palestinian state would be established. Obama, who was closely aligned with the Palestinian cause, adopted many of the ideas in the 2006 document, probably via his advisor Rhodes.

I think that this group now views with alarm the possibility of the rise of a new power bloc in the Middle East, composed of Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and others. Such a bloc would be very powerful, much more so than even a nuclear Iran, and resistant to control. I also think they see (correctly) that it would mean the end of the Palestinian dream of “return” – and the end of the Jewish state – to which Obama and Malley are ideologically committed. By strengthening Iran, they hope to drive a wedge between the members of this newly coalescing bloc, and return Israel to its isolated status in the region.

Needless to say, this group is acting against American interests. An Israeli-Sunni bloc would almost certainly align with the US, providing intelligence and support for Western interests in the Mideast. On the other hand, since the 1979 revolution, Iran has viewed the US as the “Great Satan” that is their most important enemy, even more so than Israel, the “Little Satan.” Iran is far from America, but its terrorist subsidiary, Hezbollah has increasingly stronger branches in Latin America, where it partners with drug cartels. Given the porous southern border, the potential for terrorism inside the US is great.

I think we can sum up what’s wrong with this policy with one more aphorism. This one is not by Sun Tzu, but it certainly could have been:

He who fights his friends instead of his enemies is guaranteed to lose.






Wednesday, February 16, 2022

Weekly column by Vic Rosenthal


Some Hard Facts

There are such things as hard facts. A hard fact is something that is true, not dependent on point of view, ideology, culture, religious belief, or politics. I know there is a post-modern trend to deny that they exist, but frankly it is insane, and anyone who thinks that way will not survive very long.

The laws of physics are hard facts. So are the strategic facts of geography, like the physical characteristics of Eretz Yisrael, which demand that its eastern border encompass the slope of the Jordan Valley, and that the hills of Judea and Samaria and the Golan Heights must be under Israeli control. These are the facts that make the division of the land that is so beloved by peace processors impossible.

But there are also social, historical laws. I think that these too can be hard facts. Humans have free will and “great men” (or women) sometimes influence the course of history, but in the long term, what happens is determined by the aggregate behavior of people, creatures in the primate family who are, after all, much more like chimpanzees than angels.

So now we come to the conflict between the Jews and the Arabs in Eretz Yisrael. What do the laws that govern human behavior tell us about the future of our land?

It should be clear that the situation is unstable. The prevalent ideology amongst the Arabs (the “Palestinian narrative”) is that Jewish sovereignty is an abomination. This is both a religious (Islamic) and cultural (honor-shame) issue. The various Arab political factions all share this belief, although they espouse different strategies for turning Eretz Yisrael into an Arab-ruled Arab-majority state.

As time goes by, the Arabs in Gaza, Judea/Samaria, and even pre-1967 Israel have all become more confirmed in their beliefs, more radical in their preferred solutions, and more convinced that the goal is achievable.

The areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas have been a laboratory for observing the effects of prolonged and pervasive conditioning to hate. Arab children learn in their schools and media (and every other institution of their society) that Jews are both subhuman and evil. They are encouraged to kill and rewarded for acts of incredible viciousness. A teenager who can plunge a knife into the neck of a Jewish baby or the back of a grandmother (both of these have happened) is no longer a normal human being, but has been transformed into a monster. One wonders why Amnesty International, which is prepared to accuse Israel of “crimes against humanity” for such things as distinguishing between citizens and non-citizens, has failed to document this fiendish system as one of the greatest crimes against humanity in history, and to call for the prosecution of the criminals that operate it.

But what about Israel’s Arab citizens, who were not educated by Hitlerites, and who – until recently – it seemed were becoming more prepared to accept Jewish sovereignty and to work alongside the Jews for their common benefit as Israelis? Unfortunately, the trend is in the other direction, as Israelis found out to their shock last May, when during a military confrontation with Gaza provoked by Hamas rocket barrages, their Arab neighbors turned on them – in a way that is sickeningly familiar to those who know the history of diaspora Jewry – attacked them, set their houses, businesses, and vehicles on fire, and in essence tried to drive them out of their homes. An echo, if you will, of what happened in Hevron in 1929, in Baghdad in 1941, and in Tzfat in 1517, 1834, 1929, 1936, and who knows how many more times. Precisely what the establishment of a Jewish state was supposed to preclude occurred, despite the police, the IDF, and our F-35s and nuclear weapons.

What happened? The conventional explanation is that Arabs in Israel are economically disadvantaged and that their frustration burst out into violence. The historian Efraim Karsh argues that in fact the opposite is the case:

Just as Hajj Amin Husseini and Yasser Arafat immersed their hapless subjects in disastrous conflicts that culminated in their collective undoing and continued statelessness in total disregard of the massive material gains attending Arab-Jewish coexistence, so Israel’s Arab leaders used their constituents’ vast socioeconomic progress over the past decades as a vehicle of radicalization rather than moderation.

Perhaps because of the influence of Marxism in Israeli political culture, Israeli leaders from Ben Gurion on have believed that if the economic condition of the Arabs were improved, their alienation from the state would decrease (we continue to make this mistake on other fronts, as in the idea that improving the Gaza economy can make war less likely. But aid injected into it flows directly to rockets and tunnels).

While Israeli Arabs are well-represented in professions (especially the medical field), nevertheless the ideology that drives pogromists into the streets with firebombs permeates their culture. The journalist Nadav Shragai recently observed that the ideological themes that are associated with violence by Arabs outside of pre-1967 Israel, preoccupation with the Nakba and an obsessive belief in the ultimate “return” of the descendants of the Arab refugees of 1948, are becoming more prevalent among Israeli Arabs. He wrote,

Rioting high school students from Lod made it clear that “the ‘occupation’ of 1967 does not interest them at all, only a return to their homes from before 1948.” Lod resident Aya Zeinati said that she “repeatedly explains to her children that they are not from Haifa,” but from a village “which was destroyed by the Zionists,” and that “they are going to go back there.” The imam of the Great Mosque in Lod, Sheikh Yusuf Albaz, who was arrested for incitement to riot, declared that Israel is not his country. The imam of El-Ramal Mosque in Acre, Sheikh Mahmoud Madi, referred to “our cities in internal Palestine” and estimated that the collapse of the Zionist entity was imminent. In Kafr Kanna, Sheikh Kamal Khatib, deputy head of the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, who was arrested for participating in the riots, said that “even if [the Jews] thought that the Palestinian elders had died and the young had forgotten, the elders died only after they had taught their sons that this was Palestine, and left them a key, a bill of sale, a deed, and the love of the homeland.”

Would it have been possible to prevent these developments? I think not. The alienation of Israeli Arabs grows out of the Palestinian narrative, and not out of their objective condition as a minority in Israeli society. Nothing the government can do with programs, incentives, subsidies, anti-discrimination laws, or even the (very necessary) suppression of organized and violent crime in the Arab sector can affect this.

Coming back to human behavior, we have two tribes, physically and genetically similar, but in terms of ideas – memetically – opposed. Neither side is especially comfortable with the other, but the Palestinian narrative makes the position of the Arab side not just uncomfortable, but intolerable. And it can’t be fixed by any arrangement that doesn’t end Jewish sovereignty, or indeed, any Jewish ownership of the land that the narrative insists belongs only to Palestinian Arabs. These tribes cannot coexist.

Westerners tend to think that all problems have compromise solutions, that there is always a way to talk things out, and that nothing is black and white. But that isn’t always true. Some games are zero-sum. Sometimes there has to be a winner and a loser. And in this case, the loser loses everything, include the right to live here on the land that both sides claim.

This is a distressing, even heart-rending, situation for those who appreciate both cultures. But if we aren’t prepared to meet it head on – to face the hard fact of it and act correctly – then we will be the ones who lose everything





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