Vic Rosenthal, Author at Israel Rising

June 19, 2018

Why don’t we defend ourselves?

Originally Posted in Abu Yehuda.

Great swaths of land in the Negev desert near the Gaza strip, agricultural land and nature preserves formerly the habitats of numerous endangered plant and animal species, have been reduced to ash and smoke by Palestinian fire-kites and balloon-borne incendiary devices during the past few weeks. The entire area is blackened with the smoke from fires that are being set faster than Israeli firefighters can put them out.

Our powerful army dithers, ever pursuing its apparent goal of fighting wars without hurting anyone. Today I understand that a car belonging to one of the leaders of the bombing campaign was destroyed by an “airstrike,” probably a drone-launched missile. The car was parked and empty. That’ll teach him.

Israeli officials are afraid of the legal consequences of taking effective action against those who are launching the kites and balloons. They are afraid that they will be dragged into the International Criminal Court (even though Israel did not sign the treaty creating it and does not consider itself bound by its decisions), if the army kills any of the “civilians” that are burning our country. Those under the age of 18 are counted as “children,” and as you know one of the themes of anti-IDF propaganda is the false claim that we deliberately target children.

Purposely burning agricultural land is a war crime. Attacking from heavily populated civilian areas and employing child soldiers are war crimes. Hamas and PIJ (Palestinian Islamic Jihad) don’t care, of course. Their whole strategic plan is to take advantage of the fact that Israel considers herself bound by the laws of war, the Geneva Conventions and other treaties, while they permit themselves to do anything that will kill Jews.

They don’t do it by themselves. They have help.

Israel is always required to fight an n+1 front war, with n representing the enemies that are shooting at us, Hamas, PIJ, Hezbollah, and the rest. The additional one is the international diplomatic and legal system, led by our “friends” in the European Union.

In the past week, two Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria have been partly demolished, because homes have been found to be built on “private Palestinian land.” This means that – regardless of whether the land was considered state land when the homes were built – a Palestinian claim, sometimes not even by an individual owner, that the land was at one time used for agricultural purposes by Palestinians, has been accepted by Israel’s Supreme Court. The remedy is invariably that any structure that encroaches on such land will be demolished in toto.

Recently, the Knesset passed a law (the “Regulation Law”) that allows the state to financially compensate the Palestinian “owners” when the land was not considered private at the time the structures were built, instead of bulldozing the buildings (this can be tricky, since there usually are no records that might prove ownership in the sense familiar to those living in normal countries). This law didn’t apply in these cases, because the Supreme Court had ordered the demolitions some months ago, before the law was passed. The Court has now frozen the law awaiting its decision on various petitions against it.

Naturally, our European friends and home-grown champions of Palestinian rights were scandalized by this law. “It’s legalized land theft,” they say. This is quite an exaggeration, since the law calls for the Palestinians to be paid above-market value for the land, which they are not using and may not have used for decades (if ever). Eminent domain proceedings in the US, in which an owner can be evicted from property where he is living or using for business, are far harsher. But my guess is that despite this, when the Supreme Court rules on the petitions filed against it, they will overthrow the law.

Now you may wonder who files these petitions, the ones against the Regulation Law and the ones claiming that Israeli structures have been built on “private Palestinian land.” The answer is that there is a whole industry in Israel of “human rights” non-governmental organizations that employs a battery of expensive and dedicated lawyers to fight the State of Israel. Thanks to Israel’s extraordinary system in which any citizen may petition the Supreme Court on almost any matter, regardless of whether he or she is affected by it, left-wing groups like Peace Now, Yesh Din, and others can and do involve themselves in these matters.

But who supports the organizations, pays their staffs and their lawyers? Probably no more than a few percent of Israelis support what most see as their extremist ideology. And yet left-wing NGOs are everywhere, filming and trying to provoke IDF soldiers doing their duty, finding Palestinians who will testify that their grandfathers worked the land on such-and-such a hill where today an Israeli settlement stands, and filing petition after petition in the Israeli courts, particularly the Supreme Court.

The money does not come from Israel. It doesn’t even come from the Palestinians, whose leaders are happy to skim millions from the aid they get from the US and Europe, primarily to live well or put into their Swiss bank accounts. It comes, unsurprisingly, mostly from European governments, where millions of Euros are funneled into organizations like Peace Now, Yesh Din, B’tselem, Physicians for Human Rights – Israel, Breaking the Silence, Adalah, and many others. Somewhat less important donors include the American New Israel Fund and Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

These foreign-funded NGOs are active in the Israeli and international legal arenas, as well as the international propaganda campaign to demonize and delegitimize the State of Israel. Some explicitly support BDS, despite the official positions of their donors. For example, several of them recently sent a letter to the American Secretary of State calling for an arms embargo against Israel because of its actions to defend its border.

Today the NGO Monitor organization, which keeps track of anti-Israel NGOs and their funding, released a report showing that the European Union has given large grants (hundreds of thousands of Euros) to several NGOs to press war crimes accusations against IDF officers and soldiers and other Israeli officials in foreign courts. This sort of thing may in part explain the timidity of the IDF to take effective action against the arsonists of Gaza.

While our Arab and Iranian enemies have had little success in damaging our Jewish state with wars and terrorism, our European ones have succeeded with their Euros to roll back settlement activities in Judea/Samaria, resulting in the expulsion of Jews from their homes. They have fought tooth and nail against our government’s efforts to deport illegal migrants, whom it rightly considers a demographic and social threat. They have hamstrung the IDF’s response to arson terrorism from Gaza, and turned the main concern of the IDF from defeating our enemies to avoiding legal entanglements.

The message this sends to the terrorists of Hamas, the PLO, and the PIJ is simple: you have a green light – the Jews are too weak to fight back.

There are solutions to these problems. Two years ago, the Knesset passed a relatively weak transparency law requiring some NGOs to report contributions from foreign governments. It needs to be strengthened – in fact, there is no reason for Israel to permit foreign governments to intervene in our domestic affairs at all. Opponents will tell you, precisely inverting the truth, that limiting the influence of foreign-funded NGOs is “anti-democratic,” as if democracy requires subverting the will of Israeli voters! But there is only one reason that such legislation is opposed in the Knesset, and that is because some members are themselves treasonously sucking at the European teat. That has to stop.

The Supreme Court has far too much power and zero accountability. No other democratic country has such a situation. The balance of power between the branches of government must be restored.

The other necessary change is a change of attitude. The more Israel refrains from self-defense because of fear of the legal consequences, the more she will be threatened with such consequences. The cycle must be broken, both because it prevents us from acting and because it broadcasts weakness to our enemies. The arson kites need to be met with deadly force, not endless debate. Jewish residents of the territories should have at least equal rights as Arabs, and not be evicted from their homes as a result of legal catch-22s. Illegal migrants should be deported (see here and here).

The legal and diplomatic decks are stacked against us today, partly because of our own actions. We need to get over it and defend ourselves. Nobody else will.

May 30, 2018

Israel’s media problem

Published in Abu Yehuda

If endemic irrational hatred of Israel is viewed as a disease, then its primary vector is the Western mainstream media. Although social media have been gaining in importance recently, the traditional media organizations are still the Xenopsylla cheopis spreading this plague.

They had begun to become less and less sympathetic to Israel after the oil shock of the mid-1970s. I started noticing it in 1982, during the First Lebanon War. Never mind that we went into Lebanon because our people in northern Israel were being pounded by rockets, katyushot, fired from Lebanese territory by Yasser Arafat’s PLO. We were blamed for starting the war and sharply criticized for every civilian casualty. And then we were vilified because we didn’t prevent our Christian Phalangist allies from taking (well-deserved, in my opinion) murderous revenge on the PLO.

In 2000, we saw one of the most damaging incidents of fraudulent atrocity reporting, one which was used as an excuse for countless terror attacks, the al-Durrah affair. 12-year old Mohammed al-Durrah was not shot and killed by Israeli soldiers, and probably was not shot at all by anyone, but a Palestinian-produced “news” event, recorded by a Palestinian cameraman, legitimized and transmitted around the world by a (Jewish) French reporter and TV network, ignited a worldwide conflagration of hatred. It was one of the sparks for the Second Intifada, and al-Durrah’s “death” remains a staple of anti-Israel discourse today, despite the ample evidence that it was faked.

In 2002, Israeli forces fought Palestinian terrorists in the Jenin refugee camp, a battle in which 23 IDF soldiers and 53 Arabs, only five of whom were noncombatants, died. The media again – in this case the BBC was the prime villain – accepted fabricated Palestinian accounts as the truth, reporting 500 to 1000 deaths, the deliberate massacre of hundreds of civilians and their burial in mass graves, the destruction of part of a hospital, and more. None of it happened, but that didn’t stop the media from reporting it as if it had. And like al-Durrah, it is still an article of faith in much of the world that there was a massacre in Jenin.

It continued in 2006, during the Second Lebanon War. Social media was in its infancy – Twitter had been around for only a few months and Facebook was two years old and limited to colleges and a few corporations – but already there was communication and coordinated incitement via email, newsgroups, and blogs. Still, the mainstream media outdid itself, sucking up and spewing out Hezbollah propaganda, like the famous “Red Cross ambulance incident,” dissected by the intrepid blogger called “Zombie.”

The phenomenon has only increased since then, through our various Gaza conflicts. The media repeatedly ignored the provocations, the thousands of rockets fired into Israeli communities and the kidnappings and murders carried out by terrorists associated with Hamas; and they consistently accepted Hamas’ atrocity stories and casualty figures.

Most recently, Hamas’ attempted invasion at the Gaza fence has been presented as a “peaceful demonstration” at which Israel’s shooting terrorist operatives (53 out of the 62 dead have been identified as members of Hamas or Islamic Jihad) is described in the media as an “indiscriminate massacre of unarmed protestors.” Today, social media has come into its own, creating multiple echo chambers for anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish expression; but the “real” media continues to legitimize some of the worst narratives.

Naturally there is a close relationship between hating Israel and hating Jews, because Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people. It’s instructive to recall the “3-D” criteria for determining when criticism of Israel crosses over into antisemitism – I prefer the expression “Jew hatred” – suggested in 2004 by Natan Sharansky: Demonization, Double standards, and Delegitimization.

The mainstream media, with a few exceptions (e.g., the Wall St. Journal and Fox News) is regularly guilty of at least the first two “D’s.” They are notorious for their double standards, especially including a double standard for credulity: almost any claims of Israeli misbehavior, cruelty, or criminality are repeated with little attempt at verification, even when the claim is made by a terrorist organization like Hamas or its sympathizers.

These claims – such as that Israel steals organs from dead Palestinians, a story first promulgated by Aftonbladet, a very “mainstream” Swedish newspaper – are often so outrageous as to be comparable to medieval blood libels, and clearly constitute demonization.

Prime examples of anti-Israel media somewhat more sophisticated than Aftonbladet are the New York Times and – what else? – the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz. Day in and day out they provide “coverage” of Israel and her conflicts according to the principle that “for Palestinians everything is permitted; while for Israel nothing is excused.” (I apologize for not remembering who said this first).

The New York Times has a history of hostility to Jewish concerns, which according to one book on the subject are a result of the assimilationist ideology of its Jewish publisher. Just as it minimized the Jewish dimension of the Holocaust, today it minimizes the anti-Jewish roots of irrational hatred of Israel.

Ha’aretz is interesting in that it isn’t really a newspaper for Israelis. Its Hebrew print edition and website have a negligible circulation in Israel, while its English-language website ranks about 2,300^th among all websites in the US – not up with the Times, whose rank is about 30 (for comparison, Abuyehuda’s rank is about 4.9 million), but not bad at all.

Ha’aretz is the home of Gideon Levy, who writes a column almost every day viciously attacking the Netanyahu government, the IDF, or the 90% or more of Jewish Israeli society that does not live in North Tel Aviv and belong to the academic, media, or “creative” Left. Levy has enormous sympathy for Palestinians and illegal migrants, but none for IDF soldiers, Mizrachi Jews who still remember who their enemies are, or residents of South Tel Aviv whose neighborhoods have been destroyed by said migrants.

Can the mainstream media be fixed? I doubt it. Reporters and editors come from universities where anti-Israel activities are prominent, and tend to study liberal arts, “communications,” or journalism rather than history. Then they join a pool of like-minded individuals who encourage each other to engage in activist journalism. Correspondents in the field are manipulated by very media-savvy operatives from Hamas, Hezbollah, and the PLO who use a combination of threats and inducements to turn coverage in their direction. By contrast, Israel’s efforts are sporadic, poorly funded, and often poorly conceived. The major news organizations use Arab stringers in places like Gaza and southern Lebanon, who are ideologically anti-Israel, susceptible to threats, or both.

Could social media replace it as a reliable source for news? This is even less likely. Social media does have a role to play in keeping the mainstream honest, as illustrated by the Red Cross ambulance incident mentioned above. But if mainstream standards are eroding, social media has no standards at all. It is very subject to manipulation, as was demonstrated during the last election in the US. And efforts to clean it up, such as Facebook’s proposal to measure “trust” in various news sources are likely to make things worse.

There is no overall solution to her media problem, but there are things that Israel could do. One is to increase the available resources and professionalism of her various spokespersons, such as those of the Foreign Ministry and the IDF. Another is to establish worldwide satellite news channels – like Al-Jazeera – broadcasting in multiple languages, which would present accurate news together with entertaining content. This would be extremely expensive, but a drop in the bucket compared with the military budget.

Although Israel’s commitment to free expression prevents us from silencing our “Gideon Levites,” we can at least speak louder and more clearly, in order to ensure that the real story is accessible to anyone who cares to listen.

April 18, 2018

The Devil is in the Implementation

Yossi Klein Halevi is a wonderful writer. I recommend his book Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation to anyone who wants to appreciate the nuances of Israel’s political tribes.

But like many wonderful Israeli writers on such subjects, his brain is stuck.

It is stuck on the horns of the dilemma Micah Goodman calls Catch-67: if Israel tries to absorb all of Judea and Samaria, it will either have to undemocratically deny the franchise to the Arab population or become an unstable binational state (or both). But on the other hand, if Israel gives up Judea and Samaria, it will have to deal with a security nightmare in which terrorists will be in easy shooting range of Israel’s most populated regions. A Gaza times ten. Neither choice is acceptable. Stuck.

So how does he get unstuck? Like many Jewish intellectuals, he sees the demographic problem as worse than the security problem, and opts for partition. In a recent Wall Street Journal article (unfortunately behind a paywall) he argues that both sides have legitimate aspirations to possess all of the land; but although partition is unjust for both, it is the only practical solution.

I strongly disagree with him about the legitimacy of Palestinian aspirations (so does Yisrael Medad, here), but that isn’t what I want to discuss in this post. I want to look at one small piece of the issue that is a show-stopper for everyone that takes a similar pro-partition line: the question of implementation.

Halevi writes,

Like a majority of Israelis—though the numbers are dropping, according to the polls—I support the principle of a two-state solution, for Israel’s sake no less than for the Palestinians. Extricating ourselves from ruling over another people is a moral, political and demographic imperative. It is the only way to save Israel in the long term as both a Jewish and a democratic state—the two essential elements of our being. Partition is the only real alternative to a Yugoslavia-like single state in which two rival peoples devour each other.

But in order to take that frightening leap of territorial contraction—pulling back to the pre-1967 borders, when Israel was barely 9 miles wide at its narrowest point—we need some indication that a Palestinian state would be a peaceful neighbor, and not one more enemy on our doorstep. The practical expression of that goodwill would be Palestinian agreement that the descendants of the refugees of 1948 return to a Palestinian state and not to Israel, where they would threaten its Jewish majority.

We know, and Halevi notes, the depth of Palestinian hatred for Israel and that “the relentless message, conveyed to a new generation by media and schools and mosques, is that the Jews are thieves, with no historical roots in this land.” We know, from our experience with Gaza and South Lebanon, how easy it is for a terrorist organization like Hamas or Hezbollah to establish itself in areas from which Israel withdraws. We know that the geography of the Land of Israel, with the commanding high ground of Judea and Samaria makes a pre-1967 sized Israel almost indefensible.

No Palestinian leadership has ever indicated that it is prepared to give up the “right of return.” Indeed, this idea – that all of the land from the river to the sea has been unfairly taken from them – is the single essential ideological principle of Palestinian identity. Any Palestinian agreement to two-state plans has always been hedged as temporary, as in the PLO’s “phased plan” or Hamas’ proposal of a temporary truce. Palestinian leaders deny that there is a Jewish people, or that it has a historical connection to the land. This implies that there is a strong possibility that the Palestinian side will not negotiate in good faith or keep its side of the bargain.

There are perhaps 400,000 Israeli Jews residing in Judea and Samaria (excluding Jerusalem). Even with land swaps enabling the Jewish communities with the largest populations to remain in Israel, a partition which required Jews to leave the Palestinian parts of the country would require tens of thousands, perhaps more than a hundred thousand Jews to be resettled elsewhere. Leaving aside the manifest injustice of this, it’s clear that once done it is very difficult to undo.

When a concrete concession by one side – the withdrawal of soldiers and civilians, perhaps (as in the Sinai and Gaza) the physical destruction of communities – which is hard or impossible to undo is balanced against a paper commitment to be peaceful by the other, there is little cost to the latter side to renege on the agreement.

But let’s assume that there have been negotiations and both sides have signed an agreement to give up what they consider their historic rights: Israel’s right to settlement in all the Land of Israel, and the Palestinians’ right of return to Israel for the descendents of the refugees of 1948. Now here are a few questions:

Once the IDF has withdrawn from Judea and Samaria and given control to the Palestinians, what happens if they violate their agreement to be a peaceful neighbor? Our experience during the Oslo period argues that they will not keep their word. How will the agreement be enforced? Will we be asked to depend on the UN or foreign powers? Or will Israel need to invade and retake the areas in yet another war? Neither of this options is acceptable.
Sometimes even democratic Western nations don’t live up to agreements after administrations change (for example, consider the Obama Administration’s renegingon the promises in the Bush letters to Ariel Sharon). Autocratic leaders are even less likely to maintain commitments made by their predecessors. What guarantees that the next Palestinian “President” will observe the agreement? And what if, for example, a Fatah administration is replaced by a Hamas one, or even one aligned with the Islamic State or Iran? All of these things are possible.

So we have a one-sided agreement which is almost impossible to undo, with a party that historically does not negotiate in good faith or keep its commitments, whose basic identity opposes such an agreement, which has an unstable autocratic leadership, and which is prone to being overthrown by extremists.

One of the good things about Halevi’s piece is that he understands that any agreement between Israel and the Palestinians is not in the cards for the near future. There is too much extremism (“on both sides,” he says, but I think it is mostly on the Arab side). And he doesn’t think that “the status quo is not sustainable.” We’ve been sustaining it for 50 (or 70, if you prefer) years, and we can sustain it a bit longer. He seems to agree with Micah Goodman that there is no “solution” that can be implemented next week:

A deepening Israeli-Sunni strategic relationship could evolve into a political relationship, encouraging regional involvement in tempering if not yet solving the Palestinian conflict. One possible interim deal would be gradual Israeli concessions to the Palestinians—reversing the momentum of settlement expansion and strengthening the Palestinian economy—in exchange for gradual normalization with the Sunni world.

Unfortunately, this too is wishful thinking. Regardless of what the Sunni leaders would prefer, the Palestinians are moving in the direction of more extremism, not less. If they don’t get support from Saudi Arabia, they are happy to take it from Iran or Turkey. The Death Factory set in motion by Yasser Arafat maintains itself, and concessions by Israel just encourage it.

I believe that the Jewish state has a legal, moral and historical right to all of the Land of Israel that the Palestinians do not have (although they do have human rights and ought to have at least a limited right of self-determination). I have argued this at length elsewhere. But that’s not the point.

The point is that implementing partition of the Land of Israel would risk national suicide. There’s no rush. Perhaps the best “solution” is not to look for a political agreement, but just to keep the status quo with small modifications as needed. If you must have a program, there are other options than partition for an end game. So could we stop insisting on this one?

Originally Published in Abu Yehuda.

April 10, 2018

No, it isn’t Kent State on the Mediterranean*

I talked to an American friend yesterday. She is well-educated and interested in current events, and she was concerned about what was going on at the border with Gaza. She read me an AP news account that was in her local paper (probably this one) which explained in the second paragraph that

Israeli troops opened fire from across the border, killing at least nine Palestinians and wounding 491 others in the second mass border protest in eight days. The deaths brought to at least 31 the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli fire since last week.

What is the picture that this evokes?

If I didn’t know better, I would see a bunch of people peacefully holding signs, singing “we shall overcome,” when suddenly a machine gun opens up and mows them down at random, men women and children. The article mentions that “the area was engulfed by thick black smoke from protesters setting tires on fire,” but it is only in the ninth paragraph that we are told that “the [Israeli] military said” that the “protesters” threw firebombs and explosive devices under cover of the smoke, and that “several attempts to cross the fence were thwarted.”

Let’s analyze some of this.

Are they “protesters” and if so, what are they protesting? Some of them are civilians who are sympathetic with Hamas, or who are young people with nothing more exciting to do, who have taken the free buses provided by Hamas to eat the free lunch provided there. Participants are encouraged to try to break through the border fence, and Hamas is paying them from $200 to $500 if they are injured, and $3000 to families of anyone who is killed.

The civilians are generally not the ones who are getting shot. Most of those who did are members of the al-Qassam brigades or other military organizations associated with Hamas or other terrorist factions, who a trying to damage or penetrate the border fence, or injure or kill Israeli troops on the other side.

Here is a description from an article by Nahum Barnea, an Israeli journalist who is a bitter enemy of Israel’s present government, and anything but a right-winger:

[IDF officer at the scene:] “There were armed cells among the protestors that wanted to break through the fence to set it on fire, to kidnap soldiers and perhaps break into one of the kibbutzim. There are several people within the crowd, members of Hamas’ elite Nukhba force, who are hiding guns, knives, explosives under their clothes. Their intention was to turn into a fighting force.”

Nineteen or 20 Palestinians were killed on the first Friday, I said.

“One-third of the dead are armed terrorists,” one of the officers said. “Another 40 percent are members of the organizations, including a Nukhba company commander. Most of the others were identified as key instigators. The first person who was killed was a farmer. It was a misidentification by a tank.”

The orders received from the General Staff are clear. A soldier is allowed to fire in three cases: If he is in a life-threatening situation, if he detects damage to state infrastructure [the border fence] and if he spots key instigators. In the last case, he must receive approval from a commander. First, he fires into the air, and only then he shoots towards the person’s body.

“Let’s assume that 400 people had broken through the border fence,” one of the officers said. “We would have had to stop them with fire. At least 50 of them would have been killed. It would have been a strategic event. They would have had to retaliate. We would have had to retaliate. In fact, we are preventing war through our surgical activity.

People in Gaza have much to be unhappy about. Media sympathetic to Hamas usually blame Israel, citing its “blockade” of Gaza. But the blockade is very selective, and does not prevent Gaza from importing food, medical supplies and even construction materials intended to rebuild homes and infrastructure damaged in recent wars. Hamas taxes all imports heavily, and appropriates what it wants for its own purposes. Cement and rebar imported for construction of buildings, for example, is diverted to use in attack tunnels dug under the border to Israel, which are intended to infiltrate terrorists and to kidnap Israelis.

The biggest problems for Gaza residents today are the lack of electricity, mostly because of a dispute with the Palestinian Authority, and the availability of clean water and sewage treatment facilities. International donors have provided money and equipment, but resources are consistently diverted to Hamas for military purposes.

But these are not the things they are protesting. The protest is called “The Great March of Return,” and it is on behalf of a “right of return” of the descendents of Arab refugees from the 1948 war to land that has been under Israel’s control since then. Rhetoric is very aggressive. Hamas leader Ismail Haniya said that the event marks the beginning of their return to “all of Palestine,” especially Jerusalem, which they say US President Trump had no business recognizing as the capital of Israel.

As everyone knows, the “return” of the millions who claim refugee status would be the end of the Jewish state (and probably the start of a civil war that would rival the one in Syria). In other words, what they are protesting is the very existence of Israel on land that they want for themselves.

I told my friend that Israel had few options. Could they fail to defend the border, close to Israeli communities (as close as 100 meters in some cases)? Palestinian terrorists have on countless occasions showed that they are capable of horrific violence, even slitting the throats of babies in their cribs.

Some commentators have gone as far as to accuse Israel of deliberately “massacring” Palestinians. What they don’t explain is what advantage Israel would gain by doing so. Israel is extremely conscious (too much so, in my opinion) of maintaining an image of a progressive, humane society, and would consider mass or indiscriminate killing of Palestinians a public relations disaster as well as a moral one. The view that IDF soldiers in general would seize an opportunity to kill Palestinians out of sheer hatred – which is apparently assumed by those who suggest that there has been a “massacre” – is a manifestation of the campaign of demonization that Israel and the IDF have been subjected to, and even of a pervasive anti-Jewish worldview.

Hamas, on the other hand, benefits greatly from civilian casualties, which support its narrative of victimization and provide its supporters with fodder for “lawfare” against the IDF and diplomatic sanctions against Israel.

I have recently read several articles which argue that the situation is very complicated and we shouldn’t place all the responsibility on either side. I agree that it is complicated. There are numerous players with influence here, including Israel and Hamas of course, but also the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, and notably Iran, which is financing Hamas and sees violence in Gaza as in its interest.

But it isn’t complicated in a moral sense. I have no problem saying that one side is defending itself against invasion, and the other is committing an act of aggression while at the same time victimizing its own people.

It’s a shame that important parts of the American media don’t get this – or don’t want its consumers to get it.

______________

* For those too young to remember, see Kent State Massacre.

Originally Published on Abu Yehuda.

April 2, 2018April 2, 2018

Must all our residents be citizens?

Someone asked me a question on Facebook. Social media demands that all answers be given while standing on one foot, and since I’m not Hillel, I’m going to present my answer here, using both feet.

So here is the question (I’m paraphrasing): Isn’t the only just and practical solution to your conflict with the Palestinians to create one state between the Jordan and the Mediterranean and give everybody equal rights? Make all the Arabs in the region citizens. The fellow added something about a right of return for “refugees” living elsewhere; I’ll get back to that later.

There could be an acceptable one-state solution. But it could not be created by simply making all the inhabitants citizens with equal rights in every respect.

First, there is an assumption here that every country must be like Canada or the United States, a state of its citizens. But Israel is not that. It is the nation-state of the Jewish people. That implies that there must be a difference between the status of Jews and other citizens. We go to great lengths to insist that Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel have exactly equal rights, and that is true – up to a point. But in some important respects it is not. I can call my Jewish cousin in America and invite him to come and live in Israel, and the government will allow him to do so and even give him special benefits. An Arab citizen cannot do this. This is a fundamental point, an explication of what it means to say that the state belongs to the Jewish people and not merely to everyone who lives here, even if everyone has the right to be represented in the Knesset.

The nation-state of the Jewish people, if it allows all of its citizens to vote must have a Jewish – no, a Zionist – majority. If it did not, then the Knesset could vote to remove the special status of the Jewish people. There is a dispute about the how many Arabs there actually are in the region, although it is relatively certain that Jews would still be a majority, especially if Gaza weren’t included. But the Arabs would have the support of left-wing Jews and maybe political opportunists a well. There would be massive campaigns (paid for by European governments and the New Israel Fund, no doubt) to promote reducing the Jewish majority, changing the symbols of the state, or even weakening or repealing the Law of Return. It could happen.

The Jewish state is a refuge for Diaspora Jews who are persecuted, but it is also a reservoir and an incubator of Jewish culture. Today, given the degree of assimilation in the Diaspora, it is possible to imagine the Jewish people disappearing from history if there were not a Jewish state to nurture and nourish it. The Jewish character of the state is, even today, under attack, and it is imperative to protect it.

Does this mean that Israel must never consider annexing Judea and Samaria, land that arguably (and there are many arguments) belongs to Israel and must remain under our control for strategic reasons, out of fear of losing its Zionist majority? Not necessarily.

In some countries, the great majority of the inhabitants are citizens. But this is not true in general, especially in the Middle East. In Jordan and Saudi Arabia, only about 70% are citizens, in Lebanon 75%, and in Bahrain, 48%. An extreme example is Qatar, where less than 15% of the residents are citizens.

But, you say, most of these countries aren’t democratic. Well, in ancient Athens, where the word ‘democracy’ originated, only 10-20% were citizens. But I get the point. It is more democratic when a greater percentage of the population shares the rights and duties of citizenship. Nevertheless, in the fractious Middle East, where ethnic conflicts are the rule rather than the exception, real democracy is often theoretical rather than real. Both Lebanon and Iraq are theoretically democratic republics, but their elections play out along strict ethnic lines, and it would be hard to say that “democracy” greatly benefits their inhabitants.

Democracy is not an absolute. What it means and how it is implemented varies from place to place and from time to time. Even the most democratic of countries place limitations on immigration, on suffrage (consider that in most states of the US, convicted felons have restrictions placed on their right to vote, some of them permanent), and on eligibility for naturalization of non-citizens. In my opinion, given the stresses placed on Israel by the hostility of its neighbors – indeed, the hostility of much of the world – it is miraculous that it is as democratic as it is, particularly in respect to the full civil rights enjoyed by its 1.5 million Arab citizens.

One of the most liberal policies associated with citizenship is the practice of automatically granting it to any child born on national soil. Interestingly, even in the developed world, citizenship by birthright is uncommon: only 30 countries (out of 194 UN member nations) automatically grant citizenship to children born on their soil, with the most prominent among them being the US and Canada. None are in the Middle East. Pakistan is the only country in Asia which grants this right (but there is an exception if the father is considered an “enemy of the state”).

My Facebook acquaintance mentioned a “right of return for ‘refugees’ living elsewhere.” This demand, repeated ad infinitum by anti-Zionists, is legally indefensible and practically unacceptable. It is not supported in international law. In addition, the unsustainable definition of Palestinian refugee status as a hereditary property is not applied to any other refugee population. It was invented – along with policies of preventing the resettlement of the refugees or their descendants anywhere but Israel, encouraging the growth of this population (today more than 5 million), and indoctrinating them with the idea that some day they would “return to their homes,” as a cruel exploitation of innocent people as weapons in the continuing war against the Jews.

At this point, what is supposed to be “just and practical” becomes the elimination of the Jewish state and its replacement by yet another Arab-dominated state added to the 22 already existing in the region. It seems reasonable to assume that the Jews of Israel would not sit still for this, and so it should be clear that this plan, supposedly a peaceful solution, would actually lead to war.

While an argument can be made that the Arab population of Judea and Samaria has some kind of right of self-determination that is not actualized – although it can also be said that today the rule of the autonomous Palestinian Authority does constitute self-determination – a full actualization of what Palestinians see as their rights would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state. That is, self-determination for the newly-created “Palestinian people” would come at the expense of Jewish self-determination, and possibly of the survival of the Jewish people.

And I admit that I’m biased. I admit that I care more for my people than for the Palestinians. A lot more, and not just for the obvious reason that the Palestinian Arabs have been particularly unkind to us for the past 100 years or so. There is a human drive for cultural self-preservation just as there is for individual self-preservation, although it may be suppressed in unhealthy cultures – just as unhealthy individuals sometimes lose the will to survive, or even commit suicide.

So let’s assume that at some point in the future Israel were to annex Judea and Samaria. I can find no legal, moral or practical reason for automatically granting citizenship to all the Arab residents, as my interlocutor suggests, and plenty of reasons not to. Indeed, it only seems reasonable in view of the extreme and violent hostility of much of the Arab population of the area to Israel and Jews, that Israel should follow Pakistan’s example and exclude “enemies of the state” from citizenship.

The Left argues that either we accept a partition of our country according to the 1949 armistice lines or something close to them – and lose our ability to defend the country – or we will get their disastrous version of a one-state solution. But there are numerous other possibilities, and one of the keys to developing them is the understanding that not every resident must be a citizen.

Originally Published on Abu Yehuda.