Author: Caroline Glick

Caroline Glick is an American-born Israeli journalist, newspaper editor, and writer. She writes for Makor Rishon and is the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post.[2] She is also the Senior Fellow for Middle East Affairs of the Washington, DC-based Center for Security Policy.
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Israel, American Jewry and Trump’s GOP

To understand what can and ought to be done, it is first important to understand the nature of the BDS movement.

Earlier this month Norway, Denmark and Switzerland did something surprising.

Norway announced that it was demanding the return of its money from the Palestinian Human Rights and Humanitarian Law Secretariat, for the latter’s funding of a Palestinian women’s group that built a youth center near Nablus named for PLO mass murderer Dalal Mughrabi.

Denmark followed, announcing it was cutting off all funding to the group.

And last week, the Swiss parliament passed a resolution directing the government to amend Swiss law to block funding of NGOs “involved in racist, antisemitic or hate incitement actions.”

For years, the Israeli government has been urging these and other European governments to stop funding such groups, to no avail. What explains their abrupt change of heart? In two words: Donald Trump.

For years, the Obama administration quietly encouraged the Europeans to fund these groups and to ratchet up their anti-Israel positions. Doing so, the former administration believed, would coerce Israel to make concessions to the PLO.

But now, Trump and his advisers are delivering the opposite message. And, as the actions by Denmark, Norway and Switzerland show, the new message is beginning to be received.

If the US administration keeps moving forward on this trajectory, it can do far more than suspend funding for one terrorism-supporting Palestinian NGO. It can shut down the entire BDS industry before Trump finishes his current term in office.

To understand what can and ought to be done, it is first important to understand the nature of the BDS movement. Under the catchphrase BDS, two separate campaigns against Israel and against Jews are being carried out.

The first BDS campaign is a campaign of economic warfare. The focal point of that campaign is Europe. The purpose of the campaign is to harm Israel’s economy by enacting discriminatory, anti-Israel trade policies and encouraging unofficial consumer and business boycotts of Israeli firms and products.

The US Congress can end this economic war against Israel by passing laws penalizing European states for engaging in trade practices that breach the World Trade Organization treaties. The US Treasury Department can also push strongly and effectively for such an end in its trade negotiations with the EU. The Treasury Department can also investigate whether and how EU trade practices toward Israel constitute unlawful barriers to trade.

Unlike the situation in Europe, where the BDS economic war against Israel is fairly advanced, efforts in the US to mount economic boycotts of Israel hit an iceberg early on due to the swift preemptive actions taken by state legislatures.

In 2015, then-South Carolina governor Nikki Haley became the first governor to sign a law barring her state government from doing business or investing in companies that boycott Israel. Last week Kansas became the 21st US state to pass an anti-BDS law along the same lines. Last month, all 50 state governors declared opposition to BDS.

The second BDS campaign being carried out against Israel is a form of political and social warfare.

Its epicenter is US academia. Its purpose is to erode US support for Israel, by making it politically unacceptable and socially devastating to publicly voice support for Israel on college campuses and more generally in leftist circles.

As is the case with the economic BDS campaign, the best way to defeat political BDS is through state and federal government action. If state and federal governments withheld funding to universities and colleges that permit BDS groups to operate on their campuses, campus administrators, who to date have refused to lift a finger against these hate groups, would be forced into action.

If the US Education and Justice departments opened civil rights investigations against major BDS groups for antisemitic bigotry, campus administrators would finally begin banning them from their campuses.

For many Israelis, the notion that defeating BDS is a job for the US government rather than for grassroots, American Jewish activists, will come as a surprise.

When Israelis think about the BDS movement, they tend to think that the American Jewish community is the place to turn for assistance.

This is not merely incorrect.

As two studies published in the last few weeks show, the notion that Israel can look to the American Jewish community for help with anything is becoming increasingly dubious.

To be sure, there are several American Jewish groups that devote massive resources to combating BDS on campuses. But their actions are tactical.

They fight specific BDS resolutions coming to votes before student councils. They train pro-Israel students to defend Israel to their peers.

While helpful, none of these actions constitutes a serious challenge to the movement.

On a strategic level, the effective moves made to date against BDS have been initiated by Republicans.

Alan Clemmons, the South Carolina lawmaker who initiated the anti-BDS bill in his statehouse and has since gone on to spearhead the state government anti-BDS drive nationally, is a Christian Zionist.

Clemmons didn’t act out of concern for South Carolinian Jews. The Jewish community of South Carolina numbers a mere 20,000 members. The state-by-state anti-economic BDS campaign is neither the brainchild of any major Jewish group nor the product of their efforts.

So, too, to the extent that the Trump administration and the Republican-controlled Congress take action to defeat BDS on campuses and in Europe, they won’t be answering the call of their Jewish constituents. American Jews vote overwhelmingly for the increasingly anti-Israel Democratic Party. And while making up a mere 2% of the US population, American Jews contributed 50% of the donations to the Democratic Party in the 2016 elections.

This then brings us to the two studies of the American Jewish community and its future trajectory.

The first study was published by the Jewish Agency’s Jewish People Policy Institute. It analyzes the data from the 2013 Pew survey of American Jewish attitudes. The Pew survey demonstrated that the Jewish identity of American Jews is growing increasingly attenuated and superficial.

Famously, while 19% of American Jews said that they view observance of Jewish law as an essential part of their Jewish identity, 42% said they viewed having a good sense of humor as an essential part of their Jewish identity.

The JPPI study analyzed the Pew data regarding rates of marriage and childbearing among American Jews aged 24-54. The study started with the data on intermarriage. Sixty percent of non-haredi American Jews are married to non-Jews. A mere 32% of married American Jews are raising their children as Jewish to some degree.

From there, the JPPI study considered marriage and childbirth rates in general. It works out that a mere 50% of American Jews between 24 and 54 are married. And a mere 40% of American Jews between those ages have children living with them.

The JPPI study tells us two important things.

First, in the coming years there will be far fewer American Jews. Second, among those who are Jewish, their Jewish identity will continue to weaken.

Clearly, it would be unwise for Israel to believe that it can depend on such a community to secure its interests in the US for the long haul.

The second study shows that not only can Israel not expect the American Jewish community to help it maintain its alliance with the US, the number of American Jews willing to spearhead anti-Israel campaigns is likely to grow in the coming years.

The second study was produced by Brand Israel, a group of public relations experts that for the past decade has been trying to change the way young Americans think about Israel. The idea was to discuss aspects of Israel that have nothing to do with the Palestinians, with an emphasis on Israel as a hi-tech power. The hope was that by branding Israel as the Start-Up Nation, leftists, who support the Palestinians, would still support Israel.

Fern Oppenheim, one of the leaders of Brand Israel, presented the conclusions of an analysis of the group’s work at the Herzliya Conference this week and discussed them with The Times of Israel. It works out that the PR campaign backfired.

Far from inspiring increased support for Israel, Oppenheim argued that the hi-tech-centric branding campaign made leftist American Jews even more anti-Israel. She related that over the past decade, there has been an 18-point drop in support for Israel among US Jewish students.

To remedy the situation, which she referred to as “devastating,” Oppenheim recommended changing the conversation from hi-tech to “shared values.”

The problem with Oppenheim’s recommendation is that it ignores the problem.

Young American Jews aren’t turning against Israel because their values are different from Israeli values. By and large, they have the same values as Israeli society. And if they know anything about Israel, they know that their values aren’t in conflict with Israeli values.

Young American Jews are turning on Israel for two reasons. First, they don’t care that they are Jewish and as a consequence, see no reason to stick their necks out on Israel’s behalf.

And second, due in large part to the political BDS campaign on college campuses, supporting Israel requires them to endanger or relinquish their ideological home on the Left. Since their leftist identities are far stronger than their Jewish identities, young American Jews are joining the BDS mob in increasing numbers.

This then brings us back to BDS.

The only way to diminish the groundswell of American Jews who are becoming hostile toward Israel is to defeat the forces of political BDS on campuses. To do this, Israel should turn not to the Jewish community but to evangelical Christians, the Trump administration and the Republican- controlled Congress.

As for the American Jews, Israel needs to stop viewing the community as a resource and begin to view it as a community in crisis. To this end, the most significant contribution Israel can make to the American Jewish community – particularly to non-Orthodox American Jews – is to encourage them to make aliya. Assuming that current trends will continue, the only way non-Orthodox American Jews can have faith their grandchildren will be Jewish is to make aliya.

No, this won’t appeal to all American Jews. But nothing Israel does will. Israel’s job isn’t to reach the unreachable. It is to protect its alliance with the US and to help the Jews that remain in the room.

Originally Published in Jerusalem Post

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Burying Obama’s legacy

The fact is that Trump has given Netanyahu support as he has walked away from the failed policy paradigm of the Obama years.

It may very well be that this week was the week that Israel and the US put to rest former president Barack Obama’s policies and positions on Israel and the Palestinians.

If so, the move was made despite the best efforts of Obama’s team to convince the Trump administration to maintain them.

The details of Obama’s policies and positions have been revealed in recent weeks in a series of articles published in Haaretz regarding Obama’s secretary of state John Kerry’s failed peacemaking efforts, which ended in 2014.

The articles reported segments of two drafts of a US framework for a final peace treaty between the PLO and Israel. The drafts were created in February and March 2014.

The article series is predicated on the assumption that Kerry and his team were on the precipice of a historic breakthrough between PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. But a close reading of the documents shows that the opposite was the case.

There are two reasons that Kerry had no prospects for reaching a deal.

First, he, Obama and their advisers were too hostile to Israel and its citizens to ever convince Netanyahu that Israel’s interests would be secured.

A February 2014 draft framework agreement, which was based on conversations Kerry and his team held with Netanyahu and his advisers, makes this clear. The draft includes Netanyahu’s demand that Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria not annexed to Israel would remain “in place” after the implementation of a peace deal, and presumably, become towns in the future Palestinian state.

In other words, Netanyahu demanded that the Israelis in Judea and Samaria whose towns would be located in the territory of “Palestine” would enjoy the same rights and protections as Israel’s Arab citizens enjoy.

Kerry and his team would have none of it. The February draft agreement notes, “[US] negotiators need to check with PM [Netanyahu] on whether he wants to [maintain this position]… They believe that if so, he will push strongly for ‘in place.’ ‘In place’ is inconsistent with US policy and therefore unacceptable to us as well as the Palestinians.”

In other words, the position of the Obama administration was that all Israelis living in areas that would become part of the Palestinian state must be forcibly removed from their homes and communities.

Haaretz reporters Barak Ravid and Amir Tibon recalled that in previous rounds of negotiations, the Palestinians – unlike the Obama administration – had not rejected this Israeli position out of hand. That is, in demanding the mass expulsion of Israeli Jews from their homes, the administration adopted a policy more extreme than the PLO.

Then there is the problem with the PLO.

Abbas rejected Kerry’s February 2014 draft framework agreement, which was based on conversations with Netanyahu and his advisors. But he also rejected Kerry’s March 2014 agreement, which was based on the US’s conversation with him and his advisors.

The March 2014 draft was presented to Abbas by Obama himself during a meeting between the two in the White House. Not only did Abbas not accept Obama’s offer, he refused to respond to it.

This should have surprised no one. Abbas did the same thing in 2008 after then-prime minister Ehud Olmert presented Abbas with his peace proposal. Abbas’s predecessor, Yasser Arafat, responded in the same way in July 2000 to then-prime minister Ehud Barak’s peace offer, and in December 2000, to then-president Bill Clinton’s peace offer.

Given the consistent track record, it is beyond foolish to believe that anyone – even Trump – will fare differently from his American and Israeli predecessors.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Haaretz series is what they tell us about Netanyahu.

Like him or hate him, the Netanyahu revealed in the articles is a brilliant statesman. In difficult diplomatic conditions, with the US openly siding with the PLO against him, Netanyahu managed to parry and duck. Although Haaretz tries to present Netanyahu as weak and compliant, the text shows that the opposite was the case.

In the face of massive pressure from Obama, Netanyahu refused to commit to anything. His only recorded position was that all Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria remain in place in perpetuity.

Rather than confront Kerry directly, Netanyahu stood aside and watched as the Americans drafted their anti-Israel proposals. He nodded. He smiled. He refused to commit to anything.

And he waited patiently for Abbas to walk away from the table.

Until this week, much to the dismay of many of his supporters, Netanyahu appeared unwilling to move beyond the defensive position he maintained throughout the Obama presidency. This week he took three great big steps forward.

First, Netanyahu announced that he supports amending Israel’s NGO law to ban foreign governments from funding political nonprofits registered in Israel.

For the past 20 years, Israel has been subjected to ever-escalating subversive campaigns funded and often directed by foreign governments and carried out by Israeli-registered NGOs. The purpose of these campaigns is to legitimize political and economic warfare against the Jewish state by European and other Western governments. The campaigns legitimize political and economic warfare against Israel by demonizing the Jewish state, its citizens and its soldiers.

In recent years, lawmakers have tried repeatedly to block the funding. But due to US pressure, Netanyahu scuttled all their attempts. Proposed reform bills were watered down until they were limited to instituting weak reporting requirements. Foreign government funds continue streaming into the coffers of NGOs whose positions are supported by no significant domestic constituencies.

By announcing that he now supports passing legislation that will bar foreign government funding of nonprofits, Netanyahu is striking a strategic blow at the political and economic war being waged against Israel by the EU and by the international Left.

This war, waged in the name of the Palestinians, has harmed Israel’s relations with the Palestinians by discouraging them from living peacefully with their Israeli neighbors.

Then there is UNRWA. The UN’s refugee agency dedicated to the Palestinians is arguably one of the central reasons for the perpetuation of the Palestinian conflict with Israel. Indeed, UNRWA was formed by the Arab governments to specifically block all prospect of peace between Israel and its neighbors.

UNRWA prevents the permanent resettlement of the Arabs who left Israel in 1948 and 1949 as well as their descendants. It has doomed five generations of “refugees” to live in the squalor of its camps, blocked from receiving citizenship in the countries of their birth and prevented from being resettled in other countries.

After Hamas took over Gaza in 2007, then-secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and then-foreign minister Tzipi Livni decided that the best way to respond to the move was by massively increasing UNRWA’s budget. They were unmoved by the fact that UNRWA employs Hamas terrorists. They ignored the fact that UNRWA schools in Gaza and elsewhere indoctrinate their students to embrace jihad and the cause of Israel’s annihilation.

Under Obama, the US increased its payments to UNRWA even as UNRWA schools, clinics and other facilities have been used as missile launching pads and storage depots in Hamas’s war against Israel.

This week, Netanyahu finally put to rest the dangerous folly that UNRWA is a foil to Hamas and a positive force in the region. He called for UNRWA to be dismantled and for the Palestinians and their descendants to be treated like every other refugee group in the world and be resettled by the UN’s high commissioner for refugees.

If Netanyahu’s move against UNRWA is translated into actual Israeli and US policy, it will mark the beginning of the end of one of the primary causes of the Palestinian conflict with Israel.

Finally, there is incitement. Palestinian terrorism would vastly diminish were it not for constant incitement that encourages terrorism and rewards and celebrates terrorists.

Since it was established by the Qatari regime in 1996, Al Jazeera has been a central engine of antisemitic and jihadist indoctrination of the Palestinians. And yet, Israel has never moved to close Al Jazeera’s bureau in Israel.

Israel has given the terrorist network a pass largely because it hasn’t wanted to deal with the Western outcry that such a move would provoke.

This week, for the first time, Netanyahu, along with Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman, announced they support Al Jazeera’s closure and have directed their staff to consider the best way to do so.

In so doing, Netanyahu and Liberman are making the most of the opportunity afforded Israel by the Arab states’ open cleavage with Qatar. Last week, Saudi Arabia and Jordan closed Al Jazeera’s bureaus in Riyadh and Amman. Egypt, which closed Al Jazeera’s offices in 2013, blocked its website.

Taken both separately and together, Netanyahu’s moves this week strike strategic blows at three central components of the Palestinian conflict with Israel. Incitement, political warfare and the eternalization of Palestinian refugee status all render the conflict intractable and prevent peaceful Palestinian leaders from emerging.

Notably, whereas the Obama administration would have subjected Israel to hysterical condemnations if Netanyahu had dared to take the steps he took this week, the Trump administration has taken no position on Netanyahu’s announcements.

The real reason that Trump appears to be burying Obama’s legacy is because unlike the ideologically- driven Obama, Trump is willing to consider evidence and facts when determining his opinions.

In May, Abbas came to the White House and told Trump that he abjured terrorism. Israel then presented Trump with evidence that Abbas publicly incites terrorism and uses the Palestinian Authority budget to support terrorists and their families.

Trump took in the information and upbraided Abbas for lying to him.

True, this week Secretary of State Rex Tillerson falsely told Congress that Abbas had cut off the payments. And true, Tillerson doubled down on his assertion after both the Palestinians and Israel said the payments have not been cut off.

True as well that Trump continues to believe that he can make “the deal” that his predecessors failed to secure.

But the fact is that Trump has given Netanyahu support as he has walked away from the failed policy paradigm of the Obama years.

In other words, Netanyahu’s moves this week, and the fact that the Trump administration has left him alone to make them without being second-guessed or condemned by Washington, indicates that we have finally moved past Obama’s legacy.

Where we are going is still unknown. But what is certain is that by going after the sources of the continued malignancy of the conflict and pushing back against the lies that informed Obama’s policies, both Israel and the US have abandoned them.

Originally published in Jerusalem Post

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Qatar, Trump, and the Double Game

Arguably, Qatar’s role in undermining the stability of the Islamic world has been second only to Iran’s.

President Donald Trump has been attacked by his ubiquitous critics for his apparent about-face on the crisis surrounding Qatar.

In a Twitter post on Tuesday, Trump sided firmly with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and the other Sunni states that cut diplomatic ties with Qatar and instituted an air and land blockade of the sheikhdom on Monday.

On Wednesday, Trump said that he hopes to mediate the dispute, more or less parroting the lines adopted by the State Department and the Pentagon which his Twitter posts disputed the day before.

To understand the apparent turnaround and why it is both understandable and probably not an about-face, it is important to understand the forces at play and the stakes involved in the Sunni Arab world’s showdown with Doha.

Arguably, Qatar’s role in undermining the stability of the Islamic world has been second only to Iran’s.

Beginning in the 1995, after the Pars gas field was discovered and quickly rendered Qatar the wealthiest state in the world, the Qatari regime set about undermining the Sunni regimes of the Arab world by among other things, waging a propaganda war against them and against their US ally and by massively funding terrorism.

The Qatari regime established Al Jazeera in 1996.

Despite its frequent denials, the regime has kept tight control on Al Jazeera’s messaging. That messaging has been unchanging since the network’s founding. The pan-Arab satellite station which reaches hundreds of millions of households in the region and worldwide, opposes the US’s allies in the Sunni Arab world. It supports the Muslim Brotherhood and every terrorist group spawned by it. It supports Iran and Hezbollah.

Al Jazeera is viciously anti-Israel and anti-Jewish.

It serves as a propaganda arm not only of al-Qaida and Hezbollah but of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and any other group that attacks the US, Israel, Europe and other Western targets.

Al Jazeera’s reporters have accompanied Hamas and Taliban forces in their wars against Israel and the US. After Israel released Hezbollah arch-terrorist Samir Kuntar from prison in exchange for the bodies of two IDF reservists, Al Jazeera’s Beirut bureau hosted an on-air party in his honor.

Al Jazeera was at the forefront of the propaganda campaign inciting against then-Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in 2011 and against Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2012. Its operations were widely credited with inciting their overthrow and installing in their places regimes controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood and other jihadist groups.

As for the regime itself, it has massively financed jihadist groups for more than 20 years. Qatar is a major bankroller not only of al-Qaida and Hamas but of militias associated with ISIS in Iraq and Syria. In a State Department cable from 2009 published by WikiLeaks, US diplomats referred to Qatar as the largest funder of terrorism in the world.

According to the Financial Times, the straw that broke the camel’s back for the Saudis and their allies was their discovery that in April, Qatar paid Iran, its Iraqi militias and al-Qaida forces in Syria up to a billion dollars to free members of the royal family held captive in southern Iraq and 50 terrorists held captive in Syria.

Given Qatar’s destabilizing and pernicious role in the region and worldwide in everything related to terrorism funding and incitement, Trump’s statement on Tuesday in support of the Sunnis against Qatar was entirely reasonable. What can the US do other than stand by its allies as they seek to coerce Qatar to end its destabilizing and dangerous practices? The case for supporting the Saudis, Egyptians, the UAE and the others against Qatar becomes all the more overwhelming given their demands.

The Sunnis are demanding that Qatar ditch its strategic alliance with Iran. They demand that Qatar end its financial support for terrorist groups and they demand that Qatar expel terrorists from its territory.

If Qatar is forced to abide by these demands, its abandonment of Iran in particular will constitute the single largest blow the regime in Tehran has absorbed in recent memory. Among other things, Qatar serves as Iran’s banker and diplomatic proxy.

If the story began and ended here, then Trump’s anti-Qatari stance would have been the obvious and only move. Beyond being the right thing to do, if Qatar’s regime is overthrown or emasculated, the development would mark the most significant achievement to date against the Iranian axis of jihad.

Unfortunately, the situation is not at all simple.

First there is the problem of Doha’s relations with key Americans and American institutions.

Ahead of the 2016 US elections, WikiLeaks published documents which disclosed that the emir of Qatar presented Bill Clinton with a $1 million check for the Clinton Foundation as a gift for his 65th birthday. During Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, Qatar reportedly contributed some $6m. to the Clinton Foundation.

Clinton, for her part, was deeply supportive of the regime and of Al Jazeera. For instance, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2011, Clinton praised Al Jazeera for its leading role in fomenting and expanding the protests in Egypt that brought down Mubarak.

Clinton wasn’t the only one that Qatar singled out for generosity. Since the 1990s, Qatar has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in US universities. Six major US universities have campuses in Doha.

Then there is the Brookings Institution. The premier US think tank had a revolving door relationship with the Obama and Clinton administrations.

In 2014, The New York Times reported that Brookings, which opened a branch in Doha in 2002, had received millions of dollars in contributions from Qatar. In 2013 alone, the Qatari regime contributed $14.8 million to Brookings.

Not surprisingly, Brookings’ scholars supported the overthrow of Mubarak, and supported the Muslim Brotherhood regime during its year in power. Brookings scholars urged the Obama administration to cut off military assistance to Egypt after the military overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood in 2013.

Brookings scholars have similarly written sympathetically of Qatar and its ally Turkey. As the Investigative Project on Terrorism revealed in a four-part series on Brookings’ relations with Qatar in 2014, Brookings’ scholars ignored human rights abuses by Qatar and praised Turkey’s Erdogan regime as behaving like the US in enabling religion to have a role in public life.

It is likely that given then-president Barack Obama’s strategic goal of reorienting US Middle East policy away from its traditional Sunni allies and Israel toward Iran and its allies in Qatar and Turkey, that Brookings, Clinton and other beneficiaries of Qatar’s generosity were simply knocking on an open door. Indeed, in 2014, during Operation Protective Edge, the Obama administration’s alliance with Qatar, Turkey and Iran against Sunnis and Israel came out of the shadows.

During the Hamas war with Israel, Obama sought to dislodge Egypt from its traditional role as mediator between Israel and Hamas and replace it with Qatar and Turkey. For their part, both regimes, which fund and support Hamas, accepted all of Hamas’s cease-fire demands against Israel and Egypt. As their partner, the Obama administration also supported Hamas’s demands.

Had Egypt and Israel bowed to those demands, Hamas would have achieved a strategic victory in its war against Israel and Egypt. To avoid buckling to US pressure, Egypt built a coalition with the same states that are now leading the charge against Qatar – Saudi Arabia and the UAE – and openly supported Israel.

In the end, the standoff between the two sides caused the war to end in a draw. Hamas was not dismantled, but it failed to secure Israeli or Egyptian acceptance of any of its demands for open borders and access to the international banking system.

Given that Trump is not aligned with Brookings, the Clinton Foundation or US academia, it could be argued that he is not beholden to Qatari money in any way.

But unfortunately, they are not the only beneficiaries of Qatari largesse.

There is also the Pentagon.

In the 1990s, Qatar spent more than $1b. constructing the Al Udeid Air Base outside of Doha.

It is the most sophisticated air force base in the region. In 2003, the base replaced Saudi Arabia’s Prince Sultan Air Base as headquarters for the US military’s Central Command. Since 2003, all US operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria are controlled from the base.

Following Trump’s Twitter postings, the Pentagon was quick to say that operations at Al Udeid base had not been influenced by the crisis between Qatar and its neighbors. The Pentagon spokesman refused to say whether or not Qatar sponsors terrorism.

Instead, Capt. Chris Davis stated, “I consider them a host to our very important base at Al Udeid.” He commended Qatar for hosting US forces and for its “enduring commitment to regional security.”

Also on Tuesday, according to the Egyptian media, Iran deployed Revolutionary Guard Corps forces to Doha to protect the emir and his palace.

On Wednesday, Turkey’s parliament voted to empower Erdogan to deploy forces to Qatar to protect the regime.

The moves by Qatar’s allies Iran and Turkey significantly raise the stakes in the contest of wills now at play between Qatar and its Sunni neighbors and adversaries.

With Iranian forces guarding the palace and the emir, the possibility of a bloodless coup inside the Al Thani family has been significantly diminished.

Any move against the emir will raise the prospect of an open war with Iran.

So, too, if Egypt and Saudi Arabia invade or otherwise attack Qatar, with or without US support, the US risks seeing its Arab allies at war with its NATO ally Turkey.

Under the circumstances, Trump’s refusal to endorse Article 5 of the NATO treaty during his speech in Brussels appears wise and well-considered.

Article 5 states that an attack against one NATO ally represents an attack against all NATO allies.

With the Pentagon dependent on the Qatari base, and with no clear path for unseating the emir through war or coup without risking a much larger and more dangerous conflict, the only clear option is a negotiated resolution.

Under the circumstances, the best the US can probably work toward openly is a diminishment of Qatar’s regional profile and financial support for Iran and its terrorist allies and proxies. Hence, Trump’s announcement on Wednesday that he will mediate the conflict.

However, in the medium and long term, Trump’s statement on Twitter made clear his ultimate goal.

Originally published in the Jerusalem Post

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PALESTINIAN SUFFERING AND ISRAEL

The Palestinians the international media don’t talk about — and the reason why.

How can we explain the international community’s indifference to Palestinian suffering? Every day, angry bands of protesters burn the flag of Israel, call for the destruction of the Jewish state and insist that Israel and its Jewish citizens be shunned from polite society and thrown out of the global economy all in the name of opposing “the Occupation.”

Although the breathless protesters insist that all their efforts are directed toward the Palestinians, as it works out, none of their assaults on Israel have improved the Palestinians’ lot. To the contrary, their protests have given a free pass to those that do the most to harm Palestinians.

The angry, hateful protests against Israel tell us nothing about either the history of the Palestinians’ relations with the Jewish state or their present circumstances.

And what are those circumstances? Consider the stories of two different groups of Palestinian prisoners.

The first story relates to the Palestinian terrorists imprisoned in Israeli jails after being tried and convicted of engaging in terrorist attacks against Israel.

Led by terrorist mastermind Marwan Barghouti, who is serving multiple life sentences for killing multiple Israelis, in April more than a thousand jailed terrorists opened a hunger strike demanding an improvement in their prison conditions.

The New York Times published an op-ed by Barghouti and massively covered the strike. Numerous other marquee media organizations similarly provided sympathetic coverage of the event.

Hidden beneath mountains of column inches was the basic fact that the terrorists’ demands made clear that their strike was ridiculous.

They weren’t demanding food. They weren’t demanding fair trials or the right to speak to their attorneys.

They were demanding that Israel add 20 new channels to their standard, free cable television access.

They demanded that Israel let them have telephones in their rooms.

They demanded that Israel buy them air conditioning units.

In other words, they were demanding that Israel treat them better than it treats its own soldiers.

The second prisoner story is the story of the 12,000 Palestinians that have been jailed in Syrian regime prisons since the start of the Syrian civil war. These men, women and children are denied sufficient food and water. They are subjected to torture. Several cases have been reported of Palestinian female prisoners being subjected to gang rapes. More than 500 Palestinians have died in jail. More than 500 Palestinian children are behind bars.

And the plight of the Palestinians on the outside is no better.

Nearly 4,000 Palestinians have been killed by regime forces since the start of the war. Yarmouk refugee camp has been all but depopulated. Whereas before the war began in 2011, more than 120,000 Palestinians resided in the camp just 8 km. from central Damascus, today a mere 20,000 remain. Those who remain have been besieged by regime forces for nearly three years. They have been starved and parched. Running water was cut off years ago.

And yet, the only journalist who has consistently covered the story is Palestinian affairs correspondent Khaled Abu Toameh, writing for the niche website of the Gatestone Institute.

As Abu Toameh noted in a report on the Palestinians in Syria last August, the leaders of the PLO and the Palestinian Authority like their sometimes-rivals- sometimes-partners in Hamas have refused to intervene on their behalf.

To the contrary, the PLO happily reopened its embassy in Damascus last year, despite the fact that it is accredited to a regime that is slaughtering the people that the PLO claims to represent.

Abu Toameh wrote bitterly, “The Palestinians of Syria would have been more fortunate had they been living in the West Bank or Gaza Strip. Then the international community and media would certainly have noticed them. Yet when Western journalists lavish time on Palestinians delayed at Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank, and ignore barrels of explosives dropped by the Syrian military on residential areas in refugee camps in Syria, one might start to wonder what they are really about.”

This week we got reminder of what this is really about from an odd source.

During his interview with NBC’s Megyn Kelly, Russian President Vladimir Putin grew exasperated with Kelly’s repetitious line of questioning about whether or not Russia colluded to get President Donald Trump elected last November.

After repeatedly denying Kelly’s allegations, Putin insisted that the Russian-US elections narrative is simply a conspiracy theory invented by Democrats and their allies to avoid the blame for Hillary Clinton’s defeat.

In Putin’s words, “It’s easy to say, ‘It’s not our fault. It’s the Russians. They intervened. They interfered.’” Putin then compared the anti-Russian conspiracy theory to antisemitism.

“It’s like antisemitism,” Putin explained. Anti-Jewish conspiracy spinners use the Jews as a means to deflect blame for their failures. In his words, “‘The Jews are to blame.’ You’re [not] an idiot. Because ‘the Jews are to blame.’” Putin’s statement is important for two reasons.

First, the former KGB chief knows a thing or two about antisemitic conspiracy theories. Russia has played an outsized role in inventing them for precisely the reason that Putin gave – blame deflection.

It was a precursor of the KGB, the czar’s secret police, that wrote the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion which purported to expose a Jewish world conspiracy to control humanity for nefarious ends.

And in 1949, it was the KGB that created the antisemitic conspiracy that has animated and controlled Western discourse on Israel ever since. It was then that the Soviets invented the term “anti-Zionism,” and began referring to Jews as Zionists.

And this brings us to the second noteworthy aspect of Putin’s discussion of antisemitism. The KGB rebranded Jews as “Zionists” and antisemites as “anti-Zionists” to rescue antisemitism as a tool of political warfare from the ruins of Auschwitz.

Until then, it was socially unacceptable to hate Jews.

After the KGB moved to pan Zionism as a form of colonialism and imperialism, it became fashionable again.

What Putin explained in his remarks is that conspiracy theories are not accidental occurrences.

They are deliberate, premeditated acts of political warfare that serve specific political purposes for their creators.

Anti-Zionist conspiracies, like their traditional anti-Jewish antecedents are particularly attractive because Jews are such an easy target.

Their small numbers and the ease with which they can be singled out makes them natural targets of conspiracy mongers.

After all, who will stand up for Israel and the Jews? Jews, of course, have no credibility as defenders of the Jewish state, because, well, they’re Jews.

As for non-Jewish defenders of Israel – they can dismissed as hired guns or religious fanatics or discredited in any number of other ways.

Sadly, while Putin has no compunction about standing up to the anti-Russia conspiracy spinners, with each passing year, the American Jewish community has had more and more difficulty recognizing that they are the target of a conspiracy theory and acting appropriately. Rather than stand up for Israel and against its detractors, more and more American Jews have joined them.

And those who do not join them try to get out from under the conspiracy web by pretending that it is a rational argument, rather than a conspiracy.

Indeed, increasingly, American Jewish organizations make distinctions between Israel and Judea and Samaria. They don’t take their tours beyond the 1949 armistice lines. They say that boycotts of Jewish products made beyond the lines are legitimate.

They try to “dialogue” with anti-Israel activists and blackball Israeli conservatives.

And lo and behold, it doesn’t work.

It doesn’t work because it cannot work. Because the conspiracy mongers are not interested in compromising, they are interested in delegitimizing the very notion that Jews can argue with them.

The toll this has taken on the American Jewish community was clearly in evidence this week at the Israel Day Parade in New York.

15 years ago, some 100,000 area Jews marched in the parade. This year, official counts put the number of marchers at 40,000. A disproportionate number of them were Orthodox.

Fifty years after the Six Day War, Israel has become a hard subject for American Jews to discuss not because it is hard on the merits to defend, but because the conspiracy theories which have taken control of the non-Jewish discourse on Israel have captured the American Jewish discourse as well.

The most pressing duty of the American Jewish community then is to finally recognize the nature of the battle they are beset by and fight it as hard as they can.

The long-suffering Palestinians will no doubt thank them for doing so.

Originally published by the Jerusalem Post. 

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THE LIMITS OF ISRAELI POWER

Time for Israel to take control of its future.

On Thursday, US President Donald Trump bowed to the foreign policy establishment and betrayed his voters. He signed a presidential waiver postponing the transfer of the US Embassy to Jerusalem for yet another six months.

Ahead of Trump’s move, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a last-ditch bid to convince Trump to move the embassy to Jerusalem. But it was not to be.

Israel’s failure to convince Trump to do what he repeatedly promised US voters he would do during his presidential campaign shows the disparity in power between Israel and the US.

Israel lacks the power to convince foreign nations to recognize its capital – much less to locate their embassies there. The US, on the other hand, not only has the power to recognize Jerusalem and transfer its embassy to Israel’s capital whenever it wishes to do so, it also has the ability to convince dozens of other countries to immediately follow its lead.

The disparity between what the Americans can do and what Israel can do was on display on Monday evening in a glittering hall at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. There, Bar-Ilan University conferred its Guardian of Zion award on former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton. In his acceptance speech, Bolton presented his vision for the resolution of the Palestinian conflict with Israel.

Bolton’s views are important not merely because his past work at the State Department and the UN brought the US some of its only diplomatic victories in recent decades. His views are important as well because of his close relationship with Trump.

Bolton began his discussion Monday evening by rejecting the “two-state solution.” The two-state model, he noted, has been tried and has failed repeatedly for the past 70 years. There is no reason to believe that it will succeed now. This is particularly true, he said, given the lack of Palestinian social cohesion.

Hamas controls Gaza. The PLO, which is supposed to be Israel’s peace partner, barely controls parts of Judea and Samaria. At a time when more cohesive Arab societies are unraveling, the notion that a Palestinian state would survive and advance regional peace and stability is laughable, Bolton argued.

Bolton then turned to his preferred policy for resolving the Palestinian conflict with Israel, which he dubbed “the three-state solution.” Under his plan, Egypt and Jordan would work with Israel to solve the Palestinian conflict. Egypt would take over the Gaza Strip and Jordan would negotiate the status of Judea and Samaria with Israel.

The crowd at the King David responded enthusiastically to Bolton’s proposal. This is not surprising.

Since 1967, Israelis have hoped for Jordan and Egypt to work with them to solve the problem of the Arabs of Judea, Samaria and Gaza who lived under Jordanian and Egyptian occupation from 1949-1967.

Unfortunately, Israel’s support for Bolton’s plan is irrelevant. Israel is powerless to advance it. Israel cannot convince Arab nations to help it resolve the Palestinian conflict any more than it can convince the PLO to cut a peace deal with it.

Like PLO leaders, the leaders of the Arab world know that they cannot help Israel with the Palestinians.

Doing so would involve disowning the Palestinian narrative.

The Palestinian narrative claims that the Jews of Israel are colonialist interlopers who stole the land from the Palestinians, its rightful owners. The narrative makes no distinction between Tel Aviv and Hebron. All of Israel is a crime against the Arab world. All of Israel is illegitimate.

The overwhelming majority of the Arab world believes the Palestinian narrative. For an Arab leader to walk away from it or even to signal an attenuation of his fealty to it in the interest of regional peace would be the riskiest of moves.

Israel has nothing to offer Arab leaders that could induce them to take that risk.

Although it is far from certain, the US may very well have the ability to convince Arab leaders to do so. If Trump decided that this is the way to advance peace in the Arab world, chances are he would make some headway. In other words, Bolton’s three-state plan is a plan that only America can adopt. It cannot be an Israeli plan no matter how enthusiastically the public supports involving Jordan and Egypt in solving the conflict.

Given Israel’s inability to offer the Arabs anything valuable enough for Arab leaders to risk life and limb to accept in exchange for helping to solve the Palestinian conflict, as Israel considers its own options in relation to the Palestinians, it needs to limit its goals to things that it can achieve without them. In other words, the only steps that Israel can take in relation to the Palestinians are unilateral steps.

For the past 50 years, hoping that the Arabs – and since 1993, the PLO – would finally make peace with it and so settle the permanent status of Judea and Samaria, Israel refused to take any unilateral actions in relation to its permanent interests in Judea and Samaria. Rather than apply its legal code to Judea and Samaria, it opted for the stop-gap measure of installing a military government to run the areas on the basis of Jordanian law.

Between 1994 and 1996, Israel canceled the military government in the Palestinian population centers in Judea and Samaria and Gaza. In 2005, when it withdrew, it canceled the residual military government in the rest of Gaza. Since then, the only area that remains under the Israeli military government is Area C in Judea and Samaria. Area C includes all of the Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria, and strategically critical areas including the Jordan Valley, the Samaria mountain range and the south Hebron Hills.

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Netanyahu gave an interview with Army Radio where he set out part of his vision for the permanent status of Judea and Samaria. He limited his statement to the military status of the areas. He said that under any possible future scenario, Israel must retain full security control of the areas. This, he said, is the lesson of Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

That pullout led to the transformation of Gaza into a Hamas-controlled hub of global jihad. Moreover, under Hamas, the Palestinians turned Gaza into one big, densely populated missile-launching pad against Israel.

While justified, Netanyahu’s position obscures more than it illuminates about his long-term vision for Judea and Samaria.

What does he mean by security control? Would the IDF remain in sole control over Israel’s eastern boundaries or would it serve as an overall coordinator of foreign forces operating along the border? Would IDF forces be confined to fortified positions while the Palestinians reign free in the open areas, as was the case in southern Lebanon in the years leading up to Israel’s disastrous withdrawal in 2000? Or would the IDF have freedom of action and maintain the initiative throughout Judea and Samaria? Moreover, does Netanyahu envision the IDF remaining the only military organization operating in Judea and Samaria in the long term? Beyond the security issues that require clarification, Netanyahu’s statements make no mention of the rights of Jews to live in Judea and Samaria.

Does he believe that Jews should be permitted to live permanently in the areas that Israel controls? If so, why are they subjected to the Jordanian legal code used by the military government and which proscribes their right to purchase land and register land sales? This brings us to the issue of governance. What does Netanyahu think about the military government in Area C? Does he believe that the 50-year reign of generals should continue until the Arabs choose to resolve the Palestinian conflict with Israel? What if this means that the generals will continue to rule over hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens for another 50 or 100 or 150 years? Does he, on the other hand, prefer to transfer governance responsibility in Area C to the Palestinians and place the nearly 500,000 Israelis in the area under Palestinian control? In the course of his remarks, Bolton noted that if Jordan is responsible for the Palestinians of Judea and Samaria, the issue of Jerusalem will be removed from the equation. After all, if their capital is Amman, Israel has no reason to divide its capital city.

And this brings us back to Jerusalem, which Trump spurned on Thursday.

As is the case today, 50 years ago, Israel had no power to influence the positions of foreign governments regarding its capital city. But in contrast to its decision to establish a military government in Judea and Samaria, Israel didn’t wait for foreigners to give it permission to act where it had the power to act in order to change the status of the city and ensure its ability to govern and control its capital for generations to come.

In 1967, the government voted to expand the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem to include the eastern, northern and southern quarters that had been under Jordanian occupation since 1949.

Everyone benefited from the move – including the foreign powers that still refuse to recognize the simple fact that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital.

Washington and the rest of the governments of the world know that their refusal to recognize Israel’s capital does not endanger Israel or its control of Jerusalem. They are free to bow to Arab pressure, safe in the knowledge that Israel will continue to protect the unified city.

Trump’s decision to sign the waiver delaying the embassy move is a betrayal of his campaign promise, but it doesn’t change the situation in Jerusalem. Last week, Israel celebrated 50 years of sovereignty over its united capital. Jerusalem will be neither more nor less united if and when the US moves its embassy to the capital.

Perhaps Trump will eventually keep his word and move the embassy. Perhaps he will continue to breach his promise. And as far as the Palestinians are concerned, perhaps Trump adopts Bolton’s three-state plan in relation to Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Perhaps he will maintain his predecessors’ slavish devotion to the establishment of a PLO state.

Israel can’t control what Trump will do any more than it can influence what the Arabs will do. And so it needs to take a lesson not only from its bitter experience of withdrawing from Gaza, but from its positive experience of taking matters into its own hands in Jerusalem.

The time has come, at the outset of the second 50 years of Israeli control over Judea and Samaria, for Israel to take matters into its own hands. Our leaders must stop beating around the bush. They need to use the powers they have to secure Israel’s military and civilian interests in Judea and Samaria for the next 50 years as best they can. And they need to stop waiting for someone else to solve our problems for us.

Originally published by the Jerusalem Post.