Category: Thought

Posted on

Prophecy in Israel: Expression of the Collective Hebrew Soul and Unity of Creation

“Two men remained behind in the camp, the name of one was Eldad and the name of the second was Medad, and the spirit rested upon them; they had been among the recorded ones, but they had not gone out to the Tent, and they prophesied in the camp. The youth ran and told Moshe, and he said, ‘Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp’. Yehoshua Bin Nun, the servant of Moshe since his youth, spoke up and said, ‘My lord Moshe, incarcerate them!’ Moshe said to him, ‘Are you being zealous for my sake? Would that the entire people of HaShem could be nevi’im, if HaShem would but place His Spirit upon them!’” (BAMIDBAR 11:26-29)

While both the youth and Yehoshua had expected their teacher to be angry with Eldad and Medad, Moshe astonished them with his wish that the entire Hebrew Nation become prophets. One navi per generation cannot be enough as no one else would be capable of grasping his Divine message. In order for the masses to understand and internalize the basic teachings being communicated by the leading prophet, all Israel must attain some minimum level of nevua.

Israel’s concept of nevua should not be confused with the notions of divination or fortunetelling found amongst other peoples. The Hebrew word navi is to a certain extent mistranslated by the word “prophet” which, according to Greek etymology, designates “a person who foretells.” The navi has a much more exalted role, since he is a spokesperson in this world for the Kadosh Barukh Hu, who “creates the expression (niv) of the lips” (YISHAYAHU 57:19). Thus, the navi is HaShem’s interpreter, charged with transmitting a message to the people. This message is not limited to a prediction of the future, for it possesses all the dimensions – moral, spiritual, meta-physical and meta-historical – of authentic knowledge in the broadest sense of the term.

Nevi’im are not mere forecasters. If they display the ability to foretell the future, it is only because they have achieved a sufficient level of emotional maturity and identification with the collective Hebrew soul to recognize the unity of Creation and perceive it from the back end. This perception allows them to attain a higher understanding of the world from a holistic perspective, as well as its most secret inner workings, at various levels of existence. This perspective in turn allows them to see the evolution of this enormous system of forces we call Creation. In this sense, a prophet is comparable to the scientist whose knowledge of the interplay of forces composing a limited system allows him to predict its evolution. The navi is no more a medium than the scholar announcing an eclipse of the moon. The scholar’s clairvoyance does not stem from some mysterious power but is actually the fruit of his learning, which permits him to grasp dimensions of reality invisible to others.

Throughout Scripture, we see prophets failing to rescue Israel from physical and spiritual threats. These failures are not due to a shortcoming on the part of the navi or his message but rather in the public’s ability to receive that message. There are recorded cases in which prophets have been dismissed by Israel’s political leadership and portrayed to the people as irrational public menaces. These prophets spoke a language of pure simplicity that brushed off the psychological barriers of the masses – especially those stuck in their egoistic illusions of separateness.

The Hebrew Nation is not the sum total of every Jew but rather one colossal spirit – Knesset Yisrael – that manifests itself in space and time through millions of bodies. While human beings each possess a personal soul, Israel shares one massive national soul – like a giant tree of which each Jew is an individual branch.

Rabbi Avraham Yitzḥak HaKohen Kook teaches that the highest level of Ahavat Yisrael (love for Israel) a person can achieve results from obtaining the belief, knowledge and deep understanding of Israel’s true inner essence and unity. A man who loves his son does not simply love the sum total of each limb. He loves his child as a single entity and therefore loves every individual piece of that entity. He can see each finger, leg and ear as an expression of that one soul he knows to be his son.

Through a deep self-awareness and love for Knesset Yisrael, the navi understands himself to be one with every Jew and simply a piece of a much greater whole whose distinct value derives from his personal contribution to that whole. But Jews trapped in their illusions of separateness view themselves as individuals detached from the bigger collective and therefore have trouble grasping the prophet’s impassioned language. Their illusions erect psychological barriers that cause them to perceive the navi as insane.

Rashi explains regarding SHMUEL I 18:10, that: Vayitnabeh, usually translated as “and he prophesied” is used in this verse to describe King Shaul’s mental illness because both a prophet and a madman express ideas often unintelligible to those around them.

Throughout Israel’s history, nevi’im are rarely taken seriously because the masses are seldom on a level to understand them. Therefore, a “prophet” – one who through deep love and greater consciousness has already broken free of his own illusions – is most often unable to bring his message to people whose fortified egos shield their hearts from his words.

Although Moshe wishes for all Israel to become nevi’im, not every Jew need reach the same heights. In his Guide to the Perplexed, the Rambam enumerates eleven distinct levels of nevua (with Moshe surpassing them all). And while it may not be necessary for each Jew to attain the highest plane of Divine Spirit, it is still necessary for us each to develop a minimal level of prophecy – a genuine sensitivity to Israel’s national situation – in order to understand the words of the greater nevi’im who come with simple messages of warning or salvation.

As the Jewish people return to national independence, we have already seen sparks of the Divine Spirit return, specifically among those whose compassion for their people has empowered them to break through their own psychological barriers. Clear illustrations of what the Rambam describes as the first level of nevua can be found in the valor and heroism of the pre-state Jewish freedom fighters and subsequent Israeli soldiers whose deeds resemble those of Shimshon, of whom it says “A spirit of HaShem came over him… and he struck down thirty men” (SHOFTIM 14:19). And a unique example of an even higher prophetic level in modern times was the revolutionary Hebrew poet Uri Zvi Greenberg.

The fact that Greenberg’s poetry features the pre-state Jewish underground, the Holocaust in Europe and Hebrew wars of liberation would not astonish anyone unless they were to read the dates at the bottom of each poem. Each historic event was recorded by the poet several years before actually occurring. Fellow poet Ḥaim Naḥman Bialik once asked Uri Zvi how he was able to write of the Holocaust and describe the slaughter of millions of Jews in 5682 (1922).  Greenberg replied “But I see it.” In fact, many of the poems inReḥovot Hanahar, a 5711 (1951) volume detailing the Shoah, were written the previous decade before reports of Nazi atrocities had begun to reach the world. Yet all of the details that later emerged corresponded to the words found in Greenberg’s poetry. Holy of Holies describes the brutal murder of the poet’s mother. He had written it before the actual event from a nightmare he once had, simply recording what he torturously saw.

From 5682, Uri Zvi wrote and spoke incessantly about the terrible catastrophe approaching Europe’s Jews. But although his poems were widely accepted as great cultural works, the masses were not able to heed their warnings or to recognize the dangers rapidly approaching.

Throughout the decade leading up to World War II, the poet pleaded with the Jews of Poland to organize an emergency evacuation home to Palestine. But the people could not grasp the truth in Greenberg’s warnings. Trapped in the day-to-day realities of their individual lives, most Jews were too shortsighted to see the events developing around them.

Following the miraculous Exodus from Egypt, the Children of Israel were crossing through the Sea of Reeds to freedom. The Midrashrelates that one Hebrew complained to another about the mud they had to walk through in order to get across (Shemot Rabbah 24:1). They were on their way from slavery to freedom and one man could not see past the mud on his feet. A navi does not allow the mud to concern him because he can envision a greater historic picture unfolding. He sees the course of events shaping and is consciously attached to the higher life of Israel’s national soul, encompassing each Jew in every generation throughout time.

Following the Holocaust, Uri Zvi wrote a poem in which he dialogues with HaShem. In it he asks: “How did I ever get here? A man of vision befouled by their mud…”

Like the Hebrew complaining about mud while crossing the sea, many Jews in Europe saw only what was immediate in front of them. And because they were blinded by their illusions of ego, they could not attain the minimum level of Divine Spirit necessary to understand a man trying so desperately to save them.

True love grants the vision to see beyond the present. And only a person possessing such love can be sensitive to the forces of hatred before they are mature enough to strike. While Adolf Hitler was still formulating his ideology, Greenberg had identified the danger to his people. He was able to feel and internalize the humiliation of Israel – the desecration of HaShem’s Ideal for this world – because he so deeply lived the national aspirations of his people. The central theme found woven through most of his literary work is the redemption of Israel, often focusing on wars of liberation and the eventual rebuilding of our Temple in Jerusalem.

“Every Sage in Israel who possesses the words of Torah according to their true significance and grieves for the honor of the Kadosh Barukh Hu and for the honor of Israel all his days, and lusts and feels pain for the honor of Jerusalem and of the Temple and for the swift flowering of salvation and the ingathering of the exiles, attains to the infusion of the Divine Spirit in his words…” (Tanna d’bei Eliyahu chapter 4,Mesillat Yesharim chapter 19)

Uri Zvi once told a journalist how he came to write I’ll tell it to a Child. “I dreamt one night… I saw the Temple Mount, above it an eagle, and around it circles and circles of Jews. And from the Mount a slope inclined straight to the sea. On either side were lines of soldiers from all the world’s armies. In the dream I felt that the Divine Presence was leaving the Mount. I woke up weeping. My cries woke everyone in the house. They asked ‘What happened, what happened?’ That morning I went to Chief Rabbi Kook and found him wrapped in his prayer shawl. I told him the dream. He did not say a word, just took my hand in his and wept. I went home and wrote I’ll tell it to a Child.”

Uri Zvi Greenberg was able to see so clearly what so many scholars and political leaders could not. His life and efforts serve as a vindication for Moshe’s wish that all Israel be prophets and that this is not merely a luxury but a necessity for the Hebrew mission. Greenberg had, to a certain extent, destroyed his own psychological barriers in order to attain a clearer awareness of himself as a unique piece of Knesset Yisrael. He saw himself and every Jew as parts of the same organic whole and was therefore able to see beyond “the mud on his feet.” He foretold disaster before the Nazi party had even begun its climb to power and he envisioned Israel’s redemption when few Jews were psychologically capable of even thinking in such terms. Uri Zvi’s poetry stemmed from what our Sages call the “Wisdom of the Heart” – a wisdom that views the soul of reality from an emotionally mature perspective spanning history.

Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi teaches in The Kuzari (chapter 3) that as Israel returns to our ancestral homeland, nevua will begin to reappear within our people. Israel’s current education system is based on a primitive and imbalanced Western model that places disproportionate focus on intellectual advancement and individual achievement at the expense of social and emotional development, reinforcing illusions of ego that erect barriers to attaining prophecy. But because all Israel must aspire to a basic level of Divine Spirit, it is crucial that our education system be altered to one that places at least the same emphasis on emotional and spiritual development as is currently placed on intellectual growth. Israel must raise and educate our children to be sensitive to the pain of others and to Israel’s collective destiny. Our next generation must be sufficiently compassionate to clearly see reality and to understand the words of our national shepherds. Such a generation – unable to passively endure the profanation of HaShem’s Ideal or the humiliation of His people – will be the generation of nevi’im that will usher in an era of true peace and Divine blessing for not only the Hebrew Nation but also for the whole of human civilization.

Posted on

The story of the Jewish the aunt of the terrorists in Tel Aviv

Originally published in HaKol HaYehudi

An emotional Facebook post has gone viral in Israel and laid bare the sad state of intermarriage in the Jewish State.

“Nice to meet you, I’m Raza’le the aunt of Khalid and Muhammad Mahamra,” began the post by Yael Cohen. She wrote the post shortly after the terror attack at the Sarona Market in Tel Aviv.

“The attack in Sarona takes me back 15-20 years. Khalid and Muhammad used to run around in my house as small children. They would sit on my lap and they were even babysitters for my young children. The Haredi suits that they dressed up in gave me deja vu and brought back bitter memories.”

Yael further detailed the story of her childhood and how she came to be the aunt of the two Arab terrorists. “I was 14 years old and living in a stable Jewish home in Malaga, Spain. My parents had marital problems and got a divorce. My older sister made Aliyah to Israel, met a Haredi boy from a good home, and got married. I followed in my sister’s path and was accepted to a well-known Haredi seminary in Jerusalem. I was a good student and was liked by both my friends and teachers. The teachers highly praised by me.”

“As a good student and a responsible girl, I was placed in charge of collecting small change from the girls of the seminary to buy treats for Shabbat. I would buy the treats in the Tzion mini-market next to the dormitory. There was a nice boy there named Netanel. He was Haredi, wore a white shirt and jacket, had short payos like Lithuanian yeshiva boys, and an ‘American-style’ black kippah.  Most importantly, he wasn’t Ashkenazi…”

“After a year of exchanging glances as I would buy treats, Netanel gathered the courage to speak to me about things beyond my purchases. He started by saying things like, ‘You’re very pretty’ and ‘It would be great if Hashem decided to set us up.’ He also said other nice things. One day my father came to visit me. I went proudly with him to the mini-market and Netanel asked to speak to him alone. Netanel said to him, ‘Hi Mr. Cohen, I’m also from a Cohen family, Netanel Cohen. I know it’s not generally accepted, but I’d like to ask you to speak to my parents about setting me up with your daughter.’ In front of my father, he identified himself as the son of the store owner. My father told me the story and noted that the gentle way Netanel had asked and the self-confidence he showed impressed him. Netanel had also told my father that he learned in Sephardi yeshivas. Netanel took my father’s phone and address in order to be in contact to set up a meeting between the two families.”

“My father was very impressed with the young man, but asked me not to see him until the families had a chance to speak as was accepted. In the meantime, my father wanted to double check the family and the boy. Two days later, on Erev Shavuot, Netanel asked to meet alone in order to get to know one another. I agreed. Six weeks later I found myself in the home of Netanel who had pretended to be a Haredi boy from a good home. His real home was in the village of Yatta.”

“Netanel suddenly became Abdallah. His Haredi uniform became the costume that he wore to work. Suddenly, I was barely 16 and already had a baby in my stomach.”

“Five years passed and I, Raza’le (Yael in Hebrew), had my world destroyed. I had two children on my lap. I quickly learned the Arabic language and maintaining my optimism, I tried to keep up Jewish practices. I lit candles, kept Kosher, and was Shomer Shabbat. Nonetheless, my status was as a maidservant. The beatings and humiliation were constant. The house was my only world- cleaning, cooking, and having relations with a man who had become evil, violent, and disgusting. I was in a living hell.”

“In 2007 I found a phone that someone had forgotten in the house. I called my father and he didn’t answer. I didn’t know at the time that my father was in the hospital after having his heart broken. He later passed away. Next, I called my sister and described where I was. A week later I was free with my two sons. Somehow we managed to obtain Spanish visas for the children and we returned to Spain.”

“The story doesn’t end there. My Arab ex-husband, along with his brother (who is the father of the terrorist, Khalid) flew to Spain in order to take me back. However, in Spain the two received a lesson in Jewish solidarity (without the involvement of the High Court or B’tselem). The lesson they received wiped out any future thoughts they may have had of taking me back.”

“I have recovered since then and thank G-d, my sons now learn in yeshiva and are excelling in their studies. They are good Jewish boys. Seeing the suits of the Arab terrorists from Yatta reminded me of another Arab from Yatta who dressed in a suit on Erev Shavuot. For me it was deja vu. Apparently it is the modus operandi of that cursed family from Yatta to dress in suits.”

Posted on

Can Chaos Be Controlled?

Israel increasingly finds itself in a chaotic world. The West it so latched onto all these years seems bent on pursuing suicidal policies in the face of a Radical Islamic war seeking to destroy it. The irony is that the chaos that has metastasized was encouraged, funded, and born from the USA’s own cold war policy to arm and train the Mujihadeen of Afghanistan in their fight against the Soviets during their invasion of Afghanistan.  

The Mujihadeen were more than a typical rebel group.  They were a product of aggressive islamization by   neighboring Pakistan as well as an amalgamation of foreign fighters such as Osama Bin Laden.  The idea behind President Jimmy Carter’s Operation Cyclone  was to enable the Mujihadeen to wage Jihad against the Soviets.  The Mujihadeen won, thus proving the American strategy of using heavily Islamicised groups to fight proxy wars.  The American government went on to support Islamists across the Middle East. This created created chaos with the sole objective to harm Soviet and later secular Arabist control of oil and mineral flush areas in the Middle East.  

The strategy made sense.  With the USA being an ocean away and Europe still relatively set apart from the “barbaric” deserts of the Middle East, there was never any push back against these sorts of covert neo-colonial policies. Afterall, Israel would continue to sponge up the rage of the Arab street. Of course as long as the West could fund the very allies that helped to redirect the street’s animosity to the tiny Jewish State.

Islam Can No Longer Be Controlled

The problem with creating a monster is that there is a good chance that monster will eventually turn on its maker.

The problem with creating a monster is that there is a good chance that monster will eventually turn on its maker. With the open border policies of Europe and naivety of the USA, muslims have been streaming into the west at record levels.  The immigrants themselves may not be dangerous, but they provide an opportune breeding ground for the armies of the once and future caliphate.  Even with this fact the current situation could have been avoided, but the USA played one last very dangerous game.

Department of Defense documents that have been declassified in the last year confirm that the Obama administration encouraged the flow of weapons into the moderate rebel groups in Syria, knowing they would eventually fall into Jihadists.  This worked well as it helped grow an independent Sunni state in Eastern Syria and Western Iraq.  Of course, when this state, later to be renamed ISIS refused to play by the rules, the game had turned dangerous.  Far worse was the West’s Sunni Caliphate than Assad or Iran.  Now to destroy the Frankenstein they built, the USA is forced to work with its sworn enemies.

In today’s world, geography is meaningless. ISIS has used its strength to rally disenfranchised Muslims across the world, giving them a global army in the once calm West. Chaos has become the norm and yet Western leaders, especially in the USA, seek to harness the chaos for their own benefit.

After the recent Orlando attack, calls to enforce stricter gun control laws became part of the mainstream cacophony of solutions. Not only that, calls on the right to make a Declaration of War against terrorism became part of the chorus of solutions. Both of these moves renders Americans less prepared to deal with a problem their government initiated nearly 40 years ago as well as effectively shredding the Constitution.

Does Israel Stand Alone?

The funny thing about chaos is that it is never permanent.  Chaos always leads to new order.  That is how the world works. The recent overtures between Israel and Russia are the results of finding new order amidst the global chaos. The burgeoning relationship between Israel and India as well as China and other East Asian countries will now only increase as the West crumbles.

The question for Israel going forward is how long does it stick with the West as it builds long standing relationships with an opposing bloc of nations?  The answer to that question may lie in how the West deals with the monster it helped create. If Europe and America continue to ignore the threat of Radical Islam, opting to utilize the threat to grab more power from their citizens, rather than snuff it out, their days will be quickly numbered.

Posted on

Making America Unsafe

(Originally published in Israel Hayom]

There is a deep and unacknowledged irony to the fact that U.S. President Barack Obama, of all people, has opined in the days since the terror attack in Orlando that how you term things makes no difference.

“What exactly would using this label [‘radical Islam’] accomplish? … Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away. This is a political distraction,” Obama said on Tuesday in response to the heavy criticism poured on him after he, once more, refused to use the term in connection with the mass shooting. Islamic State quickly claimed responsibility for the attack, perhaps frustrated that no one in the U.S. administration, nor the Democratic presidential candidate, will give it credit for it.

Positing that calling something or someone a particular name makes no difference is the very epitome of hypocritical dissembling, especially coming from the person at the very top of the Democratic echelons.

These are the same people who for decades fought to entrench political correctness into American society, making it impossible to call certain things by their rightful names without facing a barrage of vilification and personal smears. The American Left has fought ceaselessly to shape language according to its ideas and has succeeded so tremendously that Americans are now afraid to report suspicious activity out of fear of coming across as “Islamophobic.” This has already cost lives. Before the attack, the security company that Omar Mateen worked for was afraid of reporting him, despite his suspicious behavior, exactly because it feared being castigated as “Islamophobic.”

The U.S. has much to learn from Israel in this regard. Israel is so efficient at fighting terrorism precisely because it cannot afford the luxury of integrating political correctness into its security doctrines. The very idea is preposterous. Nevertheless, this is exactly what Obama has done.

Five years ago, Obama erased all references to Islam in the educational materials used to train the American law enforcement and national security communities. In 2011, U.S. Deputy Attorney General James Cole confirmed that the Obama administration was recalling all its training materials to eliminate references to Islam that some Muslim groups had claimed were offensive.

In 2013, The Washington Times also reported that countless experts on Islamic terrorism had been banned from speaking to any U.S. government counterterrorism conferences, including those of the FBI and CIA. Government agencies were instead ordered to invite Muslim Brotherhood front groups.

If it is only a matter of labels, then why has Obama endangered American lives by deliberately blindsiding law enforcement and national security communities on the nature of Islamic terrorism? How are they supposed to grapple with the urgent issue of jihad if they are prohibited from learning about the nature of jihad?

When Obama claims, as he did on Tuesday, that “there’s no magic to the phrase ‘radical Islam.’ If someone seriously thinks we don’t know who we’re fighting, if there’s anyone out there who thinks we’re confused about who our enemies are, that would come as a surprise to the thousands of terrorists we’ve taken off the battlefield,” he is simply dissembling. You cannot know an enemy when you prohibit your law enforcement and intelligence personnel from studying or even mentioning them.

These are all relevant questions that the mainstream media has consistently refused to ask the administration — instead, dangerously dismissing them as conspiracy theories. The price is now being paid by innocent Americans, from a Christmas party in San Bernardino to a gay nightclub in Orlando.

Words matter tremendously, and you cannot fight an enemy that you are forbidden to name. Imagine Churchill telling the British that there was “no magic” in calling out the Nazi ideology and prohibiting his intelligence community from studying Nazi Germany’s strategy and tactics.

Hillary Clinton, feeling the backlash after publishing identical statements to those of Obama, has now opportunistically declared that she is ready to say those “magical words.”

But this is meaningless pandering, especially when you know she was part of the administration that purged training materials of all things Islam.

“In my perspective, it matters what we do, not what we say,” Clinton said. “To me, radical jihadism, radical Islamism, I think they mean the same thing. I’m happy to say either, but that’s not the point.”

The administration pretends there is no Islamist threat. This is what it has firmly projected to its law enforcement and intelligence communities, and Clinton is of course fully aware of the intricate details of this fact. Stating that it matters “what we do” then becomes an empty and even dangerous statement, because it deludes Americans into believing that there is a solid and credible intelligence effort underway to prevent future Islamist terror attacks in the United States, when this cannot logically be the case given that the U.S. law enforcement and intelligence communities are not allowed to study jihad or Islamic extremism.

Posted on

Imbecility Squared – Part 1

(This article was originally published on Arutz Sheva)

“Commanders for Israel’s Security” are a group I would much rather respect than ridicule, but drivel is drivel, even when it comes from men with an illustrious past and an accumulated 6000 years of security experience.

One does not have to be a military expert to easily identify the critical defects of the armistice lines that existed until June 4, 1967 (Deputy PM Yigal Allon, former commander of Palmah strike-force, 1976).

…historians a thousand years hence will still be baffled by the mystery of our affairs. They will never understand how it was that a victorious nation, with everything in hand, suffered themselves to be brought low, and to cast away all that they had gained by measureless sacrifice and absolute victory…Now the victors are the vanquished… (Winston Churchill, in the House of Commons, 1938).

The Jews consider Judea and Samaria to be their historic dream. If the Jews leave those places, the Zionist idea will begin to collapse… Then we will move forward (Abbas Zaki, PLO ambassador to Lebanon, 2009).

It genuinely distresses me to have to write this article—but I feel I have little option.

Despite my personal bias

I confess that I have a strong personal bias in favor of men who have devoted years of their lives to the defense of their country and endangered themselves to protect others. The members of the Commanders for Israel’s Security (CIS) certainly fit that bill – comprising a group of over 200 former high-ranking officers in the IDF, intelligence services and police.

Today, however, we are faced with the bitter irony of a spectacle, in which scores of ex-senior security officials, who spent most of their adult life defending Israel, are now promoting a political initiative that will make it indefensible.

Recently, CIS, an allegedly non-politically partisan organization, which ran a virulently anti-Netanyahu campaign in the run-up to the March 2015 elections, published what purports to be a “plan” to break the ongoing deadlock over the “Palestinian issue”, appealingly but misleadingly,  entitled “Security First: Changing the Rules of the Game–A Plan to Improve Israel’s Security and International Standing”  .

In broad brush strokes, the seminal elements on which the entire proposal is based are that Israel should:

(a)    Proclaim, unilaterally, that it forgoes any claim to sovereignty beyond the yet-to-be completed security barrier, which in large measure coincides with the pre-1967 “Green Line”, adjusted to include several major settlement blocks adjacent to those lines; but,

(b)    Leave the IDF deployed there—until some “acceptable alternative security arrangement” is found – presumably the emergence of a yet-to-be located pliant Palestinian-Arab who will pledge to recognize Israel as the Jewish nation-state; and

(c)    Embrace the Saudi Peace Plan–a.k.a. Arab Peace Initiative (API) subject to certain changes which the Arabs/Saudis recently resolutely refused to consider.

Noxious brew of the fanciful, the false & the failed

According to the CIS folk (p.7), implementation of this so-called “plan” will:

– Enhance personal and national security.

– Preserve conditions for a future permanent status agreement with the Palestinians.

– Increase prospects of Israel’s integration into regional security/political arrangements with pragmatic Arab states.

– Improve Israel’s international standing and ‘pull the rug’ from under BDS-like movements.

Sadly, little analytical acumen is needed to show that not only will the CIS plan fail to achieve the objectives it claims it will,  but in all probability, it will precipitate precisely the opposite results, exacerbating the dangers it was designed to ameliorate.

Admittedly this is harsh condemnation of the public positions of a large group of prominent figures. However, over the coming weeks, I will be at pains to substantiate my severe censure of their policy recommendations.

Indeed, as I read the CIS proposal my sense of despair and dismay deepened. It is a document so embarrassingly implausible, it seems inconceivable that men who boast of 6,000 years of accumulated security experience would allow – much less, wish –their names to be associated with it.

For what it presents is little more than a disturbing brew of the fanciful, the false and the failed—deeply flawed both in the political principle on which it bases itself and the practical details which it prescribes.

Attempting to eschew being labelled yet-another (and largely discredited) attempt to achieve peace, something which it concedes is “currently unfeasible” (p.10), the CIS plan is presented as focusing primarily on enhancing security—hence the title “Security First”.

Taking the name of “security” in vain?

Curiously, however, throughout its almost 70 pages (in the English version), the proposal deals only scantily with security, the professed forte of its authors, and then only in a very general manner, with virtually no stipulation of operational details. By contrast, it devotes much time to political assessments, municipal administration, water supplies, employment , even suggesting (see pp. 45-47) that Israel intervene in the internecine Palestinian feud between Fatah and Hamas.

These are, of course, issues of considerable importance in their own right, with pursuant impact on overall security, but hardly ones in which CIS, as an organization, can claim any special professional expertise, on the basis of their long experience in the military or the security services.

But it is precisely these accumulated years of service that CIS invoke for the authority they attribute to their policy prescriptions.

After all, however admirable it may be in its own right, the battle-tested experience of an intrepid armored corps commander hardly provides any professional edge in stipulating how Jerusalem should be administered, or determining why the Palestinians have not developed wastewater treatment plants, or in assessing the state of Palestinian agriculture—all of which comprise elements of significance in the CIS policy proposal.

Accordingly, one might well be excused for feeling a sense of uneasy suspicion that CIS just might be taking the name of security in vain—to further a political agenda, which they strenuously deny they have.

“Based on our cumulative 6,000 years of experience…”

Thus, on its well-endowed bilingual website, the fellows from CIS attempt to sweep aside any dissent from mere mortals, enlisting their formidable security credentials to launch into the promotion of a political initiative that has been rejected not only by successive Israeli governments—including some of the most Palestinian-compliant (PC) in the nation’s history–but also by a sound majority of the Israeli electorate.

Accordingly, they proclaim:

“Based on our cumulative 6,000 years of experience in Israel’s various security agencies, we emphatically state that:

– Political agreements and security arrangements with the Arab World, including the Palestinians, are vital Israeli national security objectives.

– Local and regional realities make it mandatory and urgent to pursue these objectives. They also make them attainable.

– The IDF [as] by far the most potent military force in the region… can provide effective security and address all challenges within the present or any future borderline as agreed-to by our government and endorsed by our people…”

In terms of recommended policy elements, this translates (see p.8), among other thing, into Israel:

-Accepting, in principle, the Arab Peace Initiative (API), with requisite adjustments to accommodate Israel’s security and demographic needs as a basis for negotiation.

-Reiterating its commitment to resolving the conflict through negotiations towards a permanent status agreement based on the principle of ‘two states for two peoples’.

-Foregoing claims to sovereignty over West Bank territories east of the ‘security fence’, but continuing to exercise control over them in a custodial capacity until alternative security arrangement are put into place within the framework of a permanent status agreement with the Palestinians

– Freezing the construction of new settlements, the expansion of existing ones or the development of civilian infrastructures east of the ‘security fence’

The most glaring defect?

Clearly, then, this is not a non-partisan ,apolitical position but a clear endorsement of the longstanding predilections of the concessionary Israeli left, which have failed so dramatically over the last quarter-century, and now are allegedly “justified” anew by ongoing changes in the region, which, if anything, make them more implausible, irresponsible and inappropriate than ever.

As I noted previously, CIS’s plan is so deeply flawed, both in principle and in detail, that it would require far more than a single opinion column to expose and analyze them all. Accordingly in this week’s column, I will limit myself to a far-from-exhaustive discussion of what is, arguably, its most glaring defect, postponing debate on further flaws and faults for the coming weeks:

This is the a-priori (read “unilateral”) renouncing of any claims to sovereignty over the territory beyond the security barrier.

CIS wish to sidestep criticism of their plan, that could be ascribed it, given the dismal failure of the unilateral evacuation of Gaza (and South Lebanon), and the consequent emergence of a Jihadi-controlled enclave, with an arsenal bristling with weapons capable of reaching virtually the whole of Israel.

Accordingly, they claim (pp.28-9): “In contrast [to] the unilateral withdrawals Israel carried out in 2000 (from South Lebanon) and 2005 (from Gaza), the ‘Security First’ Plan calls for the

IDF to remain in the West Bank…until a permanent status agreement with the Palestinians ushers in alternative concrete, sustainable security arrangements.”
This of course raises the intriguing question of how CIS imagine events would have unfolded in, say, Gaza, had their plan been adopted, and the IDF remained deployed there, waiting with bated breath until some Palestinian emerged to “usher in alternative concrete, sustainable security arrangements.”

Unilateral withdrawal in principle

Indeed, despite all the semantic acrobatics, the unilateral capitulation inherent in the CIS proposal cannot be camouflaged by rhetoric. For whichever way you spin it, the CIS prescription comprises a unilateral acknowledgement, without any commensurate quid-pro-quo, of Arab sovereignty over the territory east of the ‘security barrier’.

In effect this constitutes a “unilateral withdrawal in principle”, entailing the abandonment of positions long held by successive Israeli governments’ for over a half-century and a clear admission that Israel has been unnecessarily and unjustifiably intransigent for decades. Even if this is not CIS’s intention, there can be little doubt that this is how it will be eagerly interpreted by a hostile international community—and an affirmation that the anti-Israel campaigns against Israel were, in fact, justified.

Indeed, for all their 6000 years of accumulated security experience, CIS seem to have lost sight of a recurring lesson of history: Giving in—or at least pledging to give in—to the demands of despots will only whet their appetite, not satiate it.

It requires little imagination to envision the pernicious political predicament such an injudicious move would create for Israel, were it to heed the CIS counsel of an open-ended deployment of the military in territory over which any claims to sovereignty are eschewed.

A giant South-Lebanon

In a stroke, Judea-Samaria would, by Israel’s own admission, be converted from “disputed territories” to “occupied territories”, and the IDF from a “defense force” to an “occupying force”.

This reality would replicate—only on a much larger scale and much closer to the urban center of the country—the realities that prevailed in pre-2000 South Lebanon when the IDF was deployed in the security zone, despite the fact that Israel made no claims to sovereignty over it.

The manner in which that episode ended—with the ignominious flight of the IDF—should provide a sobering reminder of what CIS measures are liable to lead to.

(As an aside, it might be edifying to note that both the situations in South Lebanon and Gaza, which CIS apparently wish to avoid, were the result of policy decisions made by men with “impeccable security credentials”… Ariel Sharon, and Ehud Barak.)

Of course, under the CIS plan, the time that IDF will be required to deploy in Judea-Samaria will be entirely determined by the Palestinian side, until they agree to “acceptable alternative … security arrangements”—something which is highly unlikely, since less pliant competing factions could plausibly point out that, if the Jews are confronted with sufficient resolve and violence, they will concede all for nothing.

Thus, the IDF will be ensnared in the “West-Bank mud” as it was in the “Lebanon -mud”, subject to increasing attack from a hostile alien population, and unsympathetic international opinion with increasing domestic pressure to “bring our boys home”.

And so the unilateral withdrawal in principle will inexorably become a unilateral withdrawal in practice—with no agreement with the Palestinian side and Israel exposed to all the dangers CIS hoped to avert.

Imbecility squared

As readers might sense – I have barely scratched the surface in my endeavor to expose the myriad of internal contradictions, non-sequiturs and grave errors in the CIS formula “to extricate Israel from the current dead end and to improve its security… and international standing”.

But from what I have written they may already understand why I chose to entitle this and coming columns – “Imbecility squared”.