FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

I’m a member of a Reform Jewish congregation.  I wrote the following letter to Rabbi Eric Yoffie of the Union for Reform Judaism, and Rabbi David Saperstein, head of its “Religious Action Center”. I also sent a copy to our rabbi and the president of the congregation. If you are a Reform Jew in the US, you should do the same:

February 8, 2010

Dear Rabbi Saperstein and Rabbi Yoffie,

I was shocked to see that the Reform Movement – in the person of Rabbi Saperstein –  has leapt to the defense of the New Israel Fund (NIF), after it was revealed that almost all of the negative ‘evidence’ from Israeli sources in the slanderous Goldstone report came from 16 NIF-supported non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

Although this incident has propelled the NIF into the public eye in Israel, the fact is that the NIF, with its annual budget of $32 million, has been funding numerous groups which are part of the ongoing campaign against the Jewish state for years. The independent organization NGO Monitor wrote,

While the organization does some positive work in Israel that should be applauded, it refuses to engage in debate regarding several of its grantees that demonize Israel at the UN, support boycott and divestment campaigns, promote “lawfare” cases against Israeli officials, and even advocate erasing the Jewish character of the state. Significantly, many NIF donors are unaware of these activities.

Rabbi Saperstein, and indeed all the defenders of the NIF, responded by viciously shooting the messenger – Im Tirtzu, an Israeli student organization – and by citing some other causes supported by the NIF which were innocuous. They did not challenge the substance of Im Tirtzu’s exposé.

The NIF trades on the desire of progressive American Jews to support social justice, accepting their donations under false pretenses and using them to damage the Jewish state.

I call on the URJ to place itself firmly in the truly pro-Israel camp – as Rabbi Yoffie did when he publicly rejected J Street’s call for an immediate ceasefire at the start of the Gaza war – and to end all support for and relationships with the NIF.

For more details, see my previous posts here, here, here, here and here.

Technorati Tags: Israel, New Israel Fund, URJ, Religious Action Center, Eric Yoffie, David Saperstein

The flap over Im Tirtzu’s exposé of the New Israel Fund’s (NIF) support of left-wing Israeli organizations that contributed to the slanderous Goldstone report gets bigger every day.

• Naomi Chazan, the fund’s president, was dis-invited from a speaking tour of Australia.
• After Chazan threatened to sue the Jerusalem Post, the Post dropped her as a regular columnist.
• There are calls in the Knesset to set up a commission of inquiry to investigate the NIF and foreign funding of Israeli non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
• A group of high-ranking reserve officers signed a petition supporting Im Tirtzu against the NIF.

It’s hard to exaggerate the feelings of most Israelis about the Goldstone report, which many see as a modern-day blood libel. Even many members of the so-called ‘peace camp’ feel that the report goes too far in crediting Palestinian accusations against Israel for alleged ‘war crimes’ in Gaza, while downplaying and ignoring real crimes perpetrated by  Hamas. So when Im Tirtzu pointed out that the 16 Israeli groups that produced a large majority of the anti-IDF ‘documentation’ — most of which is clearly false — were all grantees of the NIF, there was immediate outrage against the US-based fund.

Supporters of the fund in Israel and the US struck back with an assault of illogic, red herrings, ad hominem arguments and manufactured outrage at Im Tirtzu’s advertisments, but did little to refute the content of its criticism.

For example, David Saperstein of the US Reform Movement complained that

In their twisted attribution of blame for the Goldstone Report to the NIF, these attackers are trying to delegitimize the New Israel Fund in much the same way that the Goldstone Report is being used to delegitimize Israel in the eyes of the world.  It is ironic, to say the least, that those pointing to the danger of the Goldstone Report are using the same tactics of half-truths, hyperbole and sweeping generalizations they criticize in it to delegitimize the New Israel Fund.

But Im Tirtzu did not present half-truths or generalizations about the citations in the Goldstone report. They counted them. Saperstein, like many of Im Tirtzu’s critics, claims that they left out all of the ‘good things’ that NIF grantees do. But this is beside the point, which is to show that many of the NGOs that they support do the work of Israel’s enemies. And speaking of hyperbole, the Goldstone report accused Israel of deliberate murder of a civilian population, of war crimes; this is hardly the same as an analysis of the uses to which NIF money is put.

Other critics relied on tenuous chains of guilt by association. Im Tirtzu received grants from something called the “Central Fund of Israel”. Now, follow this: the Central Fund also supports an organization called Honenu, which has provided funds for the legal defense of settlers who were (rather brutally) removed from outposts by police, for soldiers accused of harming Palestinians, and for some right-wing extremists (who nevertheless are entitled to legal representation). How this proves that Im Tirtzu is itself an extremist group, and how it has any bearing on its findings about the NIF escapes me.

They also trumpet the fact that Im Tirtzu got $100,000 from Christians United for Israel (CUFI), which has raised huge amounts of money for such things as bomb shelters in Sderot, as well as making grants to local Jewish Federations in the US to direct to Israel. CUFI is unpopular as a result of the socially conservative views of its founder, Pastor John Hagee, but its largess has been distributed mostly to noncontroversial pro-Israel causes.

Other critics claimed that Im Tirtzu’s cartoon showing Naomi Chazan wearing an unflattering rhinoceros horn was outrageous and antisemitic. This too is entirely irrelevant to their charges.

Finally, many of the attacks take the form of saying that Im Tirtzu wishes to ‘muzzle’ free speech and democratic criticism of Israeli policy. This is so absurd that it beggars description. The NIF, with its  huge resources — it received $40 million in grants from the Ford Foundation alone — and its powerful friends, like the Reform movement in America, is clearly a Goliath in media presence compared to the tiny student organization that is Im Tirtzu. But since they couldn’t refute Im Tirtzu’s facts, they chose to accuse it of “McCarthyism.”

The 16 NGOs mentioned by Im Tirtzu are Adalah, Breaking the Silence, B’Tselem, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the Center for the Defense of the Individual, the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, Yesh Din, [Physicians] for Human Rights [ -- Israel], Gisha, Bimkom, Rabbis for Human Rights, Itach, Other Voice, New Profile, Machsom Watch and Who Profits from the Occupation.

It’s important to realize that these groups have done far more than contribute to the Goldstone report. Some of them are Israeli Arab (oops, ‘Palestinians living in Israel’) groups supposedly working for civil rights for Arab citizens but actually pushing an agenda to change Israel from a Jewish state to a bi-national “state of its citizens” with a new flag and national anthem, and in which the Arab minority would have veto power of government decisions.

Breaking the Silence is a group of former Israeli soldiers who have toured the US delivering ‘testimonies’ to the mistreatment of Palestinians by the IDF. When their more serious allegations have been investigated, they are almost always found to be based on hearsay. And even when stories of harassment are true, they are presented entirely without context, without explanations, for example, that incidents have taken place at checkpoints where Palestinian terrorists regularly try to smuggle bombs into Israel.

B’Tselem has been deeply involved in supporting the demonstrations against the security barrier in the villages off Bi’ilin and Ni’ilin, in which Palestinians, left-wing Israeli extremists and international supporters attempt to destroy the barrier and to provoke police and soldiers protecting it.

NGO monitor, anything but ‘extremist’, summarized the way the NIF uses its huge resources:

NIF-funded NGOs regularly engage in public relations blitzes, often facilitated by professional media consultants. They hold press conferences, issue glossy publications in multiple languages, and contribute regular op-eds and articles to high-profile media outlets such as Ma’ariv, Haaretz, The New York Times, and Huffington Post. They regularly submit reports at the UN and send representatives to conferences in Europe and America. B’Tselem has a growing lobbying office in Washington and a representative in the UK.

NGO Monitor researchers have analyzed NIF funding practices for years. While the organization does some positive work in Israel that should be applauded, it refuses to engage in debate regarding several of its grantees that demonize Israel at the UN, support boycott and divestment campaigns, promote “lawfare” cases against Israeli officials, and even advocate erasing the Jewish character of the state. Significantly, many NIF donors are unaware of these activities. NIF has rebuffed all of NGO Monitor’s attempts to discuss appropriate “red lines” for the groups they fund.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Im Tirtzu, Naomi Chazan, NIF, David Saperstein, Goldstone report

Recently, I wrote about Ahmadinejad’s bragging that Iran was already the predominant power in the region. There is no doubt that US influence has declined radically in the last few years, but Ahmadinejad is counting gestational chickens.

The biggest obstacle in his way is tiny Israel, remarkably. The conservative Arab regimes of Saudi Arabia and Egypt are paper tigers militarily and politically. Israel, with all of its problems, still projects Western power in the region (would that the West, and particularly the US administration understood this).

The Iranian strategy is to weaken Israel in every way possible, particularly by conventional warfare between it and Hizballah and perhaps Syria. Hamas is also a threat to a lesser extent. Many recent events point to a resumption of hostilities in the North in the near future, which would serve Iranian interests in multiple ways, including giving the regime more time to proceed with its atomic weapons program.

Iran and its clients believe that they are in a much better position than in 2006, and are confident of success. They believe that they will be able to fire rockets into all parts of Israel at will, and kill thousands.  They believe that the IDF will be powerless to overcome Hizballah’s fortifications and will suffer massive casualties. They believe that their secure communications system is impenetrable. They believe that Israel will be surprised by advanced weapons that Hizballah has secretly received from Iran. They believe that the Israeli leadership will dither ineffectively as happened in 2006.

They are so wrong.

Israel suffered a huge trauma in 2006, when the ground branches IDF were entirely unprepared for the conflict, and the leadership was incompetent to manage a war. But the lesson was learned. The IDF embarked on a massive shakeup, returning to the values that made it so effective in the past. Careful planning, preparation and attention to detail have become paramount again.

The IDF knows how the rocket launchers are hidden and fortified and where they are. It knows what weapons the Hizballah forces will deploy and how to counter them. It has built models of villages, bunkers and missile launchers and its soldiers have been training intensively on them. There is good intelligence, human and otherwise, on Hizballah and Syria’s plans and capabilities. And regarding the ‘impenetrable’ command and control system, Hizballah’s Nasrallah can’t order a pizza in Beirut without the IDF being aware of it.

There are contingency plans for almost any eventuality, and decisions will be made quickly. The leadership team of PM Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Chief of Staff Gaby Ashkenazi are all highly qualified military men who come from the IDF’s ground forces. The contrast with the 2006 team of Olmert, Peretz and Halutz is sharp.

Syria’s Assad, Nasrallah and Ahmadinejad have been strutting, threatening and bragging in a way that is reminiscent of Nasser’s pre-1967 hubris. Israel does not desire yet another conflict; Ehud Barak recently emphasized Israel’s commitment to peace by offering yet again (to my distress) to return the Golan Heights to Syria in return for a peace agreement. But Assad responded that Syria would agree only to take the land back; discussions about peace would have to wait.

There are many question marks. What will Iran do? What will the US do? Russia? Will someone take action against Iranian nuclear facilities? I’m happy that I’m not the PM of Israel.

Israel’s enemies, as always, are overconfident. And as always, they are going to pay the price. What a pity for everyone involved that they won’t take the other road.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Mideast war, IDF

In my last post, I wrote about how a Zionist student group in Israel called Im Tirtzu exposed the way a ‘progressive’ American foundation, the New Israel Fund (NIF), supported the Israeli non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that provided 92% of the negative citations from Israeli sources in the Goldstone report.

Im Tirtzu held a demonstration in front of the home of the NIF President, former Meretz MK Naomi Chazan, and bought full-page ads in Israeli newspapers showing Chazan wearing a rhinoceros-like horn (the Hebrew word for ‘fund’ and ‘horn’ are the same, keren).

Here is the English version that ran in the Jerusalem Post:

Im Tirtzu's full page ad showing Naomi Chazan wearing a horn, er, fund.

NIF and friends are furious. NIF called it a “particularly despicable attack.”  Rabbi Brant Rosen, a proud supporter of the anti-Zionist J Street and Jewish Voice for Peace, calls Im Tirtzu a “right-wing ultra-nationalist group”  and describes the ad as having “anti-Semitic overtones”. J Street itself said the ad was “reminiscent of propaganda from the darkest days of recent Jewish experience.” Americans for Peace Now uses almost identical language, saying that the campaign is “reminiscent of dark times in our people’s history.” Even the center-left Ron Kampeas said

Call it keren, call it horn, this is an anti-Semitic ad. No getting around it. This makes Naomi Chazan looks like she eats babies for breakfast. For lunch. And dinner. And snacks.

Sorry, but all of these accusations of antisemitism strike me as remarkably stupid.

In deciding whether something is antisemitic, intention is relevant. After all, I have displayed antisemitic cartoons from Arab and Iranian newspapers in order to make a point about their regimes. Does this make me antisemitic?

Im Tirtzu doesn’t hate Jews. Their ad does not try to make the viewer hate Jews. The caricature doesn’t make Chazan look evil, like the well-known ones of Ariel Sharon eating babies; it makes her look like a fool, which is the point. Displaying an image that is “reminiscent” of “dark times” possibly serves to suggest that dark times are coming again. It certainly doesn’t suggest that Jews are beasts with horns.

So what are they so angry about?

In my opinion just that Im Tirtzu has effectively exposed the activities of the NIF, and has revealed the progressive community that supports it and its grantees to be ‘useful idiots‘ at best.

Don’t get me wrong. Everyone who was irritated by Im Tirtzu’s ads does not desire the destruction of the Jewish state. Some of them, like Chazan herself, probably think that ending ‘the occupation’ is necessary for the survival of the state, and they view the actions of the NIF and the NGOs that it supports as helping to bring this about.

But even the moderate Left understands that the Goldstone report is poison — an attempt to delegitimize Israel and attenuate its power  to defend itself. They understand that the Goldstone project is part of the war against Israel, no less so than Hamas’ rockets. And they are furious that they have been made fools of, that as a matter of fact their money or other support has gone to aid Israel’s enemies.

They won’t admit this, of course. They’ll stick by the NIF because — just like the Communists who continued to believe into the 1950’s that Stalin was a saint rather than a psychotic mass murderer — they’ll believe almost anything rather than admit to having been duped.

So they respond the usual way. They call Im Trtzu names like ‘neo-cons’, ‘ultra-conservatives’, ‘right-wing-ultra-nationalists’, ‘right-wing hooligans’, etc. They say that it is trying to “quell dissenting voices in Israeli society,” and suggest a potential for murderous violence. Here’s a particularly egregious example, from the absolutely inimitable Richard Silverstein:

A few months ago, a distinguished Hebrew University professor opened his apartment door to a bomb blast that could have killed him.  The bomb was planted by Jack Teitel, according to Israeli authorities.  If Teitel could, from his prison cell, he’d give a thumbs up to those who are maligning Naomi Hazan and NIF.  Who knows, the next Jack Teitel may be lurking in the crowd outside her home.

Who knows? Maybe Yasser Arafat would give J Street a thumbs up from Hell, if he could. The possibilities of this kind of reasoning are limitless! Meanwhile, let’s see where the real antisemitism comes from:

Courtesy of Mr. Dry Bones

Technorati Tags: Im Tirtzu, Naomi Chazan, Goldstone Report, New Israel Fund, Israel

Alan Dershowitz begins his massive, detailed rebuttal of the Goldstone Report thus:

The Goldstone Report, when read in full and in context, is much worse than most of its detractors (and supporters) believe.  It is far more accusatory of Israel, far less balanced in its criticism of Hamas, far less honest in its evaluation of the evidence, far less responsible in drawing its conclusion, far more biased against Israeli than Palestinian witnesses, and far more willing to draw adverse inferences of intentionality from Israeli conduct and statements than from comparable Palestinian conduct and statements.  It is worse than any report previously prepared by any other United Nations agency or human rights group.

As I have mentioned before, the particularly evil aspect of the report is what Dershowitz calls the “inferences of intentionality”, that is, the conclusion drawn that Israel intentionally targeted civilian lives and property in order to inflict collective punishment on the residents of Gaza. Dershowitz writes,

At bottom the report accuses the Jewish state of having implemented a policy in Gaza that borders on genocide.  It blames the civilian deaths that occurred during Operation Cast Lead not on the fog of war, not on the use of human shields by Hamas, not on the inevitability of civilian casualties when rockets are fired from densely populated urban areas, not even on the use of “disproportionate force” by Israel.  Instead it blames the Palestinian civilian deaths on an explicit policy devised at the highest levels of the Israeli government and military, of killing as many Palestinian civilians as possible. It concludes that Operation Cast Lead was not designed to stop the rocket attacks on Israel’s civilians—more than eight thousand over a nine year period.   Instead, the rocket attacks merely served as an excuse for the Israeli military to achieve its real purpose: namely the killing of Palestinian civilians.

What can be called the ‘Goldstone project’ is a contrivance to delegitimize Israel and preempt international support from Israel’s future attempts to defend herself against certain-to-come attacks from the Iranian-supported Hamas and Hizballah. It is part of a strategy whose goal is to eliminate the Jewish state.

The 503-page work of slander rests on two pillars. One is the elaborate edifice of illegitimate inference in which conclusions are drawn by unsound arguments; and the other is the collection of false evidence upon which those arguments are based. This material was primarily gathered by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), including the usual suspects like Human Rights Watch, but also many Israeli NGO’s like the Physician’s Committee for Human Rights — Israel.

These groups laid the groundwork for the report; they are the sources that are referenced in most of the report’s footnotes and they are the ultimate source of its authority.

Now Elder of Zion has drawn our attention to a remarkable study that points out an interesting ‘coincidence’: no fewer than 92% of Goldstone’s footnotes from Israeli sources that are judged to be negative toward the IDF are sourced from NGO’s supported by the American New Israel Fund (NIF).

Here is the original Hebrew text of a Ma’ariv article describing the study, done by a Zionist student group called “Im Tirtzu” [from Hertzl's im tirtzu ain zo agada, "if you will, it is no legend"], and here is a machine translation of it. The translation is often somewhat unclear, so here is my own translation of a key paragraph:

The Goldstone report contains 1208 footnotes including 1377 references to various sources. “Im Tirtzu” checked all of these references and came to this astonishing conclusion: Close to half — 42% — of the citations in the Goldstone report from Israeli sources come from organizations supported by the New Israel Fund. When one considers only the negative ones, on which the various accusations and charges against the IDF and its officers are based, the conclusion is even more astonishing: 92% of them come from the same organizations.

The 16 Israeli NGOs listed by Im Tirtzu received a total of $7.8 million from the NIF in 2008-9. Since its founding in 1979, NIF has distributed $140 million in grants. Although some of its money comes from other foundations (it has received at least $40 million from the Ford Foundation, for ‘peace and justice’ projects), it actively solicits individual donors — even I have received literature from it.

Like J Street, the NIF (about which I’ve previously written here, here, and here) targets liberal Jews in the US, giving them the warm feeling that they can ‘help Israel’ while maintaining their commitment to ‘peace and social justice’.

It’s interesting to see how the trail starts from liberal feel-good philanthropy and ends up helping the bloody murderers of Hamas and Hizballah.

Incidentally, we’ll be hearing more about Im Tirtzu. This weekend it held a demonstration in front of the home of NIF President Naomi Chazan, which earned it a rebuke from… J Street!

Im Tirtzu demonstrators, dressed as Hamas terrorists, in front of the home of NIF President Naomi Chazan. The sign reads "thank you, New (Israel) Fund".

Update [1951 PST]: Someone asked me “what’s with the horn?” I don’t know for sure, but the  “New Israel Fund” in Hebrew is “keren hachadasha” (literally “new fund”). The word for ‘fund’ is keren [קרן], which also means ‘horn’.

Incidentally, it also means ‘ray [of light]‘, and it’s said that St. Jerome’s mistranslation of this word in Ex. 34:29 where it says “keren or panav” (usually rendered “his skin was radiant”) led to the medieval belief that Moses had horns growing from his face.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Goldstone report, New Israel Fund, Alan Dershowitz, Im Tirtzu

News item:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in a Tehran conference Saturday that whoever controls the Middle East controls the world, the semi-official Fars News Agency reported.

In a speech during a conference marking 30 years to the Islamic Revolution, Ahamdinejad reportedly implied that Iran is the top power in the Middle East. “Now the question is who has the last say in the Middle East? Well, of course, the answer is clear to every one,” Ahamdinejad said.

Before WWII, the answer was ‘Britain’. And from 1945 until Barack Obama, the answer has been ‘the US’. But in his Cairo speech, Obama more or less announced that the US, like Britain before it, was withdrawing from the region. And his inability or lack of will to resist Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons guarantees that Ahmadinejad will soon have the answer he desires.

OK, you can blame the bungled US reaction to 9/11, which included an unnecessary and hugely expensive war and a remarkably stupid followup to a military victory if you want to pin it on the Bush Administration, but shouldn’t Obama have at least made an effort to turn things around before slinking away?

It’s not such a long story. The US cultivated — indeed, armed and supported — Saddam Hussein as a counter to Iran. To a certain extent this served the interest of the Saudi regime, which, with its effective lobby and  the help of supportive oil interests, has had an inordinate influence on US policy since the 1930’s. When Saddam got too big for his britches, invaded Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia, Bush I slapped him down — but not hard enough to remove him.

With the Bush II Administration, everything changed. Bush II crushed Saddam’s military and replaced his regime with… nothing. Iran stepped in, and when US troops leave, there is no doubt that ‘independent’ Iraq will become an Iranian satellite.

Lebanon is also losing its last vestige of independence, as Iran’s proxy Hizballah consolidates its hold on that unfortunate nation. Here the fault is shared with Israel, which was given a green light in 2006 by the US and Saudi Arabia to crush Hizballah but failed to do so.

Syria has thrown in its lot with Iran, in a mutually advantageous deal to supply Hizballah, threaten Israel and exploit Lebanon.Turkey under Erdoğan has been moving closer to Iran and Syria and distancing itself from Israel.

This leaves the conservative Arab regimes of Saudi Arabia and Egypt in a precarious position, facing Islamist subversion from within (encouraged by Iran) as well as the direct threat from Iranian nukes. The Mubarak regime is particularly unstable, with no clear successor waiting in the wings.

Israel is a remaining island of pro-Western power in the region, but it will soon be fighting Hizballah and Syria in the north and Hamas in the south — all Iranian proxies of course  (yes, I am convinced that war is not far away).

Is it likely that Obama will reverse direction, support Israel in its struggle with Iran’s proxies, and do whatever is needed to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons? So far there’s no reason to think so. The administration’s policy until now has been to pressure Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians and to keep missing deadlines for applying sanctions to Iran.

The Iranian opposition might be a ray of hope, but even if it succeeds in overthrowing the regime — a long shot, given the repressive tactics that are being employed against it — there’s no reason to assume that it will not pursue at least some of the geopolitical goals of the present regime.

Today it can be said that we are right at one of those times that future historians will write about as important turning points: the American withdrawal from the Middle East.

No wonder Ahmadinejad is confident about the answer to his question.

Technorati Tags: Middle East, Iran, Barack Obama, Obama Administration

The McDermott/Ellison letter

News Item:

Fifty-four members of the U.S. Congress have signed a letter [the text is here -- ed.] asking President Barack Obama to put pressure on Israel to ease the siege of the Gaza Strip.

The letter was the initiative of Representatives Jim McDermott from Washington and Keith Ellison from Minnesota, both of whom are Democrats. Ellison is the first American Muslim to ever win election to Congress.

McDermott and Ellison wrote that they understand the threats facing Israel and the ongoing Hamas terror activities against Israeli citizens but that “this concern must be addressed without resulting in the de facto collective punishment of the Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip.”

“We ask you to press for immediate relief for the citizens of Gaza as an urgent component of your broader Middle East peace efforts,” they wrote, adding that the siege has hampered the ability of aid agencies to do their work in Gaza…

Ellison has harshly criticized the House of Representatives decision to reject the Goldstone report, arguing that the report “only presents facts and raises recommendations for the future.” He cast doubt that members of Congress who voted to reject the report even took the time to read it and that the rejection hurt the Obama government’s role as an honest broker in the Middle East conflict.

The letter was also signed by those paragons of pro-Israel-ness, J Street and Americans for Peace Now.

Although the letter pays lip service to Israel’s ‘fear of terrorism’, it calls for the removal of restrictions on people moving into and out of the strip, the shipment of construction materials, etc. which would directly lead to such terrorism.  There is only one solution, and that is the removal of the Hamas terrorists from power there.

The Left has been gleeful, of course, while the Right has pointed out that the signatories are Democrats.

I have just one tripartite thought:

• Where is the all-powerful ‘Israel Lobby’ which supposedly controls the Congress?
• Where is the iron hand of AIPAC, which can allegedly destroy any elected official that steps out of line?
• Why don’t the supposedly Jewish-controlled media step in?

Meanwhile, some Israelis have written a far more extreme letter…

More suicidal intellectuals

Yes, I should stop giving them exposure. But here is a letter from a bunch of Israelis, most of them academics, including Dr. Rachel Giora about whom I wrote yesterday, in advance of Israeli President Shimon Peres’ visit to Germany.

The letter accuses peace advocate and ‘architect of Oslo’ Shimon Peres of “numerous violations of human rights”, repeats Hamas and Hizballah atrocity stories, suggests that Israel mistreated nuclear traitor Mordechai Vanunu (in fact, he should have been hanged), and asserts that Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons — without which those who signed the letter would be dead or living in Los Angeles — is unacceptable.

But not all Israeli academics are idiots…

More evidence for early Jewish presence in Israel

A University of Haifa scholar has deciphered an inscription in Hebrew from the 10th century BCE:

A breakthrough in the research of the Hebrew scriptures has shed new light on the period in which the Bible was written. Prof. Gershon Galil of the Department of Biblical Studies at the University of Haifa has deciphered an inscription dating from the 10th century BCE (the period of King David’s reign), and has shown that this is a Hebrew inscription. The discovery makes this the earliest known Hebrew writing. The significance of this breakthrough relates to the fact that at least some of the biblical scriptures were composed hundreds of years before the dates presented today in research and that the Kingdom of Israel already existed at that time…

Prof. Galil’s deciphering of the ancient writing testifies to its being Hebrew, based on the use of verbs particular to the Hebrew language, and content specific to Hebrew culture and not adopted by any other cultures in the region. “This text is a social statement, relating to slaves, widows and orphans. It uses verbs that were characteristic of Hebrew, such as asah (“did”) and avad (“worked”), which were rarely used in other regional languages. Particular words that appear in the text, such as almanah (“widow”) are specific to Hebrew and are written differently in other local languages.

The content of the inscription is interesting because is shows a traditional Jewish concern for human rights:

The content itself was also unfamiliar to all the cultures in the region besides the Hebrew society: The present inscription provides social elements similar to those found in the biblical prophecies and very different from prophecies written by other cultures postulating glorification of the gods and taking care of their physical needs,” Prof. Galil explains.

Hebrew inscription from 1000 BCE

Here it is, with his translation:

1′ you shall not do [it], but worship the [Lord].
2′ Judge the sla[ve] and the wid[ow] / Judge the orph[an]
3′ [and] the stranger. [Pl]ead for the infant / plead for the po[or and]
4′ the widow. Rehabilitate [the poor] at the hands of the king.
5′ Protect the po[or and] the slave / [supp]ort the stranger.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Ellison, McDermott, Shimon Peres, Gershon Galil, Bible

Theodoros Pangalos: doesn't condone theft -- but how about murder?

Theodoros Pangalos is Deputy PM of Greece and a member of the Greek Parliament for the PASOK socialist party.  In 2008, Pangalos returned a Christmas gift of wine from the Israeli Ambassador. In explanation, he issued the following press release:

Dear Mr. Ambassador,

Thank you for the 3 bottles of wine that you sent me as season’s greetings. I wish to you, your family and everybody in the Embassy a happy new year. Good health and progress to you all.

Unhappily I noticed that the wine you have sent me has been produced in the Golan Heights. I have been taught since I was very young not to steel [sic] and not to accept products of theft. So I can not possibly accept this gift and I must return it back to you.

As you know, your country occupies illegally the Golan Heights who belong to Syria, according to the International Law and numerous decisions of the International Community.

I take the opportunity to express my hope that Israel will find security into its internationally recognized borders and the terrorist activities against Israel territory by Hamas or anybody else will be contained and made impossible, but I also hope that your government will cease practicing the policy of collective punishment which was applied on a mass scale by Hitler and his armies.

Actions such as those of these days of the Israel military in Gaza remind the greek [sic] people holocausts such as in Kalavrita or Doxato or Distomo and certainly in the ghetto of Warsaw.

With these thoughts allow me to express to you my best wishes for you, the Israeli people and all the people of our region of the world.

Was he also taught not to murder or allow others to do so? Perhaps not:

PASOK was in power under Andreas Papandreou from 1981-89 and from 1993-97, and Pangalos was a cabinet minister in both governments. During the first period, Greece pursued a relationship with radical Arab forces, particularly Syria, Libya, Iraq and the PLO. Cooperation was such that terrorists were allowed to operate in Greece with minimal interference.

In 1984, American and British agents captured Abdallah Fuad Shara, a member of the murderous “May 15″ organization, which

…specialized in the use of sophisticated suitcase bombs and plastic explosives, and focused on American and Israeli targets, and in particular means of transportation — ships and planes. The organization’s is charged with the attack on the Greek ship Orion in Haifa Port (December 1981); attacks on American and Israeli airliners in the years 1982-83, and attacks on crowded hotels and restaurants for the purpose of wholesale killing.

The PASOK government released him and gave him free passage to Algeria. He was finally arrested in 1990 and taken to Israel, where he received a 25-year sentence.

Another member of the May 15 group, Mohammed Rashid (or ‘Rashed’), was arrested at the Athens airport in 1988. After Papandreou was replaced by Constantine Mitsotakis, he was finally sentenced to 15 years in prison in Greece. But 8 years later, after Papandreou and PASOK returned to power, Rashid was freed for “good behavior”. He too was later rearrested, and this time taken to the US, where he ultimately was sentenced to an additional 7 years.

Numerous terrorist incidents occurred in Greece on PASOK’s watch, including the 1985 hijacking of TWA flight 847, in which an American, Robert Stethem, was brutally murdered. Papandreou adopted the policy at first in order to curry favor with Arab nations where Greece had business interests and to get support from Arabs for his anti-Turkish and anti-American policies. Later, he apparently felt that appeasement was the best way to protect Greece from terrorism.

So the highly moral Pangalos apparently has less trouble belonging to governments which have condoned terrorism than he does drinking wine produced in a territory that was occupied as a result of a defensive war!

Do I smell hypocrisy? ( a good Greek word!)

***

Update [24 Jan 1051 PST]: Some bloggers have said that this story was a hoax. Actually it did occur, but in December 2008, at least according to Pangalos’ personal website. See the link preceding the quotation.

Update [25 Jam 0835 PST]: This post originally referenced an article in the Jerusalem Post by Jonny Paul. This article was removed by the Post, possibly because it did not make clear that the events described happened 13 months ago.

Technorati Tags: Theodoros Pangalos, PASOK, Greece, Terrorism, hypocrisy

Yossi Alpher, a well-known analyst of the Israeli-Arab conflict and, despite his left-wing orientation, someone who should know better, wrote this:

[R]enewal of the peace process between Israel and Syria deserves more and better attention from the US and the moderate Arab states. Unlike in the Palestinian arena, here the parameters of a process are clear, most of the negotiating has already been done and Syrian President Bashar Assad is able to deliver. Obviously, success in the Israeli-Syrian arena is not guaranteed. But if achieved it would reduce Iran’s regional influence and weaken Hamas, thereby improving the chances for fruitful Israeli-Palestinian negotiations – when circumstances are more favorable than today.

Alpher correctly understands that while Hamas controls Gaza and while PA President Mahmoud Abbas is committed — by ideology and by fear of his constituency — to maximal demands on borders, refugees, Jerusalem, etc., there can be no secure peace agreement with the Palestinians. So, maybe for lack of anything else to do, he thinks Israel should pursue an agreement with Syria.

“if achieved it would reduce Iran’s regional influence and weaken Hamas”, he says. Well, if Bashar Assad would honestly make peace with Israel, then it might do these things. But that’s like saying that flying pigs would revolutionize air transport.

Here are some of the problems with the idea:

Syria today has a very close relationship with Iran, which provides weapons and economic benefits. It works closely with Iran’s proxy, Hizballah, in exploiting Lebanon. Recognition of the Jewish state would put Syria on the US/Israeli side of the struggle for control of the region, imperil all of this and make enemies out of Iran and Hizballah.

In addition, Syria uses the conflict with Israel for domestic political purposes. As Barry Rubin argued in his book “The Truth About Syria“, the continual state of war with Israel provides an excuse for the Syrian regime to suppress both reformist and Islamist opposition, as well as for the economic difficulties of the population.

But the Golan is extremely strategic, even in this day of missile warfare. If Israel had not controlled the Golan in 1973, there’s no doubt that Syrian tanks could have penetrated deeply into Israel’s heartland. And while the Assad regime would prefer not to make peace, it would very much want to get the Golan back. So the obvious danger is that there might be a peace agreement, one that Assad or a successor would renege on. Who would or could guarantee it? Israel’s experience with multinational or UN forces indicates that no one could.

As always, Israel is asked to make a concrete concession of a strategic asset in return for a promise. “Assad is able to deliver”, says Alpher. But would he really, and could he deliver a possibly Islamist successor in advance?

Technorati Tags: Yossi Alpher, Israel, Syria, Golan Heights