FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

On Monday an article appeared in the New York Times by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley entitled “The Two-State Solution Doesn’t Solve Anything“.

The article expresses some highly tendentious ideas, especially that Hamas in some sense might ‘accept’ a Palestinian state which did not stretch from the river to the sea as anything other than a temporary expedient, and the (unspoken, because it is demonstrably false) suggestion that this implies that Hamas’ goals do not include genocide. It also appears to take for granted that the Palestinian Arab ‘refugees’ were “dispossessed” and have “rights” [to live in Israel] which ought to be “respected”.

But — and maybe this is a case of extremist positions wrapping around and meeting — much of what they say makes sense, with some minor modifications. For example,

Few Israelis quarrel with the insistence that Israel be recognized as a Jewish state. It encapsulates their profound aspiration, rooted in the history of the Jewish people, for a fully accepted presence in the land of their forebears — for an end to Arab questioning of Israel’s legitimacy, the specter of the Palestinian refugees’ return and any irredentist sentiment among Israel’s Arab citizens.

Even fewer Palestinians take issue with the categorical rebuff of that demand, as the recent Fatah congress in Bethlehem confirmed. In their eyes, to accept Israel as a Jewish state would legitimize the Zionist enterprise that brought about their tragedy. It would render the Palestinian national struggle at best meaningless, at worst criminal. [my emphasis]

Indeed. I lean toward ‘criminal’ when I consider the multiple rejections of any sharing of the land which took place over the last hundred years or so, a land which easily could have supported Jews and Arabs had the Arabs not always turned toward murder and violence in their racist obsession to have it free of Jews.

It’s also instructive to note how the Palestinians — and assuredly Agha and Malley — are so certain that it was the Zionist enterprise that “brought about their tragedy”, and not a combination of stupid decisions, really bad leadership, and reliance on Arab nations who don’t care about Palestinians any more than they do for Jews.

They continue,

[Palestinian] firmness on the principle of their right of return flows from the belief that the 1948 war led to unjust displacement and that, whether or not refugees choose or are allowed to return to their homes, they can never be deprived of that natural right.

I’m grateful to the authors for such a clear presentation. They are of course only reporting the Palestinian position, not necessarily endorsing it. But just in case anyone is thinking “that sounds reasonable enough”, let me point out that

• The Palestinian Arabs started the war in 1947 and they were joined by their Arab allies in 1948.
• Displacement of populations is normal in war, and much of it was not due to the actions of the Zionists.
• There is no ‘natural right’ for repatriation of refugees, and certainly not for their descendants.

I also can’t disagree when they write,

To be sustainable, [a solution] will need to grapple with matters left over since 1948. The first step will be to recognize that in the hearts and minds of Israelis and Palestinians, the fundamental question is not about the details of an apparently practical solution. It is an existential struggle between two worldviews.

Two worldviews:

One is based in historical fact and supported by any rational reading of international law under which Israel is a sovereign state, a member of the UN which ought not to be required to choose between constant military and terrorist pressure from Arabs — ‘Palestinians’ and others — until it agrees to be colonized by some 4.5 million hostiles who claim an imaginary right;

and the other is based in myth and fantasy, maintained by cynical Arab leaders, nurtured by big-power conflict and oil politics, evolving into a philosophy in which death is more important than life; a worldview that has been directly responsible — as the Zionists are not — for a huge amount of misery among Palestinian Arabs since 1948.

Agha and Malley conclude thus:

For years, virtually all attention has been focused on the question of a future Palestinian state, its borders and powers. As Israelis make plain by talking about the imperative of a Jewish state, and as Palestinians highlight when they evoke the refugees’ rights, the heart of the matter is not necessarily how to define a state of Palestine. It is, as in a sense it always has been, how to define the state of Israel.

The Arabs have indeed never gotten past this. For a hundred years they have violently rejected the idea that there might be a Jewish state of any size anywhere in Palestine, far more even than they were bothered by the rule of the Ottoman Turks.

Malley and Agha, too, seem to find it problematic, although they do not ask whether the ‘Palestinian people’ — a tenuous concept — have a right to a ‘Palestinian State’, in which Jews may not live, nor do they question the ‘rights’ of the ‘refugees’ — two more tenuous concepts.

There is only the question of whether the Jewish people may have a state, and if they live in one, can it be defined as belonging to them. Of course I believe that Israel is the state of the Jewish people, the place where this people — recognized as such for thousands of years –  can exercise their right of self-determination.

We know what Agha and Malley’s answer is.

Update:
Rob Malley is a member of the Advisory Council of ‘J Street’, an organization which declares itself “pro-Israel”.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Palestinians, Jewish state, two-state solution

News item:

Residents of towns along the Gaza border have been instructed to remain vigilant in case Hamas tries to infiltrate the communities to carry out terrorist and kidnapping attacks…

The warnings collected by the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) focus mainly on terrorist threats along the security fence, as well as infiltrations into Gaza-belt communities…

In June, a major terrorist attack that included 10 gunmen and explosives-laden horses was thwarted by the IDF near the Karni crossing. The attack was carried out by a group affiliated with al-Qaida.

On Monday, a mortar shell struck near a group of IDF engineers working on the security fence. The day before, two mortar shells and a Kassam rocket were fired into Israel. The shells hit near the Erez crossing, meters away from ambulances that were transferring a Palestinian heart patient to Israel for treatment…

According to a senior officer in the IDF Southern Command, troops deployed along the Gaza border have also been facing an increased spate of sniper attacks. In addition, there has been an increase in the number of bombs planted along the security fence.

Besides to the threat of infiltration by tunnel or over the fence, there is also growing concern in the army that terrorists will try to enter Israel by sea, either by swimming or in rubber boats.

This is what many predicted would happen because Operation Cast Lead was aborted before real damage was done to Hamas’ fighting ability and its leadership. The enemy will now continue to ratchet up the level of terrorism, until…? Who knows.

Lots of reasons were given for not finishing the job: it was too dangerous for IDF soldiers, the new American president wouldn’t like it, the world wouldn’t accept further Palestinian civilian casualties, etc.

But even so, Israel suffered — in addition to the soldiers lost and wounded — a massive beating in the information arena in which every imaginable ‘human rights’ NGO, every ‘progressive’ outlet, the UN, European foreign ministries and the mainstream media bashed Israel for ‘disproportionate’ use of force, callous disregard for civilian damage, violations of international law and even war crimes. As usual, left-wing Israeli groups led the charge.

Israel’s name was blackened so that in some circles it ranks with — or below — that of Nazi Germany.

And yet, it was all a bunch of crap. Rubbish. Lies. Bullshit. But the process of delegitimization which has been started years before had prepared the ground for the sowing of lies and the harvest of hatred that immediately burgeoned forth.

Now (to change the metaphor), the truth has finally got its pants on, and Israel’s Foreign Ministry has released an exhaustive 164-page report which argues that Israel had a right to do what it did under international law, that what it did was not callous, disproportionate or criminal, and — of course — that much of what it was accused of it didn’t do.

Those who need to, like Judge Richard Goldstone of the UN Fact-Finding team, will (I hope) read the whole thing. But for the rest of us there is a 20-page analysis of it written by Yaakov Lozowick, here. I highly recommend this.

Lozowick, a historian and former Director of Archives at Yad Vashem, argues that Israel’s critics couch their condemnations in the language of international law, without actually understanding it. The way to oppose this, says Lozowick, is not to attack the legitimacy of international law:

There is an unfortunate reaction to this posturing. The centrality of international law and institutions in international affairs is largely a response to the atrocities of Nazism and the murder of Jews which was its core. If the world’s response to the Shoah is to formulate principles which forbid the Jews from defending their political sovereignty and their very lives, many of us say, then a pox on the international order. The cards cannot always be stacked against the Jews with the Jews never responding – that’s our lesson from the Shoah.

The Foreign Ministry, he says, has done exactly the right thing in showing that Israel did indeed act in accordance with international law — and in fact had no choice but to act as it did.

Read Lozowick’s paper, because there is not the slightest doubt in my mind that the days of military confrontation between Israel and Hamas are far from over.

Technorati Tags: Gaza war, Operation Cast Lead, Israel, international law, war crimes

News item:

Fatah’s sixth General Assembly has issued several hard-line resolutions in recent days, saying it would not renew peace negotiations with Israel until all Palestinian prisoners are released from Israeli jails, all settlement-building is frozen and the Gaza blockade is lifted. It also vowed to struggle against Israel “until Jerusalem returns to the Palestinians void of settlers and settlements” and pinned the blame for the death of former Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat on Israel.

I might add that the statement on Jerusalem is ambiguous, and some observers think that it refers to both East and West Jerusalem.

What are we to make of this? Several things come to mind:

• It shows the importance in Palestinian politics of always being the most radical. Anyone who appears to be willing to compromise with the hated Zionists  loses popularity in a place where 77% of the people think that “the rights and needs of the Palestinian people cannot be taken care of as long as the state of Israel exists”.

• It shows that Fatah doesn’t plan to take the path of negotiation with Israel to bring a Palestinian state into existence — either because they would rather wait for a military confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah, Iran, Syria, Hamas, etc. to weaken Israel enough so that it can be destroyed, or because they think the US will simply hand them a state on their terms.

I think there is a lesson here for the US administration. If there is any substance at all to Barack Obama’s statement that he is “absolutely committed to the security of Israel”, this goal is not served by arming and training the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority (PA)  ‘security’ forces in hopes of creating a moderate entity that will be able to resist Hamas and also serve as a nucleus for a peaceful Palestinian state.

And note that the non-Hamas Palestinian movement is definitely moving in the more radical direction. Al-Jazeerah recently interviewed a number of young, educated Palestinians and asked them about the relevance of the PLO today. They came up with statements like this:

I believe our people are fed up with negotiations and compromises and will choose to go back to resistance to ensure no more compromises and to hinder the submissive approach that characterises the PLO right now…

We need people that are politically [socially? — ed] more liberal than Hamas is but who also care about the interest of their people, maybe this will give a push to more independent figures to take the lead.

If Fatah presented a programme that is stronger and takes into account people’s choices maybe they still have a chance. On the other hand, if Hamas came up with better strategies to confront the siege maybe it will also still have a chance.

Or this:

The PLO should not exclusively utilise political talks, and the political agenda must not threaten our right of resistance.

Or this:

The PLO in its current form is not relevant to the cause or to the Palestinians. The cause was sold out long ago. I don’t think they even remember what the cause is…

The future is gloomy. I think people have to go back 60 years, remember the Nakba and all that happened and start working all over again.

This one mentions ‘nonviolence’, but the end is still the same:

I believe that we, Palestinians, are still in a liberation phase against the Israeli occupation given the dead end tunnel of political negotiations, sign agreements and the paralysed Palestinian Authority institutions…

The Israeli matrix of control – land annexation, construction of settlements, separation wall, bypass roads, control of borders, etc – create no opportunity for a viable and sovereign Palestinian Authority beyond its physical existence.

The remaining unviable and Israeli controlled 22 per cent of historical Palestine for Palestinians holds no optimism for the future. The annexation of Jordan valley makes land percentage even less.

However, I do also believe that the PLO has to refresh its blood and open its nerves to represent all spectrums of Palestinian factions who I believe should revolve around the PLO’s political agenda in affirmation to right to self-determination and right of return but consider an expansion in the methods of resistance represented in article 10 of the Palestinian National Charter to include non-violent resistance as well.

Reformed PLO should reconsider the 1988 officially endorsed two-state solution which – in my opinion – signals the starting point for the collapse of the Palestinian national project.

I think we are finding out that a two-state solution that would be barely acceptable to both sides is moving farther away every day, if indeed it ever was anything more than wishful thinking on the Israeli side combined with creative ambiguity from the Palestinians. I believe that most Israelis and Palestinians understand this.

I suspect that most of the world’s governments also get it, and unfortunately would be happy to see the Palestinian goals achieved. Just about the only place where the idea of “two [peaceful] states for two peoples” is seen as achievable seems to be the White House.

My suggestion — since there does not appear to be a solution that would make the Palestinian Arabs happy while still maintaining the principle of Jewish self-determination — is that the US should stop trying to impose one.

I would like to see the Obama administration do what it can to reduce the proven threats to peace in the region: the huge missile buildups in Lebanon and Syria, the legitimization of Hamas, and of course the Iranian nuclear threat.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Fatah, PLO

President Obama’s counter-terrorism advisor John Brennan spoke yesterday on “A New Approach for Safeguarding Americans”. The full transcript of his speech is here.

Brennan begins by emphasizing the administration’s commitment to the use of military power  and other forms of action such as law-enforcement and economic interventions “to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaida and its allies” in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And I think we have seen that the administration does appear to be taking this narrowly defined conflict seriously.

But I fear that Brennan — and Obama’s — overall conception of the threat we face falls short of reality.

Brennan says, correctly, that the enemy isn’t “terrorism”:

As many have noted, the president does not describe this as a “war on terrorism.” That is because terrorism is but a tactic – a means to an end – which, in al-Qaida’s case, is global domination by an Islamic caliphate.

So if it isn’t a war on terrorism, what is it a war on? And here is where the disturbing aspects of the administration’s view appear:

Nor does President Obama see this challenge as a fight against jihadists. Describing terrorists in this way, using the legitimate term “jihad,” which means to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal, risks giving these murderers the religious legitimacy they desperately seek but in no way deserve. Worse, it risks reinforcing the idea that the United States is somehow at war with Islam itself. And this is why President Obama has confronted this perception directly and forcefully in its speeches to Muslim audiences, declaring that America is not and never will be at war with Islam. [My emphasis]

Instead, as the president has made clear, we are at war with al-Qaida, which attacked us on 9/11 and killed 3,000 people. We are at war with its violent extremist allies who seek to carry on al-Qaida’s murderous agenda. These are the terrorists we will destroy; these are the extremists we will defeat. [My emphasis]

Doubtless Osama bin Laden believes that his jihad against the US is a “holy struggle for a moral goal”. But Brennan’s definition leaves out the historical meaning of ‘jihad’ as an expansionist, offensive struggle against non-Muslims, an aspect which is still very much part of the concept in the minds of many present-day Muslims (for an exhaustive and persuasive analysis of this topic, see Daniel Pipes: “Jihad and the Professors“).

While it is important to say that — at least as yet — the US is not “at war with Islam”, the enemy that we are facing is more than just al-Quaida and “its extremist allies”.  It is militant Islam, which emphasizes violent, offensive jihad as a fundamental part of Islam. As Daniel Pipes points out, jihad in this sense was highly important in the past and has been reemphasized by modern Islamist thinkers like al-Banna and Qutb.

Militant Islam is rapidly becoming more and more prevalent in the Muslim world; one just has to look at the inroads Hamas has made in the Palestinian movement for an example.

There seems to be a worldwide trend toward fundamentalism in the three major monotheistic religions, while many ‘moderate’ sects are losing influence and membership. I don’t know the reason for this, but it is certainly affecting Islam as well as Christianity and Judaism, and the traditional sense of ‘jihad’ is part of Islamic fundamentalism.

Compounding his failure to recognize the problem as broader than just a few “extremists”, Brennan takes an unfortunate turn in his discussion of how to deal with it:

Even as the president takes a more focused view of the threat, his approach includes a third element – a broader, more accurate understanding of the causes and conditions that help fuel violent extremism, be they in Pakistan and Afghanistan or Somalia and Yemen.

The president has been very clear on this. Poverty does not cause violence and terrorism. Lack of education does not cause terrorism. But just as there is no excuse for the wanton slaughter of innocents, there is no denying that when children have no hope for an education, when young people have no hope for a job and feel disconnected from the modern world, when governments fail to provide for the basic needs of their people, then people become more susceptible to ideologies of violence and death.

Extremist violence and terrorist attacks are therefore, often the final, murderous manifestations of a long process rooted in helplessness, humiliation and hatred. Therefore, any comprehensive approach has to also address the upstream factors, the conditions that help fuel violent extremism. Indeed, the counterinsurgency lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan apply equally to the broader fight against extremism.

We cannot shoot ourselves out of this challenge. We can take out all the terrorists we want – their leadership and their foot soldiers – but if we fail to confront the broader political, economic and social conditions under which extremists thrive, then there will always be another recruit in the pipeline, another attack coming downstream. Indeed, our failure to address these conditions also plays into the extremists’ hands, allowing them to make the false claim that the United States actually wants to keep people impoverished and unempowered.

Brennan tries hard to distinguish this position from the discredited one that “Poverty [causes] violence and terrorism” by suggesting that lack of education, poverty and repression may not be the primary causes, but create the conditions under which “ideologies of violence and death” flourish. It’s a weak argument.

I think Brennan underestimates the pull of the militant Islamic ideology itself, especially in Arab cultures. After all, the leadership of radical groups like al-Quaida, Hamas, Hezbollah, etc. are all well-educated, and in the case of bin Laden, quite wealthy. It can be argued that in some cases — like the Palestinian Arabs, who have probably been the recipient of more Western ‘development’ aid than any other similar group — there are cultural pathologies that work against political stability and economic development, as well as making the culture fertile ground for radical ideologies.

So when Brennan suggests that we need to attack these ‘conditions’ as well as fight ‘extremists’, he misses two points:

1. The ‘extremists’ are not just a small group of crazies, but part of a significant faction of fundamentalist Muslims who — while they may not themselves engage in violent jihad — accept the ideology of militant Islam which promotes it. As long as this is the case, there will always be a supply of ones who are violent.
2. Unless the cultural issues that make it hard for societies to develop in what we Westerners see as a positive direction (democracy, economic development, fair allocation of resources, etc.) can be counteracted, Western attempts to ameliorate poverty, lack of education and political repression will be seen as so much cultural imperialism.

The solution isn’t going to be easy. Maybe there isn’t any, besides continuing to fight the shock troops of militant Islam.

One thing about which I’m certain is that our position is not improved when we do not publicly face the fact that militant Islam is far more than a few violent extremists. It may well be the future of normative Islam.

Technorati Tags: John Brennan, Obama administration, terrorism, militant Islam