FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

Ha’aretz reports:

Israel has officially protested against the planned visit of Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Turkey next week.

Israel’s ambassador to Turkey, Gabi Levy, presented the protest to officials in Ankara, and the Turkish ambassador to Israel was summoned to Jerusalem.

“Israel is disappointed that Turkey has invited for an official visit a leader who denies publicly the Holocaust, and thus grants him legitimacy,” was the message given to the Turkish ambassador to relay to his government.

Will the Turks will see the irony in being asked to shun a Holocaust denier, when they themselves officially deny that their predecessors committed genocide against the Armenians?

Israel and American Jews have been caught between a rock and a hard place in regard to the Armenian Genocide. I’ve written a number of posts on the subject.

The Turkish government has its reasons for not admitting that the Young Turks, and later the Turkish Nationalists, murdered about a million and a half Armenians during and after World War I. The Israeli government also has its reasons for not wanting to irritate the Turks. Even the US administration seems to feel that Turkey is too strategically important to annoy by using the word ‘genocide’ to describe the events. But the truth is the truth.

When I first came to Fresno in 1971, you could meet people in the supermarket who had been adult eyewitnesses to the murders, rapes, torture, dislocation, disease and  starvation that characterized the Armenian Genocide. Now it’s not so easy, even harder than finding Holocaust survivors.

Survivors sometimes feel that denial is the final stage of extermination. First the physical forms of the victims were destroyed, and then their memories are erased. Most Jews are familiar with the rage that comes over them when confronted with Holocaust denial. But — at least in the West, if not in Iran or the Arab world — deniers are marginal. After all, the present government of Germany has officially accepted responsibility for the Holocaust.

One can imagine how Armenians feel — actually, you don’t need to imagine, they will tell you — when, almost 100 years after the fact, the Turkish government still insists — against the huge preponderance of historical evidence — that while something happened to the Armenians, it wasn’t genocide, the Turks were not responsible, and it might even have been the Armenians’ fault.

Turkey wants to join the EU. It would only be fair to ask them to follow the example of Germany.

Technorati Tags: Armenian Genocide, Turkey, Holocaust, genocide

The recent fighting between Hamas and a Fatah-linked clan in Gaza reminds us that Hamas is not sitting still, but rather is steadily pursuing its aims, rearming, training, consolidating. What does this mean for the “two-state” plan which is given at least lip service by the Israeli government, and which is an article of faith for most liberals and centrists in the US — including the two presidential candidates? What does it mean for those who think that “ending the occupation” is a prerequisite of peace?

Elder of Ziyon wrote,

What is striking is that of all the players in the Arab/Israeli conflict, Hamas and Hezbollah (as Iranian proxies) seem to be the only ones with real plans, strategies and the ability to follow through. The current Israeli government’s strategy is more based on wishful thinking plus some IDF contingency plans, and the Palestinian Authority [PA] has long ago become a joke.

Hamas, though, knows what it wants: it already replaced Gaza with an Islamic state, and it is mopping up any leftover opposition. It plans to take over the West Bank as well.

If, G-d forbid, Israel abandons large areas of the West Bank to Hamas, it really will become another Gaza. Anything Israel does to defend itself from the inevitable rockets will involve civilian deaths. Giving the Palestinian Arabs a state wouldn’t slow Hamas down - on the contrary, it would accelerate Hamas’ reaching its goals. Hamas’ prestige will grow and affect Jordan as well as Egypt, and Israel will literally be surrounded by Iranian proxies.

Liberals scoff that Israel doesn’t face a real existential threat from what are dismissively described as a few kids with stones, but the real threat is what I’ve described - at least two Iranian proxy armies on Israel’s doorstep from the south, east and north.

And the only thing that can stop this sequence of events is Israeli “occupation,” which, from decades of propaganda, is regarded as evil incarnate.

– Elder of Ziyon, “The Hamas threat to the West Bank - and Israel“

For those who want to help ’solve the problem’ in the region today, here’s a quick primer on what the problem isn’t and is:

• It isn’t checkpoints or the security barrier.
• It isn’t Israel building houses inside existing settlements or Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem.
• It isn’t the closure of Gaza crossings (can you imagine the result if Israel allowed Hamas operatives to cross freely into Israel?).
• It especially isn’t ‘The Occupation’.
• Rather, it is Iran’s attempt to destroy Israel and kill its Jewish inhabitants by means of its Hamas and Hezbollah proxies.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Israeli-Palestinian conflict

The Strait of Hormuz, sometimes called “the most strategic place on the planet”

I do not have secret inside information about the US or Israel’s intentions toward Iran, or of Ahmadinejad’s plans. But anybody can look at certain basic facts and draw conclusions.

For example:

If you think the US economy is struggling now, imagine if Iran took steps to interfere with the transit of oil in the Strait of Hormuz, through which 40% of all seaborne oil traffic passes! And Iran is doing its best to make sure that the US understands that they have the ability to do this.

Right now the US, Russia, China, France, the U.K. and Germany are engaging in ‘carrot and stick’ negotiations with Iran to try to get a suspension of nuclear enrichment. The carrots are “economic, technological, and political” and supposedly include everything Iran would need to build a peaceful nuclear program. The deadline for accepting the carrot has officially passed and now there is talk of ‘painful sanctions’.

Iran is temporizing, the six nations are threatening. Iran will hold out for an absolutely ridiculous price — the West is no match for them in negotiations — and while Iran may agree to some kind of suspension of their weapons program, it will never actually permanently dismantle it, and will never permit truly adequate inspections. Possibly they will not agree to a deal until they have enough enriched uranium squirreled away for a bomb or three. The strategy will be to delay, delay, and delay some more. Time is on their side.

Meanwhile, the US — either before or after the election — simply can’t afford the cost of a military solution that leaves Iran the ability to attack ships, mine the straits, etc.  This will be the case whether McCain, Obama or Teddy Roosevelt’s ghost is elected.

What about Israel? An Israeli attack on Iran would have exactly the same consequences for the West’s oil supply as an American one. Even if an Israeli government would dare launch an attack against American wishes, it would have to be done without American tactical support which would make it even more difficult.

There is only one case in which I can imagine Israel striking Iran. That would be if Iran had a nuclear weapon and was actually preparing to use it against Israel. I don’t think this is presently the case (or there would have already been an Israeli attack).

I think that Ahmadinejad understands all of the above and prefers to threaten Israel via Hamas and Hezbollah. In my opinion, these are a greater danger for Israel today than the Iranian nuclear program.

Update [1410 PDT]: It just occurred to me that maybe I have the whole thing backwards.

Maybe the present negotiations are less about preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons than about determining how much the West needs to pay Iran — in strategic concessions as well as money — to keep them from cutting our oil jugular?

Technorati Tags: Iran, nuclear weapons, Israel

Daniel Pipes recently discussed the perennial issue of whether Diaspora Jews had the ‘right’ to comment on Israeli policies:

I recently criticized the Israeli government for its exchange with Hizbullah in “Samir Kuntar and the Last Laugh” (The Jerusalem Post, July 21); to this, the eminent counterterrorism expert at Tel Aviv University, Yoram Schweitzer challenged the appropriateness of my offering views on this subject. In “Not That Bad a Deal” (July 24) he explained to Jerusalem Post readers how the “contents and tone” of my analysis are “patronizing and insulting, overlooking as they do the fact that the government and public have the right to decide for themselves …, and to shoulder the resulting price.” He also criticizes me for offering an opinion on Israeli issues from my “secure haven thousands of miles away.”

Pipes goes on to argue ably that he is indeed qualified to make judgments about policies — after all, that is his specialty, just as it is that of Schweitzer.

Anyway, if being an Israeli somehow makes one an expert on Israeli policy, should we also quote a Tel Aviv taxi driver who happens to agree with Pipes (and I suspect that more of them agree with him than with Schweitzer) as an expert?

But there is another aspect to this that Pipes doesn’t touch on. Do you recognize this text?

ERETZ-ISRAEL was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books…

On the 29th November, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish State in Eretz-Israel; the General Assembly required the inhabitants of Eretz-Israel to take such steps as were necessary on their part for the implementation of that resolution. This recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their State is irrevocable.

This right is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.  — Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Israel’s Declaration of Independence clearly states that Israel is the state of the Jewish people, not merely of “the inhabitants of Eretz-Israel”. Those inhabitants were called upon to create the state on behalf of the entire Jewish people, not just themselves. Jewish people around the world put their pennies in pushkes to buy land for the Jewish people in Eretz Israel long before there was a state or even the promise of one.

Many of today’s Diaspora Jews do not remember a time that there wasn’t a State of Israel. Obviously antisemitism did not disappear with the birth of the state, but after centuries of discrimination and pogroms culminating in the Holocaust, it is no longer possible to persecute Jews with impunity.  Do we really think that if Israel disappeared tomorrow that American Jews — who today feel themselves so comfortable in larger society — would be able to rest easy?

Israel is not just another country for Diaspora Jews and what happens in Israel is critical for them. Although they don’t have the rights and responsibilities of Israelis — to vote, to serve in the IDF, etc.  — they are anything but disinterested in what happens there, whether or not they are aware of it.

So, you ask, what about those foolish Diaspora Jews who appear to actually support Israel’s enemies? Well, what about the foolish Israeli Jews who do the same? The operative word here is “foolish”.

Quite possibly, Israel is too important to be left entirely to Israelis.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Diaspora, Daniel Pipes

The PRC (Popular Resistance Committees) is one of those nasty little terrorist organizations that flourish in Gaza:

Hamas and the Popular Resistance Committees have cooperated closely since the beginning of the ongoing violent Palestinian-Israeli confrontation. However, because of the so-called “lull in the fighting” and Hamas’ terrorism-restraining policy, Hamas has augmented the aid it gives to the PRC. The PRC has become a kind of Hamas sub-contractor… Hamas provides the PRC with extensive operational support, including monthly funding, and providing arms, training and operational instructions. — Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs

The PRC has only a few hundred members, but they are busy, especially during the ‘cease-fire’ — or what would better be called the ‘Terrorist Training and Rearmament Period’ that the short-sighted Israeli government allowed to come into being. Here is a recent video (1:22) of PRC members building rockets and training in preparation for the end of the truce.

Although there have been numerous violations, Israel managed to buy some time free of major conflict by agreeing to the truce. But the day of reckoning will come sooner or later, just as it will with the massively rearmed Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the IDF’s job will be significantly more difficult as a result.

If you are wondering how the terrorists manage to get materials for their rockets (and their spiffy uniforms) despite the so-called ’siege’ of Gaza, here is some Israel TV news footage from one day last winter when the IDF uncovered seven of the hundreds of smuggling tunnels between Gaza and Egypt.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Hamas, PRC, Qassam, Gaza

By now, everyone has probably heard about — or seen — this:

(IsraelNN.com) A soldier has been arrested for allegedly firing rubber bullets at a detained Arab rioter during the violent July 7th Naalin demonstrations, following the release of a videotape of the incident.

The tape was released by the left-wing B’Tzelem organization and shows the soldier shooting a rubber bullet at the feet of Ashraf Abu-Rahma while he was being detained by Israeli forces for violence during the riot. The demonstration, protesting the construction of the security fence through the Arab town of Naalin, is one of many in the area that have turned violent over the past months.

The handcuffed detainee was hit in the toe and not seriously injured. An officer nearby either ordered the soldier to shoot, or simply to scare him. The video has been shown over and over on worldwide media.

The Palestinians could not have made up a better issue, although if they had made it up Abu-Rahma would be as dead as Mohammed Dura.

Given what is happening at Na’alin, he probably deserved far worse than a bruised toe (after due process, of course). But what is important here is not whether IDF soldiers should shoot rubber bullets at prisoners (they shouldn’t), not whether the soldier and/or officer should be punished (they should, and the punishment should be increased by ten for sheer stupidity) and not even whether the security fence has cut off Palestinian residents from their lands.

Here’s the protocol, repeated day in and day out:

Palestinian ‘activists’, left-wing Israeli Useful Idiots like b’Tselem, and foreign helpers from such organizations like the ISM (the organization that brought Rachel Corrie to Israel), etc. find a place where the security fence abuts a Palestinian village, and try to tear it down. The media have been alerted and are out in force.

Think about how other countries would handle this! In many of them there would not even be a demonstration, since prospective participants would expect to be beaten to a pulp or met with live fire from the outset (and there wouldn’t be any journalists present). Israel is, as usual, placed in a difficult position because security forces must prevent the fence from being destroyed and protect themselves while using minimal force and permitting access to the press.

When security personnel — sometimes police but often IDF soldiers or reservists with only minimal training and equipment for riot control — arrive, they are attacked with weapons ranging from stones and Molotov cocktails to assault rifles, the demonstrators trying as hard as possible to provoke ‘overreaction’. It’s especially helpful to the cause when a child or foreigner is injured or even killed.

This serves the purpose of focusing the world’s attention on the security fence, on the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians in the territories, and on the human rights aspects of incidents such as Abu-Rahma’s bruised toe.

It buttresses the contention by Palestinians and their supporters that the conflict is primarily about ‘the occupation’ (with a systematic ambiguity about whether they are talking about the occupation of 1967 or that of 1948).

But this is emphatically not what the conflict is about. It is a peripheral effect, not a central cause. Supposing that the world’s ‘peace’ activists really wanted to bring peace  between Jews and Arabs, here are the actual issues that they should start by being concerned about:

1. Since before the founding of the State of Israel, the Arabs and Persians have been trying to prevent any form of Jewish autonomy in the Middle East. Tactics have included conventional warfare, terrorism, and lately asymmetric proxy war.
2. Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria and Iran have recently engaged in a massive buildup of forces aimed at Israel, including chemical, biological, and soon nuclear weapons, and have made no secret of their intentions.
3. Palestinians have been led to believe by the Arab/Persian world that they can and will reverse the outcome of the 1948 war by ‘armed struggle’ — and their friends have supported and financed this struggle, prevented solutions to issues such as Palestinian refugees, and encouraged terrorism.

These are the forces that have driven the conflict in the past and drive it today. These are the forces that will continue to bring wars and death. It’s unfortunately a tribute to Arab public relations skill that they have managed to misdirect the world’s moral opprobrium away from their aggressive, genocidal struggle and turn it against Israel’s attempts at self-defense.

Technorati Tags: Na’alin, IDF, Israel, Palestinians, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas

With the exception of the nine years that I spent in Israel, I have never missed an American election, not even off-year primaries. I have always taken my responsibility to vote very seriously. So this coming Presidential election — which comes at a point of real historical crisis for the US — has seen me struggling mightily in an effort to find out what the candidates actually know about the critical issues and what they would be likely to do if elected.

Barack Obama is particularly impenetrable. Because of the multiple constituencies that he is trying to appeal to, he is unlikely to  be too specific. He’s an excellent speaker and has plenty of backup and preparation — his foreign policy staff numbers 300, according to the NY Times. And of course pre-election promises have historically had little relationship to presidential actions.

But candidates, even smooth ones like Obama, sometimes reveal their degree of competence on an issue despite careful programming.  Obama’s AIPAC statement that “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided” and its immediate retraction in the face of howls from Arabs and the Left was instructive and very disquieting. Obviously this was one issue that Obama had not understood.

Now Obama has made another statement on the Middle East, and unfortunately it is a doozy. Thanks to Martin Kramer for catching this:

I think King, King Abdullah [of Jordan] is as savvy an analyst of the region and player in the region as, as there is, one of the points that he made and I think a lot of people made, is that we’ve got to have an overarching strategy recognizing that all these issues are connected. If we can solve the Israeli-Palestinian process, then that will make it easier for Arab states and the Gulf states to support us when it comes to issues like Iraq and Afghanistan.

It will also weaken Iran, which has been using Hamas and Hezbollah as a way to stir up mischief in the region. If we’ve gotten an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, maybe at the same time peeling Syria out of the Iranian orbit, that makes it easier to isolate Iran so that they have a tougher time developing a nuclear weapon. — Obama on Meet the Press, July 27, 2008. My emphasis.

Keep in mind that he uttered this pernicious nonsense after his visit to the Middle East, after his intensive discussions on Mideast issues! Kramer calls it “The Myth of Linkage“, and it appears in the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group report, as well as in statements by Jimmy Carter and Obama supporter Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Obama’s statement indicates either 1) he spoke without thinking, 2) he has no understanding of the intentions and strategies of the players in the region, or 3) he — like Carter, Brzezinski and Baker, wishes to provide a justification for a blatantly pro-Arab and anti-Israel policy.

I suppose alternative 1) is the best we can hope for.

Technorati Tags: Obama, Middle East, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, linkage, Martin Kramer

As the Bush Administration draws to a close, lots of things are possible.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni came out on Sunday against American efforts to have Israel reach an interim agreement with the Palestinians before the end of US President George W. Bush’s term based on the diplomatic talks that she has led.

Speaking at a Kadima rally in Jerusalem that was closed to the press, Livni expressed concern that the Bush administration would pressure Israel, as president Bill Clinton did at Camp David before he left office in 2001.

“I purposely am not setting deadlines [for the negotiations with the Palestinians], because I think that’s very bad,” Livni said. “I very much don’t want to be in the same situation that Ehud Barak was in at at Camp David of the end of an American administration finishing its term and trying to put pressure on everyone to bridge gaps that cannot be bridged.”  — Jerusalem Post

Indeed.  Gaps about Jerusalem and refugees, just for starters. And security: the West Bank cannot be allowed to become another Gaza, which is certainly what would happen if the IDF were to withdraw from it today.

Those to the right of Livni claim that she is just trying to position herself for the coming elections. She has been involved with ongoing negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, and  has been accused of offering dangerous concessions. So she is trying to disassociate herself from them before a disadvantageous agreement is signed.

I think the truth is that the government of Israel has been pressured by the US to take part in the process and — including Livni — has been doing its best not to make too much ‘progress’. The Palestinians have done their part in obstructing an agreement, by insisting on outrageous conditions, assuming that US pressure will force Israel to give in, basically to commit suicide.

But isn’t the Bush Administration pro-Israel? Didn’t it permit Israel to wage war against Hezbollah for several weeks?

Actually, the Bush Administration is several things, depending on whose influence is ascendant at any time. The so-called ‘neo-cons’ were relatively pro-Israel, but they lost much of their power after the early failures in Iraq, to be replaced by the same oil interests and pro-Arab State Department circles that have been determining US Middle East policy for generations. Their point of view is expressed clearly in the Iraq Study Group report.

This group is close to Saudi Arabia and other conservative Arab oil powers, and is quite worried about the expansion of Iran’s sphere of influence in the region; so it wouldn’t make them unhappy to see Hezbollah — which Caroline Glick called “the Foreign Legion of the Iranian Republican Guard” — weakened or destroyed.

The drive to force an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians is often attributed to a desire on the part of the US President for a Nobel Prize. That may have been Bill Clinton’s idea, but in this case I think a desire to go down in history is a minimal part of the motivation.

I’ve mentioned that in the mid-1970’s, Henry Kissenger made a promise to the Arabs that while the US would always support Israel’s existence, she would work to undo the outcome of the 1967 war. Remember that this was after the huge shock to the US economy brought about by the Arab oil boycott, instituted to punish the US for supporting Israel in 1973.

The official explanation of the effort to obtain a US-Palestinian ‘peace’ agreement is that the dispute is somehow central to all Mideast issues and that solving it is the key to solving them. But this is obvious nonsense. The real reason is that, in an era of skyrocketing oil prices, the Saudis and Gulf Arabs are demanding that Kissinger’s committment — and undoubtedly others that have not been publicized — be met.

As I’ve written before, Israel is prepared to give up land, but only if it will lead to real peace. And prior experiments in this direction have been less than successful.

The US, on the other hand, is simply interested in Israel giving up land.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Israeli-Arab conflict, Bush Administration, Tzippi Livni

News item:

A mysterious explosion in a suburb of Teheran that killed 15 people last Saturday was likely an attack on a Iranian military convoy carrying arms to Hizbullah, the Telegraph reported Friday…

Last Saturday’s incident was the latest in a series of mysterious explosions in the Islamic republic.

In May, Iran blamed British and US agents for an explosion at a mosque in Shiraz that had just been the site of a military exhibition. In 2007, more than a dozen Iranian engineers lost their lives while trying to fit a chemical warhead to a missile in Syria. A few months earlier, a train apparently carrying military supplies to Syria was derailed by an explosion in northern Turkey.

If indeed Israel or the US is behind these events, there is something to keep in mind.

These operations are enormously dangerous for the operatives on the ground.  Especially in Iran, the CIA or Mossad would not be likely to risk them unless the payoff was relatively large.

That means anything that might significantly delay the Iranian nuclear program, or change the balance of power between Israel and Syria or Hezbollah. Chemical/biological weapons for Hezbollah would probably count, or perhaps anti-aircraft systems.

The analogy between war and chess is not accidental.  In the early stages of a game of chess, a player tries to position his forces so that when the violence escalates the enemy’s assets will be bottled up or neutralized. Sometimes a piece is sacrificed in a trade for one of conventionally lower value in order to obtain a positional advantage.

Of course real war is infinitely more complicated than chess, with more than two players and many more pieces, pieces whose capabilities, unlike those of chess pieces, are often unknown until they are actually used. But the concept of position is fundamentally the same.

Today the US and Iran are engaged in the early stages of a game in their protracted match.  This game will involve another Israel-Hezbollah clash — after all, Hezbollah exists only for one reason, to oppose Israel — and the positional sparring has begun.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Iran, Hezbollah, Mossad, CIA, chess

Westerners were shocked at Samir Kuntar’s reception in Lebanon. Arab presidents and prime ministers greeted him, al-Jazeera even threw a birthday party for him. But actually there is nothing surprising about it given the Arab world-view.

What I do find surprising, on the other hand, is the way our leaders keep flunking “Arab Thinking 101″.   

Being a Terrorist Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry
By Barry Rubin

The number-one mistake people make trying to understand the Middle East is refusing to believe folks here think differently from themselves.

Virtually every development in the Middle East should remind us of this reality.

Yet as Captain Ahab hunted the white whale, as prospectors hunt for gold, as…well, you get the idea, so is the hunt for the great Arab moderate. There are Arab moderates, some very smart and brave people. The problem is none are in positions of power and all must shut up or face repression and being defined by fellows as enemies of the people.

The view of the Middle East held in much or most of the Western media, academia, intellectual circles, and large sections of governments is a fantasy having nothing to do with the region.

One should work against dangerous extremists with the Saudi, Egyptian, Jordanian, Moroccan, Kuwaiti, UAE, and Iraqi governments as well as the Lebanese pro-independence forces, though these all have multiple faults. But you must know the limits. And you can’t work with the Iranian, Syrian governments, Hamas and Hizballah or Muslim Brotherhood, even against al-Qaida which is ultimately–despite September 11 — a far smaller threat.

Still, one must face the fact that the last half-century’s most basic lessons have evaporated, partly due to Western policy mistakes — of excessive softness, not toughness — but mostly to the incredible power of the region’s political and intellectual system.

What keeps the region crisis-ridden, extremist, undemocratic, and unstable is not merely a system imposed by evil regimes on an innocent public. Yes, regimes continue their self-serving Arab nationalist, semi-Islamist, anti-Western, anti-Israel, demagogic messages urging the masses to support their local dictator. But this is what the public wants to hear. Rulers would be in far more trouble if they told the truth.

The glorification of the terrorist Sami Qantar is widely seen in the West as showing something is deeply wrong in the Arabic-speaking world. Yet there’s also much denial. The New York Times explained Qantar’s attack had gone terribly wrong when he murdered Israeli civilians. In fact, this was the raid’s purpose.

In another article, the Times intoned: “The United States, Israel and some of their European allies have begun to recognize that their policy of trying to defeat their enemies by isolating and vilifying them has failed.” Yet it was Iran, Syria, Hizballah, and Hamas that dispatches the Qantars on missions against not only Israeli but also Iraqi and Lebanese civilians.

If the extremists should not be vilified should they be praised? If they should not be isolated should they be embraced? Is the correct policy the feting of murderous Syrian dictator Bashar al-Asad in Paris or parleying with the genocidal-oriented Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran? Why did the U.S. government welcome the Syria-Iran-Hizballah victory in knocking down Lebanon’s moderate government? Who’s the villain in Iraq, the United States or the terrorists?

Well, for the Arabic-speaking world, the true heroes are still the terrorists. What horrified me most is not radicals cheering Qantar but that most relative moderates feeling compelled to do so. At the airport to greet him were leaders of Lebanon’s anti-Syrian, anti-Iranian Druze and Christian groups as well as the ambassadors from Egypt, Jordan, the UAE, and Morocco.

To avoid being discredited, relative moderates must affirm that anyone who murders Israeli children is a hero. That’s the measure of how far — despite daily headlines to the contrary — the region is from Arab-Israeli peace.

Yet it’s untrue the prisoner exchange has strengthened or encouraged the radicals. The truth is even worse: No matter what happens they’ll do exactly the same things. If every operation and casualty is a victory, a profit-loss calculus doesn’t apply. They’ll kidnap if there’s a prisoner exchange; they’ll kidnap if there’s no exchange. Triumph is continuing the struggle. Violence, death, and instability is cause for celebration.

Charles Harb, a Lebanese professor, claimed in the Guardian, “The Secret of Hizballah’s Success” is that its ability to get back some prisoners and bodies or force Israel out of south Lebanon “is in stark contrast to what ‘Arab moderates’ could show for in the same decade they spent negotiating with the Israeli state.”

The Saudi-backed, London-based al-Sharq al-Awsat, however, reminded readers that Hizballah’s success cost “$5.2 billion in losses and 1,200 dead” in the 2006 war. In addition, the south Lebanon war took almost 20 years, and Israel would have withdrawn far sooner if it had not been trying to block attacks against its territory.

The claim that Arab moderates have gained little through negotiation is also quite wrong. By negotiating with Israel, Egypt got back the Sinai, reopened the Suez Canal and western Sinai oilfields, and received about $60 billion to date in U.S. aid. The PLO got the Gaza Strip and much of the West Bank, putting more than two million Palestinians under its rule. Thousands of its prisoners were freed (more, of course, were taken because of its continuing violence), many billions of dollars in aid were obtained, and it could have had a Palestinian state if it so desired.

So who came out better, Egypt and the PLO (especially if it had really stuck to negotiating) or Hizballah?

Psychologically, the Arabic-speaking world says Hizballah because the “honor” gained through fighting and not yielding the dream of total victory trumps material benefits. Better martyrdom than compromise, better resistance than prosperity.

As long as this is true, there’s no hope for peace; even those who know better are dragged into shouting militant slogans. This doesn’t fit Western concepts of pragmatism, expectations that militants are just aching to be transformed into moderates, or that settling grievances through concessions defuses hatred.

That’s why policy prescriptions based on those premises are disastrous. While the West concludes that trying to defeat enemies by isolating and vilifying them has failed, the other side concludes its policy of trying to defeat its enemies by violence, vilification, and intransigence is working. That means more of the same: many decades more of the same.

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), with Walter Laqueur (Viking-Penguin); the paperback edition of The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan); A Chronological History of Terrorism, with Judy Colp Rubin, (Sharpe); and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley). To read and subscribe to MERIA and other GLORIA Center publications or to order books, visit http://www.gloriacenter.org.

Technorati Tags: Arabs, Extremism, terrorism

Ha’aretz reports:

A Palestinian bulldozer driver went on a rampage in downtown Jerusalem on Tuesday, wounding at least 24 people, just weeks after a similar attack in the capital left three dead.

The driver was identified as a 22-year-old resident of East Jerusalem who held an Israeli ID card. Police sealed off possible escape routes into the predominantly Arab area of Jerusalem and were searching for two suspects who fled the scene, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.

Another day, another jihad-by-heavy-equipment.

Time to ponder the words of A. D. Gordon:

We [the Jewish people] have become accustomed to every form of life, except to a life of labour–of labour done at our own behest and for its own sake. It will require the greatest effort of will for such a people to become normal again. — People and Labour, 1911

Now it is true that every people have many individuals who shun physical labour and try to live off the work of others… We Jews have developed an attitude of looking down on physical labour…. But labour is the only force which binds man to the soil… it is the basic energy for the creation of national culture. This is what we do not have, but we are not aware of missing it. We are a people without a country, without a national living language, without a national culture. We seem to think that if we have no labour it does not matter - let Ivan, John or Mustafa do the work, while we busy ourselves with producing a culture, with creating national values and with enthroning absolute justice in the world. — Our Tasks Ahead, 1920

The early kibbutzniks took Gordon seriously and learned how to farm, how to build, and how to defend themselves, things that most Diaspora Jews had forgotten. The Zionist idea that Jews would possess the land only when they were the workers as well as the owners of it was called “kibush ha’avoda“, the Conquest of Labor.

Israel is at a turning point today (see Daniel Pipes, “Samir Kuntar and the Last Laugh“). Lots of things have to change to get the country on the right path, but it wouldn’t hurt to start with a Reconquest of Labor.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Conquest of Labor

The J Street organization, which bills itself “the political arm of the pro-Israel, pro-peace movement” has released a new survey of the American Jewish community.

I want to discuss just one particular ‘finding’ from this poll, because it shows how J Street and others use polling deceptively.

Perhaps, more remarkable is [American Jews’] attitude on the basic dichotomy that often captures the debate – that is, when push comes to shove, does military superiority or a peace agreement better provide Israeli security.  On this fundamental question…Jews favor a peace agreement by a 50 to 34 margin…

J Street’s technique is to conflate two questions, one trivial and true and the other significant but false. The polling data naturally supports the trivial one, but the interpretation claims to have proven the significant one.

Here’s the question that gave rise to the numbers above:

1. Israel cannot rely on peace agreements with its enemies to provide security, and in the long run, Israel can only achieve real security by maintaining its military superiority; or,
2. Israel must always maintain its strong military, but in the long run, Israel can only achieve real security through peace agreements that end conflicts and establish internationally recognized borders.

The first thing that you notice is that these questions don’t present clear-cut opposing positions.  Alternative 1 says that “Israel cannot rely on peace agreements” but alternative 2 says that “Israel must always maintain its strong military”. If Israel could rely on peace agreements, then why would it need a strong military?

What the question basically comes down to is this: “Which would be better, a strong military with peace agreements that end the conflict, or military superiority without such agreements?” And the obvious, trivial answer is  “of course it would be better to have an agreed end to the conflict!” And this is what 54 percent of American Jews believe.

But this trivial proposition is not the one that J Street claims to show. Rather, they want us to believe that a majority of American Jews think that a ‘peace agreement’ provides ‘better security’ than military superiority.

And that’s not all. The question posits abstract “peace agreements that end conflicts”. But this kind of agreement, the holy grail of Israeli-Arab peacemaking is nowhere on the table today. The question is so hypothetical as to be meaningless.

There’s more, lots more, including this false dichotomy:

After we presented a mixture of hawkish and pro-peace messages, we re-asked this series of questions and the “firm support” number was unchanged.

Did it occur to the writer that it is quite consistent to be “hawkish” — that is, to believe that “military superiority” is necessary to the continued existence of the state — and to want peace? And that it is reasonable to think that the “peace efforts” that are presently under way are actually more likely to lead to war than peace? So maybe it’s not so clear who is pro-peace and who is not.

And — oh yes. One minor methodological point.

Gerstein | Agne contracted the research company YouGovPolimetrix to administer the survey by email invitation to its web-based panel, which is regularly updated and consists of 1.2 million Americans.

This poll is not a random sample, the sample was allowed to select itself! Self-selection bias is one of the most elementary errors that can be made in opinion research.

To slightly twist a remark by Mark Twain, there are lies, damn lies, and opinion polls.

Technorati Tags: J Street, polls, American Jews, Israel