FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

News item:

Two Israelis were killed when at least four Palestinian terrorists infiltrated the Nahal Oz fuel terminal from the Gaza Strip on Wednesday.

The two were employed at the terminal, which supplies the Gaza Strip with most of its fuel.

IDF troops and emergency medical teams, who arrived on the scene, came under heavy gun and mortar fire.

Mortar shells were still being fired at Israeli communities in the area several hours after the attack. — Jerusalem Post

Tell me again, why is Israel required to supply fuel and electricity to Hamastan?

And explain exactly how Israel’s border security represents a violation of human rights.

Speaking of human rights, the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) has complained that Israel does not allow Gaza residents access to health care in Israel, even to the point of causing death. Their complaint is based on information from Palestinian sources, and as usual for such information, it is almost entirely false.

However, for once Israeli authorities have investigated a widely-reported slander and have taken pains to show that it is untrue.

Some of the points made in the Israeli reply to WHO are these:

• In 2007, 7,226 exit permits were issued for patients and another 7,922 for their family member escorts, a 50% increase over 2006. This trend is continuing in 2008: in the first quarter, 2,317 exits were arranged for patients and a similar number for the relatives accompanying them. The lives of hundreds of people have been saved by sending them for urgent treatment in Israeli hospitals.
• In recent months, the transport of ten trucks full of medical equipment and supplies for the WHO was coordinated. All their requests were approved. If there is any shortage of equipment or medicine, it is due to Hamas’s redirecting vast sums of money for terror purposes rather than using them to improve conditions in the Gaza hospitals.

The reply points out that on several occasions terrorists attempted to cross into Israel, ostensibly to receive medical treatment:

…in May 2007 two women arrived at the Erez crossing under the pretext of going for medical examinations at the Ramallah hospital, but, as it transpired, their true intention was to commit suicide attacks in Netanya and Tel Aviv.

It also responds to specific cases cited by WHO. In most of them either the person was admitted to Israel, did not show up, or was not listed as having had a request made on their behalf.

Now, nobody is saying that it is as easy for a Gaza resident to get to a hospital in Israel as for someone who lives in Tel Aviv, or for that matter is an Arab from the West Bank. One of the major problems cited is the “incessant barrage of mortar fire directed at the [Erez] crossing”, which often forces its closure.

Of course, it should not surprise anyone when a terrorist group that specializes in suicide bombings uses the suffering of its own people as yet another political tool.

Here again is a favored Hamas tactic: create a “crisis”, real or invented — like the great electrical blackout which didn’t happen — and blame Israel. Then the UN, NGOs, and armies of pro-Hamas media zombies repeat it over and over until it becomes part of the conventional litany of crimes of which ‘everyone knows’ Israel is guilty.

Hamas is capable of fighting a war, developing better and better rockets, building fortifications and digging tunnels, and receives large amounts of financial aid for these purposes from Iran and various worldwide Islamic ‘charities’. Why don’t they use some of their resources to provide medical care to their people?

Technorati Tags: Israel, Hamas, terrorism

The Dry Bones Blog alternates new cartoons with old ones. Often one gets the feeling that nothing changes over the years except the faces.

Anyway, today’s cartoon is from 1994:

But for once I find myself disagreeing with Mr. Dry Bones. No, not in the sense that no leadership could be less competent than Israel’s — to disprove that, just look at the US.

What I do think is that — given its goals — the Palestinian leadership is quite competent.

What are these goals? One of them is to build up Palestinian military strength. Both Fatah and Hamas are wildly successful in this area, Fatah with American support and Hamas with help from Iran.

Another goal is to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state and economy in anything less than all of ‘Palestine’, for if this were to occur, there might be something to distract young Palestinian men from the struggle to destroy Israel.

To this end, Fatah refuses to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and insists of a right of return for descendants of Arab refugees. Hamas, always more direct, perpetrates suicide bombings and mortar attacks against border crossings just in case Gaza residents get any ideas about economic activity other than rocket science.

A third goal is to keep the pot of hatred and racism boiling so that any attempts at compromise which might lead to a peaceful two-state solution can’t get off the ground, and so that there will be a plentiful supply of martyrs, especially young ones. Both Fatah and Hamas keep up a campaign of vicious incitement against Jews and Israel, despite the fact that Fatah is supposedly a ‘partner’. Hamas’ indoctrination of children is particularly vile.

Just like the way the Arab nations have kept the Palestinian refugees miserable for 60 years, the Palestinian leadership does its best to keep its people miserable (except for their relatives), angry and full of hate.

This supports their true goal, the goal that all Palestinian leaders since Haj Amin al-Husseini have worked toward: the elimination of the Jewish presence in the Middle East.

Incompetent? Not at all.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Palestinians, Israeli-Arab conflict

Politicians are not the only ones who determine whether there will be war or peace. Media have a lot to do with it, because they can form opinion in such a way as to provide the support for the policies of governments in democracies, or the screaming mobs on the streets of dictatorships. Hearst’s New York Journal is often accused of starting the Spanish-American war of 1897; while this may be an exaggeration, it certainly made it possible.

In the case of the Israeli-Arab conflict, major organs of the media — the BBC is probably the most important of these, but we can also include CNN, Reuters, and others — have taken sides in such a way that can only prevent peace and bring war.

Note that I did not say that the problem is that they favor the Palestinian cause. Of course they do, but I would prefer to put it this way: they distort the basis of the conflict to promote policies that in fact lead directly to war, not peace.

If your understanding of the conflict was based solely on what is presented in the above media, here is what you would believe:

• Israel is an aggressor which undertakes military action to take Palestinian land and (for some unspecified reason) to make them suffer;

• Palestinian terrorism (they wouldn’t use this word) is a reaction to an illegal occupation, and therefore understandable if not justified;

• The Palestinians just want their human rights and to live in peace, but Israel refuses to end its punitive occupation.

All of the above are false. And there are important elements of the conflict that are left out. For example, here are some things that you would not learn from the BBC, CNN, or Reuters:

• The Palestinian quarrel with Israel is not about a Palestinian state alongside Israel, but about whether there should be a Jewish state at all;

• Palestinian Arab terrorism against Jews has been the going on since before the founding of the state, and continues — indeed gets worse — when Israel withdraws from occupied territory;

• Most Israelis would end the occupation and give up the right to live in traditional Jewish sites such as Hebron if they thought it would not bring massive terrorist attacks from the West Bank;

• Terrorism from Hamas and Hezbollah, which are financed and armed by Iran, combines with threats from Israel’s enemies among the Arab nations to constitute an existential threat to Israel.

So, for example, the average BBC consumer will probably support the policy of forcing Israel to withdraw from the West Bank without insisting that terrorist groups be disarmed. As a result, the West Bank would shortly be under the control of Hamas, making probable a three-front rocket assault from Hezbollah in Lebanon as well as Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza. Israel would be in mortal danger, and the likelihood of the conflict expanding into a regional war involving at least Syria and possibly Iran would be great.

On the other hand, a correct reading of the situation would tend to support polices to disarm terrorists, both in the territories and in Lebanon. It would support Israel’s maintaining a posture of deterrence against its external enemies. It would make clear to both the Palestinians and the Arab nations that Israel cannot be destroyed by violence, and that a peaceful end to the conflict which leaves Israel standing is the only way to end it.

The decision for peace or war, interestingly, is less up to Israel than to the other players, in the Mideast and elsewhere. Israel, although you wouldn’t know this from the media, really wants to be left in peace and has shown over and over that she is prepared to make sacrifices to this end. But as long as her enemies think that they can actually succeed — and today they are encouraged in this by international policy — they will continue to try.

And the BBC, CNN, Reuters and numerous others continue to help them.

Technorati Tags: media, Israel, Israeli-Arab conflict, BBC, CNN, Reuters, terrorism

I’ve written over and over about the way the US forces Israel to make concrete concessions to the Palestinian Authority (PA) which damage security, and in return get…nothing. Or get more terrorism. I’m not the only one that thinks this:

Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin has warned that continuing to ease restrictions on the Palestinians while the separation fence remains [incomplete] puts Israel at risk. According to Diskin, the completion of the eastern barrier must be considered before making any decisions on additional gestures.

Diskin made the remarks several days after Defense Minister Ehud Barak presented US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice with a 35-page booklet containing gestures to the Palestinians. — YNet

“Gestures” include the removal of roadblocks, the transfer of armored cars (bought with US money) to the PA, reduced restrictions on Palestinian ‘policemen’ (often moonlighting as terrorists), an increase in the number of Palestinians allowed to work in Israel, etc. The gestures are supposed to smooth the way to a peace deal with the PA.

How many times do we need to note that

1. The Fatah-dominated PA cannot make an agreement that would be acceptable to Israel, because they cannot agree to give up the right of return for refugees or recognize Israel as a Jewish state;
2. Even if they could, they could not deliver an end to terrorism because they do not even control their own terrorists of the al-Aqsa brigades, never mind Hamas;
3. Arming and training their ’security forces’ to ‘fight terrorism’ is absurd because these forces have no interest in fighting anybody but Israel;
4. Arming them is stupid because it’s likely the arms will end up in the hands of Hamas as they did in Gaza;
5. The only support that Fatah has from Palestinians today is from the ones that they pay, with American money, to support them.

The ‘gestures’ that are demanded by the US to support the pointless negotiations — which all sides know will go nowhere — weaken Israeli defenses against the terrorism that the PA is incapable of stopping. And there have already been terrorist penetrations in areas that roadblocks have been removed.

So why does the US demand that Israel remove roadblocks instead of demanding that the PA actually do something to fight terrorism (like disarming their own al-Aksa Brigades gunmen)?

One reason is that the US actually can force Israel to do something. The PA, since it has no influence and no real power, and because its security forces are ridden with terrorists, cannot be forced to do anything except make promises.

Another reason is that the Saudi-influenced ‘realist’ faction in the US government which is now dictating Middle east policy thinks that it is far more important to show that it is fulfilling Kissinger’s 1975 promise to the Arabs that Israel will go back to the pre-1967 borders than it is in reducing Palestinian terrorism.

Another way to put this is to say that the goal of US policy toward Israel and the Palestinians is not to end the conflict and bring peace — and we can see that the policy does not lead in this direction — but simply to get Israel out of the territories.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Palestinian Authority

Israeli Minister of Defense Ehud Barak:

“The northern front is especially sensitive, but Israel has no interest in deterioration,” Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Saturday night. “The other side knows this and according to our assessments they too have no interest in deterioration.” — Jerusalem Post

So who is “the other side” ?

If he means Syria, he’s probably correct. They have the most to lose. But what is Iran’s interest? My thinking about Hezbollah is that it is a creature of Iran and doesn’t have independent volition. In that case, Nasrallah’s recent threats are Iranian threats.

Therefore, in order to avoid war, Israel needs to have a deterrent that is credible against Iran.

In simple terms, the Iranian leadership must believe that an attack on Israel by Iranian proxies will result in a counterstrike against Iran that will do unacceptable damage.

It doesn’t help to strike the proxies alone. For example, if Hezbollah attacks Israel, and Israel thinks that Syria will support Hezbollah by missile strikes, Israel will bomb missile installations in Syria to prevent their use. So Syria will think carefully about the consequences of such a path, and will only take it if the probability of success is very high.

But what is the cost to Iran of unleashing the Hezbollah proxy that she has nurtured? In 2006, it was only money.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Syria, Hezbollah, Iran

The stupid bias of the media is one of the reasons that the world does not understand the Israeli-Arab conflict, and this lack of understanding encourages Arab and Iranian plans to wipe out Israel. When the inevitable war ensues, the media will bear much of the blame.

What’s More Important: Blue Jeans or Being Blown Up?
By Barry Rubin

It’s hard to satirize a lot of media coverage about Israel and the Arab-Israeli or Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. The truly dreadful stuff is in the details, the small stories and big assumptions on which they are based, rather than in any “scoops” or blockbuster articles.

There are basically two types of such articles. In one, the author’s basic and extreme political bias comes out clearly. The writer is consciously determined to slam Israel. This happens more often in large elements of the European press and in Reuters.

A Reuters reporter called me and told me that they were writing a story on how Israel destroyed the Palestinian economy. I suggested that perhaps they should do an article about the problems of the Palestinian economy rather than assume the answer. When the story came out, my short quote was represented fairly, but the rest of the article was totally biased, trying to prove a thesis, and even misquoted a World Bank report. In the article, the report blamed Israel for the problems but the actual text–available online–said the opposite.

Another personal experience. Australian Broadcasting Company, that country’s main and official television network interviewed me on the main events of the Middle East in 2007. I said that the most important single thing was Hamas’s takeover of the Gaza Strip, an action which set back the chances for peace by many years, even decades.

When the story was broadcast it had been edited so that I appeared to be saying that Israel policy had set back the chances for peace by many years, even decades.

I filed an official complaint and in the end they came down on my side, sort of. The decision was that the piece had been carelessly edited or something like that. In the online correction, however, they didn’t even say that but merely that I had asked that an explanation be added to make clear my point was not about Israeli policy.

Of course, the reporter had done it on purpose.

(more…)

One of the favorite themes of Neo-Nazis is that today’s Ashkenazi Jews aren’t Jews, that is, descendants of the inhabitants of ancient Judea, but rather descended from the Khazars, Caucasian nomads that converted to Judaism around the 7th century (some of them converted to Christianity and Islam too, but never mind).

Now an Israeli scholar, Shlomo Zand (or Sand) claims that Sephardic Jews aren’t Jews either, but descended from various North African tribes.

Zand is not a neo-Nazi, and he even admits that his ‘findings’ don’t reflect on the legitimacy of the State of Israel. However, since he believes that “the character of the State of Israel undermines it in a much more serious way”, and also that “the chances that the Palestinians are descendants of the ancient Judaic people are much greater than the chances that you or I are its descendants”, one can see that he is happy to provide ammunition to those who want an ideological foundation for their hoped-for destruction of Israel.

Zand, a historian who has heretofore written about 20th-century France, based his work on modern “studies that present unorthodox views of the origins of the Jews” (I can imagine). For a taste of the absurdity of his argument, here’s how the Jewish People was ‘invented’:

At a certain stage in the 19th century, intellectuals of Jewish origin in Germany, influenced by the folk character of German nationalism, took upon themselves the task of inventing a people “retrospectively,” out of a thirst to create a modern Jewish people. From historian Heinrich Graetz on, Jewish historians began to draw the history of Judaism as the history of a nation that had been a kingdom, became a wandering people and ultimately turned around and went back to its birthplace.

Of course the literature of the Jewish People goes back to long before this period. So Zand is apparently saying that at some point an influx of foreign DNA made the Jewish People not the the Jewish People, and therefore — knowing that they had been adulterated and therefore lost their birthright — they conspired to pretend that they were.

Even if we grant his genealogical point (which I don’t), certainly the ‘peoplehood’ of the Jews rests in culture and spirit and not physical DNA!

It’s argued that there is genetic evidence that links both Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews to the Middle East. I’m not qualified to evaluate it, of course, but most importantly, even if many Jews were descended from converts, who cares?

I could similarly argue that many Palestinian Arabs are descended from Egyptians that came with Muhammad Ali in the early part of the 19th Century, or Syrians who migrated to Palestine when the end of Ottoman rule and Jewish development improved the regional economy. I could talk about how nobody ever heard of the ‘Palestinian people’ until 1967. But this, too, would be irrelevant.

What is relevant is that the legitimacy of the Jewish state of Israel is not dependent on the presence of converts in the genealogy of the Jews. It is not dependent on Jewish provenance in biblical times, just as it is not justified by the Holocaust.

The Early Zionists purchased land legally, often paying exorbitant prices for poor land which they then improved by draining swamps and so forth. The yishuv (pre-state Jewish settlement) built all the institutions that would become the state.

The Jewish state received international sanction in 1947 and was kept through a series of defensive wars, which in fact are still ongoing. Israel is no less ‘legitimate’ than Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia which were created at about the same time — and possibly more so, due to the UN Partition Resolution, and the fact that Israel is a democracy.

Although religious Jews (and many Christians) believe that the Jews were given the Land as described in the Torah, there is a solid secular foundation for the state as well.

Zand’s work appears to be another manifestation of mental disorder in the extreme academic Left in Israel, similar to the completely insane thesis that the IDF’s failure to rape Arab women is a racist phenomenon.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Academia, antisemitism, Shlomo Zand, Shlomo Sand

For those Israelis who think that they live in Berkeley and those Americans who think that the primary problem in the region is Palestinian rights, a news item:

The defense establishment announced earlier in the day that the atomic, biological, and chemical protection kits recently collected from the public will be upgraded and redistributed.

The decision to redistribute the kits was made by the Defense Ministry, in view of the recent ground-to-ground missile threats made evident against Israel and in an attempt to boost home front readiness against a possible chemical attack emanating from Iran or Syria. — YNet

Syria has a large number of missiles which can reach any part of Israel and which have chemical and possibly biological warheads. In the past few days there have been reports that Syria has called up reserves and concentrated troops near the borders with Lebanon and Israel.

With all the noise that is made about the pointless negotiations with Fatah, one tends to forget that Israel faces enemies armed to the teeth in Syria and southern Lebanon, a vicious Hamas in Gaza, and a soon-to-be nuclear Iran pulling the strings and aiming her own missiles.

This situation is highly unstable, and we are not moving in a direction of reducing instability — indeed, since the fundamental issue is that Israel’s enemies do not accept her existence, nothing other than deterrence based on a perception of superior military strength (or great power intervention) can prevent war.

Unfortunately, as Barry Rubin pointed out in the previous post, the Arabs have consistently underestimated Israel and continue to do so.

So it is probably not a question of ‘if’, but rather ‘when’.

Technorati Tags: Israeli-Arab conflict, Israel, Syria

As always, the reason Western plans don’t work out is that we imagine that everybody in the world thinks exactly as we do. They don’t, especially the Palestinians. Are you reading, Secretary Rice?

Palestinian Politics: Onward and Downward
By Barry Rubin
March 23, 2008

A recent Washington Post column, entitled, “Let’s Help the Good Guys in the West Bank,” provided what it thought of as good news: “Fortunately, there is a smart and honest leader of these forces: Salam Fayyad, an apolitical economist (with a doctorate from the University of Texas) who is prime minister of the Palestinian Authority.”

The tip-off is the word “apolitical” which, in this case, means: completely lacking any political base or armed support and thus totally ineffectual.

Unfortunately, Fayyad is not Palestinian politics’ future. Those who really control Fatah, shape Palestinian public opinion, and carry guns aren’t impressed by Fayyad’s diploma.

(more…)

From Reuters:

Jewish groups complained last year when the Pope issued a decree allowing wider use of the old-style Latin Mass and a missal, or prayer book, that was phased out after the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, which met from 1962 to 1965.

They protested against the re-introduction of the old prayer for conversion of the Jews and asked the Pope to change it.

The Vatican last month revised the contested Latin prayer used by a traditionalist minority on Good Friday, the day marking Jesus Christ’s crucifixion, removing a reference to Jewish “blindness” over Christ and deleting a phrase asking God to “remove the veil from their hearts”.

Jews criticized the new version because it still says they should recognize Jesus Christ as the savior of all men. It asks that “all Israel may be saved” and Jews say it keeps an underlying call to conversion that they had wanted removed.

Vatican II changed the ancient Latin version of this prayer, removing the phrase ‘perfidious Jews’. But then it created a new collection of prayers in various local languages — the vernacular liturgy — which was supposed to replace the Latin one. The prayer which appears in the vernacular liturgy does not mention conversion, but the Latin version still did, although ‘perfidious’ was gone.

The Latin ritual did not totally disappear, however. Some conservative Catholics continued to use it, but were required to obtain permission from their bishop.

The present Pope, as mentioned in the article, is encouraging those Catholics who want to use the Latin ritual to do so, and has removed the requirement for approval. But some Jews and liberal Catholics wish that he had simply translated the vernacular prayer back into Latin. Instead, he chose to create a new prayer that took a middle course — but still mentioned conversion.

We can understand the concern, given the long history of Christian antisemitism based to a certain extent on the stiff-necked Jews’ refusal to see the light. And we can also understand the Pope — and many other Christians — for whom a primary part of their belief system is that it is universal.

I think, though, that the concern is misplaced in view of the nature of antisemitism today. Consider this:

Britain has become the epicenter for anti-Semitic trends in Europe as traditional, age-old anti-Semitism in a country whose literature and cultural tradition were “drenched” in anti-Semitism has developed into a contemporary mix of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, an Israeli historian said Monday.

The problem of anti-Semitism in Britain is exacerbated by a growing and increasingly radical Muslim population, the weak approach taken by a timid British Jewish leadership, and the detachment of the British from their Christian roots, said Hebrew University historian Prof. Robert S. Wistrich in a lecture on British anti-Semitism at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. — Jerusalem Post [my emphasis]

Wistrich goes on to argue that the roots of antisemitism in Britain are ancient, and of course they are entangled with Christianity. But it seems to me that today the major sources of antisemitism throughout the world are not Christian, but rather

• Traditional right-wing Jew hatred (neo-Nazis, etc.)

• The extreme anti-Zionism of the Left

• Muslim antisemitism and extreme anti-Zionism

Indeed, the desire to see Jews converted to Christianity is dear to Evangelical Protestants here in the US, a group which is generally pro-Zionist and which does not express views common to contemporary antisemites, such as “the Jews are responsible for 9/11 (or the Iraq war, etc.)”, or “the Jewish lobby controls the US government”. Recent violent acts against Jews or Jewish property in the US have mostly been perpetrated by neo-Nazi or racist groups, and radical Muslims.

I am personally less bothered by Christian prayers for my conversion than, for example, Hamas’ interpretation of the Quran which calls for Muslims to kill Jews.

It should be noted that critics of the Pope are not required to go into hiding because of death threats from Catholic fundamentalists.

Possibly those of us who are particularly worried about Christian antisemitism today are like the generals who always prepare to fight the last war instead of the next one?

Technorati Tags: antisemitism, anti-Semitism, Pope Benedict, Catholic liturgy