FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

A Dutch filmmaker, George Sluizer, recently claimed to have seen Ariel Sharon shoot two ‘toddlers’ in Lebanon during the Sabra/Shatila massacres. His story was published in the third-largest newspaper in the Netherlands, the Volksrant. The story is impossible for numerous reasons, not to mention the fact that Sharon would never have done such a thing.

When Hizballah was implicated in the murder of Lebanese politician Rafik Hariri, they immediately denied it and claimed that Israel had killed Hariri. There is no possible way that Israel could have benefited by Hariri’s death, and most objective observers believed (and still believe) that the plan was hatched in Syria.

In August 2009, the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet published a story by one Donald Bostrom which accused the IDF of deliberately killing young Palestinians in order to steal their organs. Despite the fact that it is impossible to harvest organs from dead bodies and despite the fact that Bostrom himself admitted that his story was entirely based on “what Palestinian families told [him],” the story has persisted and is widely believed today.

The UN’s Goldstone report claimed that one of the official objectives of Operation Cast Lead was to kill or injure as many Palestinian noncombatants as possible. Goldstone’s commission came to this conclusion despite Israel’s very visible efforts to protect civilians, and despite the fact that Israel’s interests were clearly harmed by the perception that it wanted to hurt civilians.

In November 2002, Prince Nayef of Saudi Arabia, said “It is impossible that 19 youths carried out the operation of September 11, or that bin Laden or Al Qaeda did that alone. … I think [the Zionists] are behind these events.” This, and many similar statements by other important Arabs and Muslims are quoted here.

Do you see where I’m going? There are many, many more examples, some trivial and some vicious.

It is possible to say absolutely anything about Israel, its leaders, its people and its army. It may be published in ‘legitimate’ media, and it will be believed in the worldwide community of Israel-haters. There are numerous internet sites and blogs that exist only to be repositories for this kind of story.

Most Americans think the slanders above are false. How could anyone believe them? And yet, in some places in the world almost everyone believes them. Here in the US it’s the less theatrical ones that tend to be believed, like the one that says that most of the casualties of Cast Lead were civilians (especially children), that ‘settlers’ run wild in Judea and Samaria uprooting olive trees and burning mosques, that there are starving people in Gaza, that “Israel is not interested in peace,” etc. But these are equally false.

Some of the US and Soviet propaganda of the Cold War era was equally vicious, at least if we ignore the echoes of ancient antisemitic blood libels in the attacks on Israel. What is unprecedented is the way these attacks are aimed in only one direction and emanate from so many sources: the Arab world, Iran, Europe, the UK, the international Left, etc.

It’s like schoolyard bullying, the way it’s focused on a particular target. A misfit nation, a Jewish nation in a place where Jews are despised, Israel is singled out in a historically unique way.  But it’s not simple sadism.  It has a purpose, which is to crush any sympathetic feelings toward Israel, both to stymie her political initiatives in peacetime and to justify actions to prevent her from making any gains or even defending herself in the event of war.

I don’t know what the solution is. It takes zero effort to make up a story like the one about Sharon, but it’s harder to prove that something didn’t happen. Anyway, the people that believe these tales are not persuaded by logic or evidence. Ultimately, the stories make it into the ‘conventional wisdom’, the things everyone accepts without question.

I’m sure the President of the US doesn’t believe that Sharon shoots toddlers or that Zionists perpetrated 9/11. But I wonder what stories he does believe?

Technorati Tags: Israel

Pirkei Avot (Chap. 5, Mishna 8 — h/t Lise):

Ten things were created at twilight on the eve of the first Sabbath:
the mouth of the earth (Numbers 16:32);
the mouth of the well (Numbers 21:16);
the mouth of the ass (Numbers 22:28);
the rainbow;
the manna;
Aaron’s staff;
the Shamir, writing;
the inscription on the tablets of the Ten Commandments;
and the tablets themselves.
Some also include the evil spirits, the grave of Moses, the ram of Abraham; and others add the original tongs, for tongs must be made with tongs.

So what is the Shamir? Rabbi Dovid Rosenfeld explains,

The shamir was a type of worm which produced a highly corrosive substance. The Talmud writes that it was used to hew stones for the Temple’s construction or engrave inscriptions on the stones of the High Priest’s garments (Sotah 48b). It used a force which emanated directly from G-d, and was used in the construction of the Temple — the structure which enabled G-d’s Divine Presence to dwell in the physical world.

Wikipedia provides this additional speculation:

For storage, the Shamir was always wrapped in wool and stored in a container made of lead; any other vessel would burst and disintegrate under the Shamir’s gaze.

The Shamir was either lost or had lost its potency (along with the “dripping of the honeycomb”) by the time of the destruction of the First Temple at the hands of Nebuchadnezzar in 586 B.C.

Noting the conditions under which the Shamir was stored when not in use, controversial theorist Immanuel Velikovsky posited that the Shamir’s true nature was radioactive. Velikovsky hypothesized that the Shamir was a small sample of a naturally occurring radioactive isotope, possibly radium, though he fails to explain how this would cut material.

Worms are in the news today

Iran’s nuclear project is suffering serious technical problems, evidenced by the recent shutdown of hundreds or even thousands of its uranium-enrichment centrifuges. Analysts suggest that the Stuxnet computer worm is the cause. Stuxnet has turned out to be far more sophisticated and targeted than heretofore thought:

Technical analysis shows that Stuxnet contains two different digital warheads that are obviously unrelated. The warheads are considerably different in structure and run on different platforms…

It appears that warhead one and warhead two were deployed in combination as an all-out cyber strike against the Iranian nuclear program. None of the targets, which are detailed below, can be categorized as critical infrastructure; both are dedicated military targets.

Warhead one is running on Siemens S7-315 controllers. It contains the much-quoted DEADFOOT sequence, first discovered by us on Sep 16 2010, where control is temporarily taken away from the legitimate program. Code analysis shows that warhead one manipulates an array of up to 186 high-speed drives attached to up to six Profibus segments. In essence, the manipulation is cycling drive speeds (RPM) between low values and high values. For a gas centrifuge, this will sooner or later result in cracking the rotor, thereby destroying the centrifuge…

Warhead two is running on a Siemens S7-417 controller. It has no obvious relation to warhead one in structure, configuration and timing. The configuration that warhead two is looking for matches that of a steam turbine controller as it is used in power plants, such as the Bushehr nuclear power plant. — Ralph Langner, German software engineer (h/t,Yochanan Visser)

Technorati Tags: Stuxnet, Iranian nuclear program, cyberwar

The mysterious Elder of Ziyon, one of the smartest guys around, has written an excellent article called “The If-Then Fallacy.”

The fallacy consists of inferring that if Israel makes some kind of concession, then the Arabs — and the interested bystanders such as the EU, UN, media, US administration, etc. — will respond positively. Mr. Ziyon gives several examples in which this did not occur, the withdrawal from Gaza being a prominent one.

It was suggested that if Israel would withdraw, then not only would Gaza no longer be Israel’s problem, but Israel would be rewarded diplomatically for taking risks for peace. Israel did withdraw, at great social cost — a price the former residents of the settlements there are still paying. The result was that Hamas stepped up its rocket attacks, bringing about a war for which Israel was blamed (and unfairly vilified). And the world still believes that the Gaza strip is Israel’s responsibility!

The unsound inference made in such if-then propositions depends on a hidden premise: that the Arabs have some positive objective in their relations with Israel like peace, economic development, a Palestinian state, etc. If that were the case, then perhaps Israeli concessions would lead to an improvement in relations.

But this premise is false. Neither the leadership of the Palestinian Arabs — Hamas or Fatah — nor the majority of the ‘Palestinians in the street’ has these things as a primary goal. This is obvious with Hamas, who enjoy publicly saying it, but it is not hidden very deeply by the leaders of Fatah either. Their overriding policy objective is the elimination of Israel and the establishment of Arab control over all the territory presently occupied by it.

This was the objective in 1948, and it was Arafat’s objective. Nothing has changed.

This is why all of the peace processing and all of the initiatives by Israel and the West have been fruitless. This is why the Obama Administration’s plan to create a Palestinian state by pressuring Israel will either fail or will be disastrous for Israel. It is irrational to try to negotiate borders while one party remains committed to the destruction of the other party.

And this is the reason that it is essential that a prospective peace partner be prepared to say, in Arabic as well as English, that Israel is the state of the Jewish people.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Arabs, logic, peace process

I have something to tell you: I am pro-settler.

OK, you are not surprised. But considering the amount of vitriol poured out every day on settlers and settlements, I thought I needed to explicitly say this.

For example, here is how Naomi Paiss of the putatively pro-Israel New Israel Fund (about which I wrote yesterday) justifies boycotting ‘settlement’ products and artistic activities beyond the Green Line:

The settlements are not in Israel. They represent not “just” a blot on Israel as a just and decent nation, and a terrible danger to its survival, but also the waste of billions of shekels for security, expensive bypass roads, government-subsidized construction and mortgages, and more. Those are shekels that could be used to build a more prosperous and socially just Israel. Refusing products and services made in the settlements, and opposing government expenditures there, is well within the rights of every organization and individual who intends to influence the Israeli government to finally abandon the quixotic and immoral settlement enterprise.

I think even members of the pro-Zionist Left (I think NIF has crossed the line, although they would deny it) more or less share this viewpoint. Here’s a snippet from Rabbi Eric Yoffie of the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ). Keep in mind that Rabbi Yoffie is much closer to the center than Paiss and even some other members of the URJ leadership:

Settlement leaders are idealistic, often brave, and deeply committed to their goals. But what they are fighting for is not the State of Israel, whose urgent political and diplomatic needs they ignore. It is not the citizens of Israel, whose lives and future are endangered by the path that the settlers advocate. And it is not Zionism, which calls for democratic principles that they reject.  What they are fighting for is settlements – which have become their god.

There are lots of threads here. One is that settlements are ‘not Israel’. Another is that they are bad for Israel. Yet another is that they — and by implication, those who live in them — are ‘immoral’.

The source for the ‘not Israel’ theme is the obligatory mantra chanted in every BBC report or NY Times article that mentions settlements, that they are “illegal under international law.” I am not going to present a detailed argument in opposition; it has been done competently with appropriate historical background by Nicholas Rostow here. Rostow gives both sides of the argument, and it’s clear which would prevail before an unbiased judge. Suffice to say that the terms of the mandate gave Jews a right to settle in these areas which has not been revoked; that the armistice lines established in 1949 have never been recognized as permanent borders; and that the fourth Geneva Convention — neither in language nor in intent — does not apply.

So they are legal. Are they ‘bad for Israel’? Yoffie seems to think they are because they are an obstacle to peace. This too, is a tired argument which is easily refuted. Has not Israel dismantled settlements and withdrawn from territory in the name of peace? Has not Israel proposed, at least twice in the last ten years, to withdraw from almost all of Judea and Samaria in return for peace, and have not the Arabs refused these offers, primarily because they did not include a return of ‘refugees’ to  pre-1967 Israel?

A recent poll of Palestinian Arabs has shown that 60% of them view a ‘two-state solution’ as a stepping stone to the replacement of Israel with an Arab state, 58% believe that “now is a time for armed struggle”, only 23% believe that Israel has a permanent right to exist, and 66% believe that “over time Palestinians must work to get back all the land for a Palestinian state.” Perhaps we are looking for obstacles to peace in the wrong place?

Although Paiss and Yoffie call settlements ‘dangerous’, the evacuation thereof without a true peace partner would be much more dangerous to security, as the withdrawal from Gaza illustrated.

It may be that what most of those who say that settlements are dangerous mean is that permanent possession of the territories would either make Israel ultimately become an Arab state or lose its democratic character.  But there are lots of possible solutions to this problem, whereas there’s no solution besides war to a terror state next door to the most populous part of Israel.

So finally, they are left with the ‘immorality’. That might mean that they think it’s ‘Palestinian land’ that the settlers have ‘stolen’. Which is mostly nonsense, since almost all settlements are built on state or purchased land, the armistice lines aren’t borders, etc. Naturally, the Arabs claim that everything is theirs and it was all stolen, but that goes for Tel Aviv, too.

Another reason settlers might be ‘immoral’ is that they “deny the Palestinian Arabs dignity and self-determination.” But they don’t — they simply want to live in peace in the historic Jewish homeland, alongside the Arabs, who have been trying to murder them for at least a hundred years, whose leaders refused every offer of partition or compromise. In fact the Arab struggle against Jewish self-determination is the initial cause of the conflict and what sustains it.

Historically, whenever the Arabs had the upper hand, they massacred Jews (as in Hebron in 1929 or Gush Etzion in 1948) or drove them out (the Old City in 1948). The Jordanians made stables out of synagogues and latrines out of Jewish gravestones. Who is trying to deny what to whom?

According to Yoffie, settlers can’t be Zionists because they reject democracy. Should they embrace ‘democracy’ in the form of giving up their own rights, accepting the rule of the Arabs whose heartfelt desire is to kill them or kick them out of the land of Israel? That wouldn’t be very Zionistic, would it?

The anti-settler people would probably say that I’m a racist, just like the settlers. But who denies Jews the right to live in the area “they want for their future state?”  Who has decreed a death penalty for those who sell land to Jews? Who does drive-by shootings on the roads (hence the ‘bypass roads Paiss criticizes), and who stones Jewish vehicles and tries to lynch their occupants? Who broadcasts anti-Semitic propaganda in their official media?

Who are the racists here?

Technorati Tags: Israel, settlements, settlers

A two-faced policy on BDS

This January, an American charity, the New Israel Fund (NIF), was accused of funding most of the Israeli NGO’s that provided the documentation for the Goldstone Report.  And the NIF supported organizations dedicated to the delegitimization of Israel for long before that.

As a result of pressure from the organization “NGO Monitor”, the NIF agreed to change its funding guidelines, to now include the following restrictions (my emphasis):

Organizations that engage in the following activities will not be eligible for NIF grants or support:

1. Participate in partisan political activity
2. Promote anti-democratic values
3. Support the 1967 occupation and subsequent settlement activity
4. Violate the human rights of any group or individual, advocate human rights selectively for
   one group over another and/or reject the principle of the universality of human rights
5. Condone or promote violence or use violent tactics
6. Employ racist or derogatory language or designations about any group based on their
   religion, race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation.
7. Works to deny the right of the Jewish people to sovereign self-determination within Israel, or to deny the rights of Palestinian or other non-Jewish citizens to full equality within a democratic Israel.
8. Engage in activities at odds with the positions, principles, or vision of the New Israel Fund.

But some of the NGOs supported by NIF clearly do violate no. 7 above. And we were led to believe that NIF would stop funding them. NGO Monitor tells us that

On September 16, 2010, in a JTA report published shortly before Yom Kippur, the guidelines were presented as a fundamental change in NIF’s funding policies. NIF Director Daniel Sokatch told the news agency that NIF “would prohibit proposals for a binational constitution of the kind that two NIF grantees submitted several years ago.” (The grantees in question, Adalah and Mossawa, each proposed constitutions in 2007 calling for Israel to abandon its definition as a Jewish state. NIF grantee Mada al-Carmel’s “Haifa Declaration” is similar.)

Almost immediately thereafter, NIF officials began to backtrack:

…in a later JTA story, Sokatch “clarif[ied]” that, in the cases of Adalah or Mada al-Carmel, a text denying Israel’s Jewish character “would have to be central to an organization’s activities in order to result in a suspension of funding, and that NIF would be the one to make the determination over whether or not that threshold had been reached.” [my emphasis]

So, as long as a group can claim that denying Israel’s Jewish character is merely incidental to their activity, no problem. Back right up to the money bin and fill up. Naturally, all of the organizations named above claim that their central activity is working for Arab rights, and only incidentally denying those of Jews.

More recently, the question of NIF support for groups promoting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement [BDS] has been raised. Back in April, I quoted the following from the NIF website:

Although we will continue to communicate publicly and privately to our allies and grantees that NIF does not support BDS as a strategy or tactic, we will not reduce or eliminate our funding for grantees that differ with us on a tactical matter. NIF will not fund BDS activities nor support organizations for which BDS is a substantial element of their activities, but will support organizations that conform to our grant requirements if their support for BDS is incidental or subsidiary to their significant programs.

It’s still there, and Jeffrey Goldberg understands it this way:

The way I read this, the NIF does not support the attempt by anti-Israel activists to turn the world’s only Jewish country into a pariah state, and Jews into a target — once again — of a broad-based economic boycott. Except when it does, a little.

Indeed.

Technorati Tags:   New Israel Fund, NIF, BDS, Israel