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PM Binyamin Netanyahu speaks in the Knesset this week

A war between Israel and Iran is not something that may or may not occur in the future. It is in progress now.

PM Netanyahu said as much in a speech he made yesterday to a special session of the Knesset:

Understand, the dominant factor that motivates these events in Gaza is not the Palestinian issue.  The dominant factor that motivates these events in Gaza is Iran.

Gaza equals Iran.

Where do the missiles come from?  From Iran.
Where does the money come from?  From Iran.
Who trains the terrorists?  Iran.
Who builds the infrastructure?  Iran.
I have said this many times: who gives the orders?  Iran.

Gaza is a forward operating base for Iran.

I heard some people say that a third- or fourth-rate terrorist organization is acting against a million citizens in the State of Israel.  That is not true.  Iran is operating against us.

I hope that if not all, at least most members here and the public understand that the terrorist organizations in Gaza – Hamas and Jihad, as well as Hezbollah in Lebanon – are taking shelter under an Iranian umbrella.

Gaza is just one front in the ongoing war. On March 30, there will be a “Global March to Jerusalem” (GMJ):

GMJ, scheduled for March 30, 2012, is an anti-Israel publicity stunt that aims to have a million people marching on Israel’s borders from all the surrounding countries – Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt – with the aim of reaching Jerusalem. Concurrently, demonstrations are planned in the Palestinian-administrated [sic] territories and against Israel’s diplomatic missions in major cities throughout the world.

Every imaginable anti-Israel individual and organization — Muslim, leftist, or just antisemitic — from the ANSWER coalition to the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, is supporting or taking part in this project, which could well mark the beginning of yet another Palestinian Intifada. Naturally, one of the major supporters is the Iranian regime.

On yet another front, From May 2011 through February, 2012, Iran and its Hizballah proxy have attempted to carry out terrorist strikes against Israeli targets in various parts of the world, the most recent being the February 13th bombing of the car in which the wife of an Israeli representative in India was riding.

Of course Israel has not been idle, almost certainly being behind some or all of the recent violent setbacks suffered by the Iranian nuclear program. In yesterday’s speech, the PM made it clear that Israel will not permit Iran’s umbrella for terrorism to become nuclear:

Now imagine what will happen if that umbrella becomes nuclear.  Imagine that behind these terrorist organizations stands a country that calls for our destruction and it is armed with nuclear weapons.

Are you ready for this?  I am not ready for this!  And any responsible leader understands that we cannot let this happen – because of nuclear terror and the nuclear threat, but also because of the strengthening of conventional terror and the firing of missiles at us.

In an interview on “60 minutes” this week, former Mossad head Meir Dagan repeats his contention that the consequences of a preemptive Israeli attack on Iran will be grave, and he argues that it is more difficult than many think. “There are dozens of sites,” he said. He indicates that he would much rather see an attack carried out by the US than by Israel. And he suggests that non-military options, like assisting opponents of the regime, should be emphasized.

But he does not say that Iran should be allowed to become nuclear. That is not an option for him any more than it is for Netanyahu.

While everyone would prefer that Iran give up its program peacefully, perhaps stopped by sanctions — which is simply not possible — or regime change, which is unlikely to occur in time and might not end the nuclear program in any event, this outcome is unlikely. So when the red line is crossed, Israel will have to act.

Both Netanyahu and Dagan would probably agree with Israel Hayom editor Amos Regev, who wrote this:

Nuclear weapons in the hands of Islamists is a danger to Israel. They live history. In their view, the Crusader invasion is a recent event, and as they see it, we, not to our credit, are also considered cursed Crusaders. They live this myth and are working to hasten the messiah – theirs. Give them nuclear weapons and they will use them. This is what they say. Whoever thinks this is simply “for internal propaganda purposes,” may he revel in his belief. But just as a reminder, a short while before the attack on the World Trade Center, an explicit threat was posted on al-Qaida’s Web page saying the organization was about to carry out an attack that would shock the world.

Many actors on the world stage do not want to see Israel attack Iran. There is Iran itself, of course. There is President Obama, who doesn’t want anything upsetting to happen between now and November. There is J Street, with its mysterious funders, which once lobbied against sanctions on Iran and is now pulling out the stops to oppose military action. “Wait for sanctions to take effect,” they say today.

Ideology is important. Islamist ideology (as well as traditional geopolitical ambition) is pushing Iran into war and pushing it toward nuclear weapons. But one cannot ignore the ideology of Israel’s leadership either, the ideology growing out of the historical experience of the Jewish people, that insists that threats against Israel must be taken seriously, and that the country cannot depend on anyone else to defend it.

The war is ongoing, and anyone who does not expect escalation into more open conflict is dreaming.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Iran

I know that those of us who have not been in combat for extended periods don’t understand the level of moral, emotional and physical stresses that those who fight face. So I am going to be very careful in this post not to speculate about the personal factors the led an American soldier to kill numerous Afghan civilians for no apparent reason on Sunday morning. But I think I am qualified to comment on the political aspects.

Until very recently, armies had a highly focused objective: to destroy enemy forces, to conquer and hold territory, and to defend ‘friendly’ territory and peoples against opposing armies.

Treatment of noncombatants has always been a secondary concern, varying over the centuries from the massacre of enemy men and enslavement of women and children common in ancient times, to what we hope is the more civilized behavior of Western armies today.

When an enemy army was defeated in the past, the winners brought about the political consequences that they desired, annexing territory or establishing a new regime, moving populations, exacting tribute, killing or imprisoning the former ruling groups, etc. These changes were enforced by violence or threat of violence. Since very few governments were democratic, the civilians involved could only hope that the new monarchy or dictatorship would be more benign than the previous one.

This pattern was followed in WWII, with the occupation of Germany, Japan and the Warsaw pact nations an example of the imposition of new regimes (the fact that the Western bloc managed to extricate itself peacefully from its occupations doesn’t change their essentially coercive nature).

More recently, a new paradigm is emerging, particularly in the case of the US: military forces are sent to a country which is ‘misbehaving’ in some way — in Vietnam, threatening to join the Soviet bloc; in Afghanistan, sheltering terrorist militias.* The objective of the military is to suppress the forces that are opposed to our goals, while winning the support of uncommitted groups.

Unfortunately these fundamentally contradictory goals — killing and making friends — place a huge burden on our soldiers. In order to stay alive, they must be killers when they face the enemy. Then they are expected to return to base and become Peace Corps volunteers.

This is exacerbated by the fact that these ‘police actions’ are by nature insurgencies without front lines. So the soldier never knows which form of behavior is called for.

And it gets even worse than this: while our troops are being trained in ‘cultural sensitivity’ in order to become capable of making friends with the ones who are supposedly on our side, we are facing Middle Eastern honor-shame cultures in which such ‘sensitivity’ appears as weakness and stupidity, leading to even more hatred and violence.

The icing on the cake is that our enemies understand all this, while we apparently don’t. So of course the accidental burning of Qurans or a massacre of civilians — which is standard operating procedure in the Muslim Middle East, by the way — provokes huge outbursts of rage. So we apologize, which provokes even more rage.

[Aside: No, I don’t condone massacres, and I don’t think that what the so-far-unnamed US soldier did is acceptable. But when Muslims kill Muslims, as they are doing in large numbers every day in Syria, Iraq and other places, the rage in the Muslim world is muted.

The principle is the same in Gaza, where Palestinian terrorists are applauded for trying to commit mass murder of Jews, but when those same terrorists are killed by the IDF, Egyptians are furious. Christians, Jews and other infidels are not allowed to kill Muslims — it turns their world order upside down.]

I think we in the West need to understand that we cannot expect our armies to both fight and act as social workers, especially in the Middle East.

Where there is an objective that can be achieved by military force, we must apply that force as aggressively as possible, and minimize contact between our soldiers and civilians. Compare the first three weeks of the invasion of Iraq with the other nine years of our involvement there.

But if we want to translate military victories into political gains, then we must be prepared to follow up by behaving as conquerors, not as helpers or allies. If we are not able to do this, then probably we don’t have a good reason for military action in the first place.

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* The case of Iraq is more complicated, but I believe it fits the paradigm.

Technorati Tags: Afghanistan, massacres, war

As you know by now, over 135 rockets were launched at Israel over the weekend. The barrage was in response to the targeted killing of Zuhair Mussah Ahmad Qaisi and two other Popular Resistance Committee (PRC) terrorists. The PRC, which was responsible for the recent attack near the Egyptian border, was about to launch a “large scale” attack into Israel. 13 more fighters were killed when Israel attacked rocket launching teams in Gaza. The PRC is one of the most vicious of the terrorist militias (see the link at the end of the post).

There are no reports of Israeli deaths, although about a million Israelis spent the night in shelters. Schools will be closed today (Sunday). The Gaza air strikes were targeted precisely and no Palestinians were killed who were not terrorists.

That did not stop the US State Department from issuing a statement including a remark that they “regret the loss of life.”

Considering what the PRC has done in the past, this is a remarkable thing to say!

Update [11 Mar 1222 PDT]: Here are the names and terrorist affiliations of the 16 Palestinians killed. Not one of them was a noncombatant.

Technorati Tags: Israel, PRC, State Department

Roosevelt meets Ibn Saud, 1945. "Give them Germany," he said.

Recently I was present at an event at which a pro-Israel speaker was presented with a hostile ‘question’. The questioner insisted that Israel had engaged in planned, deliberate ethnic cleansing in order to dispossess the “native Palestinian people,” and continues to maintain an apartheid state. Israel was racist in essence and should not be a state. Like a magician calling up demons, he finished with a recitation of the names of the shades from which he drew his power: Shlaim, Pappé, Morris, Flapan, etc.

The recent BDS gathering at the University of Pennsylvania and the one-state conference at Harvard establish the theme: the very idea of a Jewish state is racist, and this particular state, born in an essentially racist act of colonialism, should be dismantled.

It isn’t relevant for the refutation of these ideas, but it is nevertheless interesting to note that there is no conference at an Ivy League university calling for the dismantling of any number of essentially racist states with questionable origins. Saudi Arabia, for example, was founded in 1932 after Ibn Saud, Sultan of Nejd, violently conquered the neighboring state of Hejaz (the center of the Islamic world, where Mecca and Medina are located).

The conquest included the massacre of the male population of the city of at-Ta’if. Since then, Saudi Arabia has been one of the most religiously intolerant of the world’s nations, a place where Christians are forbidden to build churches or bring Bibles, and Jews are forbidden to enter. As recently as 2004, the official Saudi website listed “Jewish persons” as one of the groups not welcome to travel there.

But let’s get back to the efforts to delegitimize Israel. Unlike Saudi Arabia, the Jewish state has a charter in international law: the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, which included the Balfour Declaration as an integral part. And here we note an inconsistency in the position of the delegitimizers:

Despite the fact that they often appeal — improperly, but that’s a different issue — to “international law” in regard to ‘occupation’ and settlements, they do not believe that the Mandate grants any justification to the Jewish state, because it is a “colonialist document” and therefore invalid.

The people we are dealing with, while prepared to use the traditional concept of international law when it serves their purpose, actually subordinate it to postcolonial dogma. They believe that the world is divided into the colonizers and the colonized, and the latter are always right. This makes it possible for them to ‘understand’ Palestinian terrorism while finding Jewish  self-defense unacceptable.

There is a post-colonial theory of history, too. It implies that ‘truth’ is relative to ideology, specifically to post-colonial ideology. Ilan Pappé, one of the demons conjured by the heckler I mentioned, has said explicitly that his idea of historical truth is determined by his politics.

This sort of ‘flexibility’ makes it difficult to argue with the delegitimizers. Pappé and Morris have both been in trouble for taking quotations out of context, reversing their meaning, or even just making them up in their ideological zeal to ‘prove’ that Israel committed deliberate ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs.

I think that we have to take a different approach, and that is to attack the postcolonial model itself, or at least to show that it does not apply to the Israel-Arab conflict.

While the early Zionists were Europeans, they came to make a life for themselves, not to exploit the resources of the land for the benefit of a foreign power. They did not land with superior technology and use it to enslave or exploit the Arabs, but in general lived on the same or lower economic level as the Arab residents.

There was not a thriving indigenous population when the Zionists arrived. Much land was owned by absentee landlords, and disease and Ottoman taxation made life difficult. Little by little, conditions improved as a result of Zionist enterprise and to some extent outside capital.

Probably the main reason for the increase in the Arab population in the area of the Mandate from about 400,000 in 1893 to 1.3 million in 1947 was economic development due to the activities of the Zionists.

By the time the Mandate came into being, anti-Jewish agitation for ethnic and religious reasons had begun among the Arabs. The British authorities (the real colonialists) tended to favor the Arabs, and responded to Arab violence by taking successive steps to limit Jewish immigration — in contradiction to the letter and the spirit of the Mandate.

The British appointed the Jew-hating Haj Amin al-Husseini as Mufti of Jerusalem, the so-called Nazi Mufti, who would later make common cause with Hitler. Husseini incited riots and pogroms against the Jews, including the 1929 Hebron massacre. By the time WWII started, the British had more or less sealed the doors of Palestine against Jews, certainly dooming tens of thousands to Hitler’s ovens.

So far, I fail to see colonial oppression of Arabs by Jews. What I see is oppression, indeed murder, of Jews by Arabs and British colonialists. But let’s continue.

After the war, as the Zionists pushed for Jewish sovereignty in some part of the Mandate, the Arabs — both the Palestinian Arabs and the Arab nations — were absolutely livid at the prospect. When Roosevelt met King Saud in 1945, the King was adamant that Jewish refugees should not be allowed to settle in Palestine (“give them Germany,” he said). Roosevelt was shocked at his vehemence.

In 1947, the fighting between the Jews and the Palestinian Arabs began even before the UN partition resolution was passed in November. Of course the Arabs rejected it, absolutely opposing any proposed solution that involved Jewish sovereignty over any part of the land.

In 1948 Israel declared independence, was attacked by several Arab nations (who were not intending to establish Palestinian sovereignty but wanted to control the area themselves) and ultimately defeated them. In the process between 600,000 and 750,000 Arabs fled, for various reasons. At the same time — and continuing for the next few years — about 800,000 Jews in Arab countries were also forced from their homes, because they were Jews.

Jews living in the portion of Palestine that was occupied by the Jordanian army (with the help of British colonialist officers) were massacred or driven out at gunpoint.

At this point the postcolonialist historians step in and support the false narrative by arguing that the majority of Arabs who left were driven out by force in a deliberate act of ethnic cleansing. Since there is no real evidence for this, they invent it. And they mostly ignore the fate of the Jews of East Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and the Arab world.

The most that can be said is that some Arabs in hostile towns (especially along the road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem where they were harassing attempts to relieve blockaded Jerusalem)  were forced out. But the ‘master plan’ to create an Arab-free Israel did not exist, and quotations from Ben Gurion that the Arabs must be expelled have been shown to be faked.

The fact that the Arab leadership initiated riots, pogroms, and ultimately war cannot be ignored, nor can that of the cooperation between Husseini and Hitler, the plan to establish extermination camps for Jews in Palestine, or the vile way in which the British tried to thwart the promise of the Mandate.

Throughout it all, what was pervasive was the racist Arab persecution of Jews: the pogroms of the 1920’s, the riots of the ’30’s, the refusal to countenance Jewish sovereignty anywhere in Palestine, the expulsions from Arab-occupied lands, the cooperation with Hitler. And of course this took place against a background of British colonialism, as that nation tried to secure Middle Eastern oil and its route to India.

Technorati Tags: Israel, postcolonialism, delegitimization

This is (unfortunately) too good to hold back (h/t: Challah Hu Akbar):

In my previous post I said that politicians tailor their speeches to their audiences. Well, get a load of this snippet from a “Town Hall with Tunisian Youth” held by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on February 25 of this year (emphasis added by me):

QUESTION: My name is Ivan. After the electoral campaign starts in the United States – it started some time ago – we noticed here in Tunisia that most of the candidates from the both sides run towards the Zionist lobbies to get their support in the States. And afterwards, once they are elected, they come to show their support for countries like Tunisia and Egypt for a common Tunisian or a common Arab citizen. How would you reassure and gain his trust again once given the fact that you are supporting his enemy as well at the same time?

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, first, let me say you will learn as your democracy develops that a lot of things are said in political campaigns that should not bear a lot of attention. There are comments made that certainly don’t reflect the United States, don’t reflect our foreign policy, don’t reflect who we are as a people. I mean, if you go to the United States, you see mosques everywhere, you see Muslim Americans everywhere. That’s the fact. So I would not pay attention to the rhetoric.

Secondly, I would say watch what President Obama says and does. He’s our President. He represents all of the United States, and he will be reelected President, so I think that that will be a very clear signal to the entire world as to what our values are and what our President believes. So I think it’s a fair question because I know that – I sometimes am a little surprised that people around the world pay more attention to what is said in our political campaigns than most Americans, say, are paying attention. So I think you have to shut out some of the rhetoric and just focus on what we’re doing and what we stand for, and particularly what our President represents.

Thank you, Ms. Clinton, for responding to the ‘fair question’, and making sure that we Zionists understand not to listen to what the candidates say, but to pay attention to what they really stand for. Perhaps we should apply this advice to your boss as well.

Technorati Tags: Zionist lobbies, Hillary Clinton, Tunisia, Obama