FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

Palestinian President Abbas meets with U.S. Congressional Delegation in Ramallah yesterday. Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) is speaking to Abbas.

Stephen Walt, who has built a career — and it appears to be a lucrative one — on bashing Israel and skirting (maybe) the limits of antisemitism in his attacks on ‘The Lobby’, claims that AIPAC is worsening the US budget crisis:

After congressional shenanigans helped spark a major market sell-off and sparked fears of a double-dip recession, you’d think every single one of them would be heading back to their districts to figure out what their constituents wanted and to try to explain how they were going to help make things better. Or maybe a few of them would even spend the recess taking a crash course in macroeconomics and public finance, so that they could start exercising their public duties more responsibly.

But what did 81 of them decide to do instead? You guessed it: they are off on junkets to Israel, paid for by the American Israel Education Foundation, an AIPAC spinoff that has been funding such trips for years. That’s right: during the August recess nearly a fifth of the U.S. Congress will visit a single country whose entire population is less than that of New York City.

Now since these trips will last only one week and cost US taxpayers nothing, one wonders why Walt is so excited. Apparently it’s because they might have the effect of making our congresspersons pro-Israel:

Such trips also expose these visitors to the policy preferences and basic worldview of Israel’s leaders, which is of course why AIEF pays for them.

Scary. But which leaders are they meeting with? Last week, the schedule was revealed in all of its sinister dimensions:

The delegation will visit both Israel and the West Bank, and is scheduled to meet with President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah.

And what did they hear from  President Abbas?

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas met with US lawmakers visiting the West Bank and Gaza Strip [sic] and urged them to lend their support to the formation of a Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital, the PA’s WAFA news agency reported on Friday.

Abbas reportedly stressed that the future state must be “empty of settlements” …

The Palestinian president stressed that the PA’s “first, second and third choice is to establish the Palestinian state through negotiations,” adding that Israel’s settlement policy was the main obstacle to the peace process. Abbas also assured the US legislators that his upcoming UN bid for statehood, though unilateral, does not contradict the essence of the peace process.

Abbas is being more than a little disingenuous here, since the obstacle to negotiations has been Abbas’ Palestinian Authority, which continues to demand that Israel agree to give them everything they want before negotiations can start. And it is flat-out false that a unilateral declaration of statehood doesn’t contradict the peace process — it contradicts UNSC resolution 242 (and others), the Oslo interim agreement and the Road Map, all of which call for negotiations between the parties.

But Stephen Walt, who illustrated his article with a picture of known Jewish Zionist conspirators Foreign Minister Avigdor and Senator Joe Lieberman (who is not part of this trip), should be happy. Or perhaps he thinks our representatives should meet with Hamas, too?

Technorati Tags: Stephen Walt, Israel, US Congress

A few little things:

1) What’s wrong with this picture?

JERUSALEM (JTA) — Jailed Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti said worldwide protests will result from a U.S. veto of a Palestinian state at the United Nations.

Barghouti, who has been imprisoned in Israel since 2002 for murdering Israelis but still remains influential in the Arab world, told an Egyptian news service that a U.S. veto of a Palestinian state would be a “historic, deadly mistake,” the French news agency AFP reported.

“Such a veto will be confronted by millions-strong protests throughout the Arab and Muslim world, indeed throughout the whole world,” he reportedly said.

Hello? He’s a convicted multiple murderer! Why is he “influential” and talking to the press? He should be dead. And so should mass murderess Ahlam Tamimi.

2) Suddenly he gets it (maybe):

British PM David Cameron, speaking in the House of Commons about the lawlessness in the streets,

No “phoney human rights concerns” about publishing CCTV images of suspects involved in rioting would be allowed to “get in the way of bringing these criminals to justice”.

Nope, “no phoney human rights concerns” when his country is attacked by barbarians!

3) Never missing a chance to hurt Israel,

President Obama is pressuring Israel to apologize to Turkey for self-defense. I suppose he’s right — the commandos trying to enforce what a UN commission admits is a legitimate blockade should have all lined up to be beaten, stabbed and shot by Turkish thugs.

How about Turkey apologizing to the Armenians — then we’ll talk.

Why Obama needs to be involved in this issue, when he still is only hinting at making an unequivocal statement that Butcher Bashar must quit, is beyond me.

4) Meet Gabriel Matthew Schivone

Gabriel Matthew Schivone

An “Audacity of Hope” passenger, Schivone calls himself a ‘Chicano Jew’ and a ‘person of color’. He doesn’t look colored, but what do I know*.  An undergraduate at the University of Arizona, Tucson and coordinator of Arizona Jewish Voice for Peace, Schivone is uncompromising in his support for the Palestinian Arab ‘resistance’. In an op-ed published in Ha’aretz, he wrote

I am one of a growing number of young American Jews who are determined to shake off an assumed – and largely imposed – association with Israel. Prominent advocacy organizations, such as the American Jewish Committee, which proudly proclaim their unconditional support of Israel, for several years have been declaring their “serious concern” over the increasing “distancing” of young American Jews from the state.

But what Israel apologists like the AJC view as a crisis, I see as a positive development for American Jews, who, like other parts of U.S. society, are shifting from blind support for Israel to a more critical position that reflects opposition to our country’s backing for Israel’s policies.

But there seems to be a minor problem. He isn’t Jewish, in any recognizable sense!** Ha’aretz printed a letter from someone who knows Schivone personally, someone who agrees with him politically but felt the need to expose his deception:

Gabriel is not Jewish, whether in terms of ethnic ancestry, religious belief, or cultural identity. He has never identified as a Jew until it became useful in advancing his political agenda. During the High Holiday season of 2007, Gabriel told me that he discussed Israel with campus representatives of Chabad, identifying himself as a Jew. When asked why he did this, he explained that he has a distant Jewish relative and that “you use what you have.”

In all the time I’ve known him, he has never expressed feeling morally conflicted about Israel, nor has he succumbed to pressure to be “silent.” The editorial’s narrative is not Gabriel’s story, but one crafted to lend moral and emotional weight to his argument while appealing to the young, college-aged Jews whose participation is so vital to the pro-Palestinian movement.

In his response, Schivone is angry that his “most cherished sense of personal identity” has been challenged, but he doesn’t deny the substance of the charge.

* Yes, I understand that ‘person of color’ has nothing to do with pigmentation, but rather means that the person in question belongs to a group oppressed by Western colonialists, and is therefore permitted to ‘resist’ in any way he can. I just don’t buy the theory.

** No, I don’t care if he is halachically Jewish. If there is any sense in which ‘Jewish’ is meaningful, he doesn’t fit it.

Technorati Tags: Marwan Barghouti, David Cameron, Turkey, Gabriel Schivone, Israel

Protest movement in Israel includes disparate elements

Hundreds of thousands of protesters in the streets of Tel Aviv and other cities can’t be ignored, although one should keep in mind that there are more than 5 million registered voters in Israel (in 2009, 65% of them voted), and most of them are not in the streets.

There’s no doubt that many of the demonstrators’ complaints are justified. It’s just Economics 101 that monopoly or oligopoly-dominated markets result in higher prices. It’s a fact that a great degree of income inequality creates dissatisfaction. And it’s a fact that there is a real problem finding affordable housing, and not just in the most desirable parts of Tel Aviv.

But there is also no doubt that some are trying to turn the protests into a movement to replace the government with one more to their liking, and not just because of economic issues. As I wrote last week, connections between protest leaders and not only anti-Bibi but even anti-Zionist elements have been evident from the beginning.

In particular, the American New Israel Fund (NIF) has been playing a central role in financing the protests and advising their leaders. The NIF has always been arrogant about its ‘right’ to directly interfere in the politics of another nation, and the arrogance is openly on display in a fundraising letter sent to American donors by Daniel Sokatch, NIF CEO and Rachel Liel, his Executive Director in Israel, which includes this:

150,000 of my fellow Israelis went into the streets Saturday night to demand a better, more just Israel…

Our Shatil organizers are in the field, lending expertise at protest sites all over the country. And our emergency grants help sustain the activists in their ongoing protest.

I just bet.

The NIF has supported — and continues to support — various groups which engage in demonization of the IDF, call for the ‘dezionization’ of the state and boycott-divestment-sanctions of Israel. This is described in detail in my earlier post, “The New Israel Fund — the bad and the ugly.”

The NIF’s “better, more just Israel” is not the Jewish state that the great majority of Israelis, or even the majority of demonstrators, want.

If the protest leaders want their legitimate demands taken seriously, then they should tell the NIF and its “Shatil organizers” to go home.

Technorati Tags: Israel, tent protest, New Israel Fund

400 mostly Orthodox rabbis march to the White House on October 6, 1943. Roosevelt avoided meeting with them.

By Victor Rosenthal

It’s well-known that the Roosevelt Administration did little to help European Jews during the Holocaust. Unfortunately, part of the blame falls on American Jewry, which was sharply divided about how to respond — a fact which caused good men in the government to hesitate, while it gave antisemites an excuse to resist.

The NY Times has published a piece by Isabel Kershner that may bring more attention to the shameful stupidity of the Jewish establishment during that period:

The Bergson group formed in 1940 when about 10 young Jews from Palestine and Europe came to the United States to open a fund-raising and propaganda operation for the Irgun, the right-wing Zionist militia. The group was organized by Hillel Kook, a charismatic Irgun leader who adopted the pseudonym Peter H. Bergson. [Samuel] Merlin was his right-hand man.

The group began by raising money for illegal Jewish immigration to what was then the British Mandate of Palestine and promoting the idea of an army composed of stateless and Palestinian Jews. But the mission abruptly changed in November 1942 after reports of the Nazi annihilation of two million European Jews emerged. Like earlier reports of the mass killing of Jews, the news barely made the inside pages of major American newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post.

The Bergsonites were appalled by what they saw as the indifference of the Roosevelt administration and the passivity of the Jewish establishment, which staunchly supported the administration and largely accepted its argument that the primary American military objective was to win the war, not to save European Jews. The group embarked on a provocative campaign to publicize the genocide and to lobby Congress to support the rescue of Jews, roaming the hallways of Capitol Hill and knocking on doors, displaying a degree of chutzpah that made the traditional, pro-Roosevelt Jewish establishment uncomfortable.

Uncomfortable?

The establishment, led by Reform Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, fought Kook’s group tooth and nail. Writer Ben Hecht, recruited by Kook to stage a huge pageant in Madison Square Garden in March 1943 (“We will never die”) to raise awareness and embarrass the government into action, described one encounter:

I first became aware that there was annoyance with me among the Jews when Rabbi Stephen Wise, head of the Jews of New York, head of the Zionists and, as I knew from reading the papers, head of almost everything noble in American Jewry, telephoned me at the Algonquin Hotel where I had pitched my Hebrew tent.

Rabbi Wise said he would like to see me immediately in his rectory. His voice, which was sonorous and impressive, irritated me. I had never known a man with a sonorous and impressive voice who wasn’t either a con man or a bad actor. I explained I was very busy and unable to step out of my hotel.

“Then I shall tell you now, over the telephone, what I had hoped to tell you in my study,” said Rabbi Wise. “I have read your pageant script and I disapprove of it. I must ask you to cancel this pageant and discontinue all your further activities in behalf of the Jews. If you wish hereafter to work for the Jewish Cause, you will please consult me and let me advise you.”

Wise was a confidant of Roosevelt, and tried to use his influence to get the British to allow European Jews to enter Palestine, with no success. He was even unable to get Roosevelt to publicly speak out on the subject. According to Hecht, Kook told him that

The United States has a secret pact with Great Britain concerning the future of Palestine. It is intended to belong to the British. President Roosevelt will do nothing to violate that pact. He will not speak of Jews being massacred because that might excite popular opinion to rescue them–and result in their being sent to Palestine as a haven, which would be a violation of this pact [in December 1942, Roosevelt and allied governments did finally issue a declaration denouncing Hitler’s murderous project, but no concrete actions were taken — ed.].

When Kook organized a march of 400 mostly Orthodox Rabbis (but including Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, z”l, who had been ordained as a Conservative rabbi some months before) to the White House, Roosevelt left before they arrived, on the advice of Wise and others.

In Louis Rappaport’s words (“Shake Heaven and Earth: Peter Bergson and the struggle to rescue the Jews of Europe,” p. xi),

During the era, Zionist leaders like Rabbi Wise and Nahum Goldmann told the State Department that Kook/Bergson was as big a threat as Hitler to the well-being of American Jewry.

Wise did his best, in the tradition of the medieval ghetto community leader who protects his people by virtue of his relationship with the goyische prince, but he failed utterly. And then he did his best to sabotage the more aggressive, public efforts of Kook. His publicly stated reason was that he feared that Kook’s actions (which included criticism of Christians who did not intervene) would stimulate an antisemitic reaction in the US.

But there was another motive, too. Rabbi David Ellenson, president of the Reform Movement’s Hebrew Union College (in part founded by Wise), explained it in a September, 2008, talk:

“In the 1930s, it was Wise who led the rallies against Hitler, so why did he fail so horribly in the 1940s?” Ellenson asked at a Holocaust conference organized by the Washington-based David S. Wyman Institute …

He said part of the explanation lies in Wise’s “absolute and complete love” for president Franklin D. Roosevelt, as well as his antipathy toward the Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and toward the Bergson Group, whose leaders were followers of Jabotinsky, something that “helped blind him” to the need for more activism.

Ellenson said concerns of provoking an anti-Semitic backlash should not have thwarted the American Jewish leadership from actively working to prevent the extermination of six million Jews. “Jewish leaders have an obligation to be sufficiently flexible and imaginative to deal with unprecedented situations,” he said. He said he hoped that today’s leaders would respond more effectively to contemporary dangers facing the Jewish people, such as the Iranian nuclear threat.

“Stephen Wise spent too much time trying to protect FDR from criticism, and not enough time focusing on how to convince Roosevelt to help rescue Jews from Europe,” said Wyman Institute director Dr. Rafael Medoff. “Rabbi David Ellenson is to be commended for acknowledging the mistakes of his predecessor and trying to ensure that the failures of the 1940s will not be repeated.”

It seems to me that this is almost exactly what is happening today, with the liberal Jewish establishment in America cleaving to its President, Barack Obama, while the latter pursues policies inimical to Jewish survival. It is ironic that Rabbi Ellenson criticized Rabbi Wise in this way, and then three years later viciously attacked opponents of the nomination of J Street and New Israel Fund activist Rabbi Richard Jacobs as head of the Union for Reform Judaism!

Kook and Merlin, by the way, both sailed to Israel in 1948 on the ill-fated Irgun arms ship Altalena, which was fired on by IDF forces on the orders of David Ben-Gurion (Merlin was wounded, as the Times article notes). Interestingly, later in life, Ben-Gurion said that he regretted the decision, which he would not have made had he known Irgun leader Menachem Begin as well as he had since come to know him.

I don’t know if Wise regretted his actions in regard to Kook, although he apparently understood that he had failed in his responsibility toward the Jews of Europe. Toward the end of his life, he wrote,

I have seen and shared deep and terrible sorrow. The tale might be less tragic if the help of men had been less scant and fitful.

Today’s establishment still has time to choose the right path.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Peter Bergson, Hillel Kook, Rabbi Stephen Wise, Holocaust

The New York Times publishes the columns of Thomas Friedman and Roger Cohen regularly, and a disproportionate number of them can be called Israel-bashing. Sometimes they are quite ugly. But for sheer slimy dishonesty, nobody beats Nicholas Kristof when he aims his pen at Israel and her supporters.

Today’s column is representative. It starts mildly enough with a reflexive twitch at Jewish settlements:

Next month, Palestinians are expected to seek statehood at the United Nations. It’s a stunt that won’t accomplish much for anybody, but it’s more constructive than throwing rocks at Israeli cars — or, on the Israeli side, better than expanding illegal settlements.

Kristof and his ideological soulmates apparently think that if they say this enough, the way that Hamas says that Jews are descended from apes and pigs, it will become true. It’s not, and until Kristof and others can answer the arguments presented here, they should refrain from categorical statements like the above.

Yet the American House of Representatives voted 407 to 6 to call on the Obama administration to use its diplomatic capital to try to block the initiative, while also threatening to cut the Palestinians’ funding if they proceeded to seek statehood.

My goodness, imagine the power of that Zionist lobby who could pull the strings of 406 members of Congress! Of course, what Kristof leaves out is that the resolution threatens to stop funding the Palestinian Authority if it does not cut ties with the terrorist, antisemitic, genocidal Hamas!

So it isn’t a question of the poor, oppressed, third-world ‘Palestinian’ people of color being kept from self-determination and the state they ‘deserve’, it has something to do with not wanting to finance murderers. I wonder if he missed that point by accident?

Similarly, when Israel stormed into Gaza in 2008 to halt rocket attacks, more than 1,300 Gazans were killed, along with 13 Israelis, according to B’Tselem, a respected Israeli human rights group. As Gazan blood flowed, the House, by a vote of 390 to 5, hailed the invasion as “Israel’s right to defend itself.”

This paragraph is so packed full of crap that I have to refute it in the form of a list:

1. B’Tselem is funded by European governments and left-wing US organizations like the New Israel Fund. It is in no way an impartial human rights group, but rather an extremist organization devoted to nothing less than the destruction of the Jewish state. Do I go too far? Read this.
2. B’Tselem’s casualty numbers are wildly incorrect. IDF figures count 1,166 dead Gazans, of whom 709 were combatants and 295 civilians. A Hamas source later said that “about 600” of their fighters were killed. Considering the nature of urban warfare — and the fact that Hamas deliberately operated from civilian areas — this points to the exceptional care taken by the IDF to avoid civilian casualties.
3. The fact that there were more Palestinians than Israelis killed does not imply that Israel did not have a right to defend itself, after thousands of rockets and mortars were fired into Israel, not to mention cross-border terror attacks like the one in which several Israelis were killed and Gilad Shalit taken hostage.

Such Congressional tomfoolery bewilders our friends and fritters away our international capital. It also encourages the intransigence of the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and reduces the chance of a peace settlement.

Kristof seems to suggest that Israel is responsible for the lack of movement in the ‘peace process’ — probably because it has returned to building inside of its ‘illegal’ settlements. But Israel stopped building for 10 months while the Palestinians found excuses to not negotiate. If ‘intransigence’ means conditioning negotiations on a particular outcome, then it’s the Arabs who are intransigent.

If you want to know what bewilders/fritters, it’s the Obama Administration’s focus on the Palestinian issue while Iran moves to get nuclear weapons and take over the region. But that’s another story.

In the last few years, a former government official named Jeremy Ben-Ami has been trying to change the political dynamic in Washington with a new organization — J Street — that presses Congress and the White House to show more balance.

From B’Tselem, Kristof moves on to cite another anti-Israel authority, this time the phony ‘pro-Israel’ J Street, a lobby financed by anti-Zionists (including George Soros and various Arab interests) which has called for Israel to be condemned in the UN Security Council, opposed sanctions on Iran, supported the Goldstone Report, etc.

But time out to resolve the dramatic tension that Kristof’s column turns on, to wit, how can a minority of Jewish fascists force the US Congress to abandon the struggling Palestinian people? Kristof’s answer seems to be that a minority of Jewish fascists speak louder than a great left-wing majority who agree with him about Israel.

American Jews have long trended liberal, and President Obama won 78 percent of the Jewish vote in 2008. Yet major Jewish organizations, like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, embrace hawkish positions.

(“Hawkish?” You mean like wanting the Palestinians to recognize that Israel is the state of the Jewish people, or not agreeing to the idea of settling millions of hostile Arabs who are descended (maybe) from 1948 refugees in Israel, to turn it into an Arab state?)

That’s because those Jews who vote and donate based on Israel are disproportionately conservative (the same is true of Christians who are most passionate about Israel issues). Ben-Ami argues that “the loudest eight percent” have hijacked Jewish groups to press for policies that represent neither the Jewish mainstream nor the best interests of Israel.

No, it’s because the American people are overwhelmingly pro-Israel — Jews and Christians alike — and members of Congress respond to their constituents. Not being one-issue fanatics more loyal to Israel than the US, the American Jews who voted for Obama did so primarily because of issues other than Israel (although as Obama’s tilt toward the Arabs becomes more and more evident, the Israel issue becomes more important and that support erodes).

Some see this influence of Jewish organizations on foreign policy as unique and sinister, but Congress often surrenders to loudmouths who have particular foreign policy grievances and claim to have large groups behind them.

I suppose it’s better to be a loudmouth than sinister. But it’s equally wrong. Nobody hijacked AIPAC and nobody fooled Congress. There is no anti-Israel silent majority — Jews are liberals, but they are also pro-Israel.

In the case of Israel, American Jewish opinion isn’t the monolith that many assume. A 2008 survey by the American Jewish Committee asked Jews what issue they most wanted presidential candidates to discuss. Most cited the economy; only 3 percent said Israel.

Agreed, Israel isn’t the top issue of Jewish voters. If it were, we would undoubtedly be hearing about our unique and sinister dual loyalties! But just because it is not their top issue, one can’t infer that it is not an important one. That same AJC survey showed that 67% of American Jews felt ‘very close’ or ‘fairly close’ to Israel.

There’s also some evidence that young American Jews are growing disenchanted as Israeli society turns rightward. (Palestinian extremism feeds Israeli extremism, which feeds Palestinian extremism, which feeds. …)

Kristof throws everything he can into the hopper, including this reference to the tendentious article by Peter Beinart, in which the latter displays equal ignorance about Israel and American Jews.

The Israeli electorate is moving to the right insofar as the policies of the peace movement since 1993 have brought only disaster. With regard to social issues, I suggest that Beinart and Kristof both commit the fallacy of assuming that Israel is America. It’s in the Middle East, and there are important differences in values and priorities. Hamas isn’t a bunch of 1960’s civil rights workers.

Whenever I write about Israel, I get accused of double standards because I don’t spill as much ink denouncing worse abuses by, say, Syria. I plead guilty. I demand more of Israel partly because my tax dollars supply arms and aid to Israel. I hold democratic allies like Israel to a higher standard — just as I do the U.S.

It’s not just because he doesn’t criticize Syria enough for its policy of raping, torturing and murdering people whose only crime is to complain about the dictatorial regime. It’s that he accuses Israel of similar crimes, when the accusations are not true — blindingly not true — and intended to help prepare the ground for Israel’s enemies to destroy her!

I am concerned about my tax dollars, too. In particular, I’m concerned that the US is funding the Palestinian Authority, which continues to pay its ’employees’ who are in Israeli prisons for terror-related offenses and in Gaza working for Hamas. I also don’t approve of stipends to the widows of ‘martyrs’, nor do I wish to pay for street signs bearing the names of famous terrorists like Dalal Mughrabi.

One of the interesting things about this article, in addition to the fact that almost every single proposition in it is either false or misleading, is that there is absolutely nothing new here. Kristof just rehashes a bunch of tired anti-Israel themes:

• The ‘illegality’ of the settlements
• The casualties of Cast Lead
• The power of the Israel Lobby, or at least the loudness of its mouth
• The pretense that J Street is anything but a mouthpiece for anti-Zionism
• The Beinart thesis that Israel is becoming anti-democratic and dangerously right-wing
• The application of the colonial paradigm where it doesn’t come close to fitting

That’s the best that a featured writer for the great New York Times can do!

Technorati Tags: Nicholas Kristof, Israel