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The argument is about the Jewish state, not a Palestinian one

Tuesday, November 20th, 2007

Here’s how Paul Reynolds of the BBC sees the chances that Annapolis will have a positive result:

There are perhaps only two reasons for any hope.

The first is the fear of something worse.

Annapolis can be seen as a way of trying to support the moderates.

The strategy is to show Palestinians that talks can produce results and that the confrontation promoted by Hamas in Gaza is not the way forward.

The danger is that this strategy might fail and leave the Palestinians with nothing and the Israelis still in the state of “siege” described by the Irish and UN diplomat Conor Cruise O’Brien in 1986.

I would suggest that the real danger is that this strategy might succeed, Israel will get out of the West Bank, and then the ‘moderates’ will stop pretending to be moderate or be replaced by Hamas. But Reynolds’ real point is to come:

The second is a better understanding that the philosophy behind Oslo and the road map might be wrong. Both those agreements sought to establish an atmosphere of peace and security first, leading to a final agreement second.

There is nothing wrong with trying to create better conditions, something for example that the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has been trying to do on the economic front.

But without a final agreement, there can probably be no peace and security. Security will not lead to an agreement. It is an agreement that will lead to security.

In other words, unless Israel gives the Palestinians the agreement they want, there will not be peace and security. An ‘agreement’ sounds so civilized, but the word for concessions made to stop someone from trying to kill you is ‘appeasement’.

Is it too much to ask, as the roadmap and Oslo did, that the Palestinians stop terrorism before they get their state, especially since one would like to have some reason to think that they are capable of it before putting them in rocket range of Ben Gurion Airport? Apparently Reynolds thinks so.

It’s mind-boggling that the response to the failure of the Palestinians to meet their commitment to end terrorism, which was the primary reason for the collapse of Oslo and the Roadmap, should be to simply give up on the requirement and push Israel to hand over territory even while terrorism continues.

But there are other indications that Reynolds and the BBC see Israel, and not the Palestinians, as the main obstacle to peace:

There has been little sign that they are anywhere near agreement [on borders, Jerusalem, settlements, and ‘right of return’ for refugees].

Instead there has been a new argument – about an Israeli demand that Israel should be recognised as a “Jewish state”.

This is something fundamental for the Israelis but Palestinians see it as taking one of their cards – the refugees – off the table in advance.

First of all, this is not a ‘new’ argument. It is no more and no less than an insistence that the Palestinians (and the world) recognize that the Jews won the war of 1948, when a Jewish state was established in Mandatory Palestine. It is being articulated now because it is evident that the Arabs do not accept this.

The absolutely absurd, historically unprecedented, requirement that a hostile population of 4 to 5 million descendants of refugees from a war that their side lost 59 years ago ‘return’ — does not belong “on the table” at all, and it should be seen, along with the denial of Israel’s right to be a Jewish state, as a demand for the reversal of the outcome of the 1948 war. Far from a demand for self-determination for Palestinians, it is a refusal to grant this same right to Jews.

Reynolds and the BBC suggest that the issue is about such things as the size of the Palestinian state, how much of Jerusalem they will end up with, and the welfare of the refugee descendants.

What they don’t see, or (less charitably) pretend not to see is that this argument is not actually about the Palestinians and their state. More fundamentally, it’s about the Jews and theirs.

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The 9-minute gap

Wednesday, November 14th, 2007

Richard Landes invented the word ‘Pallywood‘ to describe fake ‘news’ created by Palestinians as supposed evidence of Israeli atrocities. And he has been in the forefront of the effort to expose the truly murderous deception perpetrated on the world in the Mohammed al-Dura hoax.

The 55 seconds of video allegedly showing 10-year old al-Dura shot and killed by Israeli soldiers in September 2000, and provided to world media by France2 Television, provided a focus for outrage and hatred of Israel. It appeared in the tape of Daniel Pearl’s beheading, and was cited as the reason two Israeli reservists were torn to pieces by Palestinians after they lost their way in Ramallah. Probably no single image is so emblematic of Israeli ‘inhumanity’ to Palestinians than that of the terrified boy in the arms of his father.

Today in a French courtroom, unedited film shot on behalf of France2 by Palestinian cameraman Talal abu Rahmah was supposed to shown as evidence in a libel suit filed by France2’s Jerusalem bureau head Charles Enderlin against French media critic Philippe Karsenty, who had accused Enderlin of complicity in faking the incident and called for his resignation.

This would not be the first time that anyone outside of France2 has seen the unedited footage. Landes saw it in Enderlin’s office in Jerusalem in 2003; he reported that it showed Dura apparently raising his hand to his forehead to look out after he was supposedly dead, and contained other incidents, quite obviously staged, in which Palestinians pretended to be wounded and were loaded into ambulances (in one case, when nobody came to pick up a ‘wounded’ Palestinian, he was seen to get up and walk away, obviously uninjured).

Landes was in the Paris courtroom today (read his account here) when the film was shown — that is, when only 18 of the 27 minutes of the film were shown! Several of the obviously faked sequences had been cut. There is both testimony and documentary evidence to prove this, as Landes explains.

The judge will render her decision of February 27. But whether justice will be done and Enderlin will lose his case, or not — Enderlin is very well-connected, an acquaintance of Jacques Chirac — the case illustrates the power of the media and the importance of the information war.

It also illustrates the cynicism of many in the media, who understand the Palestinian fake news industry, but exploit it anyway because it provides sensational footage. And it illustrates a remarkable lack of initiative by the Israeli government, which simply closed its eyes while the IDF and the state itself were dragged through the mud.

Update [15 Nov 2027 PST]: Richard Landes and Nidra Poller provide the best account of what transpired in the courtroom on Wednesday here.

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Journalistic ideals, Palestine style

Saturday, November 10th, 2007

We Westerners have so internalized the idea that journalists should at least strive for objectivity, that we forget that other cultures may have entirely different ideas. Richard Landes, in “Al-Dura and the public secret of Middle East journalism” describes the Muslim tradition:

According to the Islamic Mass Media Charter (Jakarta, 1980), the sacred task of Muslim media men [sic], is on the one hand to protect the Umma from “imminent dangers,” indeed to “censor all materials,” towards that end, and on the other, “To combat Zionism and its colonialist policy of creating settlements as well as its ruthless suppression of the Palestinian people.”

So when asked why he had inserted unconnected footage of an Israeli soldier firing a rifle into the Al Dura sequence in order to make it look like the Israelis had killed the boy in cold blood, an official of PA TV responded:

These are forms of artistic expression, but all of this serves to convey the truth… We never forget our higher journalistic principles to which we are committed of relating the truth and nothing but the truth.

When Talal abu Rahmah received an award for his footage of Muhammad al Dura in Morocco in 2001, he told a reporter, “I went into journalism to carry on the fight for my people.”

On November 14, the full, 27 minute footage that abu Rahmah gave to France2 television will be shown at trial in the defamation suit filed by France2’s Charles Enderlin against French media watchdog Philippe Karsenty.

These tapes were filmed by Talal abu Rahmah on September 30, 2000, and for seven years, Enderlin has claimed that the tapes prove him right and show the boy in such unbearable death throes that he cut them out of his report. But several experts who have seen the tapes ([Richard Landes] included) claim that the only scene of al Dura that Enderlin cut was the final scene where he seems alive and well; and still more disturbingly the rest of the rushes are filled with staged scenes.

Of course, regardless of the outcome, the damage has long since been done. Israelis and others have died in the name of vengeance for al-Dura. Israel has had to get used to asymmetric warfare in battlefield struggle with Hamas and Hezbollah; apparently she must also expect it in the opinion war.

Update [12 Nov 1701 PST]: Karsenty says that France2 will only show 18 minutes of footage in court (video of Karsenty here).

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NPR in Gaza

Tuesday, October 30th, 2007

Some time ago, I took National Public Radio (NPR) to task for employing what I’ve come to call the Emotive Bias Technique in its reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This morning, reporter Eric Westervelt provided another perfect example (as if any more are needed).

Westervelt interviews an ‘ordinary Gazan’, Salahadin al-Sultan, owner of a grocery store in Beit Hanoun, one of the prime locations from which Qassam rockets are fired daily at southern Israel.

Sultan shows him that there is almost nothing in the store, and that he has even had to sell off much of his family’s possessions to survive. This is because Israel — after the Hamas takeover — has “tightened its crossing points into the territories” (Westervelt does not mention that Hamas often attacks the crossings with mortar fire), so that “only limited humanitarian food and medical supplies are getting in”. What is getting in since Hamas took over, of course, are explosives — 112 tons of them — but he leaves this out too.

Westervelt admits that rockets are continuing to be fired into Israel, and so “Israel has declared Gaza a hostile entity” and is “tightening the screws”. Then we go back to Sultan, whose customers are unemployed or “government workers” (most of whom were likely employed by the ‘security services’) who get only partial salaries. Most of Sultan’s furniture is gone, sold to pay for food and bills. Sultan’s wife’s gold jewelry has been sold and — you can hear the heartstrings twanging — also his wedding ring.

A child passes with a donkey cart, selling vegetables from “forlorn boxes”, carefully driving around a refilled crater produced by an Israeli bomb not far from the shop. The explosion smashed his windows. We don’t know what the rocket launchers which must have been there did to Sderot. At one point, so many rockets were launched from Beit Hanoun, that angry residents wanted the army to return random barrage for barrage. Of course, the army only targets launchers and their operators.

The Emotive Bias Technique depends on the human propensity to remember emotionally loaded experiences much more than the recitation of facts. So Sultan’s depressing situation, his lost wedding ring, the child skirting the crater with his miserable vegetables — these make an impression. The matter-of-fact statement that, yes, rockets are being fired from Beit Hanoun does not.

In addition to Emotive Bias, Westervelt leaves out important context. Hamas is spending huge sums of money smuggling explosives and weapons into the strip, building fortifications near the border, digging tunnels under the border to attack Israel, manufacturing rockets, etc. This money could be spent on ameliorating economic conditions in Gaza, if Hamas wished to do so. Israel’s “tightening the screws” is a direct result of the rocket and mortar fire, sniping, and attempts to kidnap Israelis that are occurring every day. If Hamas would stop them, the restrictions would stop too.

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Crushed by the weight of lies

Sunday, October 14th, 2007

Some Israelis and some politically sophisticated Jews here in the US have, in a sense, been crushed by the weight of anti-Israel propaganda, and — while it is painful to say this — have become part of the problem. It’s hard to defend yourself when the lies are pouring in from all directions, and sometimes you wake up saying “wait a minute — did I fall for that?”

Daniel Gordis describes this from an Israeli point of view, but it occurs here, too, especially among those who would describe themselves as being concerned with “peace and justice”.

Cynicism is a dangerous disease, a cancer of the soul. Often, we don’t know we have it, until it’s too late, until part of us has died. It’s also contagious. And this country has stage-three cynicism. By cynicism, I don’t mean the occasional snide joke at a cocktail party. I mean a low-grade but constant self-loathing among many of the people I know at the elite of Israel’s intellectual and academic circles, for whom discussion of the Jewish State is more than passé it’s absurd. If you say something about the values inherent in Zionism, you sound odd. If you insist that the Jews have something unique to say and that having a State is our platform on which we can begin to articulate that “something,” they look at you as if you’re “cute.” As if you’d referred to a young dating couple as “courting,” or as if you’d just called a pair of jeans “dungarees.” You’re an anachronism, and no one “in the know” will take you, or your ideas, very seriously.

This self-loathing manifests itself in a relentless discussion of the occupation, with no reference to why the occupation began or to the fact that Israel doesn’t exactly have many sane choices that might end it. You see it when people insist Israel should “just sign a peace agreement already,” with no consideration of what’s unfolding in Gaza, in complete denial of the obvious fact that there’s no way that Abu Mazen can deliver on anything he promises before or during Annapolis. It’s the culture in which post-nationalism is taken as an obvious truth, with no recognition of the fact that it’s only when discussing the state of the Jews that people insist that the nation-state should be dismantled. It’s the conversational style in which every mention of an Israeli soldier has to be followed by an account of some act of barbarity, lest you appear overly nationalistic. — Daniel Gordis, “One Treadmill, Two Refugees, One College” [my emphasis — the entire article is recommended]

On the one hand, it’s important for all of us to be as well-informed as possible, and that means reading and listening to the views of the ‘other side’ and taking them seriously. This is necessary from both a moral and practical point of view.

On the other hand, the messages you receive in the media are carefully calibrated to have an effect. Many of the presenters are professionals, and they know how to bring about a result, to create an opinion in your mind, subtly and almost subliminally.

It’s important for all of us to remain focused on the basic historical facts, which have not changed as a result of post-modern, post-Zionist, post-anything-ism, so that we can resist being pushed into the pit of cyncism that Gordis describes so well, where we will become our own deadly enemies.

The opposition to the existence of Israel and the Jewish people — and that is what it is — is pervasive and well-financed, and has leveraged itself into almost a grass-roots movement in places like the UK and some US campuses. That doesn’t mean that the goal is any different than Hitler’s.

The Jews need to be part of the solution, not part of their problem.

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