FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

By Vic Rosenthal

Israel is presently being engaged in a full scale war by Hamas and the other factions’ militias, even if Israeli officials don’t admit it. As always, Hamas is happy to state their intentions clearly:

“We call on our fighters to launch rockets attacks on the settlement of Ashkelon [within the 1967 borders, of course — ed.], which was built on Palestinian-owned land,” said a Hamas official in the Jabalya refugee camp. “We will force the settlers to run away from Ashkelon as they have already done in the settlement of Sderot. We will continue to fight until the Jews leave all of Palestine.”

According to the official, Hamas has developed new rockets capable of reaching Ashkelon and other Israeli cities. “We will turn Ashkelon into a ghost city,” he warned. “We will use all methods against the Zionist enemy.”

Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders expressed satisfaction with the recent attacks on Sderot, noting that many residents had fled their homes. They also called for the resumption of suicide attacks…

The armed wings of Hamas, Fatah and Islamic Jihad said in separate statements that the rocket attacks would continue “until the Zionists flee from Palestine”…

“We will make the Jews drip tears of blood,” said Muhammad Abdel Al, a commander of the Popular Resistance Committees, an alliance of several terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip. “We will never find comfort until we shed the blood of the sons of monkeys and pigs.” — Jerusalem Post

The fact is that Israelis are presently fleeing from Sderot under a rocket bombardment to which “there is no immediate solution” in the words of the Prime Minister.

There is no question that an invasion of Gaza would be costly for Israel and for Palestinian civilians; certainly Hamas and its sponsors have been investing heavily in fortifications. I don’t know if this is the solution that the PM can’t seem to find, or if maybe there’s another one — perhaps something along the lines of the Lebanese army’s action against the Fatah al Islam terrorists.

When one nation declares a war of annihilation on another, and then attacks it murderously, the response should be commensurate. Think Britain, the Blitz, and Nazi Germany.

If the nation that is attacked does not strike back or does so weakly, the aggressor assumes that either it is for some reason incapable of fighting, or afraid of the consequences. In this case, the attack has been successful, and it will be followed by additional attacks until the enemy has been destroyed or surrenders.

Since the aggressor in this case has the backing of several major powers in the region, as well as the whole constellation of terrorist militias, the Israeli leadership is quite right in seeing the war that has been forced on it as a dangerous and costly struggle. But that doesn’t mean that the correct response is to avoid it.

I don’t know if war could have been avoided, but the situation today is past avoiding. Today it’s necessary to crush the enemy before it’s too late to act.

Think Britain, the Blitz, and Nazi Germany.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Hamas

By Vic Rosenthal (updated for clarity on 21 May)

Rabbi Eric Yoffie, head of the Union of Reform Judaism (URJ) is disturbed by the relationship between some elements of the US Jewish community and Christian Zionist Pastor John Hagee.

(more…)

It’s been suggested that the worst thing for Israel would be a complete collapse of the Palestinian Authority (PA), leaving Israel responsible for millions of Palestinians in the territories and with no one to talk to:

For the spiraling anarchy inside Gaza is not something Israel can watch from outside. A collapse of the PA as a government, something that the events of the last few days have shown is a real possibility, would have far-reaching strategic ramifications for Israel and could fundamentally change the two-state concept that has underpinned Israeli policy since 1993 and the Oslo Accords…

In a paper Reut published last November, [Gidi] Grinstein wrote that the aim of this strategy “is to establish one Palestinian/Arab/Islamic state in place of Israel through actions that will bring about Israel’s internal collapse as a state.”

According to this strategy, “the occupation accelerates Israel’s implosion and therefore should be sustained. Either way, the Hamas government in and of itself serves the ‘Strategy of Implosion’ because it creates a political deadlock, deepens the Palestinian crisis of representation, and erodes the PA’s capacity to govern.”

Grinstein, who was an adviser to Ehud Barak when Barak served as prime minister, said that the collapse of the PA – a situation of “non-governance there” – was bad for Israel. “We will have no one to talk to, and too many people to shoot at,” he said.

This analysis depends, of course, on the assumption that while there is a functional PA, there is someone to talk to whose ultimate goal is a peaceful two-state settlement.

That is by no means certain. The late, lamented Fatah organization was a creature of Israel’s greatest enemy since Amalek, Yasser Arafat. While differing from Hamas in strategy — prepared to use diplomacy as well as force — Fatah, in the opinion of many and in the words of its charter, sought the same goal: the replacement of the Jewish state with one ruled by Arabs.

If this is correct, then the destruction of Fatah is not particularly good or bad for Israel. If the “peace process” is to turn out, at the end of the day, to have been a mirage with peace always shimmering in the desert beyond reach, better to know that now.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Fatah, Hamas, Grinstein

By Vic Rosenthal

Moshe Elad wrote:

When Palestinian intellectuals in the US are seriously asked to explain how after 60 years of conflict, Israel has a space satellite, a series of Nobel Prize laureates for significant scientific achievements and an economy that thrives even during wartime, while the only Palestinian scientific achievement is the Qassam rocket, they respond: “Give us a state and we’ll be able to do the same.”

There are lots of reasons for the contrast, but one of the important ones is this: the Jews were always obsessed with the Jewish people, their survival, their culture, and their development. So were the Palestinians.

The US and Israel tried to give them a state in 2000, but they wouldn’t take it. Creating a state is slow, difficult work. Taking one away from somebody else is easier.

One of the mistakes made by some of the early Zionists was not to pay enough attention to the Arabs. The Arabs always paid attention to the Jews. The Palestinians like to talk about Palestinian culture and enterprise, but really all they care about is Jews: what they possess and how it can be taken from them. How everything originally belonged to them and how the Jews took it away. How to humiliate the Jews, how to hate them, and how to kill them.

That’s it. That’s Palestinian ‘culture’. A culture that can make heroes for children out of people that are willing to die themselves to kill Jews. Some Palestinians have big dreams, like blowing themselves up in a market, killing tens of Jews. Others have to be content with stealing Jewish cars.

In Gaza you have all these Palestinians cooped up together with no Jews to kill. They do their best, firing rockets into Sderot, trying to blow themselves up at crossings, shooting at electrical workers on poles, planting bombs near the border fence, tunneling under the border to plant explosives under Israeli military posts, torturing Israelis by kidnapping their children and dangling hope in front of them for months and sometimes years. But there’s all this untapped Palestinian creativity, of a type that is almost unique in the world, and it’s bottled up. So they have to fight each other, Hamas, Fatah, the clan two streets over.

When Jews were trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto, they published newspapers and journals, created works of art, played music, engaged in every imaginable form of economic activity — all this while they were being shipped out to extermination. The Palestinians fight, bomb internet cafes and coffee shops, assassinate rivals, kidnap friendly journalists, and try to kill Jews. The Palestinians are not imprisoned by the Jews, who would happily coexist with them, but by their mass psychosis about needing to kill Jews.

Is it something genetic that makes them like this? I don’t think so. They have a moral sense — there were great outcries of shame and horror when Fatah and Hamas started having their pitched battles in the streets. It just doesn’t extend to Jews.

I think Haj Amin al-Husseini, the fanatically antisemitic Mufti of Jerusalem and Yasser Arafat, my candidate for worst ‘human being’ of the 20th century had something to do with it. Both of these Palestinian leaders, much beloved by their people, always put killing Jews first among their priorities (Hitler did too). Arafat’s first task on his return to ‘Palestine’ in 1993 was to start building an educational system designed to create Jew-killers. Someone who was in the first grade in 1993 would be 20 years old today.

Today (Tuesday), 15 Gazans have been killed in inter-militia fighting, and 18 Israelis in Sderot wounded by Qassam rockets fired from Gaza, some seriously. Happy Nakba (catastrophe) day!

Technorati Tags: Palestinians, Jews

The phenomenon of anti-Israel Jews has always surprised me, and I tended to explain it in terms of Stockholm syndrome, rebellion against parental authority, etc. But its prevalence lately, as shown by Zombie’s photo essay on the recent appearance of Jimmy Carter in Berkeley, is making me think more in terms of some form of mass psychosis.

Zombie noted that most of the demonstrators did not appear to be connected with the university, and

It seemed, in fact, that the demonstration was more of a silent staring match between rival Jewish ideological camps: anti-Israel Jews (generally self-identified as “left-wing”) versus pro-Israel Jews (commonly though to my mind often inaccurately identified as “right-wing”).

Whatever is wrong with these people, it’s not just a few Chomskyite crazies anymore. A good friend of mine, who has been involved in pro-Israel advocacy for many years, recently told me “I’ve had it with the Jews. They’re not helpful. The real support for Israel today comes from Christians.”

I have to laugh when I read antisemitic commentary about how the Jewish Zionists work together systematically pulling the strings that cause world governments to tilt toward Israel’s interests. No string pulled by a Jew is likely to cause anything, because for sure there will be another Jew pulling in the opposite direction. Compare this to the almost unanimous position among Arabs and Muslims, even if they can’t agree on anything else, that there should not be a Jewish state in the Middle East.

Although arguments between Jews about Zionism have been going on among Jews since before the time of Herzl. Today with our enemies stooping to unimaginable depths of depravity, it’s even more depressing than usual.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Zionism, Jews