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Schoolyard bullies (from the film "Back to the Future"). Why is the Obama Administration joining them?

The Obama Administration has joined the schoolyard bullies:

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned Sunday that Israel is becoming increasingly isolated in the Middle East, The Associated Press reported.

Panetta added Israel must restart negotiations with the Palestinian Authority and work to restore relations with Egypt and Turkey.

Panetta made the comments as he was traveling to Israel, saying the ongoing upheaval in the Middle East makes it critical for the Israelis to find ways to communicate with other nations in the region in order to have stability.

“There’s not much question in my mind that they maintain that (military) edge,” AP quoted Panetta as having told reporters traveling with him. “But the question you have to ask: Is it enough to maintain a military edge if you’re isolating yourself in the diplomatic arena? Real security can only be achieved by both a strong diplomatic effort as well as a strong effort to project your military strength.” –  (my emphasis)

Let’s compare the implications of Panetta’s remarks to reality:

“Israel must restart negotiations.” Why is the onus on Israel?  It was the Palestinian Authority (PA) that broke off negotiations and then violated the agreements it had signed by seeking UN sanction for a unilateral declaration of statehood. It was the PA that insisted on one precondition after another, and Israel that agreed to talk without preconditions.

Making Israel give in to PA demands on the grounds that then there will be productive negotiations has exactly the opposite effect. The Arabs pocket the latest concession and demand more. Negotiations are never ‘productive’ because the PA will never agree to end the conflict.

“Israel must work to restore relations with Egypt and Turkey.” This is Kafkaesque. A terrorist attack which killed 7 Israelis was launched from Egyptian territory, Egyptian soldiers or police murdered at least one of the victims and were themselves killed when the Israelis returned fire. Israel apologized — for self-defense — and had its embassy destroyed, and barely avoided having security officers who were trapped inside ripped to bloody bits. Now Israel needs to “work” to restore relations? With a country that while allegedly ‘at peace’ with it, continues its vicious incitement against Jews and Israel?

In fact, why hasn’t the US suggested to Egypt that in return for the billions in aid it gets every year, maybe it should stop being the biggest purveyor of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate in the world? This has been going on for decades.

And Turkey — whose leader has systematically tried to humiliate Israel since he took power almost 10 years ago, whose campaign climaxed with the intentional provocation of a bloody incident in the Mediterranean, who has gone as far as to threaten acts of war against Israel when even the usually-pliant UN said that Israel was justified in its actions — what kind of self-abnegation does the Obama Administration expect from Israel and what makes them think it would make Turkey change course, when the present one is so deliberate?

“Israel is isolating itself.” No, Israel has bent over backwards to have good relations — with the Palestinians, with Egypt, with Turkey. Any isolation is being imposed by those who — pay attention, here it comes — do not want a solution to the conflict between Israel and its neighbors that leaves a Jewish state in existence. Can anything be more obvious?

Do Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah want coexistence? Of course not, the evidence is overwhelming that their goal is to destroy Israel. Does Hamas want coexistence? Don’t make me laugh. Does the Turkish Islamist AKP regime want good relations? Of course not, the more they hurt Israel, the better a candidate for leadership of the Muslim Middle East they will be. Do the Egyptian Islamists and nationalists want good relations? Of course not — they, too, want to prove that they are qualified to lead the Muslim world, and they need someone to blame for the economic catastrophe that is already brewing.

The Europeans (although there are exceptions) play along. They have trade relations with Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, etc. — whose regimes, incidentally, are at each others throats about every imaginable issue other than the need to end the Jewish state. And the Europeans have good, solid Israel-hating — Jew-hating, too, if the truth be told — constituencies at home, and it is not all due to Muslim immigrants, either.

So what about the Obama Administration? What does it get for joining in with the scapegoating of Israel, along with the rest of the schoolyard bullies? Somebody should ask them, because I am giving up on looking for economic and geopolitical explanations.

Technorati Tags: Leon Panetta, Israel

In yet another “why young American Jews don’t support Israel” piece, this one in Time magazine, Dana Goldstein describes her ’emotional’ conflict with her mother:

I understand the frustrations of the Palestinians who are dealing with ongoing Israeli settlement construction and sympathize with their decision to approach the U.N., but my mom supports President Obama’s promise to wield the U.S. veto, sharing his view that a two-state solution can be achieved only through negotiations with Israel.

She doesn’t talk much about why her mother would like to see Obama veto the Palestinian resolution, but like most young people she probably doesn’t listen carefully to her parents.

I would think that her mother, who is said to have a degree in Jewish History, understands that Israel is looking for an agreement that will end the conflict. It is not interested in giving Fatah and Hamas a better diplomatic and military platform to fight from. So it insists on recognition of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people and security arrangements, and will never agree to the absurd demand to resettle ‘refugees’ in Israel.

Maybe she also understands the Palestinian strategy, which is simple:

1. Demand the platform that they want from the UN.
2. Then President Obama, caught between a rock and a hard place, will pressure Israel to make concessions in order to ‘restart negotiations’ and obviate the need for a UN Security Council vote.

They can’t lose. They can repeat the cycle, with slight variations, over and over. Each time, Israel gives a little. Ultimately, they get the platform they want without the recognition and security arrangements Israel needs.

Dana Goldstein doesn’t even give lip service to Israeli concerns. She refers to the “security” fence — the quotes suggesting that is not for security — and says that it “tamped down terrorist attacks but also separated Palestinian villagers from their land and water supply.” Even given that in some places it was a real problem for Palestinians, isn’t tamping down terrorism important? Does she have any idea of what terrorism means for Israelis?

She says that she “understand[s] the frustrations” of the Palestinians, but she never seems to empathize with the real concern of the Israelis, that if the Palestinian program is carried out it will be the end of the Jewish state.

Goldstein focuses only on the Palestinians. She doesn’t mention the missile threat from Hizballah, the nuclear one from Iran, or the emerging one of Turkey and Egypt becoming confrontation states. None of these are a result of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and in fact they are arguments that this is a very bad time for concessions that would weaken Israel’s strategic position.

How did she come to feel this way?

It was only after I went to college, met Muslim friends and enrolled in a Middle Eastern history and politics course that I was challenged to reconcile my liberal, humanist worldview with the fact that the Jewish state of which I was so proud was occupying the land of 4.4 million stateless Palestinians, many of them refugees displaced by Israel’s creation.

In other words, she rejected her mother’s point of view in favor of a laughably ignorant and entirely one-sided one that she heard from the mouths of anti-Israel Muslims and left-wing academics. Surely her mother could have explained to her from a historical and legal point of view whose land it is, and whose fault it is that there are 4.4 million stateless Arabs on the permanent international dole.

She admits that Orthodox Jews are an exception to the generation gap that she describes, but she doesn’t quote any of them or seem to have an interest in why they support Israel. She does quote an 18-year old who proudly remarked that heckling Israeli PM Netanyahu helped her “reclaim her own Judaism.”

I want to avoid pop psychology here, but one wants to say: listen to your mother, girl!

***

The entire piece is facile, a collection of sophomoric anti-Israel clichés. Why did Time publish it?

The answer lies in the quotation at the beginning of this post. I’ll quote it again, with emphasis:

I understand the frustrations of the Palestinians who are dealing with ongoing Israeli settlement construction and sympathize with their decision to approach the U.N., but my mom supports President Obama’s promise to wield the U.S. veto, sharing his view that a two-state solution can be achieved only through negotiations with Israel.

So that’s the false dilemma they present: support the Palestinians, or support Obama’s efforts to pressure Israel. Make up your mind — just don’t support Israel.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Obama

An unmanned Predator launches a Hellfire missile

Unmanned weapons are big news today, as it’s reported that a drone-fired missile in Yemen has killed Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born jihadist who inspired the Ft. Hood killer, the Times Square bomber, the “underwear bomber” and more.

If there has been a single terrorist as threatening to the US as bin Laden, Awlaki was it. Through his website, videos, and online English-language magazine, “Inspire” (Google will not give me the URL, but you can see some of its content here), he — apparently effectively — inspires home-grown terrorism, the most difficult kind to interdict. Inspire‘s editor, Samir Khan, was also reportedly killed in the strike.

Everyone even slightly interested in military technology has known for some time that robotic weapons represent a major paradigm shift, like the phalanx, the  longbow, the machine gun, the military aircraft, etc. War will never be the same.

Unsurprisingly, many see this development as undesirable. Tom Engelhard writes,

The appeal is obvious: the cost (in U.S. lives) is low; in the case of the drones, nonexistent.  There is no need for large counterinsurgency armies of occupation of the sort that have bogged down on the mainland of the Greater Middle East these last years.

In an increasingly cash-strapped and anxious Washington, it must look like a literal godsend.  How could it go wrong?

Of course, that’s a thought you can only hang onto as long as you’re looking down on a planet filled with potential targets scurrying below you.  The minute you look up, the minute you leave your joystick and screen behind and begin to imagine yourself on the ground, it’s obvious how things could go so very, very wrong — how, in fact, in Pakistan, to take but one example, they are going so very, very wrong.
…
In a country now struggling simply to guarantee help to its own citizens struck by natural disasters, Washington is preparing distinctly unnatural disasters in the imperium.  In this way, both at home and abroad, the American dream is turning into the American scream.

So when we build those bases on that global field of screams, when we send our armadas of drones out to kill, don’t be surprised if the rest of the world doesn’t see us as the good guys or the heroes, but as terminators.  It’s not the best way to make friends and influence people, but once your mindset is permanent war, that’s no longer a priority.  It’s a scream, and there’s nothing funny about it.

Pakistan  has vehemently objected to the use of drones in its territory, claiming that innocent civilians are often killed by mistake. Of course, one might ask: would they prefer that we use bombers or artillery? The drones do a much more precise job of killing their targets with minimal collateral damage than almost any other way of doing it. And it isn’t immoral to want to reduce our own casualties. The Pakistanis simply don’t want us fighting there, period — a legitimate position for them to take, but the use of drones doesn’t strengthen their case, it weakens it.

Engelhardt argues that the cheapness of the weapons, the ability to use them without endangering our soldiers, and even the relative freedom from collateral damage, makes us more prone to use them, to fight in more places around the world. The checks and balances that result from the expense and danger of conventional war, he believes, will not work to prevent excesses on behalf of the ‘imperium’.

And now we can see where he’s coming from. According to Engelhardt, we are the evil empire:

As [our leaders] definitionally twitch and turn, we can just begin to glimpse — like an old-fashioned photo developing in a tray of chemicals — the outlines of a new form of American imperial war emerging before our eyes.  It involves guarding the empire on the cheap, as well as on the sly, via the CIA, which has, in recent years, developed into a full-scale, drone-heavy paramilitary outfit, via a growing secret army of special operations forces that has been incubating inside the military these last years, and of course via those missile- and bomb-armed robotic assassins of the sky.

There is, however, another way of looking at it.

Despite what Engelhardt thinks, we are not an invincible imperial power. In fact, the tide of history may have begun to turn in favor of those who hold the idea of democracy in contempt (yes, I know ours isn’t perfect), who believe in religiously-based hierarchical rule and the fundamental inferiority of women, who think that polytheists like Hindus must convert to their religion or die, that Christians and Jews must accept permanently inferior status, and that the US constitution should be replaced by the law of the Quran.

One of the reasons that they have the ability to challenge us is that they have adopted and improved techniques of asymmetric warfare, particularly terrorism, which leverage against us the complicated economic and technological structures on which our survival depends. Terrorism is used as part of an integrated military, psychological, economic and diplomatic attack which has been quite successful in pushing Western influence out of the Middle East, and in damaging us socially and economically.

Weapons like the Predator neutralize to some extent the advantage of asymmetric warfare by enabling precise targeting of terrorists in the midst of civilian populations. You simply can’t do this any other way, regardless of cost.

Traditional warfare is mostly fought by lowly soldiers, from the bottom up. But terrorist entities don’t fight with armies. We often don’t know who their ‘soldiers’ are. But they do have key men, and the way to fight them is to target the key men. Awlaki is a perfect example. Robotic weapons may be the answer to terrorism that we’ve sought for years.

Engelhardt tries to suggest that the technology is actually driving its own use, that the Predators (etc.) in effect have minds of their own, and imagines scary science-fiction scenarios in which they actually do have minds of their own. But this is nonsense. They are controlled by human beings, targets are selected by human beings, and human beings must authorize their use. They possibly give rise to a higher degree of accountability than an assault rifle in the hands of an ordinary soldier, who has to make split-second decisions based on very imperfect knowledge.

Although Englehardt would say that we have made our enemies what they are by our oppression and that they would leave us alone if we left them alone, I don’t buy it. There is an ideological imperative driving radical Islamic terrorism, and it is not one of live and let live. They have been empowered by the West’s money and technology and they are going to exploit it to their best advantage until they have conquered or destroyed us.

I would probably agree with Englehardt and his friends that we could become a far more just and humane society. I would agree that we have sometimes fought wars for the wrong reasons in the wrong places. I would even agree that there is a moral rot in some of our most important institutions, including government, that we will need to expunge if we are to survive.

But compared to our enemies, there is simply no comparison.

We have an acrimonious debate in our country about whether gays and lesbians should be allowed to marry — in Iran, they hang them. We worry about the pervasiveness of poverty in ethnic communities — in Sudan and Mauritania slavery is legal, and in Saudi Arabia it is still prevalent after officially being abolished in 1962. Last week, there was a great outcry here against the execution of  a possibly innocent man — in Syria, the regime is murdering hundreds of political opponents every week.

We have two choices. We can defend our society against the asymmetric assault mounted against it by radical Islamists, while we do our best to improve it where it falls short of our ideals, or we can accept the verdict of the Islamists that it is hopelessly corrupt and evil, and not fight back.

In my opinion the real motivation of those who attack the use of drones and similar weapons is that they are just too effective. I believe that on some level, people like Engelhardt want to see Western society humbled, even destroyed.

History gives numerous examples of more advanced civilizations being destroyed by barbarians. In our case, I don’t think it’s inevitable.

Technorati Tags: Predator, drones, Western Civilization, radical Islamism, Anwar al-Alawki

May 1948: the Jewish state is declared

Someone recently quoted an official of the New Israel Fund (NIF) as saying “NIF is not a Zionist organization.” One might respond “so what else is new?” Although the NIF’s statement of principles begins

The New Israel Fund is dedicated to the vision of the State of Israel as the sovereign expression of the right of self-determination of the Jewish people…

clearly it does not support the idea of Jewish sovereignty — rather, as we can see by examining the causes it supports, it views sovereignty as residing in the will of all of Israel’s citizens.  This is a time-honored position, if not appropriate for a Zionist group. I think the official quoted was being honest and I don’t think there would be much disagreement among them, if NIF leadership would speak openly.

I’m not attacking the NIF today, which I’ve done numerous times in the past. I just want to use this to illustrate a fundamental divide among Jews centering on Israel and Zionism.

Zionism asserts that there is a Jewish people — a nation — and that it ought to have a ‘sovereign expression’, that is, its own country, in its historical homeland.

Nationalism of any kind isn’t popular among those who identify as liberal or progressive. It’s a fundamental part of their official worldview that differences between national groups are inessential, ‘mere’ matters of culture, language, religion, ancestry, etc. As a result, they believe that it is immoral to base political structures on them. So much for any form of nationalism — including Zionism.

That is not to say that they don’t take note of cultural differences. These are the people who like to ‘celebrate diversity’. And they advocate corrective political action when they believe a group has been discriminated against, like affirmative action. But they would justify this only in order to redress an existing imbalance.

The logical extension of this is to post-colonialism, which asserts that existing worldwide political structures are massively unbalanced against ‘people of color’ (which doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with race), and that massive corrective political action, sometimes in the form of violent ‘resistance’ is justified.

This leads to absurd positions, such as the toleration of nationalism and even vicious racism, misogyny, homophobia, etc. on the part of ‘oppressed’ peoples. These behaviors are considered a result of their oppression — post-colonialists blame the ‘oppressor’, never the ‘oppressed’ — and are presumably expected to go away when the oppression is eliminated. Nationalistic aspirations by non-favored groups, like the Jewish people, are rejected. In the event that they conflict with the aspirations of an ‘oppressed’ group — well, I don’t have to draw you the picture.

This explains why the far Left is prepared to tolerate racism, terrorism and the rest when it is directed at Jews by Palestinian Arabs: a supposedly immoral nationalism is being challenged by an ‘oppressed’ group, with all of the special dispensations from normal moral rules that such groups are given.

In an imaginary ‘ideal’ world — one that is impossible given the basic drives of territoriality, tribalism, greed, etc. that characterize the human animal — it would perhaps be possible to give up nations, borders, conscription, security barriers, and many other things that apparently so irk the NIF leadership. But in the real world, the assumption of these ‘ideal’ values — even if they were not accompanied by the pernicious, deliberate tolerance of evil that is post-colonialism — is a form of unilateral disarmament.

Zionism, therefore, is not only an expression of the idea that Jewish culture is best preserved in a Jewish state and an effective response to antisemitism, it is also a response to the incoherent, fundamentally self-contradictory philosophy of post-colonialism.

Happy new year — לשנה טובה תכתבו — to all.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Zionism, NIF

Everyone is disappointed with Israel again:

[EU Foreign Affairs chief Catherine] Ashton urged Israel to “reverse” its decision to build 1,100 new housing units in Gilo, saying that “settlement activity” threatens the viability of a two-state solution.

Both Ashton and UK Foreign Secretary William Hague slammed Israel for seemingly ignoring the Quartet of Middle East mediators, which called last week for a resumption of peace talks and for both Israelis and Palestinians to resist “provocative actions” …

This new housing plan, Hague said, was just the kind of “provocative” move to be avoided. “Settlement expansion is illegal under international law [false — ed.], corrodes trust and undermines the basic principle of land for peace,” Hague said, calling on Israel to “revoke this decision.”

Earlier, the United States said that Gilo plan was “counterproductive” and urged both Israel and the Palestinians not to take steps which could complicate resumption of direct peace talks.   “We are deeply disappointed by this morning’s announcement by the government of Israel,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said.

And Mahmoud Abbas said this in his UN speech last week:

The occupation is racing against time to redraw the borders on our land according to what it wants and to impose a fait accompli on the ground that changes the realities and that is undermining the realistic potential for the existence of the State of Palestine.

So where is Gilo? Let’s see exactly how it is “provocative” and “redraws the borders”?

Map showing Gilo neighborhood, 100 yards from 1949 armistice line. Click for larger version (h/t: Lenny Ben-David)

Yes folks, this is what all the fuss is about: a few more apartments in an existing Jewish neighborhood where 40,000 Jews already live, located 100 yards from the Green Line, adjoining other Jewish neighborhoods and empty space.

Is it not 100% certain that if Israel and the Palestinians were to reach an agreement to create a Palestinian state that Gilo would end up on the Israeli side of the border? Let me put it another way: what imaginable Israeli government would agree to a treaty that would not place Gilo in Israel?

Palestinian Arab fantasies that the UN or the US is going to declare that everything outside the 1949 armistice line belongs to them so that they can move forward with their plan to expel the Jews are just that — fantasies.

So why do the US and Europe indulge them?

There are so many simply fraudulent issues here. One is the significance of the armistice line. It was not accepted by anyone — not the Jews and definitely not the Arabs –  as a border in 1949, and UNSC resolutions 242 and 338 clearly implied that it was not to become one. Jews lived on both sides of it, in Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem until the Jordanian army ethnically cleansed the area in 1948. The UNSC resolutions and the Oslo agreement clearly indicated that the border would be determined by negotiations between the parties.

The idea that the land east of the line is ‘Palestinian’ has no basis in international law or treaty and has simply been repeated enough times by the Arabs and their supporters that many — apparently even those who should know better, like Ashton and Hague — have come to believe it or pretend to.

Another false issue is expressed by the comment I  heard recently that Israel is “gobbling up” the territories in order, as Abbas says, to “redraw the map.”  But no new settlements have been established since Oslo (unless you count tiny unauthorized ‘outposts’ that are torn down by Israeli police, sometimes rather aggressively). The construction that is so vehemently opposed is all within the boundaries  of existing settlements.

In fact, most of the population growth in Judea and Samaria is due to people having children. Only a net of 4000 people moved to the territories in 2010. So much for “gobbling up!”

Finally, the requirement that Israel refrain from construction across the Green Line is a new one, adopted by the Palestinians in 2010, with the help of Barack Obama. Settlements did not prevent Israel from returning the Sinai to Egypt or (unfortunately) from evacuating Gaza.

The Palestinian strategy is simple: promise  serious negotiations if Israel will just [fill in the blank]. Then let the ‘international community’ pressure Israel. If Israel concedes, then there is suddenly another ‘roadblock to peace’. Israel is weakened, new starting points are set, and the process begins again. Of course there can never be truly serious negotiations, because the Palestinians will never agree to end the conflict while a Jewish state exists.

Now that the Security Council vote is hanging over Israel’s head (as Caroline Glick explained recently), there is yet another club to beat Israel with.

But there are real subjects that could be discussed, if there were interest in ending the conflict on both sides. They are, for example,

1. Israel’s security needs
2. Recognition of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people
3. Agreement on a solution to the refugee problem outside of Israel

Unfortunately, there will be no agreement on these because they negate the heart of today’s Palestinian position and the Palestinian cause itself.  Until there is a Palestinian leadership that can accept the idea that there will be a Jewish state, there’s no point in talking.

Israel should make this clear to the US President, EU officials, and everyone else. It should not participate in a phony ‘peace process’ based on fraudulent issues like construction outside of the Green Line, which will only gnaw away at Israel’s security without bringing peace any closer.

If this means taking unilateral steps like annexing parts of the territories and letting the chips in the UN fall where they may, so be it.

The Israeli Left is fond of saying “the status quo is not viable,” referring to the status quo in the territories. I would prefer to say “continuing the so-called ‘peace process’ is unsupportable.”

If there can’t be an honest conversation, let there be no conversation at all.

Update [1806 PDT]: Read more about Gilo and its history here.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Gilo, Palestinian statehood, Catherine Ashton, William Hague