FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

The mysterious Elder of Ziyon, one of the smartest guys around, has written an excellent article called “The If-Then Fallacy.”

The fallacy consists of inferring that if Israel makes some kind of concession, then the Arabs — and the interested bystanders such as the EU, UN, media, US administration, etc. — will respond positively. Mr. Ziyon gives several examples in which this did not occur, the withdrawal from Gaza being a prominent one.

It was suggested that if Israel would withdraw, then not only would Gaza no longer be Israel’s problem, but Israel would be rewarded diplomatically for taking risks for peace. Israel did withdraw, at great social cost — a price the former residents of the settlements there are still paying. The result was that Hamas stepped up its rocket attacks, bringing about a war for which Israel was blamed (and unfairly vilified). And the world still believes that the Gaza strip is Israel’s responsibility!

The unsound inference made in such if-then propositions depends on a hidden premise: that the Arabs have some positive objective in their relations with Israel like peace, economic development, a Palestinian state, etc. If that were the case, then perhaps Israeli concessions would lead to an improvement in relations.

But this premise is false. Neither the leadership of the Palestinian Arabs — Hamas or Fatah — nor the majority of the ‘Palestinians in the street’ has these things as a primary goal. This is obvious with Hamas, who enjoy publicly saying it, but it is not hidden very deeply by the leaders of Fatah either. Their overriding policy objective is the elimination of Israel and the establishment of Arab control over all the territory presently occupied by it.

This was the objective in 1948, and it was Arafat’s objective. Nothing has changed.

This is why all of the peace processing and all of the initiatives by Israel and the West have been fruitless. This is why the Obama Administration’s plan to create a Palestinian state by pressuring Israel will either fail or will be disastrous for Israel. It is irrational to try to negotiate borders while one party remains committed to the destruction of the other party.

And this is the reason that it is essential that a prospective peace partner be prepared to say, in Arabic as well as English, that Israel is the state of the Jewish people.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Arabs, logic, peace process

I have something to tell you: I am pro-settler.

OK, you are not surprised. But considering the amount of vitriol poured out every day on settlers and settlements, I thought I needed to explicitly say this.

For example, here is how Naomi Paiss of the putatively pro-Israel New Israel Fund (about which I wrote yesterday) justifies boycotting ‘settlement’ products and artistic activities beyond the Green Line:

The settlements are not in Israel. They represent not “just” a blot on Israel as a just and decent nation, and a terrible danger to its survival, but also the waste of billions of shekels for security, expensive bypass roads, government-subsidized construction and mortgages, and more. Those are shekels that could be used to build a more prosperous and socially just Israel. Refusing products and services made in the settlements, and opposing government expenditures there, is well within the rights of every organization and individual who intends to influence the Israeli government to finally abandon the quixotic and immoral settlement enterprise.

I think even members of the pro-Zionist Left (I think NIF has crossed the line, although they would deny it) more or less share this viewpoint. Here’s a snippet from Rabbi Eric Yoffie of the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ). Keep in mind that Rabbi Yoffie is much closer to the center than Paiss and even some other members of the URJ leadership:

Settlement leaders are idealistic, often brave, and deeply committed to their goals. But what they are fighting for is not the State of Israel, whose urgent political and diplomatic needs they ignore. It is not the citizens of Israel, whose lives and future are endangered by the path that the settlers advocate. And it is not Zionism, which calls for democratic principles that they reject.  What they are fighting for is settlements – which have become their god.

There are lots of threads here. One is that settlements are ‘not Israel’. Another is that they are bad for Israel. Yet another is that they — and by implication, those who live in them — are ‘immoral’.

The source for the ‘not Israel’ theme is the obligatory mantra chanted in every BBC report or NY Times article that mentions settlements, that they are “illegal under international law.” I am not going to present a detailed argument in opposition; it has been done competently with appropriate historical background by Nicholas Rostow here. Rostow gives both sides of the argument, and it’s clear which would prevail before an unbiased judge. Suffice to say that the terms of the mandate gave Jews a right to settle in these areas which has not been revoked; that the armistice lines established in 1949 have never been recognized as permanent borders; and that the fourth Geneva Convention — neither in language nor in intent — does not apply.

So they are legal. Are they ‘bad for Israel’? Yoffie seems to think they are because they are an obstacle to peace. This too, is a tired argument which is easily refuted. Has not Israel dismantled settlements and withdrawn from territory in the name of peace? Has not Israel proposed, at least twice in the last ten years, to withdraw from almost all of Judea and Samaria in return for peace, and have not the Arabs refused these offers, primarily because they did not include a return of ‘refugees’ to  pre-1967 Israel?

A recent poll of Palestinian Arabs has shown that 60% of them view a ‘two-state solution’ as a stepping stone to the replacement of Israel with an Arab state, 58% believe that “now is a time for armed struggle”, only 23% believe that Israel has a permanent right to exist, and 66% believe that “over time Palestinians must work to get back all the land for a Palestinian state.” Perhaps we are looking for obstacles to peace in the wrong place?

Although Paiss and Yoffie call settlements ‘dangerous’, the evacuation thereof without a true peace partner would be much more dangerous to security, as the withdrawal from Gaza illustrated.

It may be that what most of those who say that settlements are dangerous mean is that permanent possession of the territories would either make Israel ultimately become an Arab state or lose its democratic character.  But there are lots of possible solutions to this problem, whereas there’s no solution besides war to a terror state next door to the most populous part of Israel.

So finally, they are left with the ‘immorality’. That might mean that they think it’s ‘Palestinian land’ that the settlers have ‘stolen’. Which is mostly nonsense, since almost all settlements are built on state or purchased land, the armistice lines aren’t borders, etc. Naturally, the Arabs claim that everything is theirs and it was all stolen, but that goes for Tel Aviv, too.

Another reason settlers might be ‘immoral’ is that they “deny the Palestinian Arabs dignity and self-determination.” But they don’t — they simply want to live in peace in the historic Jewish homeland, alongside the Arabs, who have been trying to murder them for at least a hundred years, whose leaders refused every offer of partition or compromise. In fact the Arab struggle against Jewish self-determination is the initial cause of the conflict and what sustains it.

Historically, whenever the Arabs had the upper hand, they massacred Jews (as in Hebron in 1929 or Gush Etzion in 1948) or drove them out (the Old City in 1948). The Jordanians made stables out of synagogues and latrines out of Jewish gravestones. Who is trying to deny what to whom?

According to Yoffie, settlers can’t be Zionists because they reject democracy. Should they embrace ‘democracy’ in the form of giving up their own rights, accepting the rule of the Arabs whose heartfelt desire is to kill them or kick them out of the land of Israel? That wouldn’t be very Zionistic, would it?

The anti-settler people would probably say that I’m a racist, just like the settlers. But who denies Jews the right to live in the area “they want for their future state?”  Who has decreed a death penalty for those who sell land to Jews? Who does drive-by shootings on the roads (hence the ‘bypass roads Paiss criticizes), and who stones Jewish vehicles and tries to lynch their occupants? Who broadcasts anti-Semitic propaganda in their official media?

Who are the racists here?

Technorati Tags: Israel, settlements, settlers

A two-faced policy on BDS

This January, an American charity, the New Israel Fund (NIF), was accused of funding most of the Israeli NGO’s that provided the documentation for the Goldstone Report.  And the NIF supported organizations dedicated to the delegitimization of Israel for long before that.

As a result of pressure from the organization “NGO Monitor”, the NIF agreed to change its funding guidelines, to now include the following restrictions (my emphasis):

Organizations that engage in the following activities will not be eligible for NIF grants or support:

1. Participate in partisan political activity
2. Promote anti-democratic values
3. Support the 1967 occupation and subsequent settlement activity
4. Violate the human rights of any group or individual, advocate human rights selectively for
   one group over another and/or reject the principle of the universality of human rights
5. Condone or promote violence or use violent tactics
6. Employ racist or derogatory language or designations about any group based on their
   religion, race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation.
7. Works to deny the right of the Jewish people to sovereign self-determination within Israel, or to deny the rights of Palestinian or other non-Jewish citizens to full equality within a democratic Israel.
8. Engage in activities at odds with the positions, principles, or vision of the New Israel Fund.

But some of the NGOs supported by NIF clearly do violate no. 7 above. And we were led to believe that NIF would stop funding them. NGO Monitor tells us that

On September 16, 2010, in a JTA report published shortly before Yom Kippur, the guidelines were presented as a fundamental change in NIF’s funding policies. NIF Director Daniel Sokatch told the news agency that NIF “would prohibit proposals for a binational constitution of the kind that two NIF grantees submitted several years ago.” (The grantees in question, Adalah and Mossawa, each proposed constitutions in 2007 calling for Israel to abandon its definition as a Jewish state. NIF grantee Mada al-Carmel’s “Haifa Declaration” is similar.)

Almost immediately thereafter, NIF officials began to backtrack:

…in a later JTA story, Sokatch “clarif[ied]” that, in the cases of Adalah or Mada al-Carmel, a text denying Israel’s Jewish character “would have to be central to an organization’s activities in order to result in a suspension of funding, and that NIF would be the one to make the determination over whether or not that threshold had been reached.” [my emphasis]

So, as long as a group can claim that denying Israel’s Jewish character is merely incidental to their activity, no problem. Back right up to the money bin and fill up. Naturally, all of the organizations named above claim that their central activity is working for Arab rights, and only incidentally denying those of Jews.

More recently, the question of NIF support for groups promoting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement [BDS] has been raised. Back in April, I quoted the following from the NIF website:

Although we will continue to communicate publicly and privately to our allies and grantees that NIF does not support BDS as a strategy or tactic, we will not reduce or eliminate our funding for grantees that differ with us on a tactical matter. NIF will not fund BDS activities nor support organizations for which BDS is a substantial element of their activities, but will support organizations that conform to our grant requirements if their support for BDS is incidental or subsidiary to their significant programs.

It’s still there, and Jeffrey Goldberg understands it this way:

The way I read this, the NIF does not support the attempt by anti-Israel activists to turn the world’s only Jewish country into a pariah state, and Jews into a target — once again — of a broad-based economic boycott. Except when it does, a little.

Indeed.

Technorati Tags:   New Israel Fund, NIF, BDS, Israel

Daniel Gordis:

Until this week, we might have thought that while America and Israel could disagree on certain policies, when it came to defending Israel’s fundamental legitimacy, there could be no doubt as to what the US would do. Now, the pretense is over. This administration will protect the Jews and their state only if the Jews accede to American demands that Washington thinks it needs to advance its own diplomatic agenda abroad. That is the sign neither of a trustworthy ally nor of a country animated by principle.

The Obama Administration is animated by ‘principle’ to be sure, but the principle involved is not the moral vision of our Founding Fathers, which is grounded in Judaism, Christianity and the principles of the Enlightenment. Rather, this administration adheres to the ethical system of left-wing academe, in which the highest values are multiculturalism and political correctness (PC).

This is why our government places a nation like Israel on the scales with political entities that behave like the Barbary Pirates or worse, and finds it moral to be ‘even-handed’ in its treatment of them. And this is why our President treats despots like the King of Saudi Arabia with exaggerated respect, despite the fact that this unelected tyrant rules a kingdom which violates our basic ideals of equal rights for people of different race, sex or religion, and chops off the hands of petty thieves.

But it would be very un-multicultural to note that these Saudis (and others) are uncivilized barbarians with noisome habits and ugly attitudes, so we pretend that they deserve the same respect as Israelis or Americans.

Nothing illustrates the way in which we’ve allowed our principles to be subverted than the current flap about invasive airport security. In order to avoid the act or appearance of profiling — a serious violation of PC — the TSA is prepared to violate a much older and important social taboo by invading the personal space and privacy of travelers in an unprecedented way.

Full-body scanner image. There are better ways to spot a terrorist.

The cost of the technology is enormous, and there is a large group of people — the ones whose values differ the most from those of our administration, by the way — who will at least be humiliated and at most placed in a mortifying bind.

Not only is this expensive and socially explosive, it represents closing yet another barn door after the horse has been carried away. Having caused us to jump through another hoop, terrorists will now find a different method or target to attack.

Nevertheless, an alternative known to be effective — a rational system of profiling and psychological screening like Israel uses — is absolutely ruled out for moral reasons! But like the people who cling to their guns and their religion, the ones who object to having their bodies viewed or their ‘junk touched’ will just have to get used to it.

It’s ironic that the culture of the ‘Palestinians’ or the Saudis is considered so worthy of respect, while that of socially conservative Americans is treated with disrespect and condescension.

The administration isn’t even consistent in its multiculturalism!

Technorati Tags: Daniel Gordis, political correctness, TSA, full-body screener

It’s a no-brainer that for the 4 to 5 million hostile Arabs, 99% of whom have never lived in Israel, who have grown up and been formed under the thumbs of the most radical terrorist factions in the ‘refugee’ camps of Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority (PA), to ‘return’ to pre-1967 Israel would be catastrophic.

Everyone knows this. How could it be otherwise? And yet, the ‘right of return’, a ‘right’ which doesn’t exist anywhere in international law, combined with a hereditary refugee status — something which no other class of refugees has ever been granted — is insisted upon by those who at the same time claim that their goal is ‘two states living side by side at peace’.

The premier example, of course, is the PA, which includes the ‘right of return’ as part of their definition of a ‘two-state solution’. We’ve been through this before: a state of ‘Palestine’ where Jews are not allowed, and what used to be Israel, which will be an Arab-majority state. Good luck to the Jews there!

Another example is the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, which holds the ‘right of return’ as one of its objectives. Thanks to friend-of-Obama Ali Abumimah for stating this clearly:

An overwhelming majority of organizations have endorsed Palestinian civil society’s two calls for boycott, divestment and sactions against Israel and for academic and cultural boycott of Israel — until it ceases to deny Palestinian history, ends the Occupation, ceases discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel, and permits displaced Palestinian refugees to return to their homes.

You can be sure, therefore, that when someone calls for ‘right of return’ and ‘ending the occupation’, they are talking about the ‘occupation’ of 1948, not 1967. The advocates of BDS make a big deal about how it is a non-violent strategy, but clearly the denouement will not be non-violent, not when the ‘returnees’ start to try to claim ‘their property’.

This provides a test to distinguish those who really do desire coexistence from those who want to throw the Jews into the sea (an expression perhaps originated by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Hassan al-Banna). Do they call for ‘right of return’? Do they support the BDS delegitimization strategy? If so, they fail the test.

Even J Street is careful to claim that they are opposed to BDS. But Jewish Voice for Peace, the only ‘Jewish’ organization on the ADL’s list of the top ten most anti-Israel groups in America, supports it.

Locally, Peace Fresno explicitly calls for right of return and supports BDS (as if anyone cares). The Fresno Center for Nonviolence does, too. Do they see a contradiction? Probably not.

Technorati Tags: Israel, right of return, BDS, Palestinian Authority