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I’ve just started reading the new book by Efraim Karsh, Palestine Betrayed. I’ll write a review at some point, but there is a good one by Daniel Pipes here.

Karsh refutes the revisionist view of the history of the state of Israel that has become the standard version taught at American (and other) universities, according to which early Zionists advocated expulsion of Palestinian Arabs and then the Hagana, Etzel and Lehi carried it out. In fact — and Karsh carefully documents this — Ben Gurion, Jabotinsky and others did not call for or desire ethnic cleansing in Palestine, and most of the exodus of Arabs in 1947-49 was  not directly caused by the actions of the Jews. The nakba (catastrophe), presented in Arab mythology as an unprovoked mass expulsion on racial grounds, Karsh argues, is exactly that — a myth.

Further, he argues that the disaster that overtook the Palestinian Arabs was entirely caused by the stubborn insistence of their leadership, particularly the antisemitic, Nazi-admiring Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, to oppose any accommodation with the Jews in Palestine. The violence that characterized the pre-state period, he shows, was almost entirely provoked by these leaders, who cynically fostered hatred and suspicion of the Jews and disseminated antisemitic propaganda while profiting massively from the sale of land to those same Jews whose death or expulsion they called for daily.

In the years since 1948, the view of the ‘new historians’ has almost entirely replaced that found in contemporary accounts, and has done enormous damage to Zionism and Israel. Today most American university students accept as given that the state was founded in a racist, colonialist act of oppression in which most of the indigenous population was expelled and the remainder exploited. Their opinions on today’s events — and their decisions about whom to believe — are built on the foundation of this myth. An ironic thanks is due to Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappé, etc., the dishonest historians who, in part because they are Jews — Israeli Jews — did so much to arm Israel’s academic and media enemies.

The fact is that if you already believe that Israel’s founders were scoundrels, then it is easy for you to believe that today’s leaders are also. If you believe that  Jewish forces made a habit of massacring Arabs in 1948, it’s easy to believe that the IDF did the same in Jenin in 2002 and Gaza in 2009. And if you don’t believe that the Palestinian Arabs perpetrated systematic terrorism against Jews in 1947 and before because they accepted a genocidal, antisemitic ideology, then perhaps you can believe that today’s conflict is about borders, and that today’s terrorism is best described as a ‘cycle of violence’.

In a particularly offensive article in the New York Review of Books, Peter Beinart claims that there are two kinds of Zionism; one that is fascist, racist, uncaring about human (Palestinian) suffering, overwhelmingly Orthodox, concerned only with parochial Jewish issues and obsessed with Jewish victimhood. The other is secular, liberal, open, pro-peace, committed to human rights and Palestinian self-determination.

Guess which one Beinart thinks characterizes Israel’s government, encouraged by the American Jewish establishment? And guess who opened his eyes?

You can see this spirit in “new historians” like Tom Segev who have fearlessly excavated the darker corners of the Zionist past and in jurists like former Supreme Court President Aharon Barak who have overturned Knesset laws that violate the human rights guarantees in Israel’s “Basic Laws.” You can also see it in former Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s apparent willingness to relinquish much of the West Bank in 2000 and early 2001.

The “darker corners of the Zionist past.” Possibly if his education had shone some light into the dark corners of Arab Jew-hatred, if he knew more about Husseini’s extended love affair with Nazism, or if he understood better about why Ehud Barak’s “apparent willingness” was not good enough for Husseini’s heir, Yasser Arafat, he might understand why some Zionists are less optimistic than he that Jewish territorial compromise can be an answer to atavistic Arab hate.

I recommend Karsh’s book for a start.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Zionism, Palestinian Arabs, Efraim Karsh, Peter Beinart

Not satisfied with ordering Israel not to build new homes for Jews in East Jerusalem, the Obama Administration has now issued a diktat that Israel may not demolish illegally built Palestinian structures.

I know that the Arabs and their supporters will say that laws are applied unequally, they can’t get building permits,  etc. But as the Sheikh Jarrah controversy showed, even when Israelis carefully follow the law it doesn’t matter.  In that case, a long legal process — which culminated in a decision by the relatively left-wing Israeli Supreme Court — determined that Arabs were in fact squatters; but nevertheless the US has condemned Israel for evicting them.

The fact is that the Obama Administration has set itself up as regent over Israel, and intends to intervene in the administration of its laws whenever that suits the political goals of the US. Today those goals include the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state which will include East Jerusalem.

The US is now playing the role of the British during the mandate period, except that while the British were supposed to be working to create a “national home” for the Jews in the historic land of Israel (which goal, of course, they subverted in practice), the Americans are acting on behalf of a state for the ‘Palestinian people’. And I might add that while the British role was sanctioned by international treaties, the US has simply arrogated it.

As I’ve said before, the arguments for the need for such intervention (the “linkage theory“) do not hold water. I believe the administration is disingenuous about its motives. And I am convinced that a combination of interests and influence, from the powerful Saudi Arabian lobby — which is far more effective than the notorious “Israel Lobby” in the US — to the preponderance of left-wing academic backgrounds among administration officials, is driving it.

This policy is not in the interests of the US, which is in conflict with Iran for control of Middle Eastern oil resources and which, as a Western democracy and Enlightenment standard-bearer, should be struggling to push back the tide of Islamic radicalism which threatens to overwhelm Europe, and ultimately the world.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Obama administration

For many years the Mideast conflict was a proxy for the cold war. The USSR supported the Arab rejectionists and the Western bloc provided Israel with weapons and aid to defend itself. In 1972, Anwar Sadat expelled Russian military advisors and and began to move away from the Soviet sphere; in 1979, of course, he signed a peace treaty with Israel under the auspices of the US.

Now the Russians seem to be injecting themselves back into the region, and again they don’t intend to be helpful (at least, not from my point of view). Barry Rubin notes,

The recent visit of Russia’s President Medvedev with a huge entourage was a major step toward reestablishing the old Soviet-Syria relationship. There were broad economic talks, including the possibility of Russia building a nuclear reactor for the Syrian dictatorship…

Then there’s Medvedev’s visit to the newest member of the anti-American Islamist alliance: Turkey. In a joint statement the two countries’ leaders said that Hamas should be part of any regional negotiations. Turkish President Abdullah Gul, a hardline Islamist who was so feared that he had to promise before the last parliamentary election not to be a candidate for president. His AKP party won and within a few hours Gul was stepping into that office.

Gul explained in his joint press conference with Medvedev, who said the same exact thing: “Unfortunately Palestinians have been split into two… In order to reunite them, you have to speak to both sides. Hamas won elections in Gaza and cannot be ignored.”

A call for Hamas to be included in negotiations amounts to an endorsement of the genocidal Hamas program. Do I exaggerate? Read the Hamas covenant and consider what Hamas has done since Israel withdrew from Gaza. It really doesn’t matter if Hamas won an election, because even if the majority of Palestinian Arabs believe that Israel should be destroyed and all the Jews murdered, this is not a civilized position and it does not deserve a civilized response (to be precise, Hamas won an election, joined a coalition government, and then violently overthrew it  and set up a rump regime).

The Russians have a spotted history of civilized and not-so-civilized behavior, but this is particularly cynical considering that they are facing violent Islamic insurgencies themselves. Rubin suggests that they have made a deal with Iran that they will support the anti-American Iran-Syria-Turkey alliance in return for Iran’s withholding support for the Chechen and other Muslim separatists. Not terribly surprising, from the folks that gave us the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact of 1939.

Anyway, this is not aimed specifically at Israel, although I doubt that the traditionally antisemitic Russians would be bothered by the negative side effects of their policy for Israel. The idea is to keep Iran off their backs and also to get on the winning side in the conflict between Iran and the US for influence in the Mideast.

It’s ironic — anti-Zionists in the US often argue falsely that we wouldn’t be a target of Islamic terrorism were it not for our support of Israel. Since the conflict in the Mideast today is at least in part driven by the Iranian desire to push out US influence from the region, one could say that Israel’s problems stem from its support of the US!

Technorati Tags: Russia, Hamas, Turkey, Iran, Israel

Some recent discussions have convinced me that I should take up this question again.

What is the core issue of the conflict that surrounds Israel?

Most people that I argue with tell me that it has to do with the Palestinian Arabs. Because of the 1967 occupation, because their rights are being violated, because they don’t have a state, because the security barrier impinges on their land, because of an unending list of grievances, there can’t be peace. If Israel will fix these problems, they say, there can be peace — between Israel and the Palestinians and Israel and the Arab nations.

In the past I’ve always responded that the problem is not the occupation, but the fact that the Arabs do not accept the presence of a Jewish state of any size in the Mideast. It’s easy to prove this: all you need to do is to show that violent opposition to Israel started before 1967 — the PLO, for example, was founded in 1964 — and that the Palestinians have refused to accept very fair offers from Israel, in 2000 and 2008, to create an Arab state from the occupied territories.

The real issue, I argue, has been that the Palestinians — with support from the other Arab nations — will not be satisfied with less than a reversal of the 1948 occupation — the replacement of Israel by an Arab state.

Lately some of my opponents have started to agree. The problem is the 1948 occupation, they admit, and there should not be an Israel at all. The very existence of a Jewish state, they say, is incompatible with Palestinian rights. This is a harder argument to have, because you have to bring up lots of historical facts, and there is a whole mythology to refute. But at least they are being more honest about their goal.

But now there is an additional factor, and it has absolutely nothing to do with Palestinian Arabs, and it has come to be the overriding issue that prevents Israel from living at peace.

That factor is the Iranian program to dominate the region economically, politically and religiously. Iran wants to rid the Middle East of Western (mostly American) influence, and even grandiosely challenges the position of the US as the most powerful nation in the world. Iran’s influence is growing in Iraq, and it’s hard to see how the US will be able to withdraw from there without it quickly becoming an Iranian satellite. With the US gone, Iran will be able to dominate the conservative regimes like those of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, which depend on it for protection.

This means that one-third of the world’s oil resources will be under Iranian control. It means that Iran will be able to spread its revolutionary Islamism, and perhaps establish the Shiite caliphate that the Mullahs so desire.

Soon Iran expects to have nuclear weapons to provide an ‘umbrella’ for its expansionist activities. There’s just one little thing standing in its way, and it’s not hard to guess what it is.

Israel perceives the Iranian nuclear bomb as an existential threat, and if the US will not act to stop it, Israel will. Israel is a check on the activities of Iranian proxies Syria and Hizballah in Lebanon. Israel props up the regimes in Egypt and Jordan, and prevents the radical Hamas from gaining total control of the Palestinians. Israel is a close ally of the US, and provides intelligence and maybe other kinds of assistance to it. Tiny little Israel is a big fat bone in the Iranian throat, and Iran wants to dislodge it.

So today Iran has replaced the Arabs as the primary enemy of Israel and the main cause of the continuation of the conflict. Iran supplies and supports Hamas and Hizballah, with whom Israel has fought two recent wars, and there’s no doubt that Iranian funds flow to other terrorist factions.

This has been happening for years: remember the Karine A, the ship full of weapons intended for Arafat’s terrorists that was intercepted in 2002? Iran has paid for the huge Syrian missile buildup in recent years. Even in the Palestinian Authority, hardliners are encouraged by their hope that Iran’s proxies will keep the IDF occupied, and weaken Israel.

If we assume that the Obama Administration wants to ‘solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict’ it is going about it in the wrong way, attacking the symptoms — Israeli-Palestinian issues — instead of the cause, Iranian expansionism. Changing the approach would actually simplify US policy a great deal, because instead of trying to achieve its ends in the Middle East by creating a Palestinian state and then getting Arab support as a result — the incoherent ‘linkage theory‘ — the US could simply move directly toward its desired goal, which is (or should be) preventing the Iranian takeover of the region.

Effective action to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons would go a long way in this direction, as would real support for Iranian dissidents.

Israeli-Palestinian peace might be a byproduct.

The seized Karine A, stuffed with Iranian weapons, in port at Eilat

Technorati Tags: Israel, Palestinians, Isareli-Palestinian conflict, Iran