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Somewhere in the discussion about what it means to be pro-Israel (in the context of J Street, the New Israel Fund [NIF], etc.) I heard the following:

Being pro-Israel doesn’t mean supporting Israel no matter what it does

I get it. I understand where they’re coming from.

Suppose my neighbor is arrested and charged with stealing a car. Would I support him? Would I bail him out of jail? Well, that would depend on my judgment of his character and his motives. Maybe I would and maybe I wouldn’t.  I’d try to be fair; after all, he has the same rights as anyone else. This is the attitude of the ‘progressive’ Jew toward Israel.

Now suppose someone is arrested and charged as above. Only this time it’s my son. Everything changes. Would I support him no matter what he does? Of course not, but I would try much harder to understand him. I would give him the benefit of the doubt. I would listen to his story. I would give his explanations at least as much credence as those of his accusers, maybe more. This is the attitude of the Zionist Jew.

Zionists among the Jewish people gave birth to the modern state of Israel, sacrificed for it and supported it in its childhood.  The Zionist feels differently about Israel than he does about, say, Japan. The best analogy is to say that he feels a family relationship.

The ‘progressive’ Jew that sees himself as a post-nationalist world citizen doesn’t feel that. He imagines that he’s gone beyond the narrow family of the Jewish people and joined the wider circle of humanity. For him, Israel is “just another country“.

“No,” the J Streeter says, “we really love Israel. But we believe in Tough Love.”

Sorry, I don’t buy that. Tough love is what you get to after years of trying regular love, what you do when you have no other choice, when your family member is so bad or destructive that you have to protect yourself. The slick, cool con men of J Street never had a love relationship with the Jewish state.  The person or group at NIF that could choose Adalah to receive more than $1 million could not have loved the Jewish state, if they had read Adalah’s position papers.

This really isn’t a question of Left and Right. Amos Oz is a leftist who loves Israel, and he’s not the only one. I disagree with the Zionist Left the way I disagree with family members. There’s a bottom line that unites us, a bottom line of belief in Jewish self-determination, which presupposes a belief that it makes sense to talk about a Jewish people that we both belong to.

When Michael Oren refused to meet with J Street because it took positions — on Iranian sanctions, on calling for an immediate cease-fire in Operation Cast Lead, on the Goldstone report — that were damaging to Israel’s interests, he was in effect saying that J Street had gone beyond the bottom line. And I think we can see that this could happen because their staff’s idea of their ‘people’ is only secondarily, if at all, the Jewish people.

James Traub wrote an article in the NY Times Magazine about J Street, which, while it contained some of the usual nonsense about the Mideast, was revealing about J Street. It included this:

The average age of the dozen or so staff members is about 30. [J Street Executive Director Jeremy] Ben-Ami speaks for, and to, this post-Holocaust generation. “They’re all intermarried [see update — ed.],” he says. “They’re all doing Buddhist seders.” They are, he adds, baffled by the notion of “Israel as the place you can always count on when they come to get you.”

I think they are probably also baffled by, or at least see themselves as having transcended, the idea of the Jewish people — although I wonder how they would respond if asked if there is a ‘Palestinian people’?

Update [24 Feb 0803 PST]: I’ve been informed that in an interview Ben-Ami clarified that he did not mean that his staff was all intermarried, but rather that the young generation of Jews was “different”.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Jewish people, J Street, NIF

I’ve heard speculation that recent events in Pakistan — the arrest of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar and others — may finally make it possible for the US to locate Osama Bin Laden.

Assuming that theories that the US doesn’t really want to capture or kill Bin Laden because of connections to his powerful family are false (I honestly have no opinion about this), the question arises:

If we get him, what should we do with him?

Some will undoubtedly want to put him on trial, while others would like to publicly throw him off a tall building. Some will claim that our behavior must be based on our commitment to universal principles of morality and law, while others will point out that he didn’t treat the 3,000+ victims of 9/11 morally and he shouldn’t be treated any better.

There will be the usual statements that “it would be bad to make him a martyr”. Let’s dismiss this right away: his supporters are already fanatical enough to commit suicide in order to advance their goals. So it really doesn’t matter if they have one more picture of a dead guy to hold up.

My point of view is beginning to show: a war-crimes trial would be incredibly expensive and provide a long, drawn out opportunity for his supporters to present their point of view to the world. This point of view is not something that can be debated alongside our Western one; it represents a wholly different paradigm. There’s nothing to talk about.

Indeed, if we do anything other than kill him, we will be sending a message to the other side. It will not be the message that we are moral and strong enough to treat him ‘fairly’, it will be the message that we are too weak and cowardly to fight back.  The message we might want to send won’t cross the barrier between our disparate conceptual schemes.

Don’t even bother arresting him, even if the goal is to electrocute him after due process. Just find him and blow him to bits in the cheapest way possible.

The other side will understand.

Technorati Tags: Osama bin Laden, Pakistan

Everyone seems to want Israel to apologize, or ‘clarify’, or in some way abase itself today.

In connection with the Dubai assassination, the Dubai police chief has called for the head of the Mossad, Meir Dagan, to be arrested. British Foreign Secretary David Miliband has called the use of British passports in the operation an “outrage”, and called in the Israeli ambassador to discuss the incident.

If the Mossad did kill Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, then good for them — nobody deserved it more than Mabhouh. Hamas admitted that Mabhouh was responsible for the abduction and murder of two Israeli soldiers in 1989, has helped plan Hamas terrorism for years, and was recently involved in bringing Iranian weapons to Gaza. Israel doesn’t need to apologize; in fact the Mossad should expand its activities and kill more Hamas leaders.

Israel is at war and doesn’t need to apologize for shooting back.

In a somewhat less sensational affair, a number of US congresspersons got their noses out of joint when Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon refused to meet with them when they visited Israel on a J Street sponsored trip:

“It was with real surprise and disappointment that we read a headline in this morning’s paper saying, ‘Foreign Ministry Boycotts Members of Congress,’” said [Rep. William] Delahunt, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, to Israeli journalists at a Tel Aviv press conference Wednesday afternoon.

“In our opinion this is an inappropriate way to treat elected representatives of Israel’s closest ally who are visiting the country – and who through the years have been staunch supporters of the US-Israeli special relationship. We would respectfully ask the government for a clarification of its stance toward this and future delegations.”

Ayalon expressed what many of us feel about J Street when he said:

I don’t have to agree with J Street ideologically… but it bothers me when they present themselves as something they’re not. They can say they’re Jewish, or pro-peace, or whatever, but they can’t [say] they are a pro-Israel organization. They’ve bashed Israel on many occasions.

Bashed, and also worked directly against Israel’s interests. Is that clarified enough?

Technorati Tags: Israel, Mossad, J Street

I’ve written a lot recently (here, here, here, and here) about the controversy surrounding the New Israel Fund (NIF) and the accusations against it made by Im Tirtzu, a student Zionist organization, which claimed that 16 NIF-funded organizations were responsible for the majority of the documentation supporting the anti-Israel conclusions of the Goldstone report.

One of the 16 was “Rabbis for Human Rights” (RHR), a group founded and run by Rabbi Arik Ascherman (whom I met some years ago in another context. He seemed like a nice guy). RHR is probably one of the least offensive of the 16 groups cited by Im Tirtzu. Unlike the Israeli Arab groups Adalah and the Mossawa Center, it does not work toward the “de-Judaization” of the state, nor does it specialize in slandering the IDF throughout the world, like Breaking The Silence. I’m sure Ascherman doesn’t want to see Hamas attain its goal of replacing Israel with an Islamic state.

Here’s how NGO Monitor, a harsh critic of many Israeli NGOs, summarized its 2005 report on RHR:

RHR is an example of a human rights organization that, while critical of Israeli government policies and prone to political statements that are out of the human rights sphere, refrains from engaging in the language of demonization. RHR, however, also works in coordination with and lends support to many of the most active anti-Israel NGOs, and focuses most of its resources on Palestinian issues, while failing to address many of the complex issues involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

According to its website, RHR works to “promote the upholding of Palestinian rights in a variety of areas, in east Jerusalem, the west bank and Gaza,” which it does by legal action and “on the ground,” which sometimes includes civil disobedience. It works with Palestinian Arabs and ‘internationals’, volunteers from outside of Israel. It protects Arab farmers from “violent settlers” when they harvest olives, files lawsuits when it believes that the security barrier is encroaching on land worked by Palestinians, and tries to prevent the demolition of illegally-built Palestinian structures (alleging that Israeli policies preclude legal building).

Protecting anybody’s rights is laudable and there’s no doubt that there is a lot of unfairness in the relationship of the Israeli authorities toward Palestinians in particular cases.

But — yes, there had to be a ‘but’ — there are several problems.

One of them is that the philosophy of the group seems appropriate for a social change club on a university campus in the US, not a Middle Eastern nation at war.  Rights exist in a societal context: the Mideast isn’t Berkeley, California, and Israel’s struggle to survive in a very hostile world isn’t a student demonstration. An occupied territory with a hostile population isn’t a minority neighborhood in an American city. Like the “messianic crazies” that they decry on their website, RHR too has a one-dimensional view of right and wrong.

Yehoyada Amir’s exposition of the ideology of the group sees the “post-national approach” as the pinnacle of political evolution, although he somehow wants to leave room for an attenuated tribalism called a “familial and national partnership.”  Unfortunately he comes down way too far on the multicultural and “pan-human” side for today’s (or even tomorrow’s) Middle East. It’s a kind of unilateral disarmament in a hostile and well-armed neighborhood.

Another problem is the possible consequences of RHR’s actions. If a bunch of college students oppose, say, the gentrification of a poor neighborhood in Madison, Wisconsin then they might or might not help anyone, but in any event there will be little damage. But an Israeli  human-rights group taking the  position that the IDF’s intentions in Gaza must be investigated may have far-reaching consequences for Israel’s ability to defend itself.

RHR sees the conflict as a struggle between “two peoples”, by which I presume they mean Jews and Palestinian Arabs. But there is a much wider context which can’t be ignored, in which the Jewish state is considered an abomination, illegitimately existing in the midst of land forever belonging to Muslims, by literally hundreds of millions of Arabs and other Muslims whose fondest desire is to see it disappear.

This rejectionist opposition is also extremely well-organized and well-financed, today primarily by Iran, which is moving to surround Israel by proxy armies. It also supports terrorist groups in the territories and even extremists among the Arab citizens of Israel. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that Israel is in existential danger from these forces, even leaving aside the nuclear threat.

From RHR’s myopic point of view, the Jewish state is a behemoth oppressing powerless Palestinians; but in fact it is a very small and vulnerable island in a hostile sea. One of the strategies of Israel’s enemies is to remove the props of international support and reduce the world’s tolerance of its efforts at self-defense, in order to make it easier to physically destroy it. Thus the delegitimization campaign of which the Goldstone report is emblematic can have very real consequences for Israel’s future.

Palestinians in particular understand quite well the Western attitude toward human rights, and do their best to help make the news from the territories and Jerusalem fit the narrative of a noble people victimized by a soulless oppressor. RHR serves as a perfect megaphone for this.

Even if its complaints were not unbalanced or exaggerated, RHR  applies Berkeley standards to a Middle Eastern nation which has essentially been at war since its founding. It amplifies and focuses attention on human-rights issues which — in context — are not issues. By doing so it provides real ammunition to Israel’s enemies.

Technorati Tags: Rabbis for Human Rights, New Israel Fund, Im Tirtzu