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I just watched Prime Minister Netanyahu’s UN speech again. I liked it even more than the first time.

I liked the way he kept referring to ‘Jews’ and ‘the Jewish People’. Israel is not just a arbitrary construct based on geography. The Holocaust that Ahmadinejad denies didn’t happen to arbitrary people, it happened to Jews (I don’t deny that Hitler killed a lot of non-Jews, but the machinery of extermination was built for the Jews, who were murdered only because of their genes).

The Jewish people are not foreign conquerors in the Land of Israel. This is the land of our forefathers.

Inscribed on the walls outside this building is the great Biblical vision of peace: “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation. They shall learn war no more.” These words were spoken by the Jewish prophet Isaiah 2,800 years ago as he walked in my country, in my city, in the hills of Judea and in the streets of Jerusalem.

I liked the way he stood firm on his demand for recognition as a Jewish state:

We ask the Palestinians to finally do what they have refused to do for 62 years: Say yes to a Jewish state. Just as we are asked to recognize a nation-state for the Palestinian people, the Palestinians must be asked to recognize the nation state of the Jewish people.

This is the absolute bottom line, far more important than delineation of borders or the settlement issue. The fact that the Arabs have never accepted a Jewish state in the Land of Israel has been the cause of the conflict since the beginning, and is what drives it today.

Netanyahu clearly understands — as so many Jews, even some Israelis, do not — that  the real and only adequate  justification for the existence of the state of Israel lies in its being the state of the Jewish people. Give up on this point, and you might as well book passage back to Poland, Russia, Morocco, Iraq, etc. and let it be replaced with yet another Arab craptocracy.

Finally, he made one other demand:

The Palestinians should have all the powers to govern themselves except those handful of powers that could endanger Israel. That is why a Palestinian state must be effectively demilitarized. We don’t want another Gaza, another Iranian backed terror base abutting Jerusalem and perched on the hills a few kilometers from Tel Aviv.

Is this so unreasonable?

The Arab reaction was predictable. Robert Spencer summarized it thus:

In Saudi Arabia, the state newspaper Al-Nadwa lamented that “every paragraph of Netanyahu’s speech makes us more pessimistic.” In Jordan, the pro-government newspaper Al-Rai huffed: “Netanyahu offered rotten merchandise. Nobody will buy it.” Mohammed Sobeih, the Arab League’s undersecretary general for Palestinian affairs, said that while “extremists in Israel” might like the speech, it was “too far from what peace needs.” The President of Lebanon, Michel Suleiman, said that the speech was “intransigent when it comes to dealing with peace or regarding the solution for Palestinian refugees.”

And that was just the beginning. Others charged that Netanyahu had brought the region closer to armed conflict. Hosni Mubarak, President of the Arab Republic of Egypt, said that Netanyahu’s call to “recognize Israel as a Jewish state complicates things further and scuttles the possibilities for peace.” Apparently an Arab state is just fine, but a Jewish state, no. Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, meanwhile, asserted that Netanyahu delivered “a war speech that practically torpedoed and crippled all possibilities for a compromise,” and that “makes the region susceptible to great dangers that might explode in different directions.”

Palestinian Saeb Erekat complained that Netanyahu’s speech “left nothing for negotiations….Netanyahu wants to put us in a situation where he looks like he offered something, and we said no.” And he attempted to cast the onus back upon Netanyahu: “Netanyahu’s speech was very clear. He rejects the two-state solution.” He warned about Netanyahu’s crafty rhetoric: “I hope that the world will not be fooled by this gentleman using the term ‘come and negotiate’ and ‘a Palestinian state.’ He actually tonight destroyed the two-state solution and destroyed the permanent settlement negotiations.”

“Netanyahu,” said Yasser Abed Rabbo, a senior aide to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, “is defying the world. The international community should reply by pressure to isolate Netanyahu and his policies and force Israel to submit to the peace process.”

They are absolutely hysterical with anger because they thought that President Obama was their guy, and he would force the Israelis to finally give up. They thought that the delegitimization campaign they orchestrated by activating the antisemitic Europeans with their boycott/divestment strategy, as well as the laughable “United Nations Human Rights Council” with its cut-and-paste report on the Gaza war, had weakened Israel to the point of cooperating in its own dismemberment.

But look: Netanyahu spoke like the leader of a nation, a proud and fully legitimate nation that can and will defend itself. He didn’t surrender! How dare he?

The Arabs, in their supreme self-righteousness, switch rapidly back and forth from squealing about their victimization and demanding intervention, to threatening mayhem.

Now let them face an Israel with a leader who is confident of the justice of his position, an Israel which is prepared to wait as long as necessary — and to make the Palestinians wait as long as necessary — for a settlement which will finally establish what should have been established in 1948: that the Jewish people, like Germans, Russians, even Palestinians, have a right to self-determination in their land.

Technorati Tags: Netanyahu, Netanyahu UN speech, Israel, Palestinians

One of the hardest things about writing a blog is thinking of something even halfway original to write about every day, especially since there are far better writers, journalists and even scholars doing the same thing.

So I was excited this morning when one of my commenters handed me a topic on a silver platter, as it were. Here’s part of what he said:

I cannot speak as well for J Street as I can for Brit Tzedek. I have spoken with the Executive Director and am good friends with several of the local chapter leaders. I also know myself. Our goal is not to weaken Israel but to strengthen it. We simply don’t believe that strength lies in the barrel of a gun and in the constant war of words that this blog represents so well. Strength lies in peace, equality and justice. And more than anything else in mutual respect, very little of which is in evidence here…

So yes, perhaps we are “aging baby-boomer (leftist)[s]” …committed to worn out ideologies from a bygone era.

Then why are you so fearful of us? Simply because Obama seems to agree with our position and he is after all President of the United States of America, Israel’s one and only true ally in this cruel and unpredictable world where Nazism is not only yesterday’s nightmare, but also today’s constant threat waiting to blossom with the next desert rains?

I suspect the fear and bitterness (second only to that which you have for Palestinians and other Arabs … and anyone else who says anything critical about Israel, including Israelis) goes beyond mere political disagreement.

The fact that we continue to hope and work for peace stands directly in the way of your campaign for hopelessness. It bugs you to see people, especially fellow Jews, that can maintain a sense of the possible and don’t confirm your grim view of the deadly nature of life, especially for the Jewish People.

The writer makes several serious mistakes here, mistakes which can be deadly if they become the basis of policy.

One is  that the admirable concepts of peace, equality, justice and respect can strengthen a nation when applied unilaterally in a world where the other actors don’t share the same values. For example, the Palestinians will happily agree that they want justice, but ‘justice’ for them will be when the state of Israel has been replaced by an Arab state. And respect in the Arab world is not given to the one who compromises, but rather to the one who is most uncompromising.

Another is thinking that the geographic and  historical bubble in which American Jews have been living since WWII is somehow normal, and what the Jews in other places and other times — since the Roman conquest of Jerusalem — have experienced is abnormal. How irrational to assume that the change is permanent and applies world-wide!

The blindness displayed by the writer in the face of even recent history is astonishing. Did he not see how the wishful attribution of Western liberal values to the Palestinians lead to the disastrous failure of Oslo and the rise of Hamas? Did he not notice how the Palestinians responded to Israel’s attempt to end the occupation by withdrawing from Gaza?

Does he not listen to the statements that come from Meshaal, Nasrallah, Ahmadinejad, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and even the supposed ‘moderate’ Mahmoud Abbas and every media outlet of the PA? Does he think it’s all ‘rhetoric’? Could it be that — like Hitler — they mean what they say?

‘Campaign of hopelessness’? Rather a campaign to realistically see the world — especially the Middle East — as it is.

But despite the admitted fact that the world is “cruel and unpredictable”, the writer maintains his  optimism that if he and his friends continue to ‘work for peace’ — I presume that by this he means ‘demand Israeli concessions’ because that is the platform of Brit Tzedek and J Street — the Arabs will wake up one day thinking that the Jews can be allowed to live in Palestine after all.

Finally, I want to turn to the ad hominem part of his comment.

Speaking for myself, I’m not a bitter or fearful person. I don’t fear the ‘useful idiots‘ of the Jewish anti-Zionist Left (JAZL), although I worry about Ahmadinejad, et al, who threaten to kill my children.

To the JAZL I say: what ‘bugs’ me  isn’t envy of your naive self-delusions.

Rather, it’s the way you use your Jewishness to render your Israel-hatred kosher.

Technorati Tags: Israel

Judge Richard Goldstone wrote, in his NY Times op-ed last week, that

Unfortunately, both Israel and Hamas have dismal records of investigating their own forces. I am unaware of any case where a Hamas fighter was punished for deliberately shooting a rocket into a civilian area in Israel — on the contrary, Hamas leaders repeatedly praise such acts. While Israel has begun investigations into alleged violations by its forces in the Gaza conflict, they are unlikely to be serious and objective.

Why unlikely? There are plenty of examples of IDF soldiers disciplined for mistreating Palestinians. And the comparison to Hamas… why did he even mention Hamas in this context when he clearly understands that Hamas exists to commit war crimes?

I am not going to try to search for too much fairness, logic or consistency in the utterances of Goldstone, who fell asleep when testimony about the bombardment of Sderot was presented. But yesterday he suggested that an Israeli investigation would indeed be worthwhile:

In an exclusive interview with Channel 2 on Monday, Goldstone said IDF soldiers who committed the violations, as well as the commanders who failed to reprimand them, must stand trial for their offenses. The former judge also said that Israel should have taken the opportunity for an internal investigation of the IDF’s conduct during the offensive. — Ha’aretz

Apparently, the idea is that IDF investigations can’t possibly be objective, but that Israel should set up an ‘independent commission’ to beat up on the IDF. There is nothing that makes the Israel-haters happier than the spectacle of Israelis themselves doing the dirty work.

I’m certain that it would be easy to find plenty of anti-Zionist academics like Neve Gordon who would be happy to be party to it. It’s reminiscent of the Nazis ordering Jews to dig their own graves before shooting them, isn’t it?

In any event, look who else thinks a self-flagellation commission would be a good idea:

J Street has reviewed the Goldstone report in its entirety over the past several days…

We urge the Israeli government to establish an independent state commission of inquiry to investigate the accusations, something Israel has done on several occasions in the past.

J Street strongly condemns Hamas for its actions both before and during the Gaza war – actions which the report says may amount to crimes against humanity. [my emphasis]

It’s wonderful that they actually tack on a condemnation of Hamas, but they can’t even say “we condemn Hamas for crimes against humanity” — only that the report says that they may amount to such! Such exquisite care to give the fanatic butchers of Hamas the benefit of the doubt.

There is very little difference between calling for an investigation of the allegations in the Goldstone report and those in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, which accused the IDF of stealing organs from dead Palestinians. Both documents base their accusations primarily on the accounts of Palestinian ‘witnesses’ — indeed, the Goldstone report includes language almost identical to that in the wholly tendentious product of Human Rights Watch and other biased sources (NGO Monitor called it a “cut-and-paste job“).

In either case, the result of the investigation would be to give currency to the absurd charges. Leave it to J Street to take the Zionophobic tack every time.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Goldstone report, J Street

I admit that I’m politically schizophrenic, mixing right-and left-wing positions on different subjects. Those of my friends (those that remain) who have consistent ideologies invariably come to regard me as a extremist in favor of whatever they are against.

Anyway, the other day I was listening to a woman of the progressive persuasion talk about the really distressing phenomenon of Obama-hatred on the Right. The President’s statements and his motives are misrepresented, attacks on him are personal and possibly racist, he is portrayed in vile caricatures, he is simply hated — far beyond any criticism of policy. And she added that she was honestly afraid for his safety as a result.

Now I think his administration’s Mideast policy — worse, his entire view about the proper place of the US in the world and the intentions of its adversaries — is entirely wrong and off-balance. It’s both immoral and disadvantageous for the US and for the human race. But I absolutely agree with this woman that his political enemies have gone way too far in the direction of misrepresentation and personal vilification. And yes, it’s worse than it was with Clinton and even worse than the Left’s treatment of Bush.

So I asked her if she saw any parallel between the way the Right relates to Obama and the way she and other ‘progressives’ think about the state of Israel.

Did she see any similarity between the made-up stories about Obama’s birth and religion and the absurd blood libels against Israel spreading rapidly around the world?

Is she aware that motives attributed to Obama and Israel by opponents are always the worst possible, no matter how irrational? So Obama is said to want to wreck the economy in order to ultimately destroy capitalism and replace it with some form of socialism — and Israel is accused of acting to ‘punish’ Palestinians in order to humiliate them and destroy their culture.

Did she notice the caricatures and cartoons vilifying Israel?

Did she worry that the constant din of Israel’s enemies like Ahmadinejad, Nasrallah, Meshaal, and countless others calling for and predicting Israel’s destruction might stimulate terrorists to act?

Does she see that the goal of the assault is the same — to soften up the target so it can be destroyed?

Does she notice that she herself — someone who tries very hard to live ethically and fight against every form of oppression and unfairness — sometimes repeats false accusations against Israel that she heard on KPFA, the left-wing version of conservative ‘hate radio’?

It seems to me that anti-Israel lies and distortions are in many ways worse than those told about the President. For one thing, what are the rantings of a Glenn Beck compared with the official pronouncements of the Goldstone Commission of the ‘United Nations’ — although the credibility of the latter should be no more than that of the former?

And as far as I know, nobody has yet accused the President of stealing organs.

Technorati Tags: Obama, Israel