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The winner of this week’s Jerusalem Post op-ed writers’ contest, Hershel Tsvi Yehuda, argues persuasively that “Settlements were never the problem“. He asserts that

History shows that the conflict here in Israel is not over land, but has to do with the inability of our Arabs/Muslim neighbors to recognize that Jews and Christians have any claim, religious or historical, to the land of Israel

and then he demonstrates the truth of this statement with simple historical examples.

Mr. Yehuda is not a professional writer in English (he consistently writes “it’s” instead of “its”; I don’t know why the Post’s editors couldn’t fix this), but he gets directly to the heart of the issue without getting bogged down in discussions of who did what to whom in what order in 1948. As I said, it’s very persuasive, and I recommend it highly.

It seems to me that if there is a problem to solve and we know what the root cause of the problem is, we should attack the root, not the symptoms. Yehuda’s essay shows that the fact that Jewish settlements bother the Arabs so much is actually a symptom of a deeper problem.

If the problem that President Obama wants to solve is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, then pressuring Israel to freeze settlement construction does not go to the root of it. Rather, he should pressure the Arabs to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and admit that Jews and Christians have as much right to be in the Land of Israel as Muslims.

If he were successful in this, then peace would be a possibility. Freezing settlements does nothing except invite additional demands from Arabs who simply don’t want any Jewish state in the land.

It really is that simple.

Of course, maybe Obama is trying to solve a different problem, like the fact that Arabs and other Muslims dislike the US. His approach won’t fix this either, but that’s another story.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Arabs, settlements, Obama

News item:

Mohamed ElBaradei, outgoing chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has called the Iranian threat “hyped,” saying there is no proof the Islamic republic will soon have nuclear weapons.

“In many ways, I think the threat has been hyped,” ElBaradei told the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in an interview released Tuesday.

“Yes, there’s concern about Iran’s future intentions and Iran needs to be more transparent with the IAEA and international community,” he told the Chicago-based magazine. “But the idea that we’ll wake up tomorrow and Iran will have a nuclear weapon is an idea that isn’t supported by the facts as we have seen them so far.”

No, there’s no absolute proof that Iran will soon have nuclear weapons. But if the hypothetical weapons are aimed at you, then you are very concerned about the probability that Iran will have them at a given point in the future.

Iran’s intermediate-term goal seems to be to extend its sphere of influence over the whole Middle East. A nuclear capability would provide an umbrella to keep the US, Israel and Europe from interfering with Iran’s exercising a free hand in the region. Their problem is how to get there without triggering a preemptive response.

The only real threat to Tehran’s going nuclear is Israel. The US administration believes that it has too much to lose and too little to gain from a military operation against Iran. It won’t happen. Effective economic sanctions are impossible because Iran’s trading partners in Europe and Asia won’t allow them. Only Israel, with its back to the wall and convinced that its survival is at stake, might intervene.

So if you were an Iranian leader, what you do?

One thing is to try to determine what Israel’s red lines are and stay behind them. If possession of a deliverable weapon is a red line, then don’t possess one. Just make sure there is enough enriched uranium or plutonium available, and that all the associated technologies are far enough along so that a bomb could be put together quickly. Keep up the missile development.

Another thing is to temporize. Keep promising to talk to the Americans, and when it’s not enough to just promise, then talk. And talk. As long as this is going on the Americans will be motivated to restrain Israel (they are pretty well motivated in this direction already).

Finally, keep up the pressure on Israel from Hamas, from Hezbollah, from Syria.

And what should Israel do?

Do not be diverted. Continue to develop a plan to attack the Iranian installations if it becomes necessary. Assume that the US will be hostile to the idea, so an attack will need to reach a point of no return before the US finds out about it. This is one of numerous tough problems, like refueling, penetrating underground bunkers, target intelligence, forestalling retaliation from Iran, Hezbollah, Syria, etc.

Iran will know that these preparations are ongoing. That might deter them from actually assembling a weapon, although parallel development will occur.

Talk about carrying heavy responsibilities! How would you like to be Israel’s PM, Defense Minister or Chief of Staff? I wouldn’t.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Iranian nuclear weapons

Recently Israel’s education ministry decided that the description of the founding of the Jewish state as a nakba — catastrophe — would be removed from textbooks in state-funded Arab schools.

“In the past five months since its formation, the government, along with the Education Ministry, has announced a number of dangerous decisions,” the head of the Follow-up Committee on Arab Education in Israel said at a press conference. “Such as a prohibition to commemorate the Nakba of the Arab people in schools, the changing of road signs, forcing the singing of the ‘Tikva’ national anthem at schools and setting the promotion of military service or national service as a criterion for rewarding schools and staff.”

“We reject these decisions outright,” Atef Moaddi said. “And we stress that if an attempt is made to carry them out in Arab schools – the response will be refusal and civil disobedience…”

Moaddi told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday that [Education Minister Gideon] Sa’ar’s decision was nothing less than a “political gimmick” aimed at denying the Israeli Arab community their identity.

“For Israeli Arabs, who consider themselves a part of the Palestinian people, the Nakba is not up for debate, it is a historical fact,” Moaddi said. “But if Sa’ar thinks that by taking this narrative out of the textbooks, he will somehow absolve himself – as both a representative of the State of Israel and as a human being – of responsibility for the Nakba, he is wrong…”

He also talked about discrimination against Arabs, more resources going to the Jewish school systems, etc. But those are fixable problems.

It is not fixable when one out of every five citizens of a state considers him or herself the citizen of a different nation, one co-extensive in space and time with the other, two parallel universes in which history is fundamentally different. Especially when the difference is that one group believes that everything the other has really belongs to them.

“Our position has always been that both narratives – the Jewish, Zionist narrative and the Arab, Palestinian narrative – should be taught in both Jewish and Arab classrooms,” he continued.

This is literally insane. Both narratives should be taught? Teach that the world is round and that it’s cubical? Teach that the Jews reestablished their nation in the land where — despite the fact that there was room for all — the Arabs tried again and again to kill them, and at the same time teach that the Jews dispossessed the Arabs and expelled them?

“But the Arab pupil is not stupid. He or she will learn about the Nakba from a variety of other sources, be it on the Internet or on the street. But our position is that we prefer for them to learn about it in the educational framework of the classroom.”

For example, they can learn their ‘narrative’ in the Baladna (Our Land) youth group, funded by money from Europe and the New Israel Fund.

The ‘narratives’ are incompatible and they make the people who believe them incompatible. Which, of course, is precisely why the Europeans and the New Israel Fund support the anti-Zionist narrative.

A novel idea would be that there is only one truth, and both Jews and Arabs should learn it.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Jews, Arabs, Nakba

By Victor Rosenthal

News item:

An indictment against former prime minister Ehud Olmert was served at the Jerusalem District Court on Sunday afternoon in three out of the four corruption-related cases standing against him: ‘Rishontours’, ‘Talansky’ and the ‘Investment Center’.

The indictment, filed by State Attorney Moshe Lador and Jerusalem District Attorney Eli Abarbanel, includes severe charges against Olmert, among them fraud, breach of trust, falsifying corporate documents and tax evasion. However, the former prime minister is not charged with bribery.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if this were the last we had to hear of this man: an ‘accidental’ Prime Minister who wasn’t up to the job and also turned out to be a common thief!

Although there was plenty of blame to go around for the débacle that  was the war against Hezbollah in 2006, Olmert deserves a lot of it. Unfortunately what was not done then will need to be done in the future, and another PM will face a much tougher challenge than Olmert did in 2006.

Olmert was also — at least nominally — PM during Operation Cast Lead. While the full story of its premature termination has not yet surfaced — what was Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni told when she flew to Washington in mid-January immediately before Obama’s inauguration? — one wonders whether the outcome would have been different if someone else had been PM. This will also have to be done over again at greater cost.

Olmert was the anti-Churchill. In 2005, he expressed his wish that the disengagement from Gaza would lead to peace thus:

We are tired of fighting, we are tired of being courageous, we are tired of winning, we are tired of defeating our enemies, we want that we will be able to live in an entirely different environment of relations with our enemies. We want them to be our friends, our partners, our good neighbors, and I believe that this is not impossible… That it is within reach if we will be smart, if we will dare, if we will be prepared to take the risks, and if we will be able to convince our Palestinian partners to be able to do the same.

What an unprecedented combination of defeatist rhetoric, bad politics, and fundamentally wrong analysis!

By comparison, the US is a big country with huge resources and the capacity to survive a really rotten administration once in a while (although we don’t want to make a habit of it). But Israel is small, things happen fast, and her existence is much more precarious than many people think. One jerk in a high place can do a lot of damage.

Goodbye Mr. Olmert, good luck in court, and good riddance.

Technorati Tags: Ehud Olmert, political corruption, Israel

When I first read the following story, I thought it might be satire. But who could make this up?

The Israeli Left reacted with dismay over the weekend to the results of a Jerusalem Post-sponsored Smith Research poll published on Friday that found only 4 percent of Jewish Israelis believe that US President Barack Obama’s policies are more pro-Israel than pro-Palestinian.

The survey, which was featured prominently on Fox News in the United States and picked up by media outlets around the world, reported that 51% of Jewish Israelis considered Obama’s administration more pro-Palestinian than pro-Israel, 35% called it neutral and 10% declined to express an opinion…

“It is terrific for Israel that there is an American president with vision, and it is a pity that most Israelis don’t realize that,” Meretz faction chairman MK Ilan Gilon said. “Israelis think that Christian evangelists who rubber-stamp everything Israel does are the only Americans who are pro-Israel. But what is really good for Israel is a solution to the conflict, and Obama is doing what it takes to bring it about.”

In other words, he thinks that Jewish Israelis don’t know what’s good for them — well, maybe 4% of them do — and need to be forced to accept a solution! Of course, that solution will meet the priorities of the Obama administration, not Israel.  And high on Obama’s priority list seems to be improving American relationships and image in the Muslim world.

One outspoken representative of Israel’s Left seems to agree with me, but still thinks it’s good for Israel:

Peace Now secretary-general Yariv Oppenheimer said what mattered more at this stage of the peace process was Obama’s reputation in the Arab world, and not in Israel. [my emphasis]

“Despite the results of the poll, the Israeli interest is that Obama will be popular in the Arab world, so he could bring about a peace agreement with Israel,” Oppenheimer said. “Bush was popular in Israel and hated around the world, and his policies did not help Israel end the Palestinian conflict or quell the Iranian threat. If he succeeds in his goals of advancing Middle East peace, I am sure he will become much more popular with Israelis.”

Earth to Gilon and Oppenheimer: An important goal for Arab regimes and Iran is to weaken Israel so as to hasten her demise. Really making peace would work against that, so there’s reason to be suspicious of policies that make them happy.

Regimes like those in Syria and Iran — as Barry Rubin has argued persuasively –  find the conflict with Israel very useful for their own internal goals, such as keeping a lid on reformers and justifying repression and economic exploitation of their population. They are not motivated to give it up. Remember, the interests of the people of Syria, for example, are not the same as the interests of Bashar al-Assad and his circle, but it’s the latter that makes policy.

Oppenheimer seems to be suggesting that Israel should make concessions to demands like the settlement freeze so that Arabs will like Obama, and thus be more disposed to make peace with Israel. Huh? Good for him that he never took my logic class.

The real explanation of what’s behind Obama Administration policy is not obvious to me yet. There are those who think that the Saudi tail is wagging the American dog, and others who think that the administration is simply naive. Yesterday I suggested that maybe they are getting bad advice. As I said to a commenter on the previous post: are they dumb, ill-advised, or evil?

Tune in again in a few weeks or months to find out.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Israeli Left, Arab-Israeli conflict, Obama Mideast policy