FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

Barry Rubin has a genius for spotting the obvious truths that others miss:

The Obama administration had an idea of making the main — or at least initial — specific tactic of its Middle East policy to get a freeze of apartment-building on Israeli settlements on the West Bank. What happened should have been predictable. Israel is in no hurry to comply, giving the administration a choice between looking foolish and being a bully in a game that isn’t worth the candle.

But there’s a more immediate problem. Syria and the Palestinian Authority, which not long before had been–in part to show Obama that they were most cooperative and eager for peace, no matter how hypocritical that was — are now demanding a freeze on construction as a precondition for any further talks. In other words, the minimal chance for negotiations has been frozen due to the U.S. strategy. The ship is dead in the water.

Unintended consequences, indeed. But what were the intended ones?

As many commentators have pointed out, a freeze on construction inside existing settlements can’t possibly have a significant effect on the practical considerations of any peace agreement. Either a settlement will end up in Israel or it won’t. Therefore the point of Obama’s demand is a psychological one.

So what is the message? The Palestinians would probably say that he is agreeing with them that all the land occupied by Jordan in 1948, including East Jerusalem, is ‘Palestinian land’  in which Israel has no sovereignty. As I pointed out recently, this pretty much eviscerates UN resolution 242, which calls for “secure and recognized borders” and which definitely does not require Israel to evacuate all the land occupied in 1967.

Another possibility is that it is a relatively simple issue which Obama can use to show Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu quickly how much political damage the US can do to him if he doesn’t play along.

Whatever it means, one implication is that Israel should see the US as its ruler, not partner.  And yesterday it was made clear that the majority of US Jews are not going to object to this treatment. Monday afternoon, Obama hosted a delegation of 16 Jewish ‘leaders’ from the Center and Left for what apparently turned out to be a friendly game of softball:

The two representatives of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, president David Victor and president-elect Lee Rosenberg, asked friendly questions about Saudi Arabia and Iran, respectively, and did not press the settlements issue. Rosenberg and Solow, who are both from the Chicago area, were major fund-raisers for Obama’s presidential run.

Some of Obama’s loudest critics — the Zionist Organization of America and the National Council of Young Israel, among them — were among the notable absences from the list of those invited to the White House.

Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union of Reform Judaism, delivered a ringing endorsement of Obama’s demands for a settlement freeze, saying that settlement expansion was not in Israel’s interest. — JTA

Unfortunately, pro-Arab interests, anti-Israel NGOs, academics, left-wing Israelis, and  organizations like J Street and Americans for Peace Now — which, for the first time, were invited to a meeting of this type — have created an image of  ‘settlements’ which is highly unattractive to liberal American Jews, who are in the majority here.

The image is of ‘religious fanatics’ — almost any version of Orthodox Judaism is seen as extremist — who actively attack and provoke Arabs while living on land and using water that is in some way stolen from them (no matter how land was obtained, of course, Arabs will claim that it is ‘stolen’ and their supporters will amplify their claims).

And there is the oft-repeated assertion that settlements are ‘illegal’, which seems to have become part of common currency although it is simply false (see Jerold S. Auerbach, “Are settlements illegal?“).

The image is wrong, actually absurd for the majority of settlements. But this is the image that suffuses the media.

This is combined with the almost — dare I say it — religious adulation afforded to Barack Obama by many liberal Jews. Put simply, if it’s between Obama and Israel, they come down on the side of Obama — and I say this as a lifelong Democrat who appreciates the historic importance of a black president for the US.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that Obama and most of his Middle East advisors — and of course the historically Arabist State Department — have decided to finally restore Israel to pre-1967 borders, as Henry Kissinger assured the Arabs that we would do in 1975. They see this as necessary in order to ‘repair’ the relationship with the Arab world which they believe was wrecked by George Bush.

They may also accept the Arab position that the Israeli-Arab conflict is caused by occupation, rather than Arab rejectionism (as I believe), and that shrinking Israel will make peace possible. But I suggest that despite what Obama and his spokespeople say, ending the conflict is secondary to their main goal of reducing Israel’s size.

What has kept this from being implemented by previous administrations has been strong resistance on the part of American supporters of Israel, particularly Jews.

Because of the present situation on the Arab side — a strong, popular, rejectionist, Iranian-funded Hamas and a weak, corrupt (and probably also rejectionist) Palestinian Authority — an Israeli withdrawal today cannot be expected to ‘solve’ the conflict in a peaceful way (imagine the withdrawal from Gaza and its consequences, and then multiply this by at least 10).

Therefore, Obama’s insistence on such a withdrawal contradicts his stated commitment to Israel’s security. So resistance to this idea should be even stronger than in the past.

But then, the acceptance of cognitive dissonance — even the ability to believe contradictory propositions — is one of the hallmarks of true religious belief.

Technorati Tags: Obama, Israel, settlements

News item:

US President Barack Obama will meet on Monday with over a dozen heads of influential American Jewish organizations and is expected to respond to concerns that the White House is pressuring Israel over West Bank settlements while it is soft-pedaling with some of Israel’s worst enemies.

“American Jews more or less agree with the president on settlements, but it’s the focus on criticizing Israel that’s disconcerting,” said an organization leader who will be attending the meeting.

Strictly speaking, the “organization leader” is correct if there is at least one American Jew that agrees, but let’s take the American position as it has been explained by the State Department, express it explicitly, and try it out on some American Jews:

Any Jewish construction activity in the area of historic Palestine that was occupied by Jordan between 1948 and 1967, including areas of East Jerusalem and the West Bank that were inhabited by Jews before 1948, is verboten.

The State Department thereby throws UN resolution 242 under the bus, apparently giving up on the idea that Israel should return land (not all the land) occupied in 1967 in a way which will provide her with “secure and recognized borders” and in return for a peace treaty.

The Obama administration today in effect says that Israel does not have sovereignty over any land beyond the 1949 cease-fire lines. So much for “secure” borders. And since there is no Arab entity capable of making — and keeping — a peace treaty in this area, there will be no meaningful peace either.

What do you think, American Jews? Do you “more or less agree with the president” on this?

What about the contrast between his tough talk on settlements and his willingness to let Iran off with a warning on its nuclear program but  no sanctions?

Will Obama’s famous gift of gab help him keep the Jewish support he so richly does not deserve?

Technorati Tags: Obama, Jews

Abba Eban visits the US in 1957

Abba Eban quite famously said “The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity” in 1974 after the Geneva peace conference ended without progress toward a comprehensive Israeli-Arab peace. Eban spoke eloquently at that conference, including this:

Now, we have no trouble or reluctance in understanding what Arab nationalism is all about. It is the moving story of a people’s liberation from external servitudes. It is an effort to build a bridge between past glories and future hopes. The success of the Arab nationalist enterprise is reflected in the existence of 19 States, occupying 12 million square kilometres, in which 100 million Arabs live under their sovereign flags, in command of vast resources. The world, including Israel, has come to terms with Arab nationalism. The unsolved question is whether Arab nationalism will frankly come to terms with the modest rights of another Middle Eastern nation to live securely in its original, and only, home.

For this to happen it will, I suggest, be necessary for political and intellectual leaders in the Arab world to reject the fallacy that Israel is alien to the Middle East. Israel is not alien to the Middle East: it is an organic part of its texture and memory. Take Israel and all that has flowed from Israel out of Middle Eastern history and you evacuate that history of its central experiences. Israel’s historic, religious, national roots in the Land of Israel are a primary element of mankind’s cultural history. Nothing – not even dispersion, exile, martyrdom, long separation – has ever disrupted this connexion. Modern Israel is the resumption of a primary current in the flow of universal history. We ask our neighbours to believe that it is an authentic reality from which most of the other elements in Middle Eastern history take their birth. Israel is no more or less than the Jewish people’s resolve to be itself and to live, renewed, within its own frame of values, and thus to contribute its particular shape of mind to the universal human legacy.

In the 35 years since then, progress in this direction has been non-existent or even negative. Eban argued that peace was in the clear practical interest of both sides.  He called for defensible borders, “an end to hostility, boycott and blockade”,  a formal end to the conflict, what we would call a ‘warm peace’, and a just solution to the refugee problem — for both Jewish and Arab refugees. How hard could it be? He said,

The attainment of peace will make it possible to resolve the problem of refugees by co-operative regional action with international aid. We find it astonishing that States whose revenues from oil exports surpass 15,000 million dollars a year were not able to solve this problem in a spirit of kinship and human solidarity. In the very years when the Arab refugee problem was created by the assault on Israel in 1947 and 1948, 700,000 Jewish refugees from Arab and Moslem lands and from the debris of Hitler’s Europe were received by Israel and integrated in full citizenship and economic dignity. There have been other such solutions in Europe, in the Indian sub-continent, in Africa. The Arab refugee problem is not basically intractable: it has been perpetuated by a conscious decision to perpetuate it. But surely a peace settlement will remove any political incentive which has prevented a solution in the past. At the appropriate stage Israel will define its contribution to an international and regional effort for refugees resettlement. We shall propose compensation for abandoned lands in the context of a general discussion on property abandoned by those who have left countries in the Middle East to seek a new life.

Today his words sound remarkably naive. The combination of the empowerment of the most vicious part of the Palestinian nationalist movement, Arafat’s PLO, by a world — and an Israel — imbued with the New Left ideology of the 1960’s, along with the rise of radical Islamism exemplified by Hamas, has pushed the ideal of peace based on rational interests even farther away, almost to the vanishing point.

Support for extremist movements used to come from the Soviet Union and to some extent Saudi Arabia, but now Iran has been added, introducing an element of  radical theology to the mix. One almost misses the pragmatic Soviets.

From the point of view of the Palestinians today — both the nationalists and the Islamists — the Arabs did not miss any opportunities, because the kind of peace envisioned by Eban would not have been a desired outcome. Certainly his view of Israel as an “organic part” of the Middle East would be greeted with fury by those whose opinion is that Jewish Israel is a cancerous growth in the Arab Middle East.

Today there are few opportunities for peace because the Palestinian leadership, smelling potential victory and encouraged by rejectionists in the Arab and Iranian world, will not move in that direction. For example, the PLO, in the form of the Palestinian Authority (PA) categorically refuses to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

Thanks to the effective indoctrination campaign paid for by such disparate sources as Saudi and Iranian oil money and the European Union, the rejectionist narrative — both historically and of current events — is accepted as the true account of the conflict everywhere in the Arab world, in Europe and in left-wing and academic circles in the US. So it is not even possible to try to go over the heads of the leadership to the people.

Unfortunately, today opportunities are regularly missed by Israel, not the Arabs. And they are not opportunities to make peace, but rather opportunities to destroy the enemies of peace. So, for example, Israel allowed Yasser Arafat to leave Beirut alive in 1982; failed to destroy the fighting and resupply abilities of Hezbollah in 2006; and of course failed to crush the Hamas army and leadership in 2008-9.

Israel is in a particularly tough spot today because it seems that the Obama Administration has also more or less accepted at least part of the rejectionist narrative, although it nevertheless maintains that it is committed to Israel’s security. This is not a happy situation, because the logical consequence of this pernicious narrative is just what the rejectionists say: that there should not be a Jewish state of Israel.

Supporters of Israel in the US should understand the tension faced by the administration, the tension between its distorted view of history — which Barack Obama expressed clearly in his Cairo speech when he obscenely equated the Holocaust to the Palestinian “pursuit of a homeland” — and the administration’s concern for American public opinion, which still tends to favor Israel.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Arabs, Israeli-Arab conflict, Abba Eban

A group of rabbis is organizing a ‘fast for Gaza’, which they call Ta’anit Tzedek (one translation is ‘fast for justice’). Here is how they describe it:

The Jewish Fast for Gaza is an ad hoc group of rabbis, Jews, and people of conscience who have committed to undertake a monthly daytime fast in support of the following goals:

1. To call for a lifting of the blockade that prevents the entry of civilian goods and services into Gaza;

2. To provide humanitarian and developmental aid to the people of Gaza;

3. To call upon Israel, the US, and the international community to engage in negotiations without pre-conditions with all relevant Palestinian parties – including Hamas – in order to end the blockade;

4. To encourage the American government to vigorously engage both Israelis and Palestinians toward a just and peaceful settlement of the conflict.

Where to start? With my annoyance that people who would undoubtedly call themselves “pro-Israel” and maybe even “Zionists” would lend themselves to this? My surprise that so many rabbis would be ill-informed enough to sign on to it? My sorrow that I know some of the signatories?

Some questions for the rabbis:

1. Israel says that the blockade exists to prevent the transfer of strategic materials to Hamas, that food and medical supplies are not affected, that Hamas hijacks aid shipments and uses it for its own purposes or sells it, and that there is no ‘humanitarian crisis’ in Gaza.   Hamas and compromised agencies like UNRWA — whose personnel are 99% Palestinian and the rest biased — and NGOs like Amnesty International — which consistently puts its stamp of approval on Hamas lies and exaggerations — say otherwise. The rabbis choose to believe Hamas and friends. Why?
2. Gaza receives international help via UNRWA, which pumps millions into the strip in direct aid to refugees and payment of salaries for its more than 9,000 employees in the Strip. In addition, the Palestinian Authority — funded mostly by the US and the EU — pays the salaries of its thousands of employees in Gaza, even though they are either doing nothing or working for Hamas since its 2007 coup. Finally, President Obama has earmarked $900 million to rebuild Gaza after the recent war (incidentally, the damage is much less serious than the usual suspects claim). A great deal of this aid ends up in the hands of Hamas. Isn’t this enough?
3. Israel has already communicated with Hamas via Egypt about the captive Gilad Schalit. Hamas demands were so outrageous and unreasonable that even the Israel that freed the monster Samir Kuntar in return for some bones could not reach a deal. Now these rabbis want “negotiations without pre-conditions” with Hamas? Would they have negotiated without pre-conditions with Adolf Hitler? What is the difference?
4. Finally, the US is already ‘vigorously engaging’ Israel and the Palestinians. It is insisting that Israelis living in East Jerusalem may not build spare bedrooms, but has not insisted that Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state. What more do they want?

The rabbis quote the Torah: “Do not stand idly by when your neighbor’s blood is being spilled (Leviticus 19:16).” But blood is not being spilled in Gaza today. Have they forgotten that Israel’s government stood by for six years — in the interest of peace — while the blood of their neighbors in Sderot, Kfar Aza and other Israeli towns was spilled by Hamas? And that Israel finally acted to kill the rodef [pursuer] that was trying to murder its people?

They also quote the Talmud: “On three things the world stands: on justice, on truth, and on peace (Mishnah Avot 1:18).” The contrast between this and the group’s position couldn’t be more stark:

• Instead of truth, they accept the lies of Hamas.
• Instead of justice, they ask for more ‘American engagement’ (which so far has meant pressure on Israel).
• And instead of peace, they propose actions which will lead to the strengthening and legitimization of the murderous, antisemitic Hamas.

B’ta’avon [hearty appetite]!

Technorati Tags: Israel, Gaza, useful idiots