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Is it just me, or does the Obama Administration really make deliberately meaningless statements?

For example — something I’ve found particularly annoying — Obama, Clinton and others continue to say things like “it is time for these settlements to stop.”

Stop what? Stop being built? Stop expanding? Stop existing? We don’t know.

Or how about the vacuous statement recently made by Mr. Biden when asked about PM Netanyahu’s position that he will give the US until the end of the year to make progress on stopping the Iranian nuclear program:

Israel can determine for itself – it’s a sovereign nation – what’s in their interest and what they decide to do relative to Iran and anyone else.

Yes, Israel is a sovereign nation. But what does this tell us about the actions the US administration might take or not take if Israel asked for a green light (or attacked without one)? The answer is ‘nothing’, and other administration spokespersons were quick to make this clear.

On the other hand, here are some statements which are more meaningful. For example,

Israel has to remain a Jewish state and what I believe that means is that any negotiated peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians is going to have to involve the Palestinians relinquishing the right of return as it has been understood in the past.

Did Barak Obama say that? Yes, he did, in Cleveland in February 2008. Could we get him to say it again, today?

And of course, there was this, at AIPAC in June 2008:

The Palestinians need a state that is contiguous and cohesive, and that allows them to prosper — but any agreement with the Palestinian people must preserve Israel’s identity as a Jewish state, with secure, recognized and defensible borders. Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.

It’s clear that the pre-1967 borders are not ‘defensible’. So did he mean that they would be expanded to include major settlement blocs? His handlers rushed to defuse the ‘undivided Jerusalem’ remark the day after, but he said it. Today, of course, he is saying that Israelis living in the eastern part of undivided Jerusalem can’t add spare bedrooms.

Finally, here is what he said about Iran at AIPAC:

We will also use all elements of American power to pressure Iran. I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. That starts with aggressive, principled diplomacy without self-defeating preconditions, but with a cleareyed understanding of our interests. We have no time to waste. We cannot unconditionally rule out an approach that could prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon…

Finally, let there be no doubt: I will always keep the threat of military action on the table to defend our security and our ally Israel. Sometimes there are no alternatives to confrontation. But that only makes diplomacy more important. If we must use military force, we are more likely to succeed, and will have far greater support at home and abroad, if we have exhausted our diplomatic efforts.

Sounded tough, didn’t he?

Technorati Tags: Obama, Israel

I’ve talked about the ‘information war‘ being waged against Israel, and how her enemies and their supporters are constantly trying to delegitimize her historically, legally and morally — in order to weaken Western support and clear the path for the physical destruction of the Jewish state that is their ultimate goal:

• Historically, they attempt to revise history to show that today’s Jews have no roots in the Land of Israel

• Legally, they try to prove that Israel’s creation was not justified and that her actions violate international law

• Morally, they accuse Israel as acting for the basest of motives and in the most despicable ways, to show that Israel does not deserve to exist as a nation

While reading the very biased Amnesty International report on alleged war crimes during the recent Gaza war, I started thinking about how they do these things. I’ve discussed the historical revisionism on several occasions (see here and here for example). Today I want to write about how they try to distort perceptions of current events.

They use four basic tools:

1. Lies
2. Exaggerations
3. Facts without context
4. False imputation of motives

Lies are sometimes just stories about things that never happened. For example, it’s said that such-and-such a woman was denied permission to leave Gaza for medical treatment, but upon investigation it turns out that she doesn’t exist.

Or they can be elaborate hoaxes, such as the videotaped drama of the shooting of the boy Mohammed al-Dura. This was particularly notable because of the far-reaching consequences of the story — “al-Dura” became a rallying cry of the intifada — and the involvement of the well-known France II TV bureau chief Charles Enderlin and even the President of France at the time, Jacques Chirac.

The faked ‘death’ of al-Dura

Exaggerations take advantage of the normal tendency to say “the truth lies somewhere in between” when two sides make opposing claims. Start with an outrageous exaggeration when the other side tells the truth, and you have automatically gained ground. An obvious example is the inflated Palestinian figure for civilian casualties in the Gaza war.

Sometimes an exaggeration changes not just the degree, but the nature of  something. Consider the accusation that Israel fired white phosphorus  munitions directly at civilians, a war crime. Israel did use white phosphorus, for smoke and illumination. There undoubtedly were some people injured by the residue which fell from air bursts of such shells.  But the number and severity of these incidents were multiplied beyond measure in Palestinian reports.

White phosphorous over Gaza

Facts without context: Pro-Arab NGOs say that the Israeli navy interferes with Gazan fishing boats. But they don’t tell you the context — that the boats have been used to smuggle explosives, weapons and terrorists.

Half-ton of TNT taken from fishing boat off Gaza

False imputation of motives: Palestinians say that Israel’s actions are always designed to punish and humiliate them, not for legitimate security purposes. Israel is accused of deliberately targeting civilians in the Gaza war. But reports of civilian casualties caused international pressure which ultimately forced Israel to withdraw without achieving its military goals. The IDF was aware of this possibility from the beginning; is it logical that it would behave this way?

Note that the first three techniques make the fourth possible. A noncombatant is hurt — was it an accident or was it done on purpose? If such incidents are rare, you can infer that it is probably accidental. But if it seems to be part of a pattern, then maybe it was deliberate — and the lies, exaggerations and facts presented without context are intended precisely to establish such a pattern.

For example, the Amnesty International report mentioned above includes a number of unverifiable second-hand atrocity stories, which it follows by accusing the IDF of remarkably evil intent.  Here is a quotation from the report with the implications of motive highlighted:

Much of the destruction was wanton and deliberate, and was carried out in a manner and circumstances which indicated that it could not be justified on grounds of military necessity. Rather, it was often the result of reckless and indiscriminate attacks, which were seemingly tolerated or even directly sanctioned up the chain of command, and which at times appeared intended to collectively punish local residents for the actions of armed groups. [my emphasis]

All of these techniques are designed to work together to produce an image of Israel as an outlaw nation. And they are effective, especially when they fall on the fertile ground of those who are disposed to believe — either for ideological reasons, or because they’ve already been conditioned to do so by the massive flow of propaganda that appears in most media today, or from a predisposition to antisemitism.

Technorati Tags: Israel, information war, delegitimization

The European Commission issued a press release yesterday, saying

“…the European Union certainly takes the view that all Israeli settlement in the occupied territory is illegal and that it seriously undermines progress towards a two-state solution,” said Mr. Roy Dickinson, the European Commission’s Chargé d’affaires in Jerusalem. “Yet the economic impact of settlements on the Palestinian economy and the PA’s revenues also deserves attention. The expropriation of fertile land; the settler-only roads which carve up the occupied Palestinian territory, and the checkpoints and roadblocks which exist solely to protect settlements: these all contribute to strangling the Palestinian economy, thus they reduce the PA’s revenues and make the PA dependent on handouts from donors. And it is European taxpayers who pay most of the price of that dependence.”

What are they paying for?

Today the European Union made its seventh contribution this year to the Palestinian Authority’s payment of its civil service salaries and pensions both in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Its contribution of over NIS 71 million (€ 13 million) was delivered through PEGASE[1] and benefitted [sic] almost 80,580 civil servants and pensioners.

Yes, that’s correct. The EU is paying the salaries and pensions of Palestinian Authority [PA] civil servants in Gaza. Of course, Gaza is entirely under control of Hamas, so either these “civil servants” are working for Hamas or they are being paid for doing nothing.

And let’s also ask who are these ‘civil servants’ in the West Bank and Gaza? Are they teachers, doctors, etc.? Well, some of them are. But most are members of the various ‘security’ and police services. It seems that Palestinians need far more police officers per capita than Israel, New York or Los Angeles, despite the much lower rate of reported criminal offenses in their jurisdiction.

They need lots of weapons too. Today the Jerusalem Post reports that Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, after meeting with US envoy George Mitchell, approved the transfer of 1000 Kalashnikov assault rifles to the PA.  And there are 50 Russian armored vehicles waiting in Jordan to be delivered. In the past, arms given to the PA have been used in attacks on Israelis — sometimes PA police officers moonlight as al-Aqsa brigades or even Hamas terrorists. And when Hamas took over in Gaza in 2007, they inherited huge quantities of weapons from the fleeing PA forces.

In any event, the European Commission’s worries about the costs of settlements are probably misplaced. I suggest that they worry about the amount of their aid that is going

• Directly to Hamas,
• Indirectly to Hamas,
• To corrupt PA officials,
• To support the militarization of the PA.

I am sure that the total would exceed what the Palestinian ‘economy’ loses to settlements.

If I could grab Mr. Roy Dickinson and shake him, I would point out that

• The checkpoints and bypass roads that he decries are not a result of the presence of settlements — they are there because otherwise the Palestinians will shoot and bomb the Jewish residents. Dickinson seems to accept the Arab point of view that  terrorism against ‘settlers’ is justified, since he prefers removing the settlers to ending the violence.
• Palestinian behavior is probably impacting the Israeli economy a whole lot more, being responsible for the enormous security establishment necessary to protect Israelis from Palestinian terrorism.
• It is not the settlements that are obstacles to the two-state solution. Israel has twice — at Camp David / Taba and during the recent negotiations between the Olmert administration and the PA — offered to dismantle a large number of settlements and compensate the PA for land in the settlement blocs that would remain. These negotiations failed primarily because of Palestinian demands for all of Jerusalem and ‘return’ of refugees.

Technorati Tags: Israel, EU, European Commission, Palestinian Authority

Every few months I have to write this post, in one form or another. So I won’t be insulted if you get bored and change the channel.

I keep running into people who want to argue that the Palestinian problem is a ‘human rights problem’. Some of these people are local friends, and others are NGOs like Amnesty International, about which I wrote recently. But they all want to talk about this or that case in which Israeli soldiers or police allegedly brutalized Palestinians, or the degree of inequality between Arab and Jewish Israelis, or supposed ‘racist’ — that is, anti-Arab — attitudes among Jewish Israelis.

They suggest that these phenomena are fundamental to the conflict, and that they receive official expression as expropriation of land and water resources, and general exploitation of Palestinians for the benefit of Jews. The conception is that anti-Arab attitudes on the part of  ‘European’  Jews are a cause of the ‘colonization’ of the ‘indigenous’ Arabs, who are so ‘humiliated’ by this that they have the right — indeed no other choice than — to ‘resist’.

This view is popular in ‘progressive’ circles in the US, where Palestinian Arabs are compared to African Americans, or in Europe where the preferred metaphor is South African blacks.

On the contrary, I say that anti-Arab attitudes among Israeli Jews are symptoms of a larger regional conflict, something which can’t be fixed merely by soul-searching and self criticism on their part. I say that the actions of the government — for example, the construction of the security barrier — which certainly do impact the lives of Arabs negatively, are driven by the objective situation of Jewish Israelis, who are under siege by forces that don’t even hide their desire to commit another genocide against the Jewish people.

Some important points:

• The Arabs are not so indigenous and the Jews are not so European. Ahmadinejad and Abbas are fond of saying “why should the Palestinians be stateless as a result of Hitler’s actions?”– by which I presume they intend that the half of all Israelis who are descended from Jews that fled Arab countries after 1948 should be stateless because of the actions of various Arab despots. And while Sari Nusseibeh may be able to trace his family’s Palestinian roots back to the time of the crusades, many of the ancestors of today’s ‘Palestinians’ came to the region from Egypt with Muhammed Ali in the 1830’s — a few years before the Zionists — or fled famine in Syria during the early 20th century.

• The Arab world actively hates Israel and Jews. With the exception of Egypt and Jordan, with which Israel has ‘cold’ peace agreements, every Arab nation and Iran remains committed to the principle that Israel is illegitimate and should not exist. Some of them like Iran and Syria are actively engaged in proxy war with Israel via  non-state proxies Hamas and Hezbollah. Virtually all of them — including the Palestinian Authority — officially and unofficially produce a constant flow of hateful antisemitic propaganda in all of their media.

• Israel is sporadically at war with Hamas and Hezbollah.

• Israel is under threat from huge numbers of missiles from Hezbollah in Lebanon, from Syria — including some with chemical warheads — and from Iran, which will soon have nuclear weapons.

• Israel is highly vulnerable due to its small size and population.

• There is a worldwide propaganda assault to delegitimize Israel. Delegitimization is often the first step to genocide. The Arabs and Iran contribute to this, but also ‘progressive’ forces in Europe, American and European academia.

• Israel has few allies. It is entirely dependent on the US, which has supplied it with weapons since 1968, to maintain the military superiority it needs to survive. On the other hand, the enemies of Israel — and in particular the Palestinian and Lebanese proxies that presently constitute the ‘point of the spear’ aimed at her — are supported by oil money from Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.

The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, then, rather than a human-rights issue in which a strong nation disproportionally uses  its military power to oppress a weak minority, is seen to be a symptom of a regional conflict in which a number of rich and relatively populous nations are agreed — although they can agree on nothing else — to oppose a small and vulnerable state. In this broader conflict, Israel is the underdog.

You can’t cure pneumonia with aspirin; you need to treat the disease, not the symptoms. In order to improve relations between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, it will be necessary for the Arab world to take the pressure off, to stop trying to destroy Israel, to accept the presence of a Jewish state in the Mideast, to stop antisemitic incitement, and above all to stop supporting the Palestinian extremists that are responsible for the terrorism that has plagued Israel since its founding.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Arabs, human rights, regional conflict, terrorism

It is not especially surprising that Amnesty International (AI) has issued a report accusing Israel of committing war crimes in Gaza. In 2006, the organization issued a similar report about the Lebanese war, which was almost completely discredited.

The Gaza report affirms all the charges made against Israel and — like the 2006 report — accepts Arab testimony uncritically. For example, inflated figures for civilian casualties were obtained from “Palestinian human rights NGOs”. How could one possibly doubt their veracity?

Although the report itself is unsigned, the summary which accompanies it mentions “Donatella Rovera, who headed a field research mission to Gaza and southern Israel during and after the conflict.” Here is what I wrote about Rovera’s ‘investigative’ technique some time ago:

Rovera’s ‘research’ seems to follow the same pattern time and again (she’s frequently quoted in news reports accusing Israel of using white phosphorus shells against civilians, summary executions of Palestinian children, etc.): Palestinians tell her that thus-and-such happened, and she repeats it to reporters along with her judgment that whatever atrocity she is describing is a violation of international law.

Relying on exaggerated and sometimes invented premises — hearsay by interested parties — the report moves on to draw conclusions about Israeli motives:

Much of the destruction was wanton and deliberate, and was carried out in a manner and circumstances which indicated that it could not be justified on grounds of military necessity. Rather, it was often the result of reckless and indiscriminate attacks, which were seemingly tolerated or even directly sanctioned up the chain of command, and which at times appeared intended to collectively punish local residents for the actions of armed groups. [my emphasis]

I do not doubt that there was unnecessary damage, that civilians were unintentionally hurt or killed, or that some Israeli soldiers acted improperly — although allegations of deliberate murder of Palestinians, when investigated, have turned out to be false. But I very strongly doubt that actions were sanctioned “up the chain of command” to “collectively punish” Gazans.

Probably no Western army’s conduct has ever been so closely scrutinized than that of the IDF (US and Israeli combat veterans that I have spoken to are bemused by the phenomenon; they know that soldiers in war cannot be evaluated in the same way as candidates for university tenure).

In contrast, the cohorts of Hamas — with the exception of the impossible-to-ignore Qassam barrages, which even AI must admit to be war crimes — were portrayed as relatively clean fighters. AI does take Hamas to task not only for its rocket attacks on Israeli civilians, but also for endangering the Palestinians from whose midst they fire.  But compare the way AI evaluates the intent of Hamas with how it treated Israel:

Hamas and other armed groups also endangered Palestinian civilians by failing to take all feasible precautions in the conduct of their military activities, notably by firing rockets from residential areas and storing weapons, explosives and ammunition in them. They also mixed with the civilian population, although this would be difficult to avoid in the small and overcrowded Gaza Strip, and there is no evidence that they did so with the intent of shielding themselves. [my emphasis]

No, of course, they must be careful to not make judgments when there is no evidence!

The AI report documents every offense committed or said to committed by Israeli troops, from alleged ‘murders’ to graffiti. However it does not even mention the following war crimes committed by Hamas:

• Using humanitarian symbols for attacks, such as by transporting terrorists in ambulances
• Direct and public incitement to genocide
• The recruitment of children into the conflict
• Firing at the enemy while wearing civilian clothes
• Wearing the uniforms of the enemy
• Shooting rockets with phosphorus payloads deliberately at civilians
• Not adhering to international standards on the treatment of prisoners of war
• Immediate execution of alleged “collaborators” without a trial

No, the report was not surprising or especially interesting. What is interesting is the reaction to it from Hamas, which claimed that it was biased against them:

Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum denounced the report, saying it “equated the victim and the executioner, and denied our people’s right to resist the occupation.“

Now this is an interesting argument. Pay attention:

Hamas says  that anything they do, including launching attacks directly against the Israeli population, is justified because they are “resisting occupation”.

But there is no occupation, you say. The only Jew left in Gaza is kidnapped Israeli Gilad Schalit.

True, says Hamas, but what about the ‘blockade’ and other Israeli security measures? They are a form of occupation.

And if you look closely you’ll find that for Hamas, ‘occupation’ means ‘anything Israel does to try to prevent them from killing Jews’.

Therefore, if Israel tries to prevent Hamas from killing Jews, Hamas is justified in killing Jews. But if Israel does not try, then — what else? — Hamas will kill Jews.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Hamas, Amnesty International, war crimes, Gaza