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Palestinian ‘president’ Mahmoud Abbas greets released prisoners in Ramallah, August 14, 2013

Remember what Amalek did unto thee by the way, when ye were come forth out of Egypt;

How he met thee by the way, and smote the hindmost of thee, even all that were feeble behind thee, when thou wast faint and weary; and he feared not God. — Deut. 25:17-18

Early this morning Israel allowed 26 Palestinian Arab prisoners to go free. They were released in Ramallah and Gaza. Although this has been discussed for some time, the act itself was shocking:

Of the 26 prisoners, 17 have been convicted of murder. The remaining prisoners were jailed on charges of manslaughter, attempted murder, kidnapping and conspiring to commit murder.

Of course all of the murders were horrible, involving burning, shooting and stabbing to death men, women and children. But there is a particular depravity in the pointless killing of older Jews who represent no threat to the killers:

Among the terrorists to be released is Salah Ibrahim Ahmad Mughdad, the murderer of Holocaust-survivor Israel Tenenbaum who was found dead on June 14, 1993, at the hotel in Netanya where he had been working as a night watchman. Mughdad had murdered him on the job.

Also being released is Barbakh Faiz Rajab Madhat, who murdered 61-year-old Moshe Beker at his orchard. Beker was murdered on January 21 1994, when he arrived at his orchard and was ambushed by three terrorists, who had slept on site and waited for him. They attacked him, stabbed him to death with a knife and a pair of pruning shears, and fled.

Al Haj Othman Amar Mustafa, who murdered Steven Rosenfeld on June 7, 1989, will be released as well. Rosenfeld went on a hike in the hills near Ariel, where he lived, when he encountered a group of shepherds who stole a knife that he had in his possession, stabbed him to death, and hid his body.

Another terrorist to be released is Abdel Aal Sa’id Ouda Yusef, who murdered Ian Sean Feinberg on April 18, 1983. Feinberg, who served for several years as an officer and lawyer in Gaza, had worked with commercial companies from Gaza and was murdered during a business meeting in Gaza City. Terrorists burst into the room and announced that they had come to kill the Jew. They then proceeded to murder Feinberg using a gun and an axe.

Ramahi Salah Abdallah Faraj, who murdered 84-year-old Avraham Kinstler in July of 1992, will be released as well. Kinstler was ambushed and murdered with an axe by a terrorist as he arrived to work at his orchard.

There is little more that I can add to what I and others have written about the humiliation suffered by Israel in this affair. By allowing murderers to go free in return for less than nothing — an agreement to negotiate about relinquishing part of the historic Jewish homeland –  Israel lost its honor, its deterrent capability, and the trust of its own people.

The government tried to ‘explain’ its action by saying that the murderers in question committed their crimes before the signing of the Oslo accord. Why this should matter, since Palestinian terrorism increased after Oslo, is not clear. Anyway, it isn’t even true. Announcements were also made of plans build new homes in Jerusalem and Judea/Samaria. When or if this will actually happen is not clear.

Officially, this decision was taken to promote ‘peace’; unofficially it was understood to be a result of American pressure. No believable description of the nature of the pressure has been presented.

Israelis that I have spoken to have been unanimous in their disgust. It is hard to believe that PM Netanyahu will have a political career after this.

As expected, the released terrorists were treated as great heroes on their arrival. Also as expected, no humiliation of Israel is enough for the Arabs: according to reports, “Officials in the Palestinian Authority expressed outrage at Israel’s decision to release the terrorists late at night.”

Leaks about the proposed negotiations abound. One thing is certain: this is shaping up to be one of the most dangerous times for the state of Israel since 1948.

Therefore it shall be, when the LORD thy God hath given thee rest from all thine enemies round about, in the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee for an inheritance to possess it, that thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget it. — Deut. 25:19

Technorati Tags: Israel, prisoner release, Amalek

News item:

The Peres Center for Peace decided not to include the play “Snow Ball” in its program for the visit of the Barcelona soccer team in Israel, because the play includes the line that “the state of Israel is the national home of all Jews.”

The affair began in April of this year, when the new play, directed by Roy Horovitz, was performed as part of the Haifa International Children’s Theatre Festival. The play is based on an original Israeli script that tells the story of Felipe, a 10-year-old new immigrant to Israel from Argentina who is a huge fan of FC Barcelona star Lionel Messi.

After learning that FC Barcelona was coming to Israel, Sherry Aryeh, artistic director of the Israel Children and Youth Social Theater, which produced the play, approached the Peres Center for Peace with the suggestion of performing the play during Messi’s visit to Israel. …

But much to the theater’s surprise, the Peres Center ultimately nixed the play, via a letter written by Dvir Zivan, the manager of the Peres Center’s Sports department. The email, which has been obtained by Israel Hayom, says that “we would be happy to bring all the Jewish children to the play, but there is a problem. We do not do activities intended for one nationality only. It is hard for us to bring Palestinian children to a play that uses the words ‘Jewish state.’ Unfortunately, we will be unable to cooperate on this venture.”

This really gets to the heart of it.

Leave everything else aside — whether there can be a peaceful Palestinian state alongside Israel, whether the already existing Palestinian state ruled by Hamas can be permitted to continue to exist as a terror state, what can be done about the Palestinian Arab refugees, borders, etc. — all of this is comparatively unimportant.

Palestinian children have been taught a narrative in which a Jewish state of Israel is beyond illegitimate, its very existence a crime against humanity. Apparently Dvir Zivan and the Peres Center think that this view has to be respected. It must be treated as though it is just as good as Zionism.

Zionism is not simply Jewish nationalism. It includes Herzl’s belief that without a state, the concrete expression of Jewish peoplehood, the Jewish people will not survive. An objective reading of history after Herzl supports this.

The view that nationalism is passé is popular today. Nationalism is blamed for wars and it is associated with racism. It is argued that a nation-state cannot by definition provide equal rights for minority citizens. Anti-nationalism provides yet another weapon for Israel’s enemies, who have variously deployed their own competing nationalism, Marxism, post-colonial theory, and the Durban strategy of smearing Israel as a racist apartheid state (sometimes all of these together) in a continuous war against Jewish sovereignty.

Is it surprising that while there are many, many nation-states in the world, only the Jewish one presents a problem that anti-nationalists feel urgently needs a ‘solution’? Unfortunately, not so much. Those who would like to see the Jews finally gone from history understand that Zionism is their great enemy.

But the idea of Zionism was developed in the crucible of history, a reaction to at least two thousand years in which much of the world tried to snuff out the Jewish people at any given time. Although the Arabs and apparently the Peres Center dispute this, the Jewish people, by any fair standard, have done pretty well in creating a state where the human rights of all of its residents are respected.

With all due respect, the various Arab nationalisms have not done as well. I think it’s safe to extrapolate from the behavior of the Palestinian Arabs that their recent discovery of peoplehood, if it develops into a state, will also not produce a shining example of human moral achievement. After all, we are talking about a state of Hamas and the PLO.

Unlike say, Tibetan nationalism, an essential part of Palestinian nationalism is the denial of Zionism. So what are we to make of the position of the Peres Center that this view deserves respect?

Shimon Peres is or was a Zionist — at least he would insist on this. Will he support or repudiate the anti-Zionism of the organization that bears his name?

Technorati Tags: Zionism, Peres Center

News item:

MEXICO CITY (AP) — U.S. law enforcement officials expressed outrage over the release from prison of Mexican drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero and vowed to continue efforts to bring to justice the man who ordered the killing of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent.

Caro Quintero was sentenced to 40 years in prison for the 1985 kidnapping and killing of DEA agent Enrique Camarena but a Mexican federal court ordered his release this week saying he had been improperly tried in a federal court for state crimes. …

The Association of Former Federal Narcotics Agents in the United States said it was “outraged” by Caro Quintero’s early release and blamed corruption within Mexico’s justice system.

“The release of this violent butcher is but another example of how good faith efforts by the U.S. to work with the Mexican government can be frustrated by those powerful dark forces that work in the shadows of the Mexican ‘justice’ system,” the organization said in a statement.

So imagine how they would react if 104 “violent butcher(s)” were released from prison as a result of improper influence on the justice system, particularly if that influence came from a foreign power! This describes the prisoner release that Israel’s leaders have been coerced into accepting as the price for beginning talks with the PLO.

There isn’t justice in nature. Sometimes evil people do terrible things and escape punishment, even thrive. This brute fact has prompted countless pages of philosophical and theological discourse. But one thing that is not in doubt is that it is one of the functions of civilization to try to bring some order out of this moral chaos by imposing justice.

Hence one of the seven Noachide laws — one of the moral principles that Judaism recognizes as a requirement for any civilized nation, Jewish or not — is to establish courts of law. Subverting justice, then, is one of the worst crimes a person can commit.

PM Netanyahu fell into a trap set for him by Barack Obama, perhaps payback for the humiliation Obama suffered in May 2011, when Bibi dared to publicly instruct the ‘leader of the free world’ about “Middle East reality.”

Now Obama has handed him a “Sophie’s choice,” a moral dilemma in which both forks are horrible. Should he release the prisoners, cause immense pain to the families of their victims, damage Israel’s honor and deterrence, and subvert the legal system that condemned them (and by the way, destroy his own reputation and political career)? Or should he tell Obama to go to hell and expose Israel to whatever consequences were threatened?

Bibi has made his choice. History will judge him.

Technorati Tags: Netanyahu, Obama, prisoner release, justice

Barack Obama bows to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, April 1, 2009

What I’m going to write is highly speculative. I have no way of knowing if it is true, and it might sound far-fetched. But it does have some explanatory power. First, some background.

A question that always bothers me is this: just what is it that causes the US State Department and every administration since the 1970’s to put so much emphasis on getting the Jews out of territory conquered in 1967 — emphasis which is not justified by rational American interests, and indeed which might even work against those interests?

The Obama Administration has been particularly unbalanced in this regard, using the IRS against charities suspected of giving money to ‘settlers’, and risking embarrassment by running after an Israeli-PLO agreement like a dog in heat at the most inauspicious time possible.

I have suggested in the past that at least some of the pressure in this direction comes from Saudi Arabia. Ever since Roosevelt’s meeting with King Ibn Saud in 1945, the Saudi position that there should not be Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East has been clear. Indeed, Roosevelt even made a statement that the Saudis interpreted as a promise that the US would not support the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.

Truman’s ‘failure’ to keep the promise was bad enough, from the Saudi point of view. But the actual expansion in 1967 of the ‘cancer in the heart of the Muslim world’ as the Iranian regime likes to put it, was too much. After the additional frustration of 1973, when the Arabs almost succeeded to regain the lost territory by force, the Saudis deployed the oil weapon against the West and made it clear in no uncertain terms that it would pay for its ‘perfidy’. The era of cheap oil was gone forever, and worse was threatened if Israel were not pushed back to its pre-1967 size — a size that would, they hoped, make Israel’s ultimate destruction by Arab armies possible:

The Arab success was the result, at least to some extent, of their improved military capabilities–an improvement due to their obtaining from the U.S.S.R. the large quantities of modern, sophisticated equipment necessary to fight a “first-class war.” The relationship between quality and quantity was highlighted by the early fighting in which Israeli qualitative superiority was offset, to some degree, by Egyptian and Syrian quantitative superiority. Therefore, while Israel retained its military advantage, the margin of that advantage had diminished, and, in the light of the sharp increases in Arab oil revenues, the possibility arose that the Arabs might achieve military parity or perhaps even superiority in the longer-term future by combining qualitative improvement with quantitative dominance.

In the October War, however, a U.S.-sponsored cease fire prevented the Israelis from gaining a clear cut military victory over Egypt by isolating the Second Army as well as destroying the already trapped Third Egyptian Army. This, plus U.S. insistence on opening supply lines to the latter army, and the decisions to resupply Israel and to extend it $2.2 billion in emergency aid represented a carefully designed effort to create a situation conducive to a revitalized U.S. peacemaking effort. Soon after, Kissinger made the first of his many trips to the Middle East. — Dr. Joseph S. Szyliowicz and Major Bard E. O’Neill, “The Oil Weapon and American Foreign Policy“

In return for ending the oil boycott, Kissinger promised the Arabs “full implementation” of UNSC 242, which of course is understood by the Arabs as complete withdrawal from all territories captured in 1967, especially Jerusalem.

This is the second American ‘promise’ to the Saudis, and judging by official and unofficial US policy since then, we have been trying mightily to fulfill it. This is no accident: Saudi influence in the US, despite the diminishing importance of Saudi Arabia in today’s oil market, is immense (making the ‘Israel lobby’ look insignificant in comparison).

This influence comes from years of direct lobbying by the Kingdom, and via oil companies like Aramco, originally a subsidiary of Standard Oil, bought by the Saudis in the 1980s. But that isn’t all they bought: many American universities also found their way into the Arabian shopping cart, with donations of tens of millions of dollars to schools like Harvard and Georgetown. Politicians, too, including former Presidents have benefited from recycled petrodollars in the form of contributions to libraries, speaking engagements, etc. The Saudis are not shy about letting them know what awaits:

A hint of the problem comes from none other than Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the United States. The Washington Post reports that he boasted of his success at cultivating powerful Americans: “If the reputation . . . builds that the Saudis take care of friends when they leave office, you’d be surprised how much better friends you have who are just coming into office”… [my emphasis]

Ex-Washington hands paid handsomely by the kingdom include such figures as Spiro T. Agnew, Jimmy Carter, Clark Clifford, John B. Connally and William E. Simon. A Washington Post account lists other former officials, including George H.W. Bush, who have found the Saudi connection “lucrative.” It also quotes a Saudi source saying that the Saudis have contributed to every presidential library in recent decades.

Many ex-U.S. ambassadors to Riyadh have received substantial sums of money since John C. West set the gold standard by funding his personal foundation with a $500,000 donation from a single Saudi prince, plus more from other Saudis, soon after he left the kingdom in 1981. — Daniel Pipes, “What Riyadh buys [in Washington]“

Now for the speculative part.

The House of Saud is still interested, and will always be interested, in eliminating the Jewish state. But today it is perhaps even more concerned with a direct threat emanating from Iran and its proxies, Hizballah and Syria.

Iran represents a danger to the Saudi regime for a multiplicity of reasons, religious, political and economic. Its objective today is to take the leadership of the Gulf — indeed, the whole Middle East — away from the Saudis, who have been able to hold it thanks to American muscle. The Saudi king was even quoted as telling American officials that he wanted us to “cut off the head of the snake [Iran]” for him.

But what if the Saudis could kill both the Israeli and Iranian ‘snakes’ with a single blow? There are several ways that this could come about, all of which involve making use of the powerful Saudi influence on US policymakers:

Possibility 1: Israel could be allowed attack the Iranian nuclear program, doing significant damage. Then it might suffer greatly in the ensuing retaliation by Hizballah and Iran (perhaps also joined by Syria and Hamas). This scenario could explain what otherwise looks like US stupidity in going along with Iranian stalling while it gets closer to having the bomb.

Possibility 2: Iran could be allowed to develop a bomb, but Israel could be restrained from attacking. Then Iran might actually use its bomb against Israel. The US then would come to the aid of its ‘ally’, destroying the Iranian regime’s ability to fight and possibly even overthrowing the regime. This would explain US stupidity as above, as well as its reluctance to give a green light to Israel to attack until it is too late.

Possibility 3: The US could provoke a war between Israel and Syria, which would involve Hizballah. Both Israel and the Iranian proxies would suffer damage, although doubtless Israel would win. This would explain the puzzling behavior of US officials leaking details of Israeli attacks on weapons transfers to Hizballah.

There are other variations on the same theme.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, US Mideast policy