FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

Daniel Pipes recently discussed the perennial issue of whether Diaspora Jews had the ‘right’ to comment on Israeli policies:

I recently criticized the Israeli government for its exchange with Hizbullah in “Samir Kuntar and the Last Laugh” (The Jerusalem Post, July 21); to this, the eminent counterterrorism expert at Tel Aviv University, Yoram Schweitzer challenged the appropriateness of my offering views on this subject. In “Not That Bad a Deal” (July 24) he explained to Jerusalem Post readers how the “contents and tone” of my analysis are “patronizing and insulting, overlooking as they do the fact that the government and public have the right to decide for themselves …, and to shoulder the resulting price.” He also criticizes me for offering an opinion on Israeli issues from my “secure haven thousands of miles away.”

Pipes goes on to argue ably that he is indeed qualified to make judgments about policies — after all, that is his specialty, just as it is that of Schweitzer.

Anyway, if being an Israeli somehow makes one an expert on Israeli policy, should we also quote a Tel Aviv taxi driver who happens to agree with Pipes (and I suspect that more of them agree with him than with Schweitzer) as an expert?

But there is another aspect to this that Pipes doesn’t touch on. Do you recognize this text?

ERETZ-ISRAEL was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books…

On the 29th November, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish State in Eretz-Israel; the General Assembly required the inhabitants of Eretz-Israel to take such steps as were necessary on their part for the implementation of that resolution. This recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their State is irrevocable.

This right is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.  — Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Israel’s Declaration of Independence clearly states that Israel is the state of the Jewish people, not merely of “the inhabitants of Eretz-Israel”. Those inhabitants were called upon to create the state on behalf of the entire Jewish people, not just themselves. Jewish people around the world put their pennies in pushkes to buy land for the Jewish people in Eretz Israel long before there was a state or even the promise of one.

Many of today’s Diaspora Jews do not remember a time that there wasn’t a State of Israel. Obviously antisemitism did not disappear with the birth of the state, but after centuries of discrimination and pogroms culminating in the Holocaust, it is no longer possible to persecute Jews with impunity.  Do we really think that if Israel disappeared tomorrow that American Jews — who today feel themselves so comfortable in larger society — would be able to rest easy?

Israel is not just another country for Diaspora Jews and what happens in Israel is critical for them. Although they don’t have the rights and responsibilities of Israelis — to vote, to serve in the IDF, etc.  — they are anything but disinterested in what happens there, whether or not they are aware of it.

So, you ask, what about those foolish Diaspora Jews who appear to actually support Israel’s enemies? Well, what about the foolish Israeli Jews who do the same? The operative word here is “foolish”.

Quite possibly, Israel is too important to be left entirely to Israelis.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Diaspora, Daniel Pipes

The PRC (Popular Resistance Committees) is one of those nasty little terrorist organizations that flourish in Gaza:

Hamas and the Popular Resistance Committees have cooperated closely since the beginning of the ongoing violent Palestinian-Israeli confrontation. However, because of the so-called “lull in the fighting” and Hamas’ terrorism-restraining policy, Hamas has augmented the aid it gives to the PRC. The PRC has become a kind of Hamas sub-contractor… Hamas provides the PRC with extensive operational support, including monthly funding, and providing arms, training and operational instructions. — Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs

The PRC has only a few hundred members, but they are busy, especially during the ‘cease-fire’ — or what would better be called the ‘Terrorist Training and Rearmament Period’ that the short-sighted Israeli government allowed to come into being. Here is a recent video (1:22) of PRC members building rockets and training in preparation for the end of the truce.

Although there have been numerous violations, Israel managed to buy some time free of major conflict by agreeing to the truce. But the day of reckoning will come sooner or later, just as it will with the massively rearmed Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the IDF’s job will be significantly more difficult as a result.

If you are wondering how the terrorists manage to get materials for their rockets (and their spiffy uniforms) despite the so-called ‘siege’ of Gaza, here is some Israel TV news footage from one day last winter when the IDF uncovered seven of the hundreds of smuggling tunnels between Gaza and Egypt.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Hamas, PRC, Qassam, Gaza

By now, everyone has probably heard about — or seen — this:

(IsraelNN.com) A soldier has been arrested for allegedly firing rubber bullets at a detained Arab rioter during the violent July 7th Naalin demonstrations, following the release of a videotape of the incident.

The tape was released by the left-wing B’Tzelem organization and shows the soldier shooting a rubber bullet at the feet of Ashraf Abu-Rahma while he was being detained by Israeli forces for violence during the riot. The demonstration, protesting the construction of the security fence through the Arab town of Naalin, is one of many in the area that have turned violent over the past months.

The handcuffed detainee was hit in the toe and not seriously injured. An officer nearby either ordered the soldier to shoot, or simply to scare him. The video has been shown over and over on worldwide media.

The Palestinians could not have made up a better issue, although if they had made it up Abu-Rahma would be as dead as Mohammed Dura.

Given what is happening at Na’alin, he probably deserved far worse than a bruised toe (after due process, of course). But what is important here is not whether IDF soldiers should shoot rubber bullets at prisoners (they shouldn’t), not whether the soldier and/or officer should be punished (they should, and the punishment should be increased by ten for sheer stupidity) and not even whether the security fence has cut off Palestinian residents from their lands.

Here’s the protocol, repeated day in and day out:

Palestinian ‘activists’, left-wing Israeli Useful Idiots like b’Tselem, and foreign helpers from such organizations like the ISM (the organization that brought Rachel Corrie to Israel), etc. find a place where the security fence abuts a Palestinian village, and try to tear it down. The media have been alerted and are out in force.

Think about how other countries would handle this! In many of them there would not even be a demonstration, since prospective participants would expect to be beaten to a pulp or met with live fire from the outset (and there wouldn’t be any journalists present). Israel is, as usual, placed in a difficult position because security forces must prevent the fence from being destroyed and protect themselves while using minimal force and permitting access to the press.

When security personnel — sometimes police but often IDF soldiers or reservists with only minimal training and equipment for riot control — arrive, they are attacked with weapons ranging from stones and Molotov cocktails to assault rifles, the demonstrators trying as hard as possible to provoke ‘overreaction’. It’s especially helpful to the cause when a child or foreigner is injured or even killed.

This serves the purpose of focusing the world’s attention on the security fence, on the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians in the territories, and on the human rights aspects of incidents such as Abu-Rahma’s bruised toe.

It buttresses the contention by Palestinians and their supporters that the conflict is primarily about ‘the occupation’ (with a systematic ambiguity about whether they are talking about the occupation of 1967 or that of 1948).

But this is emphatically not what the conflict is about. It is a peripheral effect, not a central cause. Supposing that the world’s ‘peace’ activists really wanted to bring peace  between Jews and Arabs, here are the actual issues that they should start by being concerned about:

1. Since before the founding of the State of Israel, the Arabs and Persians have been trying to prevent any form of Jewish autonomy in the Middle East. Tactics have included conventional warfare, terrorism, and lately asymmetric proxy war.
2. Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria and Iran have recently engaged in a massive buildup of forces aimed at Israel, including chemical, biological, and soon nuclear weapons, and have made no secret of their intentions.
3. Palestinians have been led to believe by the Arab/Persian world that they can and will reverse the outcome of the 1948 war by ‘armed struggle’ — and their friends have supported and financed this struggle, prevented solutions to issues such as Palestinian refugees, and encouraged terrorism.

These are the forces that have driven the conflict in the past and drive it today. These are the forces that will continue to bring wars and death. It’s unfortunately a tribute to Arab public relations skill that they have managed to misdirect the world’s moral opprobrium away from their aggressive, genocidal struggle and turn it against Israel’s attempts at self-defense.

Technorati Tags: Na’alin, IDF, Israel, Palestinians, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas

With the exception of the nine years that I spent in Israel, I have never missed an American election, not even off-year primaries. I have always taken my responsibility to vote very seriously. So this coming Presidential election — which comes at a point of real historical crisis for the US — has seen me struggling mightily in an effort to find out what the candidates actually know about the critical issues and what they would be likely to do if elected.

Barack Obama is particularly impenetrable. Because of the multiple constituencies that he is trying to appeal to, he is unlikely to  be too specific. He’s an excellent speaker and has plenty of backup and preparation — his foreign policy staff numbers 300, according to the NY Times. And of course pre-election promises have historically had little relationship to presidential actions.

But candidates, even smooth ones like Obama, sometimes reveal their degree of competence on an issue despite careful programming.  Obama’s AIPAC statement that “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided” and its immediate retraction in the face of howls from Arabs and the Left was instructive and very disquieting. Obviously this was one issue that Obama had not understood.

Now Obama has made another statement on the Middle East, and unfortunately it is a doozy. Thanks to Martin Kramer for catching this:

I think King, King Abdullah [of Jordan] is as savvy an analyst of the region and player in the region as, as there is, one of the points that he made and I think a lot of people made, is that we’ve got to have an overarching strategy recognizing that all these issues are connected. If we can solve the Israeli-Palestinian process, then that will make it easier for Arab states and the Gulf states to support us when it comes to issues like Iraq and Afghanistan.

It will also weaken Iran, which has been using Hamas and Hezbollah as a way to stir up mischief in the region. If we’ve gotten an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, maybe at the same time peeling Syria out of the Iranian orbit, that makes it easier to isolate Iran so that they have a tougher time developing a nuclear weapon. — Obama on Meet the Press, July 27, 2008. My emphasis.

Keep in mind that he uttered this pernicious nonsense after his visit to the Middle East, after his intensive discussions on Mideast issues! Kramer calls it “The Myth of Linkage“, and it appears in the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group report, as well as in statements by Jimmy Carter and Obama supporter Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Obama’s statement indicates either 1) he spoke without thinking, 2) he has no understanding of the intentions and strategies of the players in the region, or 3) he — like Carter, Brzezinski and Baker, wishes to provide a justification for a blatantly pro-Arab and anti-Israel policy.

I suppose alternative 1) is the best we can hope for.

Technorati Tags: Obama, Middle East, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, linkage, Martin Kramer

As the Bush Administration draws to a close, lots of things are possible.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni came out on Sunday against American efforts to have Israel reach an interim agreement with the Palestinians before the end of US President George W. Bush’s term based on the diplomatic talks that she has led.

Speaking at a Kadima rally in Jerusalem that was closed to the press, Livni expressed concern that the Bush administration would pressure Israel, as president Bill Clinton did at Camp David before he left office in 2001.

“I purposely am not setting deadlines [for the negotiations with the Palestinians], because I think that’s very bad,” Livni said. “I very much don’t want to be in the same situation that Ehud Barak was in at at Camp David of the end of an American administration finishing its term and trying to put pressure on everyone to bridge gaps that cannot be bridged.”  — Jerusalem Post

Indeed.  Gaps about Jerusalem and refugees, just for starters. And security: the West Bank cannot be allowed to become another Gaza, which is certainly what would happen if the IDF were to withdraw from it today.

Those to the right of Livni claim that she is just trying to position herself for the coming elections. She has been involved with ongoing negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, and  has been accused of offering dangerous concessions. So she is trying to disassociate herself from them before a disadvantageous agreement is signed.

I think the truth is that the government of Israel has been pressured by the US to take part in the process and — including Livni — has been doing its best not to make too much ‘progress’. The Palestinians have done their part in obstructing an agreement, by insisting on outrageous conditions, assuming that US pressure will force Israel to give in, basically to commit suicide.

But isn’t the Bush Administration pro-Israel? Didn’t it permit Israel to wage war against Hezbollah for several weeks?

Actually, the Bush Administration is several things, depending on whose influence is ascendant at any time. The so-called ‘neo-cons’ were relatively pro-Israel, but they lost much of their power after the early failures in Iraq, to be replaced by the same oil interests and pro-Arab State Department circles that have been determining US Middle East policy for generations. Their point of view is expressed clearly in the Iraq Study Group report.

This group is close to Saudi Arabia and other conservative Arab oil powers, and is quite worried about the expansion of Iran’s sphere of influence in the region; so it wouldn’t make them unhappy to see Hezbollah — which Caroline Glick called “the Foreign Legion of the Iranian Republican Guard” — weakened or destroyed.

The drive to force an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians is often attributed to a desire on the part of the US President for a Nobel Prize. That may have been Bill Clinton’s idea, but in this case I think a desire to go down in history is a minimal part of the motivation.

I’ve mentioned that in the mid-1970’s, Henry Kissenger made a promise to the Arabs that while the US would always support Israel’s existence, she would work to undo the outcome of the 1967 war. Remember that this was after the huge shock to the US economy brought about by the Arab oil boycott, instituted to punish the US for supporting Israel in 1973.

The official explanation of the effort to obtain a US-Palestinian ‘peace’ agreement is that the dispute is somehow central to all Mideast issues and that solving it is the key to solving them. But this is obvious nonsense. The real reason is that, in an era of skyrocketing oil prices, the Saudis and Gulf Arabs are demanding that Kissinger’s committment — and undoubtedly others that have not been publicized — be met.

As I’ve written before, Israel is prepared to give up land, but only if it will lead to real peace. And prior experiments in this direction have been less than successful.

The US, on the other hand, is simply interested in Israel giving up land.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Israeli-Arab conflict, Bush Administration, Tzippi Livni