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Artist’s conception of how the new Palestinian city of Rawabi will look when finished

…we have seen more aggressive settlement construction over the last couple years than we’ve seen in a very long time — Barack Obama, interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, March 2014

US and European officials obsessively cite “settlement construction” as an “obstacle to peace.” PLO negotiators use it as an excuse to refuse to sit down with Israelis:

The chief negotiator for the Palestinian Authority, Saeb Erekat, on Friday called the construction plans “a slap to Mr. Kerry’s efforts and a clear message by Israel’s prime minister: ‘Don’t continue with your peace efforts.’ ”

“Israel Doubled West Bank Settlement Construction in 2013” screams the headline of a Time magazine article. “If Palestinians come to believe that the possibility of a contiguous sovereign Palestinian state is no longer within reach, then our ability to manage the international fallout is going to be limited,” warns (or threatens) Obama.

Two things. First, a point about language. President Obama and most of the journalists who use the expression “settlement construction” are native English speakers. Yet they persist in using this misleading expression, which anyone who didn’t know differently would think means “building (new) settlements.” But in fact, the construction they are referring to is construction of houses and apartments within the boundaries of existing communities.  The truth is that there have been virtually no new settlements established since the 1990s, except for unauthorized outposts which the government often demolishes by force.

Is there a deliberate intent to deceive? Certainly those who suggest that such construction “gobbles up land” are simply lying. The President carefully avoids saying this, referring only to his position that “settlements are illegitimate” (Europeans say “illegal”) and are “unhelpful” to the process, although he or other officials never explain exactly what “illegitimate” means or why the Palestinian claim on the land is justified.

Second, are new homes springing up like weeds? Based on the urgency expressed by the President, the Europeans and the Palestinians, one would think so. So how many new homes and apartments are being built? Time tells us:

Israel began work on 2,534 new housing units in the West Bank [Judea and Samaria] in 2013, according to the report — more than double the 1,133 units built in 2012.

This is an area with a Jewish population of more than 300,000, and a birthrate greater than 3 children per (Jewish) woman, in a country with a booming economy. For comparison, Bakersfield, California, with about the same population, a lower birthrate, and a somewhat depressed economy, built 2238 privately-owned dwelling units in 2013. I don’t see any aggression here, do you?

Keep in mind that Palestinians are also building “aggressively,” including a new “high-tech” city near Ramallah. There is also European-funded Arab construction throughout Area C, the part of the territories supposedly under complete Israeli control by the Oslo agreements. And there is continuous illegal building there as well.

You will recall that the Palestinians began insisting on freezing Jewish construction in Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem in 2009, following the lead of none other than President Obama.

So not only is this a manufactured issue, but the biggest factory is in Washington, DC!

Technorati Tags: Judea and Samaria, Barack Obama, Israel

Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu will be meeting with President Obama tomorrow. In a long interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, the President revealed — or at least presented the public face of — his thinking on the Palestinian question, Iran, Syria and other Mideast issues.

If what he told Goldberg truly reflects his thinking, it is profoundly depressing, because his remarks display both ignorance and prejudice. And the timing, when Bibi is already on his way, is ugly.

Ignorance:

…with each successive year, the window is closing for a peace deal that both the Israelis can accept and the Palestinians can accept — in part because of changes in demographics; in part because of what’s been happening with settlements; in part because Abbas is getting older, and I think nobody would dispute that whatever disagreements you may have with him, he has proven himself to be somebody who has been committed to nonviolence and diplomatic efforts to resolve this issue. We do not know what a successor to Abbas will look like.

The “time is running out” theme is pervasive (Goldberg headlines the interview with it). But “changes in demographics,”  at least if you exclude Gaza, are definitely in favor of Israel. The Jewish birthrate is high, and the Palestinian one is declining. There are far fewer ‘Palestinians’ than official numbers would have it. “What’s happening with [Jewish] settlements” — a few additional homes within existing communities are planned — is irrelevant, and one can even argue that illegal European-sponsored Arab construction in Area C is more significant as a fact on the ground.

Most important is this: the fact that Abbas is relatively (stress that word) moderate compared to his likely successors has precisely the opposite implication than the one Obama suggests. What good would a deal reached with Abbas be if (when) he is replaced by an extremist who will tear it up?

[Netanyahu] has an opportunity also to take advantage of a potential realignment of interests in the region, as many of the Arab countries see a common threat in Iran. The only reason that that potential realignment is not, and potential cooperation is not, more explicit is because of the Palestinian issue.

So the Saudis and Kuwaitis who still hate Palestinians for their support of Saddam; the Lebanese who maintain an apartheid system in which Palestinians residing there cannot go to Lebanese schools, own property or work in numerous professions, and who fought a vicious mini-war against a Palestinian militia in one of the refugee camps several years ago; the Egyptians who are enthusiastically collapsing Hamas tunnels — these Arabs would jump at the chance to cooperate with Israel if only it were nicer to the Palestinians?

Yes, they are scared to death of the prospect of a nuclear Iran, but the idea that nations which have historically (long before ‘occupation’) made opposition to Jewish sovereignty an ideological pillar of their regimes would suddenly go public about any cooperation with Israel is ludicrous.

But here’s what I know from my visits to the region: That for all that we’ve seen over the last several decades, all the mistrust that’s been built up, the Palestinians would still prefer peace. They would still prefer a country of their own that allows them to find a job, send their kids to school, travel overseas, go back and forth to work without feeling as if they are restricted or constrained as a people. And they recognize that Israel is not going anywhere. So I actually think that the voices for peace within the Palestinian community will be stronger with a framework agreement and that Abu Mazen’s position will be strengthened with a framework for negotiations.

Maybe a few short visits weren’t enough. He seems to have missed the ideological indoctrination in the Palestinian media that calls for an unending struggle until there can be a complete victory, an ideology in which martyrdom for the Palestinian cause is the highest value, and in which Jews are compared to the Crusaders, who even after hundreds of years were expelled from ‘Arab land’.

And he has missed the surveys of Palestinian popular opinion that show that, for example, in 2011, “Only 7% agreed that ‘Israel has a permanent right to exist as a homeland for the Jewish people’ while 84% thought that ‘over time Palestinians must work to get back all the land for a Palestinian state'”. So much for the Palestinians recognizing that “Israel is not going anywhere!”

Prejudice:

Do you resign yourself to what amounts to a permanent occupation of the West Bank? Is that the character of Israel as a state for a long period of time? Do you perpetuate, over the course of a decade or two decades, more and more restrictive policies in terms of Palestinian movement? Do you place restrictions on Arab-Israelis in ways that run counter to Israel’s traditions?

When I read this, I wonder what ‘Israel’ he’s talking about. The one I know has reduced restrictions on Palestinian movement in recent times, to the point of endangering security (and released murderers, if that counts). It also treats Israeli Arabs as well as any national minority is treated anywhere in the world.

So it is not realistic nor is it my desire or expectation that the core commitments we have with Israel change during the remainder of my administration or the next administration. But what I do believe is that if you see no peace deal and continued aggressive settlement construction — and we have seen more aggressive settlement construction over the last couple years than we’ve seen in a very long time — if Palestinians come to believe that the possibility of a contiguous sovereign Palestinian state is no longer within reach, then our ability to manage the international fallout is going to be limited.

Aggressive settlement construction? Nobody is building settlements, except perhaps Arabs in Area C. Why does he keep hitting this nonsensical issue? Only because it is a reason to blame Israel for the inability to reach an agreement, and to set the stage for the threats to follow. The man is a bully — except with Iran, which he is afraid of.

Here he becomes a pussycat. “Time is running out” to give the Palestinians a state that they certainly ought not to have, but

… the most important thing that I have said to Bibi and members of Congress on this whole issue is that it is profoundly in all of our interests to let this process play itself out. Let us test whether or not Iran can move far enough to give us assurances that their program is peaceful and that they do not have breakout capacity.

If, in fact, they can’t get there, the worst that will have happened is that we will have frozen their program for a six-month period. We’ll have much greater insight into their program. All the architecture of our sanctions will have still been enforced, in place. Their economy might have modestly improved during this six-month to one-year period. But I promise you that all we have to do is turn the dial back on and suddenly —

There are several paragraphs of rationalizations, but I’ll spare you. The sanctions regime is dead. It cannot be brought back to life. It was leaky before, and now it has a iceberg-sized gash in it and is listing 70 degrees. He’s given the Iranians the time they need to do precisely what they want, which is to get the “breakout capability” that will make it impossible to stop them. That is “the worst that will happen,” and it will happen for sure, unless someone bombs them.

Providing this interview on the eve of Netanyahu’s visit is reminiscent to his 2011 announcement calling for an agreement “based on pre-1967 lines” while Bibi was, like today, on his way to the White House. This tactic is an embarrassment. David Horovitz wrote,

The timing could not have been any more deliberate — an assault on the prime minister’s policies delivered precisely as Netanyahu was flying in to meet with him, and on the first day, too, of the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC’s annual tour de force conference across town.

At the very least, that might be considered bad manners, poor diplomatic protocol, a resounding preemptive slap in the face: I’ve just told the world you’re leading your country to wrack and ruin, Mr. Prime Minister. Now, what was it you wanted to talk to me about?

Did I say he was a bully?

Technorati Tags: Netanyahu, Obama, Israel

The Al Quds Brigades, one of the many terrorist gangs among the Palestinian Arabs

Put simply, Palestinians deserve a state of their own. — Barack Obama, March 21, 2013

Here I go again. But this time I do not intend to discuss all the reasons that a Palestinian state carved out of the historic homeland of the Jewish people would be a bad thing for what would be left of Israel.

No, today I want to talk about what the Palestinian Arabs have done for America — and what a Palestinian state might do.

Let’s start around the time the ‘Palestinian people’ were invented by Yasser Arafat and the KGB, 1968. On June 5, Palestinian terrorist Sirhan Bishara Sirhan murdered Senator Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles, an act that arguably changed American history. Kennedy had just won the California Democratic primary election, and many believe that he would have been elected President that November. Paul Kujawsky explained,

Sirhan blamed America for his lack of success and hated the country for its support of Israel. His anger gradually fixed on Robert Kennedy, who promised to send 50 fighter jets to Israel if elected president. He wrote in his notebook: “Kennedy must die by June 5th” — the first anniversary of the Six-Day War. …

According to [Mohammed T Mehdi, secretary-general of the Action Committee on American-Arab Relations], Sirhan’s act had a rational rationale: “The one and only reasonable explanation for Sirhan’s decision is to bring the tragedy of Palestine to the attention of the American people so that the people of the United States would not continue the strange policy of helping Zionist Jews of Europe and elsewhere go to the home of Christian and Moslem people of Palestine.”

Mehdi concluded that Sirhan had acted in justifiable self-defense: “[W]hen Robert F. Kennedy supports Israel against the Arabs, he is assuming the role of an Israeli high ranking official… Sirhan was defending himself against those 50 Phantom jets Kennedy was sending to Israel.”

I recall the event well, and I also remember that the political aspect of it was not widely discussed. Sirhan was described as a “mentally unstable Jordanian.” But his statements and writing before and after the murder clearly evidenced his political motive: the Palestinian Cause.

Another well-known case was the 1973 murder of the US Ambassador to the Sudan, Cleo Noel; his deputy George Moore, and Guy Eid, the Belgian Ambassador. They were killed by the Black September faction of Fatah. The terrorists took ten hostages, and interestingly, one of their demands was that the US release Sirhan. In 2006, the State Department declassified a report indicating that the ‘father of Palestine’, Yasser Arafat, was personally responsible. Joseph Farah wrote at the time,

The document, released earlier this year, with no fanfare, makes it clear the Khartoum operation “was planned and carried out with the full knowledge and personal approval” of Arafat, a frequent visitor to the White House throughout the 1990s who died in 2004. …

The admission comes 33 years after James J. Welsh, then the National Security Agency’s Palestinian analyst, saw a communication intercepted from Arafat to his terrorist commandos in Sudan.

There were also many ordinary Americans who lost their lives as a result of Palestinian terrorism. Here is a page that lists American terror victims. Other than those who died on 9/11, the overwhelming majority — hundreds — were murdered by Palestinian Arabs or by other terrorists on behalf of the Palestinian Cause.

Palestinians did not invent the airline hijacking. There have been hundreds of hijackings going back to at least the 1950’s, by criminals, political dissidents, mentally ill individuals and simply desperate people. But beginning with the Dawson’s Field hijackings of 1970 by the PFLP, carefully planned hijackings to achieve political goals became one of the favorite tactics of the Palestinian Arabs, and the idea seized the imaginations of terrorists and would-be terrorists, especially Arab and Muslim ones.

Neither did the Palestinians invent suicide terrorism, but in recent times, their exploits in this area have been remarkable. Between 1989 and 2008, there were at least 160 suicide attacks by Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad, the PFLP and other Palestinian gangs, causing more than 800 fatalities and countless injuries.  The much-vaunted Tamil Tigers (137 suicide attacks between 1987 and 2009) come in second.

So what do you get when you combine hijacking and suicide terrorism? Of course, the Palestinians didn’t do 9/11, much as they cheered the perpetrators on that day (and yes, the footage of Arabs dancing in Gaza streets was real). But isn’t it likely that the success of these techniques in the hands of the Palestinians served as an inspiration for the architects of 9/11?

Leaving all of this aside, could a Palestinian state possibly become a valuable ally or trading partner for the US (like, for example, Israel)? Hardly. For one thing, Palestinians don’t like us. In a survey of attitudes toward the US in 39 countries, the Palestinian Authority came in tied for third from the bottom with Egypt (only in Jordan — which has a majority of Palestinians itself — and Pakistan were we liked less). Israel was second from the top, slightly behind the Philippines, despite the recent pressure from President Obama.

The Palestinian Authority is non-democratic, without an independent judiciary or most of the institutions required for an even partly free country. Freedom house rates both Gaza and the PA as “not free.” Its ‘president’ has overstayed his term by 5 years. It is ridden by crime and corruption, and home to an alphabet soup of terrorist gangs. Palestinians have been the largest recipients of international aid for decades, and much of this aid is simply stolen or used for weapons and explosives. What kind of state could it become?

Rather than try to bring ‘Palestine’ into being despite the cost, the US should is oppose the creation of yet another oppressive failed state, a base for terrorism and an economic and human rights disaster.

Technorati Tags: Palestine, USA

May God bless and keep the Tsar… far away from us! — Rabbi, in “Fiddler on the Roof”

Mark Landler, in the administration’s favorite newspaper, writes,

WASHINGTON — President Obama, after avoiding a hands-on role in Middle East peacemaking since the setbacks of his first term, plans to plunge back into the effort, his advisers said this week, starting with an urgent appeal to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

When he welcomes Mr. Netanyahu to the White House on Monday, these officials said, Mr. Obama will press him to agree to a framework for a conclusive round of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations that is being drafted by Secretary of State John Kerry.

Later in March, Mr. Obama is likely to meet with the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, to make the same pitch. The goal, officials said, is to announce the framework, a kind of road map for further talks, by the end of April, the nine-month deadline that Mr. Kerry set last summer for a final peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians.

In response to the failure of the Kerry mission — Kerry is an object of derision in Israel, while Mahmoud Abbas has referred to his proposals as “insanity” — the administration seems intent on salvaging its latest effort to push Israel out of the territories by bringing in its biggest gun.

This raises the question, yet again, of American priorities. In a world containing Syria, Ukraine, Nigeria, Iran, Venezuela, etc., how can forcing Israel to commit suicide be so important as to require direct presidential involvement? We all have our theories.

I think, though, that this development doesn’t bode well. If anything characterized Kerry’s approach, it was naivete. According to Palestinian sources,

The top American diplomat reportedly offered for Abbas to form a Palestinian capital in the neighborhood of Beit Hanina, not all of East Jerusalem, as the Palestinians have demanded.

Kerry also suggested that Israel keep 10 settlement blocs as part of any territorial exchange, according to Al Quds, the most widely read Palestinian daily, on Wednesday.

The Jordan Valley would not be part of a future Palestinian state, Palestinian sources told the paper, nor would there be an international force stationed there. And Kerry reportedly demanded that the Palestinians recognize Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people.

Only someone who believes that Abbas and his PLO are actually interested in ending the conflict and living at peace with a Jewish state could propose such ‘radical’ concessions! Yasser Arafat would turn over in his grave if Abbas were to agree to such a framework.

The Palestinian narrative, which is explained every day in their media and schools, implies that all the land between the river and the sea belongs to them. The magnanimous Abbas is prepared to agree to establish a state today in all of Judea and Samaria, including eastern Jerusalem, rather than insisting on all of the land at once. But by no means will this end the conflict, which will continue by diplomatic and legal means, as Abbas has said in English — and by armed struggle, as Palestinian media say daily.

Kerry apparently didn’t understand this. Far better deals, including the re-division of Jerusalem and the evacuation of the Jordan Valley, were rejected by the PLO in 2001 and 2008, mostly because of the refugee issue (recognizing Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people means, among other things, that the descendents of refugees do not have a right to ‘return’).

The heart of the impasse between Israel and the PLO has always been the same. Although it is not unimaginable that Israel could have reached an accommodation with the Palestinian Arabs in the early 1990’s, it could not have done so — as events showed — with the PLO, whose very reason for being is opposition to Jewish sovereignty. Unfortunately, the PLO, Hamas and even more extreme elements have been able to suppress any moderate elements, and to establish their rejectionist ideologies as preeminent through their control of media, culture and educational systems. Today there is no partner for an agreement that leaves Israel able to defend herself.

The President will have to bring more than his pretty face to the negotiations if he wants to get the PLO to sign onto some kind of deal. And unfortunately, from what we can glean about his beliefs, particularly when we consider his background and associations, there is reason to think that he will lean more in the direction of the PLO than Kerry apparently has.

The NY Times report seems to suggest that Obama will apply more pressure to Israel to make an even more PLO-friendly deal. It’s hard to see how PM Netanyahu can give up on the only issue that matters.

It’s possible that the ‘framework’ will be so ambiguous as to be vacuous. Nevertheless, such an agreement can give more legitimacy to the PLO, and foreclose Israel’s option to end the process and take unilateral action.

We’ve had the good cop. Now we are going to get the bad cop.

Technorati Tags: Israel, PLO, John Kerry, Barack Obama

I was having a discussion with a friend about J Street, the recent BDS resolution at UCLA (which was defeated, but still…), disturbing trends in college Hillel groups, and similar examples of why some of the worst enemies of the Jewish people are Jews — especially young Jews. The question came up, as it always does: why?

Here are some answers:

The Oslo Syndrome, a coinage of Kenneth Levin in his book of the same name (which I discussed here): a disorder in which the sufferer, a Jew afflicted by powerlessness in the face of Jew-hatred, decides that the problem resides in himself rather than the Jew-haters. Thus he regains the power to affect the situation, by changing himself so that he stops being an object of hatred. This can take the form of trying to remove Jewish characteristics (nose jobs), renouncing religious observance, and of course opposing the Jewish state. The joke is on him, of course, since the Jew-haters will continue to hate him regardless.

Left-wing credentials. Since the 1960’s, when the KGB explained to Yasser Arafat that he would have more success with Western public opinion if he presented his cause as a national liberation movement for an oppressed people, rather than as the racist and genocidal project that it really is, it has been de rigeur for anyone aspiring to a leftist identity to adopt anti-Zionism as an article of faith. The need became even stronger with the Durban conference of 2001, in which Israel was equated with apartheid South Africa. Many Jews are attracted to left-wing or ‘progressive’ politics, and need the credentials to be accepted there.

Moral narcissism.

…the tendency of members of the well-meaning, intellectual elite to align with causes and ideological positions which are based, not on the actual viability or justice of a cause, but on how the moral narcissist feels about him- or herself by committing to a particular cause or movement. (R. L. Cravatts attributes this use of the term to Richard Landes)

Since the anti-Zionist position is often disguised as a moral concern for human rights, ending ‘oppression’, anti-racism, etc. (the double standard associated with its application to Zionism confirms that it is in fact a disguise), its adoption provides an emotional boost for susceptible individuals — and young Jews, especially those brought up in liberal religious and political traditions, are very susceptible.

Academic indoctrination. The large proportion of college teachers with left-wing politics, along with activist Middle Eastern students and ‘Middle East Studies’ programs, has created a strongly anti-Zionist atmosphere on many campuses. In addition, the influence of ethnic and gender studies in which politics and academics seem to have merged has made it more acceptable for teachers to use their classrooms for political indoctrination. Students strongly want to ‘belong’, and to fight the current is to risk ostracism. Together these factors have created loci of Israel-hatred like Evergreen State College.

The conventional wisdom. Jews are people like anyone else. They read newspapers, watch TV, listen to the radio. Here in the US, some of the most popular media among Jews — the NY Times, NPR, MSNBC, etc. are strongly biased against Israel. In many countries — certainly in the US — political leaders are anti-Israel. Even if a person tries to avoid it, he can’t help getting it by osmosis. Some time ago, a friend who is definitely pro-Israel said to me “if only that Netanyahu weren’t so stubborn about the settlements, there could be peace.”  When I asked him why on earth he thought that, he didn’t know.

To a great extent, these forces act on the emotions, and only peripherally by reasoned argument. Even the media coverage, which could be seen as describing facts, correctly or incorrectly, is often crafted for its emotional effect. As Jonathan Haidt argued in his insightful book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are divided by Politics and Religion (which I wrote about in more detail here), judgments of right and wrong are based on ‘intuitions’ — innate triggers of emotional responses — and only later justified by rational argument. This explains why it’s so hard to persuade someone to make this kind of judgment by citing facts and giving logical reasons.

These are some of the reasons Zionism is losing support among Jews, especially younger ones. In a forthcoming post, I will suggest ways to overcome them.

Technorati Tags: Zionism, Jews