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I want to discuss three positions taken by the Obama Administration which are opposed to American  interests and make war, not peace, more likely.  There are many other issues that I could discuss, both about the Mideast and elsewhere, but these are emblematic of the general problem.

Position 1. Sanctions and negotiations can cause Iran to give up the pursuit of nuclear weapons.

The possession of nuclear weapons will give Iran the power to dominate the Muslim Middle East, economically and politically. This is the primary goal of the revolutionary regime. The Iranian leadership is not averse to any hardship that may be felt by the general populace, because 1) as a totalitarian regime they are not politically accountable to their people, and 2) any form of economic sanctions will always be ‘leaky’ enough to permit favored elements to receive the resources they need, especially since Russia and China will not be cooperative with the West.

The result of negotiations will, at best, be that the Iranian strategy will change from a straight-line effort to get deliverable weapons to a “just in time” strategy in which all the pieces except the final assembly of a weapon are put in place.

The only thing short of military intervention that could make them stop would be a credible threat thereof, combined with a thorough and effective inspection program. This isn’t going to happen in time. Meanwhile, the enrichment of uranium and other development continues.

Position 2. The threat against the West from radical Islam comes primarily from al-Qaeda, and not radical Islam in general.

The Muslim Brotherhood is not any less radical, from an ideological point of view, than al-Qaeda. Where it differs is that it thinks, quite rationally, that for it, today, violent jihad against the West is likely to be counterproductive. Once it cements its control over the most populous country in the Middle East, it may think differently.

The Obama Administration supports — or at least does not not oppose — the Brotherhood in Egypt, it allowed Hizballah to take almost total control of Lebanon, it restricts Israel from acting against Hamas in Gaza, and it applauds the Islamist ErdoÄŸan regime in Turkey — with which it collaborates in working to replace the imploding Assad government in Syria with an Islamist regime (and I might add that before Assad’s difficulties, it called for ‘engagement’ with him).

On the home front, the administration does not consider radical Islam a threat, unless it is related to al-Qaeda. So it is supposed to be reassuring when someone is arrested for trying to explode a car bomb in Times Square and we are told that “he wasn’t a member of a recognized terrorist organization.”

The obsession with al-Qaeda, which, as Barry Rubin points out, doesn’t control countries with populations in the millions like Iran, Lebanon and Egypt, is worse than irrational — it causes us to ignore trends whose results will be disastrous in the near future.

Position 3. The Israeli-Arab conflict can be ended by withdrawal from the territories.

Although there is abundant evidence that the PLO is not prepared to end the conflict with Israel regardless of the amount of land it is given, and that anyway an Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria would likely lead to a Hamas takeover and missile attacks on the center of the country, the Obama Administration continues to insist that a “two-state solution” would bring peace.

The “land for peace” formula has been a failure, both in Gaza and increasingly with Egypt, thanks to the Islamist ideology that characterizes Hamas and is sweeping Egypt. While the PLO has a secular ideology, they are no less dedicated to reversing the nakba and recovering their ‘honor’ by eliminating the Jewish state.

Forcing Israel to make concessions encourages the Arabs to make more demands and to express their ‘frustration’ when no concession is enough by intifadas and terrorism, to which Israel is forced to respond. This is a path to war, not peace.

So why does the administration cleave to such irrational positions?

Unsurprisingly, the answer to this is also ideology. Barack Obama and many of his appointees share a New Left sensibility, which includes the ideas that colonialism and imperialism — particularly ‘US imperialism’ is the root of all evil, that it is meaningless to suggest that one culture could be morally superior to another, and that national interests should be subordinated to multilateral cooperation. Many of them accept “postcolonial” theory, in which the ‘colonized’  party — Iran, Muslims, the Palestinians — is considered morally superior to the ‘colonizers’ and is permitted to express itself violently if necessary to ‘resist’ colonization.

The challenge from Iran is a challenge to Western control of the region: for lack of a better phrase, to Western imperialism. While in principle this it is less than ideal, the world in practice would be a far worse place if the Middle East were dominated by radical Iranian imperialists. The administration is incapable of seeing this and loathe to employ traditional gunboat diplomacy to fix it.

The same ideology blinds it to the nature of radical Islam (all cultures are assumed to be of equal value, Muslim countries are ‘colonized’), as well as the Israeli-Arab conflict. In that case, we know that the Left sees it as the epitome of a struggle of national liberation from colonial bondage — which of course is almost exactly the opposite of the truth, which is that it is a reactionary attempt to crush the expression of Jewish self-determination.

Would a Romney Administration be different?

I strongly doubt that Mr. Romney and his associates share the New Left, post-colonialist ideology of the Obama Administration. So at least his policy would not be skewed by this particular perspective.

There is also another factor at work in connection with the Israeli-Arab conflict. It seems to be the case that Mr. Obama has a visceral dislike for Israeli PM Netanyahu. It was on display when he abandoned the Prime Minister to go to dinner in March 2010, when he publicly demanded Israeli withdrawal to 1949 lines while Netanyahu was en route to the US in May of 2011, and when he made his famous ‘open microphone’ remark to French President Sarkozy last November. Whether it is ideological in basis or just personal, there is no doubt that it is real. Romney, on the other hand, has known Netanyahu for some time and is said to have a good relationship with him.

Technorati Tags: Obama, Romney, foreign policy, Iran, radical Islam, Israel

Benzion and Bibi play chess (2006)

The writer Jeffrey Goldberg is a very smart guy. And unlike many who write about Israel, he knows something about it, having lived there and served in the IDF. He has interviewed many of the major players, and he is not a polemicist of the Left or the Right. His insights are often fresh and, er, insightful.

So I am always surprised when Goldberg misses the mark. And the way he missed it in an article published this Monday is illustrative of a misconception he shares with many American Jews.

Discussing the influence of Benzion Netanyahu on his son the Prime Minister, Goldberg remarks that the PM’s historian father was convinced of the “eternal nature of anti-Semitism.” He explains,

Benzion Netanyahu was a foremost scholar of the Spanish Inquisition, and he revolutionized his field by arguing convincingly that the Spanish weren’t motivated by religious feeling, but by racial hatred. In other words, conversion wasn’t enough to save the Jews: The Spanish hated the idea of Jewish blood mixing with their own. The Inquisition, then, presaged the Holocaust. He believed that physical acts of anti-Semitism are always preceded by years of hate-filled rhetoric meant to desensitize the world to the coming slaughter.

He was not the only scholar of extreme expressions of antisemitism, like the Inquisition or the Holocaust, to come to the same conclusions about the importance of radical antisemitic ideologies in shaping events. For example, Lucy Dawidowicz, in her well-known book The War Against the Jews, makes the case that Hitler’s obsession with ‘the Jewish Question’ interfered with his prosecution of the war (often to the great irritation of his generals).

Goldberg tells us that Benzion Netanyahu’s response to the threats faced by Israel today reflected this point of view:

Thus Netanyahu, like his son, saw it as a foregone conclusion that Iran seeks to build a nuclear weapon with genocide in mind. But unlike his son, Netanyahu thought that Iran should have been attacked long ago. “From the Iranian side, we hear pledges that soon — in a matter of days, even — the Zionist movement will be put to an end and there will be no more Zionists in the world,” he said at a party marking his 100th birthday. “The Jewish people are making their position clear and putting faith in their military power…”

The elder Netanyahu was similarly militant on questions of compromise with the Palestinians. Just as he saw the Iranians bent on committing genocide, he saw the Palestinians and their Arab allies singularly focused on the destruction of Israel…

Indeed, there are many parallels between the behavior of the both the Iranian regime and the PLO and Hamas — including massive incitement to hatred (see, for example, here), and the irrational subordination of other goals to opposition to Jews and ‘Zionists’ — and earlier manifestations of genocidal antisemitism.

So far, so good. But then Goldberg continues:

But there is an opportunity: Benjamin Netanyahu, precisely because he is the son of a man like Benzion, is the only Israeli politician today who could deliver the majority of Israel’s Jewish population to a painful compromise with the Palestinians. He is also one of the few whose endorsement of a deal between Tehran and Washington over the Iranian nuclear program — a deal that would allow the Iranians to have a supervised civilian program, for instance — would allay the concerns of even more hawkish Israelis. The average Israeli trusts that Netanyahu would not sell out their interests for a Nobel Peace Prize.

An opportunity? To repudiate the message of history by placing the state of Israel into the hands of the true heirs of the Nazis, the PLO? To commit national suicide by empowering the Iranian regime, which makes absolutely no secret of its intentions?

Israelis are not just paranoid. Their fears are not irrational. Someone really is after them.

There is a reason that “the average Israeli” voted for the son of Benzion Netanyahu, a man who shares his father’s values — because they too share his view of history. This is precisely why they believe that he would not sell out their interests.

The idea is not to “deliver” the Jewish population or to “allay the fears” of the ‘hawks’, as Goldberg suggests. It is not to force Israelis to buy the wishful (or cynical) thinking pushed by the Obama administration, despite their well-grounded misgivings. Rather, it is to actually ensure the survival of the state and the Jewish people.

Most American Jews, apparently including Goldberg, living in a place and time — unprecedented in history, by the way — where antisemitism is not a fact of daily life, have more or less forgotten the evil certain individuals and groups intend them. This isn’t the case in Israel, where they are reminded daily by Arab terrorism and Iranian threats.

And where they elected Bibi Netanyahu.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Benzion Netanyahu, Jeffrey Goldberg, antisemitism

Jews dance in the streets of Tel Aviv, November 30, 1947 (the partition resolution had been approved on the evening of the 29th)

In a NY Times obituary for Benzion Netanyahu, the father of Israel’s PM, who died today (Monday) at the age of 102, this sentence appears:

Ultimately, Israel was created as a result of the partition the revisionists opposed.

The “revisionists,” of course, are the followers of Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinski, who believed that the state of Israel should comprise all of historical Eretz Yisrael, which includes all of the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan (plus some parts east of the Jordan that were given to the Arabs by the British in 1922). They saw the proposed partition, which gave the Jews only a sliver of the original Mandate, as unacceptable.

Much can be written about revisionist Benzion Netanyahu (who once served as Jabotinsky’s secretary) and his son, including the true but trivial remark of an unfriendly commentator that “to understand Bibi you must understand the father.” This is true for all of us that have fathers, but the PM has certainly taken a different political path than his father.

But I digress. I want to talk about the sentence from the obituary that I quoted above. Was the state of Israel created as a result of the 1947 partition resolution?

That is what I was taught as a child: that the throng of Palestinian Jews in the photograph above were celebrating the creation of the state. But what was passed at the UN in New York was a non-binding resolution of the General Assembly, and while the ‘official’ representatives of the Zionist movement — the Jewish Agency, controlled by Jabotinsky’s ideological opponent, David Ben Gurion  — accepted the proposal, both the leadership of the Palestinian Arabs and the Arab nations vehemently rejected it. As a result, it was not implemented and did not create the envisioned Jewish and Arab states.

The British retained control until May 14, 1948. During this time they refused to assist in implementing the plan (they had abstained from voting on the resolution), because they hoped to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state. Arthur Koestler (Promise and Fulfilment – Palestine 1917-1949, p. 163) wrote,

And indeed war, between the Jewish forces (primarily the Hagana) and the Palestinian Arab militias, along with Arab ‘volunteers’ from other countries, continued. After the declaration of the state of Israel, several surrounding Arab nations invaded Palestine, hoping to grab territory for themselves as well as to finally put an end to the threat of Jewish sovereignty in their midst. The war left the Jews in physical possession of the land up to the ‘Green Line’, the 1949 armistice line between the armies.

The partition resolution, therefore, had little to do with the creation of the state of Israel and nothing to do with its boundaries (its eastern border is still undefined in international law). Its only function may have been to provide a pretext for British withdrawal.

On May 14, 1948, Israel declared independence, and the state was recognized immediately by the US and shortly thereafter by the USSR. Other nations soon followed suit. On March 4, 1949, the UN Security Council recommended that Israel be admitted to the UN and on May 11 the GA voted her its 59th member. Thus the international community recognized the Jewish state. But who or what created it?

In the 19th Century, Theodor Herzl recognized the truth that the Jewish people could only be secure as a sovereign state, and inspired the Zionist movement to bring Jews back to the land of Israel. In 1922, the League of Nations accepted the principle of a Jewish home in Palestine and wrote the text of the Balfour Declaration into the Palestine Mandate. The Mandate entrusted the creation of this home to the British.

The British, unfortunately, did their best to subvert the intent of the Mandate, in the process dooming countless Jews to death in the Holocaust. But the Jews of Palestine worked to create the structure of a Jewish state during the Mandate period, building institutions of governance, security, education, communications, health care, etc. They waged an anti-colonialist struggle against the British, while protecting themselves against terrorism (even then) from Arabs opposed to Jewish sovereignty.

When the British left, they were prepared to establish a state. Since then, Israel has defended her sovereignty in several wars.

So the answer to the question posed by the title to this post is simple: Zionist Jews in the Land of Israel created the state, and not any UN resolution.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Benzion Netanyahu

Edward R. Murrow at Sde Boker, Israel in 1956 (l-r: Murrow, Itzhak Navon, Moshe Pearlman, David Ben Gurion).

Like Hassan Nasrallah in 2006, Bob Simon and CBS were shocked at the response to the vicious little slander against Israel they perpetrated on “60 Minutes” this past Sunday.

“All we did was grab a couple of yahud and they’re bombing the crap out of us!” said Nasrallah (or something similar). “Don’t they understand the rules of the game?”

Well, Bob, we don’t have to play by your rules. We don’t have to accept your incessant attacks on Israel and consistently dishonest reporting any more than we do Hassan’s kidnapping and murder on the Lebanese border.

We are not going to let this slide anymore — not the pro-Israel community of Jews and Christians in the US, and not the Israeli government:

“The interview not only confirmed my concerns about the segment but deepened them,” [Amb. Michael Oren] wrote, calling Simon’s approach “a feebly disguised attempt to exploit Christians—and inflame religious tensions” without any “historical or diplomatic context.”

Oren blasted “Mr. Simon’s lack of understanding of – or genuine interest in – the basic facts regarding Christians in the Holy Land,” and anticipated the segment “would be irresponsible, unfair, and beneath the standards of your program.”

Rather than blaming Israel, he wrote, CBS should have blamed the local Palestinian administration, which has control of major West Bank cities, and the militant group Hamas, which controls Gaza. Israel’s critics respond that the Palestinian authorities are under ultimate Israeli control, and Palestinian Christian voices in the “60 Minutes” segment blamed Israel for their hardship.

Maybe CBS, like NPR, sees itself as a soldier in the information army of the Obama Administration. Or maybe Simon and his pretend “investigative journalists” are just too fat and lazy to actually go out and investigate anything, and find it easier to recycle the usual tired Palestinian line. After all, the rules of the game say that you never go wrong by bashing Israel.

One pro-Israel Christian group sent 29,000 emails of protest to CBS in a single day. And mainstream Jewish groups like Hadassah, the Jewish Federations, the ADL, etc. are also expressing their displeasure.

Not this will appear to have any effect on CBS, which claims to have gotten only “a few hundred” comments on the program, pro and con. They stand by their words. Courageous journalists, not afraid of The Lobby.

But things are changing. Just as the Second Lebanon War — despite Israel’s admitted failures of strategy and execution — taught Hizballah that they could not continue to act against Israel with impunity, CBS will see that they their information attacks won’t continue to go down quietly either.

Their lies and deceptions are being exposed and dissected in numerous places (for example, here). The monolithic media mouthpieces for the Obama Administration– CBS, NPR, the NY Times, AP, etc. — are now so predictably, and laughably, wrong on anything touching on Israel or, indeed, anything in the Middle East, that nobody who isn’t entirely ignorant pays attention to them. And the implication of this is that they cannot be trusted about other issues as well.

My father liked to say (usually right before an election) that “the American people are not as dumb as they look.” And he was right, although sometimes it took them longer than he’d hoped to understand how they had been fooled.

More and more people are beginning to understand that the mainstream media’s posturing about professionalism, freedom from bias and fact checking, are often precisely that.

Edward R. Murrow, who as a matter of fact was quite pro-Israel, was obsessed with professionalism, with getting the details and the story right, as well as presenting it compellingly. He had nothing but contempt for those who would slant a news story for political purposes.

Murrow wouldn’t be pleased by his network today.

Technorati Tags: 60 Minutes, Bob Simon, Palestinian Christians, Israel

Krugman: Beinart is a brave man

The universal concealment of these facts,
To which my silence subordinated itself,
I sense as incriminating lies
And force–the punishment is promised
As soon as it is ignored;
The verdict of “anti-Semitism” is familiar.

— Günter Grass, explaining how he will be punished for his ‘courage’ in saying “what must be said.”

This could be the stupidest conceit of today’s Israel-haters: that they are breaking the silence, speaking out in a fresh and original way, daring to say things that others may be thinking but fear to put into words because of the terrible retribution of the Zionist conspiracy, which will destroy them by branding them as antisemites.

The latest expression of this idiotic meme comes from the economist Paul Krugman, someone I have always admired despite his left-of-center politics. I will quote in full his remark, published today in the NY Times:

Something I’ve been meaning to do — and still don’t have the time to do properly — is say something about Peter Beinart’s brave book The Crisis of Zionism.

The truth is that like many liberal American Jews — and most American Jews are still liberal — I basically avoid thinking about where Israel is going. It seems obvious from here that the narrow-minded policies of the current government are basically a gradual, long-run form of national suicide — and that’s bad for Jews everywhere, not to mention the world. But I have other battles to fight, and to say anything to that effect is to bring yourself under intense attack from organized groups that try to make any criticism of Israeli policies tantamount to anti-Semitism.

But it’s only right to say something on behalf of Beinart, who has predictably run into that buzzsaw. As I said, a brave man, and he deserves better. [my emphasis]

I’m actually embarrassed for Krugman. It seems to me that the industry of bashing Israel is alive and well in many places, especially his own NY Times, home also to such ‘brave’ men as Thomas Friedman, Roger Cohen, Nicholas Kristof, etc. who face the Zionist buzzsaw without flinching week in and week out.

It’s not as much brave to pick on Israel as it is profitable. Who ever heard of Peter Beinart before he adopted the persona of Brave Jew Standing Up to Powerful Zionist Establishment?

Maybe Krugman should spend some time thinking about where Israel is going, because an honest effort to do so would require that he learn something about it. Beinart’s work of fantasy won’t be much help there.

Technorati Tags: Paul Krugman, Israel, Peter Beinart, Günter Grass