FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

Peter Beinart has a new piece in the New York Times. He insists that he is a Zionist and supports Israel. But there is little truth in his analysis and a huge amount of fantasy in his prescriptions.

Beinart calls for boycotting Jewish communities (‘settlements’) beyond the Green Line, because he wants to end what he calls “undemocratic Israel,” where Palestinians “are barred from citizenship and the right to vote in the state that controls their lives.”

This is quite a step for an alleged Zionist to take. Ambassador Michael Oren has said that it

…places him well beyond the Israeli mainstream, the moderate left, and the vast majority of Israelis who care about peace. The call for boycotting all products made by Israeli communities outside of Jerusalem and beyond the 1949 Armistice Lines is supported only by a marginal and highly radical fringe.

But Beinart believes that the nondemocratic nature of the regime east of the Green Line delegitimizes all of Israel, including the democratic part of it to the west, and that continued Israeli control of Judea and Samaria will result in a worldwide loss of support for the state itself.

Unfortunately for his argument, he mischaracterizes the political situation east of the Green Line; actually it is already two ‘states’ and has been thus since 1994. The part where 97% of the Palestinians live is under Palestinian Authority (PA) administration and the residents are citizens of the PA. The rest, where all of the ‘settlers’ live is under Israeli administration, but has few Arab residents.

The PA issues passports, and if it gets around to holding elections, the citizens can vote. It has massive ‘security’ and police forces. It even has Olympic teams. Many UN members recognize ‘Palestine’ as a state.

Israel does not “control the lives” of the 97% in the PA areas — the PA does. What Beinart considers “systematic oppression” and “human rights violations” are Israeli security measures like checkpoints, bypass roads and the security barrier, which he sees as ethnically-based differential treatment.

On the other hand, it is possible to see them as a reasonable response to an Arab insurgency which is aimed at repeating the ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the Jordanians in 1948, and indeed extending it to all of Israel. It is possible to imagine them going away if the security problem went away.

In addition, Beinart mischaracterizes the nature of the Jewish communities there. They are not alien colonies on ‘Palestinian land’ as the Arabs and their supporters constantly repeat, and they are not ‘illegal under international law’ as the media like to say.

It’s not as though Jews never lived in Judea and Samaria until they became ‘settlers’, either. They were there before the Jordanian Army kicked them out. They were granted the right to live there by the League of Nations Mandate, which recognized their historical presence in the land of Israel long before that.

Beinart wants to ‘restore’ Israel’s legitimacy by surrendering Jewish rights in Judea and Samaria, mitigated by some small border adjustments. This is basically the same plan proposed by the Obama Administration and the EU. If ‘settlers’ don’t like it, says Beinart, “they should move.”

In addition to the fact that the Arabs will never view any Jewish state in the Middle East as ‘legitimate’, there are a few other problems with this this plan:

1. It is essentially racist, in that it calls for establishing a Jew-free Palestinian state
2. It violates international law (the Mandate) and the spirit of UN resolutions calling for defensible borders
3. It sacrifices the well-being of Jews that live beyond the Green Line for the nationalist aspirations of Arabs
4. It precludes Israel’s ability to defend itself, since it would make a Gaza-like terrorist entity of Judea and Samaria (only much worse strategically)
5. It ignores the oft-expressed intention of the PA leaders to use such a state as a steppingstone to the elimination of Israel

Point 4 was underlined last week when Iranian-inspired terrorists fired hundreds of missiles into Israel from Gaza. Think about how much worse it could be if the high ground east of the Green Line could be used to launch short-range rockets directly into Tel Aviv, Ben Gurion Airport, etc.

The Oslo paradigm of a two-state solution was discredited by the rejection of reasonable offers by the Palestinian leadership in 2000 — when Arafat chose war instead of statehood — and 2008. They continue to press their demands  for 1949 lines, right of return for Arab refugees, no demilitarization, refusal to recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people, etc. as preconditions to negotiation. There is no intersection between the maximalist demands of the PA and the continued existence of a Jewish state of Israel.

Beinart’s plan to end the settlements by outside pressure only rewards the intransigence of the PA. Why isn’t he boycotting them (true, they don’t have any products or culture to boycott) until they agree to negotiate in good faith? Why pick on the settlers?

Of course, the PA doesn’t want a real peace. If you think that the Palestinian leadership — the PA, not just Hamas — just wants to “end the [1967] occupation,” you simply have not been paying attention. Official Palestinian media (see here) are filled with statements to the contrary, as well as praise for the most murderous terrorists and vicious anti-Jewish lies.

Beinart says that “Boycotting other Jews is a painful, unnatural act, [but] the alternative is worse.” While he is very concerned about “oppression” of Arabs, he doesn’t seem to feel the pain of the tens of thousands of Jewish settlers — in the best possible case — who would be expelled from their homes if the two-state plan with swaps were actually implemented.

By insisting on a plan whose imposition would almost certainly mark the beginning of yet another war, by demonizing and punishing the Jewish ‘settlers’ who have every right to live where they do, by calling for a boycott because Israeli security measures constitute “oppression,” Beinart’s approach is anything but ‘Zionist’!

Update [Mar 19 2012 2213 PDT]: Rewritten for clarity.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Peter Beinart, Palestinians

Parchin test facility near Tehran. Courtesy of Challah Hu Akbar. Click the picture for details and more photos.

The New York Times reports,

Today, as suspicions about Iran’s nuclear ambitions have provoked tough sanctions and threats of military confrontation, top administration officials have said that Iran still has not decided to pursue a weapon, reflecting the intelligence community’s secret analysis.

FresnoZionism has decided to help the Obama Administration find out what’s really going on in Iran by applying its until-now secret technology: a drone so small that it can pass as a fly.

Here is a transcript of an audio report sent back to FZ headquarters from Tehran recently (unfortunately all of the drone’s 20,000 compound eye lenses were focused on the cookies on the table and we are unable to determine the identities of the speakers):

Iranian 1: Your Excellency, I bring you greetings from the Pure Research for the Good of Mankind Center located in Parchin.

Iranian 2: Wonderful! How are the tests of the new device to, er, cure cancer, proceeding?

I1: Well, we managed to achieve almost-simultaneous — within one microsecond — detonation of high-explosive shaped charges.

I2: Great! That should take care of those pesky cancer cells. There isn’t any other area of research that this could possibly be useful for, is there?

I1: No, Excellency. Only curing cancer. Or very rapidly increasing the density of a chunk of, er, heavy metal, if we should ever want to do something as pointless as that.

I2: Of course. What good would that be? What else?

I1: We had Molly Maids come out and vacuum the place. We were practicing compressing heavy metals — as if we would want to do that! — and some of the heavy metals escaped the containment vessel — er, the laboratory — and dirtied up the dirt around it.

I2: Oh, Molly Maids? I hear they do a good job. Wasn’t that expensive, though?

I1: Yes, but it was necessary. Those IAEA pests were bothering us about inspecting the site again.

I2: They just want to steal our secret cancer-fighting technology!

I1: Yes, Excellency. We won’t let them.

I2: The Americans want to steal it, too. I understand they have agents everywhere. Well, listen to this: I HAVEN’T DECIDED ANYTHING! NOTHING IS DECIDED! I NEVER DECIDE! Get it?

I1: Yes, Excellency.

I2: Damn it, there’s a fly eating my cookies! Swat it at once!

At this point, the transmission ceased. But we are presenting it in the hopes that top administration officials can make sense of it.

Technorati Tags: Iran, nuclear weapons

It’s been an open secret among pro-Palestinian activists that the attitudes of the people they are trying to liberate from ‘occupation’ are somewhat less than enlightened. A recent article in Ha’aretz details the complaints of some female international and Israeli activists who have found themselves demeaned, sexually harassed, and even raped by their Arab counterparts.

I am sure that the situation is even worse than described in the left-wing Ha’aretz newspaper, whose description is bad enough.

There are also complaints against left-wing Israeli activists, and fury at an incredibly vulgar poster created by the Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity movement. Even women sharing their political viewpoint were outraged by the normalization of anti-woman violence implicit in the posters.

The usual excuses are being made. That women should understand that the goal of ‘ending the occupation’ is more important than these unfortunate phenomena, and they should be quiet. Or even that the Arabs (does this go for the non-Arab leftists too?) have been damaged by ‘occupation’ and therefore it is, naturally, the fault of Israel and particularly of ‘settlers’.

Similar claims are made by anti-Israel gay activists that ‘occupation’ causes Palestinian homophobia, while Israel’s tolerance of gays and lesbians is cynical ‘pinkwashing‘.

Because protest movements often are driven by young males, there is often a certain amount of macho posturing. In 1964, Stokely Carmichael famously said that the only position for women in his movement was “prone.” Eldridge Cleaver — in his case it was more than just posturing, as he admitted committing violent ‘political’ rapes of white women — remarked that women were useful because they had “pussy power.”

The Arab culture is a different story. Women are traditionally respected only insofar as they are protected by male relatives. One way to show disrespect for someone — or for an entire nation — is to steal his property, which includes ‘his’ women — wives, sisters, daughters. So Arabs steal cars and sheep from Jews, and rape their women.

The international and Israeli female activists are in a difficult position, because with no husbands or brothers around to protect them, they are nobody. Not even whores that have to be paid. Any unprotected woman is in danger, as Egyptian journalist Mona Eltahawy found out in Tahrir Square:

The affair of the posters may have irritated the women activists enough that they will insist that the European and Israeli men at least pretend to understand their concerns if they want continued female participation in the ‘movement’.

But the idea that women are property — a particularly sensitive form of property whose damage besmirches family ‘honor’ (a grotesque form of male pride) — is deeply embedded in Arab culture and results in countless murders of women by their own family members throughout the Arab world, including the Palestinian Authority and even among Arab citizens of Israel.

It would probably behoove both female and male activists to think a bit about the real nature of the Palestinian Arab culture that yearns to  replace Israel, and ask themselves if they are really sure that this is the outcome they prefer.

Technorati Tags: Arabs, rape, feminism, Israel

PM Binyamin Netanyahu speaks in the Knesset this week

A war between Israel and Iran is not something that may or may not occur in the future. It is in progress now.

PM Netanyahu said as much in a speech he made yesterday to a special session of the Knesset:

Understand, the dominant factor that motivates these events in Gaza is not the Palestinian issue.  The dominant factor that motivates these events in Gaza is Iran.

Gaza equals Iran.

Where do the missiles come from?  From Iran.
Where does the money come from?  From Iran.
Who trains the terrorists?  Iran.
Who builds the infrastructure?  Iran.
I have said this many times: who gives the orders?  Iran.

Gaza is a forward operating base for Iran.

I heard some people say that a third- or fourth-rate terrorist organization is acting against a million citizens in the State of Israel.  That is not true.  Iran is operating against us.

I hope that if not all, at least most members here and the public understand that the terrorist organizations in Gaza – Hamas and Jihad, as well as Hezbollah in Lebanon – are taking shelter under an Iranian umbrella.

Gaza is just one front in the ongoing war. On March 30, there will be a “Global March to Jerusalem” (GMJ):

GMJ, scheduled for March 30, 2012, is an anti-Israel publicity stunt that aims to have a million people marching on Israel’s borders from all the surrounding countries – Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt – with the aim of reaching Jerusalem. Concurrently, demonstrations are planned in the Palestinian-administrated [sic] territories and against Israel’s diplomatic missions in major cities throughout the world.

Every imaginable anti-Israel individual and organization — Muslim, leftist, or just antisemitic — from the ANSWER coalition to the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, is supporting or taking part in this project, which could well mark the beginning of yet another Palestinian Intifada. Naturally, one of the major supporters is the Iranian regime.

On yet another front, From May 2011 through February, 2012, Iran and its Hizballah proxy have attempted to carry out terrorist strikes against Israeli targets in various parts of the world, the most recent being the February 13th bombing of the car in which the wife of an Israeli representative in India was riding.

Of course Israel has not been idle, almost certainly being behind some or all of the recent violent setbacks suffered by the Iranian nuclear program. In yesterday’s speech, the PM made it clear that Israel will not permit Iran’s umbrella for terrorism to become nuclear:

Now imagine what will happen if that umbrella becomes nuclear.  Imagine that behind these terrorist organizations stands a country that calls for our destruction and it is armed with nuclear weapons.

Are you ready for this?  I am not ready for this!  And any responsible leader understands that we cannot let this happen – because of nuclear terror and the nuclear threat, but also because of the strengthening of conventional terror and the firing of missiles at us.

In an interview on “60 minutes” this week, former Mossad head Meir Dagan repeats his contention that the consequences of a preemptive Israeli attack on Iran will be grave, and he argues that it is more difficult than many think. “There are dozens of sites,” he said. He indicates that he would much rather see an attack carried out by the US than by Israel. And he suggests that non-military options, like assisting opponents of the regime, should be emphasized.

But he does not say that Iran should be allowed to become nuclear. That is not an option for him any more than it is for Netanyahu.

While everyone would prefer that Iran give up its program peacefully, perhaps stopped by sanctions — which is simply not possible — or regime change, which is unlikely to occur in time and might not end the nuclear program in any event, this outcome is unlikely. So when the red line is crossed, Israel will have to act.

Both Netanyahu and Dagan would probably agree with Israel Hayom editor Amos Regev, who wrote this:

Nuclear weapons in the hands of Islamists is a danger to Israel. They live history. In their view, the Crusader invasion is a recent event, and as they see it, we, not to our credit, are also considered cursed Crusaders. They live this myth and are working to hasten the messiah – theirs. Give them nuclear weapons and they will use them. This is what they say. Whoever thinks this is simply “for internal propaganda purposes,” may he revel in his belief. But just as a reminder, a short while before the attack on the World Trade Center, an explicit threat was posted on al-Qaida’s Web page saying the organization was about to carry out an attack that would shock the world.

Many actors on the world stage do not want to see Israel attack Iran. There is Iran itself, of course. There is President Obama, who doesn’t want anything upsetting to happen between now and November. There is J Street, with its mysterious funders, which once lobbied against sanctions on Iran and is now pulling out the stops to oppose military action. “Wait for sanctions to take effect,” they say today.

Ideology is important. Islamist ideology (as well as traditional geopolitical ambition) is pushing Iran into war and pushing it toward nuclear weapons. But one cannot ignore the ideology of Israel’s leadership either, the ideology growing out of the historical experience of the Jewish people, that insists that threats against Israel must be taken seriously, and that the country cannot depend on anyone else to defend it.

The war is ongoing, and anyone who does not expect escalation into more open conflict is dreaming.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Iran

I know that those of us who have not been in combat for extended periods don’t understand the level of moral, emotional and physical stresses that those who fight face. So I am going to be very careful in this post not to speculate about the personal factors the led an American soldier to kill numerous Afghan civilians for no apparent reason on Sunday morning. But I think I am qualified to comment on the political aspects.

Until very recently, armies had a highly focused objective: to destroy enemy forces, to conquer and hold territory, and to defend ‘friendly’ territory and peoples against opposing armies.

Treatment of noncombatants has always been a secondary concern, varying over the centuries from the massacre of enemy men and enslavement of women and children common in ancient times, to what we hope is the more civilized behavior of Western armies today.

When an enemy army was defeated in the past, the winners brought about the political consequences that they desired, annexing territory or establishing a new regime, moving populations, exacting tribute, killing or imprisoning the former ruling groups, etc. These changes were enforced by violence or threat of violence. Since very few governments were democratic, the civilians involved could only hope that the new monarchy or dictatorship would be more benign than the previous one.

This pattern was followed in WWII, with the occupation of Germany, Japan and the Warsaw pact nations an example of the imposition of new regimes (the fact that the Western bloc managed to extricate itself peacefully from its occupations doesn’t change their essentially coercive nature).

More recently, a new paradigm is emerging, particularly in the case of the US: military forces are sent to a country which is ‘misbehaving’ in some way — in Vietnam, threatening to join the Soviet bloc; in Afghanistan, sheltering terrorist militias.* The objective of the military is to suppress the forces that are opposed to our goals, while winning the support of uncommitted groups.

Unfortunately these fundamentally contradictory goals — killing and making friends — place a huge burden on our soldiers. In order to stay alive, they must be killers when they face the enemy. Then they are expected to return to base and become Peace Corps volunteers.

This is exacerbated by the fact that these ‘police actions’ are by nature insurgencies without front lines. So the soldier never knows which form of behavior is called for.

And it gets even worse than this: while our troops are being trained in ‘cultural sensitivity’ in order to become capable of making friends with the ones who are supposedly on our side, we are facing Middle Eastern honor-shame cultures in which such ‘sensitivity’ appears as weakness and stupidity, leading to even more hatred and violence.

The icing on the cake is that our enemies understand all this, while we apparently don’t. So of course the accidental burning of Qurans or a massacre of civilians — which is standard operating procedure in the Muslim Middle East, by the way — provokes huge outbursts of rage. So we apologize, which provokes even more rage.

[Aside: No, I don’t condone massacres, and I don’t think that what the so-far-unnamed US soldier did is acceptable. But when Muslims kill Muslims, as they are doing in large numbers every day in Syria, Iraq and other places, the rage in the Muslim world is muted.

The principle is the same in Gaza, where Palestinian terrorists are applauded for trying to commit mass murder of Jews, but when those same terrorists are killed by the IDF, Egyptians are furious. Christians, Jews and other infidels are not allowed to kill Muslims — it turns their world order upside down.]

I think we in the West need to understand that we cannot expect our armies to both fight and act as social workers, especially in the Middle East.

Where there is an objective that can be achieved by military force, we must apply that force as aggressively as possible, and minimize contact between our soldiers and civilians. Compare the first three weeks of the invasion of Iraq with the other nine years of our involvement there.

But if we want to translate military victories into political gains, then we must be prepared to follow up by behaving as conquerors, not as helpers or allies. If we are not able to do this, then probably we don’t have a good reason for military action in the first place.

—————————————–
* The case of Iraq is more complicated, but I believe it fits the paradigm.

Technorati Tags: Afghanistan, massacres, war