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Recently the NY Times published a letter written in reaction to a beyond-irrational attack on Israel for ‘pinkwashing’ (I discussed the original remarkably stupid op-ed here).

The letter took strong issue with the op-ed. It could positively be counted as ‘pro-Israel’. And yet, it contained this:

Israel, like any other democracy, has its flaws. Its settlement policy is destructive, the occupation of the West Bank is untenable and its government is furthering the country’s isolation and distancing it from its original vision of being a “light unto the nations.”

Similarly, when a conversation I was having with a relative recently turned to Israel, he — certainly a ‘pro-Israel’ person by any definition — agreed with me about the dangers facing the country from so many directions, but added something like “…those settlements have to stop. And Netanyau is too stubborn.”

I’ve also been told, “don’t talk about the settlements. It’s the hardest thing about Israel to defend.”

Of course it is true that “like any other democracy,” Israel has flaws. But these aren’t them. What is happening, I think, is that certain false propositions are being repeated over and over from every direction — the UN, Europe, the media, the Obama Administration, the Israeli Left — to the point that almost anybody can be excused for thinking that they are true.

Here are some of them:

1. Israel is actively taking ‘Palestinian land’
2. Israel is occupying ‘Palestinian land’
3. The ‘West Bank’ (Judea and Samaria) is ‘Palestinian land’
4. Settlement expansion makes peace talks impossible
5. If all the settlements were removed, a peaceful Palestinian state could be created

Israel has not significantly expanded the boundaries of existing settlements or established new ones in years. But the Palestinians say, and the media repeat, that every new apartment built or planned inside a town outside the 1949 armistice line, even in an existing Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem, constitutes ‘settlement expansion’, which ‘prevents the establishment of a viable Palestinian state’.

So even if you find acceptable the racist idea that ‘Palestine’ cannot contain Jewish villages the way Israel contains Arab ones, construction in existing settlements does not change existing facts on the ground.

Even if you think there is such a thing as ‘Palestinian land’ and it starts at the Green Line (I most assuredly do not), Israel is not taking it.

Even if you think settlements would need to be removed in order to have a peace agreement, there were peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority from 1993 to 2009 in the presence of settlements.

And even if you would devoutly wish to see a peaceful Palestinian state alongside Israel, there is no Palestinian leadership that presently exists or is on the horizon that wants this.

Jewish towns in Judea and Samaria, or Jewish neighborhoods in eastern Jerusalem, existed before 1948, when the Jordanians occupied those areas, forced the Jews out at gunpoint, and destroyed synagogues and yeshivot. In fact, there were Jews living in Kfar Darom in the Gaza strip before the War of Independence — they were expelled twice, once by the Egyptians in 1948  and then again in 2005 by their own army and police! (h/t EG).

Hevron, a town with great importance in Jewish history, had a flourishing Jewish community in 1929. Its Jewish inhabitants were killed or forced to flee in a vicious pogrom instigated by the Arab leadership. Some returned, only to be kicked out yet again by the Jordanians in 1948.

Did the conquest of these areas by the Jordanians and Egyptians, in a war of aggression — a war intended to wipe out the Jewish state — somehow render them Arab property where Jews are forbidden to live? Where did the supposed ‘right’ of the ‘Palestinian people’ (another concept that is less concrete than it appears) to the territories come from?

The right of Jews to settle anywhere in the Land of Israel was granted to them by the League of Nations at the same time that it created several Muslim Arab nations and a Christian one (Lebanon — it didn’t work out too well for the Christians) from the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire. Since then, through several wars, there has been one principle that was accepted by all parties — that of UNSC resolutions 242/338 and restated in the Oslo agreement, the Road Map, etc. — that the permanent borders will be decided by negotiations between the parties.

Israel has been prepared — the supposedly ‘hard-line, right-wing, stubborn’ Netanyahu was actually the first Israeli Prime Minister to publicly say that Israel would agree to a sovereign Palestinian state in the territories — to negotiate such a settlement, to give up its rights in some of the territories in the interest of peace.

But the Palestinians have refused to talk without Israel first agreeing to demands about issues that would reasonably be the outcome of negotiations, not their precondition. The Palestinians have violated the principles of UNSC resolutions 242/338 and the Oslo agreements by unilaterally pursuing a state, and the PLO now claims to be in ‘complete agreement’ with the terrorist Hamas.

I am not sure exactly why the author of the letter quoted above thinks that “the [Israeli] occupation of the West Bank is untenable,” but what is the alternative? Turning over the high ground overlooking Israel’s population centers to hostile forces? Uprooting hundreds of thousands of people simply because they are Jews? Giving up all of the heartland of Jewish history?

It’s worth mentioning the systematic ambiguity of the word ‘occupation’ here. For Western liberals it means Jewish control of areas outside of the armistice lines. For Arabs, it means Jewish control of any land in the ‘Arab Middle East’.

Israel and the PLO are moving farther apart, not closer, and it is not because of settlements or because Netanyahu is stubborn. It is because the Arabs will accept only unconditional surrender (albeit piecemeal surrender). Only by Arab logic is it the case that the side that wins the wars is required to surrender!

Technorati Tags: Israel, settlements, Netanyahu, Palestinians

Don’t miss this: The Arab Spring Choir covers The Times They Are A-Changin’. In English with Hebrew titles.

Courtesy of Latma TV.

Technorati Tags: Arab Spring, Bob Dylan, Latma

No, it's not a toga party. It's (l-r) Hamasniks Ismail Haniyya and Khaled Mashaal with Mahmoud Abbas back in 2007 after one of their periodic 'reconciliations'

The Palestinian Ma’an News agency tells us:

CAIRO (Ma’an) — President Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas leader Khalid Mashaal on Thursday said they had resolved all their differences, after a meeting in Cairo to implement a unity agreement.

“We want to assure our people and the Arab and Islamic world that we have turned a major new and real page in partnership on everything do to with the Palestinian nation,” Mashaal said.

“There are no more differences between us now,” added Abbas, who heads the Fatah movement.

Well, actually there are major differences, which, if Israel were to disappear tomorrow, would probably lead to bloodshed.

But what they are telling us is that with respect to their intentions toward Israel there is no difference. They have the same proximate goal, which is to eliminate the Jewish presence between the river and the sea. After that they can sort out who will be boss, and whether women will be allowed to walk around without their faces covered.

Abbas is saying in the clearest possible way that he is on board with the genocidal Hamas program.

The message that should be received in Jerusalem is that there is no peace process. There is no more need to make concessions to ‘strengthen Abbas’ because he is the same as Mashaal. There is no reason for Israel to collect import duties for the Palestinian Authority, because funding it is no different than funding Hamas.

Which would be no different than helping Hitler.

The Left which is concerned about the welfare of Palestinian Arabs, the various European-paid ‘Israeli’ organizations that look out for their rights, the international Human Rights industry, etc. all need to pay attention: the Palestinian leadership has staked its position as the deadly enemy of the Jewish state. Now it’s your turn to take sides.

Do you choose the path of the Palestinians, which is that “there is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad?” (Hamas Covenant, Art. 13) Do you agree that every inch of ‘Palestine’ is an “Islamic Waqf” that must be governed by an Islamic regime? (Art. 11) How do you feel about the obligation of the ‘resistance movement’ to to kill Jews? (Art. 7)

If you agree with Mashaal and Abbas, come out and say it. To those members of  A Jewish Voice for Peace who call for boycott-divestment-sanctions against Israel and want to see Gaza open for weapons shipments from Iran — admit that you, too, agree that the Jews have to go. Maybe you can resettle them in Berkeley. How about it, Rabbi Brant Rosen and Rabbi Michael Lerner?

The EU and UN: go ahead, pass resolutions that “Israel must be destroyed.” If that’s what your policy aims at, why not say it?

I’m sick of the hypocrisy. If the Palestinian Arabs can admit how they feel about Israel, why can’t you?

Technorati Tags: Israel, Abbas, Meshaal, Hamas covenant

There can be no better illustration of the lunatic obsession with Israel of the extreme Left than the issue of the treatment of gays and lesbians in Israel and the Arab and Muslim world.

The facts are simple: the majority of Israelis have a liberal Western sensibility. Although there certainly is a fundamentalist minority, they do not in general make the laws and they don’t set the tone in most places. As a result, LGBT people are not subject to discrimination in most venues, homosexuality is not illegal and — except in fundamentalist communities — not subject to social approbation or ostracism.

As I wrote a few months ago,

I think I can say unequivocally that the degree of tolerance for gays and lesbians in a society is directly proportional to the degree to which it is a free society. Israel is an (unfortunately rare) example of how it is possible for a religious tradition which opposes homosexuality to coexist with a temporal authority that does not interfere with the private lives of its citizens. In fact, you could call Israel the San Francisco of the Middle East, or — pardon the expression — the ‘Mecca’ for gay people of any ethnicity in the region.

On the other hand, most of the other countries in the region criminalize homosexuality. In some countries, gay sex is a capital crime. In others, informal sanctions include beatings and even murder.

The New York Times will apparently print anything that is anti-Israel no matter how stupid or illogical — viz. Roger Cohen, Thomas Friedman, and Nicholas Kristoff — or authored by terrorists, like op-eds by Hamas official Ahmed Yousef. Today it gave its anti-Zionist pulpit to Sarah Schulman, an activist from Jewish Voice for Peace, the only Jewish organization to make the ADL’s list of the top ten anti-Israel  groups in the nation.

Schulman wants to tell us that it is forbidden to use the facts mentioned above as a pro-Israel argument (this is not surprising, because for the pathological Israel-hater the only good thing about Jewish Israel is the most extreme fringe anti-state Left):

This message is being articulated at the highest levels. In May, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Congress that the Middle East was “a region where women are stoned, gays are hanged, Christians are persecuted.”

The growing global gay movement against the Israeli occupation has named these tactics “pinkwashing”: a deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians’ human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life. Aeyal Gross, a professor of law at Tel Aviv University, argues that “gay rights have essentially become a public-relations tool,” even though “conservative and especially religious politicians remain fiercely homophobic.” [my emphasis]

I would call it a deliberate strategy to point out the truth, that Israel is a modern nation. And the fact that although there is a religious sector that is not comfortable with gay life, nevertheless Israel has managed to create a place where there is a flourishing gay culture — this speaks volumes about the tolerant and free nature of Israeli society.

She continues,

Pinkwashing not only manipulates the hard-won gains of Israel’s gay community, but it also ignores the existence of Palestinian gay-rights organizations.

I am happy to hear that there are Palestinian gay-rights organizations, but it may be more than a few years before there is a Gay Pride parade in Ramallah — and don’t even think about Gaza City! — as there is in Tel Aviv.

In essence, Schulman’s argument is just this: don’t mention the good things about Israel, because it might distract people from the only thing that we want them to think, which is that Israel is denying the Palestinians their human rights.

Of course I believe that the conflict is about the Arab and Muslim nations of the Middle East trying to deny the Jews their human rights. Now let’s see, what good thing about their societies can I think of that will distract people from that?

Technorati Tags: Israel, Pinkwashing

Not the best policy, was it?

News item:

Against the backdrop of a mass civilian uprising in Egypt, senior Egyptian diplomats have relayed a calming message to Israel declaring their commitment to preserving peace between the two countries, Army Radio reported Tuesday. The diplomats said the peace agreement with Israel was of strategic importance to Egypt.

Of course it is. Egypt can barely afford to feed itself — actually, it can’t even do this — and the last thing it needs is a war with Israel. But this doesn’t mean that when (not if) the Muslim Brotherhood takes complete control of the government and begins the process of replacing key military leaders with its own people — that’s the real ‘Turkish model’ — it will not begin to work closely with Hamas, providing arms and even volunteers.

Hamas is in fact an offshoot of the Ikhwan (Brotherhood) itself, and while it was happy to accept Iranian support in the days of Mubarak, it will be more comfortable with its own Sunni parent organization. It will also be important for Egypt to wean Hamas away from Iran; Egypt still sees itself as the preeminent power in the region and views Iran’s growing power as a threat.

Although it’s said that the turmoil in the Middle East is due to a desire of the masses for democracy, truly progressive forces are very much in the minority, and don’t stand a chance of taking over in any Arab country (surprisingly, I think that there might be hope for one non-Arab country — Iran, which has an educated middle class that is strongly opposed to the mullocracy!).

Here is a better explanation:

The US has bled itself almost dry in two wars and is struggling to maintain its role as regional boss. Although it hasn’t happened yet and it is not a forgone conclusion that it will, it’s possible to see America withdrawing the way Britain did after WWII.

Many of the regional players expect this. US influence has dropped like a stone everywhere that Islamists are becoming more powerful: Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon, etc. The Arab Spring is really an anti-American season. Somehow the White House missed this when it helped overthrow Mubarak, and it is missing it now in its support of Turkey.

A contest for leadership is developing between three regional powers: Iran, which wants to control the flow of Persian Gulf oil and establish a Shiite caliphate; Egypt; and Turkey, which sees itself  — the Turkish foreign minister was quoted saying as much in a Wikileaks report — as the center of a new Ottoman empire.

This is playing itself out in various places, for example Syria, where Turkey is trying to help push Assad out so he can be replaced by an Ottoman-friendly Sunni Islamist regime, and Gaza, where Egypt is replacing Iran as patron of Hamas.

The Russians seem to be aligning themselves with Iran, both to help push the US out and because of their historic geopolitical rivalry with Turkey.

I wonder if the Obama Administration really understands where its policies are leading?

While Israel does not expect that Egypt will announce that it is abrogating the peace treaty and returning to Nasser-like confrontation any time soon, it is quite correct in beefing up its defensive capability in the South. And I don’t think it’s time yet to cut the defense budget.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Middle East, Arab Spring, Egypt, Turkey, Iran