Now What?

Posted on August 1, 2025 by Victor Rosenthal

Today, Jews cannot walk down the street in North America, Europe, or even Australia without the possibility of being spat on, beaten, or even murdered. Country after country mulls punishing Israel and rewarding Hamas [!] by the absurd recognition of Palestine, a non-country without defined borders. Almost 700 days after Israel was invaded and more than 1200 Israelis viciously slaughtered, tortured, raped, kidnapped – Hamas survives, receiving water, food, fuel and electricity from Israel. The war in Gaza is static, almost 900 Israeli soldiers have been killed and countless wounded, and 20 living hostages still remain in the tunnels under the Gaza strip.

How we got here is not the issue. International and domestic politics, manipulation of consciousness, covert financing of ‘popular’ movements, religious imperatives, power struggles, wars, terrorism, honor and shame, and of course, the oldest hatred all played a part. But the hour is too late for historical analysis and philosophical arguments. It’s time to act.

I can’t speak for diaspora Jews. I only have one piece of advice: take what’s happening seriously. The golden age for Jews in North America is over. Create a strategy to protect yourselves and implement it.

Israel, too, needs a whole new set of strategies. She needs a strategy for the kinetic war in Gaza and the closely related information war, both of which she is losing despite her clear military superiority.

Someone recently said that on 7 October 2023 we were the “good guys,” but Hamas propaganda quickly turned us into the “bad guys” in the story. That isn’t correct. It’s true that Hamas’ propaganda – crude as it is – has been remarkably effective, but that is because it falls on very fertile ground. We became the “bad guys” the moment the news of the obscenely vicious pogrom perpetrated by Hamas hit the professional and social media.

There are two reasons for this: one is the prior preparation of opinion leaders in the West by a decades-long takeover of the educational system and media by a red-green alliance financed by Arab petrodollars with ideological direction from the anti-Western Left. The other is a fundamental fact of human psychology: people, like turkeys, admire the strong, and peck the weak or injured ones to death. The horrors of 7/10, just like the gas chambers of Auschwitz, caused people to identify with the perpetrators, rather than the victims (incidentally, this is why so much “Holocaust education” has the opposite of its intended effect).

This is the paradox of the response to Hamas’ propaganda. Although they present the Gazans as victims, they proudly broadcast live video on 7/10. The open brutality of Hamas is contrasted with the weakness of Israel, which is forced to make concession after concession, including freeing hundreds of murderers of Jews (an act that incurs great dishonor), in order to get her tortured hostages back. Israel has even been forced to feed and supply its enemy with fuel and electricity, for which Hamas has given nothing in return.

This is why it doesn’t matter when the numbers of dead Gazans provided by Hamas are shown to be false, or when the emaciated children on the front pages of Western newspapers turn out to be suffering from various wasting diseases rather than starvation. Concern for the suffering of Gazans is an excuse, a rationalization for a deeper, less attractive emotion. Indeed, the less convincing the propaganda, the better. The important subtext is that despite its tanks and air force, Israel is a weak, wounded, loser. Hamas represents a courageous indigenous people who are winning, despite their suffering. Nobody likes a loser.

Practically speaking, the success of its information warfare has encouraged Hamas to hold on, believing that the world will come to its rescue and stop Israel before they are forced to give up control of Gaza.

There is little that can be done now to overcome the indoctrination of young people, including those who have begun to move into positions of power in Western media and politics. Reversing that damage will be a long and expensive process. But Israel can adopt a strategy to gain a psychological, as well as physical, victory over Hamas. And that will require her to change her behavior by 180 degrees.

Israel has responded to the false Palestinian claims of genocide, deliberate starvation, and so on by taking extra care to avoid civilian casualties. She has endangered her own soldiers to this end. She has allowed truckloads of food and fuel to be handed over directly to Hamas. She has even airdropped food to Palestinians in Gaza, something unprecedented in war. All of these actions send a message of weakness and submission. They in essence say, “yes, we’ve been bad, we’ll make ourselves better.” Israel has allowed herself to appear both evil and weak at the same time. No wonder the world holds her in contempt!

Rather, Israel must act like the stronger party, which in fact she is. She must use her firepower to defeat Hamas, in all parts of Gaza. No aid can be permitted to reach Hamas. Our government understands that Hamas will never release all the hostages in return for anything less than complete surrender, and it must make it clear, inside Israel and to the world, this is a price that we will not pay. If the UN, Europe, and the US want to ameliorate the condition of the Gazans, then they should force Egypt to allow refugees from the war to enter the Sinai where the UN can take care of them, and from where they can emigrate to other countries. Their welfare is not Israel’s responsibility.

Israel should make it clear that she does not accept the narrative of Palestinian peoplehood and ownership of our land, and emphasize this by annexing parts of Gaza and applying Israeli law to the Jordan Valley and Area C in Judea and Samaria. She should make it clear that after the Second Intifada and 7/10, the idea of a Palestinian state in the territories is permanently off the table. No terrorist murderer should ever again be freed from an Israeli prison in return for a hostage, and a death penalty for terrorist murder should be instituted.

We do not have unlimited time to do these things. Although they would provoke condemnation in Europe and other places, I think they would be acceptable to American president Trump, which would enable us to weather the storm. But he will not be president forever, and the demographic changes in the US and other Western countries are not favorable. If we don’t act soon, we may be prevented from acting at all.

 

One Choice: Fight to Win

October 1, 2024 Israel, politics

From AbuYehuda.com posted on August 26, 2024 by Victor Rosenthal

Yesterday Israel preempted a potentially disastrous attack by Hezbollah on the center of the country. Thirty minutes before launch time, our aircraft destroyed literally thousands of launchers, rockets, and drones that were aimed at various targets including IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv and sensitive installations in the North.

Despite being an impressive technical and tactical achievement, it does not herald a new, more aggressive Israeli military policy. A column in the Israel Hayom newspaper this morning was titled “Preemptive operation, not preemptive attack,” and that sums it up. The 100 aircraft that were involved were simply a more elaborate and expensive Iron Dome. Admittedly the enemy lost more assets than the rockets and drones it had planned to use; launchers and installations were also destroyed. But the objective of the operation was entirely defensive. Great care was taken to ensure that it would be seen as a “legitimate” response to aggression. Israel waited until just before Hezbollah was expected to fire, and the attack was limited to southern Lebanon. As is always the case when we play pure defense, the enemy has learned lessons and will try again.

It was telling that Israel and the US both indicated that the US knew about it in advance, and that the attack was “fully coordinated” with the US. It’s well known that the US forbids Israel to preemptively attack its enemies, so it was important to present it as limited and “intended to prevent escalation.” But it should be noted that Hezbollah did succeed to launch some 300 weapons at the northern part of Israel, from which tens of thousands of citizens have become refugees. The defensive strike still did not enable them to return home. No purely defensive operation can.

American policy continues to have as its top objective the prevention of escalation. The pressure to reach a cease-fire agreement with Hamas continues at a high level. Although they are often presented as “hostage return” deals, no proposal has been seriously considered that allows more than a minority of the living hostages in the hands of Hamas to return. The Americans have made it clear that they intend for any temporary cease-fire to become permanent, or at least extended; and this implies the continued rule of Hamas and the abandonment of more than half of the hostages.

Israel cannot allow a situation to continue in which large numbers of her citizens from both the northern and southern parts of the country have been driven from their homes and can’t return for fear of rocket attacks and 7 October-style invasions. Essentially, a third of our country has been occupied by our enemies since 7 October. This is the status quo that American-brokered diplomatic “solutions” will perpetuate.

American forces have been sent to the region to prevent escalation by either side while they pursue diplomatic initiatives. But today Israeli deterrence is at its lowest point in years, and any American-brokered compromises with Hamas, Hezbollah, or Iran, will be disastrous to us.

If the Democrats win the US presidency, it’s expected that the pro-Iranian policy begun under Obama will gather steam. The Iranian regime is not sitting idly by, but is galloping toward the finish line in developing its nuclear umbrella. Israel can’t afford to wait and hope for a more friendly administration next January, which may or may not materialize.

Israel lost her way strategically at some point, when her military leadership buckled under American pressure, abandoned Ben Gurion’s philosophy of taking the war to her enemies, and began to fight, as Gadi Taub said, “with a shield but without a sword.” We have paid a huge price for this, and it’s not sustainable. Now we are at the point at which we have no choice but to fight to win.

Israel’s right of self-defense

From AbuYehuda.com Posted on March 12, 2018 by Vic Rosenthal

 

When I was in elementary school, I was disciplined for hitting another pupil after he hit me. That I remember the details of the incident clearly 60-odd years later is an indication of how strongly I perceived the injustice of it. I believed my action was justified as necessary self-defense to stop an unprovoked attack. The school principal disagreed.

One of the most strongly felt principles in Western morality and jurisprudence is the right of self-defense. It is permissible in most places to kill an attacker when a person feels that his own life or that of a family member is threatened. A person is not required to allow himself to be harmed or killed, even if the action he is forced to take to protect himself would be otherwise immoral or illegal.

There are strong arguments that even convicts have a constitutional right to employ violence in self-defense in the pervasively violent environment of American prisons. Prisons are inherently violent and dangerous, and the authorities are not able to protect the prisoners’ rights given budgetary and other constraints. But incarceration does not include a requirement to commit suicide, which in many cases is what failing to defend oneself in prison means.

There is the well-known Talmudic dictum, “If a man comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first” (Sanhedrin 72:1). And even Islamic  shari’a recognizes a right of self-defense (although a non-Muslim may not be able to exercise it against a Muslim for other reasons).

The right of self-defense is also recognized internationally between states. The UN Charter (Ch. I, Art. 2.4) says that members “shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.” But the last article (51) of Chapter VII, which defines how the UN itself may use force to stop aggression, includes this exception:

Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. [my emphasis]

The International Court of Justice (ICJ), in its 1996 Advisory Opinion on the Legality of the Use or Threat of Nuclear Weapons, took note of “the fundamental right of every State to survival, and thus its right to resort to self-defence, in accordance with Article 51 of the Charter, when its survival is at stake.” The Court argued that in such a case, as long as they are used in concurrence with international humanitarian law (in particular, the principles of necessity and proportionality), even nuclear weapons could not be ruled illegal!

The right of individual self-defense derives from the most basic of human rights, the right to life. And as the UN Charter and ICJ opinion quoted above indicate, international law recognizes also a national right to life.

I believe that the Middle East, like an American prison, is an inherently violent and dangerous place, and that all states – even one unwelcome to its neighbors – have the right to defend themselves when attacked, using whatever means are necessary to do so. Even, when there is no other option, nuclear weapons.

A lot is packed into the words “when attacked.” For example, in 1973, Israel’s enemies crossed cease-fire lines and attacked Israeli positions, acts that unambiguously constituted an “attack.” In 1967, Egypt expelled UN peacekeepers from the Sinai, massed armored divisions on the Suez Canal, announced that they would “annihilate” the Jewish state and “slaughter” us (here is a recording of Radio Cairo threatening genocide in Hebrew), and closed the Strait of Tiran, which in itself was an act of war. Technically Israel fired the first shot on June 5, but from a practical and legal standpoint, Egypt and Syria were the aggressors.

The situation today is not as clear. Iran, operating through proxies, has built an offensive capability in southern Lebanon over the past decade, and now is doing the same in Syria. It has threatened us with genocide and financed terrorists of all stripes. But its buildup has been gradual and it has not yet taken actions equivalent to the expulsion of the UN peacekeepers from the Sinai or the blockade of the Strait of Tiran. At some point the line will be crossed, and Israel will need to take military action.
Unfortunately, the attitude of the international community – as expressed in UN resolutions, NGO reports, media content, and institutions like the ICJ – does not grant to Israel the same right of self-defense that every other nation is given.

Even when Israel has been  attacked, as by the massive flood of Hezbollah rockets in 2006, or the rocket barrages from Gaza in 2008, 2012 or 2014, the Islamic-European-NGO-media axis has defined Israel as the aggressor and even accused her of war crimes for her responses. These accusations, based on cooked numbers and reports coming directly from Hamas, Hezbollah, or other severely biased anti-Israel sources, were even echoed by US President Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry and other administration officials.

Israel’s efforts to reduce collateral damage in these campaigns were unprecedented, and the resultant protection of civilian life and property was far better than the US and its NATO partners have been able to achieve in various recent conflicts. But the war crimes accusations against us stuck nevertheless.
The ICJ, whose very careful and comprehensive opinion on the use of nuclear weapons was quoted above, also produced one in 2004 on the subject of Israel’s security barrier. In this highly politicized opinion, The Court reiterated all of the usual Arab and European talking points, calling the barrier illegal and declaring that Israel must dismantle it, pay compensation to all those “injured” by it, and so forth (fortunately, the Court does not have the power to force Israel to follow its advice).

Israel argued that the existence of the barrier and its location were intended to protect her population from armed attacks. But the Court simply rejected this without any investigation of the facts or attempt to rebut Israel’s claims of military necessity. It misinterpreted Article 51 of the UN Charter, saying that since Israel “controlled” the territories, she did not have a right to protect herself from armed attacks from them. And there were other significant deficiencies. Here is a small part of the criticism leveled against the decision by the one dissenting justice, Thomas Buergenthal (the only American on the Court):

All we have from the Court is a description of the harm the wall is causing and a discussion of various provisions of international humanitarian law and human rights instruments followed by the conclusion that this law has been violated.

Lacking is an examination of the facts that might show why the alleged defences of military exigencies, national security or public order are not applicable to the wall as a whole or to the individual segments of its route. The Court says that it “is not convinced” but it fails to demonstrate why it is not convinced, and that is why these conclusions are not convincing.

The shoddy, negligent reasoning and extreme political bias of this document – compare it to the nuclear weapons opinion discussed above –  is a striking testament to the obsessive treatment of Israel as a pariah state, denied the most basic right of any nation or person, a right that arguably must even be provided to prison inmates: the right of self-defense, and thereby of survival.

I’m indebted to Allen Hertz for many of the thoughts in this post.

The poisonously ambiguous concept of “two states”

From AbuYeguda.com Posted on March 8, 2018 by Vic Rosenthal

 

AIPAC CEO Howard Kohr created a stir Sunday when he called for “two states for two peoples: one Jewish with secure and defensible borders and one Palestinian with its own flag and its own future.”
Kohr deliberately echoed the words of Benjamin Netanyahu at Bar-Ilan University in 2009. Netanyahu said then,

In my vision of peace, in this small land of ours, two peoples live freely, side-by-side, in amity and mutual respect.  Each will have its own flag, its own national anthem, its own government. Neither will threaten the security or survival of the other. …

I have already stressed the first principle – recognition. Palestinians must clearly and unambiguously recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people.

The second principle is: demilitarization. The territory under Palestinian control must be demilitarized with ironclad security provisions for Israel. …

Regarding the remaining important issues that will be discussed as part of the final settlement, my positions are known: Israel needs defensible borders, and Jerusalem must remain the united capital of Israel with continued religious freedom for all faiths.

Bibi’s statement was a mistake. His enemies on the right pounced on him for giving up his historical opposition to a Palestinian state, while the Arabs and the Left derided him as insincere. He got nothing in return from Obama and lost whatever reputation he still had for principled opposition to concessions for the PLO. Most damaging to Israel was the fact that the Americans and the PLO “pocketed” his statement, making it almost impossible for him or any subsequent Israeli Prime Minister to walk it back. From then on, anyone could say “Israel officially supports a Palestinian state.”

The root of the problem is that the concept of “two states” is poisonously ambiguous. Everyone can understand it to mean something different, up to embracing diametrically opposite ideas.

Bibi’s Palestine would be a less-than sovereign autonomous entity, demilitarized, without control of airspace, borders, electronic communications or the Jordan Valley. It would not be allowed to import weapons or make military pacts with other nations. The PLO would be required to recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people (which of course they would never, ever, do).

The Israeli center-left calls for “two states for two peoples,” a formula which, like Bibi’s, implies recognition. In this view, after an Israeli withdrawal from all or part of Judea and Samaria and the creation of an Arab state, “Palestine” would accept the Jewish people’s ownership of the remaining part of Israel as legitimate. There would be no further claims against Israel, and any solution for the descendants of Arab refugees would take place outside of the borders of Israel. This would not fly with the PLO either.

Finally, there is what Mahmoud Abbas means by “two-state solution:” a “Palestine” in which there will be no Jews, which will encompass all of Judea and Samaria (and theoretically, Gaza) with the exception of small land swaps, fully sovereign in every respect. Next to it will be an Israel that will be a “state of its citizens.” It cannot belong to the Jewish people, because in the view of the PLO there is no Jewish people, only a Jewish religion. This “Israel” will accept as many of the millions of Arab “refugees” who wish to “return” to it and grant them full rights. One can only speculate how long and in what condition of civil war this state would exist until it would be absorbed into “Palestine.”

Needless to say, these visions are incompatible. The dishonest J Street organization claims that Abbas accepted the idea of “two states for two peoples,” but in fact he has never added anything about two peoples to the phrase “two states.” Indeed, Abbas’ recent speech (incidentally, one of the most nonsensical orations ever) that J Street refers to as a “Palestinian peace  plan” implicitly but clearly calls for a right of return for the Arab “refugees” to Israel.

The best thing that could happen would be for everyone to stop talking about the “two-state solution,” a phrase which has devolved into meaninglessness.

In 2009, Bibi may have been forced to utter the formula by the Obama Administration. But what about AIPAC today? Apparently panicked by a recent poll showing diminishing support for Israel among Democrats, AIPAC is struggling to get them back. The same day that Kohr made his remarks, AIPAC’s president Mort Fridman made it explict:

To my friends in the Progressive community, I want you to know that we are partners in this project. The Progressive narrative for Israel is just as compelling and critical as the conservative one. [Yes, he said that! – vr]

But there are very real forces trying to pull you out of this hall and out of this movement and we cannot let that happen. We will not let that happen.

AIPAC hoped to fend off attacks from J Street and similar groups without weakening its support from pro-Israel elements, by employing the time honored method of political triangulation. By adopting some of the ideas of its opponents on the Left, it hopes to bring them into the fold, while its supporters on the Right will have nowhere else to go.

But this is a poor strategy because the progressives among the Democrats no longer accept AIPAC’s primary objective, which is support for Israel. It’s not that they think, as the Israeli Left does, that “ending the occupation” will be likely to lead to peace, or that their vision of Israel will be more democratic, or that another partition of the Land of Israel will prevent a demographic crisis. They have absorbed the narratives of the international Left and are simply anti-Israel. They are not coming back to AIPAC.

This is especially true of the Jews among them. At some point, the Jewish progressives replaced their connection to am yisrael with one to the oppressed peoples and gender-groups of the world, including of course the Palestinians.

The best thing for AIPAC to do now, in my opinion, is to become unapologetically pro-Israel. The progressives are gone anyway, and it might make the organization more effective.

Notes on our next war

From AbuYehuda.com Posted on March 4, 2018 by Vic Rosenthal

 

There is a feeling of calm before the storm here in Israel. Everyone thinks war is unavoidable, and most people understand, at least on an intellectual level, that this war is going to be one of the toughest in Israel’s history.

I’ll say at the outset that I’m convinced that we will survive this one too, and even achieve a measure of victory. But the cost will be very high in soldiers, civilians and property, and the price we will have to exact from our enemies will be even higher. As in the past, they have worked themselves into a frenzy, listening to their own propaganda. And as in the past, they will be sorry. But there’s no stopping them, particularly since the Iranian regime thinks it will be able to destroy us by proxy, without getting its own hands dirty.

Our government and military will do their best to deter the various actors. Don’t join in, and nothing will happen to you, they will say, as they said to King Hussein of Jordan in 1967. But our enemies’ lack of understanding of our capabilities, their misconceptions about the nature of the Jewish people in Israel, and their incandescent hatred for us will continue to dazzle them.

We are facing some 130,000 rockets in Lebanon which can hit almost all of Israel, and some of which can be accurately guided to their targets. There is also an unknown number of missiles in Syria, which can carry chemical weapons. And Iran herself has missiles that can strike Israel from her territory. There are battle-hardened Hezbollah fighters and Shiite militias in Lebanon and Syria, prepared to bring the war to our territory. And unlike the IDF, they will not spare civilians that they encounter.

Hamas has also built up its missile forces since the last war, and have hardened their launchers and buried them underground. There is a threat from ISIS in the northern Sinai. Once the war begins we can expect an upsurge in terrorism from Arabs in Judea and Samaria, and possibly even from terrorist cells based in the Triangle area. How many fronts does that make?

The IDF expects incursions in the North and has made plans for evacuation of areas threatened by fighting or heavy rocket barrages. Possibly there may also be evacuations in the area around Gaza.
The enemy’s first act will probably be massive rocket attacks from Lebanon, perhaps with precision-guided missiles aimed at military targets and sensitive infrastructure. Only some of the incoming rockets will be intercepted by our anti-missile systems, which can be overwhelmed by the sheer number of projectiles. I expect that there will be incursions by elite enemy forces at the same time, in order to create panic and jam the roads with people moving south. Thousands of rockets a day will be fired at first, until our forces can destroy the launchers and stockpiles.

The IAF and artillery will hit the launch areas in southern Lebanon, causing massive damage and probably great loss of life to civilians among whom the rocket launchers are placed. IDF ground troops will enter Lebanon to root out the launchers that can’t be destroyed from the air. Heavy fighting is expected in an area that is honeycombed with tunnels and bunkers. Casualties to both the home front and the IDF in this phase may be quite high.

I can’t estimate how long it will take for the rocket fire from Lebanon to be stopped, but in 2006 it continued for an entire month until a cease-fire was signed. The IDF says that it has learned its lessons from that war, but then so has Hezbollah. I think it is true that this time we have far better intelligence and will know how to hit more targets in less time. We may even succeed in decapitating Hezbollah by killing its top leadership early on. But it is impossible to predict what will happen in a four- or five- front war. There are credible estimates of thousands of civilian and military casualties on our side. The war will probably be the most painful of any of Israel’s previous wars (at least in the sheer number of casualties).

I think that the Israel of massive construction projects and burgeoning economy will suffer a severe setback from this war, because of the human and financial costs. The “golden age” that we are experiencing today will not continue, or at least will be suspended for some years. The worldwide hate machine will go into overdrive, holding us responsible for the deaths of thousands or even tens of thousands of human shields in Lebanon and Gaza. There will be demonstrations against Israel and Jews everywhere.

What can we do to reduce the impact of the war? It seems to me that there are several possible strategies:

One is to wait for the enemy to attack and then hit them as hard as possible. This has one main advantage – at least, its proponents claim that it does – which is that world opinion and the diplomatic climate would be more favorable, since we would not be viewed as the aggressor. Our enemies would have violated international law by attacking us, and theoretically a  negotiated settlement would favor us.

The main disadvantage of this strategy is that a huge amount of damage can be done before we respond. Especially if critical infrastructure is destroyed, our response could be delayed, and the difference could be measured in thousands of deaths. Since ground troops would be required to deal with incursions and hardened rocket launchers, we would be in a difficult spot until the reserves could be called up, especially if we have been attacked on multiple fronts.

But the truth is that our diplomatic isolation stems from other nations’ perceptions of their national interest and by their prejudices, and not on the true moral or legal nature of our actions. World opinion is manipulated by governments and media and is also not reality-based. Therefore I doubt that any such abstract advantages would justify the price we would pay for it. And the price would be high.
The second strategy is to preempt and attack first. Martin Sherman has done a good job in arguing for preemption:

Given the assumption that, bolstered by its patron’s pervasive physical presence, Hezbollah will in all likelihood, eventually, use the vast arsenal at its disposal, the inevitable question is: Will Israel allow its deadly adversary to choose the time, place and circumstances for a major attack against it? Indeed, more to the point, can Israel afford to allow Hezbollah such a choice?

Sherman goes on to show that Israel cannot, particularly because the small size of the country and her technological sophistication make her especially vulnerable to destruction of critical infrastructure, such as power plants, desalination facilities, refineries, natural gas platforms, and similar facilities. A preemptive strike might not be quite as effective as it was in 1967, but it would certainly reduce the damage that Israel would need to absorb. If done properly it might result in a quick end to the war. I’ve argued the same thing here and here.

Sherman argues correctly that the idea that Israel has been successful in deterring its enemies is wrong. Rather, our restraint has been exploited to allow our enemies to build up and harden their capabilities. The choice, says Sherman, is “between incapacitating the enemy while you can; or continuing to deter the enemy—until you can’t!”

A third strategy is to continue as we have been doing, preventing Iran from establishing bases in Syria and arming Hezbollah by means of limited strikes. But this is a delaying tactic that is only partially effective, and, Sherman notes, “it is liable to lead not only to the hardening of targets— for example by converting them from surface to underground sites—but to familiarizing the enemy with Israel’s methods and capabilities.”

There is always the question “what will the great powers do?” That means, of course, the US and Russia. The rest of the world will talk, but does not have the power to act (the Sunni Arabs will condemn us in public but smile in private). It is hard to predict what the Trump Administration will do, but it is certain that a Democratic administration would be worse, which argues for taking action sooner rather than later.

Will the Americans insist on prior knowledge of the operation? Can we take the risk of telling them? What will happen if we don’t?

As far as Russia is concerned, part of our plan will have to include guaranteeing Russia’s interests in the region. What this would mean in detail would have to be worked out, but I don’t think our interests and Russia’s have to contradict each other.

The problem is that time is not on our side. The longer we wait, the more expensive in lives and money the inevitable war becomes. The comforting argument that because of our strength our enemies will continue to be deterred falls apart with every new report that Iran has built this or that facility, or introduced this or that militia into Syria.

Sherman asks: do we want a triumph like 1967 or a trauma like 1973? I don’t know if we can achieve a victory as total as 1967, but only preemption will save us from an outcome that could be much worse than 1973.

Europeans, Jews and the Holocaust

From AbuYehuda.com Posted on February 5, 2018 by Vic Rosenthal

 

The story of Jews, Poles and the Holocaust is not simple.

Of course some Poles cooperated with the Nazis in murdering Jews. Some even murdered Jews by themselves, sometimes even after the Germans were gone. On the other hand, the Poles themselves suffered tremendously from Nazi brutality. Certainly, some Poles saved Jews from the Nazis. And some hunted them down or turned them in. In different ways, Poland’s behavior during the war was both better and worse than that of other countries occupied by the Nazis.

The Nazis tried to erase the Jewish people from the world. They also tried to cripple the Polish nation by murdering  everyone of even the smallest intellectual, cultural or political importance. It was a less ambitious crime than what they did to the Jews, but it was bad enough.

It is true that Polish people were highly antisemitic before, during and after the war, and the reaction by some Poles to criticism of the law recently passed by the Polish parliament criminalizing certain kinds of speech about the period shows that Jew-hatred isn’t gone (even though most of the Jews are: Poland has about 8,000 Jews, 0.02% of its population).

The law criminalizes the use of the expression “Polish death camps.” I can see how this is annoying to Poles, but there is hardly a need for a law to enforce the common knowledge that the camps in Poland were built by the Nazis. Unfortunately, it tries to do more. It forbids anyone (with exceptions for scientific research or art) from saying that Poles were “responsible or complicit in the Nazi crimes committed by the Third German Reich.”

The law is stupid, and probably impossible to enforce fairly (what counts as “art?”). You can’t legislate history. What happened, happened. It’s important to know what and how so perhaps it will be possible to keep it from happening again.

But while it is ill-advised, the law is important as an expression of nationalist feeling in Poland, like the nationalism that has been growing in other European countries, reflected in the newfound strength of right-of-center parties in many of them, including France, Austria, Germany, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and others.

Probably the single most important reason for the shift toward nationalism in formerly universalist Europe is the wave of immigration by non-Europeans, particularly Muslims. The threat from outsiders, with their unfamiliar and often objectionable cultures is met with a heightened appreciation of one’s own country, people, culture, religion, attitudes, and so on. Depending on your point of view, this is either healthy patriotism or racist xenophobia.

Given the hostility of many of the migrants to European/Western norms, hostility which sometimes takes the form of terrorism, it is entirely understandable that native Europeans want to shut their doors and strengthen the connections between themselves and their nation. Nationalism is a tool for national self-preservation.

Naturally, the Jew in Europe, always an outsider – indeed, the paradigm case of the outsider within a nation not his own – is not included as part of the native group, even if his people had been living there for hundreds of years. So in countries with a tradition of Jew-hatred – that is, most European countries – increased nationalism is often associated with antisemitism. This leads to a paradoxical and decidedly unpleasant situation for Jews in countries like France, where there are a significant number of violently antisemitic Muslim immigrants, and the Jews who are their targets find themselves dependent on the “natives,” who aren’t always sympathetic.

But could Herzl have been right in his belief that the transformation of the Jews into a “normal” people, living in their own state, would eliminate antisemitism?

Today, for the first time in millennia, more of the world’s Jews live in Israel than anyplace else. This concentration will probably become stronger in the future, as persecution drives Jews out of places like Europe and assimilation reduces their numbers in North America. The status of the Jew in the world is therefore changing from that of an (unwanted) outsider trying to preserve his heritage in a foreign culture, to a citizen of a legitimate state, a nation among nations. He may be an expatriate, but he nevertheless has a patria.

This conception is opposed by the enemies of Israel, who believe that the Jewish state is illegitimate, and by those Jews who believe that they can both assimilate to the cultures of their “homes” in the Diaspora and still remain fully Jewish. Often they too are hostile to the Jewish state. But the trend will continue. Like it or not, most Jews in the Diaspora will soon see themselves either as expatriate Israelis or merely “persons of Jewish extraction” with ethnic food preferences.

While Muslim/left-wing anti-Zionism (the “red-green alliance”) is becoming the most common and serious manifestation of Jew-hatred in the world, traditional “right-wing” antisemitism is becoming more and more he province of the mentally disturbed fringe, both in Europe and North America. The nationalist movements in Europe are beginning to see that they have more interests in common with Israel than with her enemies, while the Israeli government is less ready to condemn them when, for example, they venerate historically antisemitic figures as heroes. The Polish government is clearly not interested in having a diplomatic crisis with Israel over the Holocaust speech law, and Israel isn’t pushing it.

The presence of anti-Jewish elements in Polish (and other European) nationalism isn’t a permanent obstacle to relations with Israel. Both sides see it as a bump in the road that can and will be overcome.
Perhaps in the long term, the enemies of Diaspora Jewish culture, antisemitism and assimilation, will reduce the population of “persons of Jewish extraction” outside of Israel to irrelevance, and then national interests alone will determine attitudes toward the Jews and their state.

I can think of worse outcomes.

Let Israel win

From AbuYehuda.com Posted on January 21, 2018 by Vic Rosenthal

 

Why can’t Israel and the Palestinians just get along? Daniel Pipes answers that wars end when one side or the other wins. And Israel, he says, is not trying to win.

Please consider two sets of three dates. The first three are 1865, 1945, and 1975 – the end of the Civil War, World War II, and the Vietnam War. All of those were conclusively ended wars. They ended the fighting, nothing more followed. The South never rose again. The Germans didn’t try to conquer Europe again. And Americans didn’t return to Vietnam.

Then, three other dates: 1918, 1953, and 1967 – the end of the First World War, the Korean War, and the Six-Day War. Those were inconclusive. The Germans did try again.

Any day, the Korean War could restart. Hostilities did resume between the Arabs and Israel.
The difference between these two sets of dates lies in the losers’ sense of defeat. In the former triad, that sense existed; in the latter, it did not. Losing a round of a war is not tantamount to feeling defeated. Defeat means the loser giving up on war goals. That’s what we Americans experienced in 1975. Victory means imposing one’s will on the enemy. The enemy gives up; the winner prevails.

In the case of Israel and the Palestinians, not only does Israel not try to decisively win, but the Palestinians are encouraged to think that if they just persevere, victory is within their grasp.

Until the Oslo accords of 1993, Pipes says, Israel’s objective in its conflicts was winning. Sometimes – when Israel was forced to withdraw from the Sinai in 1956, when she was forced to allow the Egyptian 3^rd army to escape from its encirclement in 1973, and when the US arranged for Yasser Arafat and his cadre of terrorists to flee Beirut in 1982 – international intervention prevented a decisive victory.

But since Oslo, “Israelis have tried various other approaches – appeasement, unilateral withdrawal, putting out brush fires – but not sought victory.”

Israel has refrained from taking steps that would damage the PLO and even Hamas too much because of fear that at best Israel would have to take responsibility for governing a large and mostly hostile Palestinian population; and at worst, the Israel could end up with an Iran- or ISIS- dominated regime next door. Unfortunately this fear has led to outrageous situations, such as Israel transferring money from tax collections to the PA, despite the fact that the PA pays salaries to murderers in Israeli jails. It has prevented Israel from taking effective steps against terrorism. It has made Israel tolerate a continuous flow of incitement to murder in official PA media.

Pipes has been saying this for at least 15 years (here is a prescient 2003 piece) and has been accused of cruelty for using phrases like “break their will” and “crush their hopes.” However, the point he is making is quite rational: nothing would be better for the Palestinians in the long run than losing hope.
Pipes says that the fundamental cause of the conflict is Palestinian rejectionism: “It means saying no to Zionism, to Jews, to Israel: no political contacts, no economic relations, no personal relations.” I agree with him, but I would take one step farther back and say that rejectionism itself is a consequence of accepting the “Palestinian narrative.”

The narrative has two parts:

1. A false historical story of a native civilization dispossessed from its land by foreign invaders; and,
2. A hope that with perseverance and struggle the invader society (like the Crusaders) can be expelled, the Jews killed or sent back to “where they came from.”

Given the honor-shame Arab culture of the Palestinians, the narrative commits them to an unending struggle. The narrative becomes their identity. This is one reason they resist compromise solutions so strongly. To give up on the “right of return,” for example, is to give up on being Palestinian.

Dispelling the first part of the narrative may be impossible at first, because rational arguments have little force against an emotional commitment to one’s identity. But as Pipes argues, it is possible to change the environment by concrete actions so that it becomes clear that the second part is a delusion.

The delusion that Israel can be eliminated remains after 70 years because half the world is telling the Palestinians that they’re right about that. And Israel is not working to dispel the notion.

There is the Palestinian leadership, the PLO and Hamas, which have been inciting Palestinians against Israel and Jews, and indeed telling them that there is no real state of Israel (look at their maps), just a temporary “occupation” of their land.

There is the UN, which observes an “International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People” each year, and which passes resolution after resolution attacking Israel.

There is UNRWA, an agency which exists to teach the narrative and to nourish the growth of a population of “refugees” who are encouraged to believe that some day they will “return” to a place that they never came from.

There is a massive international support system of organizations and governments that constantly tell the Palestinians that their cause is just and will prevail.

There is the attitude of the IDF and other Israeli security services that don’t want to rock the boat.
But today there have been some geopolitical developments that for the first time in decades may make it possible to directly challenge the second part of the Palestinian narrative, their belief that it is possible for them to win.

First is the split in the Muslim world caused by Iranian expansionism. Some countries, like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, understand that the main bulwark against Iran in the region is their erstwhile enemy, Israel. They are more concerned about the danger of a nuclear Iran than about destroying Israel, which they realize poses no threat to them. They are therefore prepared to take a more realistic approach to the Palestinian issue.

Second is that the cost of maintaining the corrupt Palestinian Authority and the equally corrupt UNRWA, with its exponentially growing number of “refugees,” is finally beginning to become a burden on the Western democracies. They are starting to ask themselves if it’s worth billions to support the Palestinian fantasy.

Third is the fact that the Trump administration in the US – the main source of support for the UN, for UNRWA and the PA – is starting to ask tough questions and to resent being blackmailed by terrorist militias like the PLO and Hamas. The violent Palestinian reaction to Trump’s Jerusalem announcement, which simply recognized reality and took nothing away from them, and Mahmoud Abbas’ recent extremist rant attracted attention in the US. And it doesn’t hurt that the importance of Middle Eastern oil to the American economy is far less than it was in the past.

Pipes provides some concrete suggestions to convince the Palestinians that they won’t win. In my mind, the most effective ones are those in which anti-Israel activity is punished in ways that go directly against the goals of the Palestinian movement. For example, towns that are hotbeds of terrorism should be cut off from services; the bodies of terrorists should not be returned to their families; terrorist activity should result in new Jewish settlements being established or existing ones (like Havat Gilad, the home of murdered Rabbi Raziel Shevach) being regularized or expanded. And Israel should reduce the funds that it transfers to the PA (from customs duties, etc.) by the amount that the PA pays to terrorists in Israeli jails, or to the families of “martyrs.”

The US can end its financial coddling of the PA. UNRWA, the mother of the narrative, can be abolished, and funds diverted to host nations to pay for the support and ultimately, absorption, of Palestinian “refugees.” Real refugees from 1948 – perhaps there are 20,000 of them – can be taken care of by the UN’s normal refugee agency, UNHCR.

As Pipes says, it’s a long process. Attitudes developed over decades must change, both inside and outside of Israel. But they won’t change unless we, in Israel, adopt a consistent program: one of seeking victory, not temporary quiet.

Israel is right to bar foreign agitators

From AbuYehuda.com Posted on January 14, 2018 by Vic Rosenthal

 

The usual suspects are all up in arms about the “undemocratic, McCarthyite blacklist” that Israel has imposed on activists in certain pro-BDS organizations, like the particularly vile “Jewish Voice for Peace” (JVP). Here is an almost-honest description of the goals of the BDS movement that JVP supports, from its Executive Director, Rebecca Vilkomerson:

BDS is a call from Palestinian civil society to build a global movement to pressure Israel to end the occupation, offer full equal rights to Palestinian citizens of Israel, and allow Palestinian refugees the right to return. The BDS movement is inspired by the tradition of nonviolent resistance to oppression, and draws on the example of the movement to divest from South African apartheid and other examples of targeted economic and cultural pressure to achieve justice.

Vilkomerson, who is terribly pained by the fact that she will not be permitted to visit relatives in Israel, pretends that allowing millions of “refugees” who are not refugees to “return” to a place they have never lived means something other than replacing the Jewish state of Israel with yet another Arab state. It doesn’t, and it would achieve neither justice nor peace. An influx of hostile Arabs, who have been raised and indoctrinated from birth to be an army to kill and disperse the Jews of Israel, would result in a bloody civil war at best, and a second Holocaust at worst. One wonders if Vilkomerson thinks about the fate of her Israeli relatives if her organization were to suceed. Probably they hold foreign passports, just in case.

It is also important to understand that “Palestinian civil society” is a shorthand for nongovernmental organizations primarily funded by virulently anti-Israel elements in European countries (and the US), including governments, church organizations and others, which simply want the embarrassingly successful Jewish state to disappear. Just as Arab Muslims don’t believe that Jews can be sovereign in an area that they regard as properly dar al islam, many Europeans take the position, going back to the dawn of Christianity, that the Jew ought not to be sovereign anywhere – and particularly not in the Holy Land or the Holy City, Jerusalem.

Let’s face it, they don’t give a damn about the rights of Palestinian Arabs. If it’s about rights, why are the Palestinians cared about so much more than the millions of other oppressed people, many of them Muslims and Arabs too? Where was the boycott and divestment movement against Bashar al-Assad? Where is it today when Iranians are in the streets demonstrating against a corrupt, tyrannical, misogynistic, homophobic regime which is also the biggest exporter of terrorism in the world?

The purpose of the movement is not to pressure Israel to grant anyone their rights, which “Palestinian citizens of Israel” already have, and which “Palestinian refugees” do not deserve. Israel is not hurt by the boycotts or divestments, which have very little real effect on her economy. Their true aim is to delegitimize Israel as a state, and to provide an excuse to demonize her with vicious propaganda in order to drain potential diplomatic and military support from her in her ongoing war for survival.

So just as Israel would be justified in keeping out terrorists who want to kill Jews, she is justified in refusing to admit Vilkomerson, who wishes to non-violently enable terrorists to kill Jews. Because this is precisely what the BDS movement is doing.

Jonathan Tobin would agree with most of what I’ve said, but he thinks that the blacklist of BDS groups is counterproductive:

While BDS is an annoyance to Israel, it has done little damage to the nation’s prosperous economy. … The real danger from BDS comes from the way anti-Israel groups operating on college campuses in the U.S. and elsewhere promote and practice anti-Semitism. They seek to not merely intimidate Jewish and other pro-Israel students from speaking out, but also to effectively make it difficult to openly live as Jews. …

Keeping people out of Israel simply for expressing an opinion, however odious it might be, is a mistake since the boost it gives them far outweighs the cost of any mischief they might get up to once in the country. Allowing BDS supporters to play the martyr also gives another excuse for newspapers like The New York Times to treat JVP like a legitimate organization rather than a group of Jews giving cover to anti-Semitic hatemongers. It also gives them an opportunity to falsely smear Israel as a tyrannical state rather than the pluralistic democracy that it is.

I get the point. But there is another point that I think Tobin misses. Just as allowing terrorist murderers to remain alive damages Israel’s honor and deterrence, allowing foreign agents into the country who are enemies of the state like Rebecca Vilkomerson has a similar effect. Leaving aside the damage from the provocations that she would doubtless commit – she might join Arab rioters like the Tamimis at Nabi Saleh, for example – her presence would broadcast that Israel was too weak to keep her out. It would serve as encouragement for others like her.

This is sometimes hard for liberals to understand, especially in the coastal suburbs of the US, where it’s generally believed that allowing every kind of expression short of violence is a sign of strength. But maybe they should look to both their inner cities and their flyover country, where cultures exist in which allowing yourself to be “dissed” is a sign of weakness and an invitation to violence. Sometimes strength may be in restraint, but sometimes it’s demonstrated by fighting back. This is certainly true in the Middle East we live in, where no country in its right mind would allow agitators like Vilkomerson past passport control.

The New York Times would argue that JVP is a legitimate organization regardless of what Israel does, but by barring it, at least Israel makes clear that she does not agree with the Times. And while Israel is (unfortunately, to my mind) too committed to free speech to bar its own subversives like Gideon Levy from spewing their vile lies and libels, it is not a sign of tyranny to keep foreign agitators outside.
It’s just good sense.

Shoot to kill, not to neutralize

From AbuYehuda.com Posted on January 12, 2018 by Vic Rosenthal
 

Every time there is a horrific terrorist murder of a Jew because he or she is a Jew, I am compelled to write one of what I am calling my “outrage posts.”

I’m outraged that this can continue, over and over. Every time, I write that we need a death penalty, or that we should fire a cruise missile at the center of the town that the murderers came from and then build a Jewish town on the ruins. Every time, I write that the perpetrators will almost certainly be caught, but the chances are good that they will survive their arrest and get more-than-humane treatment in an Israeli prison, and their families will receive a monthly stipend from the Palestinian Authority paid for by the US, the EU and even Israel. And every time, I am reminded of the Shalit deal, where a kidnapped soldier was traded for more than a thousand terrorists, including mass murderers.

Yesterday it was Rabbi Raziel Shevach, a 35-year old father of six children, mohel and volunteer medic, murdered in a drive-by shooting on Route 60 near Shechem, in Samaria. Because he was a Jew.

Rabbi Raziel Shevach, Hy”d, with his family

You can’t look at this picture without wanting to cry. Unless, of course, you are a member of Hamas, which announced that they “bless the heroic Nablus operation,”  the murder of Rabbi Shevach; or if you belong to Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah faction, which praised the “skilled and experienced” terrorist who carried out the “operation” and escaped.

This will undoubtedly contribute to the death penalty debate which is currently taking place in the Knesset. I have always favored a death penalty for terrorist murderers, but now I’m not so sure. If such a law passes it will surely include all kinds of safeguards and chances to appeal to the Supreme Court, and who knows what else. It will certainly take time before all the options are exhausted. This is Israel, after all, which aspires to be Berkeley, California, and you know how long it takes (forever) to get a murderer executed in California.

A death sentence that could be executed within a few weeks after the crime would be great. For that matter, so would a real life sentence without possibility of early release. But neither of these are likely.

Most of the time the security forces succeed in finding the terrorists responsible for crimes like this. And despite the fact that there are some terrorists who do want martyrdom, most of them don’t. So they give themselves up to the PA, which hands them over to Israel. Or they manage to surrender to our forces peacefully. And then they get the country-club prison, the conjugal visits, the Open University correspondence courses, the salary from the PA and perhaps an early release. I urge these terrorists to show that they are real men. Don’t go quietly! When the army or YAMAM comes to get you, point your guns at them. They’ll give you a sporting chance, which is more than you gave Rabbi Shevach.

I’ll support the death penalty law. While it probably won’t make much difference, it will make a statement. More important would be a decision by the IDF and police brass that security forces should shoot to kill, not to “neutralize,” and definitely not take terrorists alive. I’ve explained my reasons before, but the most important reason is that in the Middle East upholding your honor is an important part of deterrence; and a people that lets its members be killed without responding in kind loses its honor.

The lesson that these incidents teach me, over and over, is that there is no possibility of sharing our country with the Palestinian Arabs. They have never accepted the idea of Jewish sovereignty and never will. They will always believe that we stole the land and their honor and will always want to get them back, and violence will always be the preferred means. Incitement to murder in their official media, social media and mosques only increases from day to day.

It is the most elemental kind of conflict between human tribes, from long before the dawn of civilization. Two tribes want the same piece of land. Only one side can win. But today modern techniques of incitement and propaganda have made it possible for the tribes to be much larger and the conflict more permanent. It can’t be snuffed out or redirected. And geography doesn’t permit a compromise. One side or the other will have to win.

I wanted to believe, and indeed I did believe for many years, that compromise was possible. A deal could be worked out. Two states for two peoples. But one by one or ten or twenty at a time, Jews were murdered: rabbis, beautiful young girls, old men, soldiers, a bride having lunch with her father on the eve of her wedding, Jews shopping in stores, Jews walking on the sidewalk, riding in cars and buses, praying in synagogues, eating pizza, celebrating holidays, having Shabbat dinner with their families, waiting in line to go into a club, waiting for a bus or a ride, doing anything at all in eretz yisrael.
Rabbi Shevach is the latest, but he won’t be the last.

There have been too many. For me, the debate is over. It doesn’t matter whose narrative is closer to the truth (ours is, but it doesn’t matter). It doesn’t matter how much we Jews really, really want peace. It isn’t up to us.

What matters is that we are engaged in a war that has been waged against us since long before the founding of our state, whose objective has always been to prevent Jewish sovereignty anywhere in our homeland. Our enemies are not confused: they want total victory, and they understand what that means in a practical sense. We need similar clarity, because for the Jewish people, this is an existential war.

We can win it or we can disappear.

Why UNRWA has to go

From AbuYehuda.com Posted on January 8, 2018 by Vic Rosenthal

 

UNRWA provides healthcare, education and welfare payments for about 5 million people with Palestinian refugee status. It received its mandate to temporarily provide relief for the 600,000 to 700,000 Arabs displaced by the 1948 war from the UN General Assembly’s Resolution 302 of 1949. The resolution notes that

…continued assistance for the relief of the Palestine refugees is necessary to prevent conditions of starvation and distress among them and to further conditions of peace and stability, and that constructive measures should be undertaken at an early date with a view to the termination of international assistance for relief.

The resolution did not set out criteria for eligibility for refugee status. This was apparently decided by UNRWA staff itself. But the criteria were chosen in a way that contradicted the intent of the resolution. Instead of being structured so that the refugees could ultimately be weaned off of the international dole, the definition of a refugee, the actions of the agency and the behavior of the host countries where the refugee camps were located, all operated to create the largest possible refugee population – and a population that would continue to increase without limit.

UNRWA defined a refugee as someone who was displaced after as little as two years residence in Palestine before 1948, it made refugee status hereditary without a limitation on the number of generations, and it paid welfare benefits according to family size. These conditions ensured the continued increase of a dependent population. Today there are about 5 million people with Palestinian refugee status: refugees, their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Not only have there been more and more refugees created, their quality of life has been poor. The host countries (Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, Jordan, Palestinian Authority) restricted the mobility of the refugees, requiring them to live in specified locations, and in some cases limited the occupations that they were permitted to engage in. Refugee camps – today some the size of cities – were deliberately neglected. During the 1970s, Israel attempted to improve the conditions in some of the camps that came under its control, but was prevented from doing so by the PLO. In places where there are restrictions on employment like Lebanon, or places like Gaza where the economy is particularly weak, young men have no options for employment. UNRWA itself is a major employer of refugees; some 97% of its employees are Palestinian. In Gaza, one of the only other options is to join Hamas’ “security forces” or one of the other armed militias.

Unsurprisingly, the UNRWA schools teach hatred of Israel and nurture the Palestinian themes of dispossession and revenge. Its installations in Gaza have been used to store weapons, on the usually correct assumption that the IDF will spare them.

Most people who favor the continued existence of the state of Israel agree that UNRWA is an agency designed to perpetuate the conflict, not to ameliorate it. And yet, Israeli officials – in particular, the IDF – and the most important pro-Israel organizations in the US have always stepped back from deploying the one weapon that could actually force change, which is cutting the hundreds of millions of dollars the US, UNRWA’s largest donor, grants the agency each year. This is because the IDF (AIPAC follows the Israeli government’s lead, which in turn follows the IDF’s) sees the status quo as the least bad of all possible alternatives. If UNRWA went away, who would feed, educate and take care of 5 million dependent Arabs? Would the IDF itself have to take charge? UNRWA schools teach anti-Zionism, but what would Hamas or Islamic State schools teach? Would the humanitarian condition of the refugees decline even further, and if so, would this bring instability and terrorism?

The IDF and Israeli government have not wanted to step into the unknown, preferring the devil they know to the one they don’t, and the US has followed their lead. But simple Malthusian mathematics proves that this status quo is unsustainable. The US, EU and other donors can’t continue to meet the needs of a geometrically increasing population. And while Israel may feel that continuing to buy off the Palestinians is in her national interest, it is not obvious to the US and others that it is in theirs.
But there is, or should be, a much greater problem from the Israeli point of view. And that is that UNRWA’s very definition is profoundly anti-Israel. It is the embodiment of the Palestinian “right of return,” by virtue of its hereditary definition of “Palestinian refugee.”

The main stumbling block to ending the conflict between Israel and the Arabs (the Palestinians and others) is the claim that the “refugees” are pressing to “return” to “their homes.” This claim is what distinguishes our conflict from countless territorial disputes all over the world. It is what makes the dispute not be over borders, but over the existence of our state.

The Palestinian narrative of dispossession is buttressed by this massive UN enterprise to maintain what is in effect a nation in exile, a nation waiting to burst its bonds and expand into what it sees as its land, driving out its temporary Jewish interlopers. It is not surprising that the Palestinians expect the UN to force Israel to give them everything they ask in negotiations – after all, it has been meeting their physical needs for nearly 70 years.

In order to end the conflict without the destruction of one or both sides, any negotiation has to be reality-based. But thanks to UNRWA and their other allies, the Palestinians have developed fantasies. Two of the subjects of these fantasies are Jerusalem and the “right of return.” The fantastic Palestinian beliefs that they will possess the holy sites in Jerusalem, and that the “refugees” will “return” to Haifa, Yafo, Acco and other places make it impossible to settle the conflict peacefully.
President Trump seems to think, as his State Department does not, that a switch from fantasy to reality may have a positive effect. I think he’s right. In any event, it’s certainly true that indulging Palestinian fantasies has so far been profoundly unproductive.

Although it is not a sufficient condition for an eventual peaceful settlement, it is a necessary one that the Palestinians divest from their fantasies. And the only way to lose the “return” fantasy is to end the concept of a permanent refugee population. If there are no refugees, then there can be no question of  “right of return.” That means that UNRWA and its fundamental principle of hereditary refugee status needs to be ended too, even if the process is somewhat uncomfortable – both for the Palestinians and for Israel. Some way can be found to phase out humanitarian aid slowly, but the ideological principle has to change now.

Possibly the economic facts of life and some of the geostrategic changes in the Middle East that have been gathering steam recently will make it possible for this to happen in the near future. And then, maybe in a few generations, we can think about the possibility of actual peace between the Jews and the Arabs.

The Iranian counterrevolution: a good start

From AbuYehuda.com Posted on December 31, 2017 by Vic Rosenthal

Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones? – Bob Dylan, Ballad of a Thin Man

Since Thursday, December 28, something has been happening in Iran.
Anti-regime demonstrations have broken out all over. Although the nuclear deal with the West brought huge amounts of cash into the country, instead of improving the economy it’s been used to support the war in Syria and parceled out to Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Iraqi Shiite militias, the ballistic missile program, and many other things that I don’t know about but that serve the imperial goals of the regime.

Much of the economy is controlled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a branch of the Iranian armed forces which is involved in both internal security for the regime and its foreign adventures. People connected with the IRGC are doing well, while those who aren’t “hooked up” are suffering from the severe inflation and unemployment that plague the rest of the nation.

There are about 125,000 members of the IRGC and it controls the basij militia with several hundred thousand additional fighters in reserve. The IRGC operates Iran’s missile and nuclear programs .
Apparently, many Iranians are tired of the corrupt regime and don’t see the point of its adventures in Syria and elsewhere. I would like to believe also that they see the regime heading for a direct collision with Israel and other regional powers, and they would prefer to avoid an unnecessary and bloody war.
Although the immediate irritants are economic, the demonstrations are strongly political and aimed at the regime. Posters of Supreme Leader Khamenei, General Qassam Solemani of the IRGC’s “Quds Force” (a sort of foreign legion), and President Rouhani have been destroyed. Chants of “death to the IRGC” and “death to the dictator” have been reported.

Is it possible that the revolutionary Islamic regime established in 1979 could be overthrown?
In 2009, the so-called “Green Revolution” – a protest against what many believed to be a rigged presidential election – was brutally put down by police and the basij militia. Then demonstrations were primarily in the capital and on behalf of a reformist candidate, not directly aimed at the regime. Today’s demonstrations are both more widespread and clearly challenge the regime. There’s no reason to think the regime would hold back in its use of violence. At least two demonstrators have reportedly been killed already.

In 2009, President Obama chose not to encourage the demonstrators. Today, President Trump has expressed his support and warned the Iranian regime against violating the protesters’ rights. But it’s not clear what actions the US could take at this point to aid them. What might really make a difference could be support from the Iranian army, which is significantly larger than the IRGC, although probably a less effective fighting force.

At this point we don’t know if the demonstrations are the beginning of a planned putsch with an organization behind them, or just a spontaneous explosion of frustration. If the latter, the regime will probably succeed in shutting them down by the escalating use of force. But if the former is the case, then regime change is a possibility.

This raises so many questions! Could Iran get a non-Islamist regime? Could it get one that is not committed to imperial conquest? Could it even dream of a democratic government?
Iran is a relatively advanced country with a well-educated population. It was at one time one of the most Westernized countries in the Middle East. The 1979 revolution imposed an atavistic, medieval regime on a people that has chafed under its rule ever since. There is certainly popular support for a counter-revolution.

The consequences in the region if the Iranian regime were replaced by one which prioritized economic development over foreign adventures would be immense. If the demonstrators got their wish and the millions sent to Hezbollah and the Iraqi Shiite militias stayed in Iran, the air would go out of Bashar al-Assad’s plan to re-conquer Syria. The best he could hope for with plenty of Russian air support would be to survive in a small enclave. The Sunni resistance to his regime would be reenergized.
Needless to say, Israel would be overjoyed. Hezbollah is Israel’s most dangerous immediate enemy, with its 150,000 rockets aimed at us. Without Iranian support, the process of disarmament, which was called for by UNSC Resolution 1701 at the end of the Second Lebanon War, but never implemented, could finally begin. Lebanon could begin to think about becoming an independent sovereign nation again, instead of a country-sized human shield for Hezbollah rocket launchers.

Subversive and murderous activity against Jews and Westerners all over the world would suffer a severe blow. Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and countless other terror groups would lose their greatest source of funds for weapons and terrorism. Antisemitic propaganda would decline. Without support from a sovereign state, Hezbollah would just be another international narco-terrorism group, and the world’s police agencies could pursue it and prosecute its leaders.

Would the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda try to expand back into the vacuum? Probably. It would not be the end of terrorism or even the end of extremist Islamic terrorism. Iraq’s Shiite majority would not suddenly decide to share power with its Sunni minority, even without Iranian prodding to violent confrontation.
The Palestinians would not turn around and recognize a sovereign Jewish state in any borders, nor would the Europeans stop trying to subvert Israel for their own dark reasons. Just as all the problems of the region didn’t grow from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they aren’t all related to Iranian expansionism.
If Iran stopped exporting revolutionary Islamism, it wouldn’t create a new, more peaceful world all at once.

But what a good start it would be!

Too much nuance

From AbuYehuda.com Posted on December 29, 2017 by Vic Rosenthal

“Anyone who takes the approach that this is a black and white situation with a good side and a bad side clearly does not understand the conflict – nor could they have a peaceable solution in mind.” – Laura Ben-David

I took this quotation from an open letter to the singer Lorde (of whom I admit I have never heard), who recently announced that she would not perform in Israel after pressure from pro-Palestinian fans in her native New Zealand.

The letter was fine and I hope the young (21) performer reads it and pays attention. But the statement quoted above is wrong.

The conflict is “a black and white situation with a good side and a bad side.” As far as a solution, I admit that I don’t have a peaceable one in mind, but that’s because the people who have adopted the cause of the Palestinians are not going to give us one. They are preparing for war, and although we are doing our best to delay it, it’s just a matter of time.

Here is the conflict in a nutshell: Muslims cannot abide Jewish sovereignty in places that they have decided ought to be dar al islam, and that includes my country, Israel. That’s wrong, it’s racist, and it’s unnecessary.

The Palestinian Arabs, the point of the spear of the anti-Israel movement, have created a whole mythology to justify their opposition to our existence, but that’s all it is: a mythology. Their cause inflames Muslims everywhere in their genocidal racism, which they would quickly and happily implement if they weren’t afraid of us.

Laura Ben-David also said “the disputes and challenges in Israel are very real and very complex. If they were easy to solve, they would have been.” This, too, is misleading. There is one overriding reason that the conflict continues, and it isn’t complexity. It’s because various powerful outsiders have found it in their interest (real and imagined) to take the side of the racist Arab nations, and especially the Palestinian Arabs.

So for example, the disintegrating British Empire thought the Arabs would be far more useful than the Jews in protecting their routes to India and supplying them with oil. The KGB waged (and possibly its successor continues to wage) vicious psychological warfare against the Jewish state as part of the great-power conflict of the Cold War. The American State Department’s Arabists are more comfortable with their pure desert nomads than sneaky, tacky Jews. The Europeans cancel their Holocaust guilt by assuring themselves that we are, after all, as bad as the Nazis. And today, the burgeoning Iranian empire sees Israel as standing on its path to Middle-Eastern or even world domination (not to mention the dar al islam issue).

Western leftists, like the ones that bothered Lorde, are so obsessed with escaping their inescapable whiteness that the old KGB propaganda lights them right up. For those that are themselves Jewish, the pleasure in attacking the only Jewish state is at least doubled. Not only do they escape their whiteness, but they jettison their Jewishness at the same time! Two for one.

It’s always someone, isn’t it? There’s no other place in the world besides our tiny state that so many seem to care about so much. If only they didn’t.

Regarding solutions, we’ve tried agreeing to several of them, many highly disadvantageous from a strategic standpoint, but somehow, the more we talk about peace – or worse, withdraw from some place we are ‘occupying’ – the more we get war (this in itself tells us something about the simple polarity of the conflict).

So that is the story. I apologize to Laura Ben-David, whose heart is clearly in the right place, but there can be too much nuance. Not everything is so complex, not every argument has two sides that are both compelling, and conflicts do not always evaporate when you make an effort to understand both sides. Some things provide clear moral choices – and this is one of them.

The Obama-Hezbollah-Iran crime family

From AbuYehuda.com Posted on December 21, 2017 by Vic Rosenthal

A stunning investigative report by Josh Meyer in Politico has revealed that the Obama Administration interfered with and then shut down a campaign by the Drug Enforcement Agency and other law enforcement agencies against a billion-dollar drug and weapons trafficking empire run by Hezbollah, in order to keep from damaging relations with Iran.

The campaign, dubbed Project Cassandra, was launched in 2008 after the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed evidence that Hezbollah had transformed itself from a Middle East-focused military and political organization into an international crime syndicate that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.

Over the next eight years, agents working out of a top-secret DEA facility in Chantilly, Virginia, used wiretaps, undercover operations and informants to map Hezbollah’s illicit networks, with the help of 30 U.S. and foreign security agencies.

They followed cocaine shipments, some from Latin America to West Africa and on to Europe and the Middle East, and others through Venezuela and Mexico to the United States. They tracked the river of dirty cash as it was laundered by, among other tactics, buying American used cars and shipping them to Africa. And with the help of some key cooperating witnesses, the agents traced the conspiracy, they believed, to the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.

Sounds like precisely the sort of operation that the civilized world should be carrying out against those who want to destroy it. The administration apparently didn’t see it that way:

But as Project Cassandra reached higher into the hierarchy of the conspiracy, Obama administration officials threw an increasingly insurmountable series of roadblocks in its way, according to interviews with dozens of participants who in many cases spoke for the first time about events shrouded in secrecy, and a review of government documents and court records. When Project Cassandra leaders sought approval for some significant investigations, prosecutions, arrests and financial sanctions, officials at the Justice and Treasury departments delayed, hindered or rejected their requests.

The Justice Department declined requests by Project Cassandra and other authorities to file criminal charges against major players such as Hezbollah’s high-profile envoy to Iran, a Lebanese bank that allegedly laundered billions in alleged drug profits, and a central player in a U.S.-based cell of the Iranian paramilitary Quds force. And the State Department rejected requests to lure high-value targets to countries where they could be arrested.

“This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision,” said David Asher, who helped establish and oversee Project Cassandra as a Defense Department illicit finance analyst. “They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.”

The conjecture is that this was done in order to protect the developing nuclear deal with Iran:

Asher, for one, said Obama administration officials expressed concerns to him about alienating Tehran before, during and after the Iran nuclear deal negotiations. This was, he said, part of an effort to “defang, defund and undermine the investigations that were involving Iran and Hezbollah,” he said.

“The closer we got to the [Iran deal], the more these activities went away,” Asher said. “So much of the capability, whether it was special operations, whether it was law enforcement, whether it was [Treasury] designations — even the capacity, the personnel assigned to this mission — it was assiduously drained, almost to the last drop, by the end of the Obama administration.”

There is much more. The report is well-sourced and clearly documents a consistent policy to ignore criminal and terrorist activity by Iran’s Hezbollah proxy, doubtless in response to signals from Iran.

This policy will doubtless be justified by those responsible on the grounds that the Iranian nuclear deal was of such major importance to the US that nothing could be allowed to interfere with it – assuming that they are ever called on it, which the mainstream media doesn’t seem to be interested in doing (in the US, only Fox News and conservative media have covered it, at least so far).

The nuclear deal itself was the culmination of a process that started in 2006, when James Baker and Lee Hamilton, along with a young assistant named Ben Rhodes, who would later attain great influence as a foreign policy adviser and speechwriter for Barack Obama, produced the Iraq Study Commission report. The report advised persuading Israel to give the Golan heights to Syria and Judea and Samaria to the PLO, in return for which Iran and Syria would stop helping Iraqi insurgents kill Americans.

Although further developments showed the plan to be unworkable, Obama never gave up on the idea of “engagement” (that is, siding with) Iran in the maelstrom of Mideast conflicts. In the process, he prevented Israel from destroying Iran’s nuclear program and allowed Bashar al-Assad’s survival as Syrian ruler, as well as the entry of Russia as a major player in the Syrian conflict. The nuclear deal, rather than preventing Iran from developing deliverable nuclear weapons, actually facilitated its progress and protected it from interference by Israel or anyone else. As a side benefit, it freed up billions of dollars of Iranian money that had been embargoed after the 1979 revolution, and even paid additional hundreds of millions of dollars in cash as ransom for Americans being held in Iran.

Naturally, Iran immediately used its windfall to build up its armed proxies, Hezbollah and the Iraqi Shiite militias that have done much of the fighting in Syria on behalf of Assad. It strengthened its terrorist cells in South and Central America, and almost certainly in the heart of the US.

The imprimatur placed on the deal by the UN Security Council weakened the limitation on ballistic missile development formerly in place, and Iran is spending some of its gains on missiles that can reach most of Europe, and at some point, the USA. Iranians haven’t stopped chanting “death to America,” although now the “devil” they hate is Trump.

Obama’s was the most consistently anti-Israel administration since the founding of the state of Israel, considering the deliberate insults and provocations directed at Israel’s PM, its pressure to make dangerous concessions to the Palestinians  with no reciprocity, its lack of support and even sabotage of Israel in her periodic conflicts with Hamas, its nuclear deal, and its lame-duck abstention on an anti-Israel Security Council resolution. But the administration’s spin machine argues that its policy is, in the final analysis, favorable to American interests.

It’s hard to see how. As time has passed and the weaknesses of the deal became more and more evident, as Iran has become more powerful and US influence in the region has waned, as direct threats to the US (both from Iran and from its ally North Korea) become more apparent, it is harder and harder to maintain this fiction. The revelations contained in the Politico report make it even more difficult than before. Hezbollah’s narco-terrorism has a dual purpose. It not only pays for its weapons and murderous activities, the drugs it sells rip at the fabric of our society.

I have an acquaintance, a sweet Jewish grandmother, who liked to post pictures of the Obamas on Facebook with comments about how much “class” they had. Once she even commented “I love my President!” and she would not listen to anything negative about him. She managed to “love” him while his policies were assisting  terrorists who were killing Americans in Iraq and Jews in Israel. But those things were far away.

It would be interesting to ask how she feels about him having helped to bring drugs to her grandchildren’s schools.