THIS is why Israel has to keep its current borders

The Truth about the UN

The MOST Important Video About Israel You'll Ever See!

Ron Paul's Position on Israel

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu UN address to General Assembly Sept 23 2011

Prager University: The Middle East Problem

Israel’s Plight: 1948 and Today

Original article

The interview with historian Benny Morris that appears in today’sForeign Policy website raises interesting questions. Morris, as interviewer Evan R. Goldstein points out, was once a hero of the academic Left, and a leading advocate of the rights of Palestinians. But reality has over the years forced Morris to reconsider much of his early assumptions.

Now, he has, like the majority of his countrymen, become “more cynical about the prospects for a two-state solution.” He makes a basic argument: “The Palestinian national movement has never … reconciled itself to Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.” Once a supporter of the Oslo Accords, Morris has become what Goldstein calls an “embittered pessimist.” Like the shattered Israeli Left and once strong peace movement, Israelis know that they are not on the verge of peace, and that given Palestinian and Arab attitudes, the conflict may not be resolvable.

Every new American presidential administration, including that of Barack Obama, starts with the assumption that they are positioned as no one before has been to restart the “peace process.” The policy makers in the Obama administration think that given a new attitude and favorable response in the world to Obama’s charismatic personality, that he will succeed where others have failed.

If so, President Obama is poised to learn a tough lesson. He could save himself a great deal of trouble and useless “negotiating” by listening to Morris, and trying to come up with other solutions than another round of meaningless peace negotiations. It took the events of 2000 to shatter Morris’s own illusions. Not only did Arafat reject the offers of Barak and Clinton, but, says Morris, “they launched a terroristic and guerrilla war …suggesting that they are not just after the territories but want to drive the Jews out of Palestine.” Israel later unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005- though of course the Palestinians still call it “occupied Gaza,”-and the Palestinian response to Israel’s withdrawal “turned it into a base for rocket attacks.” Morris, who once went to prison for refusing to serve as a reservist in the occupied territories, now holds that the Palestinian’s irredentism is not going to disappear.

The proof is in the pudding. Israel agrees with Morris. The left-wing parties barely exist, and the center-right has won every Israeli election since 2001. Morris argues that the Palestinians believe the Jews have no legitimate right to be in Palestine and that they never did. The problem is the same one that existed in 1947 and 1948, when the Zionist movement accepted partition. Only they did. The Arab states then, and the Palestinian leadership now, do not. As Morris says: “Jewish Israeli society and Palestinian Arab societ are in a different place in terms of history, culture, and values.” Morris cites Muslim terrorism, the Muslim attitude towards women, and the long history of violence and hatred. That means, he sorrowfully concludes, that “it is inconceivable that a society of Jews and Arabs could function right now as one state in Palestine.” Morris has one potential solution: attaching the West Bank and Gaza to Jordan- already a majority Palestinian area- and making that the new Palestinian state.

That, of course is an old solution, rejected many times by Jordan, as well as Palestinian nationalists. But Morris argues it is more realistic and possible than any of the alternatives.

I, for one, think that Morris’ analysis of the hopelessness of a two-state solution as it is now proposed is correct. And it is not surprising. My wife and I have written a new book, which is being published today, and will be in bookstores by May 12^th if not before. Its title is A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel, and is published by Harper/Harper Collins. You can order ithere on Amazon.com.

One of the things we have found is that if you look back at Israel’s origins, and the problems facing President Truman from 1945 to 1948, is the continued rejectionism of the Arab and Palestinian leadership back then. When the UN set up a special commission to investigate a potential solution for Palestine, Jamal Husseini, vice chair of the Arab Higher Committee, told the UN that Palestinian Arabs would not collaborate with the UN commission and would not even testify before it. When the UNSCOP commission finally came out for a two state solution, the Arab League denounced partition and Zionism as completely illegitimate. Palestine, as the minister of foreign affairs for Trans-Jordan put it, had to be “an Arab state.” Husseini added that the Arab would drench the Holy Land “with the last drop of our blood in the lawful defense of all and every inch of it.” They had a simple goal: “no partition, no further Jewish immigration and no Jewish State.” Going back to ancient times, he and other Arab leaders argued that Jews had no ties to Palestine at all, and that the Zionists sought to take it “from the Arab inhabitants.”

When the UN finally voted for partition on Nov. 29, 1947, the Arab delegates stormed out of the UN hall. Prince Faisal of Saudi Arabia and Azzam Pasha, Secretary-General of the Arab League, stood up, one journalist wrote, “their white robes and headdresses shook as the mentioned to the delegates from the other Arab states to follow them. At the door…Pasha shouted, ‘Any line of partition drawn in Palestine will be a line of fire and blood.” And as the world learned, when Israel was created on May 15, 1948—five Arab nations immediately invaded the new Jewish state.

The story is the same, decades ago, and today. The Israelis opt for peace; the Arabs opt for an all Arab Palestine, without Jews. Sometimes, history does not move very far.

_____________

Comments

_____________

Professor Guvinoff:

When we use words like “problem” and “solution” we tacitly suppose that each “problem” has a “solution” that will come with it, to be discovered through the exercise of logic. This is quite appropriate in the realm of home work assignments or examination tests in math and science.

The “problem” the UN was supposed to solve with the creation of Israel was not a mathematical issue at all. The absolute hate towards the jews has been “written”, as often repeated in the movie “Lawrence of Arabia”, some 14 centuries ago, and there is no detectable effort to unwrite it, anymore than the UN is about to negociate a resolution on the “Excesses of the Koran”.

The obstacle to the security of Israel is not a “problem”, like any logical challenge would be, so any statement regarding the pursuit of a “solution” is at best a contrivance towards some other purpose.

Instead of admitting honestly that there is no legal remedy to the existencial threats faced by Israel, we keep “discussing” the “solution”.

The rare palestinians who are offering any respect towards the jews, like Wafa Younes (spelling?), the young lady who conducted a small orchestra of a dozen or so palestinian kids, who performed a concert for a jewish retirement home recently, are repudiated by the palestinians authorities.

I hope her and her musicians are safe, but I worry.

The so-called “peace process” is still an abstraction, which cannot materialize unless some serious behavior modification comes first.

Detoxification from alcohol and other substances is possible, but it takes a long time and a lot of courage. We don’t hear about “haters anonymous” groups popping up left and right in the middle east. In the meantime, Israel can only be practical and diligent about its security, because rockets, amateurish or else, cannot be countered by feelings alone.

Why I Am A Bad Jew

Original article
by Rami Kaminski, MD,

For centuries, we lived in Berdichev. In the brutal Ukrainian winter of 1941, SS soldiers arrived there and rounded up eighty-seven members of my family, babies, young adults, octogenarians, stripped them naked, marched them to a nearby ditch, and executed them. Their lifeless bodies fell silently into a mass grave.

During their two millennia in the Diaspora, Jews were not known to resist. There are few recorded instances in which Jews turned against their host nations or retaliated against their murderers. Instead, the survivors if there were any were expelled or left for another place. The murdered were regarded as good Jews. They accepted their fate helplessly, without resistance.

This narrative of the Jews has played out on the historical stage with boring monotony: Jews get killed because they are Jews. Nothing novel about it. After the Holocaust, however, the world, disgusted by this particularly ghoulish period of history, accorded some sympathy for the Jews.

Media commentary about the ongoing Gaza War reveals the world has now reverted to its pre-Holocaust perspective. Today, the only good Jew is a powerless Jew willing to become a dead one. The Zionist Revolution is to "blame". It changed everything. Jews re-created their own country.

The Arabs attacked the new Jewish State the day after independence and promised to complete Hitler's genocide. In succeeding decades, the Arabs attacked again and again. Strangely, the Jews, many of them refugees from Arab nations, adopted a surprising, new tactic: they fought back. With Zionism, the Jews stubbornly refused to follow the centuries-old script. They refuse to be killed without resistance. As a result, the world has become increasingly enraged at their impertinence.

The recent events in Gaza and Mumbai make this plain. In 2005, Israel eliminated all Jewish presence in Gaza making it Judenrein and handed it over to the Palestinians. Left behind were synagogues and thriving green houses. The Arabs looted and destroyed them literally the day after Israel's withdrawal was complete. Where these structures once stood, the Palestinians built military bases and installed rocket launchers to shell Israeli civilians. To date, some 7,000 missiles have fallen on Israeli cities and towns, killing and maiming dozens, and sowing widespread terror. Medical studies reveal nearly all Jewish children in the communities bordering Gaza suffer from serious, trauma-induced illness.

The Gazan Palestinians then elected Hamas to lead them. Hamas proceeded to kill or imprison their political rivals, and its leaders, true to the Hamas charter, were unabashed in clearly stating their aims: they will not stop until they achieve their Final Solution, kill all the Jews, take over the land of Israel, and establish a theocracy governed by Islamic law.

As killing Jews for being Jews has been a national sport for centuries, Islamic militants are justified in believing they are merely fulfilling historical tradition in Argentina, India and Gaza. Surely the Jews in Mumbai did not occupy Gaza. They were tortured and killed just for being Jews. And predictably, in the eyes of the world, they immediately became good Jews, just like my murdered family in Bertishev.

Good Jews would wait until Hamas has weapons enabling its members to achieve their ultimate goal of absolute mass murder. Those enraged by Israel's defensive military action insist Hamas uses only crude rockets, as if Qassams were BB guns, and military inferiority were somehow equivalent with moral superiority. In fact, Hamas now has Iranian-supplied Grad missiles which have landed on Beer Sheva and the outskirts of Tel Aviv.

Westerners have had only sporadic exposure to the indiscriminate killing in the name of holy war which Israel has lived with for years. Memories of 9-11, Madrid, and London have dimmed. This is not because the Islamic militants made a careful choice of weapons. They simply have not yet acquired nuclear bombs. Once they do, the West will develop a less detached view about the Islamists professed intentions for the infidels.

The only enlightened people in the civilized world who actually get it are the Israelis. They’ve not had time for detached philosophical pondering. They’ve been too busy confronting the reality of Islamic fundamentalism.

Soon, Iran will have nuclear weapons. It will give them to Hezbollah and Hamas. Today, Jews must take a position: either be "good" Jews willing to be slaughtered without resistance, or be bad Jews who defend themselves at the cost of being pariahs of our enlightened world. Good Jews would wait for another six million to be murdered, and pick up to leave for another country to start the cycle again. The bad ones refuse to go calmly into the ditch.

I confess: I'm a bad Jew!
-------------------

Rami Kaminski, MD, Is Director and Founder of the Institute for Integrative Psychiatry in New York, a not-for-profit organization aimed at evaluating current psychiatric services and how they integrate with medicine, such as the mutual effects between medical and psychiatric conditions. Prior to that, Dr. Kaminkski was the Commissioner's Liaison to Families and Community and Medical Director of Operations at the New York State Office of Mental Health. Dr. Kaminski also holds an academic position as Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University.
He earned recognition in 1990 from Mt. Sinai Hospital as Physician of the Year, and received the Exemplary Psychiatrist Awards from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. Dr. Kaminski's research explores neuropsychiatric aspects of brain disorders, such as Alzheimer and Parkinson's disease and movement disorders, as well as psychopharmacology of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. He was for many years Director of The Schizophrenia research Unit at Mount Sinai Hospital in NYC. Dr. Kaminiski also served as the Medical Director of the PMHP and consultant to the committee in charge of developing the Special Needs Program.

Jimmy Carter's War Against The Jews

An Open Letter to the World

Dear World,

I understand that you are upset by us, here in Israel.

Indeed, it appears that you are quite upset, even angry. (Outraged?)

Indeed, every few years you seem to become upset by us. Today, it is the "brutal repression of the Palestinians"; yesterday it was Lebanon; before that it was the bombing of the nuclear reactor in Baghdad and the Yom Kippur War and the Sinai campaign. It appears that Jews who triumph and who, therefore, live, upset you most extraordinarily.

Of course, dear world, long before there was an Israel, we - the Jewish people - upset you.

We upset a German people who elected Hitler and upset an Austrian people who cheered his entry into Vienna and we upset a whole slew of Slavic nations - Poles, Slovaks, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Russians, Hungarians and Romanians. And we go back a long, long way in the history of world upset.

We upset the Cossacks of Chmielnicki who massacred tens of thousands of us in 1648-49; we upset the Crusaders who, on their way to liberate the Holy Land, were so upset at Jews that they slaughtered untold numbers of us.

For centuries, we upset a Roman Catholic Church that did its best to define our relationship through inquisitions, and we upset the arch-enemy of the church, Martin Luther, who, in his call to burn the synagogues and the Jews within them, showed an admirable Christian ecumenical spirit.

And it is because we became so upset over upsetting you, dear world, that we decided to leave you - in a manner of speaking - and establish a Jewish state. The reasoning was that living in close contact with you, as resident-strangers in the various countries that comprise you, we upset you, irritate you and disturb you. What better notion, then, than to leave you (and thus love you)- and have you love us and so, we decided to come home - home to the same land we were driven out 1,900 years earlier by a Roman world that, apparently, we also upset. Alas, dear world, it appears that you are hard to please.

Having left you and your pogroms and inquisitions and crusades and holocausts, having taken our leave of the general world to live alone in our own little state, we continue to upset you. You are upset that we repress the poor Palestinians. You are deeply angered over the fact that we do not give up the lands of 1967, which are clearly the obstacle to peace in the Middle East

Moscow is upset and Washington is upset. The "radical" Arabs are upset and the gentle Egyptian moderates are upset.

Well, dear world, consider the reaction of a normal Jew from Israel.

In 1920 and 1921 and 1929, there were no territories of 1967 to impede peace between Jews and Arabs. Indeed, there was no Jewish State to upset anybody Nevertheless, the same oppressed and repressed Palestinians slaughtered tens of Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Safed and Hebron. Indeed, 67 Jews were slaughtered one day in Hebron in 1929.

Dear world, why did the Arabs - the Palestinians - massacre 67 Jews in one day in 1929? Could it have been their anger over Israeli aggression in 1967? And why were 510 Jewish men, women and children slaughtered in Arab riots between 1936-39? Was it because Arabs were upset over 1967?

And when you, dear world, proposed a UN Partition Plan in 1947 that would have created a "Palestinian State" alongside a tiny Israel and the Arabs cried "no" and went to war and killed 6,000 Jews - was that "upset" caused by the aggression of 1967? And, by the way, dear world, why did we not hear your cry of "upset" then?

The poor Palestinians who today kill Jews with explosives and firebombs and stones are part of the same people who ? when they had all the territories they now demand be given to them for their state -attempted to drive the Jewish state into the sea. The same twisted faces, the same hate, the same cry of "itbach-al-yahud" (Massacre the Jew!) that we hear and see today, were seen and heard then. The same people, the same dream - destroy Israel. What they failed to do yesterday, they dream of today, but we should not "repress" them.

Dear world, you stood by during the holocaust and you stood by in 1948 as seven states launched a war that the Arab League proudly compared to the Mongol massacres.

You stood by in 1967 as Nasser, wildly cheered by wild mobs in every Arab capital in the world, vowed to drive the Jews into the sea. And you would stand by tomorrow if Israel were facing extinction. And since we know that the Arabs-Palestinians dream daily of that extinction, we will do everything possible to remain alive in our own land. If that bothers you, dear world, well ? think of how many times in the past you bothered us.

In any event, dear world, if you are bothered by us, here is one Jew in Israel who could not care less.

By Rabbi Meir Kahane, hy"d

Middle East Arguments are "A TRIFLE ONE-SIDED*

A TRIFLE ONE-SIDED*

Original article
By Barry Rubin

David Grossman, an Israeli writer, penned an essay entitled “Israel's success in Gaza only proves it is strong, not right.” Aside from the irony of his being Israeli, Grossman’s ideas are the ultimate expression of Western reaction to the terrorist extremist challenge.

To his credit, Grossman notes there have been Palestinian “crimes and mistakes,” that the other side prefers violence, and that ignoring this “would be tantamount to belittling and condescending to them, as if they were not mature adults with minds of their own, responsible for their own decisions and failures.”

But, he concludes, since Israel is stronger, it somehow controls the conflict’s level of violence, able to be “calming it down and even bringing it to an end.” How, he asks, will peace “ever come if we fail to comprehend just how grave is the responsibility that lies on our shoulders” for achieving it?

Grossman is upset that Israelis feel united and confident, complaining about, “Those who have taught us over the years to scoff at belief in peace and any hope for change in our relations with the Arabs. Those who have convinced us that the Arabs understand only force, and therefore that is the only language we can use in our dealings with them.”
He adds, “And because we have spoken to them for so long in that language…we have forgotten that there are other languages for speaking to human beings, even to enemies, even bitter foes like Hamas” not just “the language of planes and tanks.”

The reason why almost everyone in Israel disagrees with Grossman, however, isn’t that they have forgotten anything but that they remember so accurately. It is no accident that Grossman’s article is so vague and ahistorical because for him to cite specific examples must raise the sad fact that “those who have taught us over the years to scoff at belief in peace and any hope for change in our relations with the Arabs,” are the Palestinians themselves.

Why doesn’t he mention the 1993-2000 peace process experience? Why not one word about radical Islamism? Because what undercuts his claims are two realities he won’t face and a psychological crutch that he and some others understandably cannot do without.

The first reality is that Israel remembers the Palestinian and Syrian rejection of peace. From 1993 to 2000, Israel made deep concessions and took great risks. The Palestinian leadership and Syria turned down a plan which included returning the entire Golan Heights and establishing an independent Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital.

Grossman and those thinking like him forget that Palestinian rejection of peace makes Israelis conclude logically that Palestinians aren’t ready to make peace. Even Fatah forces in Gaza—the “moderates”—brag not only about firing more than 100 rockets at Israel but also of fighting alongside Islamic Jihad, a group even more extreme than Hamas!

The second reality he ignores is radical Islamism’s rise. Hamas and Hizballah, Iran, Muslim Brotherhoods, and even Islamist impersonator Syria, aren’t persuadable through dialogue. They reject all lessons of the Middle East’s last 60 years. They want to fight for decades; they expect total victory.

Israelis know these forces won’t be moderated by Israeli words or deeds. Grossman’s good will doesn’t interest the other side. Nice well-meaning people who oppose violence, advocate compromise, and offer huge concessions face those wanting to wipe them off the map, rejecting compromise, and interpreting other’s concessions as surrender.

It’s no accident that Grossman and those who talk like him know little of Middle East politics and have less contact with Arabs or Muslims than those disagreeing with them. Hamas has no difficulty believing such people exist because they embody the Islamists’ stereotype of a weak West fearing violence, begging for mercy, and being easily beaten. Indeed, Grossman’s piece has already been translated into Arabic and cited as proof that Israel suffered a defeat in Gaza.

Part of dialogue is to hear what the other side says. Do so with Hamas and Iran; see if you still believe in dialogue. Here is what key Hamas leader Ismail Radwan said in a post-war victory rally: "Gaza is not our goal. The liberation of all of Palestine, from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea, God willing, will be achieved." Sorry, David, I don’t think you are going to make him change his mind.

That brings us to the psychological crutch: wishful thinking. It’s hard to face a life-long confrontation with evil forces seeking your utter destruction. It’s unpleasant to admit there’s no alternative to waging that struggle.

In contrast, it’s empowering to say: We can solve this with words and sensitivity. That’s why Grossman sounds sensible to outsiders knowing little and irrelevant to those understanding the specific situation:

“We must initiate speech,” says Grossman, “insist on speech, let no one put us off.” It doesn’t matter if “dialogue seems hopeless from the start” because it will protect us far more than “hundreds of planes dropping bombs.” Why is that? Because we will all come to our senses once we understand how much harm we do to each other and how “utterly senseless” is violence.

Talk is cheap. How strange is the assumption that once both sides grasp the horror of killing their enemies they’ll be repelled. But Hamas isn’t repelled it’s thrilled. As for the idea that violence is “senseless,” Hamas thinks it a glorious and sensible means to achieve its goal.

There is, of course, an alternative dialogue with Palestinians and Arabs. Deal with the Palestinian Authority— without illusions—for minimum violence and maximum mutual benefit. Cooperate with Arab states that hate Hamas, the Islamists, and Iran because of their own interests. But this requires intimidating, deterring, weakening, and discrediting Hamas. Which is why the Gaza war was imperative and concessions to Hamas are disastrous.

Beyond strategic considerations is a profound trauma, a bewildering contradiction to everything the Western intellectual, artist or policymaker holds dear. Enlightenment Man meets the Dark Ages’ advocate who sneers at reason; Realpolitik Man meets those indifferent to interests; Materialistic Man meets those repelled by materialism; and Humanistic Man meets those who glory in death and destruction. .

When one talks of such dialogue I think of the U.S. official who, interrogating captured al-Qaida men in Afghanistan in 2003, asked one, “Why did you come here?” The terrorist answered: “To kill you.” And he did. End of dialogue.

* A reference to the film "Casablanca." When Rick wants to speak to a prisoner the Germans have already killed, he is told that you are welcome to speak with him but, says Captain Renard, "I'm afraid you'd find the conversation a trifle one-sided."

_________________________________________________
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center in Herzliya, Israel, and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His books include The Truth About Syria; The Tragedy of the Middle East; and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East.

How Can the World Be Blind to Israel’s Existential Threats?

It is amazing to me that there is so much confusion over who the terrorists are, who wants war, and who wants peace.

Original article
January 30, 2009 - by Michael Yon

I heard Benjamin Netanyahu, the person who could soon become Israel’s new prime minister, speak this week at the Jerusalem Conference. The most pressing point that he talked about was that under no circumstances should Jerusalem be divided. Many believe that if Jerusalem were to divide, the terrorist group Hamas would set up a headquarters here, which would result in Iranian agents — who also wish to see genocide against the Israelis — setting up shop within the confines of Jerusalem.

It is amazing to me, as an American who travels the world on a near-constant basis, that there is so much confusion over who the terrorists are. Hamas is a terrorist organization that condones and facilitates suicide bombings and will kill every Jew on the planet if they have the chance. Meanwhile, Israel is an energetic democracy with a vibrant press. I could sit right here in Jerusalem and write bad things about Israel and Jews, and nothing would happen. Maybe I wouldn’t get invited somewhere or would be called an anti-Semite, but that would be it. Neither the Jews nor the Israelis would harm me, though they likely would write bad things about me. I came to Israel with no press accreditation and at the airport they knew that I was a writer. Yet they let me in and have allowed me to freely roam the country. Today I was in very close proximity to Mr. Netanyahu. Mr. Netanyahu talked about how, in this very hotel, Rehavam Ze’evi had been murdered just a few floors above our heads. The security seemed incredibly lax by American standards. Bernard Lewis and other extremely smart people were there.

Israel is a free country that abides by the rule of law. By contrast, if a writer were to go to Gaza or Iran, for instance, and start writing bad words, he might wind up on the news, dead. Israel allows Christians and Arab Muslims to worship freely, while Hamas wants to see us all at the bottom of the sea. Hamas, supported by Iran, is clear about their goals: they want to wipe out Israel completely, utterly, with finality. But it’s not just Israel that Hamas wants to kill; they want to kill all Jews everywhere. Complete genocide.

And when Iran has the capacity to launch rockets over to Europe or the United States, one can count on it happening. If they can manage to hatch nuclear weapons, we could see Israeli cities annihilated, leaving Israelis with little choice other than to respond with nuclear weapons, which could leave millions dead. If Iran gets nuclear weapons, Iraq will want them, as will other nations who are threatened by Iran. I’ve lived in Europe for about six years, and it is easy to imagine Europe being engulfed in a massive religious and race war. America is relatively sedate on the racial front, but Europe could explode if a serious terrorism wave were to sweep through.

It is simply astounding that many foreign governments do not see this for what it is. Good Muslims are murdered by Muslim extremists in probably dozens of countries, yet certain European governments insist that there is some sort of moral equivalence between Hamas and the democracy called Israel. At this conference, I hear incredulous Jews who are concerned that their soldiers and political leaders might be charged with war crimes and arrested if they travel to Europe. This is just one example of the racism that vexes Europe and keeps it behind where it could be. Imagine for a moment that Cuba were launching missiles at Florida. We would sink their navy, shoot down their air force, wipe out their army, and kill Castro. Yet thousands of rockets have been raining down on Israel, while many members of the international community demand that Israel do nothing. These rockets are advertised to be small and not much of a nuisance, but each one carries about 15 times more explosives than a hand grenade. Hamas favors launching the rockets when kids are going to or coming from school. Clearly they are trying to murder the children who are growing up under attack. The Israelis have proven time and again that they will choose peace if given a chance. Hamas, when given a chance, chooses war.

I hear great concern that our new administration will turn its back on Israel, leaving Israelis to fend for themselves. But these feelings are not limited to the Israelis. Concern comes from numerous allies that the United States might go cold. I’m hearing these concerns from Iraqis, British, Lithuanians, and Israelis, to name a few.

I can safely be called anti-war. But being anti-war does not mean we can hide our heads in the sand in regard to the proximate and growing threat from Iran. If you want to see World War III unfold, just sit quietly about Iran. Iran could be the opening chapter of an apocalyptic era.

_________________________________________
Michael Yon, author of Moment of Truth in Iraq: How a New 'Greatest Generation' of American Soldiers Is Turning Defeat and Disaster into Victory and Hope, spent more time embedded with U.S. and British combat troops in Iraq than any other correspondent. Michael Yon has changed his focus to Afghanistan.

Bibi’s Bold Message

Original article
By P. David Hornik
FrontPageMagazine.com | Wednesday, January 28, 2009

The Israeli papers carried reports on Monday (here, for instance) about an article in the London-based Arabic daily Asharq Al-Awsat claiming Egypt was warning Hamas to strike a deal with Israel before Binyamin Netanyahu forms the next government. Otherwise, the Egyptian officials are supposed to have said, Hamas stands to “lose everything.”

Rumors were flying about a ceasefire of a year to a year and a half in which Israel would open the crossings to Gaza and free 1,000 Hamas prisoners in return for captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Israel’s current leaders Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak, and Tzipi Livni are said to be anxious to conclude a deal for Shalit before the February 10 elections.

If so, they’re badly miscalculating. Israelis want Shalit freed and are perturbed that Operation Cast Lead didn’t secure that result. The renewed terror puts the government’s claims about restored Israei deterrence in doubt as well.

Clearly Olmert, Barak, and Livni can’t boast that the war was a resounding success, gravely weakening Hamas, and then agree to abject terms of 1,000 terrorists for one Israeli soldier. Israelis would rejoice to see Shalit back home in any case—then send Livni and Barak (with Olmert finished in any case) deeper into political defeat.

That being what Egypt is reportedly warning Hamas about: the next Israeli government won’t be so pliant. Likud Member of Knesset and close Netanyahu ally Yuval Steinitz has called to “free Shalit by our own hands.” After pounding Hamas, a terrorist organization with 20,000 fighters, Israel, a developed country with a powerful army, shouldn’t have to go begging to it. It’s because of such lack of backbone that the current government is on the way out.

But if Egypt views Netanyahu as a sort of bad boy, Western foreign establishments do too—from a different angle. President Barack Obama’s hasty dispatch to Israel of Middle East envoy and veteran peace-processor George Mitchell has sowed speculation that the aim is to get photo-ops particularly with Livni and Barak—Netanyahu’s prime-ministerial contestants—and convey to the Israeli public that it’s with these leaders that Obama can work.

Livni—much closer to Netanyahu in the polls than Barak—is herself pushing that line, warning that Washington will see a Netanyahu-led government as a “peace refuser” and be at loggerheads with it. Again, it’s a miscalculation, perhaps desperate; most Israelis aren’t in the mood to hear that Israel should be bending its will to a U.S. administration that may be afflicted with quick-fix visions for the Middle East.

In any case, Netanyahu, with all this attention converging on him, also on Monday penned an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post. Bibi is not just a commentator but a candidate running for office in a country often at the eye of the storm, and his op-ed is meant to send signals. Here is an attempt to decode them:

“In foreign policy, Obama faces a wide array of difficult decisions, from how to responsibly withdraw from Iraq to how to advance peace between Israelis and Palestinians.”

Bibi to Obama administration: I am not an opponent of the latter idea or an obstacle to it. Nor, though, am I in a rush; I believe peace can be advanced, incrementally and carefully, not achieved all at once.

“But…one issue will prove more important to Obama’s presidency than all others: Will his administration succeed in preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons?”

Bibi to Obama administration: I have, however, a strategic focus and am much more concerned about a much larger issue.

“A nuclear-armed Iran will change the world as we know it. It will pose a direct existential threat to Israel…. Iran will move quickly to dominate the world’s oil supplies and the nuclear nonproliferation treaty will be rendered meaningless.

“I am convinced that Obama recognizes these dangers. When he visited Jerusalem last summer, he said that the United States cannot afford a nuclear-armed Iran. I believe that Obama is working from his first day in office to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions.”

Bibi to Obama administration and world: I am not necessarily convinced of these things, otherwise I would not be drawing attention to them. However, even if Iran is not Obama’s first priority, it is my first priority, and that is something that will not change.

“[Israel’s] security challenges are…daunting. Hamas remains in power and will try to rearm itself with an even more deadly arsenal.”

Bibi to world: I don’t believe Operation Cast Lead came anywhere near defeating or neutralizing Hamas. I am realistic about the danger Hamas continues to pose.

“Hizbullah has de facto control over Lebanon and has tripled its lethal capacity.”

Bibi to world: Ditto for the Second Lebanon War. It didn’t achieve much and I am realistic about the danger Hizbullah continues to pose.

“And advancing peace with moderate Palestinians is possible, but must be done in a way that does not sacrifice Israel’s security interests.”

Bibi to Obama administration: Again, I don’t dismiss this idea, but I’m going to be real careful about it and will not be pushed into moves I deem harmful to Israel.

“Above all else, the top priority of the next government of Israel will be to ensure that Iran does not acquire nuclear weapons. Iran is a regime openly pledged to our destruction, and its threats must never be dismissed lightly. Israel must immediately redouble its efforts to work with the United States and other allies to neutralize this threat.”

Bibi to Obama administration and Europeans: If you’re really intending to do something about it, I will work with you against the Iranian threat. If you’re not, take note: Israel will go it alone.

To sum up, Netanyahu’s advent evokes rational fears in those who wish Israel ill and irrational enmity in those purporting to wish it well. Netanyahu, aware of the various perceptions, wants it to be known that he is above all an Israeli nationalist concerned about his country’s survival. After three years and more of weak, obsequious leadership, Israelis—with their mixed feelings about his earlier tenure at the helm—are ready to put him there again.

____________________________________
P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Tel Aviv. He blogs at http://pdavidhornik.typepad.com/. He can be reached at pdavidh2001@yahoo.com.

Gov't to recover assets in Muslim lands

Original article
Jan. 27, 2009
by Haviv Rettig Gur , THE JERUSALEM POST

The Pensioners Affairs Ministry has created a new department over the past two weeks that will begin to collect specific claims by Jews who lost their property when they left Arab countries during the 20th century.

More than 850,000 Jews fled or were expelled from Arab lands and Iran, most after Israel's founding in 1948. Estimates of the value of the property they were forced to leave behind are hard to come by, ranging from as low as $16 billion in known assets to as high as $300b. when estimates of the value of their abandoned real estate are included.

"Israel has talked about this on and off for 60 years. Now we're going to deal with it as we should have all along," said Dr. Avi Bitzur, director-general of the Pensioners Affairs Ministry.

The ministry established a department with an initial staff of five to begin to collect the claims of the Jewish refugees, about 80 percent of whom settled in Israel. Bitzur will host a panel on the issue at next week's Herzliya Conference, and over the next two weeks hopes to pass a decision through the cabinet mandating discussion of Jewish refugees whenever the question of Arab refugees are raised in peace negotiations.

According to Bitzur, who is also a political scientist at Bar-Ilan University, the new effort comes to fill a gap in awareness both in Israel and abroad. "The UN has dealt at least 700 times with Arab refugees and their property, but not once with the issue of Jewish property," he says.

It's also time for Israelis to get to know better the history of the Jews of Arab lands, who make up some 60% of the ethnic ancestry of Israeli Jews.

"It's time to deal with this amongst ourselves," says Bitzur. "I say that as a citizen, as a father and as an academic. We should know the history of the pogrom in Baghdad in 1941, of the Lybian Jews who ended up in Bergen Belsen. It's time for people to know that there was this part of the Jewish people and its history was brought to an end."

In late 2007, Baghdad-born American Jew Heskel M. Haddad, representing the World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries, called on the Israeli government to begin to seriously examine the issue of Jewish property left behind in Arab lands.

At the time, Haddad told The Jerusalem Post that WOJAC had a staggering 100,000 square kilometers in property deeds (5 times the size of Israel).

Yet it is uncertain whether the recent initiative can survive after the February 10 Knesset elections. The Pensioners Affairs Ministry was established as part of a coalition deal with the Gil Pensioners Party in 2006. With the Pensioners currently polling below the threshold to return to the Knesset, would the ministry - and with it the newly-formed department - survive in a new coalition?

According to Bitzur, emphatically yes. "The department was formed by a government decision which continues to be in effect after the elections. The department has been approved and funded by the Finance Ministry, and its workers are government workers with all the implied protections," he explains.

Internationally, too, the project has support. "The US Congress [in mid-2008] decided that any discussion of refugees in the Middle East must include the Jewish refugees from Arab lands. The current presidency of the EU, the Czech Republic, agrees with this position," he says.

Etgar Lefkovits contributed to this report.

__________________________________________________

NB:
On two occasions, in 1957 and again in 1967, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) determined that Jews fleeing from Arab countries were refugees who fell within the mandate of the UNHCR.

“Another emergency problem is now arising: that of refugees from Egypt. There is no doubt in my mind that those refugees from Egypt who are not able,or not willing to avail themselves of the protection of the Government of their nationality fall under the mandate of my office.” Mr. Auguste Lindt, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Report of the UNREF Executive Committee, Fourth Session – Geneva 29 January to 4 February, 1957.

“I refer to our recent discussion concerning Jews from Middle Eastern and North African countries in consequence of recent events. I am now able to inform you that such persons may be considered prima facie within the mandate of this Office.” Dr. E. Jahn, Office of the UN High Commissioner, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Document No. 7/2/3/Libya, July 6, 1967

Resolution 242 stipulates that a comprehensive peace settlement should necessarily include “a just settlement of the refugee problem.” No distinction is made between Arab refugees and Jewish refugees.

The international community’s intention to have Resolution 242 include the rights of Jewish refugees is evidenced by the fact that during the UN debate, the Soviet Union’s delegation attempted to restrict the “just settlement” mentioned in Resolution 242 solely to Palestinian refugees. (S/8236, discussed by the Security Council at its 1382nd meeting of November 22, 1967, notably at paragraph 117, in the words of Ambassador Kouznetsov of the Soviet Union). This attempt failed clearly signaling the intention of the international community not to restrict the “just settlement of the refugee problem” merely to Palestinian refugees.

Moreover, Justice Arthur Goldberg, the United States’ Chief Delegate to the United Nations, who was instrumental in drafting the unanimously adopted U.N. Resolution 242, has pointed out that:

“A notable omission in 242 is any reference to Palestinians, a Palestinian state on the West Bank or the PLO. The resolution addresses the objective of ‘achieving a just settlement of the refugee problem.’ This language presumably refers both to Arab and Jewish refugees, for about an equal number of each abandoned their homes as a result of the several wars."

Israel to respond harshly to deadly Gaza border blast

Original article
By Amos Harel and Anshel Pfeffer
Last update - 03:15 28/01/2009

Israel is gearing up to respond harshly against Hamas in response to a remote-control bomb attack at the Gaza Strip security fence Tuesday, which killed an Israel Defense Forces tracker and wounded three other soldiers, one seriously.

It was the Palestinians' first deadly attack since the cease-fire ended Operation Cast Lead, and came the day before the arrival of George Mitchell, the U.S. envoy to the Middle East.

In the early hours of Wednesday, Palestinians reported that an Israeli aircraft struck at tunnels used for smuggling goods and weapons on the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt.

Rafah residents began to flee their homes in panic as the aircraft struck three times before dawn, Hamas officials said. There was no initial word of any casualties.

Earlier, an Israel Air Force aircraft fired a missile at a militant on a motorbike in the Khan Yunis area of Gaza. The Shin Bet security service, which helped coordinate the missile strike, said the militant, Hussein Abu-Shamaya, was involved in the bomb attack. The bomb was planted by a Hamas breakaway group identified with the Al-Qaida-affiliated Global Jihad, the Shin Bet said.

In addition, a Palestinian man, apparently a farmer, was killed in exchanges of fire between IDF troops and Palestinians in Gaza after the bomb was detonated, according to Palestinian reports. The incident took place while IDF tanks and soldiers, assisted by helicopters, were patrolling Gaza after the attack.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned of a "further response" to the attack.

"What the IDF did today was not a response but a preliminary action," he said at a meeting of ministry directors general. "A further response to this serious incident will be forthcoming."

The security cabinet is to meet Wednesday to discuss security projects, but the situation in Gaza might also be discussed.

Olmert, noting that he had termed the cease-fire "fragile," also said: "We don't even call it a cease-fire but a holding of fire in the face of Hamas infractions, so that we can retain the IDF's freedom of action."

Defense Minister Ehud Barak decided to strike Hamas targets in response to the death of the tracker.

"We do not intend to gloss over incidents like these," Barak said. "We will not let Hamas and its outgrowths continue their hostile acts of terror. Anyone who hits us will have to absorb a serious blow in the future, too."

Sources in the Prime Minister's Bureau said Tuesday Israel was not negotiating with Hamas over a cease-fire or second lull. "The Egyptians are speaking to Hamas to attain things that are important for them, but we are not obligated to anything. We have not signed understandings or an agreement with Hamas," a source in Olmert's bureau said.

Israel and Egypt are apparently formulating an understanding on the passage of merchandise from Israel to the Gaza Strip, and at the same time some increased freedom of movement in the opening of the Rafah crossing from the Strip to Egypt.

The Kerem Shalom and Karni crossings on the Gaza border were closed after the attack. Approximately 185 trucks carrying aid and equipment were to have crossed into Gaza yesterday.

The bomb near the Gaza border detonated around 8 A.M., as an IDF patrol was passing near the Kissufim crossing, north of Kibbutz Kissufim. The tracker was killed and an officer was seriously hurt. One of his legs was amputated and the other one is severely damaged. Two other soldiers were classified as lightly hurt and will be released in a few days. Soroka Medical Center said they had extensive shrapnel wounds.

The name of the tracker, a Bedouin, was not released, at the request of his family.

A preliminary investigation revealed that the soldiers were patrolling an area that had not been patrolled for several weeks due to the fighting in the Strip. The regional brigade commander was apparently not apprised of the patrol, which was approved by the battalion commander. IDF sources said the Palestinians who planted the bomb did so Monday night, under cover of heavy fog.

The closure of the Gaza crossings is only the first stage of Israel's response to the attack, Amos Gilad, who heads the Defense Ministry's political bureau, said yesterday. "The equation in the Strip has changed," he said during a lecture at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.

_________________________________________________
Yuval Azoulay, Avi Issacharoff and Barak Ravid contributed to this report.

Clinton: Israel has right to respond to Gaza rocket attacks

Original article
By News Agencies
Last update - 19:14 27/01/2009

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Tuesday that Israel had a right to defend itself and that Palestinian rocket attacks on the Jewish territory could not go unanswered.

"We support Israel's right to self-defense. The [Palestinian] rocket barrages which are getting closer and closer to populated areas [in Israel] cannot go unanswered," Clinton said in her first news conference at the State Department.

"It is regrettable that the Hamas leadership apparently believes that it is in their interest to provoke the right of self-defense instead of building a better future for the people of Gaza," she added.

Clinto also said that President Barack Obama's first days in office have made it clear that a more open Iranian approach to the international community could benefit Iran. She said this was reflected in statements Obama made in an interview Monday with an Arab TV network.

"There is a clear opportunity for the Iranians, as the president expressed in his interview, to demonstrate some willingness to engage meaningfully with the international community," she said. "Whether or not that hand becomes less clenched is really up to them."

She said the administration is undertaking a wide-ranging and comprehensive survey of U.S. policy options toward Iran.

"There is just a lot that we are considering that I'm not prepared to discuss," she added.

More broadly, Clinton said her initial round of telephone calls with world leaders has yielded positive signs.

"There's a great exhalation of breath going on around the world as people
express their appreciation for the new direction that's being set and the team that's [been] put together by the president," she said.

"In areas of the world that have felt either overlooked or not receiving
appropriate attention to the problems they are experiencing, there's a
welcoming of the engagement that we are promising," she said.

"It's not any kind of repudiation or indictment of the past eight years so much as an excitement and an acceptance of how we are going to be doing business."

She dismissed suggestions that Obama's foreign policy team would find it
difficult to work together. She said all are determined to find the best way to execute the president's foreign policy objectives.

"We have a lot of damage to repair," she said, referring to U.S. foreign
relations as they stood when President George W. Bush left office January 20.

Clinton said she spoke by telephone today with top Iraqi officials to make clear that there will be continuity in U.S. policy.

She said her call was intended to reinforce our commitment to a democratic and sovereign Iraq and the importance of their provincial elections. Iraqis are scheduled to vote on Saturday in a set of elections that U.S. and Iraqi officials hope will further solidify progress toward national political reconciliation.

Israel, Gaza and International Law

Original article
By Alan M. Dershowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | Tuesday, January 27, 2009

The cease fire on the ground has not ended the war of words against Israel. Indeed, efforts to charge Israel with war crimes and other violations of international law are escalating. The time has come, therefore, for a common sense legal and moral analysis of the events in Gaza and southern Israel.
Let us begin with an argument that is frequently made against Israel. It is pointed out by supporters of Hamas that the official governing authority of Gaza is Hamas, because Hamas won the election. To the extent this is true, however, it is an argument in justification of Israel’s actions. If Hamas is the official government of Gaza and if Hamas ordered the firing of more of than 6,000 deadly rockets at Israeli civilians, then it follows that the government of Gaza has engaged in an armed attack against Israel under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. In other words, the government of Gaza has declared war against the government and people of Israel. This should not be surprising, since the Hamas Charter calls for the military destruction of Israel.

Under international law, and under the UN Charter, Israel has the right to respond to these thousands of armed attacks. Indeed every rocket fired into Israel is an armed attack and Israel is entitled to take whatever military actions is deemed reasonably necessary to stop these armed attacks from occurring. If Hamas were merely a small terrorist gang operating from Gaza but without the approval of the government, it would be more difficult to justify a military response that destroyed government buildings and targeted police. Israeli military actions resulted in civilians dying. Precisely how many is hotly disputed: a study conducted by the Italian Newspaper Corriere Del Sera disputed Hamas figures and put the total number of Palestinians killed, including Hamas terrorists, at less than 600. The sad reality is that people who voted for and actively support a terrorist government bear more responsibility for the actions of their government than they would for a gang operating against the wishes of the government. Surely the voters in Germany who elected Hitler bore more responsibility for Nazi atrocities than the people of Iraq did for the atrocities of the dictator Saddam Hussein, who was never fairly elected.

Israel clearly had to right to take whatever military action was necessary to stop the Hamas government from playing Russian roulette with the lives of its children. So far, no problem under international law. But here’s the rub. International law also requires that Israel’s actions must not be disproportional to its military aims and it also prohibits the willful targeting of Palestinian civilians.

To make things even more complicated, international law prohibits the use of human shields to protect combatants from lawful military actions taken by those against whom it has waged an armed attack. And there can be absolutely no doubt that it is the official policy of Hamas to use children, women, schools, mosques, hospitals and other civilian institutions and areas as shields to protect its combatants from legitimate Israeli military actions. In addition to the video evidence showing Hamas fighters deliberately placing their rockets adjacent to UN schools, mosques and to residential areas, there are the express statements of officially-elected Hamas leaders both before and during the fighting. Consider the following public statement delivered by a Hamas legislator, transmitted on Hamas television and widely circulated by video. The legislator’s name is Fathi Hammad and here is what he said:

“[The enemies of Allah] do not know that the Palestinian people has developed its [methods] of death and death-seeking. For the Palestinian people, death has become an industry, at which women excel, and so do all the people living on this land. The elderly excel at this, and so do the mujahideen and the children. This is why they have formed human shields of the women, the children, the elderly, and the mujahideen, in order to challenge the Zionist bombing machine. It is as if they were saying to the Zionist enemy: ‘We desire death like you desire life.’”

There are videos available for all to watch in which Al-Aqsa TV news broadcasts a report showing a crowd of civilians gathered on the roof of a home that was a military target. Indeed those who arranged for these human shields to protect that military target do not shy away from actually using the term “human shield.” On another occasion, Hamas leader, appearing on television demands that “the people of Palestine should gather as one to protect the Jihad warriors’ house,” calling for these civilians to “die as warriors.”

So here is the legal dilemma faced by democracies such as Israel. They have every right under international law to take whatever military actions are necessary to stop the rockets randomly fired at their civilians. Their enemy uses human shields to prevent Israel from destroying the rockets without also killing Palestinian civilians. All the law requires under these circumstances is that Israel take reasonable precaution to minimize enemy civilian deaths in order to prevent the murder of its own civilians. Has Israel taken such precautions? Let retired British colonel Richard Kemp answer that question as he did in a recent BBC interview. He said that there has been “no time in the history of warfare when an army has made more efforts to reduce civilian casualties and the deaths of innocent people than the [Israel Defense forces did in Gaza.]” To accuse Israel of “war crimes” under these circumstances is to distort international law and expose the bias of the accuser.

_______________________________________________
Alan M. Dershowitz is a Professor of Law at Harvard. His most recent book The Case Against Israel’s Enemies: Exposing Jimmy Carter and Others Who Stand In The Way of Peace is being published by Wiley at the end of this month.

Is Israel Doomed?

Original article
By Kenneth Levin
FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, January 23, 2009

Israel's enemies assert that its destruction is inevitable, and those who would destroy her are cheered on by many in the West. At the same time, Western mainstream media, particularly in Europe but also major media outlets in America, do puff pieces on Israel's genocidal adversaries, slant the news to conform to her enemies' propaganda, and support the delegimitization of the Jewish state.

The Gaza War, and the response to it across the world, have underscored the threats to the state's survival, Israel's often maladaptive and self-defeating reactions, and what is required of the state to counter those who challenge her existence.

The Threats

There are obviously those eager for Israel's demise. Since the Jewish state's creation, the Arab world has wanted it to disappear and this has not changed. Promotion of Arab supremacism, which accords little if any rights to non-Muslim or non-Arab groups in what the Arabs deem their proper domain, extends beyond Israel to abuse of Christians throughout that world as well as of Muslim but non-Arab peoples such as the Kurds of Iraq and Syria, the Muslim blacks of Darfur, the Berbers of Algeria. That abuse has repeatedly reached the level of genocidal campaigns, as reflected not only in the slaughter in Darfur, but also in the murder of some two hundred thousand Kurds in Iraq and some two million Christian and animist blacks in southern Sudan.

In terms of genocidal incitement against minority populations, none is as graphic and incessant as that purveyed in Arab media, mosques and schools - even in countries with which Israel is formally at peace - against the Jews and Israel. The existence of Israel is seen as an intolerable distortion of the proper order of things, according to which Jews should either be dead or, at best, subjugated members of society existing at the sufferance of their Arab betters.

In recent decades, enlistment in this genocidal hatred has widened to encompass many in the broader Muslim world. Obviously, the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the installation of a clerical regime that has sought to expand its influence by taking the lead in promoting Israel's destruction, has presented the Jewish state with a grave new threat. In terms of broader enmity in the Muslim world, however, the greatest factor has been aggressive Saudi export of Wahhabi fundamentalism, its preaching of virulent Jew-hatred (and hatred of other non-Muslims), and its ever increasing influence not only in once tolerant Islamic nations but also in Muslim communities in Europe, the Americas and elsewhere.

To the degree that some in the Arab world, such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, feel threatened by Iran, its alliance with Syria, and their protege organizations such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories, those states have interests which converge with Israel's. But this offers only very limited relief from the surrounding hostility Israel faces. Noteworthy in this regard is that Saudi Arabia and Egypt, as well as Jordan, continue to promote Jew-hatred in their media and schools, the Saudis continue to finance many Islamist groups even as they fear and sanction others, and any constraint on Saudi hostility towards Israel inspired by fear of Iran would certainly be reversed were the Iranian threat to "moderate" Arab regimes to disappear.

In terms of Israel's Palestinian Arab neighbors, the PLO, and its dominant party Fatah, under Arafat and since his death, have been and continue to be committed to Israel's ultimate destruction. So, too, of course, are Hamas and the other Islamist parties. Whatever true moderates exist among the Palestinians have no political voice or influence.

In addition to the animosity of the Arab world, Israel is faced with much hostile sentiment in Europe, fed by traditional anti-Semitism, by leftist anti-Americanism and association of Israel with America, by perverse, ahistorical leftist twisting of the Israeli-Arab conflict into Israeli colonialists brutalizing the supposedly indigenous population, and by the European media being house organs for anti-Israel bigotry of all these pedigrees. The growing threat of radical Islam to European states, particularly as manifested within those states' immigrant Muslim populations, has in some quarters led to greater sympathy with Israel's predicament. But elsewhere, especially among the cadres of the Left, which include most of the media, this threat has had the opposite impact and inspired a wishful thinking that all would be well, Islamist hostility would be appeased, if only Israel would make sufficient amends or simply disappear.

Nor is America immune to these distortions of reality. As the Muslim population in the United States has grown, and as it has become more radicalized, largely by Saudi promotion of Wahhabi extremism, an alliance has emerged between the far Left in this country and the forces of genocidal Islamism. Their recent joint demonstrations against Israel have included explicitly anti-Semitic "cheers," such as calls for "Jews to the ovens." Regrettably, even less extreme elements of the Left, such as some within the so-called "liberal" churches, have signed on as fellow travelers with this alliance for Israel's defamation, delegitimization and ultimate demise.

Israel is also attacked, and its very existence challenged, in the United Nations, an institution that has largely become the monster it was created to fight. The UN Human Rights Council, whose present members include such paragons of domestic civil rights as Cuba, Saudi Arabia, China, Malaysia and Bangladesh, routinely excoriates Israel in terms that single out the Jewish national liberation movement as uniquely illegitimate. The UNWRA, which for six decades has been responsible for Palestinian refugees and their families, promotes genocide under the flag of the UN. UNWRA schools teach the glories of suicide bombing and martyrdom in the effort to destroy Israel, employ members of terrorist organizations on its staff, including as teachers, and serve as a conduit for recruiting children into terrorist cadres.

In addition to all these challenges to her existence, Israel faces a domestic enemy. This extends beyond those within the Israeli Arab community who identify with Israel's external enemies. In the face of living under constant siege, some among Israel's Jewish citizens, particularly within the nation's elites, choose to distance themselves from the national predicament. They choose to find fault with the state and side with her defamers and would-be destroyers, embracing her adversaries' indictments. They urge, at a minimum, territorial and other concessions to placate Israel's enemies, even at the cost of rendering the state more vulnerable, and some even argue for the dissolution of the state to mollify her enemies. Predictably, they cast their doing so not as a desire to separate themselves from their embattled fellow citizens or to appease those who would annihilate them but as embracing a higher morality.

The same hypocrisy is seen among many Diaspora Jews, who likewise endorse the indictments of those who would destroy Israel, join in defamation and delegitimization of the state, and do so while averring only the highest ethical motives. A list of American and European Jews of this ilk would fill many pages.

The widespread and implacable hatred faced by Israel is seen by some, and often characterized in the media, as virtually insurmountable. So too, according to various voices in the media, is the translation of this hatred into physical attack. If Israel has been able to prevail in the past in conventional wars, the present and growing challenge of unconventional assault - at one extreme, with weapons of mass destruction, most threateningly an Iranian nuclear arsenal; at the other extreme, incessant terror entailing rocket and mortar attacks from terrorist forces imbedded within dense civilian populations - may be, it is suggested, beyond solution.

In addition, Israel also confronts the challenge not only of the enmity of its neighbors but of their fertility as well. Palestinian population growth ranks among the highest in the world, fertility among Arab citizens of Israel is also high, and together, it is often argued, Israel faces a demographic challenge that it has no means of countering while preserving itself as both the Jewish state and a democracy.

Managing and Mismanaging the Threats

But despite all these various, serious challenges, Israel's fate remains largely in its own hands. Israel has peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan because it convinced both states that, however much its leaders or its citizens might like to see Israel gone, the price of pursuing that goal is prohibitive. There is no peace with Syria, but Syria has long refrained from direct hostile action against Israel for the same reason of not wanting to pay the likely price.

Some argue that Islamist states and parties cannot be dissuaded by such calculations because they are driven by religious zeal and are prepared to pay any price, and imply that such adversaries therefore cannot be defeated. But this thesis has not been tested.

Such regimes are immune neither to annihilation- that is, a weakening to the point where others in their societies are able to seize control from them - nor to a battering to the extent that, even if they retain control, they are rendered unable to act, at least for an extended time, on their genocidal agenda. The biggest challenge to Israel is an Iran close to achieving nuclear arms, and - while ending Iran's nuclear program by other means would be preferable - even this challenge is not without military answers.

In terms of smaller players such as Iranian proxies Hezbollah and Hamas, military dissuasion had hardly been tried prior to the current war in Gaza.

Israel, under Ehud Barak, left southern Lebanon in 2000 without assuring that Hezbollah would not fill the void there. Barak and many other Israelis were convinced that, in any case, Hezbollah would not pursue the war across the border. Despite many subsequent episodes of Hezbollah cross-border terror, including the murder of Israeli soldiers and civilians, Israel downplayed the threat and offered no serious response. When it did respond, in 2006, it was unprepared to do so. It then ended its campaign and acquiesced to creation of a UN force in southern Lebanon that has done nothing, despite its mandate, to prevent Hezbollah from reconstituting and greatly expanding its rocket and missile arsenal and from reestablishing itself in areas which are supposed to be prohibited to it.

Some in Israel now argue that the nation nevertheless inflicted enough damage in 2006 that Hezbollah is hesitant to restart hostilities. But it is far from clear whether Hezbollah is cowed or simply biding its time or awaiting marching orders from Tehran.

Vis-a-vis Gaza, many Israeli leaders, most notably its present prime minister, deluded themselves into believing that Israel's full evacuation of its communities and military from the territory in 2005 would be followed by quiet and would be a step towards a more general peace. The evacuation was followed instead by more rocket and mortar fire targeting Israeli towns and villages, and this assault dramatically increased when Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007. Israel's abandonment of the Philadelphi corridor in the context of its general withdrawal opened the way to large-scale smuggling of ever more powerful rockets and missiles and other armaments into Gaza, yet Israel barely responded to either the rocket and mortar attacks or the smuggling.

Now it has responded and has done so in an impressive manner. It has not destroyed Hamas, but it is far from clear that the organization's destruction at this point is desirable. Of course, the impact of weakening the organization has yet to be seen. If Hamas continues to fire its rockets, mortars and missiles, Israel can resume its attack and weaken it further. Israel's most significant mistake may be not retaking the Philadelphi corridor, as it is highly unlikely that Egypt is prepared to stop weapons smuggling into Gaza or that any role given to third parties such as European observers would do the job.

But if Israel will respond to further smuggling by seizing the corridor, then this issue too can be addressed. Israel should adopt a zero tolerance policy with regard both to smuggling of weaponry into Gaza and attacks from Gaza. If it has the will to do so, it certainly has the means to enforce such a policy.

Similarly, while Hezbollah offers greater challenges, renewed hostilities on the Lebanese front too are manageable, if Israel has the will to address them effectively.

In fact, what has exacerbated actual problems, and created an impression of some of those problems being intractable, has largely been Israel's failure over the last fifteen years to address the challenges it faces. Too many Israelis became psychologically exhausted by the siege and deluded themselves into thinking they could end it if they only made sufficient concessions. In the Oslo debacle, they brought people dedicated to their destruction into the territories as "peace partners," armed them, closed their eyes to their "peace partners'" engagement in genocidal incitement and vicious, wholesale terror, and convinced themselves that their dead were "sacrifices for peace."

Only when they pushed for an "end of conflict" final agreement, and Arafat, despite Israel's offering to return virtually to the pre-1967 ceasefire lines, launched a full-scale terror war, did Israel begin to wake from its delusions. Yet, while it largely pacified the West Bank, it still repeated self-destructive policies in its tolerance of terror from Lebanon and from Gaza.

In addition, Israeli policies and rhetoric concerning the West Bank likewise continue to reflect dangerous delusions. A national goal of reaching an arrangement in the West Bank that entails Israel's retaining defensible borders, including the areas where almost all the so-called "settlers" live, while separating itself from the vast majority of Palestinians, would be understandable and reasonable. What is neither understandable nor reasonable is the belief that Israel can forego defensible borders and can hand ceded areas to Mahmoud Abbas's PA and have peace.

Nor is there merit to alarmist arguments that Israel must play the supplicant and hand the territories to whomever will take them, however hostile the recipient, because of the demographic challenges to the state; that it moreover must forego retaining defensible borders because doing so would also mean adding Arab citizens in numbers that would undermine the state demographically. The latter is factually untrue; Israel could pursue defensible lines while still separating itself from the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs. Most of the areas it needs to retain are, in fact, sparsely populated. And it need not be the supplicant to find a recipient, however hostile, to take what it would cede. Various models have been presented by sensible, strategically astute, Israeli thinkers of ways to move forward to ultimate separation from areas of dense Palestinian Arab population without compromising the security of the state.

Self-defeating Israeli actions over the last two decades have entailed more than the grave errors in policy decisions. They have gone beyond Israel's embrace of "peace partners" who had no interest in peace and the adoption of delusions that, despite what the other side says and does, sufficient concessions and self-reform and demonstrations of good will would inevitably win relief from ongoing besiegement. Likewise of profound negative consequence has been Israel's failure to make its case forcefully to the world. This too has been largely motivated by the desire to propitiate its enemies, to see salvation in concessions and self-reform and to ignore the nature and the dimensions of the threat.

And so the nation's leaders, and its foreign service bureaucrats, have failed to point out and protest strongly Palestinian and wider Arab indoctrination, in media, mosques, and schools, to Jew-hatred and genocide. They have failed to emphasize, as they should indefatigably, in every forum in which the nature of the conflict is distorted and Israel is pressed for concessions, that there can be no peace as long as the Palestinian Authority and Hamas and virtually every other Palestinian group and the Arab world more broadly aspire to Israel's ultimate destruction and promote this goal among their people and educate their young to it.

The government, including the foreign service, are too often mute when confronted with the most bigoted and unconscionable anti-Israel libels, distortions of reality, by Arab spokespeople or media factotums or others, even though their silence in the face of defamatory lies, or their weak and almost apologetic rebuttals, serve only to lend credence to the defamations and legitimacy to their purveyors.

The repeated emphasis by Israeli spokespeople during the Gaza War of the provocations that triggered Israel's actions, of the months and years of rocket and mortar assault from Gaza on Israeli towns and villages, the repeated assertion of the obvious point that no other sovereign state would tolerate such assault or refrain from responding forcefully, has been a step forward from past performance. Likewise, the response to misinformation and disinformation during the war - the shift, for example, from knee-jerk apologies in the face of claims of indiscriminate force to investigation of the claims and a fact-based answer supported by video and other evidence - is certainly an improvement on what has been the typical handling of such situations during previous hostilities. But there is still far to go in Israel's responsibly making its case. It has yet to publicly challenge, with a force appropriate to the animus of Israel's accusers, the routine slanderous assaults by Palestinian and other Arab leaders, by NGO's, by UN officials, by various political figures on the world stage, and by so many in the media.

To argue that Israel's fate is essentially in her own hands, in the hands of her people, is hardly to make light of the problems Israel faces. But as long as the great majority of Israelis do not succumb to the bigotry of their enemies and their enemies' fellow travelers, domestic and worldwide, as long as they remain steadfast in the conviction of the rightness of their cause - a rightness evident to any informed and fairminded observer - then, just as they have overcome dire threats in the past and indeed built a society whose achievements have been far beyond the wildest dreams of the nation's founders, the odds are well in their favor of continuing to meet whatever challenges confront them.

_________________________________________
Kenneth Levin is a psychiatrist and historian and author of The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People under Siege (Smith and Kraus, 2005; paperback 2006).

The Israel Exception

Original article
By Alan M. Dershowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Every time Israel seeks to defend its civilians against terrorist attacks, it is accused of war crimes by various United Nations agencies, hard left academics and some in the media. It is a totally phony charge concocted as part of Hamas’ strategy—supported by many on the hard left—to delegitimate and demonize the Jewish state. Israel is the only democracy in the world ever accused of war crimes when it fights a defensive war to protect its civilians. This is remarkable, especially in light of the fact that Israel has killed far fewer civilians than any other country in the world that has faced comparable threats. In the most recent war in Gaza fewer than a thousand civilians—even by Hamas’ skewed count—have been killed. This, despite the fact that no one can now deny that Hamas had employed a deliberate policy of using children, schools, mosques, apartment buildings and other civilian areas as shields from behind which to launch its deadly anti-personnel rockets. The Israeli Air Force has produced unchallengeable video evidence of this Hamas war crime.

Just to take one comparison, consider the recent wars waged by Russia against Chechnya. In these wars Russian troops have killed tens of thousands of Chechnyan civilians, some of them willfully, at close range and in cold blood. Yet those radical academics who scream bloody murder against Israel (particularly in England) have never called for war crime tribunals to be convened against Russia. Nor have they called for war crime charges to be filed against any other of the many countries that routinely kill civilians, not in an effort to stop enemy terrorists, but just because it is part of their policy.

Nor did we see the Nuremburg-type rallies that were directed against Israel when hundreds of thousands of civilians were being murdered in Rwanda, in Darfur and in other parts of the world. These bigoted hate-fests are reserved for Israel.

The accusation of war crimes is nothing more than a tactic selectively invoked by Israel’s enemies. Those who cry “war crime” against Israel don’t generally care about war crimes, as such, indeed they often support them when engaged in by country’s they like. What these people care about, and all they seem to care about, is Israel. Whatever Israel does is wrong regardless of the fact that so many other countries do worse.

When I raised this concern in a recent debate, my opponent accused me of changing the subject. He said we are talking about Israel now, not Chechnya or Darfur. This reminded me of a famous exchange between Harvard’s racist president, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, and the great American judge Leonard Hand. Lowell announced that he wanted to reduce the number of Jews at Harvard, because, “Jews cheat.” Judge Hand replied that “Christians also cheat.” Lowell responded, “You’re changing the subject. We are talking about Jews.”

Well, you can’t just talk about Jews. Nor can you just talk about the Jewish state. Any discussion of war crimes must be comparative and contextual. If Russia did not commit war crimes when its soldiers massacred tens of thousands of Chechnyans (not even in a defensive war) then on what basis could Israel be accused of accidentally killing a far fewer number of human shields in an effort to protect its civilians? What are the standards? Why are they not being applied equally or selectively? Can human rights endure in the face of such unequal and selective application? These are the questions the international community should be debating, not whether Israel, and Israel alone, violated the norms of that vaguest of notions called “international law” or the “law of war.”

If Israel, and Israel alone among democracies fighting defensive wars, were ever to be charged with “war crimes,” that would mark the end of international human rights law as a neutral arbitrator of conduct. Any international tribunal that were to charge Israel, having not charged the many nations that have done far worse, will lose any remaining legitimacy among fair-minded people of good will,

If the laws of war in particular, and international human rights in general, are to endure, they must be applied to nations in order of the seriousness of the violations, not in order of the political unpopularity of the nations. If the law of war were applied in this manner, Israel would be among the last, and certainly not the first, charged.

________________________________________________

Alan M. Dershowitz is a Professor of Law at Harvard. His most recent book The Case Against Israel’s Enemies: Exposing Jimmy Carter and Others Who Stand In The Way of Peace is being published by Wiley at the end of this month.

Israel Scored a Tactical Victory

Original article
But it missed a chance to finish off Hamas.
OPINION: GLOBAL VIEW, JANUARY 19, 2009, 11:43 P.M. ET

On the Gaza border

Atop a little hill near the beleaguered Israeli town of Sderot, a gaggle of TV crews train their cameras on the Gaza Strip, sentinels to a unilateral Israeli cease-fire that's barely 12 hours old. Earlier the same day, Sunday, Hamas fired 20 rockets into Israel, raising questions about its intentions but causing little serious damage. Later, a pair of Israeli F-15s streak over Gaza City, releasing bursts of chaff but dropping no bombs.

And then comes word that Hamas has declared its own conditional, week-long cease-fire. The TV people clear out. All wars eventually end. The question most Israelis are asking is whether this one has merely gone on vacation.

So why are the top echelons of Israel's political and military establishment delighted by the war's result? Long answer: They think that Israel has re-established a reputation for invincibility tarnished in the 2006 war with Hezbollah; that they bloodied and humiliated Hamas while taking few casualties; that they called overdue international attention to the tunnels Hamas uses to smuggle its arsenal; and, with the unilateral cease-fire, that they put the onus to end the violence squarely back on Hamas's shoulders.

Short answer: They think the war may be a regional game changer.

In a wide-ranging interview, a senior military official offers perhaps the most authoritative explanation of his government's war aims and his interpretation of its effects. "We have no desire to go back into Gaza," he says. "We decided we're not going to spend five years [in Gaza] like the five years Americans spent in Iraq."

On the contrary: Far from seeking regime change in Gaza, the official seems at ease that the Palestinians will remain bifurcated between Hamastan and Fatahland for many years more, the way Germany was divided during the Cold War. The idea is that a Hamas state in Gaza -- somehow deterred from mischief -- could become a kind of useful negative example to the Palestinians of the West Bank, somewhat in the way East Germany served West Germany as a monument to everything that was wrong with communism.

This leads the official to his second remarkable comment, after I ask whether Israel deliberately chose not to kill Ismail Haniyeh, the elected Palestinian prime minister and Hamas's political leader in Gaza. "Israel tried to target people from the security apparatus and military wing," he answers. "At this moment, we prefer that the less-radical wing will take over."

The current divisions within Hamas are not the only ones the official sees as a consequence of the war. Palestinians, he says, no longer look to Hamas as the party of clean and competent government. Instead, they see a group whose leaders needlessly provoked a ruinous war they didn't have the courage to fight themselves. No wonder the third intifada in the West Bank, on which Hamas had counted, never materialized.

Elsewhere, Hamas's former patrons in the Arab world have split with the group ever since it became a client of Tehran. A dozen Arab states, along with the Palestinian Authority, boycotted an emergency summit of the Arab League, which had been intended as a show of support for Hamas supremo Khaled Mashal.

Then there is Egypt. For years, it took an ambivalent view of Hamas: partly worried by the threat it poses to its own secular regime, partly delighted by the trouble it causes Israel. Now the Mubarak government at last understands that Hamas is also a strategic threat to Egypt. "An Iranian base can play against Egypt the same way it played against Israel," says the official. Almost as an aside, he adds that the timing of Israel's operation in Gaza was dictated in part by the assessment that Hamas was just months away from obtaining longer-range missiles that could reach Cairo as easily as Tel Aviv.

Now the Israeli government is prepared to believe that the Egyptians will finally clamp down on the smuggling. Israel might even allow Egypt to deploy its army in greater force in the Sinai, despite the provisions against it in the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty.

Finally there is Iran. "They have drawn a lesson," says the official. "Once again, they saw that Israel has a good air force and good intelligence, and that the combination of the two can be deadly. Unlike in 2006, they saw a well-trained ground force. They found that asymmetrical warfare does not always play for them; that we can use asymmetrical approaches to overpower an asymmetrical threat."

All this, of course, could be overturned the moment Iran goes nuclear and attempts to thwart Israel's freedom of action. Nor is it foreordained that Israel will enjoy the relatively favorable international circumstances that facilitated the past three weeks of war, or that Hamas will perform poorly the next time. "Usually, the one who loses does his homework better," observes the official.

Bottom line: Israel has scored an impressive tactical victory. But it has missed the strategic opportunity to rid itself of the menace on its doorstep. In the Middle East, opportunities don't always knock twice.