The Republican platform gets Israel right (Vic Rosenthal)

 

 Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

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Everyone knows that party platforms are just for atmosphere. They bind nobody to anything, and are quickly forgotten after the election. But I must say that the Republican platform plank on Israel – regardless of what one thinks of the candidate – is remarkable, including the very fundamental statement that “[w]e reject the false notion that Israel is an occupier…” as well as recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel (and not, as in theDemocratic platform “a matter for final status negotiations.”)

And then there is what is not there. What has especially been noted is the absence of any mention of the so-called “two-state solution” (TSS), a consistent part of US policy since 1993.

Leaving it out today is not unreasonable. For the past 23 years we have been trying and failing to come up with a TSS acceptable to both sides, and as we shall see, there are good reasons for this. A partition of the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean to create a sovereign Palestinian state is only one of numerous possible solutions to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. Why should the platform of an American political party insist on one particular solution to a foreign conflict that ultimately can only be solved by the parties involved?

But Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, who is himself neither a Republican, an Israeli nor a Palestinian, finds it ‘ominous’, a “dangerous turning point.”

Jacobs’ arguments are surprisingly weak. For example, he says,

But a one-state solution, the only alternative anyone has ever offered, allows the settlers to stay in place in their entirety, which perhaps is the intent of [David] Friedman [an adviser to Donald Trump involved in the platform drafting process], a strong backer of the settlements. This would subject Israel and the Palestinians to an endless cycle of violence.

I presume he is referring to the idea popularized by Caroline Glick and others that Israel should extend Israeli law to all of Judea and Samaria. One of the points in its favor is that one of the main causes of violence is precisely the Palestinian Authority, which incites murder on a daily basis in its media, official mosques, schools, and so forth. If it were removed there would be less violence, not more.

There is also the argument that the PA’s massive corruption is one of the main reasons for Palestinian unhappiness and frustration, and that the cause of peace would best be served by improving the daily lives of the Arab residents.

But in any event, this is not the “only” solution anyone has proposed. For example, Naftali Bennett, who presently holds the Education and Diaspora Affairs portfolios in Israel’s cabinet, suggested that Israel annex that part of the territories that are under full Israeli control under the Oslo accord (Area C), and leave the PA in control of Arabs living in the other areas. Area C contains the great majority of the Jewish communities and only a small number of Arabs.

There are still other possibilities. But Jacobs is stuck on this idée fixe that has held the Israeli Left and the American government in its grip for the last several decades, the TSS. 

Let’s look at some of the reasons that a TSS is unacceptable, even if such an agreement could be reached (don’t forget that far-reaching TSS proposals by Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert were rejected by the Arabs as not giving them enough).

1.       Security, security, security. The topography of the region is such that the only way to protect Israel’s center from rocket attacks and to defend the country from invasion from the east is to control the high ground in Judea and Samaria and the Jordan Valley. This is a matter of brute geological fact, not politics. Recent history in Lebanon and elsewhere shows that no international force or guarantee can replace the IDF.

2.       Land for Paper. Nothing that is agreed upon with one regime, the PA, would be binding on any future entity that might take control of the area, such as Hamas or even Da’esh. As a matter of fact, the PA itself has systematically violated the Oslo accords that it signed, so even without a regime change there is no reason to trust signed agreements.

3.       National Aspirations. Mahmoud Abbas himself made it clear that in the event of the establishment of a Palestinian state in the territories, he would immediately press claims against Israel “at the United Nations, human rights treaty bodies and the International Court of Justice.” The PLO, which runs the PA, does not aspire to live alongside Israel, it wants to redress Palestinian grievances from 1948, including ‘return’ of millions of descendents of Arab refugees to Israel, not the Palestinian state. This is why Abbas has always vehemently refused to agree that Israel is the state of the Jewish people or agree to a formula of “two states for two peoples.”

Jacobs also reruns the demographic argument, that 

It seems axiomatic that the alternative to two states is one state, since the demographics indicate that in the near future, the majority of that one state would not be Jewish. Such a state would then either be a Jewish state that would cease to be a democracy and disenfranchise millions of Palestinian souls, or it would be a democracy and cease to be Jewish. 

There are several reasons this isn’t true. First, nobody is including the 1.8 million Gazans in any “one-state” plan. Second, the number of Arabs in Judea and Samaria is overstated by at least one million by Palestinian sources. And third, the Arab birthrate is dropping and the Jewish one is rising, so there will not be a demographic ‘time bomb’. If Israel were to annex all of Judea and Samaria today, the population of the combined state would be 66% Jewish (the current percentage within the Green Line is about 80%). I am not arguing that Israel should do this, just pointing out that it would not change the fact of the Jewish majority.

Finally, Rabbi Jacobs refers several times to “extremists on both sides.” I presume the Palestinian extremists are the countless terrorists who stab, shoot, blow up and run down Jews every day because they are Jews. And the Jewish extremists? They write slogans on walls and build illegal shacks on hilltops in Judea and Samaria. Yes, there is one in an Israeli jail now accused of firebombing a Palestinian house and killing three family members. Even if it turns out that he is guilty – and I am still doubtful about that – it will be one person, rejected by almost all of Jewish Israel and punished by its justice system, alongside hundreds of Arab terrorists incited by the PA, encouraged and, afterwards, venerated by their society.

Rabbi Jacobs is for coexistence. So am I, which is why I oppose creating a base for terrorism on our doorstep, and why I see the Republican platform as a breath of fresh air.

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Some people just can't be helped (Vic Rosenthal)

 

 Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

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When the Zionists began to build the yishuv, the enterprise that would become the Jewish state, they had to develop an economy, a political system, an army for defense, a legal system, an educational system, a transportation network, a postal service, and countless other things. They got help, first from wealthy benefactors like Montefiore and Rothschild, and later – when they needed to resettle hundreds of thousands of often penniless refugees from the Holocaust and, later, from the Muslim world – from organized appeals in the Diaspora. In a highly controversial arrangement, Holocaust survivors in Israel also received billions as reparations from Germany (the state also received several hundreds of millions).

The Jews created cooperative enterprises in every economic sphere which enabled them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, despite a war of independence in which they lost 1% of their population, and massive immigration. Later they surprised the world by repeatedly defeating their more numerous enemies, and little by little transformed their economy to a more entrepreneurial model. Today Israel, despite the challenges, is a remarkable success, economically, socially and culturally. Not perfect, but still a remarkable success.

Despite what people think, Israel does not receive non-military aid from the US, and only modest amounts of money from Diaspora charities. Indeed, many Israelis think we can and should end the military aid, which comes with many strings attached.

Now let’s look at another group that ostensibly aspires to a state, the ‘Palestinians’.

Take the Gaza Strip, with 1.8 million residents, 72% of them with refugee status, wards of the international dole. There is no economy to speak of, except that created by UNRWA which feeds and educates its population with funds provided primarily by the US and Europe, and Hamas, which manufactures rockets, digs attack tunnels and prepares for war.

This population is rapidly growing; it is expected to reach 2.1 million by 2020, with a fertility rate of 4.2 children per woman (a conservative estimate). For comparison, the fertility rate among Arabs in Judea and Samaria is only 2.8. 21% of Gazans are between the ages of 15 and 24, and 64% under 25.

This huge ‘youth bulge’ combined with a lack of employment, is a guarantee of continued violence. And it is all paid for by the West, which, through UNRWA’s welfare policies, incentivizes Gazans to have children. Welfare costs for Palestinians increase every year, along with the population.

The West went along with Arab demands to prevent any resettlement of ‘Palestinian refugees’ and the UN granted refugee status to anyone who lived in pre-state Palestine for as little as two years – and to all their descendents in perpetuum, something done for no other refugee population. 99% of UNRWA employees are Palestinians, and the curriculum in UNRWA schools is aimed at keeping alive the narrative of Arab dispossession and dishonor that fuels the conflict. UNRWA does not ameliorate the conflict, it nourishes it.

Consider also the Arabs of Judea and Samaria, the great majority of whom live under the control of the Palestinian Authority. The PA, like UNRWA, is totally dependent on American and European money. The PA burns through most of the more than $1 billion a year it receives on corruption and its multiple ‘security forces’ (which sometimes engage in terrorism). It also disburses large payments to the families of prisoners in Israeli jails for security offenses, and to families of ‘martyrs’, including suicide bombers. The PA and its official media continue to incite violence and murder of Jews, and treat terrorists as heroes.

Large monopolies, like cement and telecommunications are in the hands of PA insiders. Crime is rampant and economic activity is stunted.

Both Israel and the Palestinians received injections of capital from abroad. Israel used it to help build the infrastructure of a state, and turn her refugees into productive citizens. The Palestinian Arab leaders stole much of the money, nurtured their people’s hatred and created a permanent class of stateless refugees as an army to fight Israel. Indeed, even if a Palestinian state were created in the territories, the refugees would not be welcome in it, because according to Palestinian dogma, the only way to stop being a refugee is to ‘return’ to ‘your home’ in Israel!

When the international community gave the Palestinians money for building infrastructure like waste treatment plants or power stations, they built mansions for PA and Hamas officials. Hamas took cement for rebuilding homes after the last war and used it to line attack tunnels. The only area in which they have shown any initiative is getting attention by killing people.

Do you see the difference here? The Jews really wanted a state. They were ready to sacrifice and struggle for it. They took advantage of the aid that was available and used it to build something. The Arabs aren’t even trying. All they want is to destroy our state.

The ‘Palestinians’ have contributed nothing to the world except violent terrorism since they invented themselves in order to oppose Jewish sovereignty some 60 years ago. It’s time to start weaning them off welfare. If they can switch from stabbing to state-building, then they should go for it. In any case, the world can’t afford to keep feeding them.

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What’s the problem with Reform Judaism? (Vic Rosenthal)

 

 Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

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Today I came across an article by Rabbi Baruch Efrati in which he opposes cooperation between Israelis and the Reform Movement.

So what, you say. Another Orthodox attack on the heretical reformim. Perhaps so, but here is what caught my attention:

The secular Jewish world does not want to take over the religious world from a theological point of view, but to live beside it – hence, the possibility of influencing that world, listening to its hearts' desires, elevating its holy sparks to their heavenly source. The secular are actually non-observant Orthodox, they do not present an alternative organized religion that turns transgressions into an ideology intended to take the place of the Torah. They have not invented a made up religion but are in the midst of a process where secularism is withering and faith is blossoming, as one can see over the last few years in which there is constant strengthening of ties to Torah, baruch Hashem.

“Non-observant Orthodox,” or as the saying goes, ‘the synagogue that they don’t go to is Orthodox’. At worst, thinks Efrati, they won’t interfere with the religious world while at best they might join it. On the other hand, the Reform are a threat. “It’s either we or them [sic],” he adds.

One wonders why he is worried, because only about 3% of Israeli Jews identify with the Reform movement, and most of those are English-speaking immigrants. The ‘non-observant Orthodox’ aren’t rushing to join them, either. Those that I talk to simply don’t see the point of Reform Judaism, maybe because just living in Israel provides the sense of Jewish community that many American Jews seek from their congregations, and because even the least observant Jew in Israel is likely to have a stronger background in Jewish history and ideas than most American Reform Jews. And of course, they already speak Hebrew!

The real possibility of religious change in Israel today comes from Orthodox Jews (including well-known rabbis) who ask why certain customs, in particular in respect to women, are adhered to when they are not required by Jewish law. They also ask why certain rabbis should have a monopoly on kosher certification, conversions, and so forth. These folks will certainly have a much greater effect on the nature of Jewish observance in Israel than Reform Jews, because they can’t be accused of ‘inventing a religion’.

Nevertheless, the American Union for Reform Judaism does present a problem for Israel, but it has little to do with theology.  It is because the Reform Movement is conducting a left-wing political campaign targeting both American Jews (primarily) and Israelis.

The campaign focuses on issues like mixed prayer at the Western Wall, ‘segregated’ Haredi buses, and the Rabbinate, which is widely perceived as arbitrary and even corrupt in its behavior in regard to marriage and conversion. Another issue is ‘religious pluralism’, which means the fact that Orthodox synagogues and rabbis are subsidized by the government’s Religious Affairs Ministry while liberal streams of Judaism are not. The URJ’s associated groups have filed numerous lawsuits in connection with these issues. The controversies are presented as evidence for Israel’s failure as a liberal democracy. 

They resonate as civil rights issues in the US. But they haven’t ever become serious concerns for most Israelis, who are much more concerned with security and economic problems. The average secular Israeli sees both the Women of the Wall and the Haredi Rabbi of the Kotel as radical extremists, and their struggle as having nothing to do with ‘normal people’.

The URJ also takes a strong position for a ‘2-state solution’ and is critical of Israel’s settlements across the Green Line. In the US it has supported the Obama Administration’s policies (after agonizing for a time, it decided ‘not to take a position’ on the Iran deal that was strongly opposed by both the Israeli government and opposition). Many American Reform rabbis belong to J Street, and the President of the URJ, Rabbi Rick Jacobs, is a former activist in both J Street and the New Israel Fund. 

Jacobs wasn’t shy about his intention to intervene in Israeli politics when he outlined his positions in his 2015 biennial address and announced that the URJ would not “check [its] commitment to tikkun olam at the door.”

The American Reform Movement, in its 1885 Pittsburgh Platform was explicitly anti-Zionist. After the state of Israel was established it was grudgingly accepted, but it wasn’t until the 1997 Miami Platform that Reform Judaism began to present itself as a Zionist movement. But two years later it began to specify the kind of Jewish state it wanted Israel to be, and the proprietary attitude has only gotten stronger. Like the Obama Administration and J Street, Reform seems to love us to death.

All of this fits neatly with the program of the tiny but loud Israeli Left, which lately has been arguing that the liberal Israel that they knew and loved is being replaced by an undemocratic, theocratic and militaristic monster, the Jewish counterpart of the Islamic State. They too want to make us better.

Just as very few Israelis are attracted to Reform Judaism, very few agree with the political point of view that the URJ espouses. And neither secular nor religious Israelis buy the idea that Israel is becoming undemocratic, theocratic and militaristic. What is happening is that the cultural elites that have set the tone here since 1948 are finally changing to match the more right-wing political landscape. Naturally, those being deposed are unhappy.

Regardless of whether they think Reform Judaism is a “made up religion” or even care, most Israelis think that decisions affecting life in this country should be made here, and not by a liberal American organization that represents very few of us. And that is the real issue.

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Hasbara: why it’s harder and more important than you think (Vic Rosenthal)

 

 Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

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Everyone says Israel does a poor job of hasbara, but the question is “what is the job?”

Hasbara is information, propaganda, public diplomacy, clarification of policies, telling the truth about Israel or telling lies. It depends on whom you ask.  Folks who don’t like what I write sometimes call me a ‘hasbarist’, which is apparently something like a pederast.

One form of hasbara – defensive hasbara – responds to what Richard Landes likes to call ‘cognitive warfare’. Cognitive warfare is a real thing that nations and ideological activists expend a lot of effort and money on and which can have serious, concrete effects.

Cognitive attacks can be targeted at different populations and intended to produce different effects. It can be aimed at an enemy population to demoralize it, reduce support for its leadership, destroy will to fight, create confusion, or cause the leaders to make mistakes. It can also be aimed at third-party nations, to keep them from supporting the target. Cognitive warfare techniques can also be used to strengthen one’s own population’s identification with particular policies.

Israel’s enemies flood the world’s media and institutions like the UN with descriptions of the IDF’s ‘disproportionate’ use of force, ‘excessive’ civilian casualties, use of prohibited weapons, cruelty and even deliberate targeting of children. Defensive operations are portrayed as unprovoked aggression. These accusations are either exaggerated, presented out of context or made up from whole cloth – sometimes they are based on faked or doctored video, the so-called ‘pallywood’. Documentation is often no more than unsupported statements from Palestinians, laundered via the NGO ‘halo effect’ (“if Human Rights Watch reports it, it must be true”) to give them credibility. Organizations like ‘Breaking the Silence’ spread unsubstantiated allegations of war crimes both in Israel and abroad. A massive quantity of accusations are made in order to overwhelm our capacity to respond.

The campaign gets results: the IDF adopts tactics to reduce collateral damage even further, to the extent that its operational effectiveness and morale of its troops are impacted. Israel is deterred from initiating operations that might result in legal action against its officers and soldiers. Unfriendly regimes in the US are unopposed when they act to turn Israeli military victories into political defeats or cut off deliveries of weapons in wartime. Sympathy for terrorist entities like Hamas and Hezbollah make it possible for them to ‘stay in business’ between conflicts and rearm. Israeli young people may even be influenced by the smear campaign to avoid military service so as not to be involved in what they are told is an immoral enterprise.

The BDS campaign that is being waged all over the world, including Europe, South Africa, Australia and the US, is a major cognitive offensive. While it is doubtful that it can ever amount to more than an economic pinprick against Israel, that isn’t its primary objective. What it has already been successful at doing, whether or not resolutions to boycott, sanction or divest are passed, is to give currency to the idea that Israel’s behavior is so egregious that decent people are expected to shun it. Even where anti-BDS laws or resolutions have been passed, these are spun as a response by ‘Jewish power’ to justified grass-roots outrage.

Defensive hasbara counteracts these sorts of cognitive warfare. Although the sheer volume of false accusations makes it difficult, they must be refuted before they can be turned into concrete legal or diplomatic challenges. 

The role of the government and the army in responding to false accusations is key, because only they have the access and authority necessary to find out the truth about incidents that happened in war or in confrontations between soldiers and civilians. The record of the Israeli authorities in this arena has been spotty at best. One of the worst failures was the case of the alleged killing of Mohammed al-Dura in 2000, which almost certainly was a scripted ‘Pallywood production’ in which neither the young al-Dura nor his father were wounded. A map showed that IDF soldiers could not have shot them. Nevertheless, shortly after the incident, the IDF officially apologized for the young al-Dura’s ‘death’!

Defensive hasbara is one piece of the puzzle, a necessary response to cognitive attacks, but in itself not sufficient to win the cognitive war. If all we do is defend ourselves, the result is that we simply help spread the accusations (I’m reminded of an anecdote about Lyndon Johnson advising his PR person to spread the story that an opposing candidate had sex with chickens in order to force him to publicly deny it). We can’t afford to ignore specific accusations, but we also need to ensure that people on our side have access to a correct account of our historical, moral and legal rights to the land of Israel as well as the justification of specific policies.

The thrust of Palestinian Arab propaganda – and it indeed is thrust at the world continuously – is that the Jews stole the land from an indigenous Palestinian people and Israel occupies it today (on both sides of the Green Line) as a cruel racist, colonialist oppressor. As long as this story is believed, then there will continue to be pressure for ‘justice’, which usually involves changes to borders and security features (e.g., the elimination of the security barrier or the blockade of Gaza) that will advance the Arab program to destroy the Jewish state and kill or disperse its people.

Just as the Palestinians and their supporters have a logically consistent (but false) narrative of history and current events to justify their demands, we too need to develop and broadcast our (in this case true) narrative. In contrast to defensive hasbara, I’ll call this positive hasbara.

If we were doing this, we would advocate for our narrative in both the inward and outward directions, in our own educational system and also in our informational efforts to the outside world. The narrative would rest on a Zionist philosophical foundation, accurate historical scholarship and solid legal argumentation. All our organs of state – the Prime Minister and government, the Foreign and Defense Ministries, the army, the Broadcasting Authority, and more – would be on the same page when it comes to our basic right to have a Jewish state here, why we must maintain military control of the territories, why Jews have a right to live anywhere in the land of Israel, and why our security measures are justified.

Needless to say, this is not the case today. We tell the world how much we want peace with the Palestinians, how beautiful our beaches are, how gay-friendly we are, how we have a lot of high-tech startups, how our medical technology is the best in the world, how our soldiers are nice to cute Arab kids, and how the terrorists murder us. The world responds by saying that terrorism is our fault because we don’t ‘end the occupation’, ‘stop settlement activity’ and ‘free Palestine’.

The necessary messages are not getting through because they are not being sent. Why is this?

We have a political and social culture that is very tolerant of political diversity. A small percentage of Israelis tend to be extremely, even pathologically, critical of the state, and at the same time sit in key positions in our most important information-related institutions, not to mention the ministries, the courts, even the army. There are academics, media personalities, artists and intellectuals who are anti-Zionist and anti-state. Instead of Naomi Shemer we have Aviv Geffen. University faculties are ludicrously unbalanced toward the Left.

These individuals can directly create roadblocks, but they also foster a lack of confidence on the part of others who don’t share their point of view. In Israel, unabashed Zionists are considered at least naïve and often extremists. Nobody wants to look silly.

Because we don’t project a consistent message that justifies our existence, we should not be surprised that people all over the world don’t bother to sort through the contradictory messages – including many that can only be called suicidal – that emanate from Israel, and instead prefer the simple call for ‘justice for the Palestinian people’.

I don’t have a solution for this problem. We aren’t Yasser Arafat, who created a unitary voice for the Palestinians by murdering anyone who disagreed with him. We aren’t the Soviets, who tightly controlled all means of expression and sent people to the Gulag for illegally using a typewriter. But as long as we don’t unite behind a Zionist ideal, we won’t be able to present a counter-view for the Palestinian narrative. And indeed, we won’t have an answer for the nihilism of the post-Zionist Left among us.

Shimon Peres said that you don’t need hasbara if you have good policy. This is wrong for many reasons, but one of them is that you can’t have good policy if you don’t have a consistent understanding of who you are and what your objectives are. You can’t fight a cognitive war over your legitimacy if you don’t know what the basic arguments for that legitimacy are. You can’t negotiate if you don’t know what you can compromise and what you can’t. Positive hasbara is more than propaganda, it’s also getting our own selves clear about what we ought to do and why.

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Cognitive warfare is real and dangerous. Defensive hasbara is the necessary response. We can improve our execution of it by adding money and manpower to the effort to counter the enemy lie machine. It’s difficult, but we know how to do it. And we should.

Positive hasbara, answering the Palestinian narrative with a persuasive one of our own, is a much harder task, because it requires that we have a consistent national narrative that we feel comfortable asserting. And we don’t.

And that’s the answer to the question at the beginning of this post: “the job” we need to do is a political one, not just a PR operation: it is no less than to unite Israel’s Jews under a Zionist ideological banner. Until we are successful at this, the only hasbara game we can play will be the defensive one.

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Bad analogies and bad politics (Vic Rosenthal)

 

 Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

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Analogical reasoning is basic to human survival. If you can eat a peach, it’s probably safe to eat an apricot. Those of us who favor profiling for security believe that future terrorists will probably be a lot like past terrorists, and so we should look harder at the ones that fit the profile. Every day we make hundreds of decisions based on analogical reasoning: a thing or situation seems like one we are familiar with, so we treat it in a similar way.

Of course there are good analogies and bad ones. There are poisonous mushrooms that look like edible ones. Part of intelligence is knowing when an analogy is a good one in regard to the particular aspect that is important in that case. Political analogies are common, and can be dangerous.

One of the worst analogies ever is the analogy between ‘Palestinians’ and black Americans (here’s a classic expression of it by Condoleezza Rice). Their history is different, their situation is different, and their behavior is different. There is nothing that one can deduce from the story of American blacks that can help one understand the ‘Palestinians’, or vice versa. The reason blacks in pre-1960s America were not allowed to sit at lunch counters with whites is nothing like the reason Arabs aren’t allowed to move freely between Gaza and Israel. 

Why on earth would anyone think this? Lately, an entire ideology has appeared based on bad analogies. Just as Freud made sexuality the main driver of human behavior and Marx placed economics in that role, the new ideology of intersectionality tells us that it is oppression and discrimination. From the (somewhat mind-numbing) Wikipedia definition:

Intersectionality holds that the classical conceptualizations of oppression within society—such as racism, sexism, classism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia and belief-based bigotry—do not act independently of each other. Instead, these forms of oppression interrelate, creating a system of oppression that reflects the "intersection" of multiple forms of discrimination.

Apparently the idea developed after feminist scholars argued that black women are doubly oppressed because of their membership in two oppressed groups (this may be empirically false, but nobody cares). It has since been generalized to a sort of unified field theory for all victims of all kinds of ‘oppression'.

This concept is related to the hierarchy of victimhood, in which being black gets more points than being white, being Palestinian gets more than being American, and so forth. Then the one with more points is allowed to tell the other that his perceptions are invalid due to his privileged point of view.

It also fits in with postcolonial theory, in which most conflict between groups is explained as a result of the oppression of a (usually non-white) colonized people by (usually Western) colonialists. The colonization can be military, economic, spiritual, or a combination; or it can be in the past but have left its victims traumatized. We could call this ‘post-colonial stress disorder’.

The prime analogy for Americans is always racism toward African-Americans, with which their national conscience is pathologically obsessed, even more so than Germans are with Jews. The more it is studied, the more it seems sui generis and not similar to other forms of discrimination. But to the intersectionalist, all the isms are similar. 

You may have noticed that Jew-hatred (commonly called ‘antisemitism’) is not mentioned in the definition, being subsumed along with ‘Islamophobia’ in “belief-based bigotry.” This obscures the fact that Jews are hated for reasons having nothing to do with their beliefs or lack of them. If this isn’t clear from recent history, it should be obvious from looking at anti-Jewish propaganda which depends on all of the traditional racial stereotypes and blood libels that have characterized Jew-hatred for several hundred years.

It also enables those who want to minimize its prevalence by lumping it with other minor ‘bigotries’, while the minuscule phenomenon of ‘transphobia’, for example, has its own category.

Finally, it’s convenient to not explicitly mention Jew-hatred because most people who subscribe to intersectionality and related dogmas see Jews as oppressors rather than victims. Needless to say, Muslims are high on the list of the victimized, colonized and oppressed, which brings us to another failure of analogical reasoning.

There’s no recognition of the distinction that can be made between irrational hatred based on race or ethnicity, and opposition to the ideological aspects of Islam and shari’a and its violent manifestations. It’s all considered ‘bigotry’. So intersectionalists suppress the legitimate criticism of the jihadist ideology that more and more characterizes Islam as it is practiced today.

I’ve saved the worst bad analogy for last. A corollary of intersectionality is solidarity, “the belief that there is a common thread of discrimination that binds together many ostensibly different communities,” which include everything from the poor, to disabled people, to animals, to climate-change activists, to Palestinians. Because all kinds of ‘oppression’ are thought to benefit a Western, white, male, rich, heterosexual ruling class, activists join together with other ‘oppressed’ groups against the power structure that is responsible for it. This Marxist panacea-ism* leads to absurdities like anti-sexual assault activists cooperating with Students for Justice in Palestine – “because all oppression is one.”

Intersectionality suppresses the cognitive dissonance that would normally arise when, as is happening now, LGBT people are being asked to join the struggle against “Islamophobia,” while others are pointing out that there is a shari’a-based death penalty for gay sex in several Muslim countries, and when a Muslim has just murdered 49 people in a gay nightclub – and at least in part was motivated to do so by his religious belief. In a feat of mental acrobatics, the conflict between Muslims motivated by Islamic ideology and the gays they oppress evaporates, and only the fact that each group sees itself as a victim remains.

Just as human behavior is motivated by more than sex and economics, not every conflict is a case of oppression, not all forms of discrimination are the same, and not every problem is related to entrenched white straight male privilege. But thanks to the doctrine that arguing against the propositions of intersectionality indicates that the speaker supports the ruling class and can be ignored, the dogma becomes irrefutable. Like other irrefutable dogmas (e.g., Marxism, Objectivism), intersectionality gets its persuasiveness from a massive circular argument. Unfortunately, it is as pernicious as it is popular.

* Panacea-ism: the belief that there is one single solution for all the world’s ills.

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Bibi and Vlad: “It’s complicated” (Vic Rosenthal)

 

 Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

Today Israel’s PM Binyamin Netanyahu is concluding a two-day visit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. This is the fourth time within a year that Netanyahu and Putin have met. Russian-Israeli relations now are probably the best they have been since the period immediately after the War of Independence.

Some of the topics that they admit to discussing have been economic, trade, technological and agricultural cooperation and the funding of pensions to Russians who have immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union. Military aides discussed communications to prevent accidental clashes between Russian and Israeli forces operating in Syria. Russia and Israel have many interests in common, and both Netanyahu and Putin are happy to talk about some of them publicly.

There are other things that they keep private. The situation is remarkably complicated.

Israel is not happy about Russian sales of sophisticated arms to Iran, such as the S-300 air defense system. Israel wants to break the chain of supplies from Iran, through the Syrian Assad regime, to Hezbollah in Lebanon. It is also worried about the Hezbollah and Iranian forces in the Syrian Golan Heights. 

But Hezbollah is fighting alongside Assad, and Putin is supporting Assad. He wants Assad to keep control of at least part of the country in order to protect Russian naval and air bases. Putin also hopes to make Syria a client and embarrass the West, who are supporting some of the anti-Assad rebels.

Meanwhile, Israel is trying to improve relations with Russia’s historic rival, Turkey, while Turkey has been assisting some of Assad’s enemies, and even shot down a Russian plane last November.

Complicated enough? Don’t forget the Islamic State, which more or less everyone opposes, except maybe Saudi Arabia and Turkey (but they don’t admit it). The Saudis are also supporting some of Assad’s other enemies, which puts them in conflict with Russian aims.

Where is the US in all this? Almost nowhere, since it made it clear that it would not intervene against Assad when he used chemical weapons in Syria, probably because it didn’t want to upset Assad’s patron, Iran. It is operating against the IS to a limited extent, and supporting Iranian forces fighting IS guerrillas.

Israel has tried to stay out of the conflict in Syria, but it is the strongest power in the region and is right next door. The rational thing would be for Russia and Israel to jointly decide Syria’s fate in a way that would serve both their interests. Not even the US or Iran would be able to prevent the two from dictating such an arrangement.

Russia has a great deal of influence over Iran, certainly more than the US has obtained from Obama’s sycophantic courtship of the contemptuous regime. It seems to me that there is plenty of room here for cooperation, and for Israel to drive at least a small wedge between Russia and Iran. Suppose Israel agreed to help Russia guarantee Assad’s survival in at least part of Syria in return for Russia pressuring Iran to withdraw Hezbollah forces from the area close to Israel’s border?

Russia’s help would also be valuable in staving off an international agreement on Syria that includes the Golan Heights. 

The Russian S-300 system was initially considered a game-changer. Its delivery to Iran was delayed for years, perhaps a result of Netanyahu’s approaches to Putin. But we haven’t heard many complaints from Jerusalem since the first units were delivered. Could it be that Israel has developed countermeasures to render it less dangerous? It is even imaginable that Israel received information from Russia about how to neutralize the version sold to Iran. 

The US has protected Iran’s nuclear program from Israel, because the Obama Administration (stupidly) does not consider Iran a threat against the American homeland. Iran recently tested a missile with a range of about 2000 km (Tel Aviv is 1500 km from Tehran). It won’t be long before Moscow, only 2500 km away, will also be in range. It’s hard to believe that the Russians will be comfortable with this. Will they help Israel delay Iran’s nuclear arming? 

Finally, there is the Palestinian issue. There have been hints that the US would not veto a UN Security Council resolution declaring settlements illegal or setting a time limit for Israel to withdraw from Judea and Samaria, especially if it is proposed after the American elections in November, when the administration will not have to fear political fallout. Russia is one of the five Security Council members that has the power to veto such a resolution. Even if it didn’t go that far, it could apply pressure to weaken the resolution before the vote.

Russian diplomacy has in the past leaned toward the Palestinians, although there have been several recent statements by Russian diplomats opposing imposed solutions and calling for direct negotiations between the parties. Everything considered, a turnabout in American and Russian votes in the Security Council would be surprising – but it could happen.

Russia wants to increase her influence in the Middle East and reduce that of the US. Putin understands that the Obama Administration has pushed Israel away, and sees an opportunity to step into the gap.

Russia wants to be more involved in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. It seems to me that at this point it would be more flexible and understanding of our position than Obama has been or Clinton is likely to be (I won’t try to predict the behavior of a Trump Administration), so I welcome this development. 

Some have said that Putin himself has a “positive attitude toward Jews.” If this is true, it makes him one of a select few among national leaders. But in any event, it is irrelevant. Nobody in Putin’s shoes, and especially not a chess-playing, Machiavellian ex-KGB officer like Putin, makes decisions based on feelings. Israel has been very careful not to step on Russia’s toes – it did not join in Western criticism of Russia for its actions in Ukraine, for example – and Netanyahu seems to have put together a solid package of inducements for a better relationship.

Israel started off life as a state with the support of the Soviet bloc, which it lost in the 1950s, when the Russians felt that it would be a more effective Cold War strategy to support our enemies, and in the 1967 and 1973 wars they armed and supplied them. In 1975, the notorious “Zionism is racism” resolution at the UN was orchestrated by the Soviet Union. During the 1970s and 80s, the Soviets trained and supported the PLO and other terror groups. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, diplomatic relations with Russia were resumed, and more than a million Russian Jews were able to come to Israel (where I live, I hear Russian on the street as much as Hebrew).

Today Russia is one of Israel’s biggest trading partners. Israel buys oil from Russia, sells military equipment to it, and hosts Russian tourists. Visas are not required for travel between the countries – as opposed to the US, which has refused to waive visa requirements for Israelis – and there is a plan to establish a free-trade agreement. 

With the American withdrawal from the Middle East and the increasingly anti-Israel tone of the administration, Israel is finding new partners. The Israel-Russia relationship “is complicated,” as Facebook would say, but it could be critical to our survival.

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The case for paranoia (Vic Rosenthal)

 

 Vic Rosenthal's Weekly Column

I am sitting at my desk on a quiet day. There are no screaming sirens. Hezbollah isn’t bombarding us with its tens of thousands of missiles, and Hamas tunnels aren’t disgorging terrorists near kibbutz dining halls. Nobody has been stabbed yet today (as far as I know) by an Arab teenager. Iran’s nuclear project is not yet complete and the Islamic State is occupied with devising more ingenious ways to kill people. Bashar al-Assad is bombing hospitals, but they are in Syria, not here.

Nevertheless we are at war.

Israel is under severe and sustained bombardment from its enemies in the Muslim world and also Europe, the UK and the US, in two main non-physical spheres of combat.

One is the propaganda war, in which the world is saturation bombed with lies about how we are the vilest imaginable creatures who are constantly committing the most sadistic atrocities, particularly against angelic Palestinian children who only want to grow into peace-loving Palestinian adults.

The world is told that we entered this land that wasn’t ours and viciously dispossessed those aforementioned peace-lovers, punishing them for the sins of Hitler, which actually weren’t sins since we ourselves are worse than Hitler and deserved everything we got. Justice, it is told, requires that 11 million ‘Palestinians’ be allowed to come ‘back’ to the land they never saw and take our nice cars and buildings and rape our women, because everything belongs to them.

People hear that our communities are illegal (according to laws and interpretations they invent as they go along) and we are white Ashkenazi racist colonialist exploiters whom it is acceptable – obligatory – to ‘resist’ violently. Not only that, but we have hooked noses and are descended from apes and pigs.

Any means of resistance is legitimate, but anything we do to defend ourselves is illegal, because it is European white colonialism. Even if some of our skins are black and most of us are not from Europe.

There is also the BDS movement, which tries to weaken the state economically while at the same time driving home the lesson that we are so depraved, so subhuman, that civilized people mustn’t engage in any kind of intercourse with us, not in commerce, sport, academics, the arts or anything else. BDS is presented as a grass-roots movement, but it is organized with the support of the usual suspects, mostly European.

Somewhat more subtly, almost all of the American ‘mainstream’ media push a line according to which Israel is intransigent, its government is extremely right-wing and it has no interest in peace. It is suggested that our PM is afraid to take risks for peace and needs to be pushed. This is despite the fact that the government is precisely in the center of the Israeli political spectrum, and has made concessions to the Arabs more or less continuously since the Oslo accords were signed, including a total withdrawal from the Gaza strip. At the same time, the Palestinians have barely altered their positions – in some ways they have hardened them – and at present refuse to sit down with us at all.

All of these propaganda themes can be shown to be false, irrational or both. But it doesn’t matter. Other ‘occupations’ throughout the world, as well as actual genocides, sieges and horribly bloody wars get little or no attention. Only Israel is singled out. Accusations against Israel are often believed with no proof, but when Israel establishes that they are false, it is ignored. 

The function of this assault of lies is to prepare the people of the world for the ultimate violent destruction of the Jewish people and their state, to make it understandable, even welcome, to them.

The other non-physical ‘war’ employs a multifaceted strategy of subversion inside Israel herself. Israel has an open society with a free press and a commitment to democratic governance and personal liberty. So our enemies dedicate massive amounts of money and manpower to exploit those characteristics in order to disrupt and destabilize our country.

Money is provided to anti-state extremists to support and nurture their organizations and allow them to carry out operations to feed the propaganda campaign, to promote conflict between Jewish and Arab citizens and to provide raw material for diplomatic and legal warfare against Israel in international forums. Anti-Israel activity by Palestinians in Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem is financed and encouraged, including illegal construction in areas supposedly under Israeli control. Demonstrations are organized with the intent of provoking security forces; international activists are pleased to provide video cameras to record the confrontations.

Attempts are made to influence our elections and to destabilize governments that the US administration and Europeans see as insufficiently compliant. The last election saw a major effort against Netanyahu, “V15,” run by a former advisor to President Obama. Financing for the project was murky, but a predecessor to V15 got a grant from the US State Department, “to promote coexistence.”

What we are planning is so important to the administration that in 2013 the CIA called Israel one of its main targets of surveillance – along with China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, and Cuba! We should be flattered to be in such company.

Especially in the US where there still remains some support for Israel, a more subtle tactic is popular: loving us to death. Groups like J Street, the Israel Policy Forum, the Union for Reform Judaism and now even the ADL insist that they can’t possibly be any more pro-Israel, but then attack Israel’s democratically elected government and argue that they have a right to pressure Israel to change its policies. Naturally the changes they want are territorial concessions that will make our state indefensible. These groups are all close to the Obama Administration and follow its lead. It used to be possible to assume that Jewish organizations would be pro-Israel. Not anymore.

We mustn’t forget the international support for the Palestinians themselves: the billions given to UNRWA, whose task is to maintain and expand the population of Arabs claiming refugee status (they are the only group in history for whom such status is hereditary). UNRWA schools are used to teach Hamas ideology, and sometimes to store rockets that will be fired at Israel. More billions are fed to the Palestinian Authority, which uses them in part to pay salaries to convicted terrorists in Israel’s jails and for propaganda against Israel (much of the rest is simply diverted to the bank accounts of the ruling elite). 

Finally, the Obama Administration has just concluded a process to strengthen Iran, the oft-declared enemy of both Israel and the US, which glories in its intention to destroy us both. Although the arrangement is supposed to serve American interests, it seems highly unlikely that it will benefit the US for Iran, where “death to America” is chanted by crowds on a daily basis, to be a nuclear-armed power in control of the entire Middle East. What is absolutely certain is that Israel’s survival has been made more difficult.

Next week there will be an international conference in Paris where several big nations will decide on ‘parameters’ that they would like to impose on Israel. The parameters will involve the usual concessions to render Israel vulnerable.

Yes, it’s paranoia. But not insanity. Much of the world is conspiring against my country. To be precise, there is a decentralized network of conspiracies, with centers located in the White House, Teheran, Riyadh, Paris, London, Ramallah and other places. Some of the participants are enemies of the others, but on this they seem to be able to cooperate: the anti-Zionist Left, the Jew-hating Right and the Muslims all agree that we have to go.

Has the world ever worked together so well for a cause? Such a massive common effort devoted to trying to accomplish one thing (in this case, our destruction)? Would they cooperate this well if an asteroid were heading for the earth? Think what the resources devoted to us could do if applied to problems like hunger, climate change, illiteracy or disease!

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