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Topic: Palestinians
Human Shields Aren't Rethinking Hamas
In the aftermath of its disastrous 50-day war against Israel this past summer Hamas saw its popularity skyrocket with huge majorities in both Gaza and the West Bank telling pollsters that the Islamists "won" and that they supported their conduct. A month later, Palestinians have sobered up a bit. But the latest numbers paint a picture of a population that is still not ready for peace or anything that looks like it.
In the aftermath of its disastrous 50-day war against Israel this past summer Hamas saw its popularity skyrocket with huge majorities in both Gaza and the West Bank telling pollsters that the Islamists "won" and that they supported their conduct. A month later, Palestinians have sobered up a bit. But the latest numbers paint a picture of a population that is still not ready for peace or anything that looks like it.
The latest survey taken by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) shows that the number of respondents who think Hamas won has declined from its postwar high of 79 percent to only 69 percent. As with the August findings, backing for Hamas and its methods are higher in the West Bank than in Gaza, where residents were directly affected by the fighting. But though the post-war surge reflects the ebbing of the high emotions engendered by the conflict, no one should mistake any of these numbers as a vote of no confidence in the Islamist terror group or a move in the direction of the supposedly more moderate Palestinian Authority and its leader Mahmoud Abbas. To the contrary, the PSR results reinforce the conclusion that strong majorities of Palestinians support Hamas's terror war even if those who must pay the price for this bloody gesture are less enthusiastic about it than onlookers.
Palestinians continue to support Hamas firing more rockets at Israel if the blockade of Gaza is not lifted with 80 percent overall endorsing this position and 72 percent of Gazans also backing the proposition. Given that the only reason the blockade was imposed on Gaza to begin with was the Hamas coup with which the group seized power in 2007, this position sets up a circular argument. But far more shocking than that is the response to the question posed about whether they support Hamas firing rockets from populated areas.
While Hamas generally denies doing this, it is not exactly a secret that it does it so as to use civilians as human shields against possible Israeli counter-attacks aimed at silencing the rocket launchers. Nor are Palestinians unaware of the fact that this practice deliberately exposes them to death and destruction, a cynical tactic whose purpose is to get as many civilians killed as possible.
Yet the survey showed that a solid majority of Palestinians—57 percent—supported this slaughter. Not surprisingly, only 48 percent in Gaza thought it was a good idea to stake them out as human sacrifices on the altar of Hamas's unending war against the Jewish state. But an impressive 62 percent in the West Bank still endorsed the practice.
Just as ominous are the results to the question about who should lead the Palestinian people. As the Times of Israel reports:
If elections were held today, Hamas's former Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh would still defeat PA President Mahmoud Abbas by a large majority of 55% compared to 38%, a margin which has, however, shrunk since August, when Haniyeh won 61% support and Abbas only 32%. But in Gaza the two leaders are currently neck and neck, with Abbas winning 47% and Haniyeh 50% in a poll with a 3% margin of error.
That neatly sums up the answer to the question as to whether Abbas, who is currently serving the 10th year of a four-year term as president of the PA will allow new elections anytime soon. It also shows why the only thing preventing another Hamas coup, this time on the West Bank in which Abbas would be deposed, is Israeli security.
Though enthusiasm for Hamas is not unanimous, it remains more popular than its Fatah rivals. Why? Because the unchanging dynamic of Palestinian politics is that whichever party spills the most Jewish blood will always have the upper hand. Since its inception a century ago, Palestinian Arab national identity has been inextricably tied to the war on Zionism.
That also explains, for those who haven't been paying attention (a group that includes the Obama administration) why Abbas remains incapable of making peace even if the former Holocaust denier (a fact about his biography that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had the nerve to mention in his address to the United Nations General Assembly) really wanted to do so. The population in both the West Bank and Gaza still are hostile to any agreement that would recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn even if meant removing the threat of war.
So long as Hamas's human shields are ready to vote for more war, any further efforts toward peace are doomed to failure. While President Obama unfairly accused Israelis of not being willing to work for peace, this is a reality that most Israelis have accepted, albeit reluctantly. It's something the administration, as well as those left-wingers eager to save Israel from itself, need to come to terms with.
Why Erekat's Anti-Israel Slander Matters
Those who want to blame Israel for the lack of peace between Israel and the Palestinians have long been running out of arguments. Israel keeps offering the Palestinians what they claim to want, and the Palestinian leadership keeps rejecting it out of hand. Because of the intellectual vacuity of the blame-Israel crowd, the rejectionists and their supporters increasingly resort to hysterical tirades in opposition to Israel's survival as a Jewish state, which are nothing if not revealing. And the latest such outburst is no different.
Those who want to blame Israel for the lack of peace between Israel and the Palestinians have long been running out of arguments. Israel keeps offering the Palestinians what they claim to want, and the Palestinian leadership keeps rejecting it out of hand. Because of the intellectual vacuity of the blame-Israel crowd, the rejectionists and their supporters increasingly resort to hysterical tirades in opposition to Israel's survival as a Jewish state, which are nothing if not revealing. And the latest such outburst is no different.
Anti-Israel activist Max Blumenthal, son of Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal, last week compared Israel to ISIS/ISIL at the kangaroo court known as the Russell Tribunal, in which anti-Semites like Roger Waters gather to compare notes on their various libels against the Jews. The gag caught on, spawning the Twitter hashtag #JSIL. But it wasn't used by anybody intelligent or important until lead Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat embraced it. According to the Times of Israel:
"Netanyahu is trying to disseminate fear of the Islamic State led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, but Netanyahu forgets that he himself leads the Jewish state," said Saeb Erekat, the Palestinians' chief negotiator in peace talks with Israel.
"He wants us to call Israel the Jewish state and supports terrorist settlers who kill, destroy and burn mosques and churches… like Baghdadi's men kill and terrorize," Erekat told AFP.
It sounds like an attempt at a clever play on words–attempt being the operative word here–but coming from Erekat it's worth drawing attention to. First of all, Erekat is no stranger to historical fabrication–this is not even the first time this year he's made up history in order to undermine the Jews' connection to Israel. Erekat is not an honest man, and he has no qualms about preying on the historical ignorance and political correctness of Western media, who are loath to challenge the Palestinian narrative.
But he's not a fringe activist, like those who came up with the JSIL hashtag. He's the chief Palestinian negotiator, and thus the man the Palestinians put front and center to craft an agreement. As the Tower reported on Erekat's earlier comments:
The Israelis have long insisted that any peace deal should include language recognizing Israel as a "Jewish state," in part but not completely as a signal from the Palestinians that a final peace deal genuinely guaranteed the end of territorial claims. Palestinian leaders have refused the demand, and Erekat's reemphasis of the position was described by one Palestinian news outlet as a rejection of "the Jewishness of Israel." Top Palestinian figures, up to and including Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas, have more broadly kept up a campaign denying a historical Jewish link to parts of Israel including Jerusalem.
The Palestinians' refusal to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state is a refusal to accept the existence of Jews among them. This is why Israel wants the acknowledgement of Israel's Jewish character: it would mean an end to the Palestinians' campaign of extermination against the Jewish people. It's the difference between a "peace process" and actual peace. The Israelis want peace; Western diplomats and their media cheerleaders want a peace process. The Palestinians want neither, but they'll participate in the charade of a peace process as long as they continue to get concessions without having to give anything up. They are not yet ready to consider peace with Jews as a goal.
Israel's identity as a Jewish state, and thus a guarantor of Jewish survival and continuity in a world that often appears indifferent to both, should not be controversial. But the survival of the Jewish people nonetheless remains a point of contention, something to be put on the table for the purposes of negotiation but not agreed to ahead of time. John Kerry, who led the last round of negotiations, has wavered on this, to his immense discredit.
Unfortunately, there remain those who believe the Jews should put their survival in the hands of the Palestinians out of some airy pseudoreligious devotion to multiculturalism. Orwell's belief that some ideas are so foolish only an intellectual could believe them lives on in American academia: UCLA professor Patricia Marks Greenfield recently took to the pages of the Washington Post to declare that "If Gaza and the West Bank were truly part of Israel, and Israel were truly a multiethnic, secular society, there would be progress toward peace."
Greenfield does not seem to fathom what this would truly mean for the Jews of Israel, nor does she express any desire for what Erekat ultimately seeks. And thus in the dry, innocuous-sounding parlance of the enlightened academic does the idea that the Jews should lose their state and control over their fate further the same ends, though certainly springing from a different mindset, as those of Saeb Erekat. And it is in that light that Erekat's repulsive comparison of Israel to ISIS should be seen. Israel's "partner for peace," the Palestinian leadership, desires to see the end of the Jewish state which, in the minds of Israel's enemies, means the end of the Jews.
What Israel Really Wants from Ties with China and India
Writing in Foreign Affairs last week, Rory Miller made the classic mistake of using accurate facts to jump to an erroneous conclusion. He gleefully pronounced the failure of Israel's effort to convert burgeoning economic ties with India and China into diplomatic capital, asserting that while Israel had expected these ties to "help secure greater international support" for its positions, in reality, China and India have both maintained staunchly pro-Palestinian policies. But though Miller is right about the Asian powers' policies, he's utterly wrong about the diplomatic gains Israel hoped to reap from these relationships.
Writing in Foreign Affairs last week, Rory Miller made the classic mistake of using accurate facts to jump to an erroneous conclusion. He gleefully pronounced the failure of Israel's effort to convert burgeoning economic ties with India and China into diplomatic capital, asserting that while Israel had expected these ties to "help secure greater international support" for its positions, in reality, China and India have both maintained staunchly pro-Palestinian policies. But though Miller is right about the Asian powers' policies, he's utterly wrong about the diplomatic gains Israel hoped to reap from these relationships.
For instance, Miller makes much of the fact that China still votes against Israel on every conceivable issue at the UN. But you'd have to be an idiot–which most senior Israeli politicians aren't–to expect it to do otherwise.
Flipping China into the pro-Israel camp might be possible if and when it democratizes, since it's one of the few countries where public opinion actually leans pro-Israel. Indeed, as the Australian paper Business Spectator noted this month, China was among the few places worldwide where Israel was actually winning the social media war during the summer's fighting in Gaza. And it certainly makes sense for Israel to cultivate this public support in preparation for the day when democratization occurs. But right now, China remains a Communist dictatorship that sees America as its chief foreign-policy rival. Thus as long as Washington (thankfully) remains Israel's main patron at the UN, Beijing will naturally take the anti-Israel side–not because it cares so passionately about the Palestinian cause (which, unlike Miller, I don't believe it does), but because it cares about the anti-American cause.
India, despite growing ties with Washington, also has a long tradition of anti-Americanism, as well as a large Muslim minority. Thus New Delhi was never a likely candidate for UN support, either.
And in fact, Miller doesn't cite any Israeli politician who actually espoused such unrealistic expectations. He simply assumes, on the basis of vague bromides like Naftali Bennett's "diplomacy can follow economy," that they musthave held such expectations.
But in reality, Israel is seeking a very different foreign-policy benefit from its trade ties with India and China–one it has never spelled out explicitly, for very good reason: What it wants is an economic insurance policy against European countries that it still officially labels as allies.
The EU currently accounts for about one-third of Israel's exports. This constitutes a dangerous vulnerability, because Europe is the one place worldwide where Israel faces a real danger of economic boycotts and sanctions. Granted, few European leaders actually want this; they consider the economic relationship with Israel mutually beneficial. But European leaders are generally far more pro-Israel than their publics, and since European countries are democracies, public opinion matters.
To date, the public's anti-Israel sentiment has produced only marginal sanctions, like those on Israeli exports from the West Bank (a minuscule percentage of Israel's total exports). But Israel can't rule out the possibility that public pressure will eventually produce more stringent sanctions if Jerusalem continues refusing to capitulate to EU demands on the Palestinian issue that are antithetical to its security. In short, Israel could someday face a devastating choice between its economic needs and its security needs–unless it can diversify its trade enough to be able to weather EU sanctions if and when they occur.
And that's precisely what Israel seeks from China and India, two countries with a history of not allowing policy disagreements to interfere with business: If it can build up its Asian trade enough to reduce its economic dependence on Europe, it will be better placed to withstand European pressure to adopt policies inimical to its survival.
Whether Israel will succeed in this goal remains to be seen. But if it does, that will be a diplomatic gain of unparalleled importance–even if it never wins Chinese or Indian support in a single UN vote.
Some Terrorists More Equal Than Others
Last week, when President Obama denounced ISIS during his speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations and called for a concerted effort by the international community to defeat the terrorist group, he received some well-deserved applause. But when Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu called for the same body to judge Hamas and Iran by the same standard they use for ISIS, he might as well have been talking to a wall. At the UN, some terrorists are more equal than others, a double standard that was also present when Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas spoke to the world body on Friday.
Last week, when President Obama denounced ISIS during his speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations and called for a concerted effort by the international community to defeat the terrorist group, he received some well-deserved applause. But when Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu called for the same body to judge Hamas and Iran by the same standard they use for ISIS, he might as well have been talking to a wall. At the UN, some terrorists are more equal than others, a double standard that was also present when Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas spoke to the world body on Friday.
That Netanyahu wouldn't persuade a UN General Assembly that has repeatedly voted to demonize Israeli acts of self-defense against Palestinian terrorism was a given. But the real tragedy is not the indifference of a world body that is tainted by the same virus of anti-Semitism that is gaining strength around the world. It is that those who are supposed to represent the Palestinians are still so cowed by the Islamists that they refuse to understand that the Islamists are as much if not a greater threat to them than they are to Israel. Though much of the Arab and Muslim world is belatedly coming to grips with the fact that ISIS must be destroyed (a task they hope will be largely accomplished by the United States with minimal aid from local forces), if they are to avoid being swept away by a sea of murderous fanaticism, so-called moderate Palestinians must understand that Hamas poses the same threat to their survival.
Instead, when PA leader Abbas had his turn last week at the UN podium, he devoted his remarks to some of the usual calumnies against Israel. He spoke of "war criminals" and genocidal crimes against the Palestinian people having been committed during the 50-day war launched by Hamas this past summer. The problem with this speech wasn't just that, in stark contrast to Netanyahu who spoke repeatedly of his desire for peace and willingness to compromise to attain an agreement, Abbas talked only about conflict.
More to the point, Abbas refused to point out that the only party that committed war crimes against the Palestinian people was Hamas, his erstwhile partner in the PA government following the signing of a unity pact last spring. It was Hamas, as Netanyahu rightly pointed out, which used Palestinian civilians as human shields behind which it launched thousands of rockets at Israeli cities. It was Hamas that sought to maximize Palestinian civilian casualties so as to create more anti-Israel talking points, not a Jewish state that was reluctantly dragged into the conflict and did its best to minimize the impact its counter-attack hand on the people of Gaza.
Abbas has repeatedly demonstrated that he is willing neither to make peace with Israel nor to confront Hamas. Instead, he wishes only to avoid an agreement while continuing to milk the international community for aid that keeps his corrupt government and the soulless oligarchy that runs it afloat. This is a tragedy for the Palestinians who have been abused by their leaders and so-called allies in the Arab and Muslim world for the past 70 years.
It is easy to understand why most of the world refuses to accept Netanyahu's analogy between ISIS and Hamas. Though, as the prime minister pointed out, the two have common ultimate goals in terms of establishing Islamist rule over the region and the world as well as speaking a common language of terror and using many of the same tactics, the international community sees ISIS as threatening other Muslims and Westerners while clinging to the belief that all Hamas wants to do is to kill Jews. The former is rightly held to be unacceptable while the latter, when cloaked in the language of anti-Zionism, is somehow rendered palatable since denying Jews the same right to sovereignty, self-determination, and self-defense that others are routinely granted is considered debatable if not completely reasonable.
But the Palestinians are the big losers here. So long as Abbas won't fight Hamas, the Palestinian people will not be forced to choose between peace and coexistence with their Jewish neighbors and a never-ending war that Hamas and much of his own Fatah Party desires. It is the people of Gaza who live under the despotic Islamist rule of Hamas and the people of the West Bank who may well do the same if Israel does not continue to protect Abbas from a coup who suffer most from the pass Hamas gets from the international community. The same is true of those who live under the thumb of the other Islamist terrorist regime that Netanyahu mentioned in his speech: the people of Iran.
UN delegates may mock Netanyahu and his use of audio-visual aids during his UN speech (this year's device was an enlarged photo of Hamas using Palestinians as human shields) or the American pop culture references in his speech (this year's favorite was his contention that pretending that Iran didn't employ terrorism was as crazy as saying Derek Jeter didn't play shortstop). But the people of Israel sent him to New York to tell the truth about the calumnies hurled at the Jewish state. It is the Palestinians who lack a leader who is similarly interested in telling the truth. Until they do, they will continue to wait for a solution to the conflict and be forced to live with the prospect of being ruled by their own Islamist killers.
The Media and Anti-Semitism
This week is unfortunately a bit of a perfect storm of conditions that foster anti-Semitism. The High Holidays are approaching, Israel has just fought a war of self-defense, and new terrorist organizations are gaining a foothold in Western societies. Israel's national Counter-Terrorism Bureau has issued its travel warning for the season, expressing concern over the usual suspects as well as Western Europe. New York hasn't been immune to the spike in anti-Semitic incidents, and last week Police Commissioner Bill Bratton pointed a finger at the media:
This week is unfortunately a bit of a perfect storm of conditions that foster anti-Semitism. The High Holidays are approaching, Israel has just fought a war of self-defense, and new terrorist organizations are gaining a foothold in Western societies. Israel's national Counter-Terrorism Bureau has issued its travel warning for the season, expressing concern over the usual suspects as well as Western Europe. New York hasn't been immune to the spike in anti-Semitic incidents, and last week Police Commissioner Bill Bratton pointed a finger at the media:
"When (the media) cover something, it tends to attract more attention," Bratton told reporters following a security briefing for the Jewish High Holy Days at police headquarters.
"But we have seen this before, that when there's attention paid to an issue, that it brings this about," Bratton continued. "And when there's continued attention — and the issue in Gaza, where it stretched over several weeks — we could see a continuing increase."
Hate crimes are up, according to the city. Bratton tried to downplay recent incidents as "lone wolf" events, though New York State homeland security commissioner Jerome Hauer countered that "Anti-Semitism is rising at a rate we haven't seen in a long, long time, and I think it will continue to grow."
Anyone who followed Western coverage of the war in Gaza won't be too surprised. But Bratton's comments weren't ill-phrased off-the-cuff remarks; they were part of a clear message from the NYPD on the role of the press in the uptick in hate crimes. Deputy Chief Michael Osgood focused a bit more on the correlation:
"On July first, the Gaza Strip becomes a major news story and stays consistent in the media through July and August, every single day, every single morning, front page of the New York Times, front page of the Wall Street Journal," he said.
Around this time, "the group ISIS becomes a major news story and they stay consistent in the news media, [and] that creates what I call an emotional surge."
Since that time, there has been an average of 18 anti-Semitic cases a month.
"A person who would normally not offend, now offends," Osgood said, describing the effect of the news. "He's moved by the emotions."
It's a bit refreshing to hear this from the police. The role of the media in stimulating anti-Semitism, especially when it comes to Israel, is no secret. Sometimes this takes the form of outright falsifying events in Arab-Israeli wars–Pallywood on the part of videographers and fauxtography on the part of photojournalists–which are usually the deadlier brand of propaganda. Witness, most famously, the example of the al-Dura affair.
But it's worth pointing out here that there are very different types of war coverage. As I wrote earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal's coverage was textured, original, investigative, and informative. The "paper of record," the New York Times, offered just the opposite: coverage that essentially followed Hamas's PR strategy. European media had similar coverage with even more violent results: attempted pogroms broke out in Paris and anti-Semitic protests could be found all over Western Europe.
The anti-Semitism is blamed on Israel's actions, which the rioters see through the prism of the media. An excellent example of this vicious cycle is Human Rights Watch's director Ken Roth. Jonathan Foreman wrote about Roth's obsessively anti-Israel Twitter feed for the current issue of COMMENTARY. But even more noxious is the group's role in pushing an anti-Israel narrative that supposedly comes with the credibility of a "human-rights" group.
It goes like this: HRW researchers get quoted by the New York Times accusing Israel of indiscriminate violence and targeting noncombatants–information that is crucial, in the Times's own acknowledgement, in forming "the characterization of the conflict." Then the Times tries to boost HRW's flagging credibility–lest more people notice the group can't be trusted–by crediting HRW as a key source in understanding "the Damage and Destruction in Gaza." Along the way, HRW will be cited in a Times opinion piece on how American support for Israel is unethical.
When Jews the world over suffer at the hands of angry anti-Semites, Ken Roth will come to their aid, blaming Israel in part for violent anti-Semitism in the West. As Jeffrey Goldberg noted, Roth tweeted the following, with a link to an article about it: "Germans rally against anti-Semitism that flared in Europe in response to Israel's conduct in Gaza war. Merkel joins." Goldberg commented: "Roth's framing of this issue is very odd and obtuse." He added that "It is a universal and immutable rule that the targets of prejudice are not the cause of prejudice." Roth defended his comments. On Twitter, he responded that, hey, he was just getting his news from the New York Times.
President Hollande's Colonialist Solution
During Friday's press conference with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, France's President Francois Hollande voiced his support for the United Nations Security Council imposing a solution on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The very notion that warring sides can be forced into peace with one another is of course absurd. Presumably, a deal that had to be imposed from outside would, by its very nature, not have the full or equal endorsement of both sides. But which side might be on the receiving end of such an imposition? Who would need coercing? Well, the clue was standing to the right of the French president.
During Friday's press conference with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, France's President Francois Hollande voiced his support for the United Nations Security Council imposing a solution on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The very notion that warring sides can be forced into peace with one another is of course absurd. Presumably, a deal that had to be imposed from outside would, by its very nature, not have the full or equal endorsement of both sides. But which side might be on the receiving end of such an imposition? Who would need coercing? Well, the clue was standing to the right of the French president.
A beaming Mahmoud Abbas was nodding along to what is after all an endorsement of his very own plan. It is Abbas who is now pushing for a "solution" to be imposed on Israel. But what on earth is a European leader doing getting behind such an idea? Didn't France get the message that the days when European politicians drew the borders of other people's countries are over?
Hollande justified his position by arguing that negotiations have dragged on too long. Well, quite. But it is obscene that he should make such a statement alongside Abbas and while endorsing Abbas's plan. It is, after all, Abbas who has acted as a serial negotiations blocker. Most of the time Abbas simply holds up efforts to even get negotiations started, usually demanding that before he can undergo the horror of sitting down to talk with Israeli officials, he must first be paid a tribute of extortionate concessions by Israel. Once negotiations finally get going, Abbas generally wastes time until the window allotted to negotiating expires, then he demands some more concessions before he will permit the talks to be resumed.
So yes, President Hollande is correct, fruitless talks have gone on too long. And yet, from the fact that he was making this announcement during a press conference with Abbas it seems reasonable to assume that the blame was not being placed at the Palestinian door. It also seems reasonable to assume that since this entire initiative originates with Abbas, the "peace plan" will be somewhat weighted in favor of the Palestinians. The Israelis, much to their cost, have repeatedly shown a readiness to surrender territory whenever they thought there was a chance of peace and security being achieved. If they were being offered a deal that genuinely guaranteed them that, then there would be no need to enlist the UN Security Council resolutions.
Yet Abbas has never found the level playing field of bilateral negotiations to his liking. For many years now he has been championing the notion of the Palestinians forcing an Israeli retreat via international diplomacy. This, of course, would allow him to push Israel back to something close to the 1949 armistice lines—which have no weight in international law as actual borders—without Israel receiving any meaningful guarantees regarding its security. And that really is why an imposed peace is so ludicrous. Even in the event that Abbas marshaled the international community for doing his bidding and imposing an Israeli withdrawal, it is doubtful that there would be any peace. In what way would Hamas, Islamic Jihad, ISIS, Hezbollah, Iran, and the rest of its proxies be beholden to this supposed solution?
If Hollande is proposing to return to the old colonial days when countries like his imposed borders on peoples and nations living overseas, then with what army does he intended to force this peace? He can have as many votes at the UN as he likes, but he would do well to remember that it is the Israeli army that is currently sheltering UN "peace keepers" in the Golan Heights. Presumably France would recommend the sanctions route that is now so beloved by Europe, bludgeoning Israel into choosing between poverty or insecurity.
Then there is also the question of why Hollande has been prepared to go along with this plan at a time when the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is the last Middle Eastern issue that a world leader ought to be expending time or energy on. Would Hollande, or any European leader, have appeared alongside Netanyahu and voiced their support for imposing a solution on the Palestinians? Of course not. This isn't about advancing peace or fairness, this is about promoting the Palestinian cause. As a man of the European left this is a cause that Hollande no doubt sympathizes with, but there is more.
During Israel's war with Hamas this summer, Paris saw Europe's most violent riots as France's North African immigrant population vented its fury over what they perceived as French support for the Jewish state. In the course of these riots the mob trapped several hundred Jews in a Paris synagogue. Yet now it is not the plight of the Jews, but rather the cause of their attackers that has been taken up by the French government in what appears to be a blatant, and no doubt ill-fated, act of appeasement.
France's colonialist past has brought a large Arab-Muslim population to its cities. Yet that last chapter of colonialism is apparently now opening the way to a new chapter of colonialism as Hollande seeks to dictate to the Israelis what their country should look like and where their borders should lie. All with a total disregard for the mounting regional turmoil that would seek to engulf Israel at the first opportunity.
Real Estate, Jewelry, and the Israeli-Palestinian Dispute
Today's publication of Defining Neighbors: Religion, Race, and the Early Zionist-Arab Encounter (Princeton University Press) by Jonathan Marc Gribetz, an assistant professor of Near Eastern studies and Judaic studies at Princeton, marks a minor miracle: it may well be the only book ever published with dust-jacket endorsements by both Ruth R. Wisse (a "brilliant study" and "an indispensable work") and Rashid Khalidi ("prodigious research"). The publisher calls it a "landmark book," one that "fundamentally recasts our understanding of the modern Jewish-Arab encounter."
Today's publication of Defining Neighbors: Religion, Race, and the Early Zionist-Arab Encounter (Princeton University Press) by Jonathan Marc Gribetz, an assistant professor of Near Eastern studies and Judaic studies at Princeton, marks a minor miracle: it may well be the only book ever published with dust-jacket endorsements by both Ruth R. Wisse (a "brilliant study" and "an indispensable work") and Rashid Khalidi ("prodigious research"). The publisher calls it a "landmark book," one that "fundamentally recasts our understanding of the modern Jewish-Arab encounter."
This post is not intended as a review, but rather a reflection on one of Professor Gribetz's central insights. To call the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a "dispute over real estate," he writes, is like calling a fight over a family inheritance a "dispute over jewelry and china": in both cases, the description misses the crux of the matter. In his book, Professor Gribetz demonstrates that, from the beginning, the Jewish-Arab conflict was a "struggle over history and identity"–played out over land, but involving fundamental issues that have always transcended the apparent subject of the dispute.
In the early years, there were frequent expressions of commonality between Jews and Arabs, epitomized by the 1919 agreement between Chaim Weizmann, the head of the Zionist Organization, and Faisal Hussein, the leader of the Arabs. The agreement cited "the racial kinship and ancient bonds existing between the Arabs and the Jewish people" and declared Arab support for the 1917 Balfour Declaration and Jewish support for an Arab state adjacent to Palestine. Faisal thereafter wrote to Felix Frankfurter (then also a Zionist leader) that "we Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement," and "will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home." That obviously did not last long.
Professor Gribetz ends his book by noting that while relations between Jews and Arabs worsened after 1919, his study itself shows that perceptions between peoples are not immutable; so it "stands to reason that they can improve as well." He does not address what might lead to such an improvement, but perhaps we can determine what will be necessary by viewing his central insight in light of the peace proposals in the decades following the period he covers.
The 1919 Weizmann-Faisal agreement was never implemented, but in 1921 Great Britain divided Palestine and gave half to Transjordan. In later years, there were numerous two-state solutions proposed for the remaining half of Palestine, all of which ended exactly as did the 1919 pact:
(1) In 1937, the Jews accepted the two-state solution proposed by the British Peel Commission; the Arabs rejected it;
(2) In 1947, the Jews accepted the UN's two-state solution; the Arabs rejected it;
(3) In 1967, Israel wanted to trade land for recognition and peace; the Arabs issued their three adamant "no's";
(4) In 1978, Israel agreed to Palestinian autonomy as part of the peace agreement with Egypt; the Palestinians rejected it;
(5) In July 2000, at Camp David, Israel offered the Palestinians a state; they walked away;
(6) In December 2000, Israel formally accepted the Clinton Parameters for a two-state solution; in January 2001, the Palestinians rejected them;
(7) In 2005, Israel removed every soldier, settler, and settlement from Gaza and turned the entire territory over to the Palestinian Authority; so far there have been three rocket wars on Israel from the land Israel gave the Palestinians to build a state;
(8) In 2008, the Israeli prime minister begged the Palestinian president to accept a two-state solution in which the Palestinians would get land equal to 100 percent (after swaps) of the West Bank and Gaza; the Palestinians walked away again;
(9) In 2009, the new Israeli prime minister formally endorsed a Palestinian state, implemented an unprecedented settlement construction freeze, and met a stone wall.
Nearly 100 years after the first two-state solution was endorsed by the Zionists, the current Palestinian president repeatedly states he will "never" recognize a Jewish state; refuses to endorse "two states for two peoples" as the goal of the peace process; and will not give a Bir Zeit speech to match the Israeli prime minister's 2009 Bar-Ilan address that endorsed a Palestinian state. He demands more of the remaining jewelry and china, while maintaining a "right to recover" the rest and repeatedly "reconciling" with those dedicated to killing the other side of the family.
The problem in that scenario is not the jewelry and china. Those who read Professor Gribetz's book will likewise learn that the real estate was not the heart of the initial Jewish-Arab encounter. Middle East peace will not arrive simply by drawing a line on a map, because the crux of this dispute has never been the real estate.
Gaza Residents: Hamas Kept Us from Fleeing Israeli Attacks
Mudar Zahran, a Palestinian-Jordanian now living in Britain, has collected and published some truly shocking testimony from Gaza residents about Hamas's behavior during this summer's war with Israel. All his interviewees insisted on remaining anonymous, and it's easy to understand why: They accuse Hamas of deliberately creating hundreds of civilian casualties by forcing civilians to stay in places Israel had warned it was going to bomb.
Mudar Zahran, a Palestinian-Jordanian now living in Britain, has collected and published some truly shocking testimony from Gaza residents about Hamas's behavior during this summer's war with Israel. All his interviewees insisted on remaining anonymous, and it's easy to understand why: They accuse Hamas of deliberately creating hundreds of civilian casualties by forcing civilians to stay in places Israel had warned it was going to bomb.
Here, for instance, is the testimony of S., a medical worker:
The Israeli army sends warnings to people [Gazans] to evacuate buildings before an attack. The Israelis either call or send a text message. Sometimes they call several times to make sure everyone has been evacuated. Hamas's strict policy, though, was not to allow us to evacuate. Many people got killed, locked inside their homes by Hamas militants. Hamas's official Al-Quds TV regularly issued warnings to Gazans not to evacuate their homes. Hamas militants would block the exits to the places residents were asked to evacuate. In the Shijaiya area, people received warnings from the Israelis and tried to evacuate the area, but Hamas militants blocked the exits and ordered people to return to their homes. Some of the people had no choice but to run towards the Israelis and ask for protection for their families. Hamas shot some of those people as they were running; the rest were forced to return to their homes and get bombed. This is how the Shijaiya massacre happened. More than 100 people were killed.
And here's K., a graduate student at an Egyptian university who was visiting his family in Gaza this summer: "When people stopped listening to Hamas orders not to evacuate and began leaving their homes anyway, Hamas imposed a curfew: anyone walking out in the street was shot without being asked any questions. That way Hamas made sure people had to stay in their homes even if they were about to get bombed."
And H., who lost his leg in an Israeli bombing: "My father received a text-message from the Israeli army warning him that our area was going to be bombed, and Hamas prevented us from leaving. They said there was a curfew. A curfew, can you believe that?"
T., a former (and evidently disenchanted) Hamas government official, explained the policy's rationale:
Some people say Hamas wants civilians killed in order to gain global sympathy, but I believe this is not the main reason. I think the reason is that if all the people were allowed to evacuate their homes, they all would have ended up in a certain area in Gaza. If that happened, it would have made the rest of Gaza empty of civilians, and the Israelis would have been able to hit Hamas without worrying about civilians in all those empty areas. Hamas wanted civilians all over the place to confuse the Israelis and make their operations more difficult.
Nor is this the only crime of which Zahran's interviewees accused Hamas. For instance, three different people–two aid workers and an imam–said Hamas stole humanitarian aid and either kept it for its own people or sold it to ordinary Gazans for exorbitant prices.
Altogether, Zahran interviewed more than 20 Gazans, all of whom had shocking things to say. That doesn't guarantee that their stories are true. Palestinians frequently fabricate atrocity tales about Israel (see, for instance, the Jenin massacre that wasn't, or the perennial favorite about Israel trying to turn Palestinians into drug addicts), so there's no reason to think anti-Hamas Palestinians aren't equally capable of fabricating atrocity tales about Hamas.
Moreover, the interviewees were clearly terrified of Hamas, so it wouldn't be easy to get them to talk to the international media (which generally relies on either Hamas-approved fixers or local stringers), UN workers (many of whom are openly affiliated with Hamas), or human-rights organizations (which, like the media, generally rely on local investigators). Still, given how many crocodile tears the media, the UN, and human-rights groups have shed over alleged Israeli "war crimes" in Gaza, one would think they could spare some time and effort to investigate alleged Hamas war crimes against its own people.
That they haven't merely confirms, once again, two basic truths: First, these self-proclaimed moral arbiters care very little about human rights unless Israel can be blamed. And second, they're fundamentally lazy: They'll always prefer the easy route of collecting "testimony" against Israel, which Gaza residents can give without fear of consequences, to the hard work of digging for information about the abuses of a terrorist government that tortures and kills anyone who dares speak against it.
The 'Klinghoffer' Opera and the Mainstreaming of Jew Hatred
The Metropolitan Opera celebrates its annual opening night on Monday but most of the discussion about the 2014-15 season centers on a performance that won't happen for another month. The debut of its production of John Adams's The Death of Klinghoffer will not occur until Oct. 20, but the year-long debate about the Met's questionable judgment in staging an opera that treats the victim and the perpetrators in a terrorist murder as morally equivalent is heating up with predicable and utterly unpersuasive arguments arrayed in favor of the decision to ignore critics and move ahead with the performance.
The Metropolitan Opera celebrates its annual opening night on Monday but most of the discussion about the 2014-15 season centers on a performance that won't happen for another month. The debut of its production of John Adams's The Death of Klinghoffer will not occur until Oct. 20, but the year-long debate about the Met's questionable judgment in staging an opera that treats the victim and the perpetrators in a terrorist murder as morally equivalent is heating up with predicable and utterly unpersuasive arguments arrayed in favor of the decision to ignore critics and move ahead with the performance.
It should be recalled that back in June, the Met attempted to compromise with those outraged by its plan to run Klinghoffer by cancelling the HD broadcast of the opera around the world in theaters and on radio. But it refused to back down on producing the opera. At the time, the New York Times criticized the Met for implicitly acknowledging that a broadcast of an opera that depicts and rationalizes both anti-Semitism and murder of Jews would be problematic at a time when Jew hatred is on the rise around the globe. But in an editorial published Friday, the paper expressed its satisfaction at the Met's decision to keep the performances of Klinghoffer on its schedule. The fact that, if anything, the plague of anti-Semitism has grown even worse over the summer as Israel-haters bashed the Jewish state for defending itself against Islamist terrorists with similar attitudes toward Jews as the ones in Klinghoffer means nothing to the Times; it praised Met general manager Peter Gelb for being "true to its artistic mission."
The Times dismisses concerns about the opera's content and its potential role in fomenting more hate with facile arguments defending artistic freedom against political pressures that don't stand up to scrutiny. No one is saying that the Met doesn't have the right to put on Klinghoffer. What its critics are pointing out is that by putting on a piece that treats terrorism and hate for Jews, the Met is coming down on the wrong side of a moral question.
A more nuanced defense of the opera comes from Opera News, the most widely read publication about the art form in North America that also happens to be the Met's house organ (although it is allowed to critically review Met performances much to Gelb's ongoing dismay). In the September issue of the magazine, Phillip Kennicott, the Washington Post's chief arts critic, attempts to take up the cudgels for Klinghoffer but in doing so without the sort of cant and generalizations that the Times has indulged in, he unwittingly helps make the case for the opera's detractors.
Rather than merely attempt to pretend that the opera doesn't justify the motivations and the actions of the murderers of Leon Klinghoffer during the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship, Kennicott acknowledges that there is a clear imbalance in the way Palestinians and Jews are depicted by composer John Adams. In discussing the two opening choruses of members of the two groups, Kennicott admits that there is a clear difference in both the text and the musical language deployed by the artist:
There is a powerful musical difference between the choruses, and that difference helps trace the moral trajectory of the opera. The Palestinian chorus begins in a dream-like phantasmagoria, but as the memory of grievance becomes more powerful, it ends in a paroxysm of rage: "Our faith will take the stones he broke / and break his teeth."
The Jewish chorus, by contrast, remains vague and undirected, full of the detail of memory, but without the clear trajectory of anger that preceded it in the Palestinian song.
He then acknowledges the crux of the matter:
How you interpret these choruses becomes key to how you interpret the opera. Many of the work's critics found the mix of lyricism and anger in the Palestinian music (including long parlando passages from the four terrorists later in the work) to be too seductive, essentially a humanizing musical language that romanticized or in some way justified their violence. And they found the Jewish characters (including a scene that was later dropped from the opera that depicted a family at home in America chatting, sometimes ironically, about travel) antiheroic, scattered and pallid representations bogged down in the material world.
In other words, the Palestinians are real people with justifiable grievances while the Jews are shown in a distinctly unfavorable light. Kennicott is then forced to perform linguistic back flips in order to try to argue that the unflattering portrayal of the Jews is somehow indicative of the "real world" in which the Jews live and therefore a more compelling and complex narrative than the palpable anger of the Palestinians that the music keeps telling us is more attractive and more deserving of support. It's a nice try but it doesn't work.
More to the point, Kennicott claims the point of the opera is to criticize the whole idea of "forward-driven narratives of heroism and anger" and to choose instead more "wandering narratives" that leave us with no satisfying conclusions about events. That's just a rather complicated way of saying that Adams views one of the most callous acts of international terrorism as one that no one should view as a simple matter of murder driven by hatred of Jews. Which is to say that he is doing exactly what his critics allege when they say the whole point of the piece is moral relativism. Indeed, as Kennicott admits, Adams's goal is to "posit a continuity of humanity between the terrorists and their victims."
In defense of this position, Kennicott argues, "A continuity of humanity is the only hope for peace." That's true. But while both sides in the Achille Lauro hijacking are, of course, human beings, a piece whose purpose is to put the terrorist and their victims on the same plane is one that is not merely depicting hate, as the opera's defenders claim, but implicitly endorsing it as being no more objectionable than the position of those who are the objects of hatred.
The critic defends the piece because he thinks it is a good thing that we have discussions about serious issues in the opera house, a position that few would dispute. Yet in making that argument, Kennicott and the Met itself are being more than a little disingenuous. There are, after all, a lot of issues that no one wants debated in the public square, let alone in the opera house or concert hall. No one, or at least no one who had any hope of getting their work produced at the Met or any other respected arts institution, would seek to make similar comparisons between say, African-American victims of lynchings and the Ku Klux Klan or between blacks subjugated by apartheid and white South Africans. That is true despite the fact that a composer could give us choruses depicting the suffering of Confederates during and after the Civil War or the wrongs done to Afrikaners in the past, much like that of the Palestinians who are meant to humanize the terrorists who shoot the old Jew Klinghoffer and throw his body overboard. Nor did John Adams choose to use his much praised choral work commemorating the 9/11 attacks, On the Transmigration of Souls, to explain the reasons why Islamists think they have a bone to pick with the West.
The reason why the Met doesn't produce operas rationalizing Jim Crow or apartheid and the classical music world doesn't celebrate al-Qaeda is not because the arts world doesn't embrace works that stir up emotions or are controversial. Kennicott is right when he says there is a consensus about that being the business of artists. We don't hear such pieces because there is also also a consensus that racism is beyond the pale of such discussions and may not be justified even in the guise of high art. What Klinghoffer's critics have noticed and its defenders seek to ignore is that the opera's embrace by arts and media Mandarins illustrates that they consider Jew hatred to fall under the rubric of those expressions that may be debated rather than one that should be merely condemned by members of decent society as they would racism.
It is an unfortunate fact that in recent years forms of anti-Semitism have crept in from the margins of society and been mainstreamed. That is exactly what an opera that rationalizes the murder of an old man merely because he was a Jew does. This is not an issue on which intellectuals should think themselves free to agree to disagree. That is why those who are angry about the Met's decision are right and the arts community and anyone else who embraces this deplorable decision are not merely wrong but opening the door to a new era of anti-Semitism.
The Only Refugees in the World Denied the Right of Resettlement
The news that hundreds of Palestinians from Gaza drowned last week when the boats in which they were trying to reach Europe sank once again highlights the hypocrisy of the world's attitude toward the Palestinians. After all, the "international community" has designated two-thirds of all Gaza residents as bona fide refugees, even though the vast majority of them were born in Gaza and have lived there all their lives. And as bona fide refugees, they shouldn't have had to board rickety smugglers' boats in a desperate attempt to reach Europe; they should have been able to apply to the UN for orderly resettlement right from their refugee camps, just as thousands of other refugees do every year. But they can't, because Palestinians are the only refugees in the world who are denied the basic right of resettlement.
The news that hundreds of Palestinians from Gaza drowned last week when the boats in which they were trying to reach Europe sank once again highlights the hypocrisy of the world's attitude toward the Palestinians. After all, the "international community" has designated two-thirds of all Gaza residents as bona fide refugees, even though the vast majority of them were born in Gaza and have lived there all their lives. And as bona fide refugees, they shouldn't have had to board rickety smugglers' boats in a desperate attempt to reach Europe; they should have been able to apply to the UN for orderly resettlement right from their refugee camps, just as thousands of other refugees do every year. But they can't, because Palestinians are the only refugees in the world who are denied the basic right of resettlement.
Granted, they are also the only "refugees" in the world for whom refugeehood is an inheritable status that can be passed down to one's descendants in perpetuity, generation after generation. Under the definition used by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which deals with all the world's refugees except Palestinians, only a few thousand elderly Gazans who were personally displaced in 1948 would be considered refugees today, rather than the 1.2 million actually on UN rolls. So if the "international community" were to argue that Gazans don't deserve a right to resettlement because they aren't really refugees, that would be perfectly legitimate.
But it doesn't. In fact, not only has the world adopted the unique definition of refugeehood promulgated by the Palestinians' personal refugee agency, UNRWA, but it actively supports this definition by funding UNRWA's ever-expanding budget to keep pace with its ever-expanding number of "refugees." And once having accepted the claim that these born-and-bred Gazans are actually refugees from an Israel they've never seen, the international community is morally obligated to ensure that they enjoy the same rights as all other refugees.
Instead, Palestinians are the only refugees in the world who are denied the right of resettlement. Whereas UNHCR resettles tens of thousands of refugees every year, UNRWA hasn't resettled a single refugee in its 65 years of existence. On the contrary, the schools it runs for Palestinian refugees indoctrinate them from kindergarten on that there is one, and only one, way for them to end their refugee status: by "returning" to the towns or villages in Israel that their ancestors fled–which most of them have never seen, and some of which no longer even exist. In short, since Israel would never voluntarily accept all five million "refugees" on UNRWA's rolls, it's telling them that the only solution to their refugeehood is Israel's destruction.
According to a poll taken in late August, a whopping 43 percent of Gazans would like to emigrate. Many of these would-be emigrants are presumably among the two-thirds of Gazans registered as refugees, meaning they ought to be entitled to resettlement aid. So here's a modest proposal: Western countries, which are UNRWA's main donors, should take a big chunk of the over $1 billion a year they give UNRWA and spend it instead on resettling those Gazans who want to leave. Not only would that help the Gazan refugees themselves, but it would save money in the long run by significantly reducing the number of refugees under UNRWA's care.
Alternatively, they could tell UNRWA they're no longer willing to go along with the fiction that its five million "refugees" are really refugees, and from now on will provide funds only for those refugees who actually meet UNHCR's definition. The remaining money would go to the governments under which most of UNRWA's registered refugees live–primarily Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, and Lebanon–to help them provide the services UNRWA now provides.
But to continue defining Palestinians as refugees while denying them the basic right to resettlement is unconscionable. And all those Westerners who claim to be so concerned over Palestinian rights should be the first to protest this hypocritical and discriminatory practice.
Bill Clinton: Bibi Derangement Syndrome's Patient Zero
Ever since leaving office, Bill Clinton's fabrications about the Israeli-Palestinian peace process have only become more fanciful and self-serving, the consistent element of which is his adamant refusal to tell the truth. But there's another common thread to Clinton's world of make believe: he is patient zero of the ensuing epidemic of Bibi Derangement Syndrome.
Ever since leaving office, Bill Clinton's fabrications about the Israeli-Palestinian peace process have only become more fanciful and self-serving, the consistent element of which is his adamant refusal to tell the truth. But there's another common thread to Clinton's world of make believe: he is patient zero of the ensuing epidemic of Bibi Derangement Syndrome.
The latest episode of Clinton's condition took place at the Harkin Steak Fry in Iowa, when Clinton was goaded into defending his Middle East policy by a pro-Palestinian activist. Caleb Howe has the transcript of the video captured by C-Span cameras:
Activist: If we don't force [Netanyahu] to make peace, we will not have peace.
Clinton: Wait, wait, wait. First of all, I agree with that. But in 2000, Ehud Barak, I got him to agree to something that I'm not sure I would have gotten Rabin to agree to, and Rabin was murdered for giving land to the Palestinians.
Activist: I agree. But Netanyahu is not the guy.
Clinton: So, they got … I agree with that, but we had, I had him a state, they would have gotten 96% of the West Bank, land swap in Gaza, appropriate water rights … and East Jerusalem! Something that hasn't even been discussed since I left office.
And by the way, don't forget, both Arafat and Abbas later said they would take it. They said, they said, 'we changed our minds, we want it now' and by then they had a government wouldn't give it to them.
Let's unpack this. First of all, Clinton agrees that Netanyahu must be forced by the U.S. to make peace. Presumably Clinton doesn't agree with Samantha Power that the U.S. should invade Israel to force this peace, but he never says exactly which gun he'd prefer be held to Bibi's head. (Perhaps holding up weapons resupply during wartime, as President Obama has done?)
He also agrees with the protester that Netanyahu is "not the guy" with whom such a peace agreement can be signed. This will likely not make Israelis too happy, because they know from experience that when Clinton doesn't want an Israeli prime minister in office, he jumps right into the elections to try to arrange his preferred outcome.
In 1996, this meddling took the form of Clinton pretty much openly campaigning for Netanyahu's opponent, Shimon Peres. In 1999, this meant Clinton's advisors helping to run Ehud Barak's campaign. The first time he was nearly successful–if memory serves, many Israelis went to sleep with Peres leading the election returns and woke to prime minister-elect Netanyahu. The second time he was successful.
But all along it was personal animus that guided Clinton–a deeply dangerous and thoroughly irresponsible way to conduct foreign policy, which helps explain why Clinton's foreign policy was such a mess. Say what you will about George W. Bush's case for regime change in Iraq, but it rested on more than "There's something about this guy I just don't like." The same cannot be said for Clinton.
Indeed, it wasn't as though Netanyahu was intransigent on matters of peace with the Palestinians. Once in office, Netanyahu too struck deals with Arafat. He agreed to the Wye River accords despite his belief that Clinton went back on a promise to free Pollard, and he agreed to redeploy troops from Hebron while continuing to implement Oslo.
Next, we have Clinton's assertion that giving Palestinians sovereignty in East Jerusalem is "Something that hasn't even been discussed since I left office." This is obviously untrue. During the Bush presidency, Ehud Olmert made such an offer to Mahmoud Abbas, who walked away. Not only that, but even Netanyahu has hinted at a willingness to divide Jerusalem.
That also undercuts the latter part of that claim by Clinton, that Abbas regretted saying no but by the time he wanted such a deal it was off the table. It was not off the table; it was offered, again, to Abbas directly.
So is anything Clinton said true? Actually, there is a kernel of truth–no doubt purely accidental–in what he said about Barak and Rabin. But it further undermines his point. Rabin was far from the two-state-cheerleader the left makes him out to be. He was far more reluctant to consider dividing Jerusalem and establishing a fully independent Palestinian state than his later successors–including Benjamin Netanyahu. Bibi now is to the left of where Rabin was then on pretty much all the main issues.
So is Barak, of course, which was Clinton's point. But the real story here is the fact that you can't simply jump from Rabin to Barak: Netanyahu was in between, and he played a significant role by forcing the right to accept and implement Oslo in order to govern and by showing the Israeli right could be talked into withdrawing from territory, even places as holy and significant as Hebron. The rightist premiers that followed Barak continued withdrawing from territory and offering peace plans to the Palestinian leadership.
When it comes to Israel, liberal politicians tend to fall into one of two categories: either they're ignorant of Israeli history and politics, or they assume their audience to be. For Clinton it's almost surely the latter, which makes it all the more ignoble.
Palestinian Elections Postponed, Obviously
As a rule, Palestinians don't tend to do democracy. The last time there was a proper parliamentary election was in 2006. That one had been essentially foisted upon them by the United States, but Hamas topped the polls and most people have regretted it ever since. There should have been another in 2009, but it was simply never held and few seemed greatly troubled by this fact.
As a rule, Palestinians don't tend to do democracy. The last time there was a proper parliamentary election was in 2006. That one had been essentially foisted upon them by the United States, but Hamas topped the polls and most people have regretted it ever since. There should have been another in 2009, but it was simply never held and few seemed greatly troubled by this fact.
Similarly, the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has managed to spin his four-year term into almost a decade as the head of the Palestinian Authority. When Abbas sabotaged the peace negotiations with Israel in May and instead signed a unity deal with the terrorists of Hamas, it was announced that Palestinian elections would be held within six months. European governments applauded. They welcomed the Palestinian return to democracy. But now, quite predictably, we hear that elections have been "postponed" once again.
This time the reason given is the aftermath of Hamas's war with Israel. The PA prime minister Rami Hamdallah has claimed that rebuilding in Gaza is more of a priority than elections right now and that the war has made voting unpractical. This of course is nonsense. If elections could be held in the most war-torn parts of Iraq and Afghanistan then there is no material reason why they couldn't be held in Gaza and in the West Bank.
A far more practical reason for why free and fair elections can't be held in Gaza right now has nothing to do with the fact that parts of it are in ruins, and far more to do with the fact that it is run by Hamas. Of course the terror group's left-wing apologists never tire of telling anyone who will listen that Hamas are the democratically elected government of Gaza. The fact that once Hamas took power they then promptly executed large numbers of their political opponents never seems to register with these people. And just like Abbas in the West Bank, Hamas has failed to ever hold any elections since.
Indeed, Abbas's own record is little better than that of Hamas's. At one point reports of how Hamas supporters in the West Bank were being imprisoned and tortured were common. Gradually, however, Fatah's power in much of the West Bank has weakened. More recently in cities such as Nablus, Hebron, and Jenin PA security forces have seemingly abandoned their efforts to suppress Islamist groups such as Hamas and others.
This is the real reason that it was always impossible to imagine the Palestinian Authority giving the green light for another election. Back in 2006 Abbas's Fatah had been assured that they would win. They are not about to make the same mistake again. Indeed, in the wake of Hamas's recent war with Israel, the Islamists are boasting the kind of approval rating that Abbas could only dream of. Recent polling has shown that even In the West Bank, some 66 percent of Palestinians would vote for Hamas if elections were held today.
And so elections won't be held today, or any time soon for that matter. Supposedly they are being put off until sometime next year. Of course, by then there will be a new reason not to hold elections. But the important thing for Abbas is that he is maintaining the veneer of democracy. It's an act that only fools those who wish to be fooled by it. But for those in the Obama administration and the European Union who insist that Abbas is legitimate and that Israel and the world must treat him as such, these pretentions toward democracy are very convenient. In reality, however, Abbas is a despot.
Israel's Predetermined Guilt and the Irrelevant Left
If you've been around Israeli politics long enough, you pick up on the one thing that bothers leftist "human-rights" groups more than anything: their irrelevance. At times, their frustration boils over into quite humorous attempts to coopt credit for Israel's democratic achievements when in fact, as usual, they've had nothing to do with it. Today's New York Times marks yet another such instance.
If you've been around Israeli politics long enough, you pick up on the one thing that bothers leftist "human-rights" groups more than anything: their irrelevance. At times, their frustration boils over into quite humorous attempts to coopt credit for Israel's democratic achievements when in fact, as usual, they've had nothing to do with it. Today's New York Times marks yet another such instance.
The Times story is on official Israeli investigations into possible wrongdoing on its part during its recent war in Gaza. This is exactly what Israel does after wars, and what it has done for decades. Not only does Israel tend to investigate individual strikes, but it puts the IDF's strategic command under the microscope, and sometimes, as with the 2006 Lebanon war, takes the investigation right up to the Israeli prime minister himself.
Because human-rights groups are thus irrelevant to the process of Israel defending human rights, they seek to convince credulous reporters (or reporters who know better but prefer to keep up the propaganda war against the Israeli government) that when Israel does something right, it's because of them. It may sound laughable to those who know the basics of Israeli life and politics, but these activist groups have a trump card: the New York Times will publish their self-congratulatory blathering.
Today that's precisely what the Times does. It starts out with the headline: "Israel, Facing Criticism, to Investigate Possible Military Misconduct in Gaza." If you didn't know better, you might read that headline and think the beginning and the end of the headline are related. They are not. It's true that Israel is facing criticism. It is also true that Israel will investigate possible military misconduct. It is not true, however, that Israel is investigating possible misconduct because fringe activists are lobbing spitballs at the IDF.
The Times continues down this road, in the process offering an illuminating portrait of just what Israeli human-rights groups do:
Some said the timing of the inquiries appeared to be an attempt by the Israeli government to pre-empt the impact of international investigations into allegations of possible Israeli war crimes committed in Gaza. They also pointed out that the cases, opened by Israel's Military Advocate General Corps, included obvious episodes that had already drawn condemnation.
One prominent Israeli human rights group, B'Tselem, refused to participate in the investigations and said history showed that the Israeli military could not possibly conduct a credible prosecution of itself.
"Based on past experience, we can only regretfully say that Israeli law enforcement authorities are unable and unwilling to investigate allegations of breaches of international humanitarian law committed during fighting in Gaza," the organization said in a statement. "Should the existing whitewashing mechanism be replaced with an independent investigative body, we would gladly cooperate with it."
So Israel will investigate without being prompted by B'Tselem. Also, B'Tselem won't get involved in the investigation. What will they be doing? Whatever it is, it has no bearing on justice and truth and morality in war. (This 2011 COMMENTARY essay by Noah Pollak remains the indispensable profile of the group.)
Earlier in the piece, however, the Times delivered a truly telling message:
The announcement, conveyed at a briefing by the Israeli military, came only two weeks after a cease-fire in the conflict, an unusually speedy response. But critics, including human rights advocates in Israel, said it remained to be seen whether the investigations would yield significant criminal indictments and punishments.
Think about that second sentence. It "remained to be seen" if there would be indictments from the investigation that just began. You would be hard-pressed to think of a more superfluous sentence to appear in a major newspaper. But the key is who the Times is supposedly paraphrasing: "critics, including human rights advocates."
That's right: the human-rights groups are upset that Israel isn't considered–or considers itself–guilty until proved innocent. In fact, they don't even care if those under investigation are proved innocent. They want "significant criminal indictments and punishments." Not just punishments: significant punishments.
Punishments for what? Well, nobody knows that yet because Israel–which is far more trustworthy in such investigations than outside organizations like the UN, which the Goldstone affair compellingly demonstrated–hasn't completed its investigation. And "human-rights" groups like B'Tselem don't know either, and won't know, because they refuse to participate in the investigation.
What Israel's critics want is not justice. They want show trials. Israel has long been more than willing to be its own toughest critic and to discipline anyone who earns it, in the military or in its political establishment. But Israel's critics there and in the international community, including so-called human-rights groups, want Israelis punished for defending themselves lawfully and morally. For surviving and thriving in the face of their genocidal enemies.
To Israel's critics in the "human-rights" NGO community, Israel's guilt is simply taken for granted. The irrelevance of those groups is a testament to Israel's collective judgment.
"Occupation" and Anti-Semitism
A Yale University chaplain recently resigned "on his own initiative" over a letter to the New York Times blaming Israel and the Jews for anti-Semitism. Clearly, nothing Israel does or doesn't do justifies attacks on Jewish citizens of other countries, but even if did, Rev. Bruce Shipman's reasoning would have been fallacious. According to Shipman, "the best antidote to anti-Semitism would be for Israel's patrons abroad" to pressure Israel "for final-status resolution to the Palestinian question." Yet based on the evidence, the Israeli policy change most likely to reduce anti-Semitic outbreaks isn't ending its "continuing occupation of the West Bank," but reoccupying evacuated Gaza.
A Yale University chaplain recently resigned "on his own initiative" over a letter to the New York Times blaming Israel and the Jews for anti-Semitism. Clearly, nothing Israel does or doesn't do justifies attacks on Jewish citizens of other countries, but even if did, Rev. Bruce Shipman's reasoning would have been fallacious. According to Shipman, "the best antidote to anti-Semitism would be for Israel's patrons abroad" to pressure Israel "for final-status resolution to the Palestinian question." Yet based on the evidence, the Israeli policy change most likely to reduce anti-Semitic outbreaks isn't ending its "continuing occupation of the West Bank," but reoccupying evacuated Gaza.
After all, every major upsurge in anti-Semitic attacks in recent years has coincided with a war that began when terrorists attacked Israel from territory it had vacated: spring 2002, when Israel reinvaded parts of the West Bank it had left under the Oslo Accords to stop a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings; summer 2006, when Hezbollah sparked a war by launching a deadly cross-border attack from south Lebanon, which Israel had vacated six years earlier; and two ground operations in Gaza, one in winter 2008/09 and one this past July and August, both launched in response to the incessant rocket fire from that territory ever since Israel withdrew every last soldier and settler in 2005. During the intervening years, incidents of anti-Semitism were hundreds or even thousands of percent lower, despite Israel's "continuing occupation of the West Bank."
The latest Gaza war epitomizes this counterintuitive truth. In July, anti-Semitic attacks were up 130 percent in America, 436 percent in Europe, 600 percent in South Africa, and a whopping 1,200 percent in South America compared to July 2013. To cite one typical example, Scotland recorded more anti-Semitic attacks during the first week of August alone than in all of 2013.
In other words, what really spurs anti-Semites to come out of the woodwork isn't "the occupation," but Israeli-caused casualties. And while one might have though withdrawals would decrease such casualties by eliminating day-to-day friction between Palestinians (or Lebanese) and Israeli troops, in reality, the opposite has occurred: Every such withdrawal has resulted in terrorist organizations taking over the vacated territory and using it to launch attacks on Israel, which in turn has produced a sharp rise in casualties, for two reasons.
First, in territory it controls, Israel can prevent terror by routine policing. But once it has quit an area, counterterrorism operations require reinvading–and military operations are obviously far more lethal than police work. Second, in territory it controls, Israel can prevent terrorists from embedding military infrastructure like tunnels and rocket launchers amid a civilian population. But once it evacuates a territory, terrorists are free to do exactly that, and they do. Consequently, any counterterrorism operation becomes far more deadly to the terrorists' own people.
The result, as I explained here last month, is that Palestinian casualties have soared since Israel's 2005 pullout from Gaza. In the current war, for instance, the UN claims 2,131 Palestinians were killed. That's more than the 1,727 fatalities Gaza suffered during the second intifada of 2000-2005. In other words, Gaza just lost more people in 50 days than it did during the bloodiest five years of the period when Israel controlled the territory.
Mark Gardner of CST, which monitors anti-Semitism in Britain, pithily explained the problem last month: During wartime, "The British public is constantly exposed to pictures of wounded or dead Palestinian children, and the effect is apparent." And because such wars have been occurring every two to four years, "the issue is ignited almost continually. The Jewish community gets hit again and again, without reprieve, and the situation is not given a chance to return to relative normalcy."
So if anyone really thinks Israeli policy should be blamed for global anti-Semitism, the data shows there's only one policy change that might actually be effective: reoccupying Gaza. Somehow, I doubt that's what the Bruce Shipmans of the world really want.
Abbas's Rigged Peace Plan
Over the weekend Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was in Cairo at the Arab League conference. Precisely what Abbas said to the foreign ministers of the other Arab countries remains unclear, as his keynote address was declared a closed session at the last minute. However, during his stay in Cairo Abbas was meeting with Egyptian President Sisi and others in an effort to drum up regional support for his new peace initiative. Indeed, the head of the Arab League, Nabil el-Araby, has hailed Abbas as being ready to negotiate a final settlement.
Over the weekend Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was in Cairo at the Arab League conference. Precisely what Abbas said to the foreign ministers of the other Arab countries remains unclear, as his keynote address was declared a closed session at the last minute. However, during his stay in Cairo Abbas was meeting with Egyptian President Sisi and others in an effort to drum up regional support for his new peace initiative. Indeed, the head of the Arab League, Nabil el-Araby, has hailed Abbas as being ready to negotiate a final settlement.
Washington is noticeably less confident. After Abbas dispatched his chief negotiators to meet with Secretary Kerry, U.S. officials have criticized the plan as "unilateral" and even hinted that there would be an American veto should Abbas seek to pursue his plan at the United Nations and in the Security Council.
This chilly response from the administration, usually so impetuous about racing ahead with the peace process, should certainly send some alarm bells ringing. After all, given that Abbas all but shut down the last round of peace negotiations, finally fleeing them just at the moment at which a decision had to be made about their extension, one has to wonder why he is suddenly so eager to resume the talks. And why now exactly? Having apparently been only too pleased to escape the negotiation table, why is Abbas suddenly so determined to be seen as reengaging?
After all, Abbas had every opportunity to continue with the U.S. sponsored negotiations that the Palestinian Authority had been participating in until May of this year. Yet Abbas had refused to extend the talks unless his extensive list of demands were met in advance, insisting that the Palestinians would instead pursue membership of several key international bodies. The Israelis had agreed to a dramatic increase in the number of Palestinian terror prisoners that they would release provided that Abbas agreed to press on with negotiations and stay away from the international bodies. Abbas chose to forgo both the additional prisoner releases and an extension of the talks. Now he insists he is ready to get back to talking peace with Israel.
One reason for Abbas's sudden turnaround stems from his own Fatah faction's standing in the wake of the recent war in Gaza. It might be assumed that after the death and destruction that Hamas's war wrought on the people of Gaza, that terror group would have fallen permanently out of favor. Yet perversely the bloodletting has apparently only endeared Hamas to the Palestinian public. Recent polling shows that in both Gaza and the West Bank Hamas enjoys unprecedented levels of approval, with 74 percent expressing a desire to see Hamas's terror tactics extended to the West Bank. Unlike Fatah, Hamas is seen as engaging in real "resistance." And because both the Obama administration and the Europeans put such considerable pressure on Israel to reward Hamas's terror war by granting far-reaching concessions, the message was received loud and clear on the Palestinian street: terrorism gets things done.
Abbas is desperate to be seen to be regaining the initiative. Yet given his past record, it would be mistaken to imagine that he has suddenly become serious about ending the conflict with Israel. Abbas has had multiple opportunities to achieve Palestinian statehood but has shirked the responsibility every time, knowing full well that an Israeli withdrawal would mean his inevitable overthrow by Hamas. Rather, as becomes apparent when one looks more closely at what is being put forward by Abbas, the focus is less on achieving peace and more on establishing a series of penalties against Israel for when the talks fail to bear fruit, as Abbas knows will be the case. This isn't about reconciliation, this is about demonstrating to the Palestinian public that diplomacy is still an effective way of waging warfare by other means.
From what we know about the plan–from Abbas's own words to Israel's opposition leader Isaac Herzog and from what has been leaked by former PA minister Mahmoud al-Habash–the plan is booby-trapped against Israel at every turn. The plan allows for negotiations to take place for a maximum of nine months, with that period being broken down into a timetable for reaching agreement on the key issues of Abbas's choosing, with borders clearly featuring as his highest priority. If at any point this process doesn't go according to plan and Abbas's timetable isn't kept to then Abbas is threatening to drag Israel before the International Criminal Court, to end cooperation on security in the West Bank and to resume efforts to achieve statehood via the UN.
There were many reasons to suspect that the last round of U.S. sponsored negotiations were unfavorable to the Israeli position, but even that playing field wasn't uneven enough for Abbas. The only negotiations Abbas is interested in are ones that are fixed in his favor–fixed to ensure he gets what he wants, and more importantly, fixed to punish Israel if he doesn't. For the moment even John Kerry appears nervous about backing so outrageous a proposal as this one. But with Abbas expected to announce his initiative later this month at the UN General Assembly meeting, we'll see if the administration's opposition holds out.
"Scholarship and Politics Don't Mix!" Say Those Who Mix Scholarship and Politics
By now, many COMMENTARY readers will have heard of Steven Salaita, about whom I wrote here. Salaita resigned from his position in Virginia Tech's English Department to take a job at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, in its Department of American Indian Studies. But Salaita's job offer was contingent on the approval of UIUC's Board of Trustees, and last month, after being made aware of a series of incendiary anti-Israel statements Salaita had made on Twitter, UIUC Chancellor Phyllis Wise declined to send Salaita's appointment to the Board. The Board has stood behind Wise.
By now, many COMMENTARY readers will have heard of Steven Salaita, about whom I wrote here. Salaita resigned from his position in Virginia Tech's English Department to take a job at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, in its Department of American Indian Studies. But Salaita's job offer was contingent on the approval of UIUC's Board of Trustees, and last month, after being made aware of a series of incendiary anti-Israel statements Salaita had made on Twitter, UIUC Chancellor Phyllis Wise declined to send Salaita's appointment to the Board. The Board has stood behind Wise.
In my previous post, I gave a sample of the tweets in question, so I'll mention just two here: in one, Salaita responds to the kidnapping of the three Israeli boys that ignited the most recent Gaza conflict: "You may be too refined to say it, but I'm not: I wish all the fucking West Bank settlers would go missing." The second mocked young American men who died in the conflict fighting for Israel: "No wonder Israel prefers killing Palestinians from the sky. It turns out American college kids aren't very good at ground combat?"
I don't know whether the university administration should have stepped in so late in the game—Salaita was already scheduled to teach courses in the fall—to refuse to approve Salaita's appointment. Sensible people are worried both about the implications for the academic freedom of conservatives and about the influence of donor money on academic appointments. But whatever the merits of the administration's position, at least one line Salaita's defenders are taking should be, as Liel Leibovitz has shown, viewed with great suspicion.
According to a petition, now signed by over 17,000, Salaita is a "brilliant, ethical, and prolific" professor, blacklisted for "his political views on Israel." He is, says one of his academic defenders, a "world renowned scholar," exercising his " freedom to found new knowledge, which is often only possible by . . . continually retesting norms and assumptions, without fear of reprisals from entrenched interests." According to this complaint, Salaita, chosen by a department using scholarly standards to judge his scholarly work, was ousted by non-scholarly Neanderthals who dislike his politics.
Is Salaita a "world renowned scholar?" Although he has published works with university presses, including Temple University Press and Syracuse University Press, his resume, which also includes work for deeply politicized presses like Zed Books and Pluto Press, is not the stuff of which international scholarly renown is made. But Leibovitz has done more than read Salaita's resume; he has read Salaita's book, Israel's Dead Soul.
In it, he finds the same propagandistic streak that one finds in Salaita's tweets. For example, in a chapter devoted to showing that the Anti-Defamation League should be regarded as a hate group, Salaita says, "it is worth noting that numerous cases of anti-Semitic vandalism in 2007 and 2008 were found to actually have been committed by Jews." Salaita provides four examples of such vandalism and claims that one of the vandals was "trained by the Mossad." In fact, the New York Times, which Salaita cites, says only that the evidently deranged suspect claimed to be trained by the Mossad. Never mind. Salaita implies, not at all subtly, not only that anti-Semitism is exaggerated but also that this exaggeration is the deliberate result of, well, a secretive Jewish—I mean Israeli!—plot.
I don't want to rest my case on Leibovitz's reading of Israeli Dead Souls. But it is disingenuous for Salaita's defenders to make so much of the distinction between scholarship, which Salaita and the department that chose him supposedly practice, and politics, which Salaita's detractors supposedly practice. Leibovitz wonders how it can be that Salaita, who has done little work on Native Americans, was hired by a Department of American Indian Studies in the first place. The answer is that American Indian Studies, or Native American Studies, emerged as part of the movement toward Ethnic Studies in the late 1960s.
This movement explicitly sought to break down the wall between scholarship and politics. This statement from the Critical Ethnic Studies Association sums up the view well: "Ethnic studies scholarship has laid the foundation for analyzing how racism, settler colonialism, immigration, imperialism, and slavery interact in the creation and maintenance of systems of domination, dispossession, criminalization, expropriation, exploitation, and violence that are predicated upon hierarchies of racialized, gendered, sexualized, economized, and nationalized social existence in the United States and beyond."
From this point of view, whether you study the domination of Palestinians by Israelis, the domination of blacks by whites, or the domination of Native Americans by the descendants of Europeans is neither here nor there. What matters is that you are judged capable of making a contribution to the anti-colonialist program. Steven Salaita, who has been best known for his role in the boycott, divestment, sanctions movement, in which the chair of UIUC's American Indian Studies department is also engaged, certainly filled that bill.
Yet Salaita's defenders are shocked, simply shocked, that politics may play a role in academic appointments. I think that the specific character of those tweets, not Salaita's political views, sunk Salaita. Many professors who favor a boycott of Israel have been hired, tenured, and promoted without incident, and anti-Israeli sentiment is far more visible at our colleges and universities than pro-Israel sentiment. But even if the trustees did decide to reject Salaita because they disagreed with his politics, how can Salaita's crowd blame them? They merely would be taking seriously the idea that there is no distinction between politics and scholarship and concluding, properly, that scholars deserve no special deference.
Ignoring Real Syrian Refugees to Support Fake Palestinian Ones
I realize it's been a busy week, what with ISIS beheading journalists, Russia invading Ukraine, and deadliest of all (to quote the inimitable Sultan Knish), Israel threatening to build new houses. But it's nevertheless shocking that one UN announcement last week should have attracted so little international attention: Last Friday, the number of registered Syrian refugees topped the 3 million mark. And those are just the ones who have made it out of Syria and registered with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. The agency estimates that another 6.5 million are internally displaced, bringing the total number of displaced Syrians to almost half the country's population.
I realize it's been a busy week, what with ISIS beheading journalists, Russia invading Ukraine, and deadliest of all (to quote the inimitable Sultan Knish), Israel threatening to build new houses. But it's nevertheless shocking that one UN announcement last week should have attracted so little international attention: Last Friday, the number of registered Syrian refugees topped the 3 million mark. And those are just the ones who have made it out of Syria and registered with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. The agency estimates that another 6.5 million are internally displaced, bringing the total number of displaced Syrians to almost half the country's population.
But buried about halfway through the announcement is a sentence that goes a long way toward explaining the international apathy: "Syrians are now the world's largest refugee population under UNHCR care, second only in number to the decades-long Palestinian crisis." In other words, even as it tries to solicit aid for distressed Syrians, the UN itself is telling people that another refugee crisis is even greater, and hence presumably more deserving of their money and attention. And it has peddled this nonsensical claim so successfully, for so long, that it now finds itself unable to meet the needs of a real crisis: The $2 billion it's desperately seeking to keep Syrian refugees alive through the upcoming winter has already been squandered on five million faux refugees, most of whom don't need it at all.
Of course, there are real Palestinian refugees–primarily the 500,000 in Syria, whose plight, like that of other Syrians, is dire. Moreover, though most of the Palestinians temporarily displaced by the Hamas-Israel war are now returning home, Gaza will need reconstruction aid.
But of the 5 million Palestinians registered as "refugees" with their own private UN agency, UNRWA, most aren't displaced in any fashion: They have lived in the same places for decades, and have houses, jobs, extended families, friends, schools, health care, and all the other accoutrements of normal life. Moreover, most live in places that, by Mideast standards, are exceptionally safe and stable, including 2.1 million in Jordan and 750,000 in the West Bank.
Nevertheless, UNRWA's staff and budget dwarfs that of UNHCR. It has 30,000 employees to deal with 5 million "refugees," while UNHCR has 8,600 to handle 10.5 million refugees plus more than twice as many other "people of concern," including 17.7 million internally displaced. UNRWA's regular budget is $1 billion a year, bolstered by periodic emergency appeals ($300 million in 2013); UNHCR had a regular budget of $4 billion plus $1.3 billion in emergency appeals as of mid-2013, but for a population seven times as large–35.8 million "people of concern."
Thus UNRWA has one staffer for every 167 Palestinians while UNHCR has one for every 4,163 non-Palestinians, and UNRWA has $260 for every Palestinian while UNHCR has $148 for every non-Palestinian. Yet the needs of the people UNHCR cares for–who have lost their homes, their jobs and their entire lives–are incomparably greater than those of the Palestinians, most of whom lead completely normal lives.
Much has been written, correctly, about how UNRWA helps perpetuate the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But to my mind, the greater outrage is the degree to which UNRWA diverts international money and attention from those who need it desperately–like the Syrian refugees–to those who don't need it at all, like the many Palestinian "refugees" who became Jordanian citizens decades ago.
And unlike the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, this is a problem the West can easily solve. Western nations provide most of UNRWA's budget, so all they have to do is reallocate this money–some to UNHCR, and some, at least initially, to Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, and perhaps Lebanon, to cushion the shock of suddenly having to provide health, education, and welfare services to millions of people who currently receive those services from UNRWA.
Then, with five million faux refugees out of the picture, perhaps the real ones will finally get the attention they deserve.
A Rabbi Upsets the Church of Liberalism
Last week, Rabbi Richard Block caused a bit of a stir by announcing he was canceling his subscription to the New York Times. It caused a stir because of who he is: "a lifelong Democrat, a political liberal, a Reform rabbi, and for four decades, until last week, a New York Times subscriber," as he wrote in Tablet.
Last week, Rabbi Richard Block caused a bit of a stir by announcing he was canceling his subscription to the New York Times. It caused a stir because of who he is: "a lifelong Democrat, a political liberal, a Reform rabbi, and for four decades, until last week, a New York Times subscriber," as he wrote in Tablet.
Every so often, someone surprises and offends the intelligentsia by revealing they don't read the Times. National Review's Jay Nordlinger wrote the definitive column on the subject back in 2004 (reprinted online at NRO a few years ago). Because Block represented a somewhat prominent liberal defector, the true believers of the religion of liberalism were aghast.
Perhaps no one took this more personally than Chemi Shalev, columnist for Haaretz. Most of Shalev's column is pretty silly, accusing Block of intellectual retreat because he no longer will give his money to the house organ of the Church of Liberalism. This is, essentially, the I know you are but what am I response to Block, since the Times's extreme ideological rigidity and enforced narrative conformity are precisely what Block objects to about the newspaper. But Shalev's column–actually, one sentence of the column–is interesting for two reasons.
The first is the extent to which the rise of conservative and pro-Israel alternative media has slowly driven the left mad. Shalev writes:
Really, Rabbi Block? You won't miss the New York Times? You'll make do with Fox News and the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Free Beacon, because they report on Israel in the way you deem acceptable? You'll give up the Times because they upset you on Gaza?
It's the third sentence there, of course, that is the interesting one. Can you imagine, Shalev asks, someone giving up the Times? What will they read, the Washington Free Beacon? This is supposed to be an insult directed at the Free Beacon, but of course a Haaretz columnist taking a shot at the reporting chops of the Beacon is actually punching up. (Sample piece from today's Haaretz: Sefi Rachlevsky's argument that the country's Orthodox Jewish schools are putting Israel in danger of transforming the Jewish state into "the world of ISIS." Haaretz tweeted out a link to the article, writing: "Israel needs humanistic science education, not religious – or else it will become like ISIS.")
The other reason that line is interesting is because it offers an opportunity to point something out about the Wall Street Journal. Shalev includes the Journal with Fox and the Beacon, presumably to impugn the objectivity of its reporting. Shalev, in other words, has no idea what he's talking about. As everybody knows, the Journal's editorial page is conservative but its reporting–as the data make explicitly clear–is not. There is a view among many leftists that if the editors of a publication are reliably supportive of Israel, the entire publication isn't to be trusted. It would be shame if Shalev subscribed to this mania.
But more importantly, the summer war with Gaza made clear that when it comes to reporting on the conflict in the Middle East, no one holds a candle to the Journal. It was by far the most important newspaper to read, at least outside of Israel, to understand the complex web of diplomacy before and during the war. Adam Entous, in particular, was head and shoulders above any of his peers.
Entous had two major scoops during the war, in addition to excellent general reporting. The first told the story of how the alliance between Israel and Egypt's new strongman Abdel Fattah el-Sisi formed after the Egyptian military overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi in a coup. The story explained how Egypt's policies changed toward Gaza, how Israel's assessment of Sisi developed, and how and why the ceasefire diplomacy during the war took shape.
The second was the major scoop that the Obama administration had downgraded its military cooperation with Israel during the war and even withheld a missile shipment in order to tie Israel's hands and force it to accept a ceasefire opposed not just by Israel but by the Arab states in the immediate vicinity who understood the deal would benefit Hamas and its benefactors, Qatar and Turkey.
Meanwhile, the Times was making a fool of itself. It wasn't just biased; it was, as the better reporting elsewhere showed, creating a version of events so far removed from reality as to make the reader wonder which war the Times was covering. This wasn't altogether surprising: the Times Jerusalem bureau chief has had a disastrous tenure and does not appear to be at all familiar with the basic geography of the country she covers and the municipality out of which her bureau is based. And the Times's Gaza correspondent was apparently using a photo of Yasser Arafat as his Facebook profile picture.
In sum, the point is not about bias: that's nothing new. The point is that if you read the Times's war coverage you did not learn anything about the war. You simply read proofread versions of Hamas press releases. I can't speak for Rabbi Block, but I get the impression he's not canceling his Times subscription because he can't deal with inconvenient facts. I imagine he's canceling his subscription because he is seeking out the facts, and this summer proved he'd have to go elsewhere for them.
Abbas's Fake Ultimatum to Israel
Mahmoud Abbas has come up with what seems like a foolproof plan to pressure Israel into withdrawing from the West Bank and allowing the creation of a Palestinian state. The Palestinian Authority leader is reportedly planning to give an ultimatum to the Israelis demanding they agree to the borders of such a state and threatening to withdraw security cooperation and go to the United Nations for redress if they don't. It sounds smart but, like virtually every other initiative undertaken by the PA, it's entirely fake, and his threats are, for the most part, a transparent bluff.
Mahmoud Abbas has come up with what seems like a foolproof plan to pressure Israel into withdrawing from the West Bank and allowing the creation of a Palestinian state. The Palestinian Authority leader is reportedly planning to give an ultimatum to the Israelis demanding they agree to the borders of such a state and threatening to withdraw security cooperation and go to the United Nations for redress if they don't. It sounds smart but, like virtually every other initiative undertaken by the PA, it's entirely fake, and his threats are, for the most part, a transparent bluff.
Abbas's plan is to set up a nine-month negotiating period that would start with Israel being forced to agree to a map for a Palestinian state largely along the parameters of the 1967 lines at the outset. After that, the parties would negotiate other issues including refugees, water, settlements, and security cooperation. If the Israelis don't do as Abbas bids, he will not only run to the UN to get it to grant the Palestinians independence and to the International Criminal Court to get the Jewish state indicted for their "crimes" against the Palestinians. He will also withdraw security cooperation.
Given the anger about Israel in the international community in the wake of the war in Gaza and the destruction and death suffered by the Palestinians during that conflict, Abbas thinks the timing is perfect for a round of pressure directed at the Jewish state. With President Obama openly displaying his anger and resentment about Israel's government, the Palestinians may believe Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's deeply divided government will crack up and give him what he wants.
While President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry may take Abbas seriously and use this initiative as the excuse for another round of Middle East diplomacy, I doubt that Netanyahu is foolish enough to take the bait. Despite his grandstanding, Abbas won't sign any peace deal no matter where his putative state's borders would be drawn. Nor has he the slightest interest in withdrawing security cooperation with Israel.
Why can Israel be so sure that Abbas doesn't mean what he says?
First, it should be remembered that despite Abbas's claims that Israel has yet to put forward a map of where an acceptable Palestinian state might be, the PA has already received several such maps and turned each one of them down over the course of negotiations stretching back to 2000. When former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered Abbas a map pretty much along the lines he is demanding in 2008, he fled the negotiations and wouldn't return to the table for years. In the latest round with the Netanyahu government during the past year, Abbas wouldn't negotiate seriously on any issue and again seized the first pretext to break them off.
The reason for this behavior is that although Abbas sometimes talks a good game about peace, he knows his public is not ready for a deal that will recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state alongside a Palestinian one. So as much as he has put on a good show in recent years about wanting a state, his goal has always been to avoid a peace deal or even being put in a position where he would be forced to say either yes or no to one.
Abbas does like the idea of going to the UN and the ICC since that allows him to avoid making reciprocal agreements with Israel, recognizing a Jewish state, and acting as if the future of the Palestinians lies in cooperation rather than futile "resistance." But he also knows that the UN can't give him a state.
As for the threat of Abbas ending security cooperation with Israel, that's a bad joke. While the Israelis do view any help they get from the various PA security forces as useful, the main beneficiary of the cooperation is not the Jewish state; it's Abbas. As the revelations of a planned Hamas coup against the PA uncovered by the Israelis proved, the PA leader's hold on his office as well as his personal security depends on Israel's good will.
That fact should also factor into an understanding of why Israelis are so reluctant to hand over more territory to Abbas. While his more moderate brand of Palestinian nationalism is certainly to be preferred over that of Hamas's Islamist rejectionism, the lack of enthusiasm for peace among Palestinians and the popularity of Hamas both restrains the PA leader's ability to make peace and would render any such deal a perilous risk for Israel.
These conclusions are bolstered by a new poll of Palestinian public opinion that shows Hamas's popularity skyrocketing in the wake of the destructive war they imposed upon the country this summer. As the Times of Israel reports:
According to the data collected on August 26-30 by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) headed by pollster Khalil Shikaki, 79 percent of Palestinians questioned in Gaza and the West Bank said that Hamas had won the war against Israel, while only 3% said Israel had won. …
In stark contrast to predictions voiced during Operation Protective Edge by senior Israeli military officers saying the extent of damage in Gaza would likely turn the civilian population against Hamas, 94% of respondents said they were satisfied with Hamas's performance in confronting the IDF and 78% were pleased with the movement's defense of civilians in Gaza. Eighty-six percent of the 1,270 adults questioned in the survey said they supported the continuation of rocket attacks at Israel as long as the blockade on Gaza is maintained.
In other words, despite the expectations of some in both Israel and the United States, the war has not created an opening for Abbas or for the advancement of moderate Palestinian policies. To the contrary, the results make it all too plain that any withdrawal from the West Bank might ultimately produce the same result as in Gaza when the removal of every soldier, settler, and settlement paved the way for a Hamas terror state rather than peace and development. Even if Israel wanted to grant Abbas his wishes and accept his ultimatum on territory, the likelihood of the creation of another, larger and more dangerous Hamas state in the West Bank would make such a move impossible. Even if Abbas wasn't bluffing—and he almost certainly is—no Israeli government of any political stripe will risk such an outcome. And it would be irresponsible for any of those who purport to be Israel's friends to urge it do so.
The Israeli "Land Grab" and Hopes for Peace
Those intransigent Israelis have done it again. Just when the world was hoping for gestures of peace, they've done something making the two-state solution with the Palestinians harder to implement. Or so most of the world is claiming today after Israel's government declared that 988 acres of vacant land in the Gush Etzion bloc south of Jerusalem is "state land" and therefore might be used for development. But the diplomatic condemnation raining down on the Israelis today is illogical and has very little to do with the terms of what a real peace deal might look like. If the Palestinians really wanted peace, this move wouldn't affect it in the least.
Those intransigent Israelis have done it again. Just when the world was hoping for gestures of peace, they've done something making the two-state solution with the Palestinians harder to implement. Or so most of the world is claiming today after Israel's government declared that 988 acres of vacant land in the Gush Etzion bloc south of Jerusalem is "state land" and therefore might be used for development. But the diplomatic condemnation raining down on the Israelis today is illogical and has very little to do with the terms of what a real peace deal might look like. If the Palestinians really wanted peace, this move wouldn't affect it in the least.
As the New York Times reported today, the seizure of the vacant land is being considered proof that the Netanyahu government doesn't want peace. It was condemned by the Palestinian Authority, the United Kingdom, and even criticized by Israeli Justice Minister Tzipi Livni. But the way the story is being presented in the mainstream press is highly misleading.
The New York Times simply refers to the land in its headline as "West Bank Land Near Bethlehem." That's true in that the place is in the area taken by Israel in June 1967 and it is near the city of Bethlehem. But savvy readers should have picked up on the mention in the story of the fact that it is "in" a settlement bloc. Though the Peace Now organization condemned the move as one that would "dramatically change the reality" in the area, since it is already inside an area that is heavily populated by Jews and claimed by the Jewish state, it's hard to see how anything that happens inside it would affect the future of other parts of the West Bank which might theoretically be conceded to the Palestinians as part of an independent state.
But this isn't just any settlement bloc; it's Gush Etzion. That may not mean much to Americans, let alone Europeans who can be counted on to condemn anything the Israelis do, but it does put the matter of whether this decision actually affects possible peace negotiations in perspective.
It needs to be remembered that most peace advocates keep telling us that the terms of peace between Israel and the Palestinians are well known and that all that is needed is the will to implement them rather than more discussions about the details. But among those terms is the concept of territorial swaps that was endorsed by President Obama and even approved by the Palestinian participants in the Geneva initiatives. The swaps would allow Israel to keep the blocs of settlements—most of which are adjacent to the 1967 lines—in exchange for other territory to be given to the Palestinians. While there is some dispute as to which blocs are part of this consensus, there is no doubt that one of them is the Etzion bloc.
There are two reasons for the assumption that Gush Etzion stays inside of Israel even if a Palestinian state is created in the West Bank.
One is that it is just south of Jerusalem and requires no great manipulation of the map. It guards the southern flank of Israel's capital and the area containing 22 Jewish communities with over 70,000 living there can be retained while leaving Bethlehem inside a putative Palestinian state.
But this land is also significant because, contrary to the narrative in which Jews are portrayed as "stealing" Arab land, Gush Etzion was actually populated and owned by Jews not only prior to 1967 but also prior to Israel's War of Independence. Gush Etzion was a bloc of Jewish settlements that was overrun by Jordanian army units and local Palestinians after a bitterly contested siege. Its inhabitants were either massacred or taken prisoner and their homes and farms destroyed. As such, it was the first land to be reclaimed for Jewish settlement after the 1967 war put it back in Israeli hands.
Let's be clear about this. Neither the ownership nor the future of Gush Etzion is up for debate in any peace talks. In every peace plan, whether put forward by Israel's government or its left-wing opponents, the bloc remains part of Israel, a reality that most sensible Palestinians accept.
The legal dispute about whether empty land can be converted to state use for development or settlement or if it is actually the property of neighboring Arab villages is one that will play itself out in Israel's courts. Given the scrupulous manner with which Israel's independent judiciary has handled such cases in the past, if the local Arabs can prove their dubious assertions of ownership, the land will be theirs.
But no matter who wins that case, it won't affect the territory of a Palestinian state since whether individual Arabs own these lots or Jews won't make a difference in peace talks. If Jews wind up living there it won't impact the future borders of a Palestinian state any more than the fact that Arabs are building on lots in Bethlehem.
Why then is the Gush Etzion land decision being represented as such a blow to a peace process that was already torpedoed earlier this year by the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation fact and rendered even more unlikely by the terrorist war of attrition launched by Hamas this summer?
The reason is fairly obvious. The Palestinians and their cheerleaders aren't really interested in negotiating peace and drawing lines that could effectively divide the land even on terms favorable to their side. The Obama-endorsed land swaps that would include Gush Etzion or any other possible provisions to achieve peace are irrelevant to their goals because it is still impossible for Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn.
That's a fact that pro-peace Israelis like Livni and others here in the United States need to understand. Livni didn't condemn the Etzion announcement because she believes it actually could impact the terms of a peace deal. She knows it won't. Rather, she thinks that the move will draw attention to the area and encourage Arabs and foreign governments to advocate for Israel to give up even this land that Jews originally owned. But whether or not attention is drawn to the bloc, the Palestinians are no more willing to let the Jews keep it than they are to let them keep any other part of the West Bank or those lands that were inside the pre-67 lines.
Livni, like some other Israelis, is also uncomfortable with the idea that the motivation for this decision is to send a message to the Arabs about terrorism. Giving more land for Jewish settlement in this area may also be a response to the kidnapping of the three Israeli teenagers that set off the war with Hamas since the trio were taken and killed in this very area. Sending such a message is a policy that can be debated, but whether or not it is wise or appropriate has nothing to do with the terms of peace.
The Gush Etzion announcement is no land grab. It concerns vacant lots inside an area that will always be kept as part of Israel. But the anger that it generated does send a signal to Israel that the Palestinians aren't going to accept their continued presence in any part of the country. That's bad news for peace but remedying it will require a shift toward acceptance of Israel's legitimacy among the Palestinians, not the surrender of Jewish communities.