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Topic: Hamas
Which Palestine Do Euros Recognize?
Today the British Parliament voted on a non-binding resolution that recognized Palestine as a state. The 274-12 vote in favor of the symbolic gesture doesn't affect the actual foreign policy of the United Kingdom but, like the announcement by the new Swedish prime minister earlier this month of his intention to also recognize it as a state, it does constitute more momentum for a Palestinian effort to bypass peace negotiations. This says a lot more about the willingness of Europeans to pressure and even demonize Israel than it does about their supposed support for peace. But as long as they're talking about recognition, it's fair to ask which Palestine they are ready to welcome into the family of nations: The weak, corrupt, and undemocratic Palestinian Authority in the West Bank or the terrorist Hamas state in Gaza? Or both?
Today the British Parliament voted on a non-binding resolution that recognized Palestine as a state. The 274-12 vote in favor of the symbolic gesture doesn't affect the actual foreign policy of the United Kingdom but, like the announcement by the new Swedish prime minister earlier this month of his intention to also recognize it as a state, it does constitute more momentum for a Palestinian effort to bypass peace negotiations. This says a lot more about the willingness of Europeans to pressure and even demonize Israel than it does about their supposed support for peace. But as long as they're talking about recognition, it's fair to ask which Palestine they are ready to welcome into the family of nations: The weak, corrupt, and undemocratic Palestinian Authority in the West Bank or the terrorist Hamas state in Gaza? Or both?
The vote in London was something of a farce as Prime Minister David Cameron has made it clear that it will not influence his nation's actions. Pushed by rank-and-file members of the opposition Labor Party it appears to be driven by a desire to embarrass its leader Ed Milliband more than anything else. But the inability of Labor's leaders to quash the vote and in the absence of a strong stand against it by Cameron, who, along with the rest of his government and its supporters, abstained on the measure rather than risk his government by actively opposing it, it's fair to say that the measure reflects public sympathy for the Palestinians.
Yet like the "Free Gaza" demonstrations that rocked European cities this past summer while Hamas rockets rained down on Israeli cities, one has to wonder what exactly those advocating the unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state think they are doing?
At its most basic level, recognizing Palestinian statehood seems to be an expression of sympathy for those who bore the brunt of Hamas's decision to launch another war against Israel: the people of Gaza. Pictures of Palestinian civilians who were killed, wounded, or made homeless by Israeli counter-attacks against Hamas missile launches and terror tunnels generated a wave of revulsion against the Jewish state as well as a desire to beat one's chest on behalf of the cause of "Free Palestine."
But which Palestine are we talking about?
Is it the Palestine of the Palestinian Authority that currently rules most of the West Bank, albeit under the security blanket of the Israel Defense Forces? Undoubtedly, that's the Palestine the Swedish prime minister thinks he's backing. That's a Palestine that is supposedly ready to make peace with Israel but which requires the economic and political support of the West in order to survive.
But, in truth, that Palestine is a corrupt kleptocracy run by Mahmoud Abbas, a man currently serving the 10th year of a four-year presidential term. The Fatah-ruled West Bank is a petty tyranny that oppresses and robs Palestinians while raking in billions in economic aid from Europe and the United States. Its leader frequently tells Western and Israeli audiences that he is ready make peace on the basis of a two-state solution, but he also is adamant about being unwilling to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders might be drawn.
But since so much of the anger at Israel is about Gaza, the fact is all too many Europeans seem willing to overlook their usual abhorrence of terrorism and think of Hamas as a legitimate government of the strip, if not as partners with the PA. That Palestine is a brutally repressive Islamist regime that is allied with those seeking to overthrow moderate Arab governments. Like Fatah in the West Bank, it is not interested in bettering the lives of its people. But unlike the PA, which seems mostly interested in profiteering off of foreign aid, Hamas's sole obsession is in replenishing its stores of rockets and ammunition and rebuilding its terror tunnels so as to be ready the next time it feels another round of fighting with Israel will be to its advantage. Hamas, which is more popular in the West Bank than Abbas and his party, is dedicated to ending the "occupation" but by that term they are referring to pre-1967 Israel, not forcing it to remove Jews from the West Bank or Jerusalem.
Nor is there much use pretending the Fatah-Hamas unity agreement is the basis of a pro-peace government. The show put on this week for international donors for the reconstruction of Gaza did nothing to bolster confidence in the ability of the so-called government of technocrats of the PA that is allegedly going to supervise the rebuilding of Gaza. In a sign of the contempt that the Palestinians have for the suckers who continue to shovel money into their coffers, the PA would only promise that half of the $5.4 billion pledged would pay for the rebuilding of Gaza. What happens to the other half? We're told that it will support the PA's budget until 2017. Which means that it will be divided among the PA's factions or indirectly shared with Hamas for its own nefarious purposes. But either way, the Swiss bankers who handle the private accounts of PA leaders should get ready for some heavy-duty deposits.
Were Europe's governments or its pro-Palestinian demonstrators truly interested in peace, they would understand that unilateral recognition of independence is a way for the PA to avoid having to talk with Israel. Whatever they may think of Israel or the Netanyahu government, it has stated its willingness to negotiate a two-state solution. But that outcome can only happen when the Palestinians stop waiting for their foreign friends to hand Israeli concessions—or Israel itself, as Hamas is frank about demanding—to them on a silver platter. If they wanted to support peace, they would tell Abbas to go back to the table with Netanyahu and to be prepared to recognize a Jewish state. They might also encourage him to get rid of Hamas, not become its partner.
Seen in that light talk about recognition of Palestine without first requiring it to make peace with Israel must seen as not merely moral preening at Israel's expense but a political manifestation of the same anti-Semitic invective that was so common during the "Free Gaza" demonstrations.
Roger Cohen, the "Nakba," and the Falsification of History
For the particularly cynical, monomaniacal critics of Israel and global Jewry, there are myriad ways to hijack the humble, introspective liturgy of the High Holidays to produce a sanctimonious ego-boosting tirade in order to make your column deadline with enough time left over to pat yourself on the back afterwards. If you're Roger Cohen of the New York Times, there's the added challenge of making sure to also mangle your history and dishonor the victims of genocide so your readers will get the column they've come to expect from you. And readers, Cohen's post-High Holidays column does not disappoint.
For the particularly cynical, monomaniacal critics of Israel and global Jewry, there are myriad ways to hijack the humble, introspective liturgy of the High Holidays to produce a sanctimonious ego-boosting tirade in order to make your column deadline with enough time left over to pat yourself on the back afterwards. If you're Roger Cohen of the New York Times, there's the added challenge of making sure to also mangle your history and dishonor the victims of genocide so your readers will get the column they've come to expect from you. And readers, Cohen's post-High Holidays column does not disappoint.
Cohen begins by explaining that as he sat in a Reform shul in London over the High Holidays, he couldn't help but notice that the rabbis were not using the pulpit to bash Israel. No matter–he has a pulpit in the New York Times, so he could do it himself. On the topic of Palestinian children killed in Hamas's recent war with Israel in Gaza, Cohen offers this:
However framed, the death of a single child to an Israeli bullet seems to betoken some failure in the longed-for Jewish state, to say nothing of several hundred. The slaughter elsewhere in the Middle East cannot be an alibi for Jews to avoid this self-scrutiny.
One straw man up, one straw man disposed of. And in particularly accusatory fashion as well: as if Israeli self-scrutiny needs Cohen's prodding, and as if any defense of its actions is properly labeled an "alibi," thereby affirming the criminal nature of Israeli self-defense. Cohen then swings again:
Throughout the Diaspora, the millennia of being strangers in strange lands, Jews' restless search in the scriptures for the ethics contained in sacred words formed a transmission belt of Judaism. For as long as the shared humanity of the other is perceived and felt, such questioning is unavoidable. The terrible thing about the Holy Land today is the denial of this humanity to the stranger. When that goes, so does essential self-interrogation. As mingling has died, separation has bred denial and contempt.
This is a classic tactic of the left: whatever the Palestinians are obviously guilty of–in this case, dehumanizing the Jews–the Jews too must be guilty of, because otherwise there would be no moral or intellectual basis for Cohen's worldview, which assumes Israel's guilt.
And it's especially rich of Cohen to throw the "separation" in Israel's face. In fact, Israeli policy is, as we saw this past week, to encourage Jews and Arabs to live side by side in shared peace and prosperity. The view of the left, the Obama administration, and the editorial board of the newspaper that employs Roger Cohen is that ethnic segregation–and in some places, like Givat Hamatos, racial segregation–must be enforced. Cohen's segregationist employers might be a better target for his ire, though that would require a level of intellectual honesty Cohen is not prepared to demonstrate.
Cohen then goes on to speculate that perhaps the rabbis did want to use the pulpit to denigrate Israel but were afraid to incur the wrath of the Jews who keep such rabbis "muzzled," in the words of a colleague of Cohen quoted in the column.
But then Cohen finally gets to the point. After referencing a passage from Stefan Zweig that refers to the Jews as the one and only "community of expulsion," Cohen updates it to make clear the Jews are now the oppressors, the ones who expel:
Two phrases leapt out: "community of expulsion," and "driven out of lands but without a land to go to." The second embodied the necessity of the Jewish state of Israel. But it was inconceivable, at least to me, without awareness of the first. Palestinians have joined the ever-recurring "community of expulsion." The words of Leviticus are worth repeating for any Jew in or concerned by Israel today: Treat the stranger as yourself, for "you were strangers in the land of Egypt."
What Cohen is saying here, implicitly, is that the Palestinian narrative of the "nakba" is correct. But with an especially offensive twist: that the Jews expelled the Palestinians in much the same way the Jews themselves have been expelled from countries for thousands of years.
It should go without saying, but apparently it does not, that for Cohen to sit in a synagogue in Europe and decide that the Palestinians are the victims of what Europe did to the Jews is not run-of-the-mill historical ignorance: it's malicious falsehood and it's repulsive. But it's also nonsensical to equate the pre-Israel Jews "without a land to go to" with the Palestinians in Gaza (or the West Bank, for that matter). In fact, the Palestinians are sitting on land that they govern, and for which Israel has offered recognition of Palestinian statehood and practically begged them to accept it.
The Palestinians are not a people without a land, and they don't have to be a people without a state. But the Palestinians would have to accept their statehood and all the responsibilities that come along with it. They've thus far chosen not to, and no amount of slandering of the Jewish people on the High Holidays is going to change that.
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.
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.
Banking on Terror: The Verdict
Earlier this week, the jury in a federal courtroom in New York City handed down a verdict that should stand as a precedent for future counter-terrorism efforts. In this case America's judicial system proved itself capable of doing something the government has not managed to do: holding financial institutions in supposedly moderate Arab countries responsible for their complicity in Hamas terrorism.
Earlier this week, the jury in a federal courtroom in New York City handed down a verdict that should stand as a precedent for future counter-terrorism efforts. In this case America's judicial system proved itself capable of doing something the government has not managed to do: holding financial institutions in supposedly moderate Arab countries responsible for their complicity in Hamas terrorism.
The case, Linde v. Arab Bank, is the result of a lot of hard work by the Israel Law Center to trace those who helped fund Hamas's terror campaign during the second intifada more than a decade ago. During the course of that terrorist war of attrition launched after the Palestinians rejected an Israeli peace offer in 2000, suicide bombers and other killers murdered more than a thousand Israelis and Americans. The 297 plaintiffs in the case are the survivors or the families of those Americans killed in 24 separate Hamas terror attacks from 2001 to 2004. It was during this period that Hamas operatives operating under the aegis of the so-called Saudi Committee used a branch of the Arab Bank in Beirut to fund activities of the terror group including providing bonuses to the families of suicide bombers as a reward for the slaughter inflicted by the terrorists.
The bank claimed it didn't know the account was being used for terrorist activities but this excuse was exposed as a blatant lie during the course of the trial. More importantly, it sought to quash the case and to refuse to divulge information about its accounts. In that effort, it was supported by the U.S. State Department that seeks, as is its wont, to appease both the Saudis and the Jordanians even if that means excusing the funding of terror.
Fortunately, the courts would not let the bank get away with withholding information and the jury was also not persuaded by the idea that those who launder money for terrorists should have impunity for their illicit activities.
The point here is not merely one of law but of policy. After 9/11 the United States moved heaven and earth to cut off every possible method for financing al-Qaeda. But that effort, which forced even Arab allies to cooperate with the restrictions was not uniformly applied to Hamas during that period. With the connivance of their friends in the Arab world who call themselves allies of the West, Hamas was been able to keep the flow of money into their coffers long after it was clear that there was little functional difference between the Palestinian group and other Islamists.
Those who claim the Arab banking system will collapse if the verdict is upheld are being hysterical. The Arab Bank should pay the victims billions but we need not hold a benefit for its owners. Like all criminals, they must pay for their misdeeds. More importantly, their plight should stand as a warning to others in the Arab world that those who fund terror will, sooner or later pay a serious price for doing so.
Let us hope that the appeals courts will be as sensible as the trial judge and the jury and uphold this decision. Like them, the appeals courts should understand that there is more at stake here than money. Hamas terrorists and their bankers should not be allowed to get away with murder.
How Iran Outwits Obama in the Middle East
While Iran's role as a leading sponsor of global terrorism is well known, far less coverage is given to Iranian leaders' strategic acumen. Yet it's clear that a theme has emerged in the Middle East: long engaged in a proxy war against America, Tehran is now, in the age of Obama, simply running circles around Washington.
While Iran's role as a leading sponsor of global terrorism is well known, far less coverage is given to Iranian leaders' strategic acumen. Yet it's clear that a theme has emerged in the Middle East: long engaged in a proxy war against America, Tehran is now, in the age of Obama, simply running circles around Washington.
There are three kinds of Mideast engagements with Iran. In all three, Iran is a step ahead of the Obama administration. The first category is direct military engagement. The United States military is involved in conflict in Iraq and Syria. In both countries, the U.S. has been treated to characterizations that America is more or less acting as Iran's air force: in Iraq, that comparison is made directly; in Syria, it is by acting essentially as Bashar al-Assad's air force–and Assad is an Iranian proxy hanging on to power in large part through Iran's investment.
The second category includes conflicts in which America's allies are up against Iranian proxies. Israel, for example, fought a summer war against Hamas, an Iranian client firing Syrian missiles delivered by Iran. Far from understanding what was taking place, the Obama administration played right into Iran's hands by distancing itself from Sisi's Egypt and not only pressuring Israel to give in to Hamas's terror but even sending Secretary of State John Kerry to Cairo with a ceasefire agreement reflecting the wishes of Hamas's patrons. When Israel objected, President Obama took retribution against Jerusalem, withholding arms transfers while Israel was under fire.
This includes Lebanon as well, where Iranian proxies not only occasionally attack Israel but have a chokehold on a the government. The West has occasionally stepped up in Lebanon, such as when it galvanized outrage at Syria to help force Assad's expulsion from its neighbor. But most of the time, the West has been unwilling or unable to protect Lebanon's sovereignty. And as Jonathan wrote earlier in the week, concern about ISIS terrorism is raising the possibility of legitimizing and mainstreaming Hezbollah.
And then there is the direct American engagement with Iran on its nuclear program. On this, the Iranians saw early on that Obama and Kerry wanted a deal of some sort that would kick the can down the road while enabling the president to claim progress. It's doubtful any such plan was more obviously bush league than begging the Iranians to disconnect some pipe rather than dismantle the program. But the limitless diplomacy, in which deadlines float past with nary a thought, has done its damage as well by giving the Iranians additional leverage–and a powerful bargaining chip–on other issues on which the U.S. would want Iranian cooperation.
Aside from these three, there is evidence of a fourth category in the Middle East: a state like Turkey. Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Putinesque turn away from democracy, human rights, and the West more generally has been conducted publicly, but even here there appears to be malign Iranian influence. Former Naval War College professor John Schindler has a fascinating post discussing the Turkish government's connections to Iranian intelligence. He writes:
The key player in this plot is a shadowy terrorist group termed Tawhid-Salam that goes back to the mid-1990s and has been blamed for several terrorist incidents, including the 2011 bombing of the Israeli consulate in Istanbul, which wounded several people, as well as a thwarted bombing of the Israeli embassy in Tbilisi, Georgia, in early 2012. Tawhid-Salam, which also goes by the revealing name "Jerusalem Army," has long been believed to be a front for Iranian intelligence, particularly its most feared component, the elite Quds (Jerusalem) Force of the Revolutionary Guards Corps (Pasdaran), which handles covert action abroad, including terrorism in many countries. It also is believed to be behind the murders of several anti-Tehran activists in Turkey in the 1990's, using Tawhid-Salam as a cut-out.
Yet nothing has been done to crack down on the group in Turkey. Schindler continues:
This may have something to do with the fact that Hakan Fidan, the head of Turkish intelligence, is apparently on the Pasdaran payroll too, and may have secret ties to Tehran going back almost twenty years. Rumors about Fidan, a member of Erdoğan's inner circle, who has headed the country's powerful National Intelligence Organization (MİT) since 2010, have swirled in counterintelligence services worldwide for years. Israeli intelligence in particular, which once had a close relationship with MİT, has long regarded Fidan as Tehran's man, and has curtailed its intelligence cooperation with Turkey commensurately, believing that all information shared with Fidan was going to Iran.
Privately, U.S. intelligence officials too have worried about Fidan's secret ties, not least because MİT includes Turkey's powerful signals intelligence (SIGINT) service, which has partnered with NATO for decades, including the National Security Agency.
I recommend reading the whole thing, but the Turkish connection serves to fill out the picture of Iranian influence throughout the Middle East. Tehran has continually played Washington, setting fires and then offering to help Obama put them out, for a price. It's a predictable racket, but Obama keeps falling for it.
Israel and the Unasked Question on Syria
The unleashing of the campaign of U.S. air strikes on terrorist targets throughout Syria last night may be the beginning of an offensive that will, as President Obama claimed this morning, "take the fight" to ISIS. If so, the bombings must be judged to be a commendable, if belated instance of presidential leadership. But as even the president's cheering section at MSNBC and other liberal strongholds suddenly take on the appearance of being "war lovers," it's fair to wonder about one question that was uppermost on the minds of most of the media this past summer when other terrorists were being pounded from the air: what about the civilian casualties and infrastructure damage?
The unleashing of the campaign of U.S. air strikes on terrorist targets throughout Syria last night may be the beginning of an offensive that will, as President Obama claimed this morning, "take the fight" to ISIS. If so, the bombings must be judged to be a commendable, if belated instance of presidential leadership. But as even the president's cheering section at MSNBC and other liberal strongholds suddenly take on the appearance of being "war lovers," it's fair to wonder about one question that was uppermost on the minds of most of the media this past summer when other terrorists were being pounded from the air: what about the civilian casualties and infrastructure damage?
Accounts of the attacks on ISIS targets as well as those on the Khorasan group speak of strikes on bases, training camps, and checkpoints as well as command-and-control centers in four provinces and having been in the vicinity of several Syrian cities. Many terrorists may have been killed and severe damage done to the ability of both ISIS and the Khorasan group to conduct operations. The first videos of the aftermath of the bombings show members of the groups digging out the rubble and seeking survivors of the attacks. The surrounding area appears to be one of built-up structures. While some of these bases and command-and-control centers may well have been in isolated places, it is likely that many, if not most, were in the vicinity of civilian residences. All of which leads to the question that almost no one, at least in the American media, is asking today: what about civilian casualties or damage to infrastructure facilities that might severely impact the quality of life of those who live in these areas?
If we are being honest, the answer to such queries is clear: we don't know. American forces conduct such operations under rules of engagement that seek to limit if not totally eliminate non-military casualties. But even under the strictest limits, civilians are killed in war. It is also to be hoped that all of the strikes were conducted with perfect accuracy, but that is the sort of thing that generally only happens in movies. In real life, war is conducted in an environment in which a host of factors make perfection as unattainable as it is in every other aspect of life. Which means it is almost certain that at least some Syrian civilians (a population that may include supporters of the terrorists and some who are essentially their hostages) were killed and wounded last night.
If anyone were thinking about that fact today, you wouldn't know it from watching any of the cable news networks. The impact of the strikes on individuals in Syria or any potential damage to civilian infrastructure is of no interest to the commentators or the anchors. Instead, the conversation about the attacks on terror targets focuses solely on how effective the strikes have been, the role of U.S. allies, and whether these actions will be followed up with sufficient ground force actions that will make it possible to truly defeat ISIS or any al-Qaeda affiliates currently running riot in the region. The only criticisms being voiced are those about the president's lack of a specific authorization from Congress for these actions, whether U.S. forces will have to fight on the ground there, or if the attacks have gone far enough.
All this is in stark contrast to the reaction to Israeli attacks on Hamas in Gaza this past summer.
Almost all of the targets struck by the Israelis were similar to those in Syria that were hit by the Americans. Moreover, unlike the case with ISIS and Khorasan, the Israeli efforts were not primarily preemptive in nature. After all, the U.S. is attacking ISIS in part because of its depredations in the region but also because of the very real likelihood that if they are left unmolested, they will eventually turn their barbaric attentions to attacks on the United States. Israel struck back at Hamas because the terror group doesn't merely intend to destroy the State of Israel and slaughter its Jewish population but because it was launching thousands of rockets at Israeli cities and towns and seeking to use terror tunnels to kidnap and kill even more Jews.
But rather than give the Israelis the same benefit of the doubt about their good intentions and efforts to limit collateral damage, the international community denounced the Israeli counter-attacks. News coverage focused almost completely on civilian casualties and the impact of the war on ordinary Palestinians rather than, as is the case today with U.S. efforts, on the military question of how best Hamas might be defeated.
Why aren't we talking about civilian casualties in Syria? There are a number of reasons.
The Western media has more or less ignored the horrific nature of the Syrian Civil War since its inception three years ago. Hundreds of thousands have already died but apparently the media sees little reason to start caring about it now just because Americans are involved.
Another is the lack of Western media on the ground in Syria. That is understandable given what has happened to some of the Western freelance journalists who were kidnapped and beheaded by ISIS. By contrast, Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists welcomed Western journalists into Gaza and allowed them to do their jobs in safety provided, of course, that they concentrated their efforts on reinforcing the narrative about the conflict that told only of civilian casualties while largely ignoring the presence of armed fighters and their attacks on Israelis. That the entire Western press corps adhered to these restrictions is a testament to both the ability of Hamas to intimidate journalists and to the fact that many in the press were all too happy to follow these instructions since they were compatible with their own views of the conflict.
Let's concede that the circumstances of these conflicts are not identical. The Israel-Palestinian conflict is more specific and related to the desire of the Arabs to refuse to share the region with a sovereign Jewish state rather than the more amorphous desire of the Syrian and Iraqi Islamists to set up a new caliphate. Hamas is also a bit more media savvy and has more experience in manipulating its message to appeal to Westerners who are willing to be fooled by terrorists.
But the real difference between the ways these two conflicts are covered has a lot more to do with the identity of the foes of the Islamists than to any of those distinctions. Muslims may slaughter Muslims by the hundreds of thousands, as they have done in Syria, without the world paying much notice. But if a fraction of that number are killed by Israeli Jews, even in a war of self-defense, that is considered intolerable by a world that has always judged Jews and their state by a double standard that has never been applied to anyone else, including the United States. Israelis, who have watched as their efforts to defend themselves have been answered by a rising tide of anti-Semitism around the globe, may be forgiven for no longer giving a damn about international opinion.
The media should continue to focus its coverage on Syria on the question of whether the president's actions are effective, not whether some accidents or mistakes by U.S. personnel resulted in civilian losses. But you can bet that the same sources will revert to the same stances they took this past summer when Hamas resumes its fight against Israel, as it will sooner or later. When it does, don't expect any admissions by journalists that they are applying different standards to Israel than they did to U.S. forces. But that is exactly what they will be doing. The term by which such prejudice is usually called is anti-Semitism.
Iron Dome and the Latest Peace Fantasy
Those who want Israel to strike a permanent peace deal with the Palestinians cannot decide if Israel's Iron Dome missile defense is a help or a hindrance. Each time Israel fights a war with Hamas, the occasional column appears claiming that Iron Dome impedes peace because Israelis are, in effect, too safe for their own good. But there is the other side of the coin for the peace camp. And that is the belief that Israel's missile defense will make Israeli military counteroffensives unnecessary and counterproductive.
Those who want Israel to strike a permanent peace deal with the Palestinians cannot decide if Israel's Iron Dome missile defense is a help or a hindrance. Each time Israel fights a war with Hamas, the occasional column appears claiming that Iron Dome impedes peace because Israelis are, in effect, too safe for their own good. But there is the other side of the coin for the peace camp. And that is the belief that Israel's missile defense will make Israeli military counteroffensives unnecessary and counterproductive.
This argument, offered in today's Washington Post by American University associate professor Boaz Atzili, suggests a two-track process: Israelis should negotiate in good faith with the Palestinians while hiding under their desks until peace arrives. Iron Dome, should its accuracy be maintained and eventually improved, would thus give Israelis the cover they need to hold their fire. There are serious flaws here, even under current, realistic best-case scenarios. These flaws become clear when Atzili gets around to scripting out such a defensive posture in practice:
So what might a defensive Israeli campaign look like? In response to a massive launching of rockets from the Gaza Strip, Israel would respond by mobilizing its truly defensive capabilities: People in the targeted area would remain in bomb shelters and fortified rooms, the Iron Dome would target missiles aimed at large population centers, and the IDF would augment its forces to guard the borders and try to intercept Hamas attempts to infiltrate by sea or tunnels. There could be casualties on the Israeli side, but these are likely to be fewer than in the last few rounds of war.
As opposed to these recent bouts of violence, Hamas is likely to face strong international pressure to stop launching rockets, which it would not be able to deflect as retaliation for Israel's action. Internally, as well, Hamas would not enjoy the same support it has received from the residents of Gaza if it cannot portray its action as defensive. In all likelihood, these pressures would result in a much more speedy cessation of the firing from the Gaza Strip. And there would be no pictures of devastation on the Palestinian side. Israel, for once, would appear in the eyes of the world (and not only in its own eyes) as the just side, and would be able to reap the diplomatic rewards.
I'm sorry, have you met Hamas–or the international community?
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I think everything in that scenario is wrong. Let's take the second part first. What "internal pressure" would Hamas face if Gazans aren't affected by Hamas's actions? It's unclear how or why they would push back on Hamas if the terror group were getting free shots at the Jews next door. The obvious answer is: they wouldn't. There is no evidence to support the assertion that Gazan Palestinians would feel bad about rocketing Israeli population centers and thus pressure their terrorist leaders to take it easy and sue for peace. It does not make any sense, it is not consistent with the history of the conflict, and it would be irresponsible for Israeli officials to put their citizens' lives on the line while they chase this unicorn.
But it's not just the strange faith in Palestinian sympathy toward Israel that makes this plan unfeasible. It's also the expectation that Israel could afford–psychologically or financially–to wait out Hamas's unchallenged rocket barrage. Six civilians were killed in this summer's war, and there's no reason to think the toll wouldn't have been higher during that same time period had Hamas been given free rein and all the time in the world to set up its attacks.
And since the idea that a Hamas rocket offensive would conclude in less time without an Israeli military campaign is absurd, the civilian death toll would no doubt be higher. That would lead to greater calls for a counteroffensive, which the IDF would undertake. The alternative, to abandon civilians to live under terror, would be indefensible. And let's remember that Israel was able to neutralize those tunnels because of the ground incursion. Without that, the tunnels survive the war.
Economically, here are the figures from Ynet on the Gaza war's toll on Israel:
Meanwhile, nearly 3,000 claims for damage have been submitted to the Israel Tax Authority, which has so far paid some $20 million for direct damages and another $21 million for missed work days and other indirect damage. …
Israel's Ministry of Tourism reports that tourism for July dropped by 26 percent from the same period last year. The sector, comprising about 7 percent of the Israeli economy, has lost at least $566 million, according to the figures.
Israel's Manufacturers Association estimated the total economic impact on Israeli manufacturers for the first round of the conflict at about 1.2 billion shekels, with factories in the south accounting for 40 percent of this figure, and facilities in Haifa and the center of the country incurring half the losses.
Morally and economically, Israel cannot abandon its citizens to their enemies. Iron Dome is a major defense breakthrough and it no doubt saves lives. But it still entails Israelis running to bomb shelters when rockets are launched at or near population centers. The country can't live underground, and it can't live in perpetual, paralyzing fear every moment of every day. Iron Dome cannot be Israel's only line of defense.
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.
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.
World Yawns as Hamas Admits War Crimes
Perhaps it's because the world is currently transfixed by the rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria and isn't paying much attention to the events in Gaza that generated such outrage from human rights groups determined to indict Israel for war crimes before any investigations are even conducted. But perhaps some of those who pooh-poohed Israel's claims that Hamas was firing rockets at Israeli cities from civilian areas and thereby using the people of Gaza as human shields will pay a smidgeon of attention to the news that, as the Associated Press reported today, Hamas operatives admit that they did exactly what the Israelis said they did.
Perhaps it's because the world is currently transfixed by the rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria and isn't paying much attention to the events in Gaza that generated such outrage from human rights groups determined to indict Israel for war crimes before any investigations are even conducted. But perhaps some of those who pooh-poohed Israel's claims that Hamas was firing rockets at Israeli cities from civilian areas and thereby using the people of Gaza as human shields will pay a smidgeon of attention to the news that, as the Associated Press reported today, Hamas operatives admit that they did exactly what the Israelis said they did.
According to the AP, contrary to the claims of its defenders, Hamas operatives have admitted firing rockets from civilian areas in Gaza. But they say they did so at a distance from actual buildings. As the AP report noted, videos from surveillance conducted by the Israeli Air Force has produced evidence of rockets flying from residential neighborhoods, hospitals, cemeteries, mosque courtyards and other civilian areas. But Hamas officials quoted by the news service now say that when they did fire from such places, the rocket launchers were always at a "safe distance" from such structures or that the nearby buildings were deliberately kept vacant.
Given the evidence of civilian casualties from Israeli fire directed at such launchings, this is a transparent lie. More to the point, if human rights groups and the international press accept this excuse they will not only be validating an almost certainly false story but also moving the goalposts to accommodate the terrorists propaganda needs.
Let's remember that the international press that flooded into Gaza during the war did a conspicuously poor job of covering Hamas activities in Gaza. No pictures were shot of Hamas fighters or of the thousands of missile launches during the 50 days of conflict. Instead they either knuckled under to Hamas intimidation or were actively complicit in publicizing the narrative the Islamists preferred that focused solely on Palestinian suffering instead of Hamas terror.
Hamas figures quoted by the AP contend that it was impossible for them to fire missiles without being in the vicinity of civilians because the strip is so congested. There are two answers to this argument.
One is to point out that, despite the contentions about Gaza being the most congested place on earth, that there are, plenty of vacant areas in the strip. Parts of Gaza are crowded but it is not one continuous urban jungle. If Hamas really wanted to avoid Israeli fire being brought down on areas where civilians lived they could have used such places. But, firing from beaches or open fields doesn't provide the cover that hospitals, mosques or school courtyards give the terrorists.
More to the point, if the only places they shoot missiles that are deliberately aimed to cause the maximum civilian casualties for the Israelis are an urban area, and then a group that was not a pack of bloodthirsty terrorists would have held its fire. Hamas did not.
These admissions prove again, as if much more proof was needed, that what Hamas did during this war was a double war crime. They were intent on slaughtering as many Jews as possible with their rockets and tunnels and also hopeful of causing Palestinian deaths as well to increase international sympathy for their cause.
Giving Hamas a pass because they fired near civilians but not on top of them is to grade them on a curve whose purpose is to justify their war on Israel. While individual Israeli strikes might have been made in error as always happens in the fog of war, Palestinian casualties were completely the responsibility of the group that launched this war for no good reason, kept it going when cease fires would have ended it before more were killed and did everything in their power to maximize the pain to their own people.
We can expect human rights groups, the United Nations to pay little attention to these admissions as they continue to seek to bash Israel for having the temerity to defend itself. But if anyone wants the truth, Hamas has just laid it out for the world to see. Too bad, much of the press and those participating in anti-Israel demonstrations where anti-Semitism is rampant, aren't interested in it.
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.
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.
The Ignorance Driving Coverage of Israel and American Policy
I can't quite decide if the headline and framing of this recent dispatch from the Washington Post's Jerusalem bureau chief is further evidence of everything that is wrong about the media's reporting on the conflict or if it's a modest step in the right direction. The headline is: "Here's what really happened in the Gaza war (according to the Israelis)."
I can't quite decide if the headline and framing of this recent dispatch from the Washington Post's Jerusalem bureau chief is further evidence of everything that is wrong about the media's reporting on the conflict or if it's a modest step in the right direction. The headline is: "Here's what really happened in the Gaza war (according to the Israelis)."
The point of the article is that a group of journalists met with an Israeli intelligence official to get Israel's side of the story. On the one hand, I suppose the media can be commended for at least recognizing that there's a side other than that churned out by Hamas flacks. On the other hand, the war is over. Perhaps, I don't know, during the war would have been a good time to figure out that there are two sides to the story? Just a thought. Additionally, isn't the fact that basic information about Hamas fighters and weaponry is considered a major scoop a massive indictment of the press?
Here's another question: should the Jerusalem bureau chief of a major American newspaper show his surprise at finding out information he should have known long before? The tone of the report, then, doesn't help either. For example:
The intelligence chief said it is not important how lethal the rockets were. He said the aim was to instill terror, to force a million Israelis to run into shelters.
So Hamas succeeded, in part.
Of the 4,500 rockets fired by Hamas and allies, 875 fell inside Gaza. Many were lobbed at Israeli soldiers during the ground offensive, but others were duds or misfires that landed short, meaning Hamas dropped explosives on its own people.
It is even possible, the intelligence chief said, that some of that fire was intentional.
Yes, some of the damage to Gaza was inflicted directly by Hamas. If you have the resources of the Washington Post behind you and you need this pointed out to you after the war, you might want to consider it not a revelation but a piece of constructive professional criticism.
What we discovered–or, rather, confirmed yet again–during this latest war was that the Palestinian leadership, and especially Hamas, relies on the ignorance of the Western press. The lack of knowledge about Palestinian politics is crucial to Hamas's strategy and it should be a source of agitation for newspapers providing the resources to cover the conflict and getting this lump of coal in return.
But it's not just ignorance of Palestinian politics; it's ignorance of Israeli politics too–far less justifiable since English is so broadly spoken there and the country allows freedom of the press. And that ignorance is not just on the part of the press; it's also from national governments, including the current occupants of the White House.
This was brought to light again by another excellent piece debunking settlement myths by Elliott Abrams and Uri Sadot, who have returned to this topic again to address the manifold falsities inspired by the recent land designation, which we covered on the blog here and here. Not only were the press and foreign leaders wrong about this particular land, but Abrams and Sadot also point out it's part of a larger misunderstanding about Israel's broader settlement policy under Benjamin Netanyahu.
The prime minister continues to rein in settlement growth. For that, he is denounced by the settler movement for restricting settlements and by Western governments for expanding settlements. Only one of those is right–and it's not the Western governments:
It's a lose-lose situation for Bibi, as nasty attacks from settler leaders coincide with those from prime ministers, foreign ministers, and presidents across the globe. The Israeli prime minister deserves credit, under these circumstances, for sticking to what he has said and appears to believe: Israel must build where it will stay, in Jerusalem and the major blocks, and it is foolish to waste resources in West Bank areas it will someday leave.
At this point, the mindless refrain on settlement construction seems to have assumed a life of its own. But anyone who's serious about addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should ignore the speeches and the rote condemnations, and study the numbers. The vast expansion of Israeli settlements in the future Palestinian state is simply not happening.
Newspapers may have resources, but nobody has the resources of the American government. And yet, the Obama administration's pronouncements on Israeli politics and policy reveal a stunning, all-encompassing ignorance. Even worse, that ignorance is voluntary: it is very easy to get the real story. The president and his Cabinet don't seem to want the real story. It's no wonder their policies toward the conflict are so destructive and their diplomacy so thoughtlessly harmful.
What the Syria Fiasco Means for Iran, Gaza
To say President Obama badly needed a foreign-policy win is an understatement. And there were decent odds he'd eventually get one: as sports fans tend to say about a batter in a terrible slump, "he's due." The plan to remove Syria's chemical weapons was supposed to be that victory. But now administration officials don't seem to even believe it themselves.
To say President Obama badly needed a foreign-policy win is an understatement. And there were decent odds he'd eventually get one: as sports fans tend to say about a batter in a terrible slump, "he's due." The plan to remove Syria's chemical weapons was supposed to be that victory. But now administration officials don't seem to even believe it themselves.
U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power, who rose to prominence accusing lots of American officials of inexcusable inaction while mass slaughter occurred on their watch and then joined the Obama Cabinet where she has practiced inexcusable inaction while mass slaughter occurred on her watch, says Assad may still have chemical weapons. And he has a record of using them. Oh, and the brutal butchers of ISIS may get their hands on them too. So the administration's one success in the Middle East was less "mission accomplished" and more "hey, we gave it a shot."
There is much to be concerned about in this report, but even the minor details are problematic:
Samantha Power spoke to reporters after the Security Council received a briefing from Sigrid Kaag, who heads the international effort to rid Syria of its chemical weapons.
The joint mission of the United Nations and the Organization for the prohibition of Chemical Weapons will end at the end of the month after destroying nearly all of Syria's declared stockpile. But Kaag said the OPCW is still working with Syria to resolve discrepancies in its declaration, which she said range from outdated records to discrepancies on the volume of materials.
Power said the U.S. is concerned not only that President Bashar Assad's regime still has chemical weapons but that any stockpiles left behind could end up in the hands of the Islamic State group, which has seized large swaths of Syria and Iraq.
"Certainly if there are chemical weapons left in Syria, there will be a risk that those weapons fall into ISIL's hands. And we can only imagine what a group like that would do if in possession of such a weapon," Power said, referring to the militant group by one of its known acronyms.
The Easter egg of disaster buried in that excerpt was the following sentence, if you missed it: "The joint mission of the United Nations and the Organization for the prohibition of Chemical Weapons will end at the end of the month after destroying nearly all of Syria's declared stockpile." It's actually quite amazing. The job isn't finished, and they know it's not, but they're ending the crux of the mission anyway because … well they just are.
So what are the lessons from yet another Obama team failure? Firstly, we knew this was a failure even before the mission came to an end, because the list of banned chemicals was not exhaustive and Assad's regime was still using other chemical weapons during this process.
But more importantly, it continues to hammer away at whatever is left of Obama's credibility. Ending the mission to follow through on the chemical-weapons deal before it's done tells us much about why the world would be foolish to trust Obama on any Iran deal. Deadlines get extended, but at some point they don't even do that anymore; the administration just gives up and pivots to trying to contain the damage from their failure.
In Syria, that damage means the possibility that not one but two actors in the conflict will use chemical weapons: the original offender, Assad, and the murderous Islamists of ISIS. In Iran, the damage from such a failure would be orders of magnitude worse, because it would mean nuclear weapons in the hands of a terroristic state actor and possibly murderous Islamist groups as well. It could be Syria, in other words, minus the state failure but plus nukes.
And it's not just Iran, of course. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has suggested that in order to preserve a cessation of hostilities emanating from Gaza, the Hamas-run enclave should be demilitarized with Obama's Syria disarmament in mind. As the Jerusalem Post reported during the recent war:
The idea of demilitarizing Gaza has its roots in the Syrian precedent, and the fact that the US and Russia managed to successfully dismantle Syria of the vast majority of its chemical weapons stockpile.
Netanyahu likes that model, and has repeatedly praised US President Barack Obama for it.
Indeed, he has called for the same paradigm to be used with Iran: dismantling their nuclear infrastructure.
That may have once sounded like a recipe for progress. It's now clearly a recipe for disaster. The Obama administration has taken to making promises in lieu of action. The Syrian precedent suggests those promises are, as always, just words.
Egypt, Abbas, Refugees, and Peace
When the Egyptian government reached out to Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas recently, one surprising and one predictable thing happened. The tale of this offer and its rejection tells us all we need to know about Palestinian politics and the changing political landscape of the Middle East.
When the Egyptian government reached out to Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas recently, one surprising and one predictable thing happened. The tale of this offer and its rejection tells us all we need to know about Palestinian politics and the changing political landscape of the Middle East.
The Palestinian Ma'an News Agency reported today that in a speech given to members of his Fatah Party on Sunday, Abbas said that the Egyptian government had made a startling offer to the PA. The Egyptians told Abbas that they were willing to cede a 618-square mile area of the Sinai adjacent to Gaza for resettlement of the Palestinian refugees, an idea first floated by former Israeli National Security Adviser Giora Eiland.
"They [the Egyptians] are prepared to receive all the refugees, [saying] 'let's end the refugee story'," Abbas was quoted by Ma'an news agency as saying.
The Palestinian leader noted that the idea was first proposed to the Egyptian government in 1956, but was furiously rejected by Palestinian leaders such as PLO militant Muhammad Youssef Al-Najjar and poet Muin Bseiso who "understood the danger of this."
"Now this is being proposed once again. A senior leader in Egypt said: 'a refuge must be found for the Palestinians and we have all this open land.' This was said to me personally. But it's illogical for the problem to be solved at Egypt's expense. We won't have it," Abbas said.
The remarkable thing about this is the decision of the Sisi government to embrace such a practical solution to the long, sad tale of the 1948 Palestinian refugees and their descendants. Like the rest of the Arab world, the Egyptians were never interested in resettling the refugees anywhere, let alone on a huge swath of the Sinai next door to Gaza. Not even during the 19 years during which Egypt illegally occupied Gaza and Jordan illegally occupied the West Bank and part of Jerusalem did either nation seek to ameliorate the suffering of the refugees by offering them the full rights of citizenship or a home anywhere but in the State of Israel. The same applies to every other Arab and Muslim country. All stuck by the demand of a "right of return" aimed at destroying the newborn Jewish state which was at that time absorbing an equal number of Jewish refugees that had fled or been thrown out of their homes in the Arab and Muslim world. Israel's enemies purposely kept the Palestinian refugees in order to use them as props in their never-ending war on Israel.
Egypt's offer was, of course, not merely aimed at finally doing the right thing by the refugees. The Hamas stronghold in Gaza is a threat to the Egyptian military government in Cairo because of its alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood. They also recognize how toxic the situation in Gaza—where hundreds of thousands of the descendants of the refugees live—and the need to get these people out of a bad situation that is only made worse by their exploitation by the Hamas terrorist government of the strip.
Resettling the refugees could be the first step in neutralizing Hamas as well as in reforming the political culture of the Palestinians to the point where it might be possible for them to start thinking about making peace instead of sticking to demands for a return to Israel. That is something that could only happen after the demands in Hamas's charter are fulfilled: the destruction of the Jewish state and the deportation/genocide of its Jewish population.
But in making this proposal, Egypt, which was the first Arab country to make peace with Israel, wasn't just seeking to deal with the threat from Hamas and its jihadist allies to the Sisi regime. It was making clear that the new unofficial alliance between Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan and Israel isn't mere talk. These Arab countries haven't suddenly fallen in love with Zionism. The Jewish state is very unpopular even in Jordan, which has a peace treaty with it and also signed an agreement to import Israeli natural gas this week. But all these moderate Arab governments understand that the real threat to their future comes not from Israel but from Iran and its Islamist allies in the Middle East, such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad.
PA leader Mahmoud Abbas is nominally in the same boat as these governments since he knows that Hamas's goal is to topple him in the West Bank just as they did in Gaza in 2007. He also has an interest in defusing the Gaza tinderbox and offering some alternative to the "right of return" to a refugee population whose adamant opposition to peace with Israel is one of the primary reasons why the PA has rejected offers of statehood and peace with Israel over the last 15 years.
If Abbas is serious about peace with Israel, as his apologists in the West and in Israel insist he is, this is an offer that he should have jumped at. But he didn't, and from the sound of it, it was not even a close call. Why?
Let's first dismiss the idea that the offer was refused out of solicitude for Egypt as Abbas said. As Egyptians always used to say back in the decades when they were fighting wars against Israel, the Palestinians were always willing to fight Israel to the last Egyptian.
Rather, the refusal reflects Abbas's recognition that although Hamas has followed in the path of his old boss Yasir Arafat and led the Palestinian people to more death and destruction with no hope in sight, it is the Islamists who seem to represent the wishes of the Palestinian people, not the so-called moderates that he leads. Any acceptance of any refugee solution that does not involve "return" to what is now Israel is the political third rail of Palestinian politics. Indeed, the refugees themselves are adamant about their rejection of any solution short of "victory" over Israel.
That is why Abbas, though supposedly in favor of a two-state solution, has rejected it every time the Israelis have offered the PA independence over almost all of the West Bank, Gaza, and even a share of Jerusalem. As much as we are told that in the aftermath of the latest war in Gaza that the time of the moderates is upon us, Palestinian opinion polls indicate that they are still backing Hamas. That means they won't make peace with Israel no matter where its borders are drawn. So long as the refugees remain homeless, when Palestinians speak of Israeli occupation, they are clearly referring to pre-1967 Israel, not the West Bank.
Egypt's offer to the PA is a healthy sign that many in the Arab world are rising above their hatred for Israel and ready to make peace, if not for the sake of the Jews then to help them combat the Islamist terror threat. That is a remarkable thing that should be celebrated. The Palestinian refusal is, however, a very unremarkable confirmation of the fact that they remain unready and unwilling to make peace.
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.
Obama's Been Pickpocketed By Reality
A liberal who has been mugged by reality may turn to conservatism, as Irving Kristol famously said. Or that liberal might blame society on behalf of his mugger and redouble his liberalism. But in either case the liberal knows he's been victimized. What happens to a liberal who, instead, has been pickpocketed by reality–robbed and victimized but who assumes he's just misplaced his wallet? The last few days have given us our clearest answer yet, in the incoherent ramblings of President Obama on the nature of the threats to the free world.
A liberal who has been mugged by reality may turn to conservatism, as Irving Kristol famously said. Or that liberal might blame society on behalf of his mugger and redouble his liberalism. But in either case the liberal knows he's been victimized. What happens to a liberal who, instead, has been pickpocketed by reality–robbed and victimized but who assumes he's just misplaced his wallet? The last few days have given us our clearest answer yet, in the incoherent ramblings of President Obama on the nature of the threats to the free world.
And over the weekend Democrats tried desperately to convince him he's been mugged. Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, says he's being "too cautious" on ISIS. That's her way of saying that she's privy to enough intel to wonder what Obama sees when he looks at the same information. Bob Menendez, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, thinks Obama needs to be doing more to fend off Russia's invasion of Ukraine–and yes, by the way, he used the word "invasion" rather than participate in the administration's Orwellian word games to deny reality and make excuses for abandoning American allies.
And the Washington Post editorial board laid into Obama's swirling confusion over the complexity of the world:
This argument with his own administration is alarming on three levels.
The first has to do with simple competence. One can only imagine the whiplash that foreign leaders must be suffering…
Similarly, his senior advisers uniformly have warned of the unprecedented threat to America and Americans represented by Islamic extremists in Syria and Iraq. But Mr. Obama didn't seem to agree…
When Mr. Obama refuses to acknowledge the reality, allies naturally wonder whether he will also refuse to respond to it.
One can almost imagine the Post's editors intended the editorial to be read aloud, slowly and with exaggerated elocution, as if speaking to a child. And so the president hasn't really been mugged by reality, because he doesn't seem to know he's been hit.
The Post editorial was right to call attention to the bewilderment America's allies around the world must be experiencing. But it's worth dwelling on the same confusion America's enemies must be feeling. Their actions have resulted in a propaganda windfall because they surely expected the American president not to parrot their talking points or shrug off their murderous intent.
When it was revealed in August that President Obama had downgraded American security cooperation with Israel and was withholding weapons transfers to Israel during wartime, Times of Israel editor David Horovitz wrote a column headlined "US livid with Israel? Hamas can't believe its luck." Indeed, Hamas probably expects at best empty words from Obama about Israel's right to defend itself, but it's doubtful they ever imagined they would start a war with Israel only to have the American president withhold military support from Israel during that war and then fume that the U.S.-Israel military relationship is such that both sides assume America will have Israel's back, at least during wartime. Obama wants Israel to make no such assumptions.
Similarly, could Vladimir Putin have expected the Obama administration to help him obfuscate the fact that he has invaded Ukraine–again? Administration officials "have a perfectly clear idea what Russian President Vladimir Putin is doing in Ukraine," the Daily Beast's Christopher Dickey wrote late last week. "They just don't want to say the word out loud." Putin must be giddy.
And when video surfaced revealing that, in the words of CNN, "Libyan militia members have apparently turned the abandoned U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, Libya, into a water park," U.S. Ambassador Deborah Jones protested the coverage of an event the symbolism of which was impossible to ignore. It was not true that those ransacking the compound were ransacking the compound, she claimed; they were, um, guarding it. We are truly in the best of hands.
What is most troublesome about this, and what might be responsible for bringing Democrats out of the woodwork to denounce Obama's foreign-policy silliness, is the fact that there doesn't appear to be anything that can get the president to confront reality. It's always been assumed that at some point Obama will wake up; Democrats are no longer convinced that's the case, and have gone public to try to assure friends and foes alike that not everyone in the U.S. government is so steeped in comforting delusions while the world burns.
Someone's at the wheel, in other words, just not the president. And now it's the rest of the world's turn to believe the spin coming out of Washington, instead of hoping American officials don't believe the spin coming in.