The End of Israel?

It's Tisha b'Av, the fast day of mourning for the destroyed Temple in Jerusalem. Three years ago, in 2009, when this blog was still active, I wrote an essay wondering if Israel could be ended. I just went back and re-read it, and it's still as relevant and essentially up to date as it was three years ago. So I'm re-posting.

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The End of Israel?

Tisha'a be'Av, the Ninth day of Av, 2009. Today we mark 1,939 years since the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by mourning and fasting, but also, from noon onwards, with acts of construction such as fixing something around the house. It's hot, we haven't had a sip of water since yesterday, but we're puttering about with a hammer looking for something to fix. Mourning, in Jewish tradition, is as much about looking forward as backward.

There's a growing constituency for the idea that Israel's time is limited. Between 1949 and the early 1970s, Israel's right to exist was openly denied by most of the Arab world, but largely unquestioned elsewhere. Then the narrative changed, and for the next quarter century the growing consensus in the West and in Israel itself was that the existential threat had passed, and if only Israel would accept the Palestinians alongside it, peace would flourish. The Green Line of 1967: if only Israel would retreat to it!

Since summer 2000 this narrative has been steadily losing ground. Most Israelis and their elected leaders have accepted the fundamental thesis if not all its details, but the Palestinians have made clear their claims begin with 1948, not 1967.

So Israel's enemies and harsh critics are dropping the pretence of seeking partition; they are ever more openly striving for an abolition of Zionism. The Jews should have no separate state of their own, say the enemies; the Jews may end up with no state of their own, say the unconfident friends, and all call for Israeli actions which may bring this about.

Here are three random examples, all from the past 24 hours. First, the rabid antisemites at the Guardian's Comment is Free, ranting about the urgent need for a world without Israel. Second, Andrew Sullivan, muddled thinker but very popular blogger, telling A.Jay Adler he can't see Israel reaching its 60th anniversary (which happened back in 2008, but no matter). Finally, Jeffrey Goldberg, journalist and blogger at The Atlantic and a staunch supporter of Israel, fearing that wrong Israeli policies might cause it not to survive. The antisemites hope for Israel's end, Sullivan is beginning to wonder, and Goldberg is beginning to fear; they all agree it's possible.

Is it? How?

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There are some seven and a half million people in Israel. 20% are Arabs or Arabic-speaking Druze, with a slowing birthrate. A few percent are Christian non-Arabs, most but not all from the former Soviet Union; culturally they are part of the Hebrew-speaking Jewish society. The rest are Jews; their birthrate is slowly rising, even the non-religious among them. The Jewish community in Israel is the world's largest; at some point soon they will become the majority of the world's Jews, though this will not immediately be obvious because the rest of the Jews are not easy to define nor count. The number of Jews in Israel is roughly the same as the number of Jews murdered during the Shoah. That would be one way to end Israel: by violence.

In December 2001 Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, often touted in the media as a moderate among the Iranian leaders, said in a public speech that Muslims should not fear from a nuclear confrontation with Israel: Israel is small and can be destroyed, the Muslim world is large, and can't. (Translated by MEMRI, but also posted on the website of the Iran Press Service). Of course, such a nuclear conflagration would also kill millions of others – Palestinians, Iranians, Jordanians, Lebanese and Syrians, but some people are willing to pay a steep price to rid the world of Jews. History proves that, just as it proves that when people repeatedly announce their intention to rid the world of Jews, they may actually mean it.

I cannot say how near the Iranians are to being able to destroy Israel with nuclear weapons, nor how many of their leaders agree with Rafsanjani, but a nuclear war could indeed end Israel; moreover, it could be launched by a very small number of people. Should a group of Israel's haters have the nuclear ability, they would not need to hold a national referendum. A few hundred willing technicians and a handful of committed mass murderers would suffice. So it must be prevented.

Sometimes I wonder if perhaps Israel shouldn't warn, that if the day ever comes when the last of her people in some nuclear submarine realize that all is lost, their orders will be to shoot off their remaining missiles at Berlin, London, Paris and Moscow. Simply to focus minds on the cost of having a world without Israel to the nations whose forefathers often gleefully persecuted Jews.

Nuclear Armageddon is logically possible; personally I have decided to live as if it's not going to happen. Elected leaders and a small number of specialists must spend their lives bearing the burden of preparing for the worst; the rest of us can't be expected to do so while living normal lives.

Interestingly, the haters of Israel yearning for its destruction don't believe in the nuclear danger. Should Israel ever take pre-emptive military action the Guardian and its ilk will shrilly denounce Israel for its paranoia; I expect the Andrew Sullivans to join them. There's a tension at the heart of the anti-Israeli discourse, which postulates that Israel should or may go down for its crimes against the Palestinians, while denying the existence of any real danger to it from anyone else. This is the Western corollary of the tension common among many Muslims of denying the Holocaust while regretting that Hitler didn't complete the job.

Short of nuclear war, is there any danger to Israel's existence?

But of course, say those who fear it or yearn for it. Their favorite scenario is that someday America will turn its back on Israel, and Israel will cave in. There are other scenarios, in which British academics and politically enthusiastic activists manage to set in movement a boycott that devastates Israel's economy and brings it to its knees, but without the active encouragement of America it's hard to see how this might work.

For such a scenario a number of things must happen.

First, a significant proportion of American society must greatly sour on Israel. Disliking a particular Israeli leader or policy won't be enough to make them enact anti-Israeli legislation. For that masses of Americans must decide Israel is uniquely evil, to the extent they'd be willing to take highly unusual measures. Since Israel isn't uniquely evil, and actually is far better than many players on the international stage, this means someone will have to inculcate in masses of Americans a dislike of Israel that is irrational – in effect, they'll need to inculcate antisemitism in a society which is largely free of it. If you assume there's a reason America is the first large Western society to cure itself of the malaise of Jew Hatred, this means that reason must be turned back.

For all my affinity to America, I don’t live there and can't say such a thing could never happen. I doubt it, but perhaps I'm naïve. It's certainly a likely scenario in Europe, indeed, it's already happening – though of course, no large European society was ever really free of Jew Hatred.

For the sake of the argument, let's assume America participates in placing sanctions against Israel, demanding Israeli measures Israel otherwise refuses to take – i.e not dismantle settlements, for which an Israeli majority could easily be found, but accept half a million descendants of Palestinian refugees, say, or dismantle the homes of hundreds of thousands of Jews in Jerusalem. That sort of thing. Would international sanctions against Israel succeed, on an issue a majority of Israelis regard as existential?

Sanctions, as a general rule, don't work. The world economy is too porous. People, companies and states will always be found to circumvent them for profit. Lots of European companies are past masters at the deception, but the Chinese don't even pretend. Furthermore, while it's just conceivable that America might roll back its history and re-acquire the taste for Jew Hatred, the Chinese and Indians never had the taste to begin with. The sole example of successful sanctions I'm aware of, against South Africa, never made a dent until the world was suddenly unipolar, in the early 1990s. It's less unipolar now than then, which is why the various sanction schemes now running aren't making much difference.

What if, improbable as it seems, there were to be universal sanctions against Israel, on a matter Israel felt it couldn't compromise on. What then?

I know I wouldn't cave in. I've gone to war, three weeks after my wedding, hoping to be back but knowing I might not. I went anyway, and some of my friends indeed didn't return. I've lived through a period where busses and supermarkets were life threatening environments. I've sent my children off to war – that was probably the hardest. Why would anyone expect me to give in on something essential faced merely with, what, economic hardship? So far as I can tell, I'm no different than most people around me. We would love to have peace with our neighbors, we have absolutely no joy from our war with them, but we're not going to relinquish the essentials we've acquired at tremendous cost these past few generations.

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It's Tisha beAv. The fast will be over in a few hours, and we'll go back to our normal routines. For today, however, we're mourning the time, two millennia ago, when our forefathers were crushed by the mightiest military power in the world. Bad things can happen to Jews, and do, with consistent regularity. Sanguinity, as in "we've got a vibrant society here, nothing can ever beat us" is not warranted by history. We actually often do get beaten, and perhaps will again. Yet it's late afternoon of Tisha Be'Av, and I suppose I should take out my tools and find something around the house that needs fixing. After all, the generation of Jews who were pulverized by the Romans were also the greatest generation of Jews ever, along with their children and grandchildren. They were the ones who got up from the rubble and re-defined their world so as to get along without the Temple; they created the Mishna; they lay the foundations for the ability to survive millennia of homelessness and disenfranchisement. Why, they even managed to launch a second, even more furious revolt against the Romans. And then they got out from under Hadrian's genocide and kept on going, until the Roman Empire was long since gone, and its successor, and its…

I'm sorry – no, I'm not sorry at all – but whoever is planning our near demise doesn't get it. We're not here because the Colonialists sent us and forgot to take us back.  We're not here as revenge for the Shoah the Europeans enabled the Germans to commit on us. We're not here on the sufferance of the Americans. We're here because we've decided to be here. Short of divine plans, which I don't pretend to be able to explain, our decisions are the most important part of the story, as they always have been.

Yaacov Lozowick
Jerusalem, July 30, 2009

Scots: We're not Boycotting Israel, only Israel

That seems to be what the folks in West Dunbartonshire are saying. See for yourselves, and tell me where I'm wrong.

Ben Gurion University: Conflict, Boycott, Science

Prof. Neve Gordon is living proof of the strength of Israel's democracy. He is stridently anti-Israeli, but also a professor at Ben Gurion University in Ber Sheva, he supports the boycott of his own university, but keeps drawing his salary from it - and the university pays it, and gives him a platform to spread his bile from, and an academic address to draw respectability from.

Yesterday he was in class teaching about human rights, when the sirens went off and everyone dashed down to a shelter for protection from an incoming rocket, fired from Gaza at Israeli civilians. My informant (thanks, AL) tells me Gordon has not yet commented on whose human rights were infringed yesterday. If this article of his is any indication, he's probably capable of saying it wasn't Palestinian violence at all; no, the poor Palestinians have been hoodwinked into misbehaving by devious Israelis who are provoking them so as to justify more repression.

(Mondoweiss is full of speculation these days: will Israel succeed in its evil ploy to brutally attack Gaza once more? They're doing everything in their power to sucker the Palestinians into provoking them. Here's one example, but there are lots of them at the site).

The Beer Sheva story gets better, however. On the same day two Palestinian Grad rockets hit the city, the University of Johannesburg became the first university in the world to boycott an Israeli university. I admit that my first reaction was to ask which of the two institutions would be harmed by the decision, but according to South African sources - indeed, according to a top UJ official - the answer is very clear: The South Africans will be harmed.

Ben-Gurion University however had been working with UJ on finding a method to clean algae that has infested South Africa's drinking water. The severing of ties meant the project was likely to come an end, leaving UJ without access to BGU's extensive water expertise. “There has been quite a lot of scare mongering that if the partnership breaks, South Africa will be confined to bad water quality,” Habib said. “The quality of our water is suffering because we are not spending the type of money on cleaning water that we need to, and not employing skill sets required.“We can deal with acid rain water in the region if we are prepared to spend money.”

Habib said individual professors from UJ would be allowed to keep up existing partnerships with BGU. "That is something for individual academics to determine, but it depends on whether BGU allows this or not.”

UJ's severing of ties with BGU came amidst talk of steep water tariff increases and a warning South Africa could run out of water within the next ten years if nothing was done to supplement water resources. The Environment and Conservation Association has said that by 2015, 80 percent of South Africa's fresh water would be so badly polluted that no purification process in the country would make it fit for consumption.The impending disaster that would be created by acid mine drainage, as well as by sewerage and industrial pollution, had on many occasions been brought to the government's attention, with no positive results, the association said.

The UJ Petition Committee said in a statement the university's senate had found “significant” evidence that BGU had research and other engagements supporting Israel's military, in particular in its occupation of Gaza.

Translation: the South Africans face an epic drinking water catastrophe. The Israelis could help, but since they occupy Gaza, they must be ostracized, no matter what the cost.

 AL, a reader I've been talking to this morning, points out that this decision demonstrates the falsity of the fundamental assumption of economics and other academic models of human behaviour that people rationally prefer their own self interest. To which I'd add that it's not even a matter of self interest, it's the simple ability to recognize facts. If Israel occupies Gaza, who's shooting those missiles and why doesn't Israel arrest them?

(Ah, I forget: Israel wants the rockets so as to justify re-occupying Gaza which it already occupies).

Gaddafi Benficiaries Boycott Israel

I've been a bit lax with blogging recently. I expect I'll return by and by. In the meantime, you might be tickled to learn that along with the various English academic institutions who overlooked the entire truth about Saif al-Islam's identity as the son of a dictator in their haste to accept his money (or rather, the money his family has stolen), there are also some prominent boycotters of Israel. Israel being such a uniquely horrendous place, you see.

NIF and Boycotts of Israel

Jeffrey Goldberg is having a discussion with the NIF about their tolerance of boycotters among their grantees. They're using weasel words to justify what I suppose they'd call a "nuanced" position; Jeffrey correctly has no patience for nuance on the matter. Faced with his stark position, however, the NIF deploys additional weasel words.

It's not pretty, what's happening to Israel's radical Left.

BDS Stories

The efforts of the BDS gang in Quebec seem not to be succeeding. They managed to convene 100 people in Montreal, some of whom must have been the non-local instigators.

Remember the disaster in Haiti? It's still there, getting worse again. The Israelis are also still there, doing their best.

A while back I wrote here about a team of researchers at Haifa University who are making some impressive advances in the war on cancer. Well, apparently they've got some local competition; this story seems to be about a totally different research team. Technion, not Haifa University. Same city, different school. Same war on cancer, though.

Hard to be a Palestinian Professor

Prof. David Newman, a staunchly left-wing Israeli professor at Ben Gurion University, explains why boycotting Israeli universities is a truly dumb idea. He offers a number of interesting reasons; I found this one particularly interesting:

In most cases, it is the Palestinian side which prefers to keep the project out of sight of the media. Important groups within Palestinian civil society, such as trade unions and academics, are highly critical of those who want to cooperate on a basis of equality when, in reality, there is no equality – political or economic. They are uncomfortable with the thought that through cooperation they are, de facto, legitimizing the occupation. Palestinian academics who work with Israelis find the political pressure to bow to the anti-intellectual logic of the boycott campaign difficult to deal with.

Boycott Now!

Yet another good reason to boycott Israeli universities, the sooner the better.

Something about the Northwest

Michael Totten has a report from the Golan Heights you ought to read. The thing about Michael is that he lets folks tell you about their world, in their words, without editing them so as to fit the template he wants you to think in. Ironically, this rather simplistic way of doing things - no self-respecting journalist or newspaper editor would be caught dead doing it that way - results in a complex picture of reality that's much better than the one the professionals would foist on us.

Meanwhile, a bit further to the north of Michael (he's in Oregon), David Brumer seems to be organizing the locals to confront their BDS neighbors. So if there are any readers of this blog from the Seattle area, this is for you. Ah, and if you wish, you can send my regards to Richard Silverstein, too. I'd do it myself but he's banned me from any channels of communications an account of my disagreeing with him on stuff.

Things to Boycott

While I've never systematically done the maths, my consistent impression is that when the Economist talks about technology, the representation of Israel is higher than it's proportion of the world's population, or even higher than it's proportion in, say, the population of the OECD countries alone. Here's an example from their most recent Technology Quarterly, about an Israeli company that may yet revolutionize air travel if the existing power players can be induced to move over a bit. This would probably save billions and be good for the environment, so the Guardian should be in favor.

The following article doesn't mention Israel at all. Yet it just so happens that the name of the researcher who is so lavishly praised in it rang a bell: Yoel Fink. So I did a spot of googling, and yes, he's that cute little two-year-old who lived across the street from us in Jerusalem; I used to baby-sit for him and his sister, way back then. He seems since to have grown up, and done quite well for himself. Go figure.

Israel's Economic Success Bolsters BDS

The other day the BDS community worldwide gave a gasp of anticipation when for a moment it looked like Harvard had suddenly divested from Israel. Then somebody thought to ask the relevant fellow at Harvard, rather than speculate, and no. Since Israel has recently been re-designated from developing economy to developed one, it appears in a different part of the Harvard portfolio. (Goldberg's got the beginning and end of the story).

Am I allowed a moment of Schadenfreude? Like this?Or perhaps, slightly less fun, like this one, in which Guy Rolnick says that no, we're not yet Switzerland? (Who is, pray tell?).

Links to Stuff

Jonathan Cristol guestblogging at Walter Russel Mead discusses the impossibility of criticizing the BDS movement without making its purveyors feel they're important:

So an article or incident that is in favor of BDS is proof that BDS is gaining steam; and an article or incident against BDS proves that it is gaining steam so quickly that the writer or publication is nervous about it. A victory is a victory and a loss is a victory. If the writer calls it anti-Semitic then that is an even greater victory as the writer is “resorting to ad hominem attacks.”

If I do write a long post or series of posts I will be handing a victory to the BDS movement. If, in that post, I write about the anti-Semitism that creeps into the BDS movement then I have handed out a huge victory. But if I am scared into not writing about BDS for fear I will be helping the BDS crazies, then that is certainly a victory for BDS. If I write about writing about BDS, I still haven’t avoided handing a victory to my opponents on this issue. So I must apologize to supporters of Israel for handing yet another victory to this small, inconsequential, but very loud movement.

CiFWatch has dug up a letter written 40 years ago by Stanley Goldfoot that could have been written yesterday.

The Israel Museum has just re-opened its renovated gates. Matthew Fishbane visited and liked the architecture, but the exhibits not so much.

Khaled Abu Toameh, a Palestinian, bemoans that journalists only care about Palestinian woes if they were caused by Israel. Self inflicted or other-inflicted: no story.

Finally, Edmund Case bemoans that too many Jews weren't overjoyed by the Clinton-Mezvinsky wedding arrangements. His thesis is that if Jews would be nice to folks, folks might like Jews. I admit this seems unconvincing to me. People decide about their identity for various reasons, but cuddly feelings aren't among them - and if they are, it's probably an affectation, not an identity.

The Goal of BDS is No Israel

Noah Pollak sends a link to this YouTube about the real goals of the BDS movement: not peace between Israel and Palestine, but No Israel.

Dr. Hossam Haick

Last summer I poked fun at the boycott brigade with this mention of a team of Israeli researchers who are leading the field in part of the war against cancer, with an Israeli Arab at their head.

Well, it turns out the full story is much more fun than that original teaser. A patriotic Israeli Arab raking in millions of Euros and $ for his path-braking research into very-early detection of cancer through smell, heading multiple teams of researchers from the world over, all based at Haifa's Technion, which he chose over some of the topmost universities in the world because he's from here.

If he succeeds he'll probably one day get a Nobel prize, at which point we'll have the interesting conundrum of counting him as an Israeli or an Arab (Israelis sometimes get Nobels, Arabs almost never).

BDS Seeks New Frontiers

What with all their failures of recent weeks (and years), the Boycott&Divestment gang is seeking new campuses to poison. Some of the locals at Stanford, however, are trying to launch a preemptive counter campaign, the sneaks.

Not Even in California

The BDS movement just lost two more votes, one in Berkeley (yet again), and one in UC San Diego. Divest this has the story.

Inevitably, some day they'll win somewhere, but in the meantime it's nice to enjoy their losses, I admit.

Things People Talk About

Over Yom Haatzmaut, Independence Day, I spent time talking to people in a number of social events. Here are some of the things I heard:

A friend who runs a company that produces high-class tools for the creation of other tools ("our equipment is the Rolls-Royce of the field: expensive but the best") told me they've been selling to unfriendly countries such as Indonesia, and in recent weeks they've been approached by a potential client in Pakistan. A second friend who was standing with us told of other Israeli companies who sell to the Arab world, mostly via Jordan and often in Jordanian packaging to hide the Israeli provenance. Someone ought to tell the boycott folks.

A North-American journalist who has been reporting on the MidEast for a generation tells me the lack of a peace process enables all sides to live in practical peace; once negotiations start again they'll have to re-start the violence.

A Canadian who lives in Israel these past 30 years remarks, apropos Obama's plans to regulate American banks: Canada has strict bank regulations and sailed through the recent turmoil mostly unharmed. Israel has strict bank regulations, and sailed through likewise unscathed. America has light bank regulations, and look where they are.

The cutting edge in military technology is robots: drones, jeeps, and science fiction spy tools all operated from afar by highly trained soldiers who can't be harmed by the battlefield conditions. Israel is in the forefront of this technology, alongside the US.

Three if not four people separately remarked on the 20th of April as Hitler's birthday. Two of them are children of Holocaust survivors, so that's where that complex comes from; one came from Russia, and one was a thirty-something from North Africa. Jews are a screwed up bunch.

Volcanoes make humans look very small. Everyone agreed on that one.

Not Even at Berkeley

The story of the divestment attempt at Berkeley has been confusing, but apparently the side that should have, lost. Divest this! has been on the story all along, and explains here that in spite of the obfuscations, the divestors really did lose. This would explain why the many reports at Mondoweiss have all been along the lines of "we won by being there". Tom Lehrer once quipped about the Spanish Civil War that "they won all the battles, but we had all the good songs".

Not that there's much about the present topic that resembles the Spanish Civil War, mind you. The naive folks who flocked to Spain to fight on the losing side at least had the decency to be willing to die for their convictions, even as they overlooked the fact that both sides were pretty awful. Compare that to, say, Cecilie Surasky at Mondoweiss: true, she's ecstatically convinced she's part of Something Big, but her gushing makes me think of a 14-year-old.

Dumb Antisemitism?

Walter Russel Mead keeps writing interesting things (I've cited him previously here and here). I have the sneaking suspicion he's not a Zionist, but when it comes to America, he seems to be what they used to call a realist. This includes realizing that most Americans support Israel and have done for a long time. In this article he comments that the reasons for this support can't be Jewish influence, manipulation or chicanery: there simply aren't enough Jews around to be having the effect they're having on so many people, and anyway, most of the Americans who so support Israel do so more fervently than many American Jews do. (Phil Wiess comes to mind, and Richard Silverstein, not to mention Norman Finkelstein or Noam Chomsky - but he's actually referring to the J-Street sort of Jews, not the nut-jobs). (h/t Goldblog)

Meanwhile, the Divest This! fellow, who obviously is a business-and-numbers chap, looks at the matter from a different direction. Not political belief or religious persuasion, but what people do to make their buck go furthest: in many cases, it appears, they do business with Israel. Heartwarming.

Divest More

You do regularly visit Divest This, yes? You don't need me to remind you?