Israel is a Rogue State

19-year-old Gabriel Latner puts us all to shame: This is how you defend Israel from English antisemites. (h/t Jennifer Rubin).

The Professors Strike Back

Yehuda Bauer, writing in Haaretz Nov. 19th, (Hebrew only, and already hidden behind their paywall) enumerates various democratic nation states with large minorities: The Latvians, for example, make up only 59.4% of the population in their nation state (Russians are 27.5%, only 56% of those Russians are Latvian citizens). Estonians make up 69% of their own nation state, while 25.6% are Russians. Kazakhs make up 63% of the population of their nation state, and the lack of democracy there isn't a matter of ethnicity - the country is equally undemocratic for all.

Menachem Lorberbaum and Carlo Strenger, both of Tel Aviv University, likewise take aim at the notion that the Jews can't have a nation state with a Palestinian minority, though near the end they also criticize the direction Israel's right is going. But that's fine. The point isn't that left-leaning professors - as these three all are - need to support Lieberman, rather that prominent left-leaning professors are still more critical of the ideas coming from the far left.

Adin Steinsaltz Completes the Talmud

It took 45 years,but the Rav Steinsaltz has completed his annotation of the entire Talmud. Three million volumes have been sold so far, and even taking into account that the complete set (now) has 45 volumes, that's still quite a number. Add to that the fact that the Schottenstein translation now competes for the same market and may well be more popular, and the additional fact that real professionals won't touch either of them because they make the study a bit less challenging, and the fact that most people purchase only the volumes they're currently studying not the entire set, and you get a sense of how many people are studying Talmud these days. I expect this hasn't been the case for many centuries, but that's a topic for another day.

The Second Intifada, Ten Years Later

This interesting snippet by Moshe Yaalon about the days he was our top general during the 2nd Intifada, sent me to this interesting book of articles. Alas, the book is, well, a book, and I don't see where I'm going to find the time to read it, although I have downloaded it. So I'm announcing it here, and if anyone reads it and wishes to call our attention to some part of it, be my guests.

Ghajar as a Test Case?

The significance of the ongoing Ghajar story is that it tests all sorts of assumptions about Israel's conflict with its neighbors.

Last night I had a discussion with a luminary of Israel's so-called human-rights firmament. The kind of person who generally puts the right of the individual above - or at least, balanced against - the right of the government to pursue policies in the national interest. I was of the opinion that the Ghajar case is a fine example: the Israeli government is about to shunt some 1500 of its citizens into a country they have no identification with, while probably negatively impacting their ability to lead normal lives, in the name of a national interest. My interlocutor, however, had no patience for my pleas to take consideration of personal needs of citizens: They are free to move anywhere else inside Israel (and by implication: why do they think it's their right to remain in the town of their forefathers). For my interlocutor, the overriding consideration was ending a piece of Israeli occupation.

When I tried to apply the same logic to other hypothetical cases, such as for example the idea that Israel will swap Israeli-Arab towns along the Green Line for settlement beyond in a future peace agreement, the discussion got too slippery for me to be able to follow it. But perhaps I wasn't trying hard enough.

This article in Haaretz postulates how the reality on the ground will in a few months: Ghajar will be fenced off from both Israel and Lebanon. Sounds jolly to me:

The security situation after the withdrawal is expected to be better than before the 2006 Second Lebanon War, as Ghajar will be defended from the north by a large UNIFIL force - equiped with watchtowers, lighting and a ground barrier that would make infiltration very difficult.

UNIFIL will effectively isolate the village from the rest of Lebanon, preventing open access to other Lebanese civilians, while the IDF will reinforce its contingent in the south of Ghajar.

According to the proposed arrangement, the IDF will retreat to the southern part of the village, thereby implementing UN Security Council Resolution 1701. The northern part of Ghajar will fall under the military responsibility of no party, while UNIFIL will prevent residents of the rest of Lebanon from entry. 

The villagers don't sound amused.

If there is anything amusing about the matter, it is surely the way it's being reported by the Guardian. Harreit Sherwood manages to imply that the pain about to be inflicted is Israel's fault. She also manages never to mention - not once - that the residents of Ghajar are Israeli citizens, and she certainly doesn't hint that they are so by choice, having requested Israeli citizenship in 1981, when it was first offered by Israel.

As to the the comments below her story: Israel complying with a UN demand to move back to a UN line is, obviously, a story of Israeli perfidy and naked aggression. Of course.

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.

Michael Oren: There Are No Settlements in Jerusalem

He's excellent, is Michael.

Destroying Empty Homes

The other day Achikam and I were revisiting some of his stories from the Gaza operation of January 2009. He remembered a case where one evening his tank unit was supposed to give support to an infantry unit which was supposed to move into two nearby high-rise buildings and take positions on their roofs, which offered a commanding view of the area. Once the infantry arrived, however, they learned that the buildings were booby trapped, and the tank crews received new orders: to knock down both structures from afar, as tanks can do and infantry can't.

I never took the Goldstone Report and tried to align any of its particular stories with that one, but it might be possible. Or you might be interested in this article, from the lifestyle section of the Guardian, back in those days, talking about how horrible that there were destroyed buildings in Gaza. The lifestyle section.

Now compare that to this mostly matter-of-fact report about how the Americans in Afghanistan are systematically knocking down homes not necessarily because they're booby-trapped, but because they're empty. (And they're using the air-force to do it, in some cases). Is this because America is uniquely evil, or because war is hell?

Ghajar: AP Misses the Heart of the Story

The Associated Press tells that Israel's government is poised to make a decision about the town of Ghajar, and the New York Times (and others) have published AP's item.

Predictably, the story totally misses the crux of the matter: that the people who live in the town are all Arabs who have acquired Israeli citizenship, and they don't want to be in Lebanon. They want to be in Israel, at least until Israel and Syria reach peace between them (and arguably, also thereafter).

That part wouldn't fit into the meta-narrative, so it doesn't get told.

Israel Nurse wrote about this recently at length, with photos, and Michael Totten wrote some interesting background here, but between you and me: who reads blogs? AP reaches more people in a day than all the political blogs together in five years, even including Andrew Sullivan.

Refudiate

Ever heard of Warren Harding? He was president of the US between the two world wars. He also invented a word, and was lampooned for doing so. That's the way it is with languages: they keep on adding words, changing meanings of existing ones (firewall, anyone?) and generally being stronger than the purists who'd keep them under control.

From a strictly lexical interpretation of the different contexts in which Palin has used “refudiate,” we have concluded that neither “refute” nor “repudiate” seems consistently precise, and that “refudiate” more or less stands on its own, suggesting a general sense of “reject.”

Although Palin is likely to be forever branded with the coinage of “refudiate,” she is by no means the first person to speak or write it—just as Warren G. Harding was not the first to use the word normalcy when he ran his 1920 presidential campaign under the slogan “A return to normalcy.” But Harding was a political celebrity, as Palin is now, and his critics spared no ridicule for his supposedly ignorant mangling of the correct word “normality.”

No, I'm not endorsing Sarah Palin, and not not endorsing her, though I admit I like her deep-seated support for Israel.

Politics and Sport

An Iranian weightlifter came in 2nd in a competition in Poland recently. Standing on the winners' podium, he refused to shake the hand of the gold medalist, an Israeli, though he did remain standing while the Israeli anthem was played. Some folks thought his snub was highly improper. The Iranian authorities thought so too, from the opposite direction: he seems to have been banished for life from representing Iran, for the crime of competing against an Israeli in the first place.

Jews Who Are Less Israel's Worst Enemies

AKUS, writing at CiF Watch, notices that the Guardian's CiF is offering less space to its stable of Jewish anti-Israelis than it used to.

Good.

Jews who are Israel's Worst Enemies

Just Journalism has published a valuable analysis of the London Review of Book's take on Israel between 2000-2010: it is stridently against. Guided by a Jewish editor, one of LRB's main tracks is to "balance" Arab writers who detest Israel with Jewish writers who detest it even more, while effectively never allowing mainstream Israelis the opportunity to respond. It's star Jewish writers are Uri Avnery, Ilan Pappe, and Ytizchak Laor (who manages to make even Gideon Levy look moderate).

Someday, long after we're no longer here to see it, in the 22nd or 23rd century, some scholar will write a fine tome about the antisemitism of the early 21st century. The London Review of Books and the Guardian will be given great prominence.

Desert Monastaries in the Suburbs

In the 1930's an American agronomist and proto-environmentalist bythe name of Walter Lowdermilk visited Mandatory Palestine as part of a world-wide survey he was doing for the American Department of Agriculture. He was deeply impressed by the efforts of the Zionist pioneers to roll back the desert and rejuvenate agricultural practices. In a subsequent book he postulated that were the land to be treated correctly it might possibly be able to support 8-10 million inhabitants someday.

There are about 12 million today, and growing.


Many years earlier - almost 1,600, to be precise - a movement had begun in which Christian monks and hermits began to settle in the desert to the east of Jerusalem. They were following in the footsteps of earlier monks in Egypt and elsewhere; the ones in the Judean desert wished to live far from the cities and bustle of civilization, but also close enough as to be able to interact with pilgrims and other potential benefactors. At the peak of the phenomenon there were more than a hundred monasteries of varying sizes in the Judean desert. Most of them were destroyed by the Persians in 614, and then were not rebuilt because of the Muslim invasion of 634. Some of them were rebuilt during the Crusader kingdoms of the 12-13th centuries, but then fell into disuse. Today there are six such monasteries, most of them with a single monk or a handful of them at most.

Of course, having 12 million people in a land that used to host a million or two at the best of times, along with the technology to pipe water out into the desert, means the settled areas are a bit larger than they once were.

How much larger? Well, take the large and famous monastery of Euthymius the Great (died in 473).

Today the remnants of the monastery lie inside the industry park of Maaleh Adumim, at the eastern edge of Greater Jerusalem.

When Euthymus looked around he saw only desert - which still works if you look north south or east. But not West:

On the hilltop a mile away is Maaleh Adumim. You can rail against it if you wish, but it's there. Martyrius (died 486) would have been even more surprised by the changes to his surroundings:

Although the records tell that the monastery of Martyrius was one of the larger ones around, no-one born after 620 or thereabouts knew where it was, until in 1979 Israel began building Maaleh Adumim, and the bulldozers came across it. So there it is, in the middle of town.

 The metal ring above the trough is from the 6th century. Since even back then the Judean desert was an oft-disputed territory, and the monks knew that not all the neighbors liked them,  they built their monastery with only one entrance and even that could be blocked by a large round rock that was rolled across the entrance.

When shove came to push, however, this didn't help. In 614 the Persians broke in, killed the monks, forgot they'd ever been there, and no-one found them for the next 1,365 years or so.

Can one imagine what these monasteries looked like in real life, before they were destroyed? Well, yes. Because to the east of Jericho there's one that's still there (or perhaps, is there again): the monastery of Gerasimus (died 475):

Outside, in the parking lot, you can see, side by side, cars with Palestinian Authority license plates and Israeli ones. Not peace, perhaps, but peaceful.

Should you be interested in learning more about this ancient chapter of history, it will come as no surprise that the single best book was written rather a while ago: The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestian Monasticism Under the Christian Empire, by Derwas Chitty.

Arafat, Clinton-Netanyahu, Israel's Left

I'm too busy these days for much blogging, sorry, but here are a few interesting links.

Josh Rogin reads tea leaves and thinks Hillary and Bibi may be headed to a breakthru, in which the future borders between Israel and Palestine will be outlined, and the issue of construction in the settlements will go away: Israel will build only within the lines. This would be a good thing if it could work; I'd assume it would not relate to Jerusalem, so that might remain a problem.


Elliot Jager talks about the mostly defunct Israeli Left.


Barry Rubin reminds us how ghastly Yaasir Arafat was (he died six years ago this week), and how much of the world's media refused to admit this:

At the time of his death he was more popular in France, where almost half the population saw Arafat as a great national hero, than among his own people. In a June 2004 poll, only 23.6 percent of Palestinians named him as the leader they most trusted. Actually, Arafat's popularity rating among Palestinians was lower than that of President George W. Bush among Americans, though the U.S. leader was-in sharp contrast to Arafat--widely portrayed as being reviled and mistrusted by a large part of his people.

Two Interesting Articles

Michael Wiess at Foreign Policy has a fine description of the settlement project and why it's not remotely the reason there's no peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Alas, no one's listening.

Daniel Pipes has a long and well-footnoted article on Islam's historical connections and sometime lack of connections to Jerusalem. I"m not fully convinced how crucial this is, since no matter what Jerusalem's historical status in Islam has been, for the Palestinians it's the most important place they've got - even though I'm not in favor of giving it to them in the way most folks seem to suggest. Pipes rather demolishes the Arabs' claim to Jerusalem, but doesn't really deal with the Palestinian one. Anyway, I've not got the time to write about this today, nor about anything else, but follow the links and you'll learn stuff.

Results of an Investigation about Negotiations

A month ago I disputed the primary narrative which has taken hold in the media, whereby the demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish nation is a ploy by Netanyahu to condemn the negotiations to failure. On the contrary, I said: this demand was first raised by a group of Lefty Israeli peace activists, in July 2001.

A few days later, following an e-mail exchange, one Mitchell Plitnick responded to this claim on his blog. Yaacov is wrong, he said, it was actually the other way around, the group of Palestinians and Israelis did reach agreement, and it's posted online here. (Mitchell used to work for the NIF, by the way).

I was a bit taken aback by his post. I was saying one thing had happened, and he was telling about a different event: might it not be possible that both happened? Did it have to be either-or? Still, knowing that human memory can be a tricky thing, I said I'd have to look into the matter. My description of an event in July 2001 was written in 2002, but perhaps it was false?

Google is useless for this sort of research, a matter I'm well familiar with because of my other profession, and the Haaretz archive likewise. Only this afternoon did I find the time to do the old-fashioned thing, and go to the National Library where I read through the microfilmed copies from Haaretz of July 2001. Prior to that, however, I did the second best: I used my connections to inquire directly from some of the Israeli participants. I sent them a copy of the two paragraphs I'd written in 2002, and inquired if they might illuminate the matter for me. Only one of them responded at all, and he told me my memory was wrong, the discussions hadn't touched upon the subject of Israel being Jewish or otherwise - tho he was careful enough to say he hadn't been at all of the meetings.

On July 9th 2001 Amira Hass, hardly the most impartial reporter Haaretz could find, filed a short report on the first day of meetings between Palestinian and Israeli peace activists. The original Hebrew is below; here's my translation into English:

Some 30 Israeli and Palestinian writers and public figures met yesterday. At the beginning of the meeting Yossi Beilin requested of those present that they formulate a joint declaration in the hope it will recreate mutual trust and express the joint trust in the possibility of reaching a peace agreement. A committee was set up to formulate the declaration.

The Israelis explained that the [Palestinian] demand for a right of return is understood as an attempt to undermine the existence of the Jewish state, and they further described their feeling of betrayal that the Intifada was launched against an Israeli government of the political camp that brought the Oslo Process. The Palestinians denied that the Intifada was initiated by Arafat. They added that the Palestinian public's trust in the process was undermined by the fact that even though the process was supposed to result in an Israeli return to the lines of 1967, Israeli governments continued to build in the settlements.

My recollections were based on a TV report from the evening of July 8th 2001, which was probably watched by a few million Israelis; the Hass report from the next morning essentially confirms it, it seems to me. That one professor I quoted above agrees with me, now that I've shown it to him (I'm not naming any of the people I turned to since they related to me as a private individual, not a journalist). 

So what can we learn from all this?

1. The Israeli demand of the Palestinians that they recognize Israel as the Jewish state, or the state of the Jewish nation, or some similar formulation, was raised by Israeli peace activists in 2001. I don't know if they were the first, but in any case they preceded the demand by Netanyahu by nine years. Moreover, their demand was made publicly, in a manner that millions of us could see and remember.

2. The Palestinians interlocutors sort of acquiesced:

Solutions can be found to all outstanding issues that should be fair and just to both sides and should not undermine the sovereignty of the Palestinian and Israeli states as determined by their respective citizens, and embodying the aspirations to statehood of both peoples, Jewish and Palestinian. 

There's wriggle room there (as in, who are the respective citizens of Israel if there's a Palestinian right of return), but even so the Palestinians did accept a formulation about Jews having a right to statehood; would that the present Palestinian leaders would say the same!

3. I was not able to find a single Israeli participant in that event who remembers it as reported at the time by Amira Hass. I didn't contact all of them, but zero from five is an interesting result.

4. Mitchell Plitnick and many of his co-activists seem to accept the Palestinian narrative: the peace process was supposed to end with Israel on the 1967 border, Jerusalem divided, and some Israeli accommodation of the refugee problem. This, however, is counter factual. No Israeli government before 2000 ever accepted those positions (Yitzchak Rabin was openly against them); and while arguably some official Israeli negotiators may have come close since 2000, they were never authorized to do so by the Israeli electorate. On the contrary. The Israeli electorate has clearly accepted the idea of partition and a two state solution, but not on the 1967 lines, not by dividing Jerusalem, and certainly not with any right of return of descendants of Palestinian refugees. Netanyahu's current positions seem rather well aligned with those of the voters (I say this as a Kadima voter), and are not a ploy to thwart peace, rather they're the terms we can live with. Plitnick is welcome to disagree (though doing so from America does rather weaken his persuasiveness), but that's what they're doing: disagreeing with the democratically elected Israeli government.

Here's the Hebrew ff the Hass report, in case anyone wishes to check my translation:

כ-30 סופרים ואנשי ציבור פלשתינאים וישראלים נפגשו אתמול. בתחילת הפגישה ביקש יוסי ביילין שהצדדים ינסו להגיע להצהרה משותפת בתקווה שהיא תסייע להחזרת האמון ההדדי ותבטא את האמון המשותף בהיתכנותו של הסכם שלום. ועדה מיוחדת תעמול על ניסוח ההצרה.

הישראלים ציינו עד כמה העלאת נושא זכות השיבה נתפסת כניסיון לחתור תחת קיום המדינה היהודית, ועל תחושת בגידה שנובעת מכך שהאינטיפדה פרצה נגד המחנה שהביא את הסכם אוסלו. הפלסטינים אמרו, שאין זה נכון שהאינטי פדה היא יוזמה של ערפאת. הם הוסיפו שאמון הציבור הפלסטיני התערער משום שלמרות שדובר על פתרון על בסיס קוי 67 המשיכו ממשלות ישראל בבניה בהתנחלויות.

Rabin on Jerusalem

There's a serious spat going on about Israeli building plans in Jerusalem. President Obama has rebuked the Israelis for the intention of building in neighborhoods of East Jerusalem which even the Geneva Accords people defined as Israeli. The Israeli lefties I follow on Twitter are all agog about the Israeli audacity (in the negative meaning of the term). Netanyahu has responded sharply: Jerusalem isn't a settlement, it's our capital. He's right, of course.

There are parts of the so-called peace-camp left who are so determined to force their agenda on Israel that in recent years they're moving ever closer to an overall denying of Jewish history. This is a subject I've alluded to occasionally, and probably ought to write about systematically someday. Today I won't go back centuries or millenia;15 years will suffice. A few months before his assassination, Yitzchak Rabin had a meeting with Dr. Israel Kimche, a scholar who knows Jerusalem and its issues as well as anyone alive; Kimche had managed to finagle a meeting with the prime minister because as he saw it, the peace process was heading towards a discussion of the division of Jerusalem, and he wanted Rabin to start thinking about it. Rabin's public position was that peace process or not, Jerusalem would not be divided and would remain under Israeli sovereignty; during the meeting he was extremely nervous and anxious to get it over with, fearing that even the appearance of listening to a scholarly presentation about division would be politically ruinous.

So far as anyone can know, he died convinced that peace could be reached without dividing the city.

No-one needs to expect the Palestinians negotiators to accept that position. But perhaps it might be reasonable for self-proclaimed Israeli champions of peace to recognize that on Jerusalem, their anointed saint the martyred Rabin held the same position Netanyahu does.

Public Service as Indenture

Raban Gamliel (the leader of the Jews of Galilee after the destruction of the Temple by the Romans) and Rabbi Yehoshua were together on a ship. Raban Gamliel had brought bread; Rabbi Yehoshua, bread and flour. When Raban Gamliel's bread ran out, they subsisted on the flour.

Raban Gamliel: How did you know we'd be delayed, and need flour?
Rabbi Yehoshua: There's a star in the sky, and once in 70 years it confuses sailors and they lose their way. I feared we might be affected and so brought additional flour.
Raban Gamliel: If you're so wise, how did you allow yourself on a ship in the first place? Couldn't you make a living with less danger? [Sea faring in those days was rather often fatal, a subject often discussed in the Talmud].
Rabbi Yehoshua: If you're wondering about me, think of your two students Rabbi Elazar Hisma and Rabbi Yochanan ben Gudgeda, who are so intelligent they can compute the number of water drops in the sea, yet they don't earn enough to feed or clothe themselves!

Raban Gamliel decided to promote them. When he returned to port he had them summoned, but they didn't appear. He summoned them again, and this time they came. When they came he said to them:

You think I'm offering you power and honor (שררה)? That's why you didn't come the first time? Indenture is what I'm giving you [since leadership posts carry obligations to the people]. As it is said (1 Kings chapter 12 verses 6-7)
And king Rehoboam consulted with the old men, that stood before Solomon his father while he yet lived, and said, How do ye advise that I may answer this people?
 ⁷And they spake unto him, saying, If thou wilt be a servant unto this people this day, and wilt serve them, and answer them, and speak good words to them, then they will be thy servants for ever. 

Just saying.


Horayot,10a-b.


This thread is introduced and explained here.

Reaching the Bottom of the Barrel

When the Oslo process collapsed in October 2000, and then the violence of the 2nd Intifada got worse and worse, and stayed worse for almost three years, there was total unanimity of opinion among almost anyone who had an opinion: the media, the diplomatic corps, the UN, accepted wisdom, academia, heads of state, politicians the world over, the remnants of our own peace camp (the blogosphere, too, tho it hadn't yet hit its stride in those faraway days). Everyone preached that the one and only single option to end the violence was through peaceful means, which in most cases meant that Israel had to offer the Palestinians better incentives to convince them to desist from the anger and its resultant violence. There's no other option, we were told. None. Not any. Inconceivable. Unimaginable. Not even theoretically possible. Only one thing to do: give the Palestinians more than had been offered them, and hope for the best. That'll work, but nothing else will. Absolutely totally completely nothing.

I apologize for laboring the point a bit, but I'm merely reflecting the reality of those days.

Alas, there wasn't much we felt we could offer the Palestinians at the time, nor were we in the mind to continue to offer what we'd already offered anyway, just before they launched the violence. Arguably, we're not in the mood till this very day, but that's a different subject.

Eventually some of our security chaps began suggesting we could arrest or kill so many terrorists, that the Palestinians would run out of supply. This thesis was called "emptying the barrel", and was much derided by all those folks cited above.

The security chaps were right. In all of the northern West Bank, there is no-one left they're still trying to get, and in the southern half of the West Bank only a handful are still being sought for. True, this achievement has been significantly assisted by collaboration with the PA security forces in the West Bank, but that has been reached without Israel making any strategic compromises of the sort demanded by "the World" back in 2000-2003. The PA made the decision because of its own interests, some of which have to do with Israeli actions.