Asa Kasher on Morality at War

If there's any single person who influences the moral code of the IDF above all others, it's philosophy professor Asa Kasher. Haaretz has an interview with him about the Gaza operation. Being limited to the format of the newspaper, it's not very satisfying, but I'm linking for future use.

Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, Guardianistas

Jonathat Freedland, a Jewish columnist at the Guardian, writes that he's disappointed in his fellow Lefties who are allowing harsh criticism of Israel to spill over into violence against the Jews of the UK.

It's an interesting article, but the comments (there are 632 of them as I write) seem mostly to disagree: Israel is abominable, Jonathan, and you're worrying about some local Jews who's feelings are hurt?

I especially liked this comment:

I have seen very, very few anti Jewish remarks on CiF but hundreds of accusations of being anti Jewish. In this climate, where genuine criticism is deliberately confused with racist criticism the accusation of antisemitism loses all meaning.

So I completely agree with Jonathan Freedland's sentiments, however the instances of antisemitism are a tiny fraction of the instances where people are called antisemitic just because calling the other guy names can be used to justify Israeli murder.

Who is There to Vote For?

Less than a week before the elections, a large group of Israelis have yet to decide who to vote for. So here's a quick guide for dummies:

There are three candidates for the prime minister's job: Bibi Netanyahu, Tzipi Livni, and, much less plausibly, Ehud Barak. The reasons for not voting for any of them are rather well balanced:
Bibi was an awful prime minster, thrown out of the job by the electorate after 3 tumultuous years by the largest margin ever. Barak, who beat him, was also awful, and was then booted out by an even greater margin, if you can believe it, after a mere 20 months. Bibi was later appointed minister of finance and did a spectacular job. Barak later also got a chance to redeem himself, as defense minister, and also did a good job. So they balance one another as dismal failures who then did great in lower jobs. Tzipi hasn't yet failed at prime minister, and her successes as a minister are bland. Nothing catastrophic, nothing spectacular.

What does all this tell us? That Bibi and Barak both learned from their mistakes, or that they function well only when someone else is the boss? If the second, let's vote for Tzipi, who will be the boss of Bibi and Ehud, for a perfect government. On the other hand, if she also needs first to fail at the top before doing fantastically one slot below, she's the last of the three we should be voting for.

So let's look at their lieutenants. Bibi has all sorts of nasties you don't want in the government, either because they're fanatics like Benny Begin, or incompetents like Limor Livnat. The same as Barak: does anyone in their right mind want Shelly Yechimowitz anywhere near a lever of power? As for Tzipi: her number two guy is Shaul Mofaz. The guy who swore he'd never leave Likud four hours before joining Kadima, the guy who proclaims we must bomb Iran but was the defense minister who allowed the IDF to fall apart to the degree it couldn't beat Hezbullah in 2006, though he forgot to tell the guy who replaced him that he wasn't handing over an operative army. That fellow, by the way, was Amir Peretz, another top guy in Barak's party: anyone want to vote for him? No? I didn't think so.

If we can't choose between the upper candidates, maybe we should choose between their policies? That might work, you'd think, and even be an entirely reasonable way of choosing. Alas, it isn't, for the simple reason that they're all the same. I suppose if you look hard enough you might find some light between their positions, but it isn't immediately clear what it might be. On economic issues they're all the same though Bibi has the advantage of knowing what he's talking about. On social issues they'll use the opposite rhetoric to do the exact same things, which in any case will be more of the same. On the use of force, whether against Iran or the Palestinains or Hezbullah, Bibi's rhetoric will be inflamed but it will all be hot air, while Barak will talk less but might wield force if he felt the need; Tzipi is an enigma. Meaning that if you're the type who likes calm rhetoric but uncalm actions, go for Barak; if you don't want any more Israeli military actions, vote Bibi. And if you think I'm talking through my hat, vote Tzipi.

Negotiations for peace: the important election on that issue already happened, in November 2008. There is no chance the Israelis and Palestinians will make peace on their own anytime soon (30 years). There is only a scant chance the Americans can cajole or convince them to. In a nutshell, if Obama tries to dictate anything a majority of Israelis can live with, no Israeli prime minister will resist him (though Bibi might be less gracious about it... and then again, he might not. Of the three he's the only one who's almost American himself). On the other hand, if Obama tries to dictate terms a majority of Israelis can't accept, any Israeli prime minister will defy him: yes, even Obama.

A friend of mine always decides how to vote by the last opinion polls before the election, when he sees who's going to be the largest party and he votes for them so they can build a stable coalition. In most cases this doesn't work, and our governing coalitions fall apart sooner or later, mostly sooner. This time, with the gap between Likud and Kadima narrowing by the day (because Likud is hemorrhaging to Lieberman's Yisrael Beitaynu), it's hard to know who'll have the largest party. So that doesn't help either.

As a matter of fact, it raises the obvious question, why not vote for Ivet Lieberman, the Russian strongman who may yet come out third, ahead of Barak's Labor? But that raises the question, why yes vote for him? What does he offer? Buckets and buckets of populistic right-wing rhetoric, if you like that stuff; and a record of a highly pragmatic power-junky that could easily override the rhetoric if it suits Ivet. (Remember the year he spent in Olmert's coalition?) Lieberman has a reputation for getting things done, which means he might be your man if you're tired of the terminal inefficiancy of much of our ruling bureacracy. He's also probably Olmert-league corrupt, with the legal bayhounds slowly getting nearer after years of trying - unless you prefer the conspiracy theory about the prosecution that takes down whomever they don't like. But if so, don't vote for Ivet, because they're about to get him.

If you want you can vote for one of three Arab parties. Since even most Arabs don't, they're small and irrelevant for policy-making of any sort. People in the know tell me they do nothing for their constituents, preferring rhetorical grandstanding. It's probably true, and would explain why no more than a third of Israel's Arabs vote for them. You can vote for the Haredi parties; actually, if you're Haredi you really don't have much alternitive since these folks exist to bring home the pork... um, sorry about that. Then there are three or four settler parties of various hues. I'm a politics junkie, but even I have long since lost track of which is which and what the differences are between them; their representatives have this habit of switching from one party to the other each time new elections seem likely, and in all of the periods in between. I expect two of them will make it in to the Knesset, and they'll have about as many MKs as the Arabs. Unlike the Arabs, they are hugely adept at manipulating the system for their purposes, similar to the Haredi parties, and mostly unpopular with everyone else, also similar to the Haredis.

I hate to say this, since I'm such a staunch Zionist and fevent believer in the utter necessity of a Jewish State, but apparently the government of the Jewish State isn't very important. It's nice to have, yes; and we enjoy changing it every three years or so, certainly; but the important parts happen on the levels a bit below the top of the societal pyramid.

Happy elections.

Suicide Bombers are Because of Rage and Despair

That's a canard no informed person should believe, of course, though most media types still hawk it for general consumption. Here's a story unusual for its horror even by the standards of the genre:

In a prison interview with the Associated Press — with interrogators nearby — she said that she helped to organise the rapes of young women and then stepped in to persuade the victims to become suicide bombers as their only escape from the shame.

Actually, now that I think of it, maybe it really is despair. If you're a woman in a culture that fiercely condemns women who have been raped, maybe killing lots of other innocents makes sense.

Though I think not.

Fissures in the Story

Remember - you must, always - how the entire world castigated Israel for the massacre in Jenin in April 2002; how the UN demanded an international investigation and Israel was castigated a second time when it refused to cooperate with a commission whose report had been written before it was even set up. All this for a massacre that never happened. If you're older, you may remember how Israel was cursed world-wide for the massacre of thousands (Yasser Arafat said, six thousand) of Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila; after the frenzy was over it turned out there were "only" hundreds of murdered, not a single one by an Israeli (which is not to defend Israel for its ugly role of allowing its Lebanese allies into the camp in the first place).

I don't know how many innocent Palestinian civilians died in the recent Gaza operation. The investigations are still going on. I won't be surprised by a number in the low hundreds, though I rather doubt there will ever be any way of knowing how many were killed by Israelis and how many by Hamas itself, by blowing up their own buildings and so on. In any case, each one of them is tragic.

But tragic isn't necesarily criminal. In the meantime, look at this:

UN backtracks on claim that deadly IDF strike hit Gaza school

This is not a new result of an investigation. It's something the UN spokesmen knew perfectly well at the time: that Israel had in fact not targeted, and also not hit, a school. The civilians killed were all outside the school, however many of them there were.

Does it make any difference, you ask? Well, yes, actually it does. First, because it responds to the statement of the Economist:

In other ways, military technology has raised the bar for what is considered acceptable. The skies above Gaza are buzzing with surveillance drones. Israeli command-and-control systems are doubtless as sophisticated as American ones, which give commanders vast digital maps in which structures are individually numbered and clearly identified if they are not to be attacked; they even have “splat” graphics to estimate the area that will be affected by a blast. Mishaps do happen; on January 5th three Israeli soldiers were killed by one of their own tanks. But without more facts, it is hard to believe the Israelis did not know about the presence of civilians at Zeitun and at the UN school.

Quite.

Even more, it matters because the UN officials are now admitting they were baldly lying three weeks ago. Don't expect the Guardian ever to do the same.

Aharon Karov's Rational Miracle

The Economist has an article this week about how Obama is about to enable stem-cell research in the US. Thus, the paper tells us, American scientists will now join colleagues in seven other countries who are already performing such research: Australia, Britain, China, the Czech Republic, Israel, Singapore and South Korea. An illustrious list, I'd say, and a short one. There aren't many countries in the world which have scientists trained and capable to engage in this potentially revolutionary life-saving and life-improving research; Israel is one of the few. Do you suppose the boycotters of Israel and divesters mean that what they say? Do you think they understand what they say? Do you think they care?

(One of the more comic aspects of the boycotters is their touching belief that Israel will be brought to its knees by their not buying tomatoes).

Allow me to wander a moment: I'l be back on message by the end of the post.

















That's a picture from Aharon Karov's wedding to Tzvia, about three weeks ago. Less than 24 hours later he was called to his infantry unit and sent to Gaza; a week later he was critically wounded in battle. His wife and family were called to the hospital in Beer Sheva, and informed he probably only had a few hours left to live.

Earlier today he was released from the hospital. Not home yet, rather to a convalescence unit near Tel Aviv, where he probably still has months of hard work ahead,and maybe years of lingering effects. But he's out of the hospital, and the doctors say his brain was not injured in spite of the head wound he sustained. Here's the Ynet report, which is in Hebrew, and includes a video. By most criteria he looks pretty bad; he can't talk, he's in a wheel chair, he has ugly scars all down the side of his head. I expect 40 or 50 years from now, as he approaches old age, he'll have health problems his peers won't have; he'll also have children and grandchildren to support him, and colleagues collected throughout his long career. Not bad for someone who gave his life for his community, and had it given back at the very last moment.

The doctors say it was a miracle. I don't know how to measure miracles. Lot's of people have been praying for him, but I don't know how to measure prayer, either. I do know, however, that he went off to defend a country that has world-class doctors and hospitals, who are committed and equipped to save every life they can even when it looks hopeless. That's one of the reasons - not the only one, but an important one none-the-less - that there are comparatively few Israeli casualties in our wars: we've invested gazillions in the ability to save lives. The Palestinians, alas, have different priorities.

Land for Peace (or Less)

A reader yesterday posted an apparently incredulous question:

Yaacov, could you please explain what you mean when you say Barak won in 1999 because "the voters recognized that the difference between Labor and Likud wasn't really that great anymore."

Would it have been conceivable in your view that the withdrawal from Lebanon and Camp David-Taba would have happened also under a Likud government???

Short, quick answer: Yes, of course that's what I'm saying.

Long, fully explained answer: I wrote extensively about this dynamic in Right to Exist, and won't try to better myself here.

Short answer with facts: So far, the only Israeli governments that ever dismantled settlements were Begin's Likud government in 1982, and Sharon's Likud one in 2005. Golda's Labor government handed over territories without settlements in 1973-4, Rabin did the same in 1974-5, and then handed territories to the PA in 1994-5, but so did Netanyahu in 1996-9. Begin, Shamir, Peres and Barak all moved out of sections of Southern Lebanon in 1982-2000. Ah, and Ben Gurion relinquished control of various Arab territories in 1949 and 1956. Is there a pattern here? Yes: that elected Israeli politicians always try to do what the electorate prefers, and the electorate generally prefers peace over territories - assuming peace is being offered. (It is just conceivable that Jerusalem is an exception to this rule, but I'm not sure).

Exceptions? Shamir in the early 1990s - and he then lost the next election, in 1992.

Quick prognosis for 2009-2011: If the Obama-(Hillary) Clinton team ever manage to cobble together a reasonable looking peace package (highly unlikely, but it's nice to hope), whatever Israeli prime minister happens to be in the office that morning will accept it. Yes, including the most likely one, Netanyahu, of course. How do I know? Because he'll want to be re-elected in 2013, not thrown out of office in 2011; and also because last time he was in office he did everything (Bill) Clinton told him to do - the problem was that he did it with bad grace. As the Yiddish saying goes, he ate the smelly fish and he was thrown out of town.

How come this surprises you, I hear you asking? How come it isn't reported this way, but rather the other way around, that the evil Likudniks will trash any chance for peace? Because of an unholy alliance of reporters on the issue: The Israeli Left needs to tell and believe that only they are capable of bringing peace, otherwise what's left for them to do? The Guardian and its ilk love to tell whatever anti Israeli narrative they can invent, factual or counter-factual, so of course they'll be full of crowing reports next week about how Israel has now ended the peace process (a story we've often heard in the past). And the rest of the media? As I never tire of saying, they rarely know what they're talking about anyway; in this case, most of their Israeli sources come from the Left, so they happily collude in telling how Netanyahu will never make peace.

If the Palestinians want peace, Netanyahu won't stop them from getting it.

Michael Totten Presents Khaled Abu Toameh

Michael Totten was recently in Israel where he met all sorts of people. Yesterday he posted the full text of a talk by Khaled Abu Toameh, to the group of Americans Michael was traveling with. It is absolutely fascinating. As Michael points out, Abu Toameh has very few nice things to say about any of the players, us Israelis included though we're not at the top of his list of fools. However, although it's 7,000 words long, I can't find more than about three or five with which to disagree. I'm a centrist Israeli; if Abu Toameh were a centrist Palestinian (or rather, if the center of Palestinian public opinion were where he is) there would be peace between us by tomorrow morning (it would take that long because of the dentist appointment I've got this afternoon, and the opera tickets I've got for this evening).

Also, once you've finished reading, please hit Michael's tip jar. He spent I don't know how many hours transcribing his recording to text, so that we could link to it and read it, and that's a public service if ever there was one.

Generational Rage

At what age do people become interested in politics? There isn't a single answer obviously. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if someone showed that Israeli youth do so earlier than their peers in most free countries do, since the issues the Israeli youth face are so dramatically more existential - and immediate - than those elsewhere.

I had an interesting conversation yesterday with a Danish journalist. Before we talked, he had been interviewing Yossi Klein Halevy, one of Israel's more intelligent journalists. Klein Halevy is of my generation; it turns out we shared the experience of having sons fighting in Gaza. According to the Danish fellow, Klein Halevy observed that his son and friends have a rage against the Palestinians that he (and I) didn't have.

I don't know abut the rage, but upon reflection, I certainly agree our children see the conflict with the Palestinians differently than we did. If we assume Israelis begin to relate to politics in their mid teens, then a formative experience for Israelis from their mid-twenties and younger was the violent Palestinian rejection of the Oslo peace process. I'm not going to get into the question of who bears blame for that and exactly what each side should have done better. The point is different. When Klein Halevy and I were becoming aware of political issues, or later, when we were young adults, we understood that the Palestinians had some sort of case against us. Some of us felt it to be a serious case, what with settlement construction and refusal to negotiate with them; others felt that was all wrong, but recognized that many of their fellow Israelis saw it that way. From sometime in the early 1970s onward, there was a growing awareness among Israelis that Israel bore some share of the responsibility for the ongoing conflict. Public opinion polls showed that by sometime in the 1980s a majority of Israelis recognized that someday there would be an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, whether they thought this was a good idea or were merely resigned to its inevitability.

I remember that in the 1980s political arguments about this were a mainstay of how we spent our time in the reserve service; actually, the whole country argued about it all the time, and if you go back to the record you'll see that those were years of high political tension (and electoral campaigns, hard as it may be to believe, were extraordinarily charged national exercises).

By the late 1990s, after Rabin's assassination and Netanyahu's continuation of the Oslo process, from his position as the leader of a Likud government, the principles of the argument were over, and we settled down to the horsetrading part. That was what enabled Barak's wide electoral victory in 1999: the voters recognized that the difference between Labor and Likud wasn't really that great anymore.

The Palestinian strategic decision in 2000 to prefer a campaign of murder of Israeli civilians over negotiations that had already given them Israeli acceptance of statehood and dismantling of many settlements, flipped the consensus of the late 1990s in the opposite direction. Rather than a majority preparing for partition and peace (welcoming it or merely accepting), an even broader consensus now assumed the Palestinians were aiming it Israel's destruction, one way or another, not at partition. If I'm correctly understanding Klein Halevy's thesis, an entire generation now has lost the feelings of guilt their parents had or at least recognized towards the Palestinians, and have replaced it with anger at the rejectionism of the Palestinians. Even as, I might add, they are willing for partition in a way their parents were not yet.

Taking this one step further, and focusing not on twenty-somethings but rather on the 16-22 year olds, their most formative introduction to politics wasn't even the Palestinian rejectionism, it was the retreat from Gaza, in which Israel abandoned Gaza and disbanded its settlements, giving the Palestinians the opportunity, on a silver platter, to prove their commitment to a State. The readers of the Guardian can pretend to themselves that Israel never meant it, and continued to strangle Gaza from outside its fences, but the young Israelis know this is factually nonsense, and remember that in the 2nd half of 2005 Israel really had left, and was not blockading Gaza - that came later.

If this analysis is correct, and I think it broadly is, it offers a bleak perspective. The Palestinians have always seen themselves as victims of Zionism, and have felt infinitely sorry for themselves. Yet in the 1980s they managed to convince many Israelis there was some, partial, justification for this. The young generation of Israelis growing into adulthood this decade, however, takes for granted the eventual partition in a way their parents didn't, but have no patience for the Palestinians feeling sorry for themselves, and are convinced that the Palestinians have only themselves to blame for their predicament.

This is probably as reasonable an explanation as any for Netanyahu's electoral victory next week. Maybe I'll blog about the elections tomorrow.

Otherworldliness at the NYT

Nicholas Kristof is a highly regarded pundit at the New York Times, so I'm told. Yesterday he published a column with the thesis that if only Obama puts lots of pressure on Israel to be nice, peace will flourish in the Middle East.

Now, I'm not going going to argue much with him. It's a free world, or anyway, the parts of it he and I live in are free, and there's no law against being uninformed or wrong. I've been uninformed and wrong myself more than once, even spectacularly so back in the 1990s when I held convictions similar to those Kristof still has. Lots of people died after that mistake, even though it looked real plausible at the time, or so we thought.

One small paragraph, however, does sort of stand out:

That means that Israel must lift the siege of Gaza, completely opening the crossings. If Hamas resumes its unconscionable rocket attacks on Israeli civilians, then bomb the tunnels or strike Hamas targets in a proportional way, but don’t escalate.

Umm, Nicholas?

The Use of Force Can Be Positive

Says Michael Gerson at the Washington Post, and explains the logic of the recent Gaza operation. It's an unusual piece for the way it flagrantly flies in the face of "accepted wisdom". (Nitpicking: Interestingly, Gerson doesn't know what Operation Defensive Shield was. As I keep saying, most people who write about the Mid East don't have their facts down pat, including the ones who do see the general picture).

It's Not Only Journalists and Pundits...

It's even the President of the United States who could benefit from a bit of cramming.

Amir Taheri looks into Obama's comment about how things were better between the US and the Arab world 20 or 30 years ago. This was of course a peculiar statement, and Taheri fleshes out how so.

It is far too early days to know what the Obama administration will or won't succeed at, in the Middle East or anywhere else. So far they're engaging in cheap and painless gestures and symbolism, and there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that: symbols sometimes can effect reality, especially when they nudge reality in a direction that already had potential. Nor is there anything intrinsically right with it, either: sometimes reality is immune to symbols, especially when they try to nudge reality in directions with no potential. The tricky thing is to get it right, to chose only the symbols that will be beneficial, and none that will have adverse effects.

How do you know the former from the latter? Two ways. The first, rather reliable though not foolproof, is to have the benefit of hindsight. Alas, that's not a good method for people who have to make decisions in the present. The second method to tell useful symbols from neutral ones from destructive ones, is to know a lot about the situation you're trying to impact. According to all reports Obama is an unusually intelligent man, widely read. The fact that his first pronouncement on the recent history of the Middle East could have been refuted with ease by anyone who's been reading newspapers and remembering their content for the period he's pronouncing on, is mildly worrisome.

International Law, Warfare, and Freedom of Speech

I'm not much of a fan of applying law to political issues, which is what the International Law Brigade is so busy doing these past decades. I spelled out my position here, back in 2007.

A few days ago Haaretz ran a long story about the International Law Department in the IDF, and how it fits into the picture. It's a fascinating article, especially if you set aside the newspaper's agenda (They're horrified by their findings). Among many interesting things in the article is the description of the inevitable result of turning warfare into a legal question: the army hires good lawyers, and they find loopholes. That what lawyers are for, after all, irrespective of whether you like Israel or not. The moment you start measuring actions of war with legal tools, you'll start measuring the actions of war with legal tools.

This of course emphasizes the utter silliness of all those pundits and journalists who chatter on and on about what is or isn't illegal in wartime: they mostly have no legal training, those folks, and even the few who do aren't using it in their reports, because if they were, the reports would inevitably resemble legal briefs, and no-one would read them except other legal types - not what the media outlets want.

Another thing about legal systems is that they develop. They evolve. They adapt. In short: they change. International law isn't good at this, because it lacks many of the trappings of a normal legal system such as a soverign, an elected legislature, law enforcement forces who are subordinate to elected executives and so on. Even so, however, they have to adapt somehow, so apparently they do so by a process of getting used to reality:

The dilemma of the gray areas and ILD's attempts to discover untapped potential in international law may perhaps explain the unit's great enthusiasm for providing legal advice to the army and the glint in advisers' eyes when certain terms roll off their tongue: "proportional equilibrium," "legitimate military target," "illegal combatants." "What we are seeing now is a revision of international law," Reisner says. "If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it. The whole of international law is now based on the notion that an act that is forbidden today becomes permissible if executed by enough countries. If the same process occurred in private law, the legal speed limit would be 115 kilometers an hour and we would pay income tax of 4 percent. So there is no connection between the question 'Will it be sanctioned?' and the act's legality. After we bombed the reactor in Iraq, the Security Council condemned Israel and claimed the attack was a violation of international law. The atmosphere was that Israel had committed a crime. Today everyone says it was preventive self-defense. International law progresses through violations. We invented the targeted assassination thesis and we had to push it. At first there were protrusions that made it hard to insert easily into the legal moulds. Eight years later it is in the center of the bounds of legitimacy."

Did the attacks of September 11 influence your legal situation?

"Absolutely. When we started to define the confrontation with the Palestinians as an armed confrontation, it was a dramatic switch, and we started to defend that position before the Supreme Court. In April 2001 I met the American envoy George Mitchell and explained that above a certain level, fighting terrorism is armed combat and not law enforcement. His committee [which examined the circumstances of the confrontation in the territories] rejected that approach. Its report called on the Israeli government to abandon the armed confrontation definition and revert to the concept of law enforcement. It took four months and four planes to change the opinion of the United States, and had it not been for those four planes I am not sure we would have been able to develop the thesis of the war against terrorism on the present scale."

After Haaretz published this article in last weekend's magazine, a number of law professors at Tel Aviv University realized, to their utter horror, that the commander of the International Law Department, Colonel Pnina Sharvit-Baruch, is about to leave the army and join them on the staff of the law department; worse, she's going to be teaching impressionable young students about international law and its applications. They launched a public campaign to block her appointment, obviously fearing that some of her students may grow up to think that it can be legal to wage war, or some similar apostasy. They've been writing letters to the dean, and publicizing their opinions in the media (well: in Haaretz), and they're generally scandalized. Which is fine. I'm pretty scandalized by them, too, but I recognize their right to poison the minds of their students if the students are foolish enough to let this happen, and can't balance their professor's silliness with common sense. That's what democracy is about, you'd think.

Today Haaretz weighed in with the full force of it's editorial column. As usual with Haaretz, they don't translate some of the more interesting stuff into English, so you'll have to learn Hebrew to see how far Haaretz has come from the days when it was a liberal (European meaning) broadsheet championing democratic values. Their thesis: This Pnina lady is a criminal, she authorized crimes, and the last place she should be is at a university.

Freedom of speech is for the speech we like.

Israel is to Blame for Britain's Woes

The Guardian is quick and expansive to report that the top British anti-terror official says Israel's actions in Gaza are fueling hatred against the West, and specifically against the UK.

Let's assume for the moment, merely for the sake of the argument, that the UK really were fully on Israeli's side, to the extent that anger at Israel could be legitimately directed also at them, and that this affinity was wholly altruistic and could be terminated at a moment's notice if so wished. And let's also assume that the hatred of the Islamists rises even higher than it already is because of anything Israel does or doesn't do. Just for the sake of the argument, mind you.

Now, the Islamist murderers threaten the UK for its position. There seem to be two over-arching responses one can think of:
1. "This is our way of life, we're proud of it, we'll never change it because of you bastards, on the contrary, bugger off or we'll crush you."
2. We must throw Israel to the dogs, because they're endangering us, the bastards.

Do you begin to see, at least dimly, why Israelis like America, and have but minimal trust in the Europeans when it comes to the essentials?

Antisemitism is Anti-Rationalism

Frank Furedi has a long and depressing article about the rise of antisemitism and its interconnectedness with Israel. As the good folks at Achse Des Guten note, the article starts out rather poorly, but then gets more serious.

I'm merely indexing for future use. One quick comment, however: to my mind, the fusion of antisemitism with anti-Zionism is a fine thing. (I'm not talking about legitimate criticism of Israel). Zionism is the most important expression of Judaism in something like 1,800 years, and you can't be against it without being against what the Jews are about. Not even if you're Jewish yourself, by the way.

"What Life Asks of Us"

David Brooks makes an interesting case for self-fulfillment through belonging, or by having an identity based on tradition.

A Positive Aspect to the Legalization of War

War is becoming ever more the subject of legal scrutiny and evaluation. Whether this is a good thing or not is a very complicated issue, since it has both positive and negative aspects. Eyal Benvenisti, a professor of law at Tel Aviv University comes from the side of the debate that thinks it's a good thing, while not, however, being a militant pacifist nor an enemy of Israel using legal gobbledygook to cast Israel as a monster. On the contrary. In his op-ed peice in Haaretz today he suggests how a correct use of legal tools will actually bolster Israel's ability to wage war:

"Fundamental examination" does not mean a government commission of inquiry or a criminal investigation. The object of the examination is to scrutinize the actions that were carried out, not to seek guilty parties (unless evidence requiring this is revealed in the course of the investigation). There is a wide gap between violations of the law, if any, and war crimes, which would require proof of intent to commit said crimes...

Second, the findings and conclusions of the investigation can be used to refute evidence and/or disprove allegations that might be raised in a legal proceeding abroad, if such takes place. And third, the limits of what is permissible and what is prohibited during warfare are not always clear. (For instance, what constitutes "excessive" incidental harm to a civilian population?) In their rulings, courts are inclined to consider what happened at the time. (Were alternatives weighed? Was there adequate advance preparation prior to the attack? Did the planners know there would be an investigation?) A fundamental investigation can serve as a basis for finding people innocent of the charges.

Those Clumsy Elders of Zion

I must admit I don't understand why the Elders of Zion decided to block the broadcasting of the Disaster Emergency Committee's emergency appeal from Gaza. By refusing to allow the broadcast they've created a tremendous furor, with tens of thousands of complaints, lawsuits against the BBC, fulmination galore, not to mention far more publicity for the ad than it would otherwise ever have generated. Why, today even Mohamed el-Baradei, top mediocre UN nuclear sleuth, has declared he's boycotting the BBC, a policy he'll undoubtedly drop five minutes after the last interview about his decision is completed. I mean, even the Israelis never boycott the BBC for long.

And of course, the advertisement is all over the Internet, so anyone can go see it at their leisure anyway. (Hint: you can, too, by following the above link to el-Baradei's protest).

Curiously, though millions are watching the ad and tens of thousands are plotzing with fury, the donations themselves are so far only around one million Pounds (that link also leads you to the ad), which at 4.5 million viewers means something like 22 pence of donations per angry viewer. Not impressive, that.

But back to the inept Elders of Zion: I really don't know what they were thinking. Had they successfully barred the BBC from broadcasting disturbing pictures from Gaza, or even better, forced it to show only parades of Israeli-flag-waving demonstrators in downtown Gaza clamoring for the IDF to save them from Hamas, then we could pat them on their backs and commend them for a job well done, though even then, merely controlling the BBC probably wouldn't have been enough and they should have blocked everyone from al-Jezeera down. As it is, however, they allowed their BBC lackeys to broadcast pictures of destruction in Gaza for day after day after week after week, along with heaps of punditry about disproportionality, evil blockades, the impossibility of ever reaching political goals through the use of violence, the urgent need to engage Hamas in dialogue about global warming and what have you... and after all that, they blocked this one short film which has no new images in it? Huh? Is this what we elected them for in our last midnight meeting in the graveyard?

The Muted Frightened Pride of Israeli-Arab Troops

The tracker killed in yesterday's attack on our border with Gaza was a Bedouin, which isn't surprising since trackers are always either Bedouin or Druze; no Jews have the ancient capabilities of reading the landscape that comes with eons of living in nature and making your living from it. A number of years back there was speculation that perhaps Ethiopian Jews might have the training, but even if they did, their choice to join mainstream Israeli society rather than adhere to being pre-industrial farmers means they're not raising their sons with the abilities. So all trackers in the IDF, that entire branch of the army, is made of Arabic-speaking Druze and Bedouins. In time of comparative calm between wars and large operations, they are the spearhead of the border patrols, statistically more likely to be killed than other troops; that's the explanation for the otherwise curious fact that the Druze town of Beit-Jahn has the highest ratio of fallen soldiers to populace of any township in Israel.

The Bedouins, by the way, are all volunteers (the Druze are enlisted); most of these men are career soldiers, which is always a matter of choice.

More and more often, these days, when one of them is killed his name is not made public. The family knows the name, the neighbors all know him, but the general public doesn't. This didn't use to be true, it's only in the past few years, so the explanation in the article behind that link - whereby there are perhaps family members on the Palestinian side of the conflict - is not persuasive. More likely what's happening is that there's a radicalization among Israel's Arabs: a slow increase of willingness to serve in the IDF on the one hand, and growing vituperation against the trend on the other.

Tragi-Comic Relief, Again

The BBC is in major trouble since the top honchos there decided not to broadcast a call by various so-called human rights organizations to help the populace of Gaza. The Guardian is FURIOUS, and since many of the staff of the BBC read the Guardian as their paper of choice (hmmm...), the fury is apparently expressing itself in internal clashes at the BBC. The New York Times tells the story in a comparatively calm tone, here.

According to the NYT, the BBC has in the past broadcast similar appeals for the victims of genocides in Rwanda, Darfur and Congo. A curious line-up, don't you think? Was the operation in Gaza a genocide? Why not broadcast similar humanitarian pleas for Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri-Lanka, Kashmir, Thailand, Burma, Nahr-el-Bared in Lebanon, Somalia, and all sorts of other places where the number of civilian victims in armed conflicts in 2008 all significantly surpassed those in Gaza, without being genocides? I know, I'm becoming tedious, sorry.

Of course, the real debate is about the impartiality of the BBC: everyone agrees it isn't, but different people think it isn't in different directions. Some think the BBC is anti-Israel, others think it's controlled by the Elders of Zion. Which is interesting, because a few years ago the BBC ran an internal investigation into precisely this question, and has never agreed to publish its results.

Personally I think that if the BBC were scrupulous about telling the truth, there wouldn't be a problem in broadcasting this particular plea for assistance: in a world in which everyone knew the realities of the Israel-Arab conflict, because the BBC reported on it well, there wouldn't be any problem in a call for aid to the civilians who suffered so severely (they really did) from the most recent round of violence, which was carefully planned and then provoked by Hamas which booby-trapped thousands of homes that now need to be replaced by tents.