AIPAC In The Age Of Trump
March 18, 2016 § 3 Comments
On Monday, Donald Trump is set to address AIPAC’s annual policy conference. Some think that he should never have been invited. Others want Trump’s appearance at AIPAC to be vigorously protested. Both of these positions are eminently understandable, and I will be very surprised if Trump’s appearance at AIPAC is a smooth one, marked by nothing more disruptive than a smattering of polite applause. Republican Jews’ attitudes toward Trump appear to range from nonplussed to horrified, and Democratic Jews’ attitudes probably start at the horrified end of the spectrum and continue further out. Trump should not expect the adoring, genuflecting audience that is typical of his rallies, even if Sheldon Adelson and the editors of Yisrael Hayom appear to be eager to fill the role of Lionel Bengelsdorf to Trump’s Charles Lindbergh.
There will be plenty of time next week to dissect Trump’s AIPAC address after the fact, but there are some important points to make ahead of time. First, Trump’s very appearance at AIPAC turns the thrust of Jewish history on its head. For centuries, Jews lived according to the whims of demagogues and tyrants. Not only were their opinions not relevant, it was often dangerous for the entire Jewish community for their opinions to be expressed at all. Jews were an exceedingly silent minority, just hoping to get through life without being noticed by the Gentile majority. If anyone would be expected to reinforce the idea that Jewish opinion doesn’t matter, it would be Trump. Leaving aside his comments in December about Jews not supporting him because he doesn’t want their money, Trump doesn’t appear to care about winning over anyone’s opinions, Jewish or not. This patron saint of blowhard braggadocio has offended too many groups to count, and while the only things bigger than his ego seem to be his monumental insecurities and desire to be praised, he is also either incapable or unconcerned with telling people what they want to hear. Yet, the man who blows off debates, refuses to do television interviews in person, and retracts the press credentials of reporters who challenge him still feels it necessary to show up at AIPAC’s annual gathering despite what is likely to be a less than welcoming crowd. To the anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists that seem to make up Trump’s core base of support, this will cause a contagious outbreak of confirmation bias that Jews control the country. To the rest of us, we should revel in the fact that Jewish and pro-Israel causes are deemed important enough to the bully-in-chief – who, like all bullies, cannot handle being denigrated or confronted – that he is willing to show up at the risk of being bullied himself. It says something about Jews in America at this moment of history, and while Trump’s appearance at AIPAC is distasteful, this is still something remarkable to note.
Second, while I agree with Jonathan Tobin’s assessment that AIPAC had little choice but to invite Trump when it invites every other presidential candidate, it is vitally important that AIPAC not be seen in any way as validating Trump’s candidacy. Here is a plausible, but hopefully far-fetched, scenario: Trump walks out onto the convention hall stage to widespread boos, gives a stem-winder of a speech about how wonderful Israel is and how crucial it is to stand with Israel, does his best insult comic routine targeted at the Obama administration and its policies toward Israel, and leaves the stage to applause and convention attendees remarking that Trump isn’t nearly as bad as they thought. Should this happen, not only will it be a disaster for this country, it will be a disaster for American Jews who will be seen as providing Trump with a springboard toward the Oval Office. AIPAC cannot be seen as legitimizing Trump, even if it provides him with a pulpit. If this means allowing the crowd to boo, or multiple anonymous quotes to journalists from AIPAC grandees about how odious they find Trump, or some other way of signaling that Trump is outside the boundaries of what is acceptable in the American political arena, it must be done.
The reason for this has nothing to do with Israel, which brings me to my final point. As I wrote last week, Trump has not provided a shred of evidence that he is committed to democratic governance beyond collecting votes in order to assume power, which is why his utterances are quite literally indistinguishable from Middle Eastern autocrats (and if you think I am exaggerating and didn’t read me on this subject last week, click on the link at the beginning of this sentence and take my quiz). Trump is a vicious race baiter who singles out religious and ethnic minorities, a misogynist who thinks nothing of belittling women with crude insults, a wannabe strongman who encourages his supporters to employ violence against those who look or think differently than they do, and a majoritarian demagogue who darkly warns of dangerous consequences should he and his supporters not get their way. He represents democracy’s nightmare, and the fact that he was the grand marshal of the Salute to Israel parade or has Jewish progeny or won an empty Jewish National Fund award means absolutely nothing. Jamie Kirchick said it best: “He is the candidate of the mob, and the mob always ends up turning on the Jews.” AIPAC is not only the largest annual gathering of Israel supporters in the U.S., but so far as I can tell it is the largest annual gathering of Jews in the U.S., and it is important for the American Jewish community to send a message. Trump must be rejected not on the basis of his approach to Israel; he must be rejected on the basis of everything else. What he does or does not think about Israel is ancillary to the conversation, because American Jews and the state of Israel do not need a friend who looks like this.
What Does It Mean To Have A Jewish State
March 10, 2016 § 2 Comments
Pew on Tuesday released its study of religion in Israeli society and there are enough interesting findings and figures in it for me to mine a year’s worth of posts. The headlines have focused on one finding in particular though, which seems like a good place to start. Pew found that 48% of Israeli Jews agreed with the statement “Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel” while 46% disagreed. Looking at the poll’s crosstabs, this difference of opinion is reflected among most demographic groups with a few exceptions, and it has led people to understandably raise the question of what this means for Israel’s non-Jews and whether Israel has already chosen to prioritize Jewishness over democracy. It is a question that must be dealt with, and it goes to a larger question of what it means to have a Jewish state.
There is context to Pew’s findings on Israeli Jews’ attitudes toward Arabs. The interviews were conducted between October 2014 and May 2015, so while the current lone-wolf terrorism phenomenon is not responsible for the numbers on Arab expulsion or transfer, the polling did begin a couple of months after the most recent war in Gaza and concurrent with the start of vehicular attacks in Jerusalem and the particularly horrific massacre at a synagogue in Har Nof. The polling question itself is also more ambiguous in the original Hebrew used by Pew in the actual questioning than in the English translation and uses wording that is often interpreted by Israelis to refer to compensating Arabs to leave rather than expelling them (מישראל ערבים להעביר או לגרש צריך). The wording also leaves unclear whether this means all Arabs, or only Arabs that commit or support terrorist attacks. In addition, this comes against a backdrop of some Israeli Arab politicians openly cheering on Israel’s avowed enemies, which was demonstrated starkly this week when MKs from Hadash and Balad condemned the Gulf Cooperation Council’s decision to label Hizballah as a terror group on the laughable theory that Hizballah only seeks to defend Lebanon’s territorial integrity (that Israel is not occupying any part of Lebanon according to the United Nations doesn’t appear to matter).
Nevertheless, none of this really matters. It explains why Israeli Jews responded ithe way they did, but it does not and cannot justify it. The number of Israeli Jews that expressed support for expelling Arabs needs to prompt serious introspection. It is the ugly equivalent of Trumpism, no less worthy of condemnation and concern than the nativist throngs who cheer Donald Trump’s call to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. or tell non-white protesters at his rallies to go back to where they came from. The ongoing terrorism against Israeli civilians and the 67% of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza who support knife attacks on Israelis are only going to harden Israeli Jews’ attitudes toward Arabs and make this situation even worse, but it is an impulse that must be resisted. Israel is a Jewish state rather than a state for only Jews, and Israel’s founders never envisioned it otherwise. Part of having a Jewish state is running that state in accordance with Jewish values, which involve treating the Arab minority in Israel with respect and absolute equality. Democracy demands no less.
Part of having a Jewish state is also focusing on the state’s raison d’être, which brings me to whether democracy also demands that Jews receive no preferential treatment in Israel at all. Shibley Telhami in the Washington Post noted that 79% of Israeli Jews agreed that Jews in Israel deserve preferential treatment, and added, “so much for the notion of democracy with full equal rights for all citizens.” This may seem to make sense at first glance, but the analysis quickly breaks down. As Brent Sasley wrote for Matzav last week, Israel is an ethnic democracy and debating what it means to be Israeli is not a rejection of democracy but a quest to figure out the social and political boundaries of the state. Unless one believes the canard that Zionism is racism, the fact that Israel gives equal rights to all citizens but gives advantages to Jews when it comes to immigration – or that Israeli Jews would like to receive official preferential treatment in other areas – does not make Israel non-democratic, nor does it make Israel racist. It is a manifestation of why Israel exists, which is to right the wrong of millennia of persecution, discrimination, expulsions, and attempts at extermination around the world.
To understand why Israeli Jews believe they should receive preferential treatment, one only needs to look at the Pew numbers on anti-Semitism. 99% of Israeli Jews view anti-Semitism around the world as common, 64% view it as very common, and 76% say it is increasing. The first instance of religious persecution in recorded history was committed by the Seleucids against Jews, giving rise to the Hasmonean revolt and the Hanukkah story. Jews during the Middle Ages were expelled at various times from England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Hungary, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. History’s most devastating and unprecedented genocide was carried out against Jews. Israel was and is deemed necessary to guard against the historically inevitable, and to suggest that Jews should not be able to ensure that Israel remains majority Jewish or that Jews don’t deserve a little affirmative action is to be remarkably blind to Jews’ travails. Few fair-minded people deride the United States’ claim to providing full equal rights for all its citizens because of admissions and hiring preferences for minorities who were subject to past injustice or mistreatment. That Jews have their own state rather than being a minority elsewhere does not change the basic rationale that makes it acceptable to give Jews in Israel a boost the way that affirmative action is acceptable here. It is not racist to have a Jewish state, and it is not racist to worry about what happens if that state one day is no longer majority Jewish.
Nobody should downplay the survey results showing unacceptable levels of intolerance toward Arabs in Israel. Intolerance of minorities is indeed fundamentally antidemocratic, and those attitudes can never be allowed to manifest themselves in Israeli policy. But nobody should turn other numbers in the study into an indictment of Israel as an inherently racist or antidemocratic project. To do so is not only to ignore acceptable practice right here at home, but to ignore the long and terrible history of why Israel is necessary in the first place.
Haj Al-Husseini and Holocaust Hucksterism
October 22, 2015 § 4 Comments
Most anyone familiar with the give and take of discourse on blogs and social media knows about Godwin’s Law. Godwin’s Law is the proposition that the longer an online discussion takes place, the greater the chance of someone making an analogy to Hitler or Nazis, until at some point such an analogy becomes inevitable. It might be time to create a new corollary to this principle, which is that the more that Prime Minister Netanyahu discusses Israel’s external foes, the more inevitable the eventual Holocaust analogy becomes. In light of Netanyahu’s comments this week to the 37th Zionist Congress about Jerusalem Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini and his responsibility for the Final Solution, the corollary seems to be in full swing.
In his Tuesday speech, Netanyahu brought up al-Husseini’s well-known connection to the Nazis and vocal support of Hitler in warning about the dangers of Palestinian incitement regarding Israel’s alleged efforts to alter the status quo on the Temple Mount. His connection between these two seemingly disparate threads was that al-Husseini had instigated riots in the 1920s by accusing the Jews of wanting to destroy al-Aqsa, and he later met with Hitler in 1941 and – in Netanyahu’s telling – convinced Hitler to exterminate European Jewry rather than expel them. So the implication is that false warnings about Jews trying to take over al-Aqsa, or to even just change the Temple Mount status quo, lead to attempts to exterminate Jews, including the Holocaust. If the logic of this is lost on you, then you are not alone, and it certainly is not the first time that Netanyahu has used Hitler, the Nazis, or the Holocaust to make a point about legitimate dangers to Jews in situations where the Holocaust has no place in the discussion.
The condemnations have come fast and furious for reasons large and small, from trivializing the Holocaust and giving succor to Holocaust deniers, to absolving Hitler from even a single ounce of the blame that he deserves, to distorting history by overstating the mufti’s role (even if he would have carried out the Holocaust if given the chance). I am positive that it was not Netanyahu’s intention in his poorly written and even more poorly conceived speech to trivialize the Holocaust or take the blame for it away from Hitler, but in his zeal to tie current Palestinian propaganda about the Temple Mount to a larger campaign to eliminate Jews wherever they may be, his words had that unintended effect. Furthermore, in getting his history wrong and overstating the role of the mufti – who was a virulent anti-Semite and a cheerleader of genocide but who was not the inspiration for the Final Solution, which started before Hitler and al-Husseini met – and linking Palestinian accusations about the Temple Mount to the Holocaust, Netanyahu makes it seem as if his grip on reality is lost. Anyone who found Ben Carson’s comments about guns and the Holocaust earlier this month to be irresponsible demagoguery should feel the same about Netanyahu’s ahistorical stream of consciousness.
While the focus on the inappropriateness of Netanyahu’s comments is important and is taking up most of the oxygen surrounding this sorry episode, the larger issue of the real-world consequences of Netanyahu’s comments is being neglected. In misappropriating historical memory while using the Holocaust to score political points and advance Israel’s agenda, Netanyahu instead accomplishes the precise opposite. Rather than alert the world to the dangers that Israel faces, Netanyahu ensures that the world will not take them seriously. This ham-handed effort at exposing lies, as Netanyahu put it in his speech, erodes Israeli credibility and desensitizes observers to the risks inherent in the daily life of Israel’s citizens.
Not for the first time, Netanyahu risks becoming the boy who cried Holocaust, seeing the ultimate marriage of threats to Jews and ability to carry those threats out at every turn. While vigilance is a virtue for any prime minister of Israel, the constant Holocaust analogies end up trivializing legitimate threats and make it far more difficult to take Netanyahu’s warnings seriously. After all, if Netanyahu is warning that al-Husseini was the inspiration for the Holocaust and that therefore current Palestinian claims about the Temple Mount should be viewed in that light, who is going to still be paying attention when Netanyahu warns about other issues? The incitement over the Temple Mount is, in fact, a legitimately dangerous issue, but it is hard to press that point once the duo of Haj Amin al-Husseini and Hitler have been turned into a social media meme. Reducing the Holocaust to just another genocide, which is what happens when every security challenge or episode of anti-Semitism is connected back to Hitler, waters down Jewish and Israeli credibility when it comes to true threats against Israel and Jews.
Then there is the issue of misuse of historical memory for instrumental purposes. One cannot decry those who, like President Obama in Cairo in 2009, point to the Holocaust as the primary motivating factor for Israel’s legitimacy – and argue instead that Israel’s existence is rooted as much in Jewish nationalism and historical claims to the land of Israel as it is to the need for a safe haven following Hitler’s campaign of extermination – and then turn around and use the Holocaust as a shield against any attempts to attack Israel in any way. Yes, the mufti of Jerusalem was a really bad guy, and yes, he encouraged Hitler to kill Jews. If that historical truth is used to create a historical fiction about the Final Solution, which then mushrooms into a larger historical misappropriation that connects genocidal extermination of Jews to limited violence motivated by false claims about the Temple Mount, then the historical crime being committed is taking place in the here and now.
There are Palestinians who do not like Jews and who will never accept Israel, and who attack Jews for no reason other than being Jewish and living in Tel Aviv. But many Palestinians bitterly resent the occupation of the West Bank or blatant discrimination within Israeli municipalities and push back against perceived and actual threats and injustices, and that pushback can be inhumane and is frequently directed against civilians. The fact that targeting civilians is unacceptable does not mean that there isn’t a tangible motivation behind it that is connected to more than blind hatred. Trotting out the Holocaust as a worldview that explains all of the violence and incitement that happens in Israel eludes reality, and places Israel in a dangerous position by missing what is actually going on and preventing an appropriate policy response. Many are laughing at what Netanyahu said on Tuesday, but the larger consequences of his ahistorical blather are no laughing matter.
The Turkish Government’s Journey Down The Rabbit Hole
July 18, 2014 § 9 Comments
If Prime Minister Erdoğan is to be taken at his word, we can officially declare Israeli-Turkish rapprochement dead. Speaking this morning, Erdoğan announced that under no circumstances will Turkey’s relationship with Israel improve as long as he is in power – which after the presidential elections next month, will be for a long time – and that the West can protest all it likes to no avail. Erdoğan also accused Israel of committing genocide and of knowing best how to kill children, which was a repeat performance from yesterday when he alleged that Israel has been committing systematic genocide against Palestinians during every Ramadan since 1948. This comes after more delightful outbursts earlier this week, during which Erdoğan claimed that there have been no rockets fired into Israel since there have been no Israeli deaths and compared Israeli MK Ayelet Shaked to Hitler, among other things.
Never one to be left out of the action, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu accused Israel of crimes against humanity and revealed that he has never taken Israel Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman seriously (although to be fair, that last point bolsters the case for Davutoğlu’s good sense). Ankara’s mayor Melih Gökçek, fresh off the heels of tweeting out pro-Hitler sentiments, urged his government yesterday to shut down the Israeli embassy in Ankara, referring to it as “the despicable murderers’ consulate” and stating that “they are 100 times more murderous than Hitler.” Not to be outdone, Bülent Yıldırım, the odious head of the “humanitarian relief NGO” IHH – the same NGO that organized the Mavi Marmara flotilla – warned Jewish tourists (yes, he said Jewish rather than Israeli, and yes, that was deliberate on his part) not to show their faces in Turkey and threatened Turkish Jews that they would pay dearly for Israel’s actions in Gaza.
While Yıldırım may have come to the conclusion of collective Jewish guilt on his own, he also could have been influenced by Yeni Akit reporter Faruk Köse. Köse wrote an open letter in his newspaper on Tuesday to the chief rabbi of Turkey in which the phrase “Siyonist/Yahudi Terör Üssü” – which translates to Zionist/Jewish terror base and is his oh-so-clever term for Israel – appeared seven times while he demanded that the rabbi and his flock apologize for Gaza because Turkey’s Jews have lived among Turks for 500 years and gotten rich off them and now support the terrorist Israeli state. Or perhaps Yıldırım is a dedicated reader of Daily Sabah, the English language AKP propaganda organ where Melih Altınok argued yesterday that not only Turkish Jews but Jews everywhere need to, in his words, “make a historic gesture” and denounce Israel publicly. According to his logic, Israel’s actions are solely responsible for increasing anti-Semitism in the world, and “hence, nationalist Jews as well as the humanist and anti-war Jews have to calculate the situation” and do what is necessary in order to stem the inevitable backlash against them. Lovely, no?
What a surprise and shock it must have been then when last night, mobs that included MPs from the AKP attacked the Israeli embassy in Ankara and consulate in Istanbul, leading Israel to reduce its diplomatic staff in the country and to send the families of diplomatic staff home. The police in Ankara, who are never hesitant to break out the tear gas, truncheons, and water cannons against Turkish civilians protesting things like government corruption, were mysteriously somehow powerless this time as they stood on the sidelines and watched. Of course, there can’t possibly be a connection between the rhetoric of high government officials lambasting Israel as a genocidal terror state and mobs attacking Israel’s diplomatic missions and chanting for murder, right? This is clearly all a misunderstanding and emanates not from Erdoğan using ugly and hateful tactics to improve his political standing but completely and entirely from Israel’s actions. Now please excuse me while I go wash off the sarcasm dripping from my keyboard.
I understand why Turks are upset about the images and news reports coming out of Gaza. Just as Diaspora Jews feel a deep sense of kinship and brotherhood with their Jewish brethren in Israel, there is a genuine sense of pan-Muslim solidarity between Turks and Palestinians. While I believe that Israel tries in good faith to minimize civilian casualties, not only do mistakes happen but sometimes Israel makes intentional decisions – like every other country in the history of the world that has ever fought a war – that it knows will lead to civilian deaths. I get the anger and frustration, and I see it personally from Turkish friends on my Facebook feed and my Twitter stream, who are furious with Israel not because they are Jew-hating anti-Semites but because they deplore the mounting civilian death toll in Gaza, which they see as disproportionate and excessive. And it isn’t just the AKP; anger at Israel is widespread among all segments of the population, as evidenced by the multiple leftist Gaza solidarity rallies taking place in Turkey today and by joint CHP/MHP presidential candidate Ekmeleddin Ihsanoğlu bashing Israel’s actions in Gaza and the CHP generally trying to score points over the last few days by absurdly trying to paint the AKP as in bed with Israel and complicit with its actions. Israel isn’t exactly popular in Turkey, to make the understatement of the decade, and to expect Turkish politicians to hold their tongues completely or to support Israel’s actions in Gaza is unreasonably naive.
But there is a world of difference between criticizing Israel out of a deeply held difference of opinion versus comparing Israelis to Hitler, equating Israel with Nazi Germany, throwing around the term genocide, openly advocating violence against Israeli nationals and property, and threatening Jews over Israel’s behavior. It is completely beyond the pale, and anyone who cares a lick about liberal values should be denouncing it loud and clear without qualification. Erdoğan is appealing to the darkest forces imaginable in order to win a presidential election and bolster his laughably pathetic standing in the Arab world, and let’s not forget that he said straight out today that he will never normalize or even improve relations with Israel while he is in office. He has dropped the charade that this has anything to do with the Mavi Marmara or even a set of fulfillable demands that Israel is not meeting, so let’s all remember that the next time someone blames Israel for the impasse in the bilateral relationship. Erdoğan is anti-Israel because he does not like Israel, full stop. If Israel withdrew its forces from Gaza, stopped responding to Hamas rockets with missiles, ended the blockade, and awarded Khaled Meshaal the Israel Prize, Erdoğan and Davutoğlu would just find some other reason not to normalize relations. Yes, the situation in Gaza undoubtedly plays a big role in all of this – just look at Israeli-Turkish relations under the Erdoğan government between 2002 and 2008, which were cordial and cooperative – but it’s about more than that at this point. Erdoğan and the AKP have gone too far down the garden path of anti-Israel rhetoric at this point to ever turn back.
Turning Lemons Into Rotten Lemons
December 4, 2012 § 9 Comments
Last night Jeffrey Goldberg tweeted an apt point that all supporters of Israel should think about very hard. He wrote, “Two things can be true at the same time: Israel is judged more harshly than any other nation–and, Netanyahu is behaving terribly.” Israel is subjected to double standards to which no other country is held, and if you think that isn’t true, consider the nearly single-minded focus on Israel that is the hallmark of the United Nations General Assembly and Human Rights Council, or the harsh spotlight trained upon Israel over civilian casualties relative to other countries. Israel behaves badly on plenty of occasions, but so do other countries with far less complex challenges, and yet a visitor from another planet encountering Earth for the first time would lump Israel together with North Korea based on the media coverage (and if you think that is a fair comparison, please just stop reading now since you’ll be wasting your time). Israel always starts off in any situation at a complete disadvantage, and this is something that no other country deals with on a similar scale. Yet, this does not mean that Israel is a completely blameless actor in every instance, and none of the above obviates the fact that not all criticism of the Netanyahu government is a result of anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, dislike of Netanyahu personally, or driven by a hidden agenda. To take the case in point, Netanyahu’s actions since last Thursday are not only childish and puerile, they are weakening Israel to an immeasurable degree.
Let’s zoom out for a minute and look at the long term picture. Israel is now perhaps more isolated than it has ever been on a number of levels, and certainly the most isolated it has been since 1975 during the Arab oil boycotts and the falling out with the Ford administration. Looking at Israel’s traditional regional allies, Israel’s relationship with Turkey is at an all-time low, its ties with Egypt are the most strained they have been in the post-Camp David era, and Jordan is too preoccupied with its own internal problems and the wave of refugees coming over the border from Syria to give Israel much cover on anything. While Israel does not have to worry about military threats from Arab states, it is looking at a long-term stream of diplomatic pressure from Islamist governments and less cooperation from Arab states on repressing non-state actors who threaten Israel.
In Europe, Israel faces an uphill battle as well. There is generally a lot of sympathy in European capitals for the Palestinians, but Europe’s indignation over settlements is real as well. This was driven home by the lopsided UN vote on Palestinian statehood, in which the Czech Republic was the only European country to vote with Israel. New allies Cyprus and Greece, to whom Israel has pinned such high hopes, both voted to grant Palestine non-member state observer status, and stalwart Israeli ally Germany abstained due to its anger over repeatedly being dismissed by Israel over the issue of settlement expansion. This all comes on the heels of the surprising European support for Operation Pillar of Cloud, which indicates that while Israel faces a tough audience in Europe, it has some wiggle room.
Then there is the United States, which has given Israel military aid for Iron Dome, constantly goes to bat for it in the UN including last week, was unwavering in its rhetorical support during military operations in Gaza, and also has been pleading with Israel to halt settlement expansion. The U.S. is unlikely to put heat on Israel like Europe does, but it has repeatedly expressed its displeasure with settlements and is very clear that it sees settlement growth as an obstacle to peace.
Given all of this, what is Israel’s most sensible course of action? Is it to loudly announce that it is going to “punish” the Palestinians for going to the UN by building thousands of more homes in the West Bank? Or is it to look at the big picture, realize that settlements are not just an excuse trotted out by anti-Semitic Europeans and Israel-hating leftists but are actually causing Israel all sorts of problems, and come up with some other way to deal with what it views as Palestinian intransigence? Israel went in the span of weeks from being viewed sympathetically due to Palestinian rockets indiscriminately targeting Israeli civilians to being denounced and having its ambassadors hauled in on the carpet over settlement expansion and being threatened with all sorts of countermeasures by the West. Please, someone make a cogent argument for me how this is somehow a brilliant strategy and how Netanyahu is ensuring Israel’s future existence, because from where I am sitting it is counterproductive, dangerous, and unwaveringly stupid. It’s all fine and good to constantly claim that Western views don’t matter and that Israel has the right to do what it wants, but that is the equivalent to burying your head in the sand. The fact is that Israel cannot exist on its own, it needs allies given the neighborhood in which it lives, and settlements are actually a problem for Israel’s allies. That’s the truth, and pretending otherwise is fiddling while Rome burns.
It has become clear to me over the past few years that contrary to the popular myth that the problems between Israel and the Palestinians stem from 1967, the parties are still fighting over 1948. Significant segments of Palestinians, with Hamas leading the way, simply will not concede the legitimacy of Israel, plain and simple. Concurrently, the constant refrains from the right about Palestinians not needing a state of their own because they have Jordan or the tired old canard that there is no land to give back to the Palestinians because it belonged to Jordan and to Egypt (always smugly spouted as if this is some brilliantly clever argument) is a vestige of 1948. Everyone loves to point out that Hamas doesn’t care about settlements, and that the PLO was founded in 1964, and both of these things are true and speak to the challenges that Israel faces that have absolutely nothing to do with settlements. But – and this a big one – settlements exacerbate the situation enormously, particularly with Western countries. Even ceding the argument that Palestinians of all stripes are never going to accept Israel in the pre-1967 borders and that Arab states will never want to make peace with Israel, Israel should then be doing everything it can to make sure it has the West on its side. You want to know what the best way to foul that up is? Proudly declaring that you don’t care what anyone else thinks and that you are going to build settlements wherever and whenever you like, and that doing so is not in any way an obstacle to a two-state solution and that in fact the blame rests solely with the other side. I am sick and tired of watching Israel’s supporters, of whom I am most definitely one, ignore the glaringly obvious facts that are right in front of their faces. Settlements are a huge problem, case closed. If you think that the benefit to expanding Israel’s presence in the West Bank outweighs everything else, then I respect your argument and at least you are going into this with eyes wide open. Pretending that settlements are an ancillary side issue though is willful blindness, and if that’s what you really think, then your powers of observation and analysis are sorely lacking.
This Post Is Not About Israeli Politics
July 18, 2012 § 6 Comments
This post is not about Israeli politics. I mean that in the most literal way possible. A bus carrying Israeli tourists in Bulgaria was blown up, and according to Ha’aretz, at least seven people have been killed. There is some dispute at this point as to whether this sub-human act was carried out by a suicide bomber or a planted explosive device, but that doesn’t really matter since the purpose of killing Jews was accomplished either way. The attack comes 18 years to the day that Hizballah terrorists blew up a Jewish community center in Argentina, which certainly will not escape the notice of Israeli defense and intelligence officials.
This post is not about Israeli politics. I mean that in a figurative sense as well, since do not for even one second think that the massacring of Israeli tourists has anything at all to do with Israeli politics, Israeli policy in the West Bank, Israeli treatment of Palestinians, or anything else that Israel does. There is simply no excuse under the sun to blow up civilians, and the victims of the terrorist attack on that bus were not targeted because they are Israelis or because some deranged lunatic thinks that Bibi Netanyahu is not serious about establishing an independent Palestinian state. The innocents on that bus were murdered in cold blood for being Jews, plain and simple. Anyone who suggests otherwise needs to not only be dismissed outright, but to be shouted down, publicly shamed, and made to feel foolish for wallowing in abject ignorance. The word “Israel” should only enter this conversation for the purpose of identifying the citizenship of the people who were killed.
This post is not about Israeli politics. Today’s terrorist attack should serve as a reminder that when people use Israel as an excuse to kill Jews for who they are, it obliterates the line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. I think that distinction does in some cases actually exist, but unless the people who constantly remind us that the two are not the same call this out as forcefully as I am right now, then their argument should be permanently consigned to the dustbin of history and they should be rightly dubbed as frauds. Do I call out Israeli misbehavior all the time when I think it is warranted? I sure do. Just look at my previous post for an example. Does anything that Israel ever does justify what happened today under the banner of anti-Zionism? Not for anyone who isn’t barbaric. It’s as simple as that, completely black and white. Anyone who doesn’t get that needs to seriously rethink their world view and place as a human being.
