Evan Zuesse http://www.jta.org/user/profile/55516 en-us zsilberman@washingtonjewishweek.com Copyright 2012 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 What we have lacked in the reports of this "private exchange of views" between Obama and Sarkozy is precisely the larger context and other comments overheard, in media reports. It is a matter of course that reporters with their own well-established agendas will edit the remarks to suit their own preferences. We still do not know just what Sarkozy was commenting on with his "liar" accusation, but Seth's blog article begins to fill in the gaps, and it is reassuring. His "take" does help to redeem Obama a bit, and is a welcome corrective. (I don't think Seth is correct, though, to allege that "right-wing" supporters of Israel are pleased with the anti-Netanyahu comment of Obama. They are not so partisan as to wish ill for US-Israel relations. They deplore Obama's too often inept and unsympathetic initiatives and views, now shown up again despite Seth's persuasive caveats.) Any more information about the actual conversation and Sarkozy's own responses? 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 One last comment: why is it that we never hear about Mahmud Abbas (or for that matter Yasser Arafat) being called a "liar" by American and European leaders? Why is it, if those leaders think that Abbas and Erekat, etc., are in fact constantly lying (as they are), we never get "leaks" to the media of private conversations by political figures and diplomats that say so? For example, Abbas has said (echoing of course Yasser Arafat's claim, which is the official Palestinian position) that the Temple Mount was never a Jewish holy site, and the Temple never existed in Jerusalem -- it was always a mosque, even before the rise of Islam. Even the Western Wall, according to Abbas and co., is not an authentic Jewish holy site, and under Palestinian administration might well be made a Muslim shrine from which Jews would be permanently excluded, as has been Muslim policy on the Temple Mount itself, the Cave of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs in Hebron, and all other Jewish holy sites in "Palestine." Why do not Western leaders make "private comments" about that, that end up merely accidentally leaked to the media? Food for thought. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 In short, if you fearlessly tell the inconvenient truth to power, the powerful call you "Liar!" Netanyahu has shown up both Obama and Sarkozy too many times simply by standing up for Israel and telling it like it is. He becomes hard to bear for them: he is right, and they are wrong. We see it again in regard both to the Palestinian attempts to declare themselves a state unilaterally at the UN, which Netanyahu says directly and grossly violates and invalidates the Oslo Accords -- which is the truth -- and in regard to the need for Obama and Europe to end the palaver and actually to stop Iran's extremely dangerous nuclear program -- which is the truth. Obviously that rubs many leaders the wrong way. It is easier to blame Netanyahu than to face the truths he refuses to shut up about. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Netanyahu addressed the UN and called it a dark place filled with lies - which is the truth. He stated plainly to Obama in a press conference that Israel would never return to the 67 borders and that those borders were indefensible, and rehearsed the real history behind Israel's struggle simply to survive in a genocidally oriented Middle East - which is the truth. He said that Israel has tried time and again to sit down to serious peace negotiations with the Palestinians, and it is they who refuse, and even try to impose conditions that require Israel's self-destruction - which is the truth. He said that Obama tried to force on Israel a freeze on "settlements" within Jerusalem that no previous administration had done, breaking previous commitments - which is the truth. All of these are truths that Obama, Sarkozy, the EU and the UN routinely deny, in Orwellian fashion. For some pointed further comment on the "Liar!" claim from Europeans who are systematically lying themselves into social and economic collapse, see David Spengler's amusing post "What does Sarkozy mean by the term 'liar'?" at http://pjmedia.com/spengler. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Ron Kampeas is "not at all sure why [Kagan's endorsement of retired Israeli Supreme Court Barak] is germane to how she will function as a judge." He even quite misleadingly phrases her praise of Barak's judicial activism as her "why I admire Israel" moment. The remarks have little to do with Israel per se. They relate instead to judicial philosophy. Such sneering misrepresentation boggles the mind, and at the least raises questions about Kampeas's possible bias or journalistic ethics. The praise of Barak's judicial activism is directly relevant to how Kagan herself will function as a judge. Many commentators have shown how and why this is so, at length. Certainly Robert Bork made no secret of how germane it is, and Kampeas has reported on Bork's remarks, even if rather dismissively one might add. Furthermore, and at the very least, comments from readers of earlier JTA articles on Kagan's attempt to justify rewriting the American Constitution as Barak has effectively written de novo an Israeli constitution, would have alerted Kampeas to the issues. See for example the comments on Ami Eden's article on Bork's comments, "Bork aims to Bork Barack's Kagan with Barak," June 24, on this Capital J blog, at politics/article/2010/06/24/2739764/bork-aims-to-bork-baracks-kagan-with-barak/ They are serious issues, directly germane to the confirmation hearings on Kagan, and indeed with bearing on what kind of country the U.S. is going to become in future decades under the rule of the Supreme Court. These are matters that Kampeas is obligated by professional ethics to report on honestly and fairly. His own apparent advocacy for a Barak-style rewriting of the Constitution, as Kagan appears to wish for, should not prevent him reporting properly on the implications of the various viewpoints for American democracy. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Robert Bork's analysis (see the link to the "lengthly attack on Barak in a 2007 piece" in the JTA article) is spot-on, and raises some fundamental questions about democracy versus judicial activism that most other posters here ignore and hope will just go away. The problems are real. As most authorities affirm, Israel has the most activist Supreme Court in the world, and many of its decisions are arguably not reflective even of Jewish ethics nor, incontestably, of Israeli views generally. They reflect only the very left-liberal views of the judges themselves, who by the way choose their successors so even the nominees to the Supreme Court do not go through a parliamentary vetting and are not in the slightest responsible to nor democratically subject to the Israeli people. Instead, the nominees are merely chosen to perpetuate the ideology, for we must call it that, of the present Supreme Court. There is no advise-and-consent here, nor check-and-balance between the various branches of government, and thus no democracy in any proper understanding of that term. Barak, as Bork points out, claims that extreme judicial rewriting of Israeli law constitutes "substantive democracy" as opposed to "formal democracy," as if elections, the checks and balances of branches of government, etc., are merely "formal democracy," not "substantive," while ideological decrees determined only by a judicial elite answerable to no-one are "substantive" REAL democracy. Shades of the "people's democracies" of North Korea, the USSR, China, and the like, I say. It is an entirely legitimate topic of concern that Ms. Kagan seems to endorse this sort of undemocratic judicial activism, rather than the duty of judges to sustain the explicit restrictions and limitations both on judicial power and on interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. To suppose, in addition, that international law as arrived at by the too-often kangaroo court of the U.N. is superior to and should have any bearing on American law is merely to travesty both U.S. constitutional obligations and, too often, morality itself. The U.N., with its highly authoritarian block of 57 Muslim nations that have not even been able to arrive at a clear definition of terrorism, and which has gotten the U.N. to rule that Islam is exempt from all democratic criticism, is no moral nor impressive legal authority, and should not set the pattern for American law. The U.N. Human Rights Council itself legitimates blatant and innumerable human rights violations around the world, while attacking chiefly Israel whose standard of human rights is far above most of the members on the HRC itself. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Shavuot is one of the most important Jewish festivals in the calendar, and the lack of knowledge about it is an index of how lost most overly assimilatedJews are from their own tradition. Its chief meaning is not as an archaic harvest festival (as many Christian and secular Jewish academics have liked to argue), but as the always-relevant celebration of the arrival of the Children of Israel and the Erev Rav, the other former slaves who escaped with the Children of Israel, at Mt. Sinai, where they all experienced the revelation at Mt. Sinai and together accepted the covenant with HaShem, all converting to Judaism which was first defined then, and only then really becoming the Jewish people. We are taught that that experience of God and Torah, and entry into the covenant which occurred then, was not limited to that generation, but every generation of Jews should regard themselves as having been present then, and Shavuot is therefore our portion in that epochal and ever-new experience. That we were all converted at Mt. Sinai to Torah and God, and that the Jewish people only became such through that conversion and through the covenant we entered into, makes us all a convert people. That is the biggest reason the Book of Ruth is what we read during Shavuot: her story is really our own and the story of the Sinai generation in nucleus. But of course Ruth was also the ancestress of King David, and therefore symbolically of the coming Messiah who will bring world peace and the communion of all peoples under God, so reading her story also points to the future, not just the past or present. As is laid down halakhically in regard to the conversion process, one begins with laying out only some of the commandments, explaining some of the most crucial and elemental ones, and also explaining some of the minor ones, so as to indicate the general nature of the Way of the Torah to the convert so there can be informed consent, while also stressing that there is more to learn. So it happened on the first Shavuot, at Mt. Sinai: Israel was informed about the Ten Commandments and other commandments both major and minor, and they accepted, saying "We will do and listen [further]!" The learning process that follows conversion had begun. Of course, our arrival 50 days after the Exodus from Egypt at Sinai, and Shavuot, was not the end of our Sinai experience. As the Torah tells us in detail, Moses then went up into the mountain for 40 days to learn all the details of the Covenant-Teaching (Torah means "Teaching"), and the Jews below became anxious and insecure, and finally had Aaron build a Golden Calf for them (on the Ninth of Av, midway through the 40 days) since Moses appeared to be gone forever and they needed some way to connect with HaShem. Moses descended on the 29th of Av with the Two Tablets, broke them and then ground the Golden Calf to dust, calling the people together on the first of Ellul with the blowing of ram's horns, and urging them to repent and prepare themselves for his return (hence the blowing of ram's horns and theme of self-purification and communal harmony through the month of Ellul, ever since). Moses then went up into the mountain a further 40 days, refashioning a second set of the Two Tablets, and returned on Yom Kippur to a completely repentant Israel. So this is the foundation meaning of Yom Kippur. And on Succot, all Israel celebrated the renewed presence of HaShem in their midst, the divine presence filling the whole world and giving new life to everything. So Succot takes its primal meaning from those events at Mt. Sinai, the culmination of the first six months following the Exodus. None of this is new information. It is all laid down in the Torah itself, and is described in the Book of Exodus. It is also established clearly in rabbinic writings, and for example in Rashi's comments on the Torah text, so there is nothing secret about it. The attempt of secular and Christian scholars to reduce Shavuot to a merely folklorist harvest festival taken from the Canaanites, and even to claim that it got its Sinai significance only in the Hellenistic period (!!) is a complete rewrite, serving their joint anti-Judaic or even in the case of the secularists anti-religious ends. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Avineri has a very short memory. Remember the extraordinarily hostile European reaction to Israel's acting in self-defense against thousands of Gaza rockets, during Israel's previous government led by the Labor and Kadimah parties? Remember the general lack of sympathy shown by Europe to Israel's self-defense Lebanon campaign against Hezbollah rockets and terrorism in 2007, when again Netanyahu was not Prime Minister? Remember the world's reception of Ariel Sharon, back in 2001, when he was blamed by Arafat for Arafat's instigation of the Intifada, and the world fell into line with Arafat again after having previously almost abandoned him for his torpedoing the Camp David peace offer of 2000? Remember the non-"genocidial massacre" of Jenin, in 2001, with Sharon portrayed even on the covers of The Guardian and The Economist as a Nazi child-eating fiend, all of this really a creation of leftist-Palestinian propaganda that again the world bought holus-bolus, until the alleged "massacre" was disproved by a U.N. investigative commission? For that matter, remember the long and consistent record of European cowering to Muslim extremist regimes and Palestinian demonizations of Israel, extending over decades? Remember the eager way leftists in Europe adopted rabid anti-Zionism after Israel's victory in the Six Day War of 1967, following the furious defamations unleased at the time in the U.N. and on the world stage by the Soviet Union? Where has the supposedly learned academic Avineri been over the past six decades? It is well-known that he is a leftist himself, and therefore unsympathetic to right-center political figures as such. Netanyahu is therefore being blamed by him in scapegoating fashion for things completely unrelated to him. The problem does not lie with Netanyahu, who has an overwhelming majority of Israel's population solidly behind him. If anything, the problem lies with the utter failure of the leftist peace opium-dreams of the past, and the intransigent refusal to accept peace or work towards it by the Palestinians and Muslims world-wide. But Avineri would never want to admit that, any more than Europe would. Pipe dreams lead to scapegoating and self-harming, blaming one's own side for the failures caused by the vicious other side. It is noticeable that Brith Shalom, the Yishuv-period ancestor to the current discredited Peace Now (with which Avineri is so associated), was a group of intellectuals who simply could not find any Arab intellectuals ready to sit down with them or join their group. Brith Shalom, adamantly unwilling to admit Arabs were to blame for any of their violence and intransigence, sought to ignore this inability to find Arab interlocutors, and instead blamed the Yishuv leadership for the ongoing terrorism and conflict. This has remained the strategy, if you can call it that, of Peace Now types up to this day. Abbas refuses even to sit down with Netanyahu in peace negotiations? It is due to Netanyahu's alleged intransigence and alleged refusal to accept a 2-state solution (both false claims), never Abba's. Etc. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 As a matter of fact, though, Foxman ignores in his courteous letter to Goldstone the overwhelming evidence from the Goldstone Report itself, and as well from Goldstone's subsequent defenses of it, that Goldstone quite consciously and intentionally crafted the Report in a biased and dishonest manner, to demonize Israel and to slant the Report against Israel. It goes beyond the evidence, for example, to lay the charge that Israel intentionally sought civilian casualties, when there is overwhelming evidence that it did not (if it had, Israel could easily have wiped out hundreds of thousands of Gazans, not a few hundred.) The Report even misrepresents international law itself in its claims against Israel, and shows very sloppy legal investigative methodology in handling witnesses and other evidence. Goldstone knew, after all (as do we all), not only the heavy bias of the UN and HRC itself, which commissioned him, but also that of Hamas itself, an openly antisemitic terrorist organization which has boasted of its genocidal agenda against Jews. Even its charter cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He choose to trust evidence from such an organization and to dismiss as unreliable and dubious evidence from Israel and NGOs and individuals defending it. He continues to defend his indefensible Report, using dodgy answers. This goes far beyond naivety. So there will be no recantation coming from Richard Goldstone. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Not really, David. Foxman is merely stating the obvious, as any unbiased reader of his article can see. For a full analysis of what is wrong with the Goldstone Report, and the dishonesty of "Goldstone's" letter to Congress defending it (a letter not even written by Goldstone but by a founder and leader of J-Street, Mort Halperin), see my post at; http://blogs.jta.org/politics/article/2009/10/30/1008853/goldstone-v-ros-lehtinen-and-berman#comment_92224 There are links in that post to some of the chief detailed refutations of the Goldstone Report on the internet, showing the Report's hollowness in case after case. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 The Congressional resolution is a triumph for decency and sanity in the often very indecent and immoral alternative universe of Middle Eastern (and U.N.) politics. In that universe authoritarian and even totalitarian regimes, sponsors of terrorism and hate, guilty of endless crimes against their own people and each other, arraign the only liberal democracy in the Middle East before kangeroo courts for the "crime" of defending itself against terrorism. In fact, the Goldstone Report and the U.N. H.R.C. itself are used by those regimes as part of their on-going war against liberal democracy as such. None of them are real allies of the U.S., but rather must be numbered amongst its enemies. Israel here as so often is a stand-in and front-line for all decent and liberal societies in the world. As for Judge Goldstone's obvious willingness to associate himself with such regimes and organisations against the only Jewish state in the world, laying trumped-up charges against it, while claiming to act on its behalf, well, that speaks for itself. But for those for whom those behaviors do not speak for themselves, see the actual text of the letter Judge Goldstone wrote to Congress members considering his Report, and the analysis of the slipperiness and even dishonesty in that letter in my post responding to it, at this website's blog at: http://blogs.jta.org/politics/article/2009/10/30/1008853/goldstone-v-ros-lehtinen-and-berman#comment_92224 It turns out that the letter to Congress was not even actually written by Judge Goldstone, though he no doubt signed it, but by one of the founders of J-Street, Morton Halperin. See my post above for details. This in turn exposes the double-facedness of J-Street, which has pretended to be pro-Israel and critical of the Goldstone Report and to accept the right of the State of Israel to defend itself against Palestinian terrorism. Actually J-Street founders are working feverishly against it. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Readers of all the above would be interested in some revelatory comments regarding the "Goldstone" letter to Congress elsewhere on-line. It turns out the letter was written not by Goldstone, although no doubt he signed it, but by his J-Street advisor, Morton Halperin. This sheds light not only on the probity or lack of it of Judge Goldstone, but also of J Street - and also George Soros, who is sponsoring and funding a lot of this. Here are the other items, the first by the Editor of The Weekly Standard, Michael Goldfarb, the second by Steve Rosen, an academic posting on the Harvard University "Middle East Forum" blog: http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2009/10/j_street_adviser_morton_halper.asp J Street Adviser Morton Halperin Goes to Work for Goldstone THE WEEKLY STANDARD has obtained a document authored by Judge Richard Goldstone that is now being circulated on Capitol Hill. The document was written in response to HR 867 -- the resolution sponsored by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Howard Berman condemning Goldstone's report on Israeli war crimes in Operation Cast Lead. Goldstone explains in the document that he sends his "comments on this resolution in an effort to correct factual errors." Spencer Ackerman reported today that J Street would oppose the resolution in the House, but J Street chief Jeremy Ben-Ami has also said his organization "refuses to embrace" the Goldstone report. But it seems that certain elements of J Street have indeed embraced Goldstone and his report. Upon further inspection of the Goldstone letter, the actual author seems to be Morton H. Halperin, who serves on the J Street advisory council and is a senior adviser at George Soros's Open Society Institute. The original document can be downloaded here. (A check of the file's "properties" reveals the author as Morton H. Halperin.) Individuals with official ties to J Street are not just embracing the Goldstone report, they are involved in efforts on behalf of Goldstone himself to scuttle opposition to the report in Congress. It's just another example of the disconnect between J Street's official positions and the actions of those who are connected to the organization. Posted by Michael Goldfarb on October 30, 2009 12:51 PM http://www.meforum.org/blog/obama-mideast-monitor/2009/11/j-street-allied-to-goldstone J Street allied to Goldstone?? by Steve Rosen  •  Nov 2, 2009 at 9:03 pm I haven't posted for a while, but this is remarkable. Michael Goldfarb at the Weekly Standard discovered ("J Street Adviser Morton Halperin Goes to Work for Goldstone") that a letter purportedly written by Judge Richard Goldstone to criticize a House of Representative resolution condemning the Goldstone report (HR 867 sponsored by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Howard Berman) was substantially written by Morton H. Halperin, who serves on the J Street advisory council and is a senior adviser at George Soros's Open Society Institute. The original document can be downloaded from the Standard. A check of the file's "properties" revealed the author as Halperin. There has been a lot of warm and cozy talk about expanding our definition of the pro-Israel family to include some cousins who dissent a little here and there, like calling for less pressure on Iran and more on Israel. But this Goldstone maneuver is not mere dissent, but an apolgia for a report that would, if left unanswered, make it impossible for Israel to defend itself against a systematic campaign to target Israeli civilians. Mort Halperin was one of the key founders of J Street, and held what may have been the first serious fundraiser for the new organization in his home. This is not merely wrong, but profoundly evil, and it is being done by one of the fathers of J Street, which tosses around the phrase "pro-Israel" while robbing it of all meaning. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 steve ariza may be in Outer Mongolia. You cannot believe everything a blogger, especially such a nasty one, says about himself/herself, starting with the claim to being Jewish at all. I tend to give the benefit of a doubt, although steve ariza stretches it quite a bit - see the uniformly negative tone of all his posts. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Ron Kampeas may think that Richard Goldstone wins on points, but I do not. In fact, many of his responses are "disingenuous": he fudges the issues, dodges the points, and unfortunately simply does not tell the truth or is "economical" with it. E.g.,he claims at the end of his letter that his Report was not shaped by Hamas. He omits to mention that a major source for his Goldstone Report was TAWTHEQ. According to the "Elder of Ziyon" blog, "TAWTHEQ is quoted in the context of the Gaza war more often than HRW and seems to be mentioned in the report body about as often as PCHR (although PCHR is mentioned more in footnotes.) In other words, it seems that Goldstone put a lot of emphasis on TAWTHEQ's direct testimony to the Commission. Who is TAWTHEQ? It is not an NGO - it is Hamas! The organization is an Arabic acronym for the "Central Commission for Documentation and Pursuit of Israeli War Criminals." The possible objectivity of such an organization seems remote." See elderofziyon.blogspot.com/search/label/Goldstone Report This address follows directly after the http:// - there is no www. in it. The analysis of the TAWTHEQ group is article #8 in the "Goldstone Report" file. The "Elder of Ziyon" blog is probably the most detailed and devastating of the analyses of that report. But also see the other links in www.goldstonereport.org Goldstone's dismissal of the possibility that Gazan witnesses might reasonably fear retaliation from Hamas if they testified in support of the IDF conduct of the war, or refuted Hamas claims, is derisory. This refusal to admit that he is dealing with a criminal organization and cannot ignore issues like intimidation, human shields, etc., runs right through the Report. There are literally no democratic nor responsibly self-critical Palestinian institutions allowed in Gaza. It is far from having the transparency and honesty in matters of war or peace that Israel has. Goldstone ignores this. Or rather, throughout his Report he makes it clear that he considers Hamas/Palestinian claims far more credible than Israeli. He dismissed Israeli government documents and Israeli NGO analyses dealing with some of the very cases he deals with in the Report, and then has the gall to claim that there was no information from Israel or the IDF to support its side of the conflict, which is why, he says, he favored the Hamas side and version of events. Actually he refused to take into account Israeli-sourced information presented to him regarding the IDF incidents and policies he criticises. Instead, many of his trusted Gazan witnesses, and many of the victims, whom he claimed were civilians, have been shown to have been members of Hamas militias. This information was often presented to Goldstone before the completion of his Report, e.g., by Lt. Col. Jonathan Halevi among others (see www.goldstonereport.org for links): he refused to accept these corrections. On the "human shields" issue his answer avoids the crux of the matter entirely, and even ignores "international law" on this issue. In his answer the question becomes not whether Hamas positioned rockets or fighters in schools, crowded streets, hospitals, etc. - which they did, as a matter of course, and which is itself an evidence of using civilians as human shields and a war crime - but whether Hamas forced civilians in front of them as literal shields. Whether civilians are forced into or volunteer for such "shields" is not the issue in international law. Simply their use in this fashion is already illegal. Furthermore, he rejected IDF videos available on the internet showing Hamas using civilians and civilian areas as human shields (and also dressing as civilians themselves, also a war crime). There is plenty of evidence that with or without the consent of their civilian neighbors, without consultation in fact, Hamas fighters regularly did use civilians and civilian areas as shields, stored weapons in private homes, shot from crowded streets and groups of children, even positioned their military headquarters in the basement of Gaza's main hospital. All of this is known to Goldstone. His phrasing in his letter obscures all this. He claims that he got the UN HRC to change the mandate to include possible Hamas war crimes. Actually, he did not. The HRC considered this change and voted not to ratify it. He only got a verbal commitment from the HRC head, which carried no weight without ratification from the Council itself. That is how the HRC could pass a resolution, on receiving the Report, which only condemned Israel for alleged war crimes and recommended UN indictment of Israel, and was totally silent on Hamas. Goldstone pretended to be surprised and hurt by this omission. It was actually entirely in order. He is just trying to cover himself. Moreover, his insincerity in this matter is shown by the fact that only 5% or less of the actual report deals with allegations against Hamas, and it is all generalities and even exonerations, there are no detailed cases dealt with and nothing therefore that would be indictable; but over 95% of the over 500 pages focuses on Israel. So the entire Hamas section is just a fig leaf, intended to be such. He claims that Ms. Chinkin, one of the four investigators on the Goldstone Commission, is quoted misleadingly for condemning Israel heatedly for war crimes even before undertaking the investigation, because she also mentioned in passing Hamas use of rockets as war crimes. But he fails to mention that the heavy weight of her statement was anti-Israel and pro-Hamas, and that she had served on pro-Palestinian advocacy groups before becoming a member of the Goldstone Commission. In no way is she a neutral arbiter. A major issue is whether the Goldstone Report strips from Israel, or any liberal democracy, its moral right of self-defense against terrorist groups. Goldstone says he does not do this. Yet it is very difficult to see how any democracy can defend itself in his terms. In his letter above, he misrepresents "Just War" theory to do this (note his reference to ius ad bellum), including issues of "proportionality," risk to civilian lives, etc. On this, see for example Michael Walzer, "Responsibility and Proportionality in State and Non-State Wars," available at www.carlisle.army.mil/USAWC/PARAMETERS/09spring/walzer.pdf For detailed refutation of the Report, case by case, see the Elder of Ziyon blog and other links named above. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 What a wonderful speech. It is clear that the American people chose the wrong person to be their next president: they chose pie-in-the-sky-bye-and-bye/yes-we-can over substance and real understanding of the moral and historical issues. The mistake will take a long time being corrected, and meanwhile could lead to some very bad conflicts, actually (even if unintentionally) brought on and encouraged by the feeble American policies. Obama's almost lunatic placating of extremist groups around the world, strategy a la Chamberlain, actually furthers their agendas and advances their cause. E.g., Iran is getting good cover and even indifference toward its domestic repression of dissidents, as it continues unimpeded toward the nuclear holocaust it wants, without any significant set-back from the Americans. As for the Palestinians, why should they sit down to peace negotiations when the U.S. does its work for it against the Israelis, wringing more self-damaging concessions out of them for no reciprocal concessions from the Palestinians? Romney makes all these points, and more besides. He is certainly right about the danger of the U.S. ignoring the Asia-Pacific region. China is basically taking over there, or at least moving strongly in that direction. It is very worrying, for example, that China's government enterprises are trying to buy up almost all Australian mining companies, so that they can control the prices and the supplies of even essential trace elements in modern industry around the world. They have had several set-backs thanks to some principled decisions by the Australian government, but the pressure continues, and has met some successes already. The U.S. should focus more on the Asia-Pacific region, and not get its attention distracted by the intractable Palestinian refusal to make peace. Where are the Democratic critics of Obama making Romney's absolutely essential points? Not to be heard from. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 The Anti-Defamation League is an essential part of the Jewish community's effort to counter antisemitism. It is very effective and has done an enormous amount of good, both for Jews and non-Jews since it has also been a potent voice for broader tolerance and better ethnic relations for all groups in the U.S.. Foxman is not a baptised Christian. But one thing is certain, steve ariza is not a Jew. The accusation that Foxman is baptised is one that one only finds circulating on antisemitic hate websites. Obviously that is ariza's home territory. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 steve ariza, hundreds of millions of people have been turned off tennis because they were not able to make the Wimbledon finals and play against Agassi. Did you know that? I didn't. But in your world, it is true. Oddly enough, people tune into their TV programs when the big tennis matches are shown, nevertheless - you wouldn't guess it. I guess not everyone gets everything they want in life. "Deal with it!" Really it is too funny. Actually, of course, kids are not "turned away" from this program, only not admitted in a given year because funds can't cover every applicant. Bravo for the program: it now is so popular it has waiting lists. But while going to Israel is a "birthright," it is not a right. It is a gift. Decent people are grateful if they get a gift, but they don't become haters of the donors if they don't get a gift. There is something very wrong with the nasty attitude shown here by "steve." In any case, the gift of a trip to Israel is one any Jewish family can provide their children and in fact themselves. I know a good number of Jewish families who have already sent their children there, usually after finishing high school or for a summer during their university years, for weeks or months at an accommodating kibbutz or other appropriate organization, including yeshivot. Sometimes it was done through their shul, or via relatives in Israel. They did not wait for the Birthright Program. The truth is any Jew can go there on their own, at some point in their life, and every Jew should. It is a transformational experience. Simply to see Jewish holy sites is deeply moving, and to be in a flourishing, majority Jewish nation: fabulous! I recommend it to our readers. But I am grateful for the Birthright Program too, as every Jew should be. It is worthy of charitable support: contact them and see what you can donate! 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 "steve ariza" repeats practically verbatim here the utterly and even perversely untruthful comments he gave on "Michael Steinhardt Joins Board of JDC-Taub Center," comments which I refuted there but which he repeats unabashedly here. It is simply not the case that due to the Birthright Program "over 100,000 american jews have become alienated from judaism" [sic: lack of capitalization]. The reality is diametrically opposite to this. So I too will repeat the entirely true points I wrote there: Taglit-Birthright Israel has helped to provide nearly 225,000 American Jewish youth educational tours of Israel. So says a recent study that also shows that “rates of marriage outside the faith were sharply curbed among young Jews who have taken ‘birthright’ trips to Israel, a development that could hearten Jewish leaders worried about assimilation,” quoting from an article from the Wall Street Journal by Jennifer Levitz, “Jewish marriage Tied to Israel Trip,” on Oct. 26. See http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125652745959507567.html It is now fully established that a high quality educational program like this can be a major turning point in people’s lives: it has really made a major difference for Jewish young people. More power to it and to Michael Steinhardt! Of course, since this program depends on charitable donations, it cannot accommodate all American Jewish teenagers at once. But over 200,000 is a highly impressive figure for subsidized trips and stays half-way around the world. That already comprises a very significant percentage of Jewish youth in the U.S., and it is still going on so others too will be included. As for "steve ariza"'s very strange, kooky and highly negative criticisms of what has to be seen as one of the most successful Jewish renewal programs ever, I suggest readers check out his other posts. They are repetitiously hateful and vile about all positive developments in Jewish life, especially those relating to Israel. Note even here his sweeping nasty comments about American Jewish leaders too. His comments cannot be taken seriously. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 In an article entitled "Four Questions about American Jewish Demography," in Jewish Political Studies Review, 20:1-2 (Spring 2008), Ira M. Sheskin describes "the methodological difficulties involved in estimating Jewish populations. It is likely that somewhere between 5.2 million and 6.4 million Jews live in the United States, with the most probable range being 6.0-6.4 million. Whether the American Jewish population is increasing, decreasing, or remaining the same is not totally clear, though it will almost certainly decrease in the future. It appears that the number of Jews in the United States is currently higher than the number in Israel, though this also is very likely to change in the future." The usual figure given for the percentage of Jews in America at present is 2.5% In any case, the decline in numbers, if it has occurred at all (lower birth rates than formerly and than in Israel today, high intermarriage rates - not found in Israel - and lessened Jewish knowledge are the usual factors named), has nothing to do with Zionism but, quite the opposite, with lessened affiliation with all forms of Jewish life and involvement, which Zionist ideologies, groups and activities actually have very significantly countered. Zionism has been an energizing factor in American Jewish life, as in Jewish life around the world. It has saved Russian Jewry, for example, holding together those repressed "Jews of Silence" during the Soviet years, and leading to a rebirth of all forms of Jewish affiliation there since the fall of the Soviet Union. The full article by Sheskin is on-line at http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/showpage.asp?DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=84&FID=625 Scroll down to the Vol. 20 issue. For Jews interested in Jewish life and affairs anywhere, by the way, this is a wonderful and highly informative website. I am not and have never been known in any context as "ari." There is nothing else to respond to in "steve ariza"'s rant. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 I am sorry, steve ariza, but all of your statements are wrong, and can be shown to be such by relevant Israel census reports and the like. The gross deviance from the reality even puts into doubt your claim to have served in the IDF or lived in Israel at all. Moreover, the offensively antisemitic language ("jew zoo of israel") and blatantly delusional assertions of sinister Zionist manipulations ("arabs are bred by zionists to help create problems for Jews" ) strongly suggests that you are not Jewish at all, rather you are anti-Jewish but seek to legitimate your hateful views under a "Jewish" blog identity, as quite a few antisemites have done in these blogs. However, to the demographic facts: birth rates are not "about zero among secular Jews." This already shows you are unfamiliar with Israel and have not lived there. The birth rates in Israel are highest at 4.8 births per woman amongst the Orthodox, but also high amongst the secular with their 2.2 births, a figure which indicators show will increase even from that quite satisfactory level. It should also be kept in mind that between the 15-20% who are secular and the over 25% who are Orthodox about 60% are "traditionalist," which means they have religious views and/or practices. Their birth rates would also be intermediate between the two categories of "secular" and "Orthodox," sustaining an overall birth rate for Jews around 3%. These, for example, are the rates of the Russian Jews. This is confirmed by the most recent Israel Government census reports, and analyses of them. Quoting Yoram Ettinger, in his article "The Case for Demographic Optimism," which appeared in The Jewish Week of October 13, just a couple of weeks ago (available on-line), "The number of Jewish births during the first half of 2009 accounted for 76 percent of all births, compared with 75 percent in 2008 and 69 percent in 1995. "The secular, rather than the religious, sector has been chiefly responsible for the Jewish growth. For example, the olim (or, immigrants) from the USSR arrived in Israel with a typical Russian fertility rate of one birth per woman; today, those women are giving birth to two to three children, the typical secular Israeli Jewish birthrate. Moreover, the Arab-Jewish fertility gap shrunk from six births per woman in 1969 to 0.7 births in 2008, with the two converging toward three births per woman. "The swift decline in the Israeli Arab fertility rate reflects the impressive Arab integration into Israel’s infrastructure of employment, education, health, trade, finance, politics, sports and culture." However, as Ettinger shows, a steep decline in Arab birth rates and family size has been going on across the Middle East in just the past two decades, as these societies begin to modernize, education spreads, and women begin to take up a more autonomous role in the economic and social life of those countries. I also recommend the article by Paul Morland, "Defusing the Demographic Scare," Haaretz for August 5; he makes the same points and shows that Israeli Jews now have higher birth rates than those in several neighboring Arab countries. Your statements about Ethiopian famine are also absolutely false. How telling that you even claim: "This famine propaganda was put out by zionists to raise money from who? thats right from naive american Jews." Truly amazing. Jews do not control the world's media, "steve." Next you will be quoting from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. There were famines in Ethiopia, and I suggest you do a Google search on the topic. Ethiopian Jews are certainly happier in Israel than they were in Ethiopia, where they faced frequent famine, desperate poverty, constant discrimination both governmental and societal, and even threats of genocide. The Beta Israel were dying out in Ethiopia: coming to Israel saved the community. That the letters they wrote back to their relatives in Ethiopia described a far better situation for them in Israel as Jews and as human beings is proven by the fact that the numbers of Ethiopian Beta Israel and even of Falash Mura (formerly Jewish) wanting to immigrate to Israel kept spiralling upward by thousands every year. Surveys amongst the Beta Israel confirm their proud and positive affirmation of Israel. Russian Jews are similarly very positive about Israel and glad to be there. They have not made Israel a transit point to settlement elsewhere in the West, as they could have done, nor have they returned to Russia: they like it in Israel. As I wrote before, surveys show that there is a truly impressive consensus from all Jewish groups about how happy and contented they are with their lives in Israel. You say that I did not show what benefits have come to American Jews from Israel. Actually, I did. Read my post again. The benefits have been enormous, socially, culturally and religiously. One very dramatic evidence of the positive good Israel does American Jewry is shown by the remarkable effects of the Birthright Program, in which 225,000 young American Jews are treated to short stays in Israel. They not only show enhanced involvement in Jewish life and religion following this, but their intermarriage rate has plummeted: they want to raise a new Jewishly affirmative generation. This was shown in a recent JTA article on the subject. Furthermore, and just in general, the flourishing of Jewish communities anywhere is a boost and good news for Jewish communities anywhere else, since we are Am Echad, one people. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Actually, I must amend my earlier numbers. Taglit-Birthright Israel has helped to provide nearly 225,000 American Jewish youth educational tours of Israel. So says a recent study that also shows that "rates of marriage outside the faith were sharply curbed among young Jews who have taken 'birthright' trips to Israel, a development that could hearten Jewish leaders worried about assimilation," quoting from an article from the Wall Street Journal by Jennifer Levitz, "Jewish marriage Tied to Israel Trip," on Oct. 26. See http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125652745959507567.html It is now fully established that a high quality educational program like this can be a major turning point in people's lives: it has really made a major difference for Jewish young people. More power to it! 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 The Birthright Program is an unqualified success, and has deepened the Jewish knowledge and attachment to the Jewish people of over 100,000 young American Jews. To understand Ariza's sneering comments, merely check his abusive remarks on all other topics in JTA blogs. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 I strongly urge all Jewish readers of JTA to read Sharansky's full article: it is a beautiful statement of shared Jewish identity between the Jews of Israel and those of the Diaspora. Sharansky is an authentic hero of our generation, broadminded, idealistic, knowledgeable and dedicated, a model for us all. That he is now the Chairman of the Jewish Agency is an honor to that agency, and gives some hope that it will again amount to something in world Jewish life. Steve Ariza's abusive and hateful post in response shows at the least that he is not pro-Jewish, and that he cannot help reacting emotively and very negatively even or perhaps especially to such a basic, proud and loving affirmation of Jewish identity. Let that instruct us on how to view all his posts. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Grigory, I do not mean to reproach you directly in regard to the issue of the Jewish Councils of Nazi-occupied Europe, and I apologize if you are offended; I actually agree with your basic sentiments concerning the UN and the American Jewish community, but just wish to rectify a widespread but unfair opinion about those tormented Jewish leaders under the Nazis. Obviously there is a lot that can be said about them, but this is not the place. Perhaps a better analogy might be with the Yevsektsiya, the Jewish Communists appointed by the Soviet government to govern the Jews of the USSR in the early years of the Communist revolution: they brutally suppressed all manifestations of Jewish religion and institutional identity, closing synagogues and yeshivas, putting rabbis in prison or executing them, "purging" even secular Jewish leadership and ensuring that there would be no Jewish education of the next generation. The reason this is a better analogy to Goldstein is that the members of the Yevsektsiya voluntarily and eagerly undertook to destroy Jewish communal autonomy, culture and traditions. They endorsed the anti-Jewish agenda they enforced. The leaders of the Jewish Councils under the Nazis did not endorse Nazism and were not willing collaborators but actually sought to preserve Jewish life, community existence and religious institutions despite the Nazis and even against the Nazi will. Goldstein, whatever may be his disclaimers, has effectively and knowingly made himself an eager and entirely voluntary collaborator with the anti-Zionists, using their double standards to delegitiimize the Jewish state and even its right to any self-defense at all. He is remarkably soft on terrorist enemies of Israel, in contrast. So to the degree that any comparisons are justified, he is like the Yevsektsiya, not like the Judenräte. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 One last brief point. Grigory refers to Goldstone as similar to those tragic figures who served in Judenräte, Jewish Councils, under the Nazis. The analogy is deeply unfair to those Jewish leaders of the Nazi period, although these misrepresentations have been made so often that they tend to gain currency and credibility amongst those unfamiliar with, or reluctant to face, the realities of the Nazi universe. We are alive now: they are dead (some committed suicide when they could no longer endure their impossible situation, others were beaten to death by Nazis or killed in death camps). We can criticise them; they cannot defend themselves. They tried to make the life of Jews in ghettos bearable even in the face of Nazi brutality and random murder (in which they themselves might well be beaten up or killed by Nazi officers), to provide some work, to sustain voluntary and religious associations, to distribute rations that were intentionally one-third normal daily sustenance, designed to weaken fatally and slowly to starve to death hundreds of thousands of people. Hannah Arendt began this tendency (in Eichmann in Jerusalem) to blame the victims, which she even dared to make out were more guilty than the Nazis themselves. This is such a desecration of the truth and unjust smearing of their lives it must be named as such. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Probably the best and most detailed examination of the flaws in the Goldstone Report, revealing its dishonesty in excruciating detail, its failure to exercise proper standards for legal investigations of testimony in criminal matters, its own manifest bias, etc., etc., is that of http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/search/label/Goldstone Report I recommend it to readers. Among the many who contacted the Goldstone Commission when it was conducting its investigation and presented evidence on behalf of the IDF was Lt. Col. Jonathan Halevi (res.). As he did with all others who did this, Goldstone ignored Halevi's evidence, or rather, referred to it in passing in his report at one or two points, dishonestly, as if it supported his conclusions. (Goldstone of course has since contradicted his own report and insisted it was not really a proper legal "investigation," merely a preliminary and hasty "fact-finding mission" - but what kind of "fact-finding mission" rejects all evidence from one side of a dispute? He even says, in an interview with the Jewish Forward, that he would not be surprised if his conclusions in the Report are shown to be baseless in court trials. Nevertheless, he continues to push for Israel to be condemned in the U.N. on the basis of his Report. He devotes next to no attention to Hamas war crimes in the Report, but pretends to be hurt that the U.N. ignored his minimalist criticism of them altogether in their resolutions. Thus he speaks out of both sides of his mouth, on every issue.) Lt. Col. Halevi, however, has published elsewhere his analysis of the Goldstone Report and its flawed treatment of evidence. See his detailed analysis at http://jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DRIT=1&DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=111&FID=442&PID=0&IID=3086&TTL=Blocking_the_Truth_of_the_Gaza_War The same is now also available at http://www.spme.net/cgi-bin/articles.cgi?ID=6073 No knowledgeable Jew - or non-Jew for that matter - can therefore support the Goldstone Report. (The reference to non-Jews is proven by Bolton's comments in the JTA article above, the open criticisms by the U.S. administration generally, or by any of the Western democracies who refused to endorse the UN HRC resolution on it, as well as by leading experts on the problems liberal democracies face in fighting counter-terrorist wars such as Col. Richard Kemp, ret., former Commander of British forces in Afghanistan, and Major General Jim Molan, ret., Chief of Operations for the Iraq Multinational Force in 2004-5.) Even less can knowledgeable and decent Jews or non-Jews enroll themselves as useful idiots with and further the agenda of those bloodthirsty groups and authoritarian states seeking to delegitimize Israel completely, trying to make it a pariah state, and to kill Jews, whatever their views may be about the Report itself. Goldstone's willingness to play this role, knowingly and intentionally, utterly compromises any claim to Zionist beliefs or ethical stature he might wish to make. In the same way, as the above links demonstrate, the nature of the Report itself utterly compromises any claim he might make to judicial expertise or stature. "Michael Levin," or Mahmoud al-Havoun, cites B'Tselem. But Mahmoud fails to note that B'Tselem itself has emphasized in its statements that the Report is obviously highly biased and one-sided, and that B'Tselem does not endorse the Report as it stands. In an article by Haviv Rettig Gur, published in the Jerusalem Post on Sept 30, B'tselem's executive director Jessica Montell is quoted as follows: "There's no question that the HRC, which mandated the Goldstone [fact-finding mission into the Gaza fighting], has an inappropriate, disproportionate fixation with Israel," she said, adding that the Council was "a political body made up of diplomats, not human rights experts, which means that the powerful states are never going to come under scrutiny the way the powerless will. So China, Russia and the US will never have commission of inquiry, regardless of how their crimes rank relative to Israeli crimes." Furthermore, the Goldstone Report itself, which was presented in its final version to the Human Rights Council on Tuesday, is "disagreeable" and mistaken in some of its gravest accusations against Israel, she believes. These include the claim that Israel intentionally targeted the civilian population rather than Hamas, and the "weak, hesitant way that the report mentions Hamas's strategy of using civilians [in combat]." But, she added, Israel could have avoided such a report had it conducted "a thorough investigation" of Cast Lead itself, something which B'Tselem continues to urge on Israel's leaders. End quote from the Jerusalem Post. But even the link provided by Mahmoud contains the statement by B'Tselem that the Report was strongly one-sided and biased. Mahmoud somehow did not see those passages, and fails to point them out. This proves his unreliability, if not plain dishonesty, just as Goldstone, in his frequent claims that critics have only attacked him, but have not dealt with the actual details of the Report itself, is not being honest. See the above links, of which Goldstone knows because his attention has been drawn to them. He just continues to pretend that they do not exist and thus he need not respond to their serious evidence and criticisms. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 I think Michael Hess has set a new low in his posts, and well deserves to be removed, permanently, from this website. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Turning from phony red herrings, obviously designed to change the subject but based solely on malice, to the authentic, Col. Richard Kemp's testimony is powerful precisely because he is one of the world's most experienced authorities on counter-terrorist operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, having commanded the British forces in Afghanistan, seen action in Iraq, and also having been in Israel during the Gaza operation and witnessing its conduct first-hand. He knows what he is talking about. His assertions are backed up by none other than Major General Jim Molan, ret., Chief of Operations of the Iraq Multinational Force in 2004-5. So counter-terrorism experts leading both the British and the American/Multinational Coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan consider that Israel has set an exceptionally high standard for all democracies fighting terrorists. His article strongly defending the way the IDF conducted its war on Hamas is must reading; it appeared in the national newspaper in Australia, The Australian, for Oct. 2, and so readers here may not have seen it. The URL is http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,26152548-7583,00.html 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 "Michael Levin," your real first name would not be Adolf, would it? Your posts might suggest it. This is very old news, already thoroughly discredited even though you pretend otherwise. But anyway, the Breaking the Silence report had many problems with its credibility, ranging from the way it was written, its methodology and underlying assumptions, and also the way it was presented to the public. Plenty of analyses at the time, back in July, pointed these things out. Have you forgotten them so easily? Since the stories were anonymous, they could not be verified at all. That means, "steve," anything goes. Their sources, the actual incidents alleged, everything is open to fantasy and baseless malice. The burden of proof lies with the report, and the report cannot and even purposely will not sustain that burden. Most of us will recall rather similar claims made by the Danny Zamir group, but at least those claims were specific and could be investigated. They all proved to be without foundation. Even the actual soldiers who were the sources turned out not to have seen the incidents they described, which occurred in quite different ways to those described in the soldiers' rumors. Breaking the Silence avoids that "pitfall," by refusing to divulge any verifiable detail nor to name names that might make proper inquiries possible. It also avoids the risk of its sources being called before courts by the supposed criminal perpetrators involved in alleged incidents, the accusatory testimony revealed in open court to have no content, and their originators being convicted of slander. So the substantive value of the Breaking the Silence report is nil. It proves nothing and was even designed to prove nothing, mere propaganda puffery. This is shown as well by the way the "report" was published. There was actually a concerted effort NOT to present it to the IDF first, for it to respond. The goal from the start was to further the anti-Israel propaganda campaign, to discredit Israel. There have been lots of cutting critiques of the Breaking the Silence report. HonestReporting.com had a good one on July 16. See http://www.honestreporting.com/articles/45884734/critiques/new/Breaking_the_Silence_More_Rumor__Hearsay.asp The following is an excerpt from that article: NGO Monitor's Dan Kosky points to the Breaking the Silence report's central problems - flawed methodology and absence of any reasonable research standards: By Breaking the Silence's own admission, the allegations are comprised of "the testimony of around 30 combatants" – a fraction of the thousands of Israeli combat troops deployed during the Gaza conflict. This extremely narrow and presumably hand-picked sample is an absurd basis on which to pass judgment, and even these limited testimonies were entirely unverifiable. All statements are anonymous, and so-called "evidence" is further compromised by the absence of any details of where and when alleged incidents occurred. Consequently, were the report intended to prompt the IDF to investigate individual allegations, Breaking the Silence has made this impossible. ... As for Breaking the Silence's motivations, The Jerusalem Post's Amir Mizroch offers an insider's insight on his personal blog on how the group attempted to give Ha'aretz exclusive rights to the story. The paper, in light of its previous embarrassment [with the Zamir report], did not take the bait and sent the report to the IDF for response. Meanwhile, Breaking the Silence attempted to get the JPost's military correspondent off the story, fearing that the paper would take a critical look at their report. According to Mizroch: Several days before all this, Breaking The Silence gave out their report to a wide array of foreign media, and not to the IDF to probe into itself, with the caveat that they observe the embargo until after Ha'aretz published the report first. All of which shows their original intent was to get as much uncritical worldwide publicity for their report. Legitimate, sure. Fair? Not so sure. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Your vote, "steve," would be pretty much alone, at least amongst Jews - of course, you may not be Jewish at all and may pal around with anti-Zionists/antisemites, who of course have the same view as you on this issue. But Jews don't take their cue from antisemites. Most Jews around the world are supporters of Israel and believe in it. After all, there is place in the world for one tiny Jewish state in the Jewish homeland, and there needs to be no apology for it. Israel has fulfilled the Zionist dream in many respects: as intended, it has indeed been a refuge for a people who, when there was no Israel, had no refuge offered almost anywhere in the world despite their desperate efforts to flee genocide. Since then, the Jews of the USSR, of Ethiopia, of the Arab world, all threatened physically and deeply oppressed culturally, have found secure protection, refuge and more than that, happiness and success, in Israel among their own co-religionists. Israel has been a truly outstanding success in almost all areas, an example of the power of the human spirit that can inspire all humanity, and a source of deep pride to Jews everywhere. Following the abyss of the Holocaust, without Israel I think it is unquestionable that the loss of Jewish morale and abandonment of Jewish identity would be far far worse worldwide. Israel has made a future for Jews, as Jews, much more possible and much more positive. Israel has helped to further this too by becoming the chief center (with American Jewry but usually much more positively Jewish) for Jewish religious, philosophical and cultural renewal and creativity, changing and greatly enhancing Jewish life in the last two generations. Besides all this, the Jews of Israel are simply very happy and satisfied people. My comments in an earlier JTA exchange apply here: opinion polls reveal that Israelis are amongst the happiest and most satisfied population in the world.  E.g., in a poll in July 2007, conducted by the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics of over 7,000 people, 83% of Israeli Jews said they were either “happy” or “very happy” with their lives, and around 75% of Israeli Arabs said the same.  Amongst the fervently Orthodox, the figure was an astounding 97%, amongst “traditional” Jews 82%, and amongst the secular, 87%.  This contentment and success is reflected in one of the lowest suicide rates in the world, and also in one of the lowest rates for alcoholism and drug addiction.  Male life expectancy according to some current authorities is the second highest in the world, and women’s rates are close.  In any case they are extraordinarily high given the often third world countries many Israelis have come from. Birth rates are well over replacement levels, showing faith in life and the future, and actual purchasing power increases every year.  Israel has weathered the world downturn better than the great majority of other Western nations, growing about 4% per annum during the last two years (in significant part due to Netanyahu’s economic reforms as Minister of Finance under Sharon).  Israel was less than a third world country at its founding, with much of it wasteland and devastated by a desperate war of survival.  The refugees that flooded there often had to live in tents.  It is now a thoroughly modern state filled with the full infrastructure found in Europe and the U.S., and is near to or on a par with them in income levels and prosperity.  Its cafes, restaurants, museums, parks and concert halls are flourishing.  One of the major reasons for this astonishing success is ideological: people believe in the value of their lives and their society, as Jews and Zionists, and they know from direct personal involvement that they have moral right and justice on their side.  They are proud to be Jews and to be Israelis, and believe in Zionism and the Jewish state as such.  Their liberal democracy is a model for the world, extending full freedoms to all its citizens, Jewish and non-Jewish.  In fact, Israel is the only country in the Middle East in which the percentage of Christians in the population has increased and not declined over the past 60 years.  As I mentioned, Israel has justified its existence simply by its being a secure refuge for Jews suffering persecution anywhere in the world. But its positive role in renewal of Jewish culture, both religious and secular, is also a validation of the Zionist enterprise. Religious Jews know this very well: many of the greatest sages, rabbis and charismatic thinkers in the Jewish world are in Israel, and their works inspire religious Jews everywhere. Yeshiva studies engage more Jews now than ever before, and many of these yeshivot are in Israel. Not only religious Jewry has been renewed. Israel's mostly secular universities are ranked amongst the best in the world.  Israel’s 5.5 million Jews produce more Nobel Prize winners than the entire Muslim world with its 1.4 billion people.  Israel's IT centers have revolutionized modern life everywhere; they are literally the equal of Silicon Valley or better, and their computer chips and software probably power or help to power the reader’s own computer.  Their agricultural and medical advances have improved people's lives over the entire planet.  Israel rejoices in its cult of life, and gives in this as in so many other respects a complete and instructive contrast to their enemies with their self-declared “cult of death.” 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 "... even IF his views do not accord with the liberal left ...," I meant. I might have added, even if his views do not accord with my own, either. I am not defending him because I agree with him. Still, Limbaugh seems to be a decent person and certainly his views are still entirely within and even strongly supportive of the liberal democratic tradition and framework. Democracy and true liberalism (classical liberalism) has nothing to fear from him, and in fact, we need people like Rush Limbaugh who can vigorously defend positions on the right. Otherwise our entire society will get unbalanced and unsane, even tend to totalitarianism. The media does no one a favor by being so strongly leftist; it certainly does not help support democracy. Democracy is the most successful, peaceable and long-lasting type of political system precisely because there is freedom to express views that do not accord with the official line on political virtue, and thus to remind people that there are respectable multiple sides to important issues. Rush Limbaugh is doing moishegil a big favor by not agreeing with him. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 I don't know all that much about Rush Limbaugh; the last book by him I read was over two decades ago, so although there was no racism nor bigotry in it, just very straight talk and opinions, basically fairly mainstream conservative in nature (Barry Goldwater was a hero), it occurred to me that maybe he has changed since then, and I could therefore be wrong about him. So, to check him out, I went to his website, at http://www.rushlimbaugh.com. It looks like he is precisely the same sort of person he was two decades ago, a bit to the right of John McCain and Huckaby (sp?) but still within the frame. A very large percentage of the American population votes on the center right of politics; they cannot all be dismissed from democratic discourse. As Lloyd Marcus, a proudly "Black unhyphenated American," wrote in American Thinker this past week, "If Rush Limbaugh is a Racist, Are His 20 Million Listeners Also?" (http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/10/if_rush_limbaugh_is_a_racist_a.html). Limbaugh himself has discussed his supposedly racist comments (never made by him) in the Wall Street Journal, at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704322004574477021697942920.html. I particularly like the comments of Mark Steyn on the controversy; he is always witty and to the point: this is in regard to the claim that Limbaugh is "divisive" (i.e., disagrees with the liberal left): http://www.ocregister.com/articles/mao-million-don-2610375-saying-dream So I stand by what I wrote: Limbaugh is no demagogue, even his views do not accord with the liberal left that so dominates media discourse. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Moishgil, it would appear that political leanings trump even ethical considerations for you. One does not need to agree with Rush Limbaugh to condemn Sharpton's extremist and violent rabble-rousing, and antisemitic language on top of that. Sharpton is clearly the worst sort of demogogue. Limbaugh is not a demagogue at all, even if his views are sharply critical of the liberal left and so he gets you angry (as shown in your own wild and exaggerated rhetoric). But, mind you, it is not yet a crime in the U.S. to be conservative and centrist-right in politics. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 The real point here is the official Palestinian Authority "peace demand" is that the whole of the West Bank be "ethnically cleansed" of Jews. This is an openly racist position, indeed openly antisemitic. The anti-Zionists who support Palestinian terrorism and complain constantly about Israel's mythical "ethnic cleansing" and even "genocide" of Palestinians, and who fiercely deny that they themselves are antisemites, blithely ignore - when they do not try to justify - this antisemitic and racist policy of the Palestinians, just as they can manage to do the same about the openly genocidal charter of Hamas, and the implicitly genocidal position of the P.A. itself with its "non-negotiable" demand for Israel to accept the influx of 5 or 8 million violent and hate-filled Palestinians into Israel itself. Actually, if the Arabs of Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine had really decently and fully protected and secured the rights of non-Muslims in their midst, including protection from judicial and mob harassment and humiliations, open access to and maintenance of their own religious shrines and institutions, equal property rights and freedom of expression, and acceptance of Jewish immigration and settlement as was allowed by the Ottoman Empire after 1492, etc., there would almost certainly not have been a state of Israel at all. The League of Nations and the United Nations would probably not have been persuaded that there was a need for it. However, the discussions at the League of Nations and the United Nations had to take account of the defenseless, victimized and oppressed situation of the Jews amongst the Arabs, and the simple necessity for the growing and peaceably inclined Jewish community to be able to defend itself against both institutionalized humiliations and the constant terrorist attacks. And thus the Arab violence and intransigence, orchestrated by Haj Amin el-Hussaini, Hitler's acolyte, played directly into the hands of those amongst the Jews who saw a desperate need not just for a state for the Jews to provide protection in the region, but for the existence even more importantly of a majority Jewish state that would also be able to provide a refuge for Jews threatened anywhere in the world. Here as in so many other cases authoritarian/totalitarian extremism is its own worst enemy, with Muslim extremism harming Muslims even more than others, and the cause of Islam itself being irretreivably blemished, and thus insuring its own ultimate defeat. We have seen this process already several times in our own lifetimes, with the Thousand Year Reich of the Nazis lasting only 12 years, and the Millenarian Proletarian Paradise of Communism collapsing around the world in just two generations, a bit over 70 years. Jihadi Islam thus too will refute and destroy itself. The "cult of death," which is just another version of the cults of power that have always enraptured pagan idolatries, guarantees itself short life-spans, the worst they are, the shorter they are, while the Jewish cult of life and validation that the weak are precious too, has meant that despite being trampled into the dust by Egypt, Babylonia, Rome and all the other power-infatuated empires of the past, they have left only ruins, while the Jews are still here and are still flourishing and creative. In the Torah, the doom of all totalitarian and idolatrous cults of power and of enforced conformity and submission, is the moral and meaning of the story of the Tower of Babel. For a profound analysis of this point, which was already made by our Sages and highlighted by Moses Mendelssohn in his work Jerusalem back in the eighteenth century, see now the wonderful book put out recently by Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, entitled Future Tense. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 The response of HRW to Bernstein's severe criticism of its tendency to focus on the alleged human rights violations of the sole democracy in the Middle East, ignoring or playing down the blatant atrocities of Israel's enemies and neighboring authoritarian states, is basically to fudge the issue. The HRW statement just blathers on with generalities, most of them either misleading or untrue (e.g., HRW may occasionally issue critical responses to human rights violations by Syria, Saudi Arabia or for that matter Fatahstan or Hamastan, but these are much fewer than those directed against Israel, much briefer, and much more quickly relegated to yesterday's news not just by the media, but also by HRW itself - no major news conferences on specific reports, no appeals to the UN, no repetition of accusations for months afterwards). Furthermore, the HRW actually does not address Bernstein's question of why HRW chooses to so emphasize criticism of the sole open and stable democracy in the Middle East, reversing its mandate established by Bernstein himself. It merely rejects his challenge to focus instead on the many far more abusive closed societies, without giving any justification for it. It is thus a thoroughly insincere response. Perhaps nothing better can be expected of an organization that, like its former Board member Richard Goldstone himself, has the intrenched habit of treating all Palestinian atrocity claims, even those produced in Hamas propaganda studios, with deep respect, while ignoring or discrediting those from Israeli official sources or pro-Israeli independent testimonies and analyses. HRW is a partisan adjunct of propaganda units run by Israel's enemies. Its Muslim and anti-Zionist bias is blatant, whatever disclaimers it issues, and it is now thoroughly discredited, at least as regards issues relating to Muslims and Jews and democratic societies generally. Hopefully it will still do some occasional good work in whatever problematic and authoritarian human rights areas are left in the world that are not Muslim-related. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 I just had a look at the complete article in the Jerusalem Post in which Goldstone tries to paint himself as a martyr to truth, unjustly vilified by other chauvinist Jews, and very briefly glanced at one of the brief responses by bloggers, drawn by the name of one blogger I know, Richard Landes, a serious scholar of contemporary Middle Eastern affairs. His entry is worth reproducing here as a further comment on Goldstone's self-eulogy. "61. dishonesty again and again if Judge Goldstone thinks there's no detailed critique of his report, he sould spend some time at Understanding the Goldstone Report (www.goldstonereport.org); and for those who want a detailed analysis of this arrticle, please see: "Goldstone spins to the uninformed in the JPost" (http://www.theaugeanstables.com/2009/10/19/goldstone-spins-to-the-uninformed-in-the-jpost/). Richard Landes - Israel (10/19/2009 14:48)" 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 As the material I cited in my previous post shows, the claims of some of the bloggers just before that Israel failed to refute various Hamas allegations and so is responsible for the failings of the Goldstone Report, are false, and based either on the ignorance of those bloggers, or, in the case of Goldstone himself, "disingenuousness." Goldstone simply failed to exercise the impartial and unbiased care required in all judicial examinations of evidence. There were resources available to him, and methods of inquiry, which he refused to make use of; he also presented dubious and incomplete testimonials by partisan sources, openly affiliated with Hamas in some chief cases, as being completely reliable and therefore needing no "other side." He knew that his Gazan informants would remain in Gaza following his investigation, and that if they testified in defense of the IDF their life expectancy would be very short. He also knew that Israel, on the other hand, is an open democracy with plenty of self-criticism, including professional standards and self-criticism within the IDF itself as well as criticism if it seemed warranted from the general media and public outside it. But according to him nothing from Israel in defense of the IDF or in refutation of Hamas was credible, whether governmental or not, and so he just dismissed it all. On his entirely inadequate methodology and open bias, see the "Elder of Ziyon" blog already mentioned. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Despite what Judge Goldstone says, in fact there were all sorts of materials and evidence available to him, some of it directly presented to him, which gave a counter-argument to the Palestinians and often Hamas-sourced materials he chiefly used. He ignored all of that evidence, or if possible tried to use it to confirm Palestinian claims instead. These materials included the Israeli government's own report on its own investigations on most of the incidents discussed in Goldstone's report; this is freely available on the internet at http://www.mfa.gov.il/GazaFacts/Goldstone/israel-gaza-faq-goldstone-mission-7.htm Also note the IDF report on alleged abuses published on April 22, at http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Terrorism-+Obstacle+to+Peace/Hamas+war+against+Israel/IDF_Conclusion_of_investigations_Operation_Cast_Lead_Part1_22-Apr-2009.htm.htm Also see the contributions of Lt. Col. (res.) Jonathan Halevi, "Blocking the Truth of the Gaza War," still available at http://jcpa.org Of independent accounts presented to him refuting Hamas claims, possibly the best and most detailed were by the blogger called "Elder of Ziyon." See http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/search/label/Goldstone Report 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 The solution to Gaza's predicament is peace with Israel: recognition of its legitimacy as a Jewish state, disarming of terrorist groups (no more rocket attacks, no more atrocities aimed at civilians, etc.), ending hate incitement so that the peace is grounded in decent acceptance of Israelis and Jews. Then the borders would be open and there would be unimpeded traffic of goods and persons. So, "Michael Levin," you may hate to hear it, but the solution is obvious. It is also obvious that Hamas and too many Gazans are not willing to pay the price for peace, and that they actually choose and prefer their cult of death, as they boastingly call it, with its attendant violent, poverty and hatred, over a cult of life. It is telling that for example in January, 2008, Hamas closed down supply of fuel and flour from their store-houses despite several months of supplies stored there, and despite regular Israeli deliveries, actually shut off electricity and closed bakeries, creating an artificial crisis and widespread suffering in Gaza which they then -- blamed on Israel. They claimed that Israel was closing borders even to the sick, despite Israel providing emergency clinics on the borders which Hamas itself prevented Gazans from using. Even the Saudis blamed them for this "crisis" and faulted their indifference to their own people's suffering, even their manipulation of it for propaganda points. It is similar to their use of their own children as human shields and even as suicide bombers. The P.A. similarly accused Hamas of repeating these self-caused blackouts of electrical and fuel supply then and again in November of 2008. In April of 2009, Hamas yet again totally shut down the border crossings, even with Egypt, and then again claimed that an intolerable crisis had been created by Israel. Anyone remember the Hamas sniper fire that killed utility workers just to the north of Gaza who were working to keep the electric supply to Gaza? Or the shooting at truckdrivers who were transporting food supplies and medicine to Gaza from Israel? Or how about the Gazan systematic wrecking of all the agricultural machinery and fittings the Israelis left behind as a gift to Gaza's future well-being, which could have usefully employed thousands and helped make Gaza self-sufficient in food, when the Israelis evacuated Gaza back in 2005? Israel in any case is not obliged by international law to supply those who are dedicated to its destruction, and who constitute a fanatical enemy organization. Another point: why isn't Michael Levin, if that is his real name, concerned about the Egyptian border crossings? Why only blame Israel for supplying only basic necessities, when Israel is treated as an enemy of Gaza, and Egypt is supportive of Gaza, but also recognizes the threat of Hamas to its own security? Why the double standards, "Michael"? 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Will Edwards, your comment on the term "antisemitism" is both right and wrong; of course, Arabs are also "Semites," but in actual fact the term first arose in Germany in the 19th century solely in application to Jews, and its first full application was by Wilhelm Marr, a radical antisemite, in his book Der Weg zum Siege des Germanentums über das Judentum (1879). Often the term is said to have originated with him, but this is not quite true. In any case it solely referred to Jews. In the same year as his book, Marr founded the Antisemiten-Liga, the League of Antisemites, the first European political party centered on antisemitism as such. The antisemites glossed their hatred as based on racial grounds, but actually they also included converts to Judaism in the demonization, as did Hitler and the Nazis: i.e., even if a "Half-Jew" had two converts to Judaism as grandparents, he was guilty of being a "Half-Jew," and the specific hatred of Judaism was again shown in the fact that although "Half-Jews" who renounced Jews and Judaism and affirmed their Nazi allegiance might be allowed to be at least possible Aryans and Germans-on-sufferance, subject to special surveillance, any "Half-Jew" who still affirmed Judaism was treated as a full-Jew and deported or worse. So the real hatred was of Judaism and Jewishness as such. Jewish and Nazi values were absolute opposites. By the way, it is also interesting to note that even Wilhelm Marr came late in life to renounce his racist views of Jews as being ungrounded and unfairly demonizing. This hatred did not apply to Arabs. Hitler himself made this clear in his warm welcome to Haj Amin el-Hussaini in Berlin in WWII, and the Nazis also stressed this explicitly in their intensive propagandizing in Arab countries in the 30s and 40s. Antisemitism meant solely Jew-hatred. The "scientific" basis of antisemitism was only a veneer of justification, and was mere pseudo-science. Even Hitler, already in Mein Kampf, accepted that the Jews are not a single race, but mixed due to the conversion to Judaism of people from many different races and lands over thousands of years - but he made just this a new reproach against them, claiming that they represented the "mongrelization" of races, and even their intermarriage with Aryans was part of a plot to water down the pure Aryan race and "mongrelize" that too. The reason I write the term as "antisemitism" is because it is really not about "Semites" at all, in fact as we certainly see today, and also in the past, rabid antisemites can be frank admirers of Arab authoritarianism or totalitarianism, militarism, violence and antisemitism, and can and do seek common cause with them in their shared hatred for Jews and pluralism, liberal democratic countries, institutions and values. Note Mr Evans's demonization of "capitalism" in his post of 10/01 at 5 pm: this of course is the code term for liberal democracy and illustrates my points. In the Arab world there has never been any doubt about the religious basis of their hatred, since it is stressed as such in the Qur'an and later mainstream Muslim writings. That is why the situation for the Jews of Ottoman Syria-Palestine was so miserable even in the last decades before Zionist immigration there began. It did not have its roots in that immigration, in fact the increased Jewish presence brought advantageous employment, economic benefits and for some even prosperity to a generally impoverished Arab population, including not only local villagers but also tens of thousands of Arabs from elsewhere who moved to "Palestine" in the decades leading up to the Second World War. The hatred of some radical Arabs did not have its source in any theft of land or displacement, since there was no conceivable basis for such views from 1890 to 1948, but reflected old-style Muslim antisemitism tinctured with the first stirrings of pan-Arab nationalism (this too applying to Arabs racist-nationalist ideas from Europe which always stressed antisemitic themes); they were also inspired by local feuds between different tribes and patrons, some of whom favored Jews and others, the more vicious, which did not. There were many Arabs who considered the Jewish influx a practically unalloyed benefit, raising up the whole region (e.g., both King Faisal of Syria before the League of Nations, and later King Abdullah of Jordan before the same body, argued in this vein). But extremist groups gathered around and under Haj Amin el-Hussaini, who from 1920 on organized a reign of terror in the Arab community in which many more tolerant leaders were assassinated, including King Abdullah himself. Bad coins drive out good, a saying as true in the political world as in economics. This however is just the reason the West must respond forcibly and with unity to the jihadis. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Haj Amin el-Hussaini was Arafat's uncle, according to all historians and Arafat's own biographies. Furthermore, he gave the young Arafat personal tutoring in antisemitism and political doctrines in Egypt after WWII. Those interested can consult the Wikipedia article for starters. There is plenty of other material available on this. On the existence of Muslim and Arab antisemitism prior to modern times, and the resultant extremely precarious position of Jews in Muslim lands (and Christians, Zoroastrians, Hindus, etc.), I would recommend to JTA Jewish readers (the other posters are beyond the reach of decency) two authoritative and massively documented books edited by Andrew G. Bostom: The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism (2008), and The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims (2005). These are very extensive anthologies of Quranic sources and other mainstream Muslim authorities down through the ages dealing with the topic of each book, to which are added hundreds of pages of scholarly essays by leading authorities on every aspect of the history of the specific subject. Also excellent is the much more succinct Mohammed, Allah, and the Jews: The Foundational Doctrine; part of The Islamic Triology series, Vol. 5 (Center for the Study of Political Islam, CSPI, 2006), which particularly examines the Islamic religious sources. All of these can be purchased at Amazon.com. Other excellent accounts are by Norman Stillman, ed., The Jews of Arab Lands, and Bat Ye'or, The Dhimmi, which covers the situation of other non-Muslim minorities under Muslim rule. The piteous plight of Jews in the Land of Israel in the 11th and 12th centuries was already commented on by Maimonides, who indeed had tried to settle in the Land of Israel (escaping Muslim persecution in Spain) but found it impossible; the great Yehudah Halevi too (also a refugee from Spain) tried a generation later, but was (at least according to traditional accounts) purposely trampled down by a Muslim on a horse at the city gates of Jerusalem and was killed. The great Rabbi Nahmanides found the Jewish community desperately impoverished and decimated by extortionate taxation when he settled there in the 13th century, to such a degree that starvation was not unusual, and most of the community lived on charitable contributions sent by Diaspora Jewish communities, a situation very similar if not identical to that described in Jewish and non-Jewish accounts of Jews in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Land of Israel in the Ottoman Period, many centuries later. Despite periods of relative prosperity and security, physical attacks on Jewish communities and on individual Jews were not uncommon, and the Muslim courts seldom defended Jews involved in such conflicts, rather they often used such occasions to add to Jewish fines and taxes. Due to the frequent periods of general lawlessness, and the perceived inoffensiveness of Jews, Bedouin raids on Jewish communities such as Safed and Tiberias were frequent throughout the Middle Ages and had the result that Jews were often forced to abandon their cities for a time and flee elsewhere; many were murdered. For these reasons the Galilee and Tiberias were practically uninhabited during the 17th century. The desolation of the Holy Land described by all travellers there in the 19th century was not due to natural factors, in short, but was due above all to the constant oppression and cruel and insecure situation in the land, which particularly affected Jews who were favored victims, along with other non-Muslim minorities. Nevertheless, Jews kept coming to settle there over the centuries, even if their numbers were suppressed, and their mortality rates elevated, by the constant persecution and discrimination. Two excellent summary overviews are James Parkes, Whose Land?: A History of the Peoples of Palestine (1970) and Izhak Ben-Zvi, who gives a fair account of both darkness and light, in his "Under Ottoman Rule," in The Jews in Their Land, ed. David Ben-Gurion (1974). 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Excellent news. Israel is better able to defend itself from Iranian threats - and it is an added bonus that TD and Iran are both sad and displeased, for the same reasons of course. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Ari H. raises the "demography" scare tactic, in the absence of any real suggestion for how to overcome the many impossibilities of a peace-treaty with an opponent who refuses to drop maximalist Israel-destroying demands, which is divided into two extremist wings so that there is no peace leader of the Palestinians who can deliver peace and security for Israel, and who supposedly require a concensus amongst all 21 or 22 Arab nations and 57 Muslim nations. "Negotiations" as a magic spell just doesn't work with these types. Sorry, Ari H. I do think, however, that you can have a very pleasant and ageeable negotiation with "Dror," who thinks as you do, "Esther Haman," the various so-called "Davids" and "ApostasyUSA." You are welcome to it. As regards the alleged demographic threat, it is a hoax. In this, as in so many other things, the Palestinians have simply lied. Unfortunately, because the leftists in Israel tend to take to take their cue from the Palestinians with touching naivety, these false conclusions persuaded Olmert and through him Sharon, and led to some disastrously ill-conceived policies. In recent years a more in-depth examination of the demography question has refuted Palestinian claims entirely. See for example Bennett Zimmerman and Michael Wise, "Defusing the Demographic Time Bomb," inFocus, Spring 2008, available at: http://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/article/111 And Paul Morland, "Defusing the Demographic Scare," Haaretz, Aug. 5, 2009, at: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/objects/pages/PrintArticleEn.jhtml?itemNo=1084014 Perhaps the most detailed and biting of all is Yakov Faitelson, "The Politics of Palestinian Demography," Middle East Quarterly, Spring 2009, at: http://www.meforum.or/2124/the-politics-of-palestinian-demography 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Ari H raises the "demography" scare-tactic, in the absence of any real suggestion for how to overcome the many impossibilities of a peace-treaty in the near future with Fatah/Hamas/Iran-Hezbollah/all 57 Muslim nations and 21 or 22 Arab states, etc. "Negotiations" as a magic spell just doesn't work with these types. Sorry, Ari H. I do think however that you can have a very pleasant and agreeable negotiation with "Dror," "Esther Haman," the various "Davids" and "ApostasyUSA." You are welcome to it. As regards the alleged demographic threat, it is a hoax. In this, as in so many other topics, the Palestinians have knowingly lied, massaged the figures (including double-counting), and twisted things, and unfortunately because so many leftists in Israel take their cue from the Palestinians, this has been echoed in various fora in Israel and actually persuaded Olmert and through him Sharon that there really was a demographic threat. In the last few years, the actual figures have been closely examined, and it has been found that there is no demographic threat at all. On this, see for example the following items (Added after various attempts to post this: I have found when I entered this post that it was knocked back repeatedly as possible spam which needs review by the Moderator. In my experience, the Moderator never reviews such posts, so they stay unposted. However, the problem seems to be in the web addresses of the items given, so if I break up these addresses I might get it posted anyway. This is what I now do.) Bennett Zimmerman and Michael Wise, "Defusing the Demographic Time Bomb," inFocus, Spring 2008, available at: http://www.jewishpolicycenter.org. Look for, and add to the just-given address, /article/111 Paul Morland, "Defusing the Demographic Scare," published in Haaretz on Aug. 5 of this year, available at: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen. Look for and add to the address, /objects/pages/PrintArticleEn.jhtml?itemNo=1084014 and, perhaps most detailed and most biting of all, Yakov Faitelson, "The Politics of Palestinian Demography," Middle East Quarterly for Spring of 2009, available at: http://www.meforum.org Look for and add to the address /2124/the-politics-of-palestinian-demography 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Ari H raises the "demography" scare-tactic, in the absence of any real suggestion for how to overcome the many impossibilities of a peace-treaty in the near future with Fatah/Hamas/Iran-Hezbollah/all 57 Muslim nations and 21 or 22 Arab states, etc. "Negotiations" as a magic spell just doesn't work with these types. Sorry, Ari H. I do think however that you can have a very pleasant and agreeable negotiation with "Dror," "Esther Haman," the various "Davids" and "ApostasyUSA." You are welcome to it. As regards the alleged demographic threat, it is a hoax. In this, as in so many other topics, the Palestinians have knowingly lied, massaged the figures (including double-counting), and twisted things, and unfortunately because so many leftists in Israel take their cue from the Palestinians, this has been echoed in various fora in Israel and actually persuaded Olmert and through him Sharon that there really was a demographic threat. In the last few years, the actual figures have been closely examined, and it has been found that there is no demographic threat at all. On this, see for example the following items: Bennett Zimmerman and Michael Wise, "Defusing the Demographic Time Bomb," inFocus, Spring 2008, available at: http://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/article/111 Paul Morland, "Defusing the Demographic Scare," published in Haaretz on Aug. 5 of this year, available at: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/objects/pages/PrintArticleEn.jhtml?itemNo=1084014 and, perhaps most detailed and most biting of all, Yakov Faitelson, "The Politics of Palestinian Demography," Middle East Quarterly for Spring of 2009, available at: http://www.meforum.org/2124/the-politics-of-palestinian-demography 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 The poll indicates that Obama is in trouble even with American Jewish voters. So he should be. Cheryl, those posters you so rightly excoriate are obvious extremists and Amalekites. Some with phony Jewish blog names are clearly not Jewish at all, like "Dror." I liked the name chosen by one antisemite at the start of this thread, "Esther Haman" - get it? Haman indeed. There is really nothing needed to answer to in their wild claims. I would like however to repeat here in response to Mr. Choudury a post I gave before, since it clarifies what Israel is up against, makes clear what these posters are rooting for, needs reiteration and applies also to Iran. The Palestinians, and the Arab world generally in regard to Israel, are merely the current inheritors of Nazi antisemitic ideology. This can be shown in terms of the Nazi period, and today. 1.  HISTORICAL LINKS  TO NAZI RACISM: the leader of Palestinian anti-Zionist terrorist activities and militancy before Yasser Arafat, Arafat’s own uncle and his personal mentor Haj Amin el-Hussaini, actually spent World War II in Berlin as Hitler’s protogè.  During the 1930s, with German financing, he had led a civil war against the Jews and the British in British Mandate Palestine.  Fleeing to Iraq, he failed a Nazi-supported coup attempt, but personally led a pogrom slaughtering over 143 Jews in Iraq in 1941 before gaining sanctuary in Nazi Germany.  He toured the concentration camps with Heinrich Himmler, personally ensured the annihilation there of more European Jews during the war and propagandized on Middle Eastern radio for Hitler.  In 1941 he issued a fatwa declaring obligatory Muslim fighting with Nazis against Britain and the Allies, and created several Muslim Waffen SS divisions in the Nazi army.  Hitler promised him rule of a Greater Syria tributary state, and free hand in wiping out any Jews remaining after the war.  The Mufti taught his ‘Arab national socialism’ to his nephew Arafat in Egypt in the 1950s; it still shapes the P.L.O. (The Nazi-influenced Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood created Hamas.).  Arafat had particularly close ties to Syria and Iraq, whose “secular national socialist” Ba’athist ideology also applied Nazi ideas to pan-Arab nationalism.  On all this, see Matthias Kuentzel, Jihad and Jew-Hatred (2007), backed up by other recent German-language scholarship (cf. http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/Printable.aspx?GUID=E985B271-A76A-4A9D-9AC9-ED5D84BDA37F on studies by K-M Mallmann and M. Cüppers, and http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/17089176.html on Klaus Gensicke's research on the Mufti's and other Arab Nazi ties).   Of course, the eager uptake of Nazi antisemitism by Muslim societies points to a more deep-rooted antisemitism in Islam itself. On this, see the encyclopedic anthology of Muslim sources, and scholarly essays on the history of Muslim-Jewish relations, in Andrew Bostom, ed., The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism (2008).   2.  PRESENT NAZI RHETORIC AND LIES: Even today the P.A. routinely promotes racist teachings using texts such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion from Nazi Germany.  Children’s school texts & television programs repeat antisemitic libels, sermons in the mosques incite hate of an extreme kind, and political and terrorist leaders openly justify their own policies on the same grounds.  Mahmoud Abbas, the present “moderate” P.A. leader, wrote his Ph.D. thesis supporting Holocaust denial.  Hamas calls for genocide against all Jews even in its charter and actually cites Nazi texts for justification.  On this, see the actual Hamas Charter at  http://www.acpr.org.il/resources/hamascharter.html  and an analysis by Andrew Bostom and David Littman at http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2009/01/01/heeding-david-littman-confronting-hamas’-genocidal-jew-hatred-part-1/#comments Myths of Jewish ritual cannibalism and the Protocols are still widely disseminated and believed.  A demonizing inflation of the “threat” from Jews echoes Nazi themes about their own peaceable Jewish population, merely 1% of Germans; in the same way the tiny Jewish state, numbering merely 5.6 million Jews and 1.4 million non-Jews, is said today to be a “Goliath” aiming to take over the 350 million Arabs and 21 Arab states of the entire Middle East. Despite all of its wars being defensive in nature, each has been recast as aggressive malicious attempts to occupy all neighboring countries and commit genocide and ethnic cleansing against Arabs (these fantasies project the constant actual Arab/Muslim calls to wipe out Israel and annihilate all its Jews).  In sharp contrast to all this, Israel outlaws race-hate literature, or incitement, whether it be against Arabs or others, and firmly implements this policy in its media and schools. Unsurprisingly, all Jewish political parties in Israel reject Nazism root and branch.  2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Specifically to the plight of the Jews displaced from Gaza, I really think that this is a major scandal. It is the consequence of the secularist bias of the reigning circles in Israel. The often quite religious Jews who went to build up Gaza (even be it noted employing local Gazans and benefiting the Gaza economy) at considerable sacrifice and with great effort, true Zionists, were basically just abandoned after they were forced out of Gaza. They have been shabbily treated. At the very least, Israel owed them full recompense, in all decency. But the attitude of the leftist Haaretz writers, who merely refer to them with scorn and contempt, has been all too typical of others in power too. Non-religious Israelis should be ashamed of their behavior in this matter. This is particularly true of the leaders of the Labor Party and Kadima, specifically and above all Barak and Olmert. The entire withdrawal was mismanaged, just as the withdrawal from Lebanon by Barak was similarly mismanaged, and only ended up harming the most devoted sectors within Israel to the state, and the best friends of Israel in Lebanon, meanwhile empowering the most extreme of her enemies. Netanyahu has been right all along about this, as he was about the Oslo Accords themselves, another leftist fiasco if ever there was one. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 A really superb series of posts, Cheryl. Thank you for them: they outshine the JTA article that evoked them and are more informative. JTA should take you on as a reporter and have you write up some of their news items. A further point on the claim of the Palestinians to be the descendants of the Philistines/Canaanites: as the Torah relates to us over many historical books, starting with the time of Joshua and continuing right through to the Babylonian Exile, and as is corroborated by the Prophets, the B'nai Yisrael after a few battles settled amongst and gradually intermarried with the Canaanites, became influenced by their cults and their later generations needed constantly to be brought back to the Sinai Covenant by their sages, scribes and prophets. It was a tough struggle by Torah-observant Jews and by the prophets, but in the end the strongest influence on the resultant intermarried generations was the Torah heritage, and when in 586 BCE practically all the inhabitants of Judea were exiled to Egypt and Babylon, they were exiled as "Jews," not as "Canaanites." So the whole population was Judaized; indeed, as the Book of Ruth reveals to us, the attraction of Torah Judaism was so strong it even drew after it some from amongst neighboring peoples. There were no self-styled "Canaanites" left in the land centuries after King David, certainly not by the time of the Babylonian Exile. Furthermore, if some amongst the exiled Jews still tended to polytheism after their expulsion, they could and did easily just drop away from Jewish observance in their new lands, following the Egyptian polytheistic gods in Egypt or the Babylonian gods in Babylonia, and thus in a few generations utterly disappearing into the majority populations there as did all the other displaced and exiled peoples of antiquity. E.g., the Moabites went into exile: where are they now? The only Jews who returned from captivity under Ezra and Nehemiah to the land of Israel were believing Jews, sifted as in a sieve. They repopulated the land, and Judaism was followed by all who lived there. Meanwhile, the only "Jews" who retained a Jewish heritage in foreign lands were believing Jews too, held together, separated from other cultures and sustained as a distinctive people and community above all by their Torah. This everywhere recognized distinctive communal Jewish social and cultural perseverance and identity in the Diaspora, centering on the Torah Covenant and Mitzvot, is for example famously acknowledged as such by Haman in the Book of Esther, 3:8. Those who had abandoned the Torah commandments ended up ceasing to be Jews at all, and disappeared from history in Egypt and Babylonia. All this means that the only remaining descendants of the "Canaanites" today are the Jews themselves. They are the natives of the land of Israel, more aboriginal than any other people there. Thus the Palestinian case is thoroughly without foundation, being refuted by the Bible itself. However, as their denial that there are any Jewish holy sites at all in Jerusalem shows us, they are not really interested in history at all, only in anti-Jewish mythology. So their claim has only been a propaganda ploy all along. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 An instructive comparison might be to the Turkish treatment of the Kurdish terrorist movements, both inside Turkey, and in Iraq. Perhaps if Israel took that as a model Turkey would applaud? Then, of course, the number of Gazans killed would be at least in the tens of thousands, but one can't have everything. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 TD obviously does not mind terrorists killing Jews. It is only Jews fighting back and killing their would-be murderers that he objects to. All of his posts are of this nature, usually expressed in the most bestial fashion, too. He really should not be on this website. Where is the Moderator? 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 None of the antisemites in this blog should be posting here, including, of course, the non-Jew TD posing as a halbjude. Only the Nazis had such racist categories, TD, and of course you. There is nothing like this in real Judaism. You do not belong here, and obviously hate Jews and Israel, indeed all Jewish self-affirmation. All your posts are at gutter level, and do not advance any discussion. Ari H, Ehud Barak is not "beyond the pale." This astonishing statement by you indicates your prejudiced endorsement of the Goldstone Report and its double standards, its mockery of judicial process in the treatment of witnesses, and so much else that has already been shown about it by critics. I note however that such an endorsement is characteristic of your treatment of all reports on Israel, disqualifying any that are positive about Israel or that come from Israeli mainstream organizations. You credulously accept all those that are critical, even such anonymous slanders as in the "Breaking the Silence" accusations. So your comments lack much credibility. Actually, Ari H, accusing Israel of war-crimes effectively means that no Western democracy can wage war against its terrorist enemies without being taken to court for "war crimes." Israel's record is far better than that of Nato in Serbia, the Coalition in Iraq or Afghanistan, or the UN itself in Rwanda, Bosnia, Lebanon, and elsewhere. So all those parties would be "outside the law" if challenged, much faster than Israel. And the Allied war against Nazi Germany could never have been fought at all. Even if the specific cases were exactly as described in the Goldstone Report, they only involve a few instances of war crimes; contrary to the Report itself, they do not establish that Israel itself sought civilian deaths. That is a non-sequitur and unproven assumption. It just shows the bias of the Report authors. But the other instances of Western military response to terrorist groups have far more bloody and massive reprisals that they could be indicted for in unjust courts. The UN is trying to prevent all defense by Western democracies against their enemies, while encouraging those enemies to fight them. The Israel issue is here as in so much else just the "canary-in-the-gold-mine" in a much larger struggle for decency in world affairs. Kofi Annan, for example, could and should have been indicted at his own International Court of Justice for complicity in the genocides of both Rwanda and Bosnia, his responsibility for the deaths of many thousands. In both conflicts, he, as the person directing the UN forces in those places, knowingly and despite the already evidenced genocidal intentions of the Hutu/Serbs, ordered his UN troops to withdraw from advancing Hutu/Serbian forces , abandoning to them tens of thousands of Tutsis/Bosnians who had taken refuge under UN protection, who were duly massacred by their genocidal enemies. Annan's claims that he could not help this because of inadequate funding ignores that merely firing one or two bureaucrats at UN headquarters would provide adequate funding just by itself, or that loans could be taken out, or troops funded elsewhere could have been moved to the regions involved, or that funds from other UN operations could have been appropriated under emergency regulations, or whatever. Kofi Annan should be in jail. But, you say, he was, or went on to be, UN General Secretary! Well, what do you know? What does this say about the UN that wants to indict Israel? Is it beyond the pale, Ari H? Still, there is an interesting point to be made in all this. It is improbable actually that the Palestinians and their antisemitic sympathizers really want Ehud Barak or anyone else accused in the Goldstone Report to come to trial in a neutral, competent and fair court, since the manifestly flimsy and methodologically inadequate and biased nature of that Report would then be revealed for all to see, and there would be a lot of smelly "mud" on the face not only of Goldstone, but also of the UN Human Rights Council generally, the Palestinians, and all of the antisemites who have so eagerly pushed the war crimes claim. The only real question is whether a British court would be neutral and fair in the matter, since anti-Zionism has been pushed so hard by the British media that a fair trial may well be impossible in that country. It is notable that even the comments by the British judge who refused to prosecute suggest this bias. Still, the flimsiness of the accusations when fully exposed in his courtroom might be too obvious even for him to deny. I therefore think that Israel might well allow one of the accused persons in the Goldstone Report go on trial in England, although not a leader whose absence would harm Israel's on-going affairs, if he or she is willing, just to prove that the Goldstone Report reflects a kangeroo-court style of justice. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Interesting that the State Department spokesman said the Quartet proposal was the "ideal" approach. What does this tell us of State Dept ideals and views of Israel, given the Israeli rejection of the whole thing and the explicit statement that nothing by way of reciprocity is required of the Palestinians? It is in fact as David Schimel says a betrayal by Obama's administration (and Hilary Clinton as head of the State Dept, of whom better might have been expected) of Israel, and a complete reversal of the attitudes of the Bush administration and indeed of all previous American administrations. Evidently, the State Department and apparently Obama and Clinton completely agree with the European stance on Israel, which gives lip service to Israel's right to defend itself, but which does not do anything much beyond that to support Israel in the U.N. or elsewhere, and prefers to support Israel's enemies instead. It is tempting just to say that Israel should endorse the Quartet's rejection of "reciprocity" by giving up any obligation on its part to do anything in support of the Quartet proposal or to enable Palestinian independence, in fact it should state it is unwilling to continue peace negotiations at all unless the Palestinians commit themselves to them without the threat of unilateral actions. Furthermore, Israel should make clear that it will take strong measures if the Palestinians go ahead with any unilateral declarations of statehood, not only including formal discontinuation of peace negotiations but also direct action against the Palestinians (a tight cordon around the West Bank to monitor arms shipments, overflights, prevention of any Palestinian politicians from going abroad, etc.). A unilateral Palestinian declaration of a state, created without retreat from the maximalist demands of the Fatah and Hamas, and without any peace being concluded with Israel, might well be declared by Israel to be equivalent to an act of war, and so could be met by Israel moving back to various selected uninhabited parts of the West Bank from which Israel withdrew in fulfilment of the Oslo Accords, thus creating the very bantustanization of the West Bank and the creation of permanent check-points that the Palestinians falsely claim was called for in the Camp David peace offer of 2000. It should be made clear to the Quartet that Israel considers even a renewed Intifada better than the creation of a country overlooking all Israel's cities that is dedicated from birth to the destruction of Israel and that will be able to use a fully armed military to accomplish that. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Interestingly, the actual poll, which has been published on the internet (see www.theisraelproject.org), shows precisely the division of Republicans and Democrats, men and women, various age groupings, income levels, religious affiliations, and so on, as the general American population, which is really the only valid measure professional pollsters accept for such polls. The poll therefore reflects reality as much as any poll can, granting that all polls are merely approximations, sometimes however very close approximations as in this case. The poll was a scientific one, and is actually a very impressive achievement. A lot can be learned from it about a wide variety of subjects relating both to the U.S. and to attitudes to Middle Eastern affairs. Ari H has a consistent and unbroken record in JTA blogs going back a long time of casting doubt on any findings whatsoever that are positive to Israel or that are done by pro-Israel organizations, whether in Israel or in the U.S. This taints his views of this specific case, as of all others he comments on. Effectively, if Ari H had his way, no pro-Israel organization at all whether in Israel or in the U.S. could conduct research, issue findings, make polls, or the like, no matter how high the quality - they should all just be silenced. Instead, it seems he thinks (judging from past responses from him) only anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian groups should be allowed to express themselves, for only they have any credence. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Additionally, they were not presented as matters that henceforth set a base-line for any future negotiations. Quite the contrary, the Palestinians missed the boat and it left without them. Henceforth, inevitably given their record of subsequent violence and terrorism, including both the Second Intifada and the rockets from Gaza, and stalling, continued growth of Jewish towns and of Jerusalem itself has further forever reduced the area Palestinians can legitimately claim as their own. If they stall further and make maximalist demands still, as they do, this growth will continue further. So if they REALLY want a state with maximum territory, maybe even at 80%, they should take what they can get now. But you know what? They won't. There is and should be a penalty for terrorism and its racist and genocidal behaviors and ideas. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Dennis Ross makes clear in his book, mentioned above, that Camp David talks continued on for many weeks after the failure of Camp David itself, and eventually the Israelis under Barak had accepted fully 97% of the West Bank, and 100% of Gaza, would be offered to the Palestinians for a real peace deal (p 755). The Palestinians rejected this. The maps provided by Gush Shalom, which Evans gives as a link in his post, do not reflect this reality. They distort the truth. However, I do note that whereas Evans claimed in our earlier discussion, using fantastical Palestinian maps and claims, that the Camp David talks only allowed for broken-up, non-contiguous "bantustan" type West Bank Palestinian territory, now he uses the Gush Shalom maps which admit that the offer was of a fully contiguous West Bank territory, even if according to Gush Shalom the offer was only of 80% or so. Ross shows explicitly that this is not the case. It was 92% or more (due to fuzziness in negotiations) at the end of Camp David, and 97% at the end of subsequent discussions. This may be taken as the final word on the subject. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 By the way, Evans again presents false information while pretending it has not been refuted in earlier discussions on this very website, this time regarding the offer Israel (Ehud Barak) made at Camp David in 2000. I very much recommend as gripping reading the extraordinarily detailed account of Camp David by the chief American advisor and facilitator of the talks, Dennis Ross, in his book covering 12 years of US-Arab-Israeli and other US-Middle Eastern affairs, as US envoy to the Middle East under two presidents, The Missing Peace (2004). President Clinton confirms Ross's account of Camp David in his own biography and in subsequent interviews, as has Ehud Barak himself. Even William B. Quandt, a Middle East expert and political advisor certainlynot known for his pro-Israeli views, stated that this work must be taken very seriously as a truthful and "weighty" account, and Kissinger said it is "a candid, thoughtful and detailed picture of the process [of US/Israeli/Palestinian talks and US involvement in the Arab world]." Madeleine Albright, George Schultz, Warren Christopher and others join in its praise. Yet the picture it gives of Yasser Arafat and the Palestinians generally is a truly devastating indictment of them. It is the case that Israel made an extraordinarily generous offer that took the Palestinians by surprise, to which they had no answer or counter-offer, but which they simply rejected out of hand in preference to war. Arafat started the Second Intifada soon afterward to wipe from the world's memory his refusal of peace on any realistic terms. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Salam al-Mariyati repeats the incorrect assertion that Israel "occupies" Palestinian land. This is stated repeatedly and at every opportunity by the Palestinians, with such effect on its credulous and anti-Zionist hearers that it has now been accepted as truth by almost all the media and in UN publications, resolutions, etc. It nevertheless is false. Like the anti-Zionists, then, I too will just repeat myself from earlier posts by re-entering this refutation. I still haven't had any rebuttals of it, by the way. The West Bank and Gaza are often characterized as “Occupied Land,” illegally held by Israel.   This is false for five reasons:   A.  Israel won that land in a defensive war of survival launched by its enemies in 1967, so it has that land by legal right, in international law.  It may decide to return SOME of it as part of a final peace treaty, which is all that U.N. Resolution 242 actually calls for, but at present the most that can be claimed is that the land is “Disputed,” not “Occupied.”   B. How can a state be “occupied” by another state when the “occupied” state has never existed? There never was an independent Arab state of “Palestine,” or having any other name, occupying just the Biblical Israel or with a capital in Jerusalem or elsewhere in Biblical Israel, so its land and borders never existed and cannot be “occupied.”  During the past 1,400 years of Muslim domination of the Middle East, there was never a Muslim state of Palestine nor were there even calls for such a state by its Arab inhabitants, nor were these territories called “occupied Palestine” when they were held by Jordan and Egypt before 1967. Its borders therefore can only first be determined by final peace negotiations which have not yet occurred.   C. After the League of Nations and U.N. British Mandate ended over Palestine in 1948, Arab states and military groups refused to accept the U.N. resolution to devolve the territories to a Jewish and a new Palestinian Arab state, and invaded to take over the entire area.  Jordan and Egypt appropriated the portions of the territory that Israel did not hold; this appropriation was illegal. They did not set up a “Palestine” on those lands, but instead incarcerated the Palestinians in refuge camps and gave them neither rights nor even financial support.  They lost these territories in the 1967 war to Israel, the only legally constituted state of the region.  If the land is “occupied” at all, then, it is as “occupied Jordan” or “occupied Egypt.” Nevertheless neither Egypt nor Jordan continue to demand return of these territories to themselves, so they are not “occupied” Jordan or Egypt.  They therefore belong only to Israel. Israel does not want to incorporate them fully into Israel, and, in full accordance with U.N. Resolution 242, with allowance for negotiated adjustments to final borders to take account of Israel’s entirely legitimate and justified security concerns, has held the land in trust until a proper peace treaty is agreed to with a legitimate Arab partner willing to take them over. D. Under the Oslo Accords, Israel has sought to cooperate in creating such a legitimate peace partner in bestowing full internal administration of the Palestinian Authority population and cities to the P.A.; Israel does not occupy those areas. It has fully withdrawn from Gaza, and only enters the P.A. and mans check-points to apprehend criminal terrorists that the P.A. refuses to arrest or punish.  As the P.A. takes over that function, as it actually has in the last year or so (chiefly because its Fatah leaders now really want to suppress Hamas and associated jihadi militants, simply to stay in power), those check-points can and are being withdrawn.  In simple fact, therefore, Israel occupies neither the West Bank nor Gaza today.  Those areas are entirely what the Palestinians have made of them.  “Occupation” has only been an excuse by them for monumental maladministration, corruption (the billions of dollars in international aid has gone chiefly into a few leaders’ bank accounts), scapegoating hatred and war.  E. Gaza raises another issue.  It is sometimes claimed that Israel still “occupies” Gaza since it controls the entry points into Israel and limits supplies to the essentials of food and medicine.  On the other hand, Egypt controls the entry point into Egypt, and does the same.  Does Egypt “occupy” Gaza?  If attempts to restrict supplies to a country at war equates to “occupation,” then certainly Nazi Germany “occupied” England during the Second World War, which would be news to the British, and the Allies for their part “occupied” Nazi-held Europe, which would make the Second World War incomprehensible. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Thoroughly Disgusted has claimed in the past to be at least partly Jewish, as a cover for his/her explicit antisemitism. I disbelieve his/her claim, since such phony claims are common on web-blogs by Aryan and other antisemites. Something of the truth has been smoked out in his last post, with his assertion that "Zionists" kill Presidents. Now where have we heard that before? Only from Muslims, and the most extreme antisemites in the West. I recall first hearing this claim in the Old City in Jerusalem back in the 80s, in regard to the assassination of Robert Kennedy (of course the all too well-known truth is that Sirhan Sirhan was a Palestinian and as usual the Palestinians, pleased with their own deed, were displeased with the disapproval of it by others and sought therefore to blame it on Jews as a propaganda ploy, very like the standard Muslim response to 9.11). So my guess is that s/he is a Muslim fanatic, but the second possibility is a neo-Nazi. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Or maybe it is not President Bush he was aiming at? Apologies if I got that wrong. But it is still entirely irrelevant to the tragic loss of Assaf Ramon's life. Chaim aruchim and condolences to his family, which has suffered so much. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 These really are amazing comments from Leland Madearis, which do as Blackie says reveal a distinct lack of decency, show his ethical deficiencies and reduce the credibility of all his postings. Interestingly, he could not help slamming former President George W. Bush, too, irrelevant though that is to the subject. Shows where he stands politically. Cheryl's poem, on the other hand, was a beautiful contribution. Thank you, Cheryl. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Another tell-tale trait is the indifference of the antisemites to the actual topic, because any excuse will do for them to "get off" on their bullying. The actual topic of the article here is Netanyahu's refusal to treat Jerusalem as outside Israel, or a "settlement," and his nuanced approach to "freezing" other construction in Jewish parts of the West Bank. What does Evans have to say about this? Nothing. He offers us an irrelevant and false Ben-Gurion quote instead, part of his new fictional Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He also adds that the Diaspora has some non-Zionist foundation by citing a far-out leftist academic. This too has nothing to do with the topic. And Fernando claims Jews are bullies because they don't love Hamas, which besides being racist is also not relevant. Again I wonder if there is a Moderator of this website at all. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 The only bullies on this website are the antisemites that come onto it specifically to try to beat up Jews verbally and virtually, gratuitously insulting them again and again, obsessively, and regardless of the subject. The essential trait of antisemites, actually, is bullying. This marks them out down through the ages as members of the same unethical species. Amalekites are merely a sub-branch of this larger bullying tribe - as the Torah tells us, they feared to fight the main body of the Children of Israel (and the other escaping slaves, the "mixed multitude," who came with them), who were leaving Egypt under Moses, but instead they circled around to pick off the stragglers, the elderly, infirm, ailing, the women and children and scattered others who followed up in the rear. That is their hallmark. Cowards all though filled with bluster. There is a lot of bullying in the world, and it can and should be stopped in the primary school years by proper school policies, such as Dan Olveus has outlined in several books. Hitler was a bully as a child, as his biographies show; the application of proper retraining and therapy at school then would have saved many millions of lives. I dare say each and everyone of the antisemites on this site was also a bully in their schoolyards, were not properly dealt with then, and so they obviously continue this here (and therefore also in their personal relations), probably having been failures in real life despite their harshest efforts. Only failures would indulge in such antics here. Virtual reality is the last refuge of the scoundrel. In virtual reality they can pretend again to be dominant over their victims. David Evans is a chief instance of this obsessive bullying, having tried in numerous earlier lengthly exchanges in the JTA blogs to pass off various interminable falsehoods, insults and slanders and not getting away with it. E.g., I showed in an earlier thread, just this past month, that his "Ben-Gurion" quotes were phony and false. What does he care about truth? Here he is again with them. He has also had his Schlomo Sand reference dismissed (no other Jewish historian agrees with Sand, not even one so far as I am aware), and so on. But bullies are not interested in truth. The Sand and Ben-Gurion citations show something else. The constant recourse by Evans and other antisemitic bullies to invented evidence and extremely marginal and discredited "authorities" demonstrates again and again the intellectual vacuity and weakness of such rabidly anti-Zionist/antisemitic ranting. No mainstream authorities can be cited, since these guys are so lunatic. Bullies, indeed. Actually, they disprove themselves and discredit their positions with just about every post, in this way. It is only too easy to shoot them down. They even are open about their replacement of truth by false but malevolent fantasies, their actual preference for myths. Like "Fernando" here - feel the love from Hamas by just being nice to them. One can only laugh. This is practically a self-refutation: one need say nothing to it. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Sorry, I went back to the Rosenbaum article to check it and found that he does not claim to have coined the term "solutionism": he attributes it to Jeffrey Goldberg. Another excellent article which is on the same thing, and reviews all the various "solutions" to date that have been public fiascos of the first order, or alternatively have just dropped out of sight, in regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict, is by Daniel Pipes. I have cited it several times in posts, but it is so relevant here too that I give it again: http://www.danielpipes.org/7653/peace-process-or-war-process 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 So many "unique moments," which were really the same moment. American presidents tend to get those moments - it is like an itch they must scratch. One particularly thinks of President Clinton in Washington in 1993 and again at Camp David in 2000, etc., etc. These moments turn out not to be so unique after all. Funnily enough, Olmert also had his "unique moment," which he still hearkens back to, and so did Ehud Barak, and so did Ariel Sharon with his withdrawal from Gaza, and so did Yitzhak Rabin. We can add Neville Chamberlain for his own famous "unique moment." Now it's Obama. When will they ever learn? All of this comes from not taking the enemy seriously. It is a kind of self-harming patronizing of evil. Ron Rosenbaum has coined a good name for this type of willful simple-mindedness. He calls it "solutionism." It is "Yes we can!" applied to reaching peace with fanatics and pathological murderers. See Robenbaum's remarks at: http://pajamasmedia.com/ronrosenbaum/2009/09/23/obama-and-solutionism-at-the-un/ Even more in-depth analysis is given by Barry Rubin, whose articles are always extremely insightful and informative - I recommend him to JTA readers. He is head of the GLORIA center in Israel, which puts out the Middle East Review of International Affairs, an academic quarterly which has a huge readership around the world. On the issue of wishful thinking and irresponsible leaders' blind faith in "solutions" see his analysis at: http://www.gloriacenter.org/index.asp?pname=submenus/articles/2008/rubin/6_9.asp Emanuel and Obama will realize one day that wishes do not make it so. Real grown-ups are people who have learnt that in childhood. Oddly enough, Obama's whole election campaign was predicated on the infantile idea that wishes do make it so. What a lot of people like to believe that! It helps out evil groups a lot. The only way to deal with evil is to fight and crush it. Talks merely aggrandize it. Why do we have to rerun World War II in every generation? 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Dershowitz is a very bright man, highly knowledgeable in international law, sharp and penetrating in his analysis of issues relating to Israel, ethical and decent, and has his heart in the right place - he is certainly no self-hating Jew, and obviously is not a non-Jewish antisemite. No doubt coincidentally, none of this applies to his critics on this website. Therefore they naturally do not like what he says. David (whose Judaeophobia has been amply on display in his many postings) simply invents defects, applying defamatory generalizations to Dershowitz that Dershowitz proved with chapter and verse to apply to Norman Finkelstein, a truly horrific and dishonest polemicist and neo-Nazi sympathizer (he contributes publications against Jews to Holocaust denial journals and has also attended Iranian conferences and been happy to be used by Ahmadinejab), at the time of the controversy over Finkelstein's being considered for tenure at DePaul University (he eventually did not get tenure). David clearly wishes revenge for that triumph of Dershowitz, one of very many he has had in debates. By the way, Dershowitz is a Harvard professor (tenured), something Finkelstein could never attain to in a million years, and that clearly is beyond a dream for "David" and his ilk. This does not mean that I support his endorsement of Obama. Melanie Phillips has the better of him in this (they had a too-fierce stoush in their blogs about some months back). But both are important advocates for decency and international law (distorted out of shape by leftists, Palestinians, and the UN generally) and for the State of Israel. We can be grateful for him, his legal expertise and rhetorical skills, and his persistence and courage. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 I would suggest to the Moderator - is there really such a person? - that he wake up from his extended sleep or return from his extended coffee breaks and remove all "Thoroughly Disgusted" posts from this website. They are consistently extreme, categorically biased in a racist fashion, and unacceptable in polite society. It is not possible to have a decent discussion with such persons: they are not mentally on that level at all. It is all gutter talk. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Actually, a lot of Obama's initiatives have made peace less likely than ever, rather than more likely, and negotiations more certain to fail, not that they would have succeeded anyway. E.g., he leaned on Israel so heavily about "settlements" including within Jerusalem itself when the Palestinians had accepted most of them already, but of course they reversed themselves happily with such an American endorsement, and decided to put off negotiations until Israel was forced into accepting this new American gift of Israeli land. Why bother to negotiate when they were happily getting more already than they could have achieved by themselves? Obama also dumped previous administrations' commitments to Israel that gave a foundation for Israeli concessions. Those commitments were given as binding and enduring ones, but suddenly they were not. Without those commitments, Israel would put itself at greater risk by making those concessions, and so would naturally and inevitably be less likely to do so. But even more ominously, Obama has now established a dangerous precedent for American reneging on assurances to its ally Israel, which means that Israel can in principle no longer trust the promises of Obama or perhaps even future administrations when putting itself at risk. That is a very serious matter. Furthermore, Obama made negotiations certain to fail by enlarging the participants to all 21 Arab states and all 57 Muslim countries, as well of course as Hamas and Fatah - the more the participants, the more certain consensus could never happen. It is of course true that ultimately the consent and support of all Arab and Muslim countries is necessary if peace is truly to be ensured for Israel, but it is also true that when Mashiach comes peace will fill the earth, but nevertheless one cannot make practical everyday policy based on wishfulness, and it is a species of lunacy to do so. Israel will not get peace if it insists on maximalist endorsement from all Muslim countries before it does. It will be content with a workable cold-war-style peace, with appropriate safeguards in place in the final negotiations, with the Palestinians of the sort that has worked tolerably well with Egypt and Jordan. So Obama's naive maximalist, all-or-nothing sort of approach is guaranteed to fail miserably. President George W. Bush's approach was far more realistic and focused. Peace will come when the Palestinians really want it and are willing to give up maximalist demands, recognize Israel and its Jewishness, stop hate incitement (it is good anyway that Obama keeps stressing this too!), and disarms its terrorist groups and militias. Until then Israel will be firmly supported so that it can afford to be patient and conciliatory. Binding commitments even if given in unformalized form from the U.S. could be relied upon as a basis for concessions even in the absence of satisfactory peace responses from the Palestinians. Obama is going to be mugged by reality, and it is going to hurt, including hurting his domestic and international standing generally. This is as certain as that night follows day. I just hope it is not the Israelis who will be the ones being most hurt. Iran should be his chief focus, not Israel, and not the hopelessly hateful and terrorist-oriented Palestinians. On the reality of things, see the excellent article by Daniel Pipes, at: http://www.danielpipes.org/7653/peace-process-or-war-process It is not very happy reading, but there is no la-de-da wishful thinking in it either, just recognition of the real world. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Ari H, you may or may not be right about how the opinion poll in Israel, apparently conducted by the Jerusalem Post, phrased the questions concerning Obama. I have tried to locate the actual poll, and have not found it nor any article spelling out its questions fully. What is clear from the figures, however, is a tremendous lack of confidence or trust in Israel for Obama's peace plans and behaviors regarding Israel. That, after all, is what even in your phrasing the 4% means. So neither Cheryl nor I have lied. There is a further rather telling point, Ari H, which you may not know about. Israel is a democracy. The Jews of Israel voted overwhelmingly for Netanyahu and other parties sceptical of Palestinian peace intentions, and against Labor and Kadima. They strongly support Netanyahu's approach to the Israel-Palestinian issue and to Obama. Attempts by the American administration to win them over have utterly failed, instead have shored up Netanyahu's support rather than diminished it. This just by itself indicates the validity of the conclusions Cheryl and I have drawn. Of course Israelis want peace. They always have. The problem is that there must be two sides agreeing to a real peace deal, and the Palestinians have always been "missing in action." They have reduced each and every peace negotiation to an exercise in self-harming futility. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 I think I have answered your questions already, Ari H. The vast majority of Jews around the world certainly want peace in the ME, and accept that negotiation among other things is necessary for it, but do not believe that peace even with "negotiations" can be reached with the Palestinians with their present outlook - in which case negotiations now at best are time-wasting theatre and at worse seriously counter-productive - so they, quite simply, do not support Obama's policies regarding Israel, considering them naive, badly misguided, only helpful to Israel's enemies and harmful to Israel's security. Opinion polls demonstrate this. Why are negotiations not helpful now? First of all, they are regarded as part of a larger strategy aiming at the destruction of Israel, not as serious steps to peace at all. Basically, the Palestinians refuse to negotiate their basic requirement that Israel disappear as such. This is shown for example in the refusal to accept the Jewish nature of the State of Israel, which cancels any half-hearted vow to recognize Israel made after the Oslo Accords, and seeks to reverse the UN resolution establishing Israel as a Jewish state back in 1947. There is no Palestinian intention to accept the terms of the Balfour Declaration of 1917. So peace negotiations cannot be serious. Another evidence of this refusal is the Palestinian declaration that their "Right of Return" inside Israel is an essential, non-negotiable precondition for any peace agreement - but this simply cancels out Israel just by itself, and denies its legitimacy. Any Jews left alive after this "Right of Return" Lebanon-type civil war situation ended, if any, would be in a Palestinian Muslim state. The refusal to offer realistic compromises for peace indicates the lack of intention by the Palestinians to make peace. This applies as well to Jerusalem issues, the Temple Mount/Western Wall and many other sticking points. A further indication is the Palestinian refusal to cease their constant antisemitic and anti-Zionist hate incitement in their media, education, politics and behavior, glorifying and praising all their terrorists and atrocities. The Palestinian public has not been prepared for peace with Israel, in fact they have been prepared to reject any leader who proposes sincere peace as being an Israeli agent or stooge. Demonization of Israel, Zionism and Jews must precede any peace treaty, not follow it. There are also no political institutions in the P.A. or Gaza that would be able to implement or preserve peace. The billions of dollars in aid that could have built those institutions have been utterly wasted. The Palestinians have been lousy at governing themselves, and could not maintain a peaceable state, an even semi-competent criminal justice system, nor even a real democracy. They only know how to maintain corrupt and semi-anarchic thugocracies. Even if all these obstacles were overcome and cured, Hamas and Hamastan in Gaza present insurmountable obstacles to peace. Hamas is not a political party, it is a religion of death. One does not change this just by signing a paper. The nature of Hamas, and the separate identity of Gaza, precludes a peace treaty and makes "negotiations" with Fatah/PLO identities an empty charade. Those West Bank leaders cannot deliver even their own people, even if they really wished to do so which they do not, and they cannot deliver Hamas and Gaza, so what point is there in "peace negotiations" with them? Further obstacles to peace negotiations lie in the wider Middle East. Israel, if it is to have a secure peace, must change the violently antisemitic mind-set of its neighbors and their refusal to accept a Jewish state in their midst. The Arab and other Muslim states are far from this at present. Peace negotiations that do not include concessions and genuine peaceable recognition from Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, and indeed even with Hezbollah of Lebanon would not bring peace, and would in the end not even be possible. The refusal of Israel's wider enemies to give up their demonization of Zionism, Israel and Jews, or even to make the extremely minimal symbolic gestures Obama has been asking for, shows the futility at this point in time of any peace negotiations. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 It is true that the vast majority of Jews around the world support a negotiated peace between Israel and the Palestinians and indeed the Arab world, if that were really possible, but that is not actually what "Ari H" means. He means that the "vast majority" support Obama's definition of how to get to that peace, and that is simply false, as Cheryl Mavrikos indicates. According to opinion polls in Israel, only about 4%, some say 6%, of Jews there (where almost half the world's Jews live), think Obama's efforts will bring anything good for Israel or for peace. There is truly an overwhelming majority, almost unanimous, against his initiatives, and an amazingly massive vote of no-confidence in him and his "peace-plans." In the U.S., where most of the other half of world Jewry lives, an opinion poll of American Jews back in June revealed that "Some 66 percent of those polled do not believe that Israeli support of a two-state solution -- including establishing an independent Palestinian state and stopping the expansion of settlements -- will  bring lasting peace to the region, with 22 percent saying it will. In addition, 48 percent believe the Israeli support would not end Palestinian terrorism; 39 percent said it would." This quotes the JTA report on the poll back on June 15th. These figures show that a solid majority of American Jews, too, dissent from Obama's naive and one-sided proposals, and even more deeply they doubt the desire of the Palestinians really to make peace. Since June, undoubtedly, disillusionment with Obama's continued pressure on Israel has grown even further. Why this vast majority of world Jewry rejecting Obama's approach, when they so strongly want peace? Simply the reality of Palestinian terrorism and hatred, which has made a mockery of every possible Israeli concession down through the years, even including unilateral withdrawal from Palestinian areas. Arafat responded to the extremely generous Camp David peace offer with the Second Intifada, just as every previous concession by Israel after the Oslo Accords were signed in 1994 was answered by outbursts of terrorist atrocities. In fact, a vast majority of Jews around the world rather doubts that any peace treaty is realistically possible with the Palestinians, who "never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity" for the obvious, strong and consistent reason that they don't want peace at all, they want the destruction of Israel and the annihilation of the Jews there, with "peace negotiations" merely another tactic in that long war. This is why the leftist "Peace Now" brigades, once so strong and optimistic in Israel, are now miniscule in numbers and hardly heard from. This is also why "J-Street" does not represent American Jewry, and why the mainstream AIPAC and AJC, etc., still do. The views of Ari H are diametrically opposed to the vast majority of Jews around the world. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Comments on this blog by Mermelstein and others are basically just repeating assertions by him and those like him at another thread in the JTA website. E.g., Mermelstein's open contempt for analyses and detailed refutations of Gaza War allegations by self-respecting Jews and Israelis, including the IDF itself, is on display at http://www.jta.org/news/article/2009/09/18/1007984/whats-next-for-the-goldstone-report/CP3 and earlier pages of that thread, and I will not repeat my response to it here. He claims or at the least implies rather strongly that only non-Jews who are negative to Israel, and who therefore would never participate in an Israeli conference, can give objective analyses of the Gaza War, although Jews willing to endorse Hamas as better than Israel might also be acceptable. This assertion of the sole validity of negative and anti-Israeli assessments, and the disqualification of any positive Jewish perspectives, of course is both false and highly prejudiced. But while I reject the premise, I do give web references at the above web-address to detailed, independent, authoritative and non-Jewish analyses of the conduct of the Gaza War that support Israel's claims it behaved with moral restraint - I would add, with actually far more such moral care than any other modern (or ancient) army. It is very interesting to see how feeble Mermelstein's responses are to those analyses. One other thing from that thread's discussion which I merely mention here, and that is that it is false to assert that Israel "occupies" Gaza, as certain posters do in the present thread. For a fuller refutation of that idea, see the above web-address. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Mermelstein's comments on JCPA merely confirm his extremely biased views that I have already strongly criticised and rejected in my post at the top of p. 3 of this thread, to the effect that no defense of Israel issuing from Israel is credible. As I have said, this is mere prejudice no different in its way from pure antisemitism. In any case, the address by the British Colonel Kemp reflects his own well considered views, his own battle experience and his investigations during the Gaza campaign. He specifically focuses on how such counter-terror war operations present moral challenges which, he shows, Israel handled exceptionally well. Perhaps Mermelstein has extended his extreme bias to include any non-Israeli or non-Jew, however knowledgeable, who agrees to speak up in support of Israel or participate in a conference in Israel? This would be in character. This attitude is beneath contempt. Kemp's article can perhaps be most easily accessed by putting in a Google search for "Richard Kemp Gaza War," and the first item listed is to his actual speech at the JCPA conference. Cordesman's long and detailed analysis of "The Gaza War" is accessible on the CSIS site; I found it using the information I gave in my earlier post, without the specific URL. It does not deal with the Goldstone Report and I did not claim that it did; it deals directly with the conflict and assesses among other things whether Israel did seek to minimize civilian casualties. It presents a lot of evidence that Israel did, all ignored of course by the biased Goldstone Report. As for Mermelstein's lofty patronizing tone and snotty attitude to White's article, even pretending to give it a C+ grade for a high school student, this too is in character and says more about Mermelstein than White. By the way, Mermelstein as usual is wrong about white phosphorus being illegal and a war crime. It is not, just as a matter of fact. See the articles named above, and indeed any of the many critical analyses of the failures of fact and analysis of the Goldstone Report. These analyses frequently address the specifics, including the phosphorus claim, contrary to Mermelstein. NGO Monitor, Alan Dershowitz, Melanie Phillips (her typically eloquent, incisive and specific comments can be read at http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/5334541/the-moral-inversion-of-richard-goldstone.thtml), HonestReporting.com (click on "The Goldstone Report" on their home page), and many other commentators have already tackled "the specifics." Above all, the IDF report itself does. The full URL for this is: http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Terrorism-+Obstacle+to+Peace/Terrorism+and+Islamic+Fundamentalism-/Operation_in_Gaza-Factual_and_Legal_Aspects.htm Clearly Mermelstein is as ignorant about these analyses as he appears to be about antisemitism down through the ages, the liberal democratic character of Israel, the general history of warfare, what "occupation" consists of in international law, and assorted other matters. One last comment on the "occupied Gaza" claim. Gaza is not an occupied territory, in actual international law. A lie does not become truth because it is repeated often enough, even by the UN Goldstone Report. Judge Goldstone, like his colleagues at Human Rights Watch and on the UN Human Rights Council, obviously do not know that Israel withdrew from Gaza completely in 2005, and it is presently mal-administered solely by the government of Hamastan. If, as anti-Zionists like Mermelstein also claim, Gaza is still occupied by Israel because Israel only allows food, medicine, energy supplies and other essentials in through its border check-points and restricts movement into Israel from it, then clearly Egypt also "occupies" Gaza because it does exactly the same from its shared border with Gaza. But, strangely enough, Mermelstein, Goldstone, B'tselem, Human Rights Watch, and the UN apparachniks never suggest that Egypt "occupies" Gaza. How odd - perhaps some coincidental blip in their thinking all at the same point? Furthermore, Nazi Germany interdicted supplies to England during the Second World War. This means, according to Mermelstein et al. that Nazi Germany "occupied" England then. This may come as a surprise to the English then or now. And in turn, the Allies for their part, including Britain, created a cordon around Nazi Europe preventing supplies from getting into it. This of course means according to Mermelstin that even as Britain was occupied by the Nazis it itself occupied Germany, indeed all the Allies "occupied" Nazi Europe right through the Second World War, making the War itself utterly incomprehensible. One could go on. But what would be the point? There is no one so stupid as the person who insists on principle on being so. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Fortunately, the "Levin," "Mermelstein," "Ari H" and "David" of this website do not speak for anyone other than themselves, while the overwhelming majority of Jews still have their heads on their shoulders, know their enemies when they are subject to their murderous and genocidal attacks, and are willing to defend themselves very successfully and morally when given the means. They support the morality and legitimacy of the only Jewish state in the world, a state morally head and shoulders above not only their fanatical enemies, but also above most other states in the dis-united, immoral and dysfunctional "United Nations." It is interesting to note in passing and as an aside that universal human rights as a concept stems only from the Jewish Scriptures, resting as it does there on the belief that we all stem from Adam, and are all therefore equally in the divine image however much some of us profane it, God commands us to respect this and to this end has given the Noahite Laws of basic ethical monotheism to all humanity (which include respect for courts of law, etc.). So, according to the Torah, a basic standard of justice applies to all, but even more pointedly we must all equally be treated with mercy as well as justice. This Israel does. (But self-defense against those who would kill Jews is not only permitted but mandated.) Such a belief in universal human rights, revamping society and laws themselves at least within the Jewish people to actualize mercy and justice, in fact are not found anywhere else in the ancient world, though they have now spread everywhere and are the foundation of most social thinking. This is the human rights that the above named possible non-Jewish or maybe even anti-Jewish Jews, or possible non-Jews sporting "Jewish" names, constantly pretend to support (but which they mercilessly exercise only against Jews, of course), and which they betray constantly since they are notably silent and indifferent about the human rights violations of Jew-killers and antisemites (example: Hamas in Gaza). 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 The reports' URLs have again been bounced as being possible "spam." So I can only give the general websites and not the specific addresses here. The Cordesman report, a very lengthly one in pdf form, can be found on the website of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, i.e., www.csis.org Search there for publication 090202_gaza_war.pdf The White investigative report can be found on the website of www.washingtoninstitute.org with a publication code templateC05.php?CID=3034 The Kemp analysis can be found on the website of www.jcpa.org, with a code concluding with IID=3026, although the address is quite lengthly and it may be simplest just to put in Kemp's name in the Search box at that website. Others can be added but these represent a very respectable range of expert opinion and in-depth investigations. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 The reports I referred to above are, in respective order, Cordesman's detailed analysis: http://csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/090202_gaza_war.pdf White's investigation and evaluation: http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC05.php?CID=3034 Colonel Kemp's evaluation in a lengthly address to a Joint International Conference on "Hamas, the Gaza War and Accountability under International Law," at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs: http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp? DBID=1&TMID=111&LNGID=1&FID=378&PID;-0&IID=3026 Others can be added but these represent a very respectable range of expert opinion and in-depth investigations. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Mermelstein seems to think that any reports or investigations issuing from Israeli authorities or groups, or from Jews supportive of Israel, are per se tainted, unreliable and unbelievable, and therefore should be dismissed out of hand, without even the need to attend to the substantive content of those reports, investigations, or refutations of slanders and biased criticisms. I utterly reject this view. It is prejudicial on the face of it. Furthermore, it wilfully ignores that Israel is an open democracy with a free press and freedom of information, and that self-criticism is taken for granted in Israel to a degree exceptional even amongst democracies, so that government and IDF reports and investigations must be extremely well researched, cautious and grounded in the facts to pass muster with its own citizens. It also ignores that Hamas, and Fatah for that matter, are illiberal, indeed totalitarian (in the case of Hamas) or authoritarian (in the case of the P.L.O. Fatah) terrorist sponsors and instigators, with a long track record of manufacturing atrocity stories against Israel while freely practicing their own quite real atrocities against Jews generally. In Hamastan, or Fatahstan, a person risks his or her life to tell the truth about Israel in contradiction to the demonization that is the sole permitted line in those communities. It is even more a risk of one's life to condemn Hamas or Fatah people for endangering Palestinian lives or committing war crimes against Israelis. So truth cannot in fact be expected from Palestinians, simply because of the nature of their society and the absence of a true free press, freedom of opinion, or even of the democratic right to criticise the government in power. It is a chief criticism of the Goldstone Report that it pretends that Palestinians and Palestinian official propaganda are more trustworthy than Israelis, indeed it dismisses out of hand Israeli government and IDF investigative reports. This just by itself disqualifies the Goldstone Report, as it does reports by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, B'tselem, and similar groups. As for non-Jewish authoritative reports that support the Israeli claim that the IDF exercised care to avoid civilian casualties to a degree that is actually unprecedented in the history of warfare, certainly of urban warfare against terrorist groups that always make use of civilian shields, I would refer Mermelstein to Anthony Cordesman of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, in the U.S. (Cordesman is an authority on guerrilla warfare and counter-terrorism methods around the world), Jeffrey White who is a defense fellow at The Washington Institute, specializing in the military and security affairs of Iraq and the Levant, and, most dramatically relevant of all, Colonel Richard Kemp CBE, a senior British Army officer who has seen recent service in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as in other theatres of operation, and who investigated IDF operations in person during and after the Gaza War. I will give the URLs to these reports in a subsequent post, since every time I have included them in a post the entire post is refused publication by the thread as being possible "spam" that must pass review by the Moderator. Hopefully at least this first part will be accepted without cavil. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Mermelstein seems to think that any reports or investigations issuing from Israeli authorities or groups, or from Jews supportive of Israel, are per se tainted, unreliable and unbelievable, and therefore should be dismissed out of hand, without even the need to attend to the substantive content of those reports, investigations, or refutations of slanders and biased criticisms. I utterly reject this view. It is prejudicial on the face of it. Furthermore, it wilfully ignores that Israel is an open democracy with a free press and freedom of information, and that self-criticism is taken for granted in Israel to a degree exceptional even amongst democracies, so that government and IDF reports and investigations must be extremely well researched, cautious and grounded in the facts to pass muster with its own citizens. It also ignores that Hamas, and Fatah for that matter, are illiberal, indeed totalitarian (in the case of Hamas) or authoritarian (in the case of the P.L.O. Fatah) terrorist sponsors and instigators, with a long track record of manufacturing atrocity stories against Israel while freely practicing their own quite real atrocities against Jews generally. In Hamastan, or Fatahstan, a person risks his or her life to tell the truth about Israel in contradiction to the demonization that is the sole permitted line in those communities. It is even more a risk of one's life to condemn Hamas or Fatah people for endangering Palestinian lives or committing war crimes against Israelis. So truth cannot in fact be expected from Palestinians, simply because of the nature of their society and the absence of a true free press, freedom of opinion, or even of the democratic right to criticise the government in power. It is a chief criticism of the Goldstone Report that it pretends that Palestinians and Palestinian official propaganda are more trustworthy than Israelis, indeed it dismisses out of hand Israeli government and IDF investigative reports. This just by itself disqualifies the Goldstone Report, as it does reports by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, B'tselem, and similar groups. As for non-Jewish authoritative reports that support the Israeli claim that the IDF exercised care to avoid civilian casualties to a degree that is actually unprecedented in the history of warfare, certainly of urban warfare against terrorist groups that always make use of civilian shields, I would refer Mermelstein to Anthony Cordesman of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, in the U.S. (Cordesman is an authority on guerrilla warfare and counter-terrorism methods around the world), Jeffrey White who is a defense fellow at The Washington Institute, specializing in the military and security affairs of Iraq and the Levant, and, most dramatically relevant of all, Colonel Richard Kemp CBE, a senior British Army officer who has seen recent service in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as in other theatres of operation, and who investigated IDF operations in person during and after the Gaza War. Their reports are, in respective order, Cordesman's detailed analysis: http://csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/090202_gaza_war.pdf White's investigation and evaluation: http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC05.php?CID=3034 Colonel Kemp's evaluation in a lengthly address to a Joint International Conference on "Hamas, the Gaza War and Accountability under International Law," at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs: http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp? DBID=1&TMID=111&LNGID=1&FID=378&PID;-0&IID=3026 Others can be added but these represent a very respectable range of expert opinion and in-depth investigations. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 In answer to some of the posters here, it is relevant to reproduce the comments made by the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Susan E. Rice, concerning the lack of credibility and the obvious bias of the Goldstone Report. Her views are those of any decent person in light of the heavily one-sided and prejudicial nature of that report. She even states that the report puts BACK peace efforts, rather than advancing them. In fact, one can go further: the Report is yet one more proof of the nearly total irrelevance to human rights issues of the Human Rights Council of the U.N., and Ambassador Rice makes some trenchant even if diplomatic remarks on this as well. The comments were made in an interview published in The Washington Post on Sept. 21. They are as follows: "On rejecting Richard Goldstone's U.N. report on war crimes by Israel and Hamas: "As I said the other day the mandate was unbalanced, one-sided and unacceptable. Goldstone did seek to expand his purview to look at Hamas and others and while we note that, the weight of the report is something like 85 percent oriented towards very specific and harsh condemnation and conclusions related to Israel and very sort of lightly treats without great specificity Hamas' terrorism and its own atrocities. So in that respect it remains unbalanced, although obviously less so than it might have been and so that is still a source of significant concern. "We think that this [Goldstone's Gaza report] derived from the [human rights] council and belongs in the council as the venue for its consideration. And in this as in many other respects the US focus, and I think constructively the focus of many other countries, is to try to look not to the past but to the future. The best way to end suffering and abuses is for there to be a long term solution and peace based on two states living side by side in peace and security and that's what this administration is focusing on tirelessly. And things that take us backward, not just this, but bad habits here in the U.N. that are old school habits need to be challenged and put aside if we are going to create an atmosphere conducive to progress and a future that is far better than the present one. "The United States understands that Israel is a vibrant and strong democracy and it has more than sufficient capacity to conduct a credible internal investigation and we've encouraged it to do so. But the fundamental problem with this particular report is it was hatched with a bias inherent in its mandate. It is as a consequence a product that largely reflects that imbalance in its mandate, notwithstanding the effort to look at the other side to some extent, albeit a lesser extent. "It comes from a body whose track record and history is one of focusing unduly and excessively on one country, Israel, to the exclusion of credible sustained treatment of the world's most egregious instances of human rights abuses in places like Sudan or Zimbabwe or Burma and so we are committed to bringing greater balance, bringing greater focus to the most egregious instances of abuse and we think that despite its flaws the place for this report to be discussed remains in the [Human Rights] Council. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Perhaps Mr. Mermelstein merely wants documentation of the moral decency and extraordinary efforts to avoid civilian casualties of the IDF, from non-Israeli and non-Jewish sources, since he apparently believes that nothing from Israeli nor Jewish sources can be believed. This is an astonishing assumption, to put it mildly. Actually, of course, he is dead wrong. It is Hamas and Co., not Israel, who rule in a totalitarian fashion, kill dissenters and critics in their own community so there can be no effective questioning of their claims; who are responsible for theatrical propaganda media productions acting out and then claiming mythical Israeli atrocities, and who have been caught out doing this numerous times. Israel, on the other hand, as a thoroughly open democracy with a vigorous free press, has plenty of its own people willing and able to question Israeli government and IDF assertions, which therefore have to be highly responsible and based on honest and probing investigations - just as in other democracies. Moreover, Mermelstein's attitude, which rejects the reliability or relevance of Jewish- and Israeli-sourced defenses of Israel's conduct of war, effectively is an attempt to silence one entire side of a conflict, damning them a priori, before even attending to their statements. So it is highly prejudicial and even racist. By the way, this is the methodological approach of the U.N. Human Rights Council and their Goldstone Report, as it is of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and other such organizations. They are very credulous about Hamas-sourced claims, but reject Israeli testimonies and investigations. That, precisely, is why these groups cannot be seen as neutral referees nor reliable investigators. However, although I reject entirely the premise of Mr. Mermelstein's challenge, I think it relevant still to present some non-Jewish expert evaluations of Israel's conduct of the Gaza War which support Israeli claims of basic decency and morality, and show Israel's sincere attempts to avoid civilian casualties, while these reports also show the evidence for Hamas war crimes, use of human shields, intentional attacks on civiians, and the like. Anthony Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in the U.S., well-known for his in-depth and disinterested analysis of world conflicts generally and who made first-hand investigation of the War's conduct by the IDF, finds Israel's claims vindicated fully; see his full report and analysis at: http://csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/090202_gaza_war.pdf Jeffrey White, a defense fellow at The Washington Institute, specializing in the military and security affairs of Iraq and the Levant, finds the same. See his analysis and report at: http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC05.php?CID=3034 Most dramatic and telling, perhaps, is the hard-hitting analysis offered by Colonel Richard Kemp, CBE, from the British armed services, who has served in Iraq and elsewhere. He shows how the Israeli conduct of war can be taken as an outstanding model for the conduct of all counter-terrorist wars, such as are being fought in many parts of the world against groups that observe none of the "rules of war" - like Hamas. See his address to the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs last June, at: http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DBID=1&TMID=111&LNGID=1&FID=378&PID=0&IID=3026 I hope this is sufficient to answer the question. There really is an israeli response worth listening to regarding the claims of war crimes. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Perhaps Mr. Mermelstein merely wants documentation of the moral decency and extraordinary efforts to avoid civilian casualties of the IDF, from non-Israeli and non-Jewish sources, since he apparently believes that nothing from Israeli nor Jewish sources can be believed. This is an astonishing assumption, to put it mildly. Actually, of course, he is dead wrong. It is Hamas and Co., not Israel, who rule in a totalitarian fashion, kill dissenters and critics in their own community so there can be no effective questioning of their claims; who are responsible for theatrical propaganda media productions acting out and then claiming mythical Israeli atrocities, and who have been caught out doing this numerous times. Israel, on the other hand, as a thoroughly open democracy with a vigorous free press, has plenty of its own people willing and able to question Israeli government and IDF assertions, which therefore have to be highly responsible and based on honest and probing investigations - just as in other democracies. Moreover, Mermelstein's attitude, which rejects the reliability or relevance of Jewish- and Israeli-sourced defenses of Israel's conduct of war, effectively is an attempt to silence one entire side of a conflict, damning them a priori, before even attending to their statements. So it is highly prejudicial and even racist. By the way, this is the methodological approach of the U.N. Human Rights Council and their Goldstone Report, as it is of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and other such organizations. They are very credulous about Hamas-sourced claims, but reject Israeli testimonies and investigations. That, precisely, is why these groups cannot be seen as neutral referees nor reliable investigators. However, although I reject entirely the premise of Mr. Mermelstein's challenge, I think it relevant still to present some non-Jewish expert evaluations of Israel's conduct of the Gaza War which support Israeli claims of basic decency and morality, and show Israel's sincere attempts to avoid civilian casualties, while these reports also show the evidence for Hamas war crimes, use of human shields, intentional attacks on civiians, and the like. Anthony Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in the U.S., well-known for his in-depth and disinterested analysis of world conflicts generally and who made first-hand investigation of the War's conduct by the IDF, finds Israel's claims vindicated fully; see his full report and analysis at: http://csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/090202_gaza_war.pdf Jeffrey White, a defense fellow at The Washington Institute, specializing in the military and security affairs of Iraq and the Levant, finds the same. See his analysis and report at: http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC05.php?CID=3034 Most dramatic and telling, perhaps, is the hard-hitting analysis offered by Colonel Richard Kemp, CBE, from the British armed services, who has served in Iraq and elsewhere. He shows how the Israeli conduct of war can be taken as an outstanding model for the conduct of all counter-terrorist wars, such as are being fought in many parts of the world against groups that observe none of the "rules of war" - like Hamas. See his address to the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs last June, at: http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DBID=1&TMID=111&LNGID=1&FID=378&PID=0&IID=3026 I hope that this answers Mermelstein's questions. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Perhaps Mr. Mermelstein merely wants documentation of the moral decency and extraordinary efforts to avoid civilian casualties of the IDF, from non-Israeli and non-Jewish sources, since he apparently believes that nothing from Israeli nor Jewish sources can be believed. This is an astonishing assumption, to put it mildly. Actually, of course, he is dead wrong. It is Hamas and Co., not Israel, who rule in a totalitarian fashion, kill dissenters and critics in their own community so there can be no effective questioning of their claims; who are responsible for theatrical propaganda media productions acting out and then claiming mythical Israeli atrocities, and who have been caught out doing this numerous times. Israel, on the other hand, as a thoroughly open democracy with a vigorous free press, has plenty of its own people willing and able to question Israeli government and IDF assertions, which therefore have to be highly responsible and based on honest and probing investigations - just as in other democracies. Moreover, Mermelstein's attitude, which rejects the reliability or relevance of Jewish- and Israeli-sourced defenses of Israel's conduct of war, effectively is an attempt to silence one entire side of a conflict, damning them a priori, before even attending to their statements. So it is highly prejudicial and even racist. By the way, this is the methodological approach of the U.N. Human Rights Council and their Goldstone Report, as it is of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and other such organizations. They are very credulous about Hamas-sourced claims, but reject Israeli testimonies and investigations. That, precisely, is why these groups cannot be seen as neutral referees nor reliable investigators. However, although I reject entirely the premise of Mr. Mermelstein's challenge, I think it relevant still to present some non-Jewish expert evaluations of Israel's conduct of the Gaza War which support Israeli claims of basic decency and morality, and show Israel's sincere attempts to avoid civilian casualties, while these reports also show the evidence for Hamas war crimes, use of human shields, intentional attacks on civiians, and the like. Anthony Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in the U.S., well-known for his in-depth and disinterested analysis of world conflicts generally and who made first-hand investigation of the War's conduct by the IDF, finds Israel's claims vindicated fully; see his full report and analysis at: http://csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/090202_gaza_war.pdf Jeffrey White, a defense fellow at The Washington Institute, specializing in the military and security affairs of Iraq and the Levant, finds the same. See his analysis and report at: http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC05.php?CID=3034 Most dramatic and telling, perhaps, is the hard-hitting analysis offered by Colonel Richard Kemp, CBE, from the British armed services, who has served in Iraq and elsewhere. He shows how the Israeli conduct of war can be taken as an outstanding model for the conduct of all counter-terrorist wars, such as are being fought in many parts of the world against groups that observe none of the "rules of war" - like Hamas. See his address to the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs last June, at: http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DBID=1&TMID=111&LNGID=1&FID=378&PID=0&IID=3026 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Mermelstein, if that is your real name and if you really are Jewish, are you really asking me to provide evidence for the existence of antisemitism down through the ages? Or that Israel exists, and is a liberal democracy? While Hamas and the Fatah PLO organization are not and that both have terrorist and genocidal goals? Just one topic may need explanation, since perhaps you have not already encountered it in your apparently highly restricted reading. It is the continuity of the Palestinian terrorist groups with the Nazis. 1.  HISTORICAL LINKS  TO NAZI RACISM: the leader of Palestinian anti-Zionist terrorist activities and militancy before Yasser Arafat, Arafat’s own uncle and his personal mentor Haj Amin el-Hussaini, actually spent World War II in Berlin as Hitler’s protogè.  During the 1930s, with German financing, he had led a civil war against the Jews and the British in British Mandate Palestine.  He then fled to Lebanon and on to Iraq, where he attempted a Nazi-supported coup, failed but personally led a pogrom slaughtering over 143 Jews in Iraq in 1941 before gaining sanctuary in Nazi Germany.  He toured the concentration camps with Heinrich Himmler, personally helped implement the annihilation of over 100,000 European Jews during the war and propagandized on Middle Eastern radio for Hitler.  In 1941 he issued a fatwa declaring obligatory Muslim participation with Nazis against Britain and the Allies, and created three divisions of Muslim Waffen SS fighting in the Nazi army.  Hitler promised him future rule in a Judenrein (Jew-free) Middle East.  His ‘Arab national socialism’ was taught to his nephew Arafat in Egypt in the 1950s, and was eventually enshrined in the P.L.O.  The key themes of Nazism remain mainstream in the P.L.O. (and also in Hamas).  The mufti's grandson was until recently the “Grand Mufti” of el-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, appointed by Arafat.  Arafat had particularly close ties to Syria and Iraq, whose “secular national socialist” Ba’athist ideology openly drew upon and applied Nazi ideas to pan-Arab nationalism.  These have received overwhelming support by Palestinians and other Arab populations.  On all this, see Matthias Kuentzel, Jihad and Jew-Hatred (2007http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/014/080ruyhg.asp?pg=1), and also the confirming studies by various other German scholars on Palestinian and Arab links to Nazism (e.g., see http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/17089176.html).  At the same time, the eagerness of the adoption of Nazi antisemitism by Muslim societies points to a more deep-rooted antisemitism in Islam itself, whose hateful teachings about Jews and Judaism extend from the Qur'an through the traditional commentary literature to the present leading religious authorities including of course the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Hussaini himself and Hamas. On this, see the encyclopedic anthology of Muslim sources, and scholarly essays on the history of Muslim-Jewish relations, in Andrew Bostom, ed., The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism (2008).   2.  PRESENT NAZI RHETORIC AND LIES: Even today the P.A. routinely promotes racist teachings using texts such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion from Nazi Germany.  Children’s school texts & television programs repeat antisemitic libels, sermons in the mosques incite hate of an extreme kind, and political and terrorist leaders openly justify their own policies on the same grounds.  Mahmoud Abbas, the present “moderate” P.A. leader, wrote his Ph.D. thesis supporting Holocaust denial.  Hamas calls for genocide against all Jews even in its charter and actually cites Nazi texts for justification.  On this, see the actual Hamas Charter at  http://www.acpr.org.il/resources/hamascharter.html  and an analysis by Andrew Bostom and David Littman at http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2009/01/01/heeding-david-littman-confronting-hamas’-genocidal-jew-hatred-part-1/#comments Myths of Jewish ritual cannibalism and the Protocols are still widely disseminated and believed.  A demonizing inflation of the “threat” from Jews echoes Nazi themes about their own peaceable Jewish population, merely 1% of Germans; in the same way the tiny Jewish state, numbering merely 5.6 million Jews and 1.4 million non-Jews, is said today to be a “Goliath” aiming to take over the 350 million Arabs and 21 Arab states of the entire Middle East. Despite all of its wars being defensive in nature, each has been recast as aggressive malicious attempts to occupy all neighboring countries and commit genocide and ethnic cleansing against Arabs (these fantasies project the constant actual Arab/Muslim calls to wipe out Israel and annihilate all its Jews).  In sharp contrast to all this, all Jewish political parties in Israel reject Nazism root and branch.  2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 How typical that such an Arab-Israeli "peace" organization is founded by Jews - not by Arabs or Palestinians. THEIR "peace" organizations ring with cries of "Death to the Jews!" There is no equivalent to "Peace Now" on the Palestinian side, no rallies of hundreds of thousands calling out for peace talks and willing to make concessions and to decry violence. This has been the reality of things since before WWII in the Middle East, when "Peace Now" was "Neve Shalom" but still had next to no Arab members or mirror organizations. That brute fact cannot be wished away. But wishing away is the modus operandi of too many confused, and often rootless and Judaically ignorant Jews, who often seem merely to wish to merge with the larger world. As the well-meaning Lauren Barr will discover, like all those who have walked this road before her, the problem is not Jewish attitudes. It is Muslim and Arab attitudes. And, unfortunately, they are very deeply rooted in traditional Muslim teachings and contemporary political discourse, so they are not going to change very soon, or maybe not for several more centuries. Islam has not even begun the process of modernization and internal reform that both Judaism and Christianity have worked through over five centuries of struggle (for Christianity; a bit more than two for Judaism since the struggle was much less difficult for it). I would recommend to Lauren Barr, for example, the outstanding anthology of Qur'anic and later mainstream Muslim texts, and scholarly articles on all aspects of the subject including a thorough historical review, edited by Andrew G. Bostom, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History (2008). It is the best and most thorough scholarly treatment of the subject in any language. It will be an eye-opener to her, directly relevant to her round-table dialogue efforts. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Mr. Stern's article is outstanding and judicious. We should thank him for an excellent contribution to our understanding of the UN "Human Rights" Council's Goldstone Report. Dror Mermelstein's response to Mr. Stern, however, seems to come from la-la land (e.g., he attempts to justify Goldstone's refusal to take context into account, seeks to whitewash Hamas while ignoring that even during the supposed 6-month truce 329 rockets and mortars were fired into Israel from Gaza - i.e., the "truce" meant chiefly that Israel was not allowed to respond to rockets or other attacks, but not that attacks would not be made by Hamas or that rockets would not be fired off - and he omits that Hamas unilaterally refused to renew the "truce" on December 15, declaring an open state of war with Israel and following this up with yet more rockets and mortars; on this see http://www.terrorism-info.org.il/malam_multimedia/English/eng_n/html/hamas_e017.htm), while Ari H's contribution is merely in line with his consistent habit of giving enthusiastic credence to every anti-Israel human rights report or attack around while dismissing every positive Israel human rights defense. Thus he has in the recent past declared the validity and truth of Human Rights Watch's uncritical echo of Hamas propaganda about the Gaza War despite precise and penetrating relevations of its bias, similarly defending the anonymous Breaking the Silence slanders, and now endorsing the Goldstone Report, while dismissing out of hand NGO Monitor, Alan Dershowitz, and even the IDF Report itself on alleged human rights abuses (see: http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Terrorism-+Obstacle+to+Peace/Terrorism+and+Islamic+Fundamentalism-/Operation_in_Gaza-Factual_and_Legal_Aspects.htm). So Ari H's sneering at Israel and the IDF is entirely predictable, but also entirely biased and prejudged. (Marilyn Shepherd's standard frankly antisemitic rant does not deserve a response.) To me, the bottom line is that any assessment of the Gaza War that uncritically accepts as automatically true testimony from within Hamas-controlled areas, from persons who might be killed if they spoke out against Hamas human rights violations or who spoke truthfully about israeli efforts to avoid civilian casualties, while dismissing contemptuously accounts from Israeli sources both personal and official defending Israel's conduct of the war, cannot be taken seriously. Furthermore, any report that treats a totalitarian terrorist group (guilty of innumerable atrocities both against its own people and against its enemies, that has a record of phony atrocity stories about Israel, that has genocidal goals written into its founding charter and that even boasts openly of intentionally killing civilians on the other side) as being equal to a liberal democracy (that observes the rule of law, avoids civilian casualties as far as possible even when the enemy constantly uses human shields, follows universal moral principles and is open to self-criticism), simply cannot be regarded as truthful, unbiased or even as decent and humane. Instead, an even worse insult, I must regard it as a typical fictional product of the U.N. Human Rights Council. How telling, too, is the repeated practice of that Council to choose specifically and above all Jews to head up their antisemitic kangaroo courts and their investigative reports on dear "Palestine" and evil Israel, like Robert Falk, a long-time anti-Zionist and also a believer in a Mossad-CIA conspiracy to blow up the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and the White House and then to blame Muslim terrorists for it (perhaps also kindly providing Osama bin-Laden with those suicide martyrs video tapes of the perpetrators' last words, in his own boasting videos from Afghani caves?) and now Richard Goldstone (who somewhat surprisingly is quite willing to be the chief of an openly tainted and anti-Israel inquiry, one-sided from its inception, even if he is a member of Human Rights Watch Board, and therefore shares HRW's biases). This search for acceptably anti-Zionist Jews to head Human Rights Council indictments of Israel suggests the standard ploy of antisemites: "Some of my best friends are Jews!" (I.e., self-repudiating Jews, of course). 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Cheryl, your comments on the ultimately un-Jewish and highly assimilationist, certainly not Orthodox or traditionalist, and even self-harming liberal democratic orientation of most American Jews are excellent and to the point. We see it clearly with Obama and Carter. It is interesting that by-and-large the strongest supporters of Israel amongst the last generation's American presidents have been Republicans, although full credit should be given to Johnson and Clinton, at least, and some Republicans have not been very trustworthy friends either, such as the first President Bush, George W.'s father. But if Nixon had not been in office in 1973, it is almost certain that Israel would have been wiped out in the Yom Kippur War of that year, since it was running out of materiel to fight the war and had reached the point of desperation. At that point, Nixon stood up to the U.S.S.R. direct threat to him of nuclear war if the U.S. aided Israel (the Soviets went to the highest nuclear alert before outright war - Nixon responded by ordering the corresponding American highest nuclear alert around the world). He did not take the European refusal to aid even in refueling American planes at European airports as an excuse for doing nothing, as most presidents would have. Instead, he ordered unprecedented around-the-clock direct flights of military supplies to Israel from the U.S., with refueling done in mid-air, and by delivering those supplies enabled Israel to fight back and ultimately to win that war. Otherwise it would have gone under. And recently revealed Soviet archival material proves that the Soviets had ships on the way to land on Israeli beaches, which were called off when the Americans came down so strongly in defense of Israel. By the way, the Jewish vote for Nixon was minimal, and certainly just this disproves the thesis of antisemites that the "Jewish Lobby" controls American politics. Rather, there are genuine American reasons, both idealistic and pragmatic, for the bipartisan American support for the only stable and real democracy in the Middle East even today, and America's firmest and most like-minded ally there. It is also not accidental that around the world the most anti-Zionist voices are also the most anti-American, not just on the issue of Israel and Zionism, but in general: they are jealous of and hate America and its democratic freedoms and success. Anti-Zionists, like antisemites down through history, tend towards authoritarianism and even totalitarianism, and live in a miasma of hatred and violence. Naturally they despise America. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Throwing around the "Nazis" label even when dealing with strongly anti-Nazi and liberal democratic persons like former President Bush, whose foreign policy was explicitly driven by the desire to enable peoples everywhere to live in democratic and free societies, is worse than mindless and perverse, Will Edwards. It evacuates the term "Nazi" of any real content. In the end it constitutes a denial of the extreme evil that really happened. It is as much a refusal to understand what Nazism and evil really are, as is the free-and-easy or trendy use of terms relating to the Holocaust and genocide itself, which end up emptying these too of their distinctive truths, often, be it noted, so that that tragedy can be flippantly turned on the Jews themselves, the victims of the Holocaust. While neo-Conservatives are center-right in politics, this essentially links them to the classical liberal thinkers, whose ideology lies behind the Constitution of the United States. They are very far from being of the extreme totalitarian right, as were the Nazis. In fact, neo-Conservatives are certainly the polar opposites of the Nazis. They stand for individual freedom and responsibility, including the freedom from statist absolutism (thus they are against socialist solutions to social problem - it is relevant that the word "NAZI" was an anagram for the German words for the "National Socialist Workers Party" of German: Fascism is more akin to socialism than it is to right-liberal anti-statist ideologies). Neo-Conservatives therefore gladly support the spread of democracy and individual freedoms everywhere, including the right of opposition parties (outlawed by the Nazis). They maintain that liberal democracy is the only historically proven solution to war and violence: no liberal democracy has gone to war with another liberal democracy in the past 200 years. Moreover, liberal democracies have statistically far less internal violence than any other kind of society, precisely because of their insistence on freedom of expression and of political association, which encourages dissenting views to be heard and allows them to be supported if they have any persuasiveness. In fact, statistics show that the more individual freedom a society has, the less internal violence it has. See, on this, R.J. Rummel's work, at www.hawaii.edu/powerkills Beyond that, there are such a diversity of views that people labeled "neo-Conservative" have (e.g., some being supportive of the war in Iraq, others doubtful about it or critical), that we often find that the term ends up telling us very little about the actual people called "neo-Conservative" but more about those leftists who use the label against them as a kind of curse-word and exorcism. For one thing seems sure: the neo-Conservatives have given center-right adherents a probing and often profound theoretical foundation for their criticisms of leftist statist politics and ideologies, and so leftists have come to fear them. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Ehud Barak is a chief instance of the delusional thinking that has also dominated other Israeli leaders and, as well, American presidents sponsoring "Israel-Palestinian peace talks," over the past generation: he thinks that the Palestinians actually want peace, and all that is needed is kindly talks and dangling the carrots of concessions. As Abba Eban famously said, in the 60s I believe, the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity," but you would think that finally American and Israeli leaders like Barak, Olmert, Clinton, Obama, et al, would grasp that there is actually a consistent reason for this strange Palestinian incompetence. It is not just coincidence, year after year, decade after decade. They actually don't want peace. They want to annihilate Israel, full stop. Peace talks are seen by them as merely another form of warfare, as Arafat himself confessed in Arab television interviews in the early years of the Oslo Accords. In such a situation, peace talks are pointless, in fact counter-productive, until the Palestinians are convinced that their efforts will fail and they are really ready to make peace, stop the hate-incitement and the antisemitic anti-Zionist ranting in their media, educational systems, mosques and political speeches, and accept Israel as their neighbour. But that change of attitude requires war and their definitive defeat, in such a way that they can no longer delude themselves that Israel will vanish. On this, see the excellent article by Daniel Pipes, http://www.danielpipes.org/7653/peace-process-or-war-process That article should be required reading by all Israeli politicians, and American politicians as well. Obama in particular could learn from it. In the same way, exactly, offering concessions to the Nazis, as Chamberlain tried to do in his eagerness to avoid war in the late 1930s, was counterproductive and only strengthened and furthered Nazi war-aims. Some ideologies must be defeated; they are not open to negotiation. Iran is another instance. Wishful thinking ends up strengthening evil, not overcoming it. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 What is remarkable in all this is that Israel, despite being damned and demonized as so many of the antisemitic posters on this website do, is in truth a highly moral liberal democracy forced to fight several wars over the past two generations simply to survive against genocidally minded authoritarian and even totalitarian enemies, rabid antisemites and terrorist groups. The contrast is not something hidden or obscure: it is obvious to anyone who knows about modern history. Israel is a Western liberal democracy; the Palestinian authoritarian leadership is either from the PLO terrorist group Fatah, or the Hamas terrorist group - neither are democratic nor liberal. So to blacken Israel and whiten its enemies takes extraordinary indifference to truth and decency. Israel's army makes extraordinary efforts to avoid civilian casualties - far beyond the standard of any other modern country's armies - but its accusers give a free pass to even the most blatant atrocities against Jewish civilians by Palestinian (literally Nazi-influenced) terrorists and their Palestinian government leaders. The double standards are blatant. They reflect the same pathology that antisemitism has shown down through the ages. Zionism is not the problem, Choudury, anymore than Jews in general are the problem, but antisemitism is one of the greatest threats to world peace in our age. Antisemitic mythologies have already contributed to a world war and today fuel jihadi groups and rule the Muslim mind. This demonization of the only non-Muslim, non-Arab state in the Middle East is the problem, and Jews have nothing to do with it. It is a pathology in the minds of those, Muslim and non-Muslim, who will demonize Jews no matter what they do. It is antisemitism, finding new myths in every century, that gives rise to the "killing spree ... continu(ing) generation after generation." Those who contribute to such thinking are not decent people, though they like to pretend to high moral outrage against mythological Jewish atrocities. The hollowness of this is shown in their indifference to much worse atrocities by the enemies of the Jews. How fortunate it is that now Jews can actually defend themselves against such evil-minded people: they have their own state! Too bad for the antisemites: Israel is here to stay, whether they like it or not. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Blackie, invective is not an argument. Please preserve some derech eretz, even when dealing with such people, not for their sake, but for your own. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Most of Ari H's posts seem to demonstrate that he has a real problem with organizations with a positive view of Israel and/or Jewish matters, but none with those that have anti-Israel or anti-Jewish agendas - like Human Rights Watch, the "Breaking the Silence" report, and the like. Simply having the support of mainstream Jewish community organizations, for example, disqualifies HonestReporting.com and Camera.org from being trustworthy media critics websites in his eyes, while anti-Zionist funding or support for Breaking the Silence, HRW, and similar organizations don't raise any problems in his mind concerning their objectivity. In regard to HonestReporting.com and Camera.org, he damns them even though their detailed analyses and multitude of instances from most media groups demonstrate beyond the shadow of a doubt that the media in general does indeed bias the news against Israel. Ari H doesn't want to hear it. He suggests that his amateur reading of various articles gives a better insight. Now he objects to Gerald Steinberg's NGO Monitor because it publishes some scathing and very effective criticisms of Human Rights Watch, on the grounds that Steinberg is known to be supportive of Israel. Imagine that, supportive of Israel - can it really be so? So he simply ignores and passes by in silence the solid and specific evidence presented by Steinberg of the long-standing and strong bias of Joe Stork and Sarah Leah Whitson, fully evident even before they joined HRW (so they should never have been appointed to their positions with that organization if it had any integrity), and he similarly ignores the very ineffective defenses of them by John Roth, well refuted by Steinberg and Jeffrey Goldberg in various critical articles. It turns out that Stork even attempted to justify the Palestinian terrorists who perpetrated the Munich Olympics massacres, back when they occurred, and despite his disclaimer his bias continues in much the same way in regard to Palestinian terrorism at present. In no way, given the record of their non-HRW activities, can it be said that Whitson and Stork are neutral or objective referees. Steinberg shows this. Ari H doesn't like it. So instead of dealing with the message, he tries to shoot the messenger. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Quite a few neo-Nazi contributors to this item! The subject really brings them out of the woodwork. "Steve" even offers us such priceless insights as the (actually non-existent) 150,000 Jewish soldiers in the Wehrmacht, the (mythical) non-existence of the Holocaust, the disinterest of the Nazis in death camps, and also the elaborate pie-in-the-sky that was all that the dear Nazis really wanted all along and the mean ole world just didn't give them. About those "Jewish" soldiers in the Wehrmacht: actually, all Nazi soldiers had to present documentary evidence of their Aryanness. As the Nuremberg laws back in the 30s spelled out, Jews were defined racially and in terms of percentage of racial backgrounds, and those with two or less "Jewish" grandparents might still have a future in Nazi Germany as lesser beings, if they proved themselves thoroughly Aryan and antisemitic. These "Jewish" grandparents, of course, might well be themselves converts to Christianity or otherwise entirely non-Jewish in outlook, and most of the Halb-Juden and lesser Mischlinge did not even know of their partial Jewish ancestry until the terrible truth was revealed to them through documentary searches. They were almost all thoroughly Nazi themselves. Their plight was pitiable. As for those with more Jewish grandparents, whether Christians or not, they were sent off to the concentration camps. But even worse is the phony "Jew" act played by "Thomas" in his post. "We" Jews! That's a good one. "We think of us being better than the rest and that is way so much hate is put towards us" (sic: can't even spell). And the little reference to those darn Rothschilds, a favorite bete noire of the more rabid antisemites. Neither of these two posters belong on this site. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 If you say so, Terry. After all, antisemitism has at various periods even in the recent past overwhelmed majority populations, played a part in world wars, expressed itself in outright genocide, influenced many classic works in Western and Middle Eastern literature and religious scriptures, and is now at 90% in most Arab countries. Antisemitism is a clear and present danger to the world, not the Jews, not Israel, but antisemitism. It has been a major and central expression of authoritarian and especially totalitarian movements down through the centuries. It has been "justified" by all kinds of intellectual contructions in defense of all kinds of currently fashionable ideas. Hatred and delegitimization of the only Jewish state in the world is a major obsession of many especially on the left within the Western self-considered intelligentsia and artistic elite. Since antisemitism has appealed to so many contradictory groups, anti-capitalist, anti-communist, anti-religious and anti-secular, anti-traditional and anti-modernist, there are a multitude of clever and fashionable ways it might appeal to the 50+ signers, who might therefore buy into it in some ways without endorsing all other expressions of it. So people can be more or less antisemitic in practice and belief. Denying the legitimacy of Tel Aviv is antisemitic in foundation. But this does not mean that each signer is fully antisemitic in other respects. And even if they are, this still does not mean that they knowingly endorse the consequences of their own delegitimization of Israel, which of course is the annihilation and wiping out of the entire city, along with the rest of the state. There is naturally no other way, realistically speaking, that Tel Aviv would disappear. You can depend on it: the Israelis would defend their right to life and to live in Israel. But many of the 50 + signers may well just be the usual sort of artistic and faddish simpletons. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Let us apply this to the case at hand: David Hicks. We can start with the Obsessiveness: he certainly spends a good deal of time posting comments on this Jewish site. All of these gratuitous comments, whether on topic or off, and regardless of the subject dealt with, are intended to offend and hurt its Jewish readers. The posts therefore chiefly convey hatred and desire to harm as many Jews as possible. And there is a consistent phony tone of moral outrage in all of this. Let us take for example Hicks's complaints about the alleged production, by some Jews in Melbourne, Australia, of anti-Palestinian "T-shirts." This may or may not be true. However, it says nothing about mainstream Jewish behavior one way or another, either in Melbourne or elsewhere. It is not as if any Jewish leaders either in Melbourne, Israel or anywhere else are wearing such shirts, much less advocating the murderous sentiments allegedly printed on them. We find no Zionist howling crowds wearing such T-shirts nor chanting such sentiments, although precisely such sorts of rabble-rousing hate-incitement, including offensive T-shirts, placards and explicit calls for "Death to Jews!" and "Annihilation to Israel" have prominently marked anti-Zionist/antisemitic rallies, and been loudly egged on by leading pro-Palestinian spokespeople at such rallies, in Australia and elsewhere in recent years. Such sentiments are mainstream amongst the Palestinians, permeating their political announcements and demands, their media, their educational system and books, and their aggression. But such sentiments are extremely marginal amongst Jews. By using instances in this heavily slanted manner, on the one hand Israel and Jews elsewhere are condemned and delegitimized, but on the other hand, magically, the Palestinians and their antisemitic supporters are raised up into legitimacy. So Hicks is, as we can see, definitely trying to smear and demonize the whole Zionist cause with selected atypical occasional "negative examples" (that might not even be true, but which even in his version are very marginal and do not involve any mainstream nor representative Jewish spokespeople or groups). This alleged default among a few Jews is offered as justification for delegitimizing the whole Zionist cause. And it rests on double standards, as mentioned. This is just one instance from Hicks's contributions at the JTA website. The others show the same thing. The case Hicks and others of the same sort try to make does not connect with the reality of Jewish life and values, Zionism or Israel. It is bound to miss the mark, because rather than confront and acknowledge the living complex and basically very positive reality of Zionism and Israel, or the very tough neighborhood Israel is in and its terrorist-oriented enemies, it is solely interested in building a case against Jews, in the service of hatred. Demonization, delegitimization, double-standards, and, finally, aggressive obsessiveness: these are the classic hallmarks of antisemitism down through the ages. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Natan Sharansky has provided a very useful shorthand definition of antisemitism which also indicates how it differs from legitimate criticism of Israel or Zionism, or the criticism that normally occurs in all democracies: his “three Ds” are demonization, delegitimation, and double standards.  The demonization is shown in a sole interest by the antisemite in negative interpretations of “Zionist” and/or Jewish matters, to an extent that puts Jews into a unique and utterly evil category (often knowingly using outright falsehoods to do so), from which comes the delegitimation (they have no right to self-determination, for example, nor for self-defense), and perhaps most tellingly, the use of double standards: the very things that are ignored or justified in the enemies of the Jews, or even praised despite their being far worse than anything on the Jewish side, are condemned in the Jews themselves, to the point where even morally restrained self-defense by them is seen as a crime against humanity. Minor and/or unrepresentative failings are blown up by them to major "typical" evils, while major and typical evils amongst Israel's enemies are diminished to "understandable" excesses "in response to Jewish crimes," or even mere inventions by Zionists. To this we can add another trait characteristic of rabid antisemites, i.e., the most extreme of them, which is aggressive obsessiveness: antisemites cannot leave Jews alone.  They spend a lot of time trying to offend them and to attack them, including nowadays bombarding Jewish blogs on the internet.  Such traits, characteristic of so much anti-Zionism, fully justify the term antisemitism.  However, anti-Zionism is already highly suspect as such of being antisemitic in nature, since it does not rest on criticism of any particular thing per se while allowing its basic decency, as would legitimate criticism, but rejects it in essence, using false premises and demonizing mythologies. Its whole message is that only one national liberation movement in the world is illegitimate and innately tainted, the Jewish one. Jewish self-affirmation is bad as such, unlike that of any other group. This badness is so complete that any atrocity or evil response at all, even genocidal attempts against Israel by its enemies. is excused. The only good Jews such antisemites will recognize are highly marginal and alienated anti-Jewish Jews, like Norman Finkelstein (specifically praised by Hicks), who seek every forum (even neo-Nazi journals!) to criticise Jewish self-affirmation and Jewish self-defense. These antisemitic Jews (some of whom are even willing to support Yasser Arafat the murderer of countless Jews, and stand with Ahmadinejab who vows to wipe out Israel and attack Jews elsewhere in a new Holocaust) are given great play by gentile Jew-haters, constituting the current version of the standard antisemitic disclaimer that "Some of my best friends are Jews." Their choice of "good Jews" proves their antisemitism just by itself. So yes, hostility to Israel and Zionism is the currently "permissible" form of antisemitism, the same antisemitism that inspired the Nazis and drove the Soviets. In fact, since Israel, as its very name declares, and Zionism too, are both founded on the ages-old Jewish attachment to their Holy Land, since Israel is peopled by Jewish refugees from around the world, including survivors of the genocide of the Nazis, and since Israel (as a thoroughly democratic state) naturally expresses the Zionist will and views of the vast majority of its mostly Jewish citizens, hostility to it and to its basic ideology as such connotes hostility to the Jews in it. Additionally, overwhelming percentages of Jews outside Israel support its right to exist and to defend itself. So demonizing Israel also leads to demonization of Jews everywhere, and delegitimizing it leads to delegitimization of any group self-affirmation or self-defense by the Jewish people anywhere. We see such delegitimatization in this very blog, in the "outrage" of antisemitic posters that any Jews or the IDF itself might defend Israel, or even that Jewish media watchdogs (supported by mainstream Jewish organizations - horrors to betsy!) might criticise the often blatantly one-sided anti-Zionist tendency of the general media, or whatever. The suspicion of antisemitic motivations for anti-Zionist polemicists further increases when one notes that they studiously ignore or if that is not possible try to justify every flaw and every kind of openly praised atrocity and inhumanity perpetrated by Israel's enemies, while Israel, for its part, is held by them to a standard of saintly "perfection" that, when it is not reached is used as confirmation of Israel/Zionism's demonic nature and illegitimacy. Such bias goes far beyond legitimate criticism of this or that specific issue. It is not found in the criticisms directed to any other nation. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Some of the posters here are angry at the evident ill-will, even outright malice, of those antisemites and anti-Zionists who choose to bombard this Jewish website with their droppings. And yes, sometimes they express themselves in objectionable ways as a result. When attacked directly, people often respond that way. Nevertheless, Israel is not a racist state, although the Palestinian Authority is racist in every respect. In Israel, racist statements and hate-incitement are considered sufficient reasons to de-register a political party, as Kach was de-registered. But, it is very significant, Kach never got more than 1% of the vote in any election. Compare that to the dominant and mainstream role of both Hamas and Fatah amongst the Palestinians, or the over 90% antisemitism rampant in almost all Arab countries according to the Pew Global Survey "The Great Divide: How Westerners and Muslims View Each Other" for June 2006 (http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=253). The "behaviours of the Zionist Statee of Israel ... decade after decade" are indeed plain to see, unless you have a log in your eye. It is a vigorous, stable and strongly liberal democracy, with all the usual features of Western liberal democracy, including extending full citizenship to Israeli Arabs whether Christian or Muslim and all civil rights. Indeed, they extend these civil rights further than are found in almost any other Western democracy when it comes to tolerating treasonous behavior from those who are openly allied to their enemies. Israeli Arabs have for example enjoyed the right to set up anti-Zionist political parties and send off their political leaders to Syria and Lebanon to appear on TV with them in solidarity with their anti-Israel and antisemitic policies. I am referring to Azmi Bishara, founder of the Balad Party, who after his trips took up again his Parliamentary post, only later to be discovered to have committed espionage and aided Israel's enemies in more concrete ways, which finally led to his resignation from the Kenesset and his being indicted for treason, espionage and money-laundering. Frankly, no other country in an on-going state of cold or hot war would have been so patient. Israel is a multi-racial society. This is so not only in regard to its extending citizenship to non-Jews of all backgrounds and races, but even in regard to Jews, whose racial backgrounds range from Ethiopian to Indian, from Chinese to Aryan, from Arab to ancient Biblical Jews. The converts to Judaism down through the ages include just about all the races of humanity. In no way would any knowledgeable defender of Israel "drop away and disappear" in response to your reproaches. I dare say that no other state in modern (or ancient) history has treated a considerable portion of its own population having direct links and kinship with the chief enemies of the state, as well as Israel has done. No other Western democracy has so good a record. As for the behavior of Israel's army: it takes extraordinary measures to avoid civilian casualties in the battles and wars forced upon it by annihilatory and terrorist enemies. The trumped up charges of various biased groups do not change the reality, which is in fact one that almost no other state at war can match. I notice that you do not even bother to deny your own extremely racist statements, which are a matter of the public record. You just try to deflect criticism by commending yourself for your restraint on this website. How is it then that your antisemitism is so obvious to all? I refer you again to Sharansky's "three Ds" and my comments thereon. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 But quite apart from where Tel Aviv was and is located, the supposition that land inside Israel proper is "contested ground" essentially supports the peace-rejecting anti-Zionist polemic that Israel has no legitimacy per se, even within the 1967 borders, and, because Palestinians wish to wipe it out, we must conclude that all of it is merely "contested ground." The United Nations itself radified the establishment of Israel in 1948, after resolving that it had a right to be established in 1947. All the major nations of the world endorsed this and recognized Israel, and even Egypt and Jordan have joined them in this, formally declaring peace with it. Israel at least within the green line is not contested ground at all, although we may properly accept that the West Bank and Gaza can be characterized as "Disputed Territory" (not "Occupied," for reasons I have given elsewhere at this website), and so when the Palestinians are willing to come to a real peace treaty, adjustments can be made to provide for a state of "Palestine" that has never existed as such up to now in history. Contested borders, by the way, do not mean that the states involved are "contested," only that the borders at certain points are. No illegitiimacy arises from this. There are plenty of nations whose borders are still contested, but no one for example supposes that China is "contested" and illegitimate because of its aggression against India and seizures of certain areas, its contested takeover of Tibet, its contested claims on Taiwan, or other conflict regions. Or that Russia is illegitimate because of its dubious borders now enclosing such satellites as Western Ossetia and Chechnya. Spain still occasionally suffers from separatist terrorist movements "contesting" various provinces; no one supposes that Spain does not exist legitimately. Saudi Arabia's border with Yemen is contested; does that mean that all of Saudi Arabia is "contested territory" and that it is not a legitimate state? Just to repeat something from a previous thread, there are four chief traits of antisemitism: Demonization, Delegitimatization, Double Standards (Natan Sharansky's "three Ds") and Obsessiveness. The attempt to wish away Israel's very successful 60 years of existence shows the "delegitimization" trait quite clearly, and so does the underlying demonizing supposition that Israel alone among the nations of the world is illegitimate: this is also blatant double standards. As for obsessiveness, see Ehren's other posts at this Jewish website. I would suggest to him that he grow up, stop picking on others, and get a life. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Sorry, I misspelled the address, leaving out a "d": it is http://www.paulbogdanor.com/israel.html 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Tel Aviv was not a neighborhood of Jaffa. It was uninhabited sand-dunes a good distance from Jaffa. Nobody lived there when Jews fleeing Arab attacks in Jaffa moved there for safety and security. Consult any standard history of the period. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Mr. Ehrens, just a question out of idle curiosity: are you German or the descendant, mayhap, of Nazi parents? Your use of terms like "der Staat," "das Volk" and "das Vaterland" may be your normal terminology in conversation, and obviously springs from your own usage, since there is nothing like it in Israel, in which even German Jewish survivors of the Holocaust speak Hebrew in preference. So are you just innocently using your normal language? The President of Ben-Gurion University may or may not be right in upholding basic patriotism and decency of discourse in academic declarations, but in any case slurring her and those who agree with her with your own Nazistic terminology really says nothing about her, and everything about you. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Actually, HonestReporting.com and CAMERA.org are essential reading for those wishing to find out what the news actually is, as opposed to what various biased media types want it to be. Those watchdog sites have revealed specific and detailed instances of the very many distortions and untruths accepted in the general press. Actually, those two websites, and others like them, put paid to the standard antisemitic and anti-Zionist line that Jews control the media. The truth is the opposite: they are subjected to a constant double standard and warped reporting. Naturally, however, rabid antisemites object even to the occasional positive interpretation given in some media articles. So they continue with their claims of Zionist/Jewish control of the media and even of the Western democracies. Ehrens, Vlad Observer, Hicks and others exemplify these traits. Let us for the sake of economy only deal with one of these critics. David Hicks, it has been reported that you or your namesake, the terrorist imprisoned at Quantanamo prison, said that you intended to "go back to Australia and rob and kill Jews ... crash a plane into a building" and to "go out with that last big adrenaline rush." Of course these statements were later denied but in your diary as published you stated that quite properly "Muslims fight against Jews and kill them." It appears that you or your namesake has finally given up Islam, but antisemitism seems to have been deeper rooted, having flourished before the conversion to Islam and continuing after it. Racist comments about the Jewish control of the media pervade this diary, as they do in letters to Hicks' father. So "David Hicks"-style protests against the so-called racism of defenders of Israel ring very hollow indeed. It is very similar to the claims of Israeli genocide, ethnic cleansing or militarism by those Palestinian military groups who officially and openly demand ethnic cleansing of Jews from "Palestine" and actually commit genocidal terrorist acts against Jews and seek their general annihilation, or the use of other "Nazi" epithets against Jews by those who are the direct inheritors and perpetuators of Nazistic policies today. Nor do these critics of Israel, who pretend to high moral outrage about its alleged atrocities and injustices, even give a peep about the actual constant atrocities and injustices of the Palestinians, whether against Israelis and Jews, or against other Palestinians. Rather than take their comments seriously, then, just log on to HonestReporting.com and CAMERA.org and find out what really "lies behind the news." Other very good sites are: www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/myths2/cover.html and www.paulboganor.com/israel.html 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Referring to the security fence as a "Wall" is incorrect, Mr. Ehrens. Something like 95% of the security barrier is a fence. That is where it runs through open land. But in urban areas, it is a wall to prevent the kind of firing from Palestinian areas that occurred hourly from Bethlehem during the Second Intifada, aiming at pedestrians, cars, apartment windows, and the like. That wall constitutes only 5% of the security barrier. Those who characterize the barrier as a "Wall" (or even an "Apartheid Wall") are 95% liars. Security fence is far far more accurate. And it works. The Second Intifada came to a halt. Even the terrorist organizations themselves have admitted that the erection of the security fence was a chief reason for this. E.g., this item appeared in early 2008: http://www.terrorism-info.org.il/malam_multimedia/English/eng_n/html/ct_250308e.htm   Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Israel Intelligence Heritage & Commemoration Center (IICC) March 26, 2008     The leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad again admits that the Israeli security fence built by Israel in Judea and Samaria prevents the terrorist organizations from reaching the heart of Israel to carry out suicide bombing attacks   Overview 1. PIJ leader Ramadan Abdallah Shalah was interviewed in Damascus by the Qatari newspaper Al-Sharq. He said that the second intifada was currently characterized by rocket fire , which had replaced the previous stage of suicide bombing attacks. That, he said, was because the enemy [i.e., Israel ] had found ways and means to protect itself from such attacks: "… For example, they built a separation fence in the West Bank . We do not deny that it limits the ability of the resistance [i.e., the terrorist organizations] to arrive deep within [Israeli territory] to carry out suicide bombing attacks , but the resistance has not surrendered or become helpless, and is looking for other ways to cope with the requirements of every stage [of the intifada]…" (Al-Sharq, March 23, 20008 ). 2. It was not the first time that senior figures of the PIJ and Hamas, the two terrorist organizations which carried out the greatest number of suicide bombing attacks against Israel, have publicly admitted that the security fence makes it difficult for them to carry out suicide bombing attacks within Israel : 1) PIJ leader Ramadan Abdallah Shalah told Hezbollah's Al-Manar TV that the terrorist organizations had no intention of abandoning suicide bombing attacks but that their timing and the possibility of carrying them out from the West Bank depended on other factors. "For example," he said, "there is the separation fence which is an obstacle to the resistance [i.e., the terrorist organizations], and if it were not there, the situation would be entirely different" 1 (Al-Manar TV, November 11, 2006 ). 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 [Continued from previous post] At the outbreak of WW2 Banna also appealed to Nazi Germany for help in fighting against the British backed monarchy in Egypt. MB even helped spy on the movement of British troops for the Nazis. The Nazi party’s ascent to power through exploiting democratic means inspired Banna to similarly use democracy as a tool to take power. The best known Nazi sympathiser in the Muslim brotherhood was Banna’s friend Hajj al-Amin Housseni, who worked to propagate Nazi propaganda. Housseni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, instigated riots against the Jews in 1929 (which destroyed the 3000-year old Jewish community in Hebron) and again in 1936 before visiting Nazi Germany in 1941. The founder of Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT), Taqiuddin al-Nabhani, who prior to establishing HT was involved with the MB, also associated with Housseni. Another prominent member of the Muslim brotherhood was Syed Qutb. Qutb’s books, especially ‘Milestones’ and ‘Social Justice in Islam’ played a key part in formulating Islamism’s violent ideology. Qutb also wrote an essay called “Our struggle against the Jews” in which he condemns the Jews as being the root of all evil. Although he was executed in 1966, his works continue to be a source of inspiration for militant Islamist movements like al-Qaeda. Members of the Muslim Brotherhood assassinated the prime minister of Egypt in 1948 and, in the following year, Hasan al-Banna himself was assassinated, it is rumoured by the Egyptian intelligence services. His MB movement is today the largest Islamist party in the world and its offshoots, from Hamas to the Muslim Association of Britain, are active around the globe. Hamas also distribute literature such as ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ and also encourage the killing of all Jews. The founding charter of Hamas not only makes reference to ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ but it calls for the destruction of the State of Israel with which Hamas states that it can never have permanent peace. However just as the Nazis did, Hamas is prepared to use democracy as a tactic to get to power. Hasan al-Banna was an anti-Semitic bigot who supported Nazism. His Muslim Brotherhood movement remains true to those ideas today. http://www.hurryupharry.org/2009/09/01/hasan-al-banna-brotherhood-jihad-and-nazism/ 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 The following article, appearing today on the HurryUpHarry blog, is relevant to this article on Tutu, the Nazi links to the Arab world, Hamas and Fatah, etc. Hasan al-Banna: Brotherhood, Jihad and Nazism Your View, September 1st 2009, 9:39 pm This is a guest post by Raziq **** The Muslim Brotherhood is the largest Islamist party in the world today. It also claims to be a democratic party. In this article I look at its founderHasan al-Banna, the reasons why he established the Muslim Brotherhood, and his Nazi sympathies. Hasan al-Banna was born in 1906 to a poor family in Southern Egypt. During his teenage years he took part in demonstrations against British Rule. He later went on to become a school teacher and in 1928 founded the ‘The Muslim Brotherhood’ (MB), the world’s largest Islamist group. Although the end of the Ottoman Empire was brought about by Turkish secular Muslims, some Muslims, like Banna, blamed “the West” and thus he established the MB with the aim of creating an Islamist State in direct antithesis to western ideals. Banna was able to recruit from a large cross-section of Egyptian society by manipulating issues such as social inequality, public health and the growing conflict in Palestine. Banna claimed his group would solve all these problems and thereby resurrect lost Arab glories. According to Banna, the Ottomans and every other non-Arab Muslim power had not properly understood Islam. Banna lists this as one of the reasons why these Muslim empires failed in the past: “The transfer of authority to non-Arabs: Persians at one time, at another, the Mamluks, Turks and others who had never had the genuine taste of Islam, and whose hearts had never been illuminated with the light of the Qur’an because of the difficulty they encountered in trying to grasp its concepts, even though they read the words of Allah (swt)…” (Between Yesterday and Today by Hasan al-Banna, Pg 5, Prelude Ltd, 1997) This is a strange statement considering that the Ottoman Muftis had been giving fatwas to Muslims around the world for over 500 years. It was also under the Ottoman Turks that Muslim power reached its zenith. But none of this mattered to Banna, as far as he was concerned only his party had the correct political model. Banna also believed in the compulsory nature of aggressive jihad: “All Muslims must make jihad –Jihad is an obligation from Allah on every Muslim and cannot be ignored or evaded.” (The Way of Jihad by Hassan al-Banna, Pg 2) But Banna preferred to fight the Jihad once the MB had wrested state power from all rivals: “It is Fard (obligatory) on us to fight with our enemies. The Imam must send a military expedition to the Dar al-Harb (land of war) every year at least once or twice, and the people must support him in this” (The Way of Jihad by Hassan al-Banna, Pg 8, Prelude Ltd, 1997) To get to power Banna was even prepared to ally with the likes of the Nazis. Banna’s ideology and the Nazi ideology were quite similar. The Nazis wanted to create an expansionist empire with a Fuhrer at its head; Banna wanted a Caliphate with a religious leader at its head. In the 30s and 40s the MB worked tirelessly to propagate Nazi propaganda in the Middle East. Members of the MB translated Hitler’s book ‘Mein Kampf’ into Arabic, calling it ‘My jihad’ and they also propagated the notorious anti-Semitic forgery ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’. [I will continue this in the next post, so as not to run over our word-limit.] 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 The "Hassan al-Banna" referred to in the Lipsky article is the Muslim Brotherhood, which developed in Egypt from the 1920s on, was heavily influenced by Nazi ideology and support, threatened to take over Egypt at several points in the past decades, was responsible for the assassination of Anwar Sadat (who himself was a Nazi agent during WWII, ironically enough), and has spread into most neighboring Arab countries. Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, and shares all its antisemitic obsessions. Another big influence from the Nazis was on the Ba'athist Party of Syria and of Iraq. Saddam Hussain was head of the Ba'athist Party of Iraq. Syria today is still run by the Syrian Ba'athist Party. Basically, the Ba'athists as secular racists were even purer Arab versions of the Nazis than the Muslim Brotherhood (which was of course grounded in Islamic religion), just shifting the "Master Race" from the Aryan race to the Arab race. The Palestine Liberation Organization was at first loudly "secular," under Yasser Arafat, and had an explicitly racist understanding of Palestinian national identity. As tutored by his uncle the Mufti, Arafat was in his early years deeply and directly shaped by Nazi antisemitic ideas and bloodlust values. But of course, Arafat, like the Mufti himself, was also acting from Muslim commitments too, and this became more explicit with the years. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Supporters of the Palestinians consistently refuse to face the Nazi links of its 1930s and 40s leadership, including the mentor of Yasser Arafat, his own uncle, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and, even more damning, the continuation of Nazi themes, methods, media and education indoctrination and even the specific genocidal antisemitic goals, by the present Palestinian leadership, both Hamas and Fatah. Tutu is wrong to assert that the poor Palestinians are paying for Europe's guilt. Seth Lipsky, in his article "The Mufti Demarch: Why Avigdor Lieberman Wants to Circulate a Photo of Hitler and the Mufti," http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/12017/the-mufti-demarche/ writes: "Jeffrey Goldberg, in a dispatch issued by The New York Times in January 2008, considered the question of how the anti-Jewish ideas being used by Iranian agencies such as Hezbollah were able to 'work their way into modern-day Islamist discourse.' He reasons that they were imported from Europe, and quoted a German scholar, Matthias Küntzel, as warning of their seriousness. Küntzel, Goldberg noted, 'makes a bold and consequential argument: the dissemination of European models of anti-Semitism among Muslims was not haphazard, but an actual project of the Nazi Party, meant to turn Muslims against Jews and Zionism.' "Küntzel was quoted by Goldberg as saying that the mufti and the 'Egyptian proto-Islamist' Hassan al-Banna 'willingly and knowingly carried Nazi ideology directly to the Muslim masses.' Goldberg reckons that Hassan al-Banna 'did not embrace Nazism in the same uncomplicated manner' as the mufti, but he quotes Küntzel as saying his movement was subsidized with German funds that enabled it to, among other things, distribute Arabic translations of, among other tomes, Mein Kampf. He quoted Küntzel as writing that across the Arab world, 'Nazi methods and ideology whipped up anti-Zionist fervor, and the effects of this concerted campaign are still being felt today.' "Goldberg offered a caveat, saying that 'one doesn't have to be soft on Germany to believe it was organic Muslim ideas as well as Nazi ideas that led to the spread of anti-Semitism in the Middle East.' But he concluded that Küntzel was 'right to state that we are witnessing a terrible explosion of anti-Jewish hatred in the Middle East.' Goldberg quoted his own interview with a former leader of Hamas, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, who said: 'The question is not what the Germans did to the Jews, but what the Jews did to the Germans.' Goldberg ended by quoting Küntzel as arguing that we should see men like Rantisi for what they are: heirs to the mufti, and heirs to the Nazis. "In other words, the more one gets into it, the more it is plain that Avigdor Lieberman knows just what he is doing—and is doing it for good reason." Actually, Lipsky and Goldberg could have quoted more than just the work of Küntzel, Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 (2007 - for a summary, see http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/014/080ruyhg.asp?pg=1). E.g., Klaus-Michael Mallman and Martin Cüppers, Halbmond und Hakenkreuz. Das Dritte Reich, die Araber und Palästina (2008). and Klaus Gensicke, Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten (2008) have also documented in thorough detail the extensive involvement of the Nazis in the Middle East, through Haj Amin el-Husaini and others, spreading rabid antisemitism which still festers to this day. See, on Gensicke's book, the review by John Rosenthal: http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/17089176.html Gensicke stresses that native Muslim antisemitism was a very important factor in the eager "take-up" of Nazi antisemitic themes. On this native Muslim antisemitism, also see the devastating and magisterial anthology of original sources and scholarly articles, Andrew Bostom, ed., The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History (2008), the best survey of the subject available in any language. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 It really isn't even a matter of stifling debate, as some egregiously argumentative types claim. It is just a matter of being civil and humane about one's criticism, not attacking the person but just the issue and in a way that empathetically allows for decency and good intentions on the other side. Of course, this presumes that there are decency and good intentions on the other side. I would draw the line at some of the antisemitic posters to JTA blogs. But here we are talking of basically positive debates, premised on the legitimacy of both sides. In that context, more derech eretz means more morality, because derech eretz (good manners, civility) is actually a moral matter, not just an etiquette issue. It means acknowledging the other person and not trying to dominate him/her. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 David Hicks, you are perhaps the recruit to al-Qaeda arrested by the Americans and thrown into prison, recently released in Australia? Perhaps if not you should change your name. As for the claim that Israel is in "Occupied Palestine" and is racist, what a laugh. I see that an earlier post of mine that refutes that claim has been overlooked by you. So I post it again. The West Bank and Gaza are often characterized as “Occupied Land,” illegally held by Israel.   This is false for five reasons:   A.  Israel won that land in a defensive war of survival launched by its enemies in 1967, so it has that land by legal right, in international law.  It may decide to return SOME of it as part of a final peace treaty, which is all that U.N. Resolution 242 actually calls for, but at present the most that can be claimed is that the land is “Disputed,” not “Occupied.”   B. How can a state be “occupied” by another state when the “occupied” state has never existed? There never was an independent Arab state of “Palestine,” or having any other name, occupying just the Biblical Israel or with a capital in Jerusalem or elsewhere in Biblical Israel, so its land and borders never existed and cannot be “occupied.”  During the past 1,400 years of Muslim domination of the Middle East, there was never a Muslim state of Palestine nor were there even calls for such a state by its Arab inhabitants, nor were these territories called “occupied Palestine” when they were held by Jordan and Egypt before 1967. Its borders therefore can only first be determined by final peace negotiations which have not yet occurred.   C. After the League of Nations and U.N. British Mandate ended over Palestine in 1948, Arab states and military groups refused to accept the U.N. resolution to devolve the territories to a Jewish and a new Palestinian Arab state, and invaded to take over the entire area.  Jordan and Egypt appropriated the portions of the territory that Israel did not hold; this appropriation was illegal. They did not set up a “Palestine” on those lands, but instead incarcerated the Palestinians in refuge camps and gave them neither rights nor even financial support.  They lost these territories in the 1967 war to Israel, the only legally constituted state of the region.  If the land is “occupied” at all, then, it is as “occupied Jordan” or “occupied Egypt.” Nevertheless neither Egypt nor Jordan continue to demand return of these territories to themselves, so they are not “occupied” Jordan or Egypt.  They therefore belong only to Israel. Israel does not want to incorporate them fully into Israel, and, in full accordance with U.N. Resolution 242, with allowance for negotiated adjustments to final borders to take account of Israel’s entirely legitimate and justified security concerns, has held the land in trust until a proper peace treaty is agreed to with a legitimate Arab partner willing to take them over. D. Under the Oslo Accords, Israel has sought to cooperate in creating such a legitimate peace partner in bestowing full internal administration of the Palestinian Authority population and cities to the P.A.; Israel does not occupy those areas. It has fully withdrawn from Gaza, and only enters the P.A. and mans check-points to apprehend criminal terrorists that the P.A. refuses to arrest or punish.  As the P.A. takes over that function, as it actually has in the last year or so (chiefly because its Fatah leaders now really want to suppress Hamas and associated jihadi militants, simply to stay in power), those check-points can and are being withdrawn.  In simple fact, therefore, Israel occupies neither the West Bank nor Gaza today.  Those areas are entirely what the Palestinians have made of them.  “Occupation” has only been an excuse by them for monumental maladministration, corruption (the billions of dollars in international aid has gone chiefly into a few leaders’ bank accounts, but have slowly lifted the economy while still only slightly ameliorating Palestinian unemployment), scapegoating hatred and war.  E. Gaza raises another issue.  It is sometimes claimed that Israel still “occupies” Gaza since it controls the entry points into Israel and limits supplies to the essentials of food and medicine.  On the other hand, Egypt controls the entry point into Egypt, and does the same.  Does Egypt “occupy” Gaza?  If attempts to restrict supplies to a country at war equates to “occupation,” then certainly Nazi Germany “occupied” England during the Second World War, which would be news to the British, and the Allies for their part “occupied” Nazi-held Europe, which would make the Second World War incomprehensible. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 It is completely in character for Mr. Evans to claim that none of his posts have been refuted, and that mere opinions have been offered in opposition to his factual links. I have shown in post after post how false his claims are, giving factual evidence and specific rebuttals. Now he lies about those posts, saying I have not presented factual, evidence-based rebuttals or disproofs, when I had. Let us start with the Ben Gurion "quotes." His links for this, as is evident, are to highly polemical websites and authors, known for their own unreliability. E.g., he cites Ilan Pappe, the well-known far-left (even Trotsky-ite) ideologue, whose writings on Israel have been thoroughly demolished even by fellow "New Historian" Benny Morris. Pappe has been shown to make up his own evidence, and cannot be relied upon by any genuine scholar; he is therefore ignored by mainstream scholarship but much loved and cited by far leftists and others who are anti-Zionists/antisemites. (Interestingly, Mr. Evans also likes to use Norman Finklestein as a source against Jews, although Finklestein is a contributor to Holocaust denial journals on the far right.) In rebuttal to the Ben Gurion false quotes, in any case, I provided a link in this thread, back on the 26th of August, to http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=7&x_issue=57&x_article=1521 This link shows in precise detail how some of the very "quotes" Mr. Evans cites have been altered, misattributed or simply fabricated whole-cloth, giving the actual sources (where they are real ones) and dating the false versions and their originators. Another, very good and probing article on these false quotes, placing them in their ages-old antisemitic context and showing again in detail how these "quotations" falsify the real sources, is by Anthony Julius, "False Confessions: How Anti-Zionists Incriminate Zionism," at: http://z-word.com/on-zionism/antisemitism-and-anti-zionism/false-confessions:-how-anti-zionists-incriminate-zionism.html In effect, Mr. Evans wishes to collaborate in creating and disseminating an updated version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, making use of false quotes from Ben Gurion to do so. Now there is an important point that must be made about all this. The very fact that there are any "false quotes" relating to Ben Gurion means that almost certainly all the quotes are false. It is not necessary to waste the time to refute each and every one of them. After all, if any had been genuine, there would have been no need for any fabrications; anti-Zionists could simply have quoted the genuine statements from mainstream histories and authorities (not Ilan Pappe and his thoroughly marginal sort, or some extremist Palestinian website!), and there would be nothing to object to. But the actual sources were clearly not satisfactory for anti-Zionist purposes, and once the malicious originators made up a few false quotes, or misattributed them and rewrote the contexts, there was no barrier to them inventing and distorting yet others and multiplying them ad infinitum, making them worse and worse, and sailing further on into the fairyland of their own malice. Mr. Evans has been caught out red-handed in his own falsification or doctoring of sources and contexts, in his use of Israeli statistics and other data on the rockets and mortars shot off from Gaza over the past few years, during the "cease-fire," and after the Hamas refusal to renew the truce in December. Our first exchanges were on that subject, and I showed by quoting the actual sources more fully than he had, that he selectively used the Israeli sources to give a misleading impression of what they said. I also showed that his reliance on extremely one-sided Hamas and Fatah propaganda sources, including Hamas film units in Shifa Hospital during the Gaza conflict, for his claims about Israeli atrocities failed the smell test. That is not merely an opinion: the tendency of these sources to falsify claims has been well-documented over the years. Another instance however of wilful falsehood is his distortion of President Clinton's own analysis of Arafat's refusal to accept the Camp David peace offer. Etc. The reader can review all this for him- or her-self. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 The West Bank and Gaza are often characterized as “Occupied Land,” illegally held by Israel.   This is false for five reasons:   A.  Israel won that land in a defensive war of survival launched by its enemies in 1967, so it has that land by legal right, in international law.  It may decide to return SOME of it as part of a final peace treaty, which is all that U.N. Resolution 242 actually calls for, but at present the most that can be claimed is that the land is “Disputed,” not “Occupied.”   B. How can a state be “occupied” by another state when the “occupied” state has never existed? There never was an independent Arab state of “Palestine,” or having any other name, occupying just the Biblical Israel or with a capital in Jerusalem or elsewhere in Biblical Israel, so its land and borders never existed and cannot be “occupied.”  During the past 1,400 years of Muslim domination of the Middle East, there was never a Muslim state of Palestine nor were there even calls for such a state by its Arab inhabitants, nor were these territories called “occupied Palestine” when they were held by Jordan and Egypt before 1967. Its borders therefore can only first be determined by final peace negotiations which have not yet occurred.   C. After the League of Nations and U.N. British Mandate ended over Palestine in 1948, Arab states and military groups refused to accept the U.N. resolution to devolve the territories to a Jewish and a new Palestinian Arab state, and invaded to take over the entire area.  Jordan and Egypt appropriated the portions of the territory that Israel did not hold; this appropriation was illegal. They did not set up a “Palestine” on those lands, but instead incarcerated the Palestinians in refuge camps and gave them neither rights nor even financial support.  They lost these territories in the 1967 war to Israel, the only legally constituted state of the region.  If the land is “occupied” at all, then, it is as “occupied Jordan” or “occupied Egypt.” Nevertheless neither Egypt nor Jordan continue to demand return of these territories to themselves, so they are not “occupied” Jordan or Egypt.  They therefore belong only to Israel. Israel does not want to incorporate them fully into Israel, and, in full accordance with U.N. Resolution 242, with allowance for negotiated adjustments to final borders to take account of Israel’s entirely legitimate and justified security concerns, has held the land in trust until a proper peace treaty is agreed to with a legitimate Arab partner willing to take them over. D. Under the Oslo Accords, Israel has sought to cooperate in creating such a legitimate peace partner in bestowing full internal administration of the Palestinian Authority population and cities to the P.A.; Israel does not occupy those areas. It has fully withdrawn from Gaza, and only enters the P.A. and mans check-points to apprehend criminal terrorists that the P.A. refuses to arrest or punish.  As the P.A. takes over that function, as it actually has in the last year or so (chiefly because its Fatah leaders now really want to suppress Hamas and associated jihadi militants, simply to stay in power), those check-points can and are being withdrawn.  In simple fact, therefore, Israel occupies neither the West Bank nor Gaza today.  Those areas are entirely what the Palestinians have made of them.  “Occupation” has only been an excuse by them for monumental maladministration, corruption (the billions of dollars in international aid has gone chiefly into a few leaders’ bank accounts, but have slowly lifted the economy while still only slightly ameliorating Palestinian unemployment), scapegoating hatred and war.  E. Gaza raises another issue.  It is sometimes claimed that Israel still “occupies” Gaza since it controls the entry points into Israel and limits supplies to the essentials of food and medicine.  On the other hand, Egypt controls the entry point into Egypt, and does the same.  Does Egypt “occupy” Gaza?  If attempts to restrict supplies to a country at war equates to “occupation,” then certainly Nazi Germany “occupied” England during the Second World War, which would be news to the British, and the Allies for their part “occupied” Nazi-held Europe, which would make the Second World War incomprehensible. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 It is usual, when schools accept students that do not have the basic standard of education that other students do, that those students are put into special classes for accelerated learning, so that they can catch up and then be placed in the usual classes for that year. This applies in general. It also applies to religious schools, for example for students who do not know Hebrew. E.g., when my children went to a religious school in Ohio after some years in public schools, they were placed in special classes for Hebrew and related studies. After a year or so of hard work they were able to join the regular classes. There is no racism in this, only common sense. If students without the basic understanding of a subject are placed in regular classes, they simply won't learn anything, or will end up disrupting or slowing down the learning of all the other students and earning general resentment. Advancing unprepared students into regular classes actually guarantee their disadvantage at the school, and make it permanent. Something like this (i.e., special introductory classes) occurred with Russian students when they first came to Israel. They worked out well and joined the general classes pretty soon. The racism, then, is really only in the critics who make special exceptions and demand special "favors" (which are no favors at all, as mentioned) because some of the present new students are black. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Folks, Mr. Evans has already been exposed as a serial prevaricator in this very thread, maliciously selecting his sources to defame, doctoring his quotes, when reading Jewish sources or sources favorable to Jews often claiming they say the exact opposite of what they actually say, and so on. Many examples of this have been shown in this thread and refuted. He in his own terminology has already sacrificed his own soul. He talks of "justice" and roots for terrorists and the acolytes of Nazism in the Arab-Israeli conflict, whose goals remain the same as they were in the Second World War. Even when in supposed proof of his non-antisemitism he tries to force out some brief praise of the Jewish religion he cannot bring himself to write "Judaism" - he has to write "Judahism," for reasons I can guess at but which in any case are not complimentary, and which certainly indicate that Jews are not the authority on their own religion. There is no need to respond any further to his contributions. It is enough to repeat that as has been demonstrated for his previous posts, they are all lies, half-truths or distortions. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Additionally, while of course there is much in Mark Anthony's posts that Jews would not accept, his good will is evident and so I thank him for his comments too. Israel needs the support of Mark and those who think as he does, too, and that support, especially when added to that of people of decency and good-will having other outlooks, certainly has helped to counter the violently aggressive and antisemitic sentiments and actions, and the hatred of Western civilization as such (all brought together in their anti-Zionism), coming out of the Arab and Muslim world. The truth is that while Jews and Christians, and indeed people of Muslim and other faiths, have important things about which they disagree, we are all threatened by the inhumane tides of hatred and war, and as well by the moral and spiritual nihilism that pervades too much in the secular sphere. If we can stand together while respecting our differences, and join in resisting such threats to our common existence, we can contribute to a wider communion of peace in the world. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Phili Alawal, thank you for your comments. I hope you are not including my contributions in the "lot of Bull" you refer to, and actually I have been in Israel for extended stays, totaling together almost three years over the past four decades. Every time I return I am amazed at how improved and developed things are since my last visit. Israel, baruch haShem, goes from strength to strength. May it continue to do so. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Ari, you claimed that settlers and Palestinians were similar to each other in their treatment of each other, or at least that saying that settlers were a lot better in their relations was "highly contestable," etc. I refuted that, and now you say that you did not mean to suggest that their behaviors overall were comparable, really, only that beatings of each other, as such, and regardless of relative statistics of such events, were. But you did not make that caveat in your original post. Aside from that, I was not trying to refute you. So get over it. I agree, and said in my first response, that the case should have been tried in court, whatever may have been the surrounding circumstances, which, I do think, cannot justify thuggish behavior outside the law (I guess I did express myself poorly when I spoke of possible things we were not told about the specific individuals involved, and you could reasonably have misunderstood my meaning - what I wanted to indicate was that in such cases, there is always a lot behind things and when we learn them, we often end up changing our opinion about the specific people involved - not always, but often). Another issue: you seemed to be making some blanket condemnations of "settlers" as such. That is stereotypical and prejudiced. I sought with my response to indicate that thuggish behavior is far from being characteristic of settlers, quite the opposite. You may have accepted this: your response just above suggests you now grant we are talking only about "a minority," I would add: a very very small minority. A bit more nuance would be advisable for you, frankly in all your contributions to threads at JTA. Minority behavior should be clearly stated to be such, and majority norms and behavior acknowledged. Moreover, individual behavior needs to be viewed in terms of context, not to justify it necessarily, but simply to understand it. (Of course, some "contexts" are based on erroneous assumptions and need therapeutic correction!) Really, that applies to how we deal with any group or individual. That's my prescription for you. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Actually the old ways, as Mr. Evans calls it, have served Israel very well indeed. They have kept the Jews of Israel alive despite the very best efforts of their enemies, and thus have already been a great success, and moreover they have also produced one of the most dynamic, innovative and happiest countries in the world. I realize it will come as a big surprise to people like Mr. Evans, but opinion polls reveal that Israelis are amongst the happiest and most satisfied population in the world. E.g., in a poll in July 2007, conducted by the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics of over 7,000 people, 83% of Israeli Jews said they were either "happy" or "very happy" with their lives, and around 75% of Israeli Arabs said the same. Amongst the fervently Orthodox, the figure was an astounding 97%, amongst "traditional" Jews 82%, and amongst the secular, 87%. This contentment and success is reflected in one of the lowest suicide rates in the world, and also in one of the lowest rates for alcoholism and drug addiction. Male life expectancy is the second highest in the world, and women's rates are close. Birth rates are well over replacement levels, showing faith in life and the future, and actual purchasing power increases every year. Israel has weathered the world downturn better than the great majority of other Western nations, growing about 4% per annum during the last two years (in significant part due to Netanyahu's economic reforms as Minister of Finance under Sharon). Israel was less than a third world country at its founding, with much of it wasteland and devastated by a desperate war of survival. The refugees that flooded there often had to live in tents. It is now a thoroughly modern state filled with the full infrastructure found in Europe and the U.S., and is near to or on a par with them in income levels and prosperity. Its cafes, restaurants, museums, parks and concert halls are flourishing. One of the major reasons for this astonishing success is ideological: people believe in the value of their lives and their society, as Jews and Zionists, and they know from direct personal involvement that they have moral right and justice on their side. They are proud to be Jews and to be Israelis, and believe in Zionism and the Jewish state as such. Their liberal democracy is a model for the world, extending full freedoms to all its citizens, Jewish and non-Jewish. In fact, Israel is the only country in the Middle East in which the percentage of Christians in the population has increased and not declined over the past 60 years. Above all, as the only Jewish state in the world Israelis have gladly taken in and saved from decimation or utter destruction many diaspora Jewish communities, including about 800,000 refugees from the Arab world. Jewish culture, both religious and secular, is going through a renaissance in israel. revitalizing Jewish life everywhere. Its universities are ranked amongst the best in the world. Israel's 5.5 million Jews produce more Nobel Prize winners than the entire Muslim world with its well over 1 billion people. Their IT centers are literally the equal of Silicon Valley or better, and their computer chips and software probably power or help to power the reader's own computer. Their agricultural and medical advances have improved the lives of the entire planet. Israel rejoices in its cult of life, and gives in this as in so many other respects a complete and instructive contrast to their enemies with their self-declared "cult of death." They have proven themselves in war, too. Though numbering only a few hundred thousand at the time, they stood off the entire might of five Arab countries at their birth, and triumphed. They have similarly prevailed in every single war they were forced into since then. We even notice that those conflicts termed a "failure" by one-eyed critics, like the Lebanon War of 2007, forced Hezbollah back from Israel's borders, and brought to an end the Hezbollah rocket attacks, border incursions and kidnap attempts that caused that war to begin with. Despair away, Mr. Evans, and grind your teeth. This nightmare, as you call it, is solely due to the "cult of death" of Israel's opponents, and they are the ones who are its chief victims. They can bring their nightmare to an end at any time simply by accepting Israel in their midst and making real peace with it. You would be a better friend to them if you encouraged them to make those accommodations. So there is no way your dream of the disappearance of Israel and annihilation of its people is going to happen. Israel is here to stay and it is quite willing to defend itself. You, and the Arab/Muslim world, will just have to get used to it. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 As regards Mr. Evans's Ben-Gurion allegations, they are supported merely by false and doctored quotes, sometimes not even from Ben-Gurion, omitting key words, sentences and/or context, and sometimes even simply fictional. Full demonstration of this in terms of the specific quotes is available from the website address given below. Ben-Gurion did not seek the expulsion of Arabs from Israel or Jewish-controlled areas of Mandate Palestine before Israel's establishment. Indeed, it is a matter of record that the Zionist leadership actually begged the Arabs of Haifa and other areas to stay. I recommend to our readers the CAMERA website as a good general resource for details on false quotes purporting to be from Zionist leaders. There is a whole anti-Zionist sub-industry involved in the manufacture and circulation of these false quotes on the internet. In regard to Ben-Gurion, specifically, and dealing with several of the most "damning" alleged statements by him quoted by Evans, see http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=7&x_issue=57&x_article=1521 This shows us that what we have from antisemites are the words they WISH Zionist leaders had said, to balance the well-documented and openly public recent as well as past racist, frankly antisemitic, ethnic-cleansing and annihilatory statements from Palestinian and other Arab and Muslim leaders (e.g., Ahmadinejab is not Arab, but Persian). They have looked in vain for Zionist leader equivalents, so they take statements from such people as Ben-Gurion or others (Moshe Dayan is another favorite victim for their ventriloquism), add racist clauses to sentences, attribute to a leader something unrepresentative said by a non-entity, or just make things up. The sources Mr. Evans cites for his phony quotes from Ben-Gurion come from such websites. However, it is not accidental that Mr. Evans prefers and constantly collects such extremely one-sided, malicious and fictional material, spending a great deal of time on it, even material defaming Judaism. He clearly also wants to delegitimize the Jewish religion as such. Naturally that will not sway any Jews, but he posts the stuff just to offend and hurt them. For a blog that has as its theme allegations about Gaza human rights violations, that really says a lot about Mr. Evans. It is also way off-topic. I would like to suggest bluntly to the Moderator of this site that Mr. Evans has no further positive value as a contributer. It can be amusing to demonstrate in one subject after another the falsity of his use of sources and his general claims, and thus to show the weakness of the anti-Zionist positions, but a lot of it becomes repetitious and boring after a while, especially since he keeps repeating things already refuted. His posts henceforth should simply be banned. Perhaps other readers can support this suggestion. The internet world is quite wide enough to leave such fanatics room to indulge their hatreds off of Jewish sites. Anyone wishing more of it can go to such sites. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Now we have David R. Evans the theologian and Bible scholar. How rich! His antisemitism runs right down to his toes. I note parenthetically the same selective use of citations and viewpoints in regard to Biblical sources as in his use, for example, of Clinton quotes, Israeli reports on rockets from Gaza, Ben Gurion's sayings, and so on. His "scholarship" serves his hate agenda, and has only accidental relationship to any reality at all, in every area. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Still ranting in your echo chamber, Mr. Evans? Actually, you shoot yourself in your foot with every post. And when caught out in lies, half-truths and distortions, you pretend they never occurred, and repeat the same falsehoods anew. So for example in your claim that Arabs were "dispossessed" by Jewish settlers in their midst (and not by the consequences of the war of annihilation they fought and lost), or that Israel had no legitimate causus belli in the Gaza conflict, or that Israel's peace offer at Camp David was not an extraordinarily generous one, etc., etc. Each has been demonstrated to be invalid. You pretend that this is not so, and continually shift ground to yet other slanders. Just in your last response, you ignore the refutation of your own claims in the quote from Clinton I gave, that the rejection of the Camp David peace offer was because the borders proposed were not viable for a Palestinian state - Clinton explicitly denies that, and nails the hidden Palestinian agenda, to do away with Israel as such by importing the Lebanon civil war into Israel itself. Then you continue on with your own claim that borders were the issue, as if Clinton had affirmed that. Useless to engage with you as such - we have your measure and did so from the start - but I have enjoyed the opportunity to present the facts to our readers, so that they are able to counter similar lies in the future. I return to the helpful definition of antisemitism that I quoted at the start of our exchange, formulated by many analysts but neatly summarized by Natan Sharansky in his "three Ds": Demonization, Delegitimization, and Double Standards. I also added an "O": Obsessiveness. Enough said. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 I am pleased that Mr. Evans brought up the U.N. resolutions. It fits with his tendency to shoot himself in the foot. He is certainly right that there is a very long list of anti-Israel resolutions passed by the U.N. in various fora, such as the General Assembly and the Human Rights Commission/Human Rights Council. What he fails to grasp, however, is that it is precisely that very long list that invalidates the justice of the accusations. In fact, it demonstrates plainly what a deeply biased and morally corrupt institution the U.N. is as such, and how little qualified it is to decide human rights issues fairly or even at all. No less than 80% of all U.N. resolutions of any sort critical of any country in the world are directed against Israel, and just to take the present Human Rights Council of the U.N. as an instance, from its inception in mid-2006 to the end of 2008 it passed 20 resolutions alleging human rights violations against Israel, four against Myanmar (Burma) and one against North Korea: that's it. There was nothing against Somalia, where 400,000 have died since 1991, and still counting, nothing against Sudan, where close to 2 million have died in a still continuing conflict, nothing against China itself even though its massive human rights violations are reported daily in world newspapers (neither the savage repression of the Tibetans nor even the massacres of Tienamin Square were protested by the U.N. back when they occurred), nothing against Russia where the grossest abuses still continue in Chechnya and Georgia, as well as within Russia itself, nothing at all against Zimbabwe, Zaire, etc., etc. On the other hand there would be an automatic majority guaranteed in the U.N. Human Rights Council for even a resolution accusing Israelis of chewing gum. This, by the way, is the same Human Rights Council on which Cuba, China, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan sit, and to which are warmly welcomed and praised Sudan, Iran, Syria, Zimbabwe and other major human rights violating nations, some of them guilty of outright genocide. In fact, Sudan is now taking on the rotating Presidency of the General Assembly, and Russia, China and Saudi Arabia sit on the Security Council. The U.N. provides no moral leadership whatsoever. Its credibility is zero. A good instance of the U.N. is its refusal to confront the problem of antisemitism in Muslim countries. In 1997, Organization of the Islamic Conference members accused the special rapporteur on racism of 'blasphemy' for reporting on anti-Semitism in Muslim countries. Consequently, in the next report on racism, in 1999, the section on anti-Semitism mentioned specifically only Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union as problem areas. That is just one tiny instance out of hundreds of the blatant bias and injustice that runs rampant at the U.N., and it also points to one of the chief reasons for this: the 57 Muslim nations, and the majority of undemocratic, authoritarian states in the U.N., aided by a cowardly Europe, wield far more power than the one little Jewish state in the world. Yet how ironical it is that the representatives of all those states enter the U.N. building in New York City through a door over which is inscribed the Jewish dream: "They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more," taken from Isaiah 2:4 and Micah 4:3 (identical wording). Even more tellingly, in terms of U.N. hypocrisy, is that in both sources, these words are preceded by: "It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills, and all the nations shall flow to it, and many peoples shall come, and say: 'Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, and that we may walk in his paths.' For out of Zion shall go forth the Torah, and the world of the Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations, and shall decide for many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks ... (etc.)" God's judgment over the evil-doing of the nations is very different from than that of the United Nations, we can be sure. The activities within the U.N. cruelly mock the very source it draws as a cloak around itself and broadcasts on its entry. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Dennis Ross, the chief facilitator of the Camp David talks in 2000, has written an extremely detailed and lengthly account of those talks, The Missing Peace, published in 2004. Mr. Evans, all the evidence you call for is there. As mentioned, Clinton's account of his presidency, My Life (2004) confirms Ross's detailed account (repeated in various interviews), as does Ehud Barak in numerous interviews and speeches. The maps you refer to, which are common on Palestinian websites, are mostly entirely phony ones. There was a map developed at an early point in the talks by Israel as a talking-point proposal that offered 76% of the West Bank to the Palestinians but was dropped later on for Israel's eventual offer of 97%, so it is not relevant. That map is the only evidence Robert Malley had for his contentions. He is of course contradicted by all the other major participants in the meetings, and Ross gives full details of that too. Furthermore, I repeat what I wrote before: if the borders were a problem, it was up to Arafat to make a counter-offer. He did not. Clinton told Alan Dershowitz later on that the failure of the negotiations was due to "the refusal of the Palestinians and Arafat to give up the right of return. That was the sticking point. It wasn't Jerusalem. It wasn't borders. It was the right of return." The silence of Arafat on the borders issue after the Camp David meeting is its own completely effective refutation of the now-established Palestinian line about Camp David. Even Arafat's own policy advisors, according to their own testimony later, pressed him to accept Israel's proposed peace deal and could not understand his refusal of this idea (after all, once they had their state, they would be able to attack Israel from a stronger base later on, inventing some new excuse or "provocation" as they wished). You repeat the false claim that Jews dispossessed hundreds of thousands of non-Jews. I have already refuted that libel; read my post on that again: they dispossessed no-one in the course of Jewish population growth in the area. If the Arabs had accepted their own U.N.-delineated state of Palestine in 1948 living in peace next to the U.N.-delineated State of Israel, there would have been no movement of people at all. Of course, when the Jews were attacked by five Arab nations (and by two private armies as well) from late 1947 and through 1948, naturally they fought back, and that war against all odds ended in Israel's survival and enlarged boundaries; it also caused a refugee emigration. But this was not Israel's fault: it happens in all wars, this one was blatantly a war caused by the Arabs and the refugees were created by them and remain their responsibility. There is plenty of evidence of Jewish efforts to persuade Arab neighbors to stay in place, especially early in the conflict. There was no stealing of land, merely Israel's heroic survival against the odds. Obviously you object to that. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Thank you very much, Cheryl Mavrikos, your praise means a lot to me. I have especially admired your own posts and been grateful for them: your comments always cut to the essence of things, and your goodness also shines through, so your commendation really makes my day. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 I am struck by your claim that it is "rather controversial and highly contestable" that the settlers in their attitudes and behavior to the Palestinians are any better than the Palestinians are to the settlers. That is simply amazing. You apparently live in a universe in which settlers organize terrorist atrocities against Palestinians like suicide bombings on a regular basis, in which they deny that any Arabs have a right to live in Israel just as Palestinians deny that Jews have a right to live in the West Bank and Gaza, and so they murder even Israeli Arabs so as to eliminate them from their land. They apparently, in your universe, name streets and schools after terrorist "martyrs," induct children into terrorist activities and even promote this on Israeli TV, deny that there are any Muslim or Arab Christian holy places in Jerusalem, etc., etc. I must say you have a very remarkable view of things. But in my universe, the vast majority of so-called settlers are kind, good and peaceable people, very critical of terrorism from no matter what group, and in fact would be quite content to live with Arab neighbors in peace. I have met lots of such people. They very definitely include Orthodox Jews, too, Ari. Did you know, by the way, that the Kach party which certainly had followers who acted thuggishly at times, never got more than 1% of the vote in Israeli elections before it was banned outright in Israel? The equivalent amongst the Palestinians is Fatah and Hamas, together comprising practically the whole of the Palestinian political scene, and the truth is that in comparison to them Kach was so moderate as to be really comparable to the practically non-existent liberal opposition in the P.A. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Melvyn, your response is good and very understandable, and the Dr. Martin Luther King quote cuts to the heart of things, but please permit me to add that an essential point has been missed: Mr. Evans does not WANT to listen. He is the person "cherry-picking" his sources and quotes; the cherry-picking is not just found in his sources. So he actually knows that he is misrepresenting the truth and lying, as a result, and it makes no difference: it is all just grist to his propaganda mill. If it seems to sound damning of Israel, even if it really isn't, it is good enough to excuse what he is really about, which is hatred. Recommending to him to read less biased and more accurate accounts will therefore not be effective. I showed this in an earlier post in terms of the "rockets" issue (and again in regard to what occurred at Camp David in 2000), demonstrating that he simply removed counter-evidence from those Israeli or authentic sources he cited (he was trying to use Jewish sources against Jews, of course, that is why he cited them at all), pruned his quotes to fit his own measure, omitted contextual details and so on. He had read the Israeli sources (and in regard to Camp David knows about Clinton's, Barak's, and Ross's accounts), but omitted, cut and pasted to suit himself. It was all demonization and double standards, simple mythology. I would like to underline the very telling fact that Evans and his ilk knowingly support and root for the chief inheritors and devotees of the Nazi ideology in the Middle East. To his sort, Palestinian and other Muslim antisemitic hate incitement, open endorsement of indiscriminate mass murder of Jewish populations, efforts at ethnic cleansing, racist definitions both of themselves and of their enemies, outright glorification of violence and even explicitly boasting like the SS of their "cult of death," are all matters of indifference if not actually justifiable and applauded. And after all, if you endorse terrorist murdering of innocents, what is a little murder of words and truth? Nothing. So nevermind about providing correct sources. That is certainly the attitude of the Palestinians, and it is the attitude of their supporters. They affect a high tone of moral outrage about this or that alleged atrocity from the Jewish side, but mysteriously are deaf to and bored by atrocities from the anti-Jewish side, even when it is Palestinian atrocities against Palestinians. We notice no lengthly paragraphs on that from Mr. Evans. What crowds were in the streets of London or Egypt or Iran protesting the knee-capping, burning alive or tossing off of high buildings of Fatah members in Gaza by Hamas over the past few years? What complaints were made by Arab countries to the U.N. Human Rights Council about such atrocities? None. And of course who cares about the "honor killings" that so mar the family lives of Palestinians? Or the torture in jails? A little detail to bear out the hollowness of the "moral outrage" about Palestinian suffering by anti-Zionists: more Palestinians have been killed by other Palestinians in the past two decades than have been killed in all the clashes with Israelis. And the death toll of Palestinians is even higher from other Arabs. One never hears about that. Nobody cares. So there is no point in appealing to Mr. Evans to go to better sources. However, for others, I recommend Mitchell Bard, Myths and Facts: A Guide to the Arab-Israeli Conflict, available on-line and for free download at: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/myths2/cover.html It can also be purchased from local bookstores or ordered in. Another excellent resource is http://www.paulbogdanor.com/israel 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 I wonder at your selective outrage, Mr. Ehrens. I assume that you use a computer. Its chips quite likely came from Israel: throw it away, by all means. Some of the software also came from Israel: don't use it. IBM and Intel have major manufacturing and research centers in Israel; so, I believe, most other major computer companies. Israel is now in advance even of California's Silicon Valley, and actually tops the world in such matters. Goodbye to the IT world for you! If you are diabetic, or suffer various heart conditions, please stop taking medicine or using medical equipment that came from Israel, by all means - live up to your ideals, be thorough about it and make us all happy. It's a win-win option. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Israel of course did not exist as such during the Second World War, but I meant the Jewish people, "Israel" in the traditional sense. The enemies of the State of Israel today are besides largely identical with the enemies of the People of Israel down through the ages. Anti-Zionism is largely driven by old-fashioned antisemitism. And that, ironically, is just why it must exist as a refuge. That old-fashioned antisemitism, were there to be no Israel as refuge, would have already spelled the decimation if not worse of the remainder of eastern European (and Soviet) Jewry, the disappearance of the Ethiopian Jews, and little chance of escape for the Jews of Muslim lands. While the expropriation of property and expulsion of Jews from the Arab Middle East was no doubt accelerated by the conflict with Israel, it very likely would have happened anyway, given the situation in the radicalizing and racist-nationalist Middle East, the influence of Nazistic ideas about Jews throughout the region (combining with traditional Muslim antisemitism), the usefulness of scapegoating to authoritarian regimes, and the hostility to the West (to Muslims, Jews represented the West and modernity). That the percentage of Christians has generally halved or dropped even close to zero in almost all countries throughout the Arab world due to harsh persecution and out-migration, indicates what would have been the fate of the even smaller and weaker Jewish community. Fortunately, there was an Israel to give them refuge, and more "Sephardi" Jews came to Israel as refugees than Palestinian refugees from the War of Independence in 1948. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Mr. Evans recycles the lies current amongst Palestinians and apologists for terrorism concerning Camp David talks in 2000, lies contradicted by President Clinton's own analysis in interviews and subsequent writings (such as his recent memoirs of his presidency), Ehud Barak's account, and that of Dennis Ross, the chief Middle East advisor to Clinton at the time. Besides it is a bit hard on the face of it to claim that the Palestinians would be divided on the West Bank into non-communicating "cantons" or "bantustans" when fully 97% of the West Bank was offered to Arafat with the other 3% made up by other border adjustments. Such percentages force entire Palestinian control over the West Bank, without "cantons." Total hokum, Mr. Evans, and you know it. Moreover it is a matter of record that Arafat did not raise this objection at the time. Instead, he brought up some entirely new objections, without making any counter-offers on the proposed boundaries. These objections related chiefly to the alleged claim of the "Right of Return" of all Palestinians inside Israel itself. This of course would mean the dissolution of Israel, so it was a non-goer from the start, as Arafat had to know. In effect it meant the total rejection of peace with Israel or recognition of it, no matter what the offer. He also shocked Clinton by demanding the whole of the Old City of Jerusalem and all of the Temple Mount, explicitly and bare-facedly denying that there were any Jewish holy sites in Jerusalem at all, and specifically that the Temple Mount ever had a Jewish Temple on it, and he even stated that the Western Wall was not a Jewish holy site. This was repeated and extended at the Taba discussions that followed. (However, despite Clinton's shock, this is the standard delusional Palestinian line, intended of course to remove any legitimate claim of Jews to Jerusalem and Zion itself. It follows the Nazi dictum that the bigger the lie, the more people are inclined to just give way, and if you repeat such lies often enough, they gain currency even despite manifest falsehood and numerous refutations. Such a line, of course, puts very serious doubt on any Palestinian inclination to honor Jewish religious freedom in any way or even protect Jewish religious shrines in its own ethnically cleansed "secular(/Muslim) democratic(/authoritarian-theocratic) Palestine.") Following which rejection of the Camp David and the Taba offers, when he lost a lot of support around the world and even the Saudis criticised him for his refusal to accept Israel's offer, Arafat instituted the Intifada as his chief answer. There was no talk of "cantonments" then either. That was dreamed up a year later as a post-hoc rationalization. But Arafat knew that the reflex position of both the Muslim world and the lefties in the West would be that when Israel defended itself against the terrorist murders of its people, and the Palestinians re-ran their old "victim" act and pushed their children into the midst of battles, the media would come down hard on Israel and reverse any positive image it had gained through its magnanimous peace offer. And so it eventuated. The evident malice of Mr. Evans actually serves a very useful purpose on this site. Each one of his claims can be shot down in flames in such a way as to make clear to any reasonable and decent onlooker that Israel does indeed have justice and right on its side, and that it is facing much the same sort of enemy it faced in the Second World War. As for that, I recommend Klaus Gensicke, Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten (2008), reviewed by John Rosenthal, "The Mufti and the Holocaust," at http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/17089176.html, and Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cueppers, Halbmond und Hakenkreuz: Das "Dritte Reich", die Araber und Palaestina (2006: "Crescent Moon and Swastika: The Third Reich, the Arabs and Palestine), reviewed at http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/Printable.aspx?GUID=E985B271-A76A-4A9D-9AC9-ED5D84BDA37F, all this German-language research extending the insights into the Nazi links of the Palestinian movement and Arab movements more generally, ranging from the Muslim Brotherhood to the Ba'athist Party, that Matthias Kuentzl already revealed in Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 (2007). The evidence is overwhelming. Thanks for giving us the opportunity to bring up these unsavory details about your terrorist friends, Mr. Evans. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Israel's control of supplies entering Gaza from Israel, to an enemy community that had been attempting suicide bombings, lobbing rockets and shooting off mortars into Israel for almost a decade (and even after Israel had completely withdrawn from there), and which kidnapped one of its soldiers, was not a violation of the cease-fire, Mr. Evans, since Israel never entered into such specific commitments: in fact, the cease-fire was wholly an indirect one, since Hamas refused point-blank even to enter into direct negotiations with Israel about it. So your reply misses the target. Failing to establish your claims about the current situation, which you persist in distorting in futile fashion, you shift ground to challenging the legitimacy of Israel's very existence, and wish to change the subject to that. And yet you claim that this does not constitute yet more evidence of antisemitism. Israel exists, Mr. Evans, and is entirely legal. Get over your obsessions because you cannot reverse history. It was established by the UN back in 1947, entirely legitimately and in faithfulness to the explicit mandate stemming from the League of Nations and entrusted to Britain after WWI, even though Britain came to betray that trust out of geo-political and colonial interests involving Arab oil and other matters. There was actually no "Palestine" to colonize, as a matter of fact. There had never been an Arab/Muslim state of that name, or any other occupying that area or having its capital there, in all the 1400 years of Muslim dominance, nor did the Arabs there ever call for such a state until after Israel was born. In fact, Haj Amin el-Hussaini, who served German colonial interests in the area from the late 1930s and throughout WWII, and who was the leader of the "Resistance" in that generation, actually was killing Jews (and English) for the sake of a Greater Syria centered in Damascus, and other Arabs who instead sought to live in peace with Jews and centered their hopes in Amman. Even today, "Palestinian nationalism" has its core in anti-Zionism/antisemitism, not in any positive efforts to build up a functioning and viable state of its own. Its heart is in hatred of its neighbor, not in love of its own distinctive national heritage which hardly exists as such. Or haven't you noticed that? Neither was the land colonized nor stolen from Arabs of the region. Jews had lived despite the most oppressive and unjust treatment from the Ottomans in the region from time immemorial, and constituted the majority in several cities in the area including Jerusalem. Immigrants from elsewhere were similarly peaceable, and indeed sought cooperation with locals, and the prosperity and new growth they brought even attracted many thousands of Arabs from elsewhere in the Middle East. The land they farmed or built on had all been legitimately and peaceably purchased, or was wasteland unowned by anyone, desert, swamp, or sand-dunes (as was Tel Aviv). Under the UN partition plan, the boundaries of the proposed Jewish state enclosed an over 95% Jewish population, and there were no Jews at all in the proposed Palestinian state. If the Palestinians had accepted that plan, there would have been peace and prosperity for all, without pain or sacrifice, with no displacement or dispossession at all, and no refugees. But instead, they attempted to wipe out the Jewish population altogether. It was the Palestinians who refused a sovereign state, not the Israelis who prevented them from having one. And they refused again and again in later decades. When Egypt and Jordan occupied the West Bank and Gaza (1948-67), and "Palestine" was theirs to establish, they did not do so and there was no outcry from "Palestinians" to have their sovereign state. When Israel offered sovereignty on very generous terms in 2000, Arafat responded with the Intifada. Presently the Palestinians even refuse to recognize Israel's existence as a Jewish state, something which underlies their entire history of violent rejectionism, prejudice and hatred. And as for their fate in any Arab-majority state, just have a look at the situation for Christians anywhere in the Middle East, and color it blacker, since Jews were even smaller in numbers and had no Jewish states elsewhere to help protect their rights. If the Gazans gave up their expressed intention to wipe out all Jews from Israel, and destroy the state, and their aggression towards that end, genuinely accepting peace with Israel, the restrictions on border crossings would disappear. That is the nub of the issue. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Mr. Evans also predictably enough omits to mention just what the Hamas cease-fire violation was and why Israel entered into Gaza on November 4th. His eyes no doubt bounced over the passage describing how Hamas operatives were digging a tunnel beneath Israeli army positions in order to kill and/or kidnap Israeli soldiers, to add to the one they already had, Gilad Shalit (held without allowing even Red Cross visits, be it noted as another war crime). This Hamas operation, stopped just before it was to be pulled off, is obviously no unacceptable violation of the cease-fire terms in itself, in Mr. Evans' opinion, so Israel had no right to stop it. Neither according to him should it have responded to the unilateral Hamas refusal to renew the cease-fire on December 19th, which was effectively a formal Hamas declaration of open war on Israel. None of this constitutes a causus belli, he thinks. And of course he entirely dismisses the very point stressed in the Israeli government report he cited, namely that the rockets Hamas used were extending their range potentially to Beer Sheva, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and already put a million Israelis in the line of fire. Finally, although as we have seen he selectively and misleadingly presents Israel-government-sourced documents when he wishes, so at least we know he read them, he ignores them completely when their content too sharply refutes his assertions, as for example in his claim that "1,400 civilians" were killed in the Israeli attack on Gaza terrorists. Not even the Palestinians claim that. Apparently according to him only civilians were killed by the IDF in the entire Gaza operation. The Israelis just had very bad aim. That is a laugh, and false on the face of it. According to the IDF report on Palestinian casualties issued in March, 1,166 Palestinians were killed in the Gaza conflict, of whom 709 were Hamas or other militants killed in battle, and just under 300 people were civilians, including 89 children aged 16 and under (of whom some, it must be admitted, were actually combatants due to the Hamas custom of using children fighters, for almost all died in battle situations), and 49 women. (By the way, Mr. Evans does not suspect that Hamas had any responsibility to keep children and women away from battle zones, or their own fighters away from civilians, and that it is a major war crime in itself that they did not, so that a considerable part of the responsibility for their death lies with Hamas itself.) Some 162 men were not clearly identifiable as either civilians or combatants. Around 90% of the "police" who were killed were Hamas and/or Islamic Jihad operatives. See, for example, http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3692950,00.html and http://www.solomonia.com/blog/archive/2009/07/ben-dror-yemini-how-many-civilians-were/index.shtml#comments By the way, Ari is wrong: the Breaking the Silence slanderers were indeed anonymous, and what is more they were so out of moral cowardice and possibly also because they knew there was nothing substantial to their charges. With anonymity and vague accusations, no specific cases could be investigated and tried, and no one could be called into court to give testimony and/or be sued for slander. It has nothing to do with "whistle-blowers." If there was substance to the case the accusers would be vindicated, indeed they would be lionized by lefties and anti-Zionists. Nor SHOULD the IDF give a blanket immunity to prosecution for slanderers and false accusers. That obviously would be against the law. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 As for his use of Israeli sources, Mr. Evans cites the January 1, 2009 "Summary of Rocket and Mortar Shelling in 2008" from the Israel Information Center at the Israel Intelligence Heritage and Commemoration Center (http://www.terrorism-info.org.il/malam_multimedia/English/eng_n/pdf/ipc_e007.pdf) and draws some very restricted and selected passages from it. But somehow he missed for example the following on pages 2 and 3, summarizing its findings: "Following are three major characteristics of the use made by Hamas and the other terrorist organizations of rockets during 2008 (see chapter on statistical data for details): "a. A dramatic increase in the extent of rocket fire and mortar shelling despite the six months long lull in the fighting: in 2008, the peak year of rocket fire and mortar shelling [i.e., since the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005], a total of 3,278 rockets and mortar shells landed in Israeli territory (1,750 rockets and 1,528 mortar shells). That is a significant increase compared to 2007 (the number of landings in 2008 more than doubled) and compared to the previous years of the Palestinian terrorist campaign. "b. A significant increase in the number of Israeli residents exposed to rocket fire within 40 km of the Gaza Strip: before 2008, the city of Sderot (about 20,000 residents) as well as villages around the Gaza Strip were the preferred target of rocket fire and mortar shelling. In 2008, other cities and hundreds of thousands of Israelis gradually entered the circle of fire: first the cities of Ashkelon and Netivot, and later, during Operation Cast Lead, Ashdod, Beersheba, and other cities within a range of 40 kilometers from the Gaza Strip. The rocket attacks created a new reality in which nearly one million Israeli residents (about 15 percent of the entire population) are exposed to rocket fire and mortar shelling in various levels of intensity. "c. A significant improvement in the effectiveness of rockets and mortar shells possessed by Hamas and an increase in their quantity: in 2008, Hamas put into use 122-mm Grad launchers (for ranges of 20.4 km and approximately 40 km) and standard 120-mm mortars, which were smuggled into the Gaza Strip (in our assessment, from Iran). Those standard rockets and mortars, significantly different from self-manufactured rockets and mortars, not only increased the range of fire but also increased its effectiveness. That is a result of increasing the rockets’ warhead size and their fragmentation. As for the mortars—the standard 120-mm mortars are more precise and their range is greater than that of the other mortars possessed by Hamas and the other terrorist organizations." So my earlier comments were indeed somewhat in error: the figures I gave for "rockets" applied to both rocket and (the more effective) mortar attacks, and should actually have been much higher. E.g., there were actually over 12,000 rockets and mortar attacks since 2005, not 8,000. I was relying on a number of Israeli newspaper reports, which usually gave the figures I repeated. The official figures are now presented, above. They far exceed Mr. Evans' claims, as he would have known since he cited portions of that very report. Furthermore, Mr. Evans alleges that Israel unjustifiably broke the cease-fire on November 4, 2008, by invading a short distance into Gaza and killing seven Hamas terrorists. Predictably, there is much that he leaves out. He omits to mention the 362 rockets and mortars fired from Gaza during the supposed six-month cease-fire (p. 7 of the Israel report); these attacks, aiming at the civilian population by the way, a war-crime, were evidently in his opinion not breaking the cease-fire. Cease-fire violations by Hamas are obviously in his opinion entirely legitimate, and Israel had no right to object nor to react. Here is an example of double standards in action. Only Israeli cease-fire violations are real violations. About 26 of the Hamas attacks occurred during the first four months of the six-month cease-fire, so the "lull" which he claims as a credit to Hamas was merely relative to the thousands of attacks that preceded them. In fact they were still unacceptable violations - and not just war-crimes but also crimes against humanity, in the usual definition of these terms. But after Israel defended itself from a major Hamas cease-fire violation on November 4th, Hamas decided to up the ante and well over three hundred rockets and mortars were fired off into Israel in the next month and a half, a period that was still under the truce. These violations, too, Mr. Evans dismisses as relevant to the final Israeli response. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Mr. Evans gives us all a very good example indeed of standard Palestinian and general anti-Zionist media propaganda, and shows why none of it can be trusted. Among those standard propaganda methods are highly selective use of quotations from Israeli documents that do not support his allegations, but rather prove the contrary when read fully and in context (so he actually knows that he is falsifying things); presentation of terrorist Hamas-sourced claims of Jewish atrocities as if they are neutral, objective, known and established facts rather than fictional or at least highly dubious productions from terrorist organizations with a long track record of false allegations; and finally and most damningly, strong demonization of Israel while completely ignoring or exonerating blatant criminal and human rights violations by the Palestinians. Natah Sharansky has provided a very useful shorthand definition of antisemitism which also indicates how it differs from legitimate criticism such as normally occurs in all democracies: his "three Ds" are demonization, delegitimation, and double standards. The demonization is shown in a sole interest by the antisemite in negative interpretations of "Zionist" and/or Jewish matters, to an extent that puts Jews into a unique and utterly evil category (often knowingly using outright falsehoods to do so), from which comes the delegitimation (they have no right to self-determination, for example, or for self-defense), and perhaps most tellingly, the use of double standards: the very things that are ignored or justified in the enemies of the Jews, or even praised despite their being far worse than anything on the Jewish side, are condemned in the Jews themselves, to the point where even morally restrained self-defense by them is seen as a crime against humanity. To this we can add another trait characteristic of rabid antisemites, the most extreme of them, which is obsessiveness: antisemites cannot leave Jews alone. They spend a lot of time trying to offend them and to attack them, including nowadays bombarding Jewish blogs on the internet. Such traits, characteristic of so much anti-Zionism, fully justify the label of antisemitism. For Mr. Evans's information, in any case, al-Jazeera, which merely reproduced Hamas propaganda videos without any critical distance whatsoever, is not a reliable source. Accepting its reporting is the same as accepting Hamas propaganda straight out. And the same holds for the Palestinian website Evans cites with its pictures of murdered children - we cannot even be sure that the children were dead rather than painted up a bit by their Hamas film-crew producers, and analysis of several videos coming out of that hospital prove that at least some of the "dead children" featured were actually alive and breathing. I recall early in the Gaza war reading several detailed analyses of those videos and the play-acting of the Maoist Norwegian doctor shown in them, who is on record as saying frankly that lying in the service of a good cause is justified. In any case these photos and other videos broadcast by al-Jazeera and other Arab stations came from the same Hamas video production unit at Shifa Hospital that was literally Hamas headquarters (a good example of "human shields" policy), and I noted at the time as a curious thing that none of these videos show adult Palestinian militants' corpses, lest we might think that Gaza terrorist militias suffered any losses at all. The whole thing is quite unbelievable. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Ari H, although you seem to be quite unfair usually in regard to Israel you are right to condemn any Jewish thuggery against Palestinians - it is contrary to Jewish cultural values, to Halakhah, to explicit Israeli law, and to common decency, and so it is very disappointing, and although the full facts are not given in this article and there may be more to the dismissal of the case than the reasons given (e.g., there may be a history of bad relations between the specific persons involved), it is also disappointing at least at first glance that the court dismissed charges. Such criticism of this quite unusual case applies, even if Palestinians for their part regularly attack settlers, knife those walking in Hebron, lynch any wandering by mistake into Palestinian villages (and in all killed over a thousand Israelis in such ways during the Second Intifada), demand the forcible ethnic cleansing of all Jews from the West Bank, and even support continuing terrorist atrocities against both settlers and Jews inside the Green Line by steady majorities of 70% in Palestinian opinion polls year after year. Their behavior does not really justify our mirroring it. But Ari, and just by the way, I must have missed your posts condemning those Palestinian atrocities! Naturally you would not have double standards. I expect that you have written far more posts against the Palestinian crimes, on Palestinian, anti-Zionist and leftist sites, and are even more outraged by the Palestinian murders than Israeli beatings, if only because such atrocities are worse in themselves, are actually typical of Palestinian behavior rather than atypical as in Israel, directly express general Palestinian culture, laws, religious teachings and political ideologies, and so are much more frequent and more of a spur to outright war. Please direct me to your many posts critical of the Palestinians, Ari old boy. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 One does not need to be Einstein to see that those anti-Zionists (if not worse) who deplore Christian evangelical support for Israel are enemies of the state and of the Jewish people generally. Israel, the only Jewish state in the world, subjected to constant demonization and double standards and thus already isolated by the billion-plus Muslims and their cowardly allies in the Third World and the West, needs all the friends she can get. Jews can easily let the Millenium take care of itself: truth will be revealed then for all the world to see. However they live now in the pre-Messianic Era, surrounded by ill-wishers who would like to murder them and so I like all reasonable and devoted Jews am grateful for evangelical support: it is indeed as Huckabee has said: that support has been more realistic, constant and faithful than that from many assimilated and leftist American Jews. Without that support, and that of non-evangelical Americans too (because - it needs to be stressed - the evangelical support is only a part of that broader consensus), there would not have been an Israel to begin with, nor would it have survived to the present. It is telling that the strongest support for Israel has come from the center-right of American politics and society, including Presidents Reagan, Nixon and Bush, and that President Nixon literally saved Israel in the 1973 war, facing down threats of nuclear war from the USSR and total non-cooperation from Europe to resupply Israel's military materiel at a crucial point in that war. Without that support Israel would have gone under. Quite apart from its own inability to continue the fight without adequate supplies, recently revealed documents from the former USSR have shown that the USSR was actually ready to invade Israel itself but desisted because of this US support. By the way, Huckabee did not say that Nablus Arabs could travel anywhere in Israel (David Ehrens quite typically willfully misunderstands what he meant): he said, or meant, that Arabs in Israel (where they have full citizenship and civil rights) can do so, while any Jew caught in Nablus (or elsewhere in the P.A.) would be murdered and has no rights at all. Ehrens overlooks that the Palestinians explicitly demand a Judenfrei Palestinian state, ethnically cleansed, as a condition for "peace," as well as the "return" of Palestinians schooled in hatred inside Israel itself, to create bloody chaos, prior of course to going on to wipe out all Israeli Jews as well once the Palestinians gain their own state and a national army. (Supporters of the Palestinians consistently refuse to face the Nazi links of its 1930s and 40s leadership, including the mentor of Yasser Arafat, his own uncle, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and the continuation of Nazi themes, methods, media and education indoctrination and genocidal antisemitic goals, by the present Palestinian leadership, both Hamas and Fatah. It is a pity that the American Jewish Democratic supporters of Obama do not take this seriously, contrary to Israeli Jews who must live daily under that reality and who whether leftist peaceniks or not almost completely distrust Obama.) It is a great pity that Huckabee or McCain did not become president. The signs were all there before the election for those willing to see them and not wish them away. Obama has been a disaster. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 It is really interesting how the antisemites try to take over Jewish news websites, as in this case. The Moderators seem to be asleep at their desks. David Evans ignores that it is not an issue of "hundreds of rockets" being fired from Gaza, but thousands, over 8,000 rockets since Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, and fully 2,500 between January 2008 and November of that year notwithstanding the supposed "cease-fire". Israel's self-restraint has been exemplary, far more than just about any other nation would have shown. When Hamas refused even to renew the "cease-fire" in November, declaring its firm intention to increase its aggression, Israel really had little choice but to respond. The rockets moreover improved during this time, and the new Grad rockets supplied from Iran (and Russia) extended the genocidal agenda of Hamas as far as Beersheva and almost reached to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. No country could continue to react indifferently. Israel's response, however, was again exemplary and a lesson to the world in fighting terrorists who use their own populations as human shields. The leafleting of neighborhoods about to be attacked, telephone calls to warn residents to flee, the care exercised to avoid civilian casualties, all set a standard far above that of NATO or the Coalition in former Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan in recent years, and this in turn was far above the behavior even of the Allies in WWII. It is certainly far above the standards of the Palestinians! This is a matter of the open record. As for the objections of the UN, loaded as it is with its 57 Islamic nations against 1 Jewish nation, and run by authoritarian states at odds with democracy and human rights themselves, they prove nothing. Human rights organizations funded from Saudi Arabia similarly prove nothing with their white-washing of or relative indifference to terrorist groups and authoritarian states committing the really massive human rights crimes. The situation in the world is a bit more complicated than the simplistic comic-book world view of the anti-Israeli posters here. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 The West Bank and Gaza are often characterized as “Occupied Land,” illegally held by Israel.   This is false for four reasons:  A.  Israel won that land in a defensive war of survival launched by its enemies in 1967, so it has that land by legal right, in international law.  It may decide to return SOME of it as part of a final peace treaty, which is all that U.N. Resolution 242 actually calls for, but at present the most that can be claimed is that the land is “Disputed,” not “Occupied.”   B. How can a state be “occupied” by another state when the “occupied” state has never existed? There never was an independent Arab state of “Palestine,” or having any other name, occupying just the Biblical Israel or with a capital in Jerusalem or elsewhere in Biblical Israel, so its land and borders never existed and cannot be “occupied.”  During the past 1,400 years of Muslim domination of the Middle East, there was never a Muslim state of Palestine nor were there even calls for such a state by its Arab inhabitants, nor were these territories called "occupied Palestine" when they were held by Jordan and Egypt before 1967. Its borders therefore can only first be determined by final peace negotiations which have not yet occurred.   C. After the League of Nations and U.N. British Mandate ended over Palestine in 1948, Arab states and military groups refused to accept the U.N. resolution to devolve the territories to a Jewish and a new Palestinian Arab state, and invaded to take over the entire area. Jordan and Egypt appropriated the portions of the territory that Israel did not hold; this appropriation was illegal. They did not set up a "Palestine" on those lands, but instead incarcerated the Palestinians in refuge camps and gave them neither rights nor even financial support. They lost these territories in the 1967 war to Israel, the only legally constituted state of the region. If the land is "occupied" at all, then, it is as "occupied Jordan" or "occupied Egypt." Nevertheless neither Egypt nor Jordan continue to demand return of these territories to themselves, so they are not "occupied" Jordan or Egypt. They therefore belong only to Israel. Israel does not want to incorporate them fully into Israel, and, in full accordance with U.N. Resolution 242, with allowance for negotiated adjustments to final borders to take account of Israel's entirely legitimate and justified security concerns, has held the land in trust until a proper peace treaty is agreed to with a legitimate Arab partner willing to take them over. D. Under the Oslo Accords, Israel has sought to cooperate in creating such a legitimate peace partner in bestowing full internal administration of the Palestinian Authority population and cities to the P.A.; Israel does not occupy those areas. It has fully withdrawn from Gaza, and only enters the P.A. and mans check-points to apprehend criminal terrorists that the P.A. refuses to arrest or punish.  As the P.A. takes over that function, as it actually has in the last year or so (chiefly because its Fatah leaders now really want to suppress Hamas and associated jihadi militants, simply to stay in power), those check-points can and are being withdrawn. In simple fact, therefore, Israel occupies neither the West Bank nor Gaza today.  Those areas are entirely what the Palestinians have made of them.  “Occupation” has only been an excuse by them for monumental maladministration, corruption (the billions of dollars in international aid has gone chiefly into a few leaders' bank accounts, but have slowly lifted the economy while still only slightly ameliorating Palestinian unemployment), scapegoating hatred and war. Gaza raises another issue. It is sometimes claimed that Israel still "occupies" Gaza since it controls the entry points into Israel and limits supplies to the essentials of food and medicine.  On the other hand, Egypt controls the entry point into Egypt, and does the same.  Does Egypt "occupy" Gaza? If attempts to restrict supplies to a country at war equates to "occupation," then certainly Nazi Germany "occupied" England during the Second World War, which would be news to the British, and the Allies for their part "occupied" Nazi-held Europe, which would make the Second World War incomprehensible. 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00 Michael Oren's article on the West Bank economy is of course very good, but should be read in conjunction with the even more informative and insightful, and more witty and humorous, article by "Spengler" in the Asian Times for today (18 Aug.), "Palestine Problem Hopeless, But Not Serious." The URL is http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KH18Ak01.html Spengler shows through comparative statistical tables that the Palestinians of both the West Bank and Gaza, when their actual population which is more than one million less than their claimed population is taken into account, are actually much better off economically, medically and so on than the Arabs in any of the immediately surrounding states, and indeed better than most of the Gulf States. Their life-expectancy is higher, their educational levels and literacy, their per capita income, and etc., so it is in their interests to keep up the victim image and just let the international aid flow in, spurring it if donors' interest wane through a little terrorism, rocket barrages or riots of outrage, and not ever settling into a real state at peace. That is why even Fatah "moderates" newly appointed to lead that party have made clear they do not want peace with Israel (nor therefore a Palestinian state at all). Certainly peace would be very unsatisfactory to the legions of Palestinian well-wishers, according to Eamonn MacDonagh, "The Progressive Commentariat and the Palestinians," http://blog.z-word.com/2009/08/the-progressive-commentariat-and-the-palestinians/#more-1380 No one amongst this clique wants the Palestinians to change their immature ways and tantrums, and grow up to be like Israel, because that would mean they would be able to be responsible for themselves and would not need the Progressives any more. MacDonagh argues that Progressives like Chomsky and J-Street love to feel that they have special insight into the needs of the mentally disadvantaged and self-destructive, but who needs them if their clients are cured? 2012-02-09T;22:54:00-05:00