Just how much of a difference between anti-semitism and anti-Zionism?

We are often told, sometimes with exasperation, by the critics of Israel that there is a big, big difference between being anti-Israel and being anti-Semitic. Without delivering an entire dissertation on the subject, I'll just say that the more virulent, committed, and tunnel-visioned your anti-Israel perspective, the less plausible the claim.

But some cases don't even require us to develop such general principles, as they wear the equivalence between the two perspectives right on their faces. Viz., here:

A Michigan woman posted a video on YouTube supporting Palestinian stabbing attacks against Jews and blasted Muslims who try to argue that stabbing is “haram,” or forbidden, under Islamic law.

The Middle East Media Research Institute translated the Arabic-language video posted on YouTube last week by Lina Allan, who MEMRI described as “a Palestinian-Jordanian activist who lives in Michigan.”
[snip]
Allan disparaged Muslims who claim Islam does not allow stabbing attacks, accusing them of trying to be “muftis” and telling them to “go back to watching Turkish soap operas.”
Throughout the video, titled, “Is Stabbing Jews Haram [Forbidden]?” she notably used only the word “Jews” to describe the target of stabbing attacks, not “Israelis.”
[snip]
“Nobody can feel the suffering of the Palestinian people but the Palestinians living in Palestine,” Allan said. “I wish that you would stop interfering. Spare us your views, and go back to watching Turkish soap operas. It would be better if you didn’t talk about something you don’t understand.”

“I, Lina Allan, do not support the Palestinian government or any party. I support the Palestinian people, and I support any decision made by the Palestinian people, in order to regain its rights and its land,” she said.

As she delivered her statement, hanging behind her on the walls were photos of ancient Petra in Jordan and a sign that read, “Calm and Proud to Be an Arab.”

Israel has faced a wave of nearly daily stabbing, car-ramming and shooting attacks since September, that has been widely encouraged in songs and videos on Palestinian social media. The latest attack was a shooting in Hebron on Sunday.

Well, yes, Miss Allan, that's very clear. Thank you for being so forthright.

When we're talking about going around stabbing people, of course (and car-ramming, etc.), the distinction becomes more or less moot. If I supported stabbing random Swedes, would that be better than my supporting stabbing random Scandinavians?

Anti-Israel Derangement Syndrome

In an earlier post I wrote, concerning Israel, "So my fundamental sense of fair play is moved to note these things and take the side that I think is most aligned with truth and accuracy."

There is something eerily fascinating about the sheer amount of irrational venom directed at the nation of Israel for even existing as a nation. Once you notice the venom, it's hard to stop noticing it. It's a bit like the virulent anti-white racism that is excused or even directly encouraged by the leftists in America and Europe. Once you notice it, you can't un-see it. And it's so manifestly unfair and weird that it's interesting, in its own bizarre way.

The most recent incident of this type concerns an Israel-hating retired Jewish academic (British), who refused to answer a child's questions about, of all things, the domestication of the horse. Nor did she merely hit the delete key on the inquiry e-mail. She wrote back a spiteful little note saying that she would answer the questions only when there is "justice for Palestinians in Palestine." Why would she do such a thing? Because she (the retired professor) is part of a Boycott Israel group and thinks refusing to answer questions about horses from an Israeli 13-year-old is a part of her boycott commitment. Really. I'm not making this up. You can't make it up. In fact, in this story Dr. Marsha Levine doubles down and defends her actions, proudly telling the UK Telegraph that she would answer similar questions from a child from another country.

Dr Levine, who completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge's Department of Archaeology before taking up research posts at Columbia University and Syracuse University in New York, told The Telegraph that if a school student from a different country had got in touch with her to ask about horses, she would have responded differently.

“Kids have questions, I usually answer their questions,” she said. “But I have agreed to BDS [the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel], and I do want to see justice for Palestine.

“In Israel the majority of Israelis support the policies of the government which abuses the rights of Palestinians, so the fact is I don’t want to help Israelis, and if you don't start with children where do you start?

“And she is not that young anyway, her English is pretty good. If people don’t stand up for justice, the world is going to come to an end.”

Yes, folks, you read that right. Dr. Marsha Levine is doing her small part to prevent the end of the world by refusing to answer an Israeli child about archaeology and the history of the domestic horse. Makes sense to me! What a hero!

I have never heard of such a mean, petty, spiteful, unprofessional action by an individual professor in relation to a person asking academic questions from any other country, ever. Not even South Africa in the heyday of that boycott movement. Knowing leftists, I suppose it's possible that it happened if and when some unwitting South African schoolgirl with a Dutch name wrote to a lefty professor in, say, 1990. There was no Internet then (to speak of) to shame a professor who did such a thing, so we might not have heard of it. But my guess is that politics has hardened since then and has more greatly overwhelmed such outdated notions as professionalism and courtesy. After all, if Levine wanted to pontificate against Israel, why couldn't she have done that in addition to answering questions about the domestication of the horse? My guess (though it's only a guess) is that this would have been the response of a leftist professor thirty years ago. Yes, that would be silly, pompous, and even somewhat unprofessional, injecting an unrelated political sermon into a discussion about one's academic specialty. But it would not be blatantly mean-spirited.

I note, too, the creepiness of Levine's emphasis on the age of Shachar Rabinovitch, her young correspondent: "She is not that young anyway."

Hmmm, is it just me, or is there something rather chilling about that? It is thus that people speak who are justifying much darker actions than a snarky e-mail. Let's not forget that "Palestinian" terrorists will sometimes justify killing Israeli civilians on the grounds that, given Israel's requirement of civil or military service for all young adults, there are no real Israeli civilians over a certain age. Levine is making a judgement of responsibility--what Christians sometimes call a judgement that the child has reached the "age of accountability" when she is capable of sin. The sin in question, here, is the sin of being a non-self-hating Israeli. Shachar is, apparently, considered old enough by Levine that she must either repudiate her country or be held to share in its corporate guilt. Am I saying that Levine thinks Shachar deserves to die in a terrorist attack if she doesn't share Levine's politics? Not quite. But I am saying that people exactly like Levine are often extremely quick to make excuses for "Palestinian" terror attacks, and I am also saying that Levine's haste to try to impute some kind of guilt or responsibility to Shachar, and her desire to emphasize the allegedly widespread wrong-thought among Israelis, bodes ill for her ability to condemn acts of terrorism wholeheartedly.

When people are just plain mean-spirited and vindictive toward the innocent, one starts to wonder why. When one starts to wonder why, one starts to see all kinds of facts about the poisonous nature of certain ideologies. When it comes to Israel hatred, Dr. Levine is an opportunity to gain wisdom about both the nasty fruit and the nasty root of that ideology.

Blogging about Israel

Quite some time ago a comment showed up for moderation, which I did not moderate. It was creepy in a variety of ways. But one thing that it contained was the question, "Why do you blog so much about Israel?" Well, I had to wonder if that particular reader had a problem with his vision, since all of my posts under the "Israel" label were even by that time rather old. Yes, there are quite a few of them, but my blogging interests had already moved to other topics by that time, as blogging interests have a way of doing, sometimes randomly. But it nonetheless really bugged this commentator that I would have so many pro-Israel posts. No doubt he wanted to do some kind of psychoanalysis on me. Both the creepy left and the creepy right tend towards psychoanalysis of their opponents. It's one way of avoiding replying to content.

I get a lot of my news about Israel from this interesting (yes, far-right) blog by Carl in Jerusalem. I find the news so often so depressing that I don't read Carl as much as I used to. Plus, he does more on Twitter now, and I don't follow Twitter. But it's still useful to keep up.

Here's the thing: What both the anti-Israel left and the anti-Israel right don't realize is that it's possible to be pro-Israel, or even to the right of pro-Israel (that is to say, annoyed with Israel's leaders when they don't defend their people enough or when they enter into the zombie-like fake "peace process") without romanticizing. I am not under the illusion, for example, that I would "fit in" in Israel or that the bulk of Israelis are "my kind of people." For example, I am well aware of the fact that the country has a socialist economy and that its government contains many anti-religious, left-wing secularists. That creates an internal dynamic to Israeli politics that is all too familiar to me as an American conservative. Just as many people in power in America would hate me as a scary "religious conservative," so would many people in power in Israel. But that doesn't mean that the Haredi or "ultra-conservatives" would be my dear buddies, either, even though I often agree with their perspective on their internal politics and on the realities of "Palestinian" terrorism and other topics. See, I believe that Christians should be free to evangelize, yes, even in Israel where doing so is "insensitive," not to mention illegal. The nicer ultra-orthodox would use the power of law to suppress such evangelism. The less nice would try to stone Christian missionaries if they carried out, e.g., street preaching.

I also realize that Israel has very liberal abortion laws and an out-of-control Supreme Court. And they foolishly have no death penalty (again, the result of being founded by a bunch of earnest, secular socialists), which means that they have all these warehoused terrorists sitting around in prison who should have been fertilizing the ground long ago. When misguided leaders later want to trade scores of evil terrorists for a kidnapped soldier, why, there the evil terrorists are, waiting to be traded! Which provides a perverse incentive for more evil terrorists to kidnap more Israeli soldiers. It's enough to make any sensible conservative want to tear out his hair.

But the reader who follows such matters will have noticed by now that even these complaints are not the usual complaints against Israel, whether from the anti-Israel American right or the anti-Israel American left. I didn't say that they love to kill "Palestinian" children. I didn't say that they are wicked colonial occupiers. I didn't say that the so-called "settlements" are an offense against justice and right. I didn't say that Israel "stole" the land.

That's because I think that all of those things are false. So I have ended up being hard-line pro-Israel not because I have no criticisms. Nor is my reasoning that "God gave them the land, so we have to support them." I never make such religious, premillenial Christian arguments myself. Nor do I look at Israel through a romantic haze. Rather, I think that for all its faults Israel is a good regional ally for the U.S. (though it has often been badly treated by the U.S.), shares important political perspectives and goals, and that it is madness to try to turn any more of that sliver of the Middle East back over to murderous Arabs. Indeed, if anything could have shown that, the disastrous case study of the Gaza strip should have done so for all the world to see. That the world doesn't see means that the world is deaf and blind and would, in fact, prefer that the entire nation of Israel commit hari kari in the name of crazily abstract principles combined with a false historical narrative. And again and again the lies and falsehoods come up, combined with suppression of facts. For example, how much do most Americans know about rock attacks by "Palestinians," sometimes "teens," that kill ordinary Israeli Jews just trying to drive down the road and go about their business? Not much, I'll warrant. So my fundamental sense of fair play is moved to note these things and take the side that I think is most aligned with truth and accuracy. I have realized which group wants to get on with the business of living normal lives and taking care of themselves and which group(s) want nothing but destruction, not even desiring to rule themselves in a constructive, peaceful fashion. Once one has really noticed that, it's difficult to have any sympathy anymore for the "Palestinian" cause.

At the same time, I am often weary. Who wouldn't be, even looking at the situation from a distance? It's hard to deal with what is in essence an intractable socio-political situation. The "Palestinians" have no reasonable plan. They want Israel destroyed "from the river to the sea." Most Israelis would love to work out some form of peaceful coexistence with their neighbors, but that isn't what their neighbors want. So the situation has to go on indefinitely. Our American rulers consistently pressure Israel to harm its own people, overlook even rocket attacks on its borders, and engage in foolish negotiations. Indeed, Republican Presidents have been some of the worst offenders. George W. Bush arguably did more harm to his Israeli ally than Barack Obama, because he was allegedly Israel's friend, so there was a motive to let Condoleeza Rice micromanage such internal matters as how many building permits were written for East Jerusalem. Which is crazy. At least with Obama they know they are dealing with an enemy. But the spectacle of the Middle East is rarely an edifying one, and after a while I feel as though (as with many topics) I have said all that there is to be said, which is why I rarely blog about Israel nowadays.

My attention was partly drawn to the subject again by the recent flareups of rocket attacks and terrorist attacks and also by someone's posting (apparently with approval) this silly story on Facebook about a babyish, potty-mouthed "Palestinian American" academic, specializing in victimology, who is trying to make a killing in the grievance market because he wasn't given an enviable job. His hiring was shot down when his virulent, f-bomb-filled rants against Israel on Twitter were brought to light. Poor baby. The sympathetic post is notably coy about his "controversial" tweets. The AAUP, which is of course completely on his side, nonetheless does include some of them in an appendix  here. Needless to say, they make it clear why he wasn't considered a good candidate for a full-time job teaching the young in the world of higher education. Not that his "work" is any better.

Oh, in happier news, oil has been discovered on the Golan Heights on the Israeli side. Good thing it wasn't given back to Syria in an act of mindless, unilateral niceness. As Carl in Jerusalem muses, one wonders if there is also oil on the Syrian side. But they'd have to stop shooting to find out.

So that's what it means for me to blog about Israel. And now I'll probably go back to not doing so for awhile, because the subject depresses me. But when I do, that's where I will be coming from.

Willingness to die: True religion and fakery

This video is doing the rounds on Facebook. In it, with a chilling smile on her face, a "Palestinian" mother chats with a reporter about how she hopes her son will grow up to be a suicide bomber. She talks about how she considers death to be "normal" and how all her people, including children, hope for martyrdom and are unafraid of death in the cause they serve. That cause, she makes clear, is the total destruction of the Jewish state of Israel and the complete takeover of Jerusalem by the Palestinian Arabs. The worst part of it is that the conversation takes place while her child is being medically treated by the very Jewish people she is hoping he will grow up and kill. (Note: It seems to me to be possible that the video is mis-labeled as far as timing. It may be a scene from the documentary Precious Life, which is several years old. See this story. If so, the reporter claims that the mother gradually changed her mind about the value of human life and even came to hope for peace with Israel in the course of the filming. I haven't been able to verify that the video is indeed a snippet from that movie, but it seems likely, as the dialogue quoted is similar.)

As I listened to her, I was struck by the fact that in its glorification of so-called "martyrs"--suicide bombers--Islam is taking an important Christian idea and twisting it. No lie, of course, is so powerful as the lie that starts with truth and then corrupts that truth. The truth is that we should be willing to give up our lives for a cause greater than ourselves. Christians teach their children this as well. The hymn "Faith of Our Fathers" says, speaking of the heroes of old, "And truly blest would be our fate, if we, like them, should die for Thee. Faith of our fathers, holy faith! We will be true to thee till death."

But Christian martyrdom could not be more different from Muslim "martyrdom." Christian martyrdom consists in refusing to deny Christ or in carrying out some noble task such as missions, even if this means that one is killed by one's enemies. Christian martyrs going back to Stephen ask God to forgive their enemies, in this following our Lord Jesus Christ's prayer on the cross.

It is a wicked perversion of the desire for transcendence to admire as martyrs those whose entire goal is to kill innocent civilians and who kill themselves in the process. To teach children to grow up to be "martyrs" of this type is an abuse of their innocence.

Islam is a counterfeit religion, and here we see one aspect of its fakery: Islam counterfeits Christian martyrdom and harnesses, in the service of murder, the human desire to give ultimate service to a transcendent cause.

There is an apologetic point to the contrast as well. If you do much work in Christian apologetics at all, it is guaranteed that sooner or later someone will dismiss the disciples' willingness to die for their testimony by saying, "A lot of people are willing to die for what they believe," instancing suicide bombers, Japanese kamikaze pilots, and who knows what else. Most discouraging of all is when that sort of flippant dismissal comes from a fellow Christian who, for whatever reason, wants to dismiss the historical case for Christianity as weak.

Not only did the apostles not commit murder like Muslim suicide bombers, not only did they not die in war, like Japanese pilots, not only were they not under the spell of a charismatic leader who urged them to suicide, like the followers of Jim Jones. Beyond all of that, they were willing to die not for an ideology but for their testimony to specific, empirical facts that they had heard and seen for themselves. They did not die, nor did they risk death, merely for a feeling, merely for a desire to serve something beyond themselves. Their cause was not a political policy nor even a religion but rather a Person whom they had seen alive again after his death. Their cause, to put it as bluntly as possible, was plain fact, fact so clear and undeniable to them that they could not deny it on pain of being deceivers themselves. The relevance of this point to the evidential value of their testimony would be difficult to stress too strongly.

We must pray for those who worship death, like this "Palestinian" mother. We should also pray for her son, that he learns the truth of the Gospel. Let us offer to our own children the true concept of martyrdom, the true willingness to die for our faith, and let us teach them the difference between that and counterfeits. And let us thank God for the apostles, who offered their lives that we might know the truth, and that the truth might set us free.

Follow-up on Mearsheimer et. al.

This is a follow-up to the previous post. Subsequent to writing that post, I did more research on the British anti-semite whose book was lauded by allegedly respectable political scientist John Mearsheimer and who was defended (in the course of defending Mearsheimer) by philosopher Brian Leiter. I am indebted to this post by Pejman Yousefzadeh for links to this additional information. I put this information into the comments on my earlier post, but I think it deserves more attention than that is likely to get there.

One of the questions that arose in the course of Mearsheimer's and Leiter's defense of Mearsheimer's blurb was whether or not Atzmon, the author of the bizarre book that Mearsheimer blurbed, is either a Holocaust denier or Holocaust revisionist. Mearsheimer, in the course of doubling down and refusing to budge, stated unequivocally:

I cannot find evidence in his book or in his other writings that indicate he 'traffics in Holocaust denial.

Notice that this concerns other things Atzmon has written, not just the book Mearsheimer blurbed. Like Leiter, who blandly declared Atzmon (on the basis of extremely brief research) a "cosmopolitan" rather than an anti-semite, Mearsheimer declares him no Holocaust denier at all.

In the very first comment on Mearsheimer's post defending himself (and Atzmon), a reader attempted to provide more data. The reader provided a partial quotation and a link. I am here providing a longer quotation with a different link to the same post. Here is Atzmon on the Holocaust (emphasis added).

It took me years to accept that the Holocaust narrative, in its current form, doesn’t make any historical sense. Here is just one little anecdote to elaborate on:

If, for instance, the Nazis wanted the Jews out of their Reich (Judenrein - free of Jews), or even dead, as the Zionist narrative insists, how come they marched hundreds of thousands of them back into the Reich at the end of the war? I have been concerned with this simple question for more than a while.

[snip]

I am left puzzled here; if the Nazis ran a death factory in Auschwitz-Birkenau, why would the Jewish prisoners join them at the end of the war? Why didn’t the Jews wait for their Red liberators?

I think that 65 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, we must be entitled to start to ask the necessary questions. We should ask for some conclusive historical evidence and arguments rather than follow a religious narrative that is sustained by political pressure and laws.

If this is not "trafficking" in Holocaust denial, I'm not sure what would count. In my earlier post I pointed out that Atzmon plays the post-modernist and says that he "neither affirms nor denies" the Holocaust. That's bad enough. Oddly, the postmodern mask seems to have slipped here. He's talking about "historical sense" and saying in so many words that such Holocaust details as the desire of the Nazis to eradicate the Jews from the Reich and the existence of a death camp at Auschwitz do not make historical sense. Yet I have no evidence that Mearsheimer and Leiter have revised their opinion on the subject or on Mearsheimer's endorsement of Atzmon, despite the fact that this information was made available to Mearsheimer. If readers have evidence that either Mearsheimer or Leiter has done a 180 and repudiated Atzmon, do post that evidence in comments.

Well, and here's a nasty tempest in a nasty teapot

I very recently learned about a little brouhaha that's been going on for a while when someone sent me a link to this article . It's about someone I know of in quite another context--Philosopher Brian Leiter.

As near as I can get the facts, they go approximately and briefly like this: Brian Leiter is a colleague (that is, at the same university) and buddy of John Mearsheimer, of The Israel Lobby fame (or infamy). Mearsheimer wrote a positive blurb for an unpleasantly bizarre little book called The Wandering Who by a Brit named Gilad Atzmon. The book, inter alia (and there are plenty of alia), implies that we should not entirely reject the blood libel against Jews in the Middle Ages. The blood libel, of course, is the claim that Jews kill or killed Gentile children to mix their blood with matzos at Passover.

Mearsheimer was strongly criticized (one should hope so!) for writing the blurb but refused to back down from it. Leiter leaped to Mearsheimer's defense without, it appears, doing his homework very well. In the course of that defense of Mearsheimer he implied that Atzmon is not an anti-semite and that therefore the criticisms of Mearsheimer for endorsing Atzmon are hysterical right-wing smears. This defense of Mearsheimer and, in the course of it, defense of Atzmon, resulted in Leiter's being named by Alan Dershowitz in the above article as someone who is helping to make anti-semitism acceptable in the mainstream.

Got that?

Now, please remember, I just started looking into this very recently, with even less motivation than Leiter should have had for being very careful. I wanted to be fair though, so, though I didn't want to read the whole of The Wandering Who, I did find a couple of Gilad Atzmon's own defenses of his book, including what he calls his "deconstruction" of Alan Dershowitz's criticisms. See here and here.

And guess what? Atzmon really does endorse at least a provisional acceptance of the blood libel. He says,

Anyway, [Dershowitz is] certainly not impressed by my idea that children should be allowed to question “how the teacher could know that these accusations of Jews making Matza out of young Goyim’s blood were indeed empty or groundless” (185). I suppose that Dershowitz hasn’t heard about Israeli professor Ariel Toaff’s study of Jewish medieval blood libel. Toaff found that accusations of blood rituals levelled against Jews in the Middle Ages were not entirely without foundation, to say the least.

Sweet, huh?

This exceedingly telling "defense" by Atzmon appeared on November 9, and Leiter's defense of Mearsheimer for endorsing Atzmon's book appeared on September 26. So Leiter didn't have access, presumably, to Atzmon's own further gloss on the passage in his book. But what Atzmon says here makes it clear that those who took him to be, shall we say, trying to open minds about the truth of the blood libel by portraying Jewish educators as stifling free inquiry were understanding him completely correctly! (Atzmon's story was about how he as a child raised a question about whether the blood libel was justified and about how he was sent home as a punishment for being so bold as to step outside of usual Jewish thought. His point in telling the story, now, billing his childhood self as the persecuted hero of epistemic honesty, is not terribly obscure.)

Now, just to complicate matters a tiny tad, Atzmon turns out to be, or at least finds it convenient to present himself as, some sort of postmodern historical skeptic. He says,

Dershowitz sure has some chutzpah, since it’s actually he who didn’t read ‘The Wandering Who’. If he had, he would have seen that in the book and in all my writing I neither deny nor do I affirm any historical aspect of the Holocaust, gas chambers or the Judeocide in general. Instead, I insist that history cannot be sealed by laws. I also insist that intellectual curiosity and our knowledge of the past cannot be vetted or confined by anyone, let alone such morbid minds as that of Dershowitz himself.

and

I actually urge my readers to question every historical narrative and this obviously includes the Shoa and Jewish history.

This allows Atzmon to be a Holocaust-denier with (im)plausible deniability. He can encourage people to be skeptical about the occurrence of the Holocaust as an "historical narrative," but when he wants to defend himself, he can fall back (as he does in the interview Leiter read--see below) on talking like the Holocaust did happen. He can also point out that he's treating the Holocaust like he treats all history. Nifty, huh? It's amazing what postmodernism can do for all manner of nastiness, including anti-semitism.

When Leiter hastened to the defense of Mearsheimer, he didn't apparently check into the allegations about Atzmon in any detail whatsoever. He seems to have based his evaluation of Atzmon on an interview (a fawning interview published at Atzmon's own site) in which Atzmon maunders on about the Holocaust in pseudo-academic terminology that downplays the true nature of his views. (Whaddaya know, it doesn't look like the little matter of the blood libel comes up in that interview.) From this Leiter infers that Atzmon is probably not an anti-semite.

Now, how can I put this tactfully? That's careless. If I had a colleague accused of enthusiastically endorsing a disgusting piece of anti-semitic trash, with the specific accusation that the tract in question promotes the blood libel, I'd try to do a leetle more research than Prof. Leiter appears to have done before rushing off and publishing something on the Internet calling the criticisms of my colleague "right-wing smears."

But maybe that's just me.

Unprincipled. And stupid.

I don't have time to write much about this, because I'm at work on a technical paper. But since I do occasionally write about Israeli issues at this blog I thought I couldn't let pass the shocking news that Israel has agreed to release over 1,000 terrorists in a deal with Hamas for the release of Gilad Shalit. Let's hope that he's at least "released" alive rather than dead.

This trade of terrorists for an imprisoned soldier is wrong. Carl in Jerusalem has some great things to say about it, and especially about the silly "what else could we do" line, here and here. He also links to a post by the father of one of the terrorists' victims, here.

The chimera of the peace process

The problem of the Israelis and the "Palestinians" is intractable. There is no good solution. And the reason that there is no good solution is that the "Palestinians" do not have good will and that they raise their children through successive generations not to have good will. Their goal is the eradication of the nation of Israel, an Arab "Palestine" that encompasses all the land from the river to the sea, and all concessions made will simply be used as stepping stones to that goal. A Palestinian state would simply be another such stepping stone. It would not be a functional, autonomous state whose rulers had anything like the normal goals of the rulers of a state--running infrastructure, governing their own people for something like the public good. It would simply be a rocket-launching pad against Israel, a dysfunctional pseudo-state funded by everyone else (including Israel, for that matter), and Israel's implacable enemy. Like Gaza, in fact, only bigger (and possibly, of course, including Gaza and cutting Israel literally in two).

Another way to put this is that most Israelis would be happy with some kind of two-state solution but that the Palestinians don't really want a state of their own in which to settle down and try to flourish as peaceful neighbors of the Israelis. They want the destruction of Israel. A no-win situation.

And the frightening fact, as Gaza has shown us, is that the outside world would blame Israel for both active and passive attempts to protect itself from this implacable enemy--for both border control and for defensive response to direct attack--and would hold Israel directly and permanently responsible for the self-inflicted misery of the Palestinian people. Ceding land to the Palestinians and demanding that they take responsibility for themselves will never be allowed to the Israelis as a way out of the no-win situation.

So, in my opinion, there should be no "peace process." It's a sham and worse than a sham.

While it's perhaps too much to expect Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal to draw this conclusion, it's possible that he's beginning to get it about the intractability of the problem and the foolishness of talking about peace negotiations as though peace is an attainable outcome. In a rather surprising op-ed last week, he said the following (emphasis added):

The fiction that is typically offered about the refugees by devotees of the peace process is that Palestinian leaders see them as a bargaining chip in their negotiations with Israel, perhaps in exchange for the re-division of Jerusalem. But listen in on the internal dialogue of Palestinians and you will hear that the “right of return” is an inviolable, inalienable and individual right of every refugee. In other words, a right that can never (and never safely) be bargained away by Palestinian leaders for the sake of a settlement with Israel.

In this belief the Palestinians are sustained by many things.

One is the mythology of 1948, which is long on tales of what Jews did to Arabs but short on what Arabs did to Jews—or to themselves. Another is the text of U.N. resolution 194, written in 1948, which plainly states that “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.” A third is UNRWA, the U.N. agency that has perpetuated the Palestinian refugee problem for generations when most other refugees have been successfully repatriated. A fourth is their ill treatment at the hands of their Arab hosts, which has caused them to yearn for the fantasy of a homeland—orchards and all—that modern-day Israel succeeds in looking very much like. A fifth is the incessant drone of Palestinian propaganda whose idea of Palestinian statehood traces the map of Israel itself.

Other things could be mentioned. But the roots of the problem are beside the point. The real point is that a grievance that has been nursed for 63 years and that can move people to acts like those witnessed on Sunday is never going to allow a political accommodation with Israel and would never be satisfied by one anyway.

No wonder Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s prime minister, can say he would be prepared to accept the 1967 borders—but that establishing those borders will never mean an end to the conflict. The same goes for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who praised Sunday’s slain protesters as martyrs who “died for the Palestinian people’s rights and freedom.” This from the “moderate” who is supposed to acquaint his people with the reality and purpose of a two-state solution.

Blogger David Isaac makes the point concerning the intractability of the situation:

One of the curious things about the Arab-Israel conflict is that the truth behind the conflict cannot be said: The simple truth that there is no “peace process”, there never was a “peace process”, and the Arabs want Israel eliminated. It’s a testament to how off-limits this truth is that, until this Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal...never published an op-ed saying so. It’s impossible to enact intelligent policy when it’s based on a lie. Of course, Israel contributes to the problem by endorsing the ‘two-state solution’. Israel needs to be the first to say this is a delusion. Only then can we expect things to change.

As Isaac points out, it's perhaps asking a lot of the Wall Street Journal to draw conclusions which even Israel's allegedly most hawkish political rulers don't seem willing to draw, at least not openly and consistently. As he puts it concerning Netanyahu, "We may indeed be entering a new era in the Arab-Israel conflict, one in which Israel’s leaders tell the unvarnished truth, only to dismiss it a moment later." (This is just one reason why the silly talk from the left about bloodthirsty "Likudniks" is such a joke--something coming from an alternative reality that bears no connection to the world we actually live in.)

Isaac quotes some home truths on this subject from The Hollow Peace by Shmuel Katz. (Emphasis added.)

[The spokesmen of the Establishment] refrained from mentioning the fact that the Arab nations meant to prevent the birth of the Jewish State, and that they continued, once the State was born, to hatch plots for its destruction. Israel’s policy ignored this bitter truth and centred mainly on the slogan that Israel wanted peace and that her leaders were prepared to negotiate with any Arab leader. This formula unwittingly distorted the image of the Arab leaders: it endowed them in the eyes of the world, with the quality of reasonableness, as though they were open to discussion. The image of the dispute itself was altered out of all recognition, and made to seem an ordinary border dispute, which could be eliminated by a chat with some Arab leader.

[snip]

To diplomats of the nations of the world – in Washington or in London, in Paris or in Stockholm – accustomed to “handling” territorial disputes in a commonly accepted format, which they could understand from their experience and education, it was “discomfiting” to have to hear that one party to this dispute, the Arabs, with whom they maintained friendly relations, were simply athirst for the blood of the other side and desired nothing but to liquidate them. As for the Israeli diplomats, it made them uncomfortable to have to tell the foreign diplomats that their routine thinking was worlds away from the realities, and that the solutions they proposed were chimerical.

Exactly. You cannot negotiate under these circumstances, and there is no point in doing so. If that were not obvious a priori, it should now be obvious a posteriori after decades of chimerical negotiations (with all-too-real negative consequences for Israeli citizens) and still more so after the withdrawal from Gaza with its inevitable consequences.

"Palestinian" "police" are terrorists

If you're an Israeli Jew and you have the audacity to try to go and pray at Joseph's tomb without carefully coordinating your visit with the IDF, you might just get gunned down by Kalashnikov-wielding "Palestinian" "police" shrieking, "Allahu akbar!" They can't just have people promiscuously praying at a Jewish holy site without special permission, can they? Obviously a highly dangerous activity justifying the immediate use of deadly force. And why not praise Allah while killing a Jew? Especially a Hasid? Sounds like a win-win from their perspective. (See also here.)

This is what the Israelis get for treating the "Palestinians" as a quasi-state entity in Judea and Samaria, aka the "West Bank." No good deed will go unpunished. Except that I'm not at all sure that giving the "Palestinians" partial control over Judea and Samaria was a good deed, if we include "wise, prudent, and good for all concerned" in "good."

Got 'em

Two "Palestinian" young men, entirely unrepentant (of course), have been arrested in the slaughter of the Fogel family. Thanks to Malcolm and Yaacov for the links (here and here). Kudos to the Shin Bet.

It appears (from last names) that they are related to the two Fatah men whose arrest was earlier reported in WorldNet Daily. In fact, it looks like a whole lot of people in the village of Awarta are related to one another and like covering up this particular massacre was something of a family affair. The young murderers may have dreamed up the idea on their own, but their uncle and other family members helped them hide and dispose of the evidence afterwards. Charming people. But give them a state, and I'm sure all will be well./sarc

I continue to say: May the Israelis vote in a death penalty, and may their courts not strike it down. It would be a real advance.

Various arrests in Fogel case by Israeli military

Since I fretted here about the dearth of information on the investigation of the Fogel family massacre in Israel, I thought it only fair to post this update. It seems that the Israeli military is in fact making arrests and taking fingerprints and DNA samples from quite a number of people at the "Palestinian" village of Awarta, near Itamar, where the murders took place. Apparently the investigation is being carried out more or less secretly--that is to say, without release of details to the public--by the IDF.

This could mean that the report in WND of the arrest of men from Fatah (hence, plausibly men who had been trained by the U.S.) was correct, though the IDF sweep seems to be trying to catch conspirators as well as for those who actually carried out the murders.

Hmmm. Good luck to the investigators. I still wish they had the d.p. there.

Criminal Justice

I regularly read (and link in the sidebar) an Israeli blog called Israel Matzav. The blogger, Carl in Jerusalem, is an Orthodox Jew who apparently lives over the "green line." He has been blogging a lot recently about the Fogel massacre, about which I've done a couple of posts here at Extra Thoughts.

The thing that as an American reader I find most frustrating about the coverage of this is the absence of any criminal justice approach to the evil. Carl has recently embedded a video, which I don't intend to watch and advise others to avoid, that contains and is headed by graphic pictures of the slain. (I'm deliberately not linking the blog from this particular post lest an unwary reader go, scroll down, and inadvertently see the picture heading the video.) Carl is trying to stir up appropriate outrage. With that I agree. But the proper response, the active and positive use of outrage, is to demand that evil men be brought to justice as individuals. Even though we in the rest of the world cannot personally do anything, we at least need to have something clearly appropriate, something a healthy mind rightly seeks, to say that others should do. Otherwise dwelling on horror becomes an end in itself, which is not healthy.

I've asked again and again at the site for confirmation of the report that two "Palestinians" have been arrested for the murder--no response. There is, in fact, no discussion of the topic of catching the murderers and of how that is going in any of the posts I have read at the site. It begins to look like the progress of the case and the facts about any arrest are secrets in Israel, even at a "right-wing" blog. In America, of course, whoever was in charge of the investigation would be hounded by the press and asked what progress he was making in catching the murderers. The arrest of the murderers could not possibly be a secret.

Actually, I have to admit that I don't even know how that works in Samaria (aka "the West Bank"), given the semi-independence of the "Palestinian Authority." Is it difficult or impossible for Israel even to make an arrest? But if so, why is there a report of arrests going around? Who would have made those arrests? Even just spelling that out for American readers would be helpful.

Perhaps someone will respond that one should not take a criminal justice approach to terrorism. I'm not sure what the point of such a response in this context would be. The right and natural next step after feeling due outrage is to want these evildoers arrested and punished.

But it's even more frustrating than that, because Israel does not have a death penalty. In fact, Israel has released even horrific Palestinian killers like Samir Kuntar, who also slaughtered an innocent Israeli child, in order to get back the dead bodies of Israeli soldiers. So the whole thing begins to look like a rather bitter game to an American eye. The murderers of the Fogel family will never get anything like justice. At the most they will be arrested and spend some time--almost certainly not the rest of their lives--in prison. And the world may or may not find out about that. It's terribly frustrating.

In that justice vacuum, if I may so call it, one begins to wonder about the point of harrowing readers with an embedded video headed with a graphic image that I, for one, did not want to see. Perhaps the idea is to get some on the left to start to see the darkness in the hearts of the Jew-hating "Palestinians" and the impossibility of making peace with them; I doubt if this tactic will succeed. In any event, the murder of real, concrete people should call forth first and foremost a cry for justice for them, the punishment, individually, of their killers.

I hope that this post will not enrage any Israeli readers and especially that it won't get me banned from commenting on a valuable site. I realize that there may be reasons for the news blackout on the criminal case, reasons that we in America simply do not know. But it may be useful for anyone on the Israeli right who happens to read this to know how these things play out in the minds of those already most sympathetic to "settlers" and most angered by the slaughter of the Fogels.

"America will get at you?"

The murders of the Fogel family in Israel do not exactly reflect glory on the U.S. A report from World Net Daily claims that two arrests have been made in the case and that both of those arrested are members of Fatah forces--the forces that have received training from the U.S. I've been disgusted by this for a long time, and it goes back to the Bush administration. More of this Good Muslim/Bad Muslim nonsense, in which we, the rubes, go in and lavish help on those we've decided to define as "good Muslims." In this case, the Moderate Ones happen to be the PLO.

Anybody remember when Fatah was just called "the PLO" and was openly spoken of as a terrorist organization? Yeah, well, that was a long time ago. Maybe I'm showing my age. We changed our minds about considering them to be terrorists, and instead we trained them to fight the "bad Muslims"--that is, Hamas. And now it looks like the "good ones" are murdering Jews. Great. I've tried to get confirmation of this arrest story from a source other than WND but haven't yet succeeded. I will post if and when I do get some sort of independent confirmation.

There's an expenditure of foreign aid funds I could really get enthusiastic about: Funds spent training and aiding Palestinian terrorists.

Here's another zinger: Benjamin Netanyahu visited the family and friends during their mourning. He spoke to Tamar, the twelve-year-old daughter who came home from a youth activity and found the bodies of her parents and siblings. Guess what she says? "What will happen if you do anything? America will get at you?"

Ouch. Take that, Barack Obama.

Jeff Jacoby on the slaughter of the innocents in Itamar

Here's a good article on the horrible slaughter of most of an Israeli family, the Fogel family, by Palestinian Arabs. Best quotation (emphasis added):

There are those who believe passionately that all human beings are inherently good and rational creatures, essentially the same once you get beyond surface disagreements. Such people cannot accept the reality of a culture that extols death over life, that inculcates a vitriolic hatred of Jews, that induces children to idolize terrorists. Since they would never murder a family in its sleep without being driven to it by some overpowering horror, they imagine that nobody would. This is the mindset that sees a massacre of Jews and concludes that Jews must in some way have provoked it. It’s the mindset behind the narrative that continually blames Israel for the enmity of its neighbors and makes it Israel’s responsibility to end their violence.

The truth is simpler, and bleaker. Human goodness is not hard-wired. It takes sustained effort and healthy values to produce good people; in the absence of those values, cruelty and intolerance are far more likely to flourish.

I'll have a bit more to say about the slaughter of the Fogels in a later post. I'm trying to confirm or disconfirm reports of an arrest in the case. For the moment I'll just say--Israel definitely needs the death penalty.

Double standards

I suppose it's a bit boring to talk about double standards, but this happens to be on my mind.

Why is it, do you suppose, that one virtually never hears a person who has a big "thing" about not giving U.S. aid to Israel talk about stopping giving money to the UN? Hmmm?

Here's one of the many, many nifty things the UN is doing: Glorifying female terrorists as "women's role models." I know you're all shocked.

But seriously. The place where people begin talking about saving our tax dollars and cutting spending tells you a lot about their priorities.

The Melkites have a dhimmitude problem

Which at this point has definitely become an insanity problem.

The patriarch of the Melkite Church (in communion with Rome) has blamed...the Jews for the Catholics killed by Al Qaeda in Baghdad. It's a "Zionist plot" to make Islam look bad. You can't make this stuff up.

By the way, this isn't the first time. Remember when the Melkites had a conference to talk about persecution of Christians in the Middle East? It all turns out to have nothing to do with Islam. It's the Jooooos.

Z Street and Bob Jones University

Readers here will have noticed my relative silence, which is of course explained by my extra activity at What's Wrong With the World. Jeff Culbreath and I have been tag-teaming this week on a big (and I do mean big) three-part series called "Disinviting Islam," which I'm sure my readers have already seen, saving me the trouble of finding the three links. (Right? Thanks for accommodating my laziness.)

Before I got all involved in that, I did come across some interesting additional information on the Obama IRS's outrageous attempts to discriminate in granting non-profit status on the basis of a group's position on the State of Israel. I mentioned it here. Apparently the supposed excuse for this special policy toward pro-Israel groups is the Bob Jones court decision according to which tax exempt status can be denied if the organization has a policy that is contrary to "established public policy." In Bob Jones's case this concerned, if I recall correctly, the university's policy on interracial dating which was related to U.S. antidiscrimination law.

But there is a huge gap between "established public policy" and what the IRS agent allegedly said to Z Street, namely, that tax exempt status might be disallowed if the group's policies different from the policies of the Obama administration. The foreign policy approach of one administration can differ radically from that of the previous administration and the next administration. It is not in itself a matter of U.S. law, and to refer to one particular administration's policy as "established public policy" is not only absurd but dangerous in ways that go far beyond Z Street. Think of it this way: The Obama administration is obviously hugely supportive of homosexual rights, yet they haven't been able to get all of those "rights" codified by Congress. While we're talking about Christian universities, how about a university that has a policy against homosexual acts by its faculty, which might be contrary to "administration policy." Could they be refused tax exempt status as well?

This one is worth flagging, and watching. I hope for many reasons that Z Street prevails in its lawsuit.

Hah! Take that, Barry!

Right. No kidding. Netanyahu says something that should not need to be said. Jerusalem is not a settlement! If Bibi's new spine is a result of the elections last Tuesday, that's one result I can get on board with.

And, to be fair, guess who it was that I first noticed lumping the eastern part of Jerusalem (you know, the capital city of Israel) with "settlements" in "the West Bank"? Yup. Condoleeza Rice. Obama is far more virulently anti-Israel than Bush, but Bush was in some ways more dangerous, because Israel, viewing him as a friend, made more concessions for him.

Anti-Israel idiots get fisked

There's a great, great, ranting post on idiot clerics and their recent anathemas against Israel. Desmond Tutu comes in for a well-deserved fisking. One of Tutu's biggest foot-in-mouth moments appears to have been this, which he doubtless thought was profound:

[S]urely we must recognise that people caged in, starved and stripped of their essential material and political rights must resist their Pharaoh?

Joining in the party, the Anglican Primate of Wales, one Barry Morgan, says,

[O]ur own Prime Minister has described Gaza as a prison camp.

To which Midwest Conservative Journal replies,

Then your own Prime Minister is a blithering idiot. He might be anti-Semitic as well but let’s just stick with what we know for the time being.

Midwest Conservative also gives us this great line,

All we’re doing is saying that until Israel works out a “peace” deal with people who want kill every Jew they can and wipe Israel off the map and comes to terms with the fact that Jewish deaths really don’t bother us at all, we’re going to treat Israel as a pariah.

You get the picture. If you are pro-Israel, you'll love it. If not, you'll hate it. I think it's great. Go read the whole thing if you're on my side and give yourself something to smile about this Sunday. Here's that link again.

HT Romish Graffiti

A foreign events fantasy

My fantasy speech from an Israeli Prime Minister:

I have no interest whatsoever in the so-called peace process. The peace process is a sham and worse than a sham. We do not have a "partner for peace." The only thing that can come of our engaging in such talks is that we will make dangerous concessions to our bitter enemies, enemies who relentlessly seek our eradication. Why should we do such a thing? So far from asking for the opportunity to engage in "direct talks" with representatives of the "Palestinians," I ask only that we be left alone to get on with governing our country and keeping our citizens safe. Oh, and by the way, a construction freeze in our capital city of Jerusalem is obscene, and construction in the eastern part of our capital begins tomorrow. Have a nice day.

I can dream, anyway.