Caroline Glick :: July 2011 Archives

Israel's "social justice" protesters and and apologies for everyone!

This week on The Tribal Update, the weekly television on internet program produced by Latma, the Hebrew-language media satire website I run, we bring you a wide array of subjects to chew on and laugh about.

First and foremost, we bring you a new musical perspective on the "social justice" protesters demanding the destruction of capitalism in Israel and Bibi's head on a platter.

In case you haven't been following, a consortium of the New Israel Fund, various other leftist pressure groups, the Communist party, the media, Israeli celebs, and Tzipi Livni have been organizing large protests replete with NIF-funded props including tents to bring down the government in the name of "the middle class."

Funny, I'm middle class and I am absolutely certain that I don't want to bring the government down.

Then we bring you a discussion of the wisdom of bowing to Turkey's demand for Israel to apologize for preventing the Mavi Marmara terror ship from reaching Gaza last year.

We also bring you a thought provoking commentary on the morality of the leftist demanding cheap housing in Tel Aviv from a person who has felt the sting of homelessness.

Enjoy the show!

Latma is funded through contributions to the Center for Security Policy in Washington. If you would like to support our efforts, you can contribute by clicking here. It takes you to the online contribution page to the Center for Security Policy through Network for Good. To earmark your donation to Latma, please write "Latma" in the box marked "designation."

As I have mentioned, we formed a non-profit organization in Israel to accept donations from outside the United States. Last week we opened a bank account for our group, the Zionist Incubator.

Here is the information you need to wire contributions to the Zionist Incubator for Latma.

Bank Name: Israel Discount Bank Ltd.

Branch Number: 510

Branch Name: Mevasseret Zion

BIC Code: IDBLILITXXX

Account Number (IBAN 23 digits): IL94-0115-1000-0010-4351-154

Beneficiary's Name: Zionist Incubator

Beneficiary's address: POB 841 Mevasseret Zion, Israel 90805

Posted on July 31, 2011 at 11:44 AM

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Breivik and totalitarian democrats

Last Friday morning, Anders Breivik burst onto the international screen when he carried out a monstrous act of terrorism against his fellow Norwegians. Breivik bombed the offices housing the Norwegian government with the intention of murdering its leaders. He then travelled to the Utoya Island and murdered scores of young people participating in a summer program sponsored by Norway's ruling party.

In all, last Friday Breivik murdered 76 people. Most of them were teenagers.

Although Breivik has admitted to his crimes, there are still some important questions that remain unanswered. For instance, we still do not know if he acted alone. Breivik claims that there are multiple cells of his fellow terrorists ready to attack. But so far, no one has found evidence to support his claim. We also still do not know if - for all his bravado - Breivik was acting on his own initiative or as an agent for others.

Finding the answers to these, and other questions are is a matter of the highest urgency. For if in fact Breivik is not a lone wolf, then there is considerable danger that additional, perhaps pre-planned attacks may be carried out in the near future. And given the now demonstrated inadequacy of Norway's law enforcement arms in contending with terror attacks, the prospect of further attacks should be keeping Norwegian and other European leaders up at night.

Despite the dangers, very little of the public discourse since Breivik's murderous assault on his countrymen has been devoted to these issues. Rather, the Norwegian and Western media have focused their discussion of Breivik's terrorist attack on his self-justifications for it. Those self-justifications are found mainly in a 1,500 page manifesto that Breivik posted on the Internet.

Some of the material for his manifesto was plagiarized from the manifesto written by Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, whose bombing campaign spanned two decades and killed 3 and wounded 23. Kaczynski got the New York Times and the Washington Post to publish his self-justifications in 1995 by threatening to murder more people if they refused.

Breivik's manifesto has become the center of the international discussion of his actions largely as a result of the sources he cited.

Kaczynski, like his fellow eco-terrorist Jason Jay Lee, who took several people hostage at the Discovery Channel in Maryland last September, was influenced by the writings of former US vice president Al Gore. A well worn copy of Gore's book Earth in the Balance was reportedly found by federal agents when they searched Kaczynski's cabin in Montana in 1996. Lee claimed that he was "awakened" to the need to commit terrorism to save the environment after he watched Gore's film, "An Inconvenient Truth."

Aside from Kaczynski, (whom he plagiarized without naming), certain parts of Breivik's manifesto read like a source guide to leading conservative writers and bloggers in the Western world. And this is unprecedented. Never before has a terrorist cited so many conservatives to justify his positions.

Breivik particularly noted writers who focus on critical examinations of multiculturalism and the dangers emanating from jihadists and the cause of global jihad. He also cited the work of earlier political philosophers and writers including John Stuart Mill, George Orwell, John Locke, Edmund Burke, Winston Churchill and Thomas Jefferson.

Breivik's citation of conservative writers, (including myself and many of my friends and colleagues in the US and Europe), has dominated the public discussion of his actions. The leftist dominated Western media - most notably the New York Times -- and the left wing of the blogosphere have used his reliance on their ideological opponents' arguments as a means of blaming the ideas propounded by conservative thinkers and the thinkers themselves for Breivik's heinous acts of murder.

For instance, a front page news story in the Times on Monday claimed, "The man accused of the killing spree in Norway was deeply influenced by a small group of American bloggers and writers who have warned for years about the threat from Islam."

The reporter, Scott Shane named several popular anti-jihadist blogs that Breivik mentioned in his manifesto. Shane then quoted left-leaning terrorism expert Marc Sageman who alleged that that the writings of anti-jihad authors "are the infrastructure from which Breivik emerged."

That is, Shane quoted Sageman accusing these writers of responsibility for Breivik's acts of murder.

Before considering the veracity of Sageman's claim, it is worth noting that no similar allegations were leveled by the media or their favored terror experts against Gore in the wake of Lee's hostage taking last year, or in the aftermath of Kaczynski's arrest in 1996. Moreover, Noam Chomsky, Michael Scheuer, Stephen Walt and John Mearshimer, whose writings were endorsed by Osama Bin Laden, have not been accused of responsibility for al Qaeda terrorism.

That is, leftist writers whose works have been admired by terrorists have not been held accountable for the acts of terrorism conducted by their readers.

Nor should they have been. And to understand why this sort of guilt-by-readership is wrong, it is worth considering what separates liberal democracies from what the great Israeli historian Jacob Talmon referred to as totalitarian democracies. Liberal democracies are founded on the notion that it is not simply acceptable for citizens to participate in debates about the issues facing their societies. It is admirable for citizens in democracies to participate in debates - even heated ones -- about their government's policies as well as their societies' cultural and moral direction. A citizenry unengaged is a citizenry that is in danger of losing its freedom.

One of the reasons that argument and debate are the foundations of a liberal democratic order is because the more engaged citizens feel in the life of their societies, the less likely they will be to reject the rules governing their society and turn to violence to get their way. As a rule, liberal democracies reject the resort to violence as a means of winning an argument. This is why, for liberal democracies, terrorism in all forms is absolutely unacceptable.

Whether or not one agrees with the ideological self-justifications of a terrorist, as a member of a liberal democratic society, one is expected to abhor his act of terrorism. Because by resorting to violence to achieve his aims, the terrorist is acting in a manner that fundamentally undermines the liberal democratic order.

Liberal democracies are always works in progress. Their citizens do not expect for a day to come when the debaters fall silent because everyone agrees with one another as all are convinced of the rightness of one side. This is because liberal democracies are not founded on messianic aspirations to create a perfect society.

In contrast, totalitarian democracies - and totalitarian democrats -- do have a messianic temperament and a utopian mission to create a perfect society. And so its members do have hopes of ending debate and argument once and for all.

As Talmon explained in his 1952 classic, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, the totalitarian democratic model was envisioned by Jean Jacques Rousseau the philosophical godfather of the French Revolution. Rousseau believed that a group of anointed leaders could push a society towards perfection by essentially coercing the people to accept their view of right and wrong. Talmon drew a direct line between Rousseau and the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century - Nazism, fascism and communism.

Today, those who seek to silence conservative thinkers by making a criminal connection between our writings and the acts of a terrorist are doing so in pursuit of patently illiberal ends to say the least. If they can convince the public that our ideas cause the mass murder of children, then our voices will be silenced.

Another aspect of the same anti-liberal behavior is the tendency by many to pick and choose which sorts of terrorism are acceptable and which are unacceptable in accordance with the ideological justifications the terrorists give for their actions. The most recent notable example of this behavior is an interview that Norwegian Ambassador Svein Sevje gave to Maariv on Tuesday. Maariv asked Sevje whether in the wake of Breivik's terrorist attack Norwegians would be more sympathetic to the victimization of innocent Israelis by Palestinian terrorists.

Sevje said no, and explained, "We Norwegians view the occupation as the reason for terror against Israel. Many Norwegians still see the occupation as the reason for attacks against Israel. Whoever thinks this way, will not change his mind as a result of the attack in Oslo."

So in the mind of the illiberal Norwegians, terrorism is justified if the ideology behind it is considered justified. For them it is unacceptable for Breivik to murder Norwegian children because his ideology is wrong. But it is acceptable for Palestinians to murder Israeli children because their ideology is right.

As much as statements by Sevje, (or Gore, Walt, Mearshimer, Scheuer or Chomsky), may anger their ideological adversaries, no self-respecting liberal democratic thinker would accuse their political philosophies of inspiring terrorism.

There is only one point at which political philosophy merges into terrorism. That point is when political thinkers call on their followers to carry out acts of terrorism in the name of their political philosophy and they make this call with the reasonable expectation that their followers will fulfill their wishes. Political thinkers who fit this description include the likes of Muslim Brotherhood "spiritual" leader Yousef Qaradawi, Osama Bin Laden, Hamas founder Sheikh Yassin, al Qaeda in Yemen leader Anwar Awlaki and other jihadist leaders.

These leaders are dangerous because they operate outside of the boundaries of democratic polemics. They do not care whether the wider public agrees with their views. Like Mao -- who murdered 70 million people -- they believe that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun not out of rational discourse.

Revealingly, many not particularly liberal Western democracies have granted these terrorist philosophers visas, and embraced them as legitimate thinkers. The hero's welcome Qaradawi enjoyed during his 2005 visit to Britain by then London mayor Ken Livingstone is a particularly vivid example of this practice. The illiberal trajectory British politics has veered onto was similarly demonstrated by the government's 2009 refusal to grant a visa to Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders. Wilders has been demonized as an enemy of freedom for his criticism of Islamic totalitarianism.

The Left's attempts to link conservative writers, politicians and philosophers with Breivik are nothing new. The same thing happened in 1995, when the Left tried to blame rabbis and politicians for the sociopathic Yigal Amir's assassination of then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. The same thing happened in the US last summer with the Left's insistent attempts to link the psychotic Jared Loughner who shot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and her constituents, with Governor Sarah Palin and the Tea Party.

And it is this tendency that most endangers the future of liberal democracies. If the Left is ever successful in its bid to criminalize ideological opponents and justify acts of terrorism against their opponents, their victory will destroy the liberal democratic foundations of Western civilization.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on July 29, 2011 at 4:31 PM

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No Prizes for Erdogan

Shortly after Turkey's Islamist Prime Minister Recip Erdogan came to power in 2002, he began undermining Turkey's strategic alliance with Israel. Erdogan officially ended the alliance last May when he sent the IHH, an al Qaeda-aligned, Turkish NGO affiliated with his Islamist AKP Party to lead the pro-Hamas flotilla to Gaza.

Aboard the Mavi Marmara, IHH members violently attacked IDF naval commandos who boarded the ship in order to prevent it from breaking Israel's lawful maritime blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza coast. In the life and death battle that ensued, nine of the IHH assailants were killed.

By attempting to break Israel's lawful blockade, passengers aboard the Mavi Marmara and the rest of the ships in the flotilla were engaged in illicit acts of war against the Jewish state and providing illicit aid and comfort to an illegal terrorist organization. In supporting and arguably organizing the flotilla, including the Mavi Marmara, Erdogan himself was waging an unlawful war against Israel.

Erdogan reacted to the Mavi Marmara incident with enraged indignation. He demanded that Israel apologize for its commandos' actions and pay compensation to the families of the dead. He also demanded an international inquiry into Israel's actions.

Answering his call, the UN set up a commission to investigate last year's flotilla episode. The report has been ready since May. But its publication has been repeatedly delayed. According to media accounts of its findings, the UN commission agrees that Israel's blockade of Gaza is legal. It also claims that the naval commandos used disproportionate force in fending off the Mavi Marmara passengers' assault against them.

In a bid to salvage Turkey's ties to Israel and so increase waning Congressional support for Turkey, the Obama administration has been mediating talks between Israel and Turkey for the past few months. According to news reports, the administration is now pressuring Israel to agree to Erdogan's demand for an apology and to pay compensation to the families of those killed onboard the Mavi Marmara. The U.S. is also demanding that Turkey agree not to press damages or war crimes claims against Israeli personnel in international or other courts.

Given President Obama's expressed admiration and support for Erdogan, it makes sense that he is pushing this position. But the question remains, why is Turkey insisting that Israel apologize and pay damages for the IDF's lawful actions on the Mavi Marmara? What is he trying to achieve? And what would be the consequences if Israel were to bow to U.S. pressure and apologize?

There are two explanations for Erdogan's behavior. First, there is the issue of honor, which plays such a prominent role in Islamic society. He views the Mavi Marmara incident in the context of honor politics. And he demands an apology from Israel in order to increase his honor and diminish Israel's.

Most of Israel's objections to Erdogan's demand to date have centered around this issue. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Yaalon have cited this as the primary reason for refusing to apologize.

But while unpleasant, honor is probably not Erdogan's main rationale for pursing his demand for an Israeli apology. Since he was reelected to serve a third term as prime minister last month Erdogan has been openly seeking to establish a neo-Ottoman Turkish hegemonic position in the Arab world.

To this end he has been actively interfering in the popular revolt against Syrian dictator Bashar Assad. The IHH has been hosting Syrian opposition leaders in Turkey. Erdogan's clear aim is to replace Iran as Syria's overlord in a post-Assad Syria.

Erdogan has also been actively engaging Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood since the overthrow of former president Hosni Mubarak in February. Erdogan plans a high profile visit to Egypt in the near future. And he plans to end his visit to Egypt by crossing the Egyptian border with Gaza. There he will become the highest-level foreign leader to visit Gaza since the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood Hamas took over in 2007.

As far as Erdogan is concerned, if he gets the U.S. to force Israel to apologize, it will be a massive public relations coup in his bid to convince the Arabs to accept his leadership. After all, Israel would be apologizing for having had the temerity to oppose the aggression of IHH terrorists engaged in an act of war against Israel. An Israeli apology would serve as proof that his double game of remaining a NATO member and carrying out aggression against Israel is the winning formula. If Israel apologizes for defending itself against Turkish aggression, Erdogan will have succeeded where the Arabs have failed.

Obviously, on the merits, Israel has no reason to apologize. And Turkish promises not to file lawsuits and war crimes complaints against Israel will have no legal weight. The Turkish pledge will not bind the relatives of the dead. And an Israeli apology and compensation will provide them with a prima facie claim that Israel admits culpability.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak and senior IDF officers reportedly argue in favor of an apology, claiming the strategic alliance with Turkey is so important that Israel must be willing to swallow its pride in order to rebuild it.

This argument has apparently won over Intelligence Minister Dan Meridor. It has also caused Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman to temper his honor-based rejection of the Turkish demand.

The problem with this argument is that it fails to take address Erdogan's second, and more strategically significant motivation of using Israeli humiliation to strengthen his image as a pan-Islamic leader.

That motivation gives lie to the notion that Erdogan has any interest in reinstating Turkey's strategic alliance with Israel. The man who is cultivating Hamas in the PA, and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Syria, is not going to permit the Israeli Air Force to renew its training flights over Turkish airspace.

Erdogan is not going to share intelligence with Israel on Iran. He will not cooperate with Mossad agents along Turkey's border with Iran or Syria.

Instead he will use his ability to humiliate Israel and curb its military operations to demonstrate to the Muslim Brotherhood that it should accept Turkey's role as regional hegemon and operate under its wings.

Moreover, Israel can fully expect that under Erdogan, Turkey will share any intelligence information Israel provides with the likes of the Muslim Brotherhood, and that any intelligence information Turkey transfers to Israel to be of limited value.

The UN announced on Sunday that it was delaying the publication of its report on the Mavi Marmara for another month. The expectation is that Israel will bow to Turkish and U.S. pressure and apologize and so obviate the need for the report to ever see the light of day.

Given the true stakes involved, Israel must stick to its guns and say no apology, no compensation, and no political prize for Erdogan.

Originally published in The Jewish Press.

Posted on July 27, 2011 at 3:10 PM

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Interview on Israel National News Radio

Sunday I gave an interview to Josh Haste on his hasbara hour program at Israel National Radio.

Here's the link to the interview.

Posted on July 27, 2011 at 3:06 PM

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Squandering Israel's limited influence

The past month has been a difficult one for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for the Palestinians (UNRWA). First Palestinians in Hamas-controlled Gaza held mass protests against the agency's attempt to change its name to the United Nations Agency for Palestinian Refugees. Conspiracy theories claimed the name change was part of a secret plan to end the Palestinians' refugee status so as to block their demand to "return" to Israel.

UNRWA officials explained repeatedly to the public and to Hamas terror masters that this was not the case. The agency's devotion to the cause of "return" remained unchanged. The name change was just a bid to streamline their website to mark the agency's 60th anniversary.

But to no avail. Within days, the name change was canceled.

But that didn't end UNRWA's problems. Last week, demonstrators returned to protest against the agency, this time for its cutbacks in benefits. Protesters blocked the entrance to UNRWA's offices and generally frightened its employees.

In response to the protests, UNRWA's spokesman Chris Gunness gave an interview to the Palestinian Ma'an news agency. His clear goal was to shift the blame away from UNRWA for the unpopular policies. First Gunness criticized UNRWA's donor countries. They have not answered UNRWA's call for hundreds of millions of extra aid dollars to UNRWA - whose annual budget is in excess of $1 billion.

Then Gunness shifted the blame to UNRWA's favorite bogeyman: Israel.

Israel, he claimed, is responsible for all of Gaza's economic woes because of its lawful maritime blockade of the Hamas-ruled territory's coastline. Gunness ignored the fact that despite that lawful blockade, which he falsely labeled "a clear breach of international law," Gaza has experienced overall economic growth in recent years. Its markets are full. It suffers no blockade-induced shortages in basic goods.

As he put it, "From UNRWA's point of view, it would be better for those states and organizations with the power to bring the necessary pressures to bear [on Israel] to end the collective punishment rather than pay UNRWA to deal with its disastrous impact."

THE PALESTINIAN protests against UNRWA demonstrate very clearly that from the Palestinians' perspective, UNRWA's job is to give them cash handouts in order to enable them to continue waging their war for Israel's destruction. And as UNRWA's quick capitulation to their protests against its name change, and its bid to blame their purported suffering on Israel make clear, UNRWA shares their perspective on what its role is in Palestinian society.

This state of affairs is not new. And in large part, it is UNRWA's consistent support for the Palestinian war against Israel that informed the US House Foreign Relations Committee's welcome decision last week to cut US foreign assistance to international organizations - including the UN - by 25 percent.

The US is UNRWA's largest donor. Its contributions to the agency have doubled since Hamas took over Gaza in 2007. In 2009, the US contributed $268 million in US taxpayer funds to the agency. The amount accounted for 27% of UNRWA's total budget.

UNRWA, with its role of UN enabler for the Palestinian war against Israel, was not the only target of the committee's foreign aid budget bill. Egypt, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, Yemen and Pakistan are also targeted.

The Foreign Relations Committee bill prohibits further security assistance to Egypt until after the president certifies that it is not directly or indirectly controlled by a terrorist organization; is fully implementing its peace treaty with Israel; and is actively destroying smuggling tunnels along its border with Israel.

The bill likewise prohibits further security assistance to Lebanon until the president certifies that no members of Hezbollah hold positions in any governmental agency or outlet.

Finally it prohibits security assistance to the PA until the president certifies that no member of Hamas holds any policy position in any governmental office or outlet; that the PA is dismantling extremist infrastructure in Gaza and Judea and Samaria; that the PA has halted anti-Israel incitement; and that the PA recognizes Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state.

As committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen told The Jerusalem Post last week, "Basically, if Hamas, Hezbollah, other foreign terrorist organizations or violent extremist groups hold policy positions in their respective governments, they are not to receive US assistance."

The bill is a clear demonstration of the depth of support for Israel among members of the House of Representatives.

It is also a clear demonstration of the depth of concern House members harbor regarding Obama's policies towards Israel and the wider Middle East.

SINCE TAKING office, Obama has refused to accept the positions put forward by his predecessor George W. Bush regarding Israel's final borders and the Palestinian demand to overrun Israel with UN-financed "refugees."

Those positions were codified in Bush's 2004 letter to then-prime minister Ariel Sharon.

Bush's letter stated that the US would not support an Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 armistice lines; would not support the uprooting of all the Israeli communities built outside those lines; and rejected the Palestinian demand for the so-called "right of return" of millions of foreign born, UNRWA-supported Arabs to Israel.

The House bill codifies Bush's letter as US law. It also requires the State Department to report to Congress on steps it is taking to fight the delegitimization campaign against Israel. It ends the presidential waiver for moving the US embassy to Jerusalem in 2014. It requires the State Department to list Jerusalem as part of Israel on official US documents.

The House bill has a long road to travel before it becomes US law. Chances that it will pass as written are slight, and not merely because Obama would likely veto it if it came to his desk.

The first obstacle it faces is in the Democrat-controlled Senate. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is led by Senator John Kerry. Kerry is no friend of Israel's. And he is a passionate supporter of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad.

He visited Hamas-controlled Gaza in February 2009.

In his current position, Kerry has served as a surrogate for Obama on Middle East issues. As early as March 2009, Kerry was calling for Israel to transfer control over Gaza's international borders to Hamas terrorists. He was also demanding that Israel bar Jews from building in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria. Kerry has been an outspoken opponent of action against Iran's illicit nuclear installations.

He has acted as an apologist for Assad's illicit nuclear proliferation. He has also been a friendly visitor to Hezbollah/Iran-controlled Lebanon.

Given Kerry's positions, there is no chance that he will approve the House's bill.

But in opposing the bill, Kerry and his fellow Democrats will reportedly be ably assisted by Israel. Last week, the Post reported that the Democrats justify maintaining US support for the PA by arguing that they are simply doing the bidding of the Israeli government.

And speaking to the Post, an Israeli official said, "We are interested in the Palestinian Authority maintaining law and order, and strengthening their security forces and prospering. If there's no change with Hamas and Fatah [in terms of Hamas participation in a unity government], there's no reason to change the current situation."

Other media reports have claimed that the IDF General Staff opposes ending US assistance to the PA.

Moreover, in the past, Israeli leaders - first and foremost former foreign minister Tzipi Livni - have been outspoken supporters of US financial assistance to UNRWA.

Indeed, members of Congress note that if it weren't for Israeli objections, they would have ended US financial support for UNRWA years ago.

It is hard to see what Israeli interest is served by these positions. And it is even more difficult to understand how it serves the country's interest to use any of its leverage in the US Congress to lobby for the Palestinians or UNRWA.

To a large degree, these positions are the consequence of the failure and basic irrelevance of Israel's public discourse.

Controlled by the political Left, the public debate in Israel has never allowed the basic assumptions of the failed Oslo peace process with the PLO to be questioned.

Among other things, those assumptions include the view that for Israel to garner international support, it needs to be perceived as pro-peace by the international community.

And that assumed requirement has made it necessary for Israeli diplomats and policymakers to cleave to the discredited position that the Palestinians are interested in peace and should therefore be supported by the US specifically and by the international community generally.

In 1993, the embassy in Washington began lobbying Congress to approve hundreds of millions of dollars in assistance to the PA. And because the ideological and policy assumptions of the Oslo process have never been scrutinized despite the policy's abject failure, apparently, this remains the underlying policy assumption of the Foreign Ministry in its dealings with foreign governments, including the US Congress.

The IDF's support for the PA is not an indication of the PA's strategic value to Israel. Rather it is reflective of the army's confusion about its role.

US-trained and -financed PA security forces took lead roles in the Palestinian terror war against Israel from 2000 to 2004. IDF field commanders have no confidence that the new Palestinian US-trained forces deployed in Judea and Samaria will stand with Israel against their terrorist brethren in a future conflict. Indeed, several have expressed confidence that in a future conflict, these UStrained forces will again lead the fighting against Israel.

The IDF is likely defending US funding to these enemy forces because its commanders fear that if the PA collapses due to a lack of US funding, the IDF will be called on to perform its law and order functions. But again, this view is in large part the consequence of the absence of an informed public debate about Israel's policy option in light of the failure of the Oslo process.

If the PA collapses, the option of reverting to Israel's military rule of the areas is not Israel's only option. Israel can also apply Israeli law to Judea and Samaria. The police can take up the law and order functions carried out by the PA today. And the IDF can concentrate on war fighting.

The fact of the matter is that contrary to what the anti- Semites claim, Israel does not control the US Congress.

And what Israel says has limited impact on lawmakers.

Democrats who cite official Israeli support for aid to the Palestinians as the justification for their support of such aid are quick to ignore Israel's positions when it comes to moving the US embassy to Jerusalem and supporting Jewish property rights in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria.

But Israel does have some leverage on Capitol Hill. And it should be using all of it to build support for attacking Iran's nuclear installations and defending and strengthening Israel's ability and sovereign right to defend itself.

Israel certainly should not be expending any of its limited influence to maintain US support for the Palestinians or UNRWA.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on July 25, 2011 at 4:44 PM

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Israel's premier opportunist

Saying that Israel faces daunting challenges today and that those challenges will multiply and grow in the near future should not be construed as a partisan or ideological statement. Rather, it is a statement of fact.

It is also a fact that the greatest dangers facing Israel stem from President Barack Obama's rapid withdrawal of the US from its position as the predominant power in the Middle East on the one hand, and from Iran's rise as a nuclear power and regional power on the other.

These power shifts along with the Muslim Brotherhood's rising power in Egypt; Turkey's Islamist government's regional ambitions; the rise of jihadist forces throughout the Persian Gulf; and the growing instability of the Syrian and Jordanian regimes, together constitute a threat environment unmatched in Israel's history.

Alongside these conventional threats, Israel is the target of a sustained, escalating political campaign to delegitimize its right to exist and its right to defend itself by the Palestinians and the international Left. This campaign threatens Israel's economy and prepares the ground for violent aggression against Israel by conditioning the West to believe that Israel deserves to be attacked.

Given the magnitude, multiplicity and complexity of the threats Israel faces, it would be reasonable to expect our leading politicians from all parties to place patriotism above partisanship and at least on the issues that are beyond dispute to work together to defend the country.

And it would seem reasonable to assume that the issues beyond dispute are Israel's right to exist and defend itself as well as its need to deter or defeat its enemies.

Throughout most of the state's 63 year history, opposition leaders have joined forces with the government to defend the country in times of trouble. Most recently, while serving as head of the opposition during Ehud Olmert's tenure as prime minister, in 2006 Binyamin Netanyahu traveled to Europe at Olmert's request and defended Israel's war against Hezbollah.

During the course of hostilities, Netanyahu never criticized Olmert's poor war leadership in public. He did not publicly criticize then-foreign minister Tzipi Livni's scandalously incompetent handling of the cease-fire negotiations at the UN Security Council. Instead, Netanyahu communicated his criticism to Olmert behind closed doors. As he saw it, public criticism would diminish Olmert's ability to win the war.

Shortly after Netanyahu took office in March 2009, the UN released its libelous Goldstone Report in which Olmert and his government were falsely accused of committing war crimes during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza. Although Netanyahu himself was not mentioned or accused of anything, he led a staunch campaign to discredit the report.

Netanyahu didn't act as he did because he wanted to help Kadima. He acted as he did because he realized that it was Israel, not Olmert and Livni, that was under attack. As prime minister and as opposition leader, it is his job to defend Israel from attack even when the most direct beneficiaries of his actions are his political rivals.

NETANYAHU'S DECENT behavior didn't make him a hero. His behavior is the minimum we can and should expect from our elected officials, whether they are in the government or the opposition. We should be able to reasonably expect that those who seek public office with the declared intention of serving as national leaders will always put the national interest above their partisan interests when the two conflict.

Unfortunately, this fundamental, eminently reasonable expectation is being trampled by opposition leader Tzipi Livni today. Since taking the helm of the opposition, Livni has never been willing to recognize that foreign attacks on Netanyahu are quite often attacks on Israel.

Rather than acknowledge that attacks on the legitimacy of the democratically elected government of her country are attacks on her country, Livni has viewed every attack on Netanyahu as an opportunity to weaken his government.

In this vein, Livni has consistently sided with Obama, the Palestinians and the international Left against Netanyahu, and blamed Netanyahu for their attacks on Israel. For instance, when during his visit to the US in May, Netanyahu rejected Obama's hostile call for Israel to retreat to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines, Livni defended Obama as a friend of Israel and accused Netanyahu of harming Israel's ties to the US.

Indeed, Livni called for Netanyahu to resign.

Livni ignored Obama's shocking renunciation of pledges his predecessor made to the Sharon government regarding Israel's right to defensible borders and US rejection of the Palestinians' demands for unlimited immigration to Israel and for Israel to vacate all the Israeli towns and villages built beyond the 1949 armistice lines.

Livni ignored the fact she herself demanded that the Palestinians renounce the so-called "right of return," and blamed Netanyahu for all the unpleasantness. As she put it, "A prime minister that harms the relationship with the US over something unsubstantial is harming Israel's security and deterrence."

As for the Palestinians, as far as Livni is concerned, they can do no wrong while Netanyahu is in office. Although the Palestinian negotiations department documents that were leaked earlier this year to The Guardian show Livni arguing that the Palestinians have to recognize Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state, since Netanyahu took office, she has abandoned this position in favor of blanket support for the Palestinians against Netanyahu.

In Livni's world, the fact that the Palestinians have refused to hold negotiations with Israel for two years is an opportunity to attack Netanyahu.

The fact that her friends in Fatah just signed a unity deal with Hamas is insignificant. As for their bid to ditch the peace process and ask the UN to recognize a Palestinian state without peace with Israel - that too is an opportunity to attack Netanyahu.

Last month, Netanyahu told an interviewer that the conflict with the Palestinians is not about territory but about their rejection of Israel's right to exist. He asserted that as a consequence, it will be impossible to resolve the conflict until they change their view of Israel.

As is her wont, Livni treated her opponent's observation about an unpleasant reality as equivalent to creating that reality. Attacking Netanyahu from the Knesset podium she hissed, "Who are you to tell the citizens of Israel that they and their children, and later their children's children, will continue to live by their swords forever? Who are you to bury the chances of a deal and of normal life here, after just a few hours in the room meant for negotiations you didn't conduct?"

THEN THERE is Livni's ardent support for far-Left organizations in Israel and abroad that work actively to undermine Israel's legitimacy. Take J Street. It took less than a year for J Street to demonstrate that its claim that it is pro-Israel is a sham. J Street lobbied the US Congress not to impose sanctions on Iran. It lobbied the Obama administration to allow an anti-Israel resolution to pass at the UN Security Council. It has included advocates of the boycott, sanctions and divestment campaign against Israel at its annual conference. It supports several of the most anti- Israel members of Congress.

Due to J Street's hostility, the government has rightly shunned it. But Livni has embraced it - mainly in a bid to make Netanyahu look petty.

In so doing, she has given legitimacy to a deeply hostile organization whose goals are far outside the mainstream of both Israeli public opinion and American public opinion.

Then there is her outspoken support for anti- Zionist Israeli and foreign organizations that participate in the international Left's campaign to delegitimize Israel. Many of these groups worked with the Goldstone Commission and others to criminalize Kadima's leadership - including Livni - as war criminals.

If it hadn't been for Livni, last week the Knesset would have approved by a much wider margin an anti-boycott law that enjoyed support from across the political spectrum. Instead, it passed with the support of right-wing lawmakers alone.

The original anti-boycott bill was co-sponsored by Likud MK Ze'ev Elkin and Kadima MK Dalia Itzik. Several Kadima MKs were vocal advocates of legislation punishing those waging economic war against Israel.

For instance, Kadima MK Otniel Schneller said, "Those who oppose the bill with phony democratic claims are legitimizing the international trend of boycotting Israeli academia, culture and economics, thereby damaging the legitimacy of Israeli democracy and Jewish morals."

But Livni would have none of it.

Last week, Livni forbade Kadima MKs to support the legislation in any form, and then led the charge in attacking it with those very same "phony democratic claims."

By acting as she did, she didn't merely hurt the government. She hurt the country. Now everyone from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, to B'Tselem, to the International Solidarity Movement will cite Livni's position as proof that there is nothing wrong with waging economic warfare against Israel. They will quote her to claim it is reasonable to single Israel out from the rest of the nations of the world for delegitimization and divestment.

Livni insists that Kadima is not a leftist party and that she is not a leftist even as her positions are identical to those of the post-Zionist Meretz party.

Livni's political rationale is clear. She knows that despite her protestations, no one other than her media supporters believes that Kadima is a centrist party. As a consequence, her only chance of forming a government is by capturing the entire leftist vote.

Although many Kadima MKs object to her positions and criticize her for being too radical, they realize they have no choice but to go along. If they want to remain in Kadima and in politics, they must appeal to Kadima's voters - who are all on the Left.

This is why Livni's rival for party leadership Shaul Mofaz has adopted a peace plan that is even more radical than Livni's plan to give Fatah everything it wants. Mofaz's plan is to recognize and seek to negotiate a settlement with Hamas.

Mofaz is no dove. But his only option for beating Livni in the Kadima leadership primary is to outflank her on the Left.

Livni has always been an opportunist. When Netanyahu brought her into the Knesset in 1999, she was a super hawk. When in 2004, then-prime minister Ariel Sharon adopted the far Left's strategy of wholesale territorial surrender, Livni moved from junior minister to senior minister in less than two years by adopting the positions of the far Left.

Today, as she attacks Netanyahu for advancing positions that most Israelis agree with, she does so not because she believes Netanyahu is wrong. After all, she advanced many of the same positions when she was foreign minister. She attacks him because she wants to bring down his government so that she can have another shot at getting elected to replace him. That her behavior's affects Israel's ability to withstand political and military aggression is clearly of no concern to her.

It is hard to quantify the damage Livni's opportunistic attacks on the government have already caused the country. As we move into an uncertain future, it is disconcerting to consider the damage Livni will cause with her shameless exploitation of Israel's vulnerabilities for her own political gain.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on July 22, 2011 at 10:34 AM

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The non-political tent city and Arab MKs defend Hanin Zuabi

This week on the Tribal Update, the television on internet show brought to you by Latma, the Hebrew language media criticism site I run we bring you an inside look at the non-political tent city of young Tel Avivians that has captured the imagination of the non-political media.

We also bring you MK Abdul Messit discussing the Knesset Ethics Committee's decision to suspend MK Hanin Zuabi from the Knesset for three weeks due to her participation in last year's terror flotilla to Gaza.

Enjoy the show!

Latma is funded through contributions to the Center for Security Policy in Washington. If you would like to support our efforts, you can contribute by clicking here. It takes you to the online contribution page to the Center for Security Policy through Network for Good. To earmark your donation to Latma, please write "Latma" in the box marked "designation."

As I have mentioned, we formed a non-profit organization in Israel to accept donations from outside the United States. Last week we opened a bank account for our group, the Zionist Incubator.

Here is the information you need to wire contributions to the Zionist Incubator for Latma.

Bank Name: Israel Discount Bank Ltd.

Branch Number: 510

Branch Name: Mevasseret Zion

BIC Code: IDBLILITXXX

Account Number (IBAN 23 digits): IL94-0115-1000-0010-4351-154

Beneficiary's Name: Zionist Incubator

Beneficiary's address: POB 841 Mevasseret Zion, Israel 90805

Posted on July 22, 2011 at 10:12 AM

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Israel's only two options

Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas is in Europe this week seeking to convince the Spanish and Norwegian governments to support the Palestinian bid to sidestep negotiations with Israel and have the UN General Assembly recognize Palestinian sovereignty over Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem in addition to Gaza.

The Palestinians know that without US support, their initiative will fail to gain Security Council support and therefore have no legal weight. But they believe that if they push hard enough, Israel's control over these areas will eventually unravel and they will gain control over them without ever accepting Israel's right to exist.

Fatah's UN gambit, along with its unity deal with Hamas, makes clear that the time has come for Israel to finally face the facts: There are only two realistic options for dealing with Judea and Samaria.

Either the Palestinians will take control of Judea and Samaria, or Israel will annex them.

If the Palestinians take control, they will establish a terror state in the areas, which - like their terror state in Gaza - will use its territory as a starting point for continued war against Israel.

It isn't only Israel's experience with post-withdrawal Gaza and South Lebanon that make it clear that a post-withdrawal Palestinian-controlled Judea and Samaria will become a terror state. The Palestinians themselves make no bones about this.

In a Palestinian public opinion survey released last week by The Israel Project, 65 percent of Palestinians said they believe that they should conduct negotiations with Israel. But before we get excited, we need to read the fine print.

According to the survey, those two-thirds of Palestinians believe that talks should not lead to the establishment of the State of Palestine next to Israel and at peace with the Jewish state. They believe the establishment of "Palestine" next to Israel should serve as a means for continuing their war against Israel. The goal of that war is to destroy what's left of Israel after the "peace" treaty and gobble it into "Palestine."

That is, 66% of Palestinians believe "peace" talks with Israel should be conducted in bad faith.

Moreover, three-quarters deny Jewish ties to Jerusalem, and 80% support Islamic jihad against Jews as called for in the Hamas charter; 73% support the annihilation of the Jewish people as called for in the Hamas charter on the basis of Islamic scripture.

As bad as Israel's experience with post-withdrawal Gaza and South Lebanon has been, Israel's prospects with a post-withdrawal Judea and Samaria will be far worse. It isn't simply that withdrawal will invite aggression from Judea and Samaria. It will invite foreign Arab armies to invade the rump Jewish state.

Unlike the post-withdrawal situation with Gaza and South Lebanon, without Judea and Samaria, Israel would not have the territorial depth and topographical advantage to defend itself from invasion from the east.

Moreover, the establishment of the second Palestinian terror state after Gaza in Judea and Samaria would embolden some of Israel's Arab citizens in the Galilee and the Negev as well as in Jaffa, Lod, Haifa and beyond to escalate their already declared irredentist plans to demand autonomy or unification with whatever Palestinian terror state they choose.

Living under the constant threat of invasion from the east (and the south, from a Muslim Brotherhood-controlled Egyptian army moving through the Sinai and Gaza), Israel would likely be deterred from taking concerted action against its treacherous Arab citizens.

As then-prime minister Ariel Sharon warned in 2001, the situation would be analogous to the plight of Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. Just as the Nazis deterred the Czech government from acting against its traitorous German minority in the Sudetenland in the 1930s, so Arab states (and a nuclear Iran), supporting the Palestinian terror states in Judea and Samaria and in Gaza, would make it impossible for Israel to enforce its sovereign rights on its remaining territory.

Israel's destruction would be all but preordained.

The second option is for Israel to annex Judea and Samaria, complete with its hostile Arab population.

Absorbing the Arab population of Judea and Samaria would increase Israel's Arab minority from 20% to 33% of the overall population. This is true whether or not Israel grants them full citizenship with voting rights or permanent residency without them.

Obviously such a scenario would present Israel with new and complex legal, social and law enforcement challenges. But it would also provide Israel with substantial advantages and opportunities.

Israel would have to consider its electoral laws and weigh the prospect of moving from a proportional representation system to a direct, district system. It would have to begin enforcing its laws toward its Arab citizens in a manner identical to the way it enforces its laws against its Jewish citizens. This includes everything from administrative laws concerning building to criminal statutes related to treason. It would have to ensure that Arab schoolchildren are no longer indoctrinated to hate Jews, despite the fact that according to the Israel Project survey, 53% of Palestinians support such anti-Semitic indoctrination in the classroom.

These steps would be difficult to enact.

On the other side, annexing Judea and Samaria holds unmistakable advantages for Israel. For instance, Israel would regain complete military control over the areas. Israel ceded much of this control to the PLO in 1996.

The Palestinian armies Israel agreed to allow the PLO to field have played a central role in the Palestinian terror machine. They have also played a key role in indoctrinating Palestinian society to seek and work toward Israel's destruction. By bringing about the disbanding of these terror forces, Israel would go a long way toward securing its citizens from attack.

Furthermore, by asserting its sovereign rights to its heartland, for the first time since 1967, Israel would be adopting an unambiguous position around which its citizens and supporters could rally. Annexation would also finally free Israel's politicians and diplomats to tell the truth about the pathological nature of Palestinian nationalism and about the rank hypocrisy and anti-Semitism at the heart of much of the international Left's campaigns on behalf of the Palestinians.

No, annexation won't be easy. But then again, the alternative is national suicide.

And again, these are the only options. Either the Palestinians form a terror state from which it will wage war against the shrunken, indefensible Jewish state, or Israel expands the size of the Jewish state.

Since 1967, Israel has refused to accept the fact that these are the only two options available. Instead, successive governments and the nation as a whole have set their hopes on imaginary third options. For the Left, this option has been the fantasy of a two-state solution. This "solution" involves the Palestinians controlling some or all of the lands Israel took over from Jordan and Egypt in the Six Day War, establishing a state, and all of us living happily ever after.

Given the Palestinians' overwhelming, consistent and violent support for the destruction of Israel in any size, this leftist fantasy never had a leg to stand on.

And since 1993, when the Rabin government adopted the Left's fantasy as state policy, more than 2,000 Israelis have been killed in its pursuit.

Not only has the Left's third option fantasy facilitated the Palestinian terror machine's ability to kill Jews, it has empowered their propaganda war against Israel.

Israel's pursuit of the nonexistent two-state solution has eroded its own international position to a degree unprecedented in its history.

Last week's meeting of the so-called Middle East Quartet ended without a final statement. It isn't that its members couldn't agree on the need to establish "Palestine" in Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem. That was a no-brainer. The Quartet members couldn't agree on the need to accept the Jewish state. Russia reportedly rejected wording that would have enjoined the Palestinians to accept the Jewish state's right to exist as part of a peace treaty.

And this was eminently foreseeable. The unhinged two-state solution makes Israel's legitimacy contingent on the establishment of a Palestinian state. And it put the burden to establish a Palestinian state on Israel.

Since everyone except Israel and the US always accepted the establishment of a Palestinian state, and no one except Israel and the US always accepted the existence of the Jewish state, by making its own legitimacy dependent on Palestinian statehood, Israel started the clock running on its own demonization.

The longer Israel allows its very right to exist to be contingent on the establishment of another terror state committed to its destruction, the less the nations of the world will feel obliged to accept its right to exist.

As for the Right, its leaders have embraced imaginary third options of their own. Either Jordan would come in and save us, or the Palestinians would come to like us, or something.

The one thing that both the Left's fantasy option and the Right's fantasy option share is their belief that the Palestinians or the Arabs as a whole will eventually change. Both sides' imaginary third options maintain that with sufficient inducements or time, the Arabs will change their behavior and drop their goal of destroying Israel.

Our 44-year dalliance in fantasyland has not simply weakened us militarily and diplomatically. It has torn us apart internally by surrendering the debate to the two ideological fringes of the political spectrum. Actually, to be precise, we have surrendered 99% of our public discourse to the radical Left and 1% to the radical Right.

The Left's control over the discourse has caused its ideological opposite's numbers to increasingly disengage from the state. That would be bad enough, but the Palestinians' inarguable bad faith and continued commitment to Israel's destruction have driven the far Left far off the cliff of reason and rationality.

Unable to convince their fellow Israelis that their two-state pipe dream will bring peace, the Israeli Left has joined forces with the international Left in its increasingly shrill campaigns to delegitimize the country's right to exist and undermine its ability to defend itself.

This sorry state of affairs is exemplified today by the radical Left's hysterical response to the Knesset's passage last week of the anti-boycott law. The comparatively mild law makes it a civil offense to solicit boycotts against Israel. It bars people engaged in economic warfare against Israel from getting government benefits and makes them liable to punitive damages in civil suits.

The Left's hysterical public relations campaign to demonize the law and its supporters as fascists and seek its overthrow through the Supreme Court makes clear that the Left will wage war against its own country in pursuit of its delusion.

But aside from driving the public discourse into the depths of ideological madness, Israel's embrace of fantasy has made it impossible for us to conduct a sober-minded discussion of our only real options. The time has come to debate these two options, choose one, and move forward.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on July 18, 2011 at 3:24 PM

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Caution: Storm Approaching

It was seven months ago that Mohammed Bouazizi, a vegetable peddler in Tunisia set himself and the Arab world on fire. The 26-year-old staged his suicidal protest on the steps of the local city hall after a municipal inspector took away his unlicensed vegetable cart thus denying him the ability to feed his family of eight.

Most depictions of the Arab revolutions that followed his act have cast them as struggles for freedom and good government. These depictions miss the main cause of these political upheavals. No doubt millions of Arabs are upset about the freedom deficit in Arab lands. But the fact is that economics has played a decisive role in all of them.

In Bouzizi's case, his self-immolation was provoked by economic desperation. And if current trends continue, the revolutionary ferment we have seen so far is only the tip of the iceberg. Moreover, the political whirlwind will not be contained in the Middle East.

Most of the news coming out about Egypt today emanates from Cairo's Tahrir Square. There the protesters continue to demand ousted president Hosni Mubarak's head on a platter alongside the skulls of his sons, business associates, advisors and everyone else who prospered under his rule. While the supposedly liberal democratic protesters' swift descent into bloodlust is no doubt worth noting, the main reason these protesters continue to gain so much international attention is because they are easy to find. A reporter looking for a story's failsafe option is to mosey on over to the square and put a microphone into the crowd.

But while easily accesible, the action at Tahrir Square is not Egypt's most important story. The most important, strategically consequential story is that Egypt is rapidly going broke. By the end of the year, the military dictatorship will likely not only default on Egypt's loans. Field Marshal Tantawi and his deputies will almost certainly be unable to feed the Egyptian people.

Some raw statistics are in order here.

Among Egypt's population of 80 million, some 32 million are illiterate. They engage in subsistence farming that is too inefficient to support them. Egypt needs to import half of its food from abroad.

As David Goldman, (aka Spengler), reported in Asia Times Online, in May the International Monetary Fund warned of the impending economic collapse of non-oil exporting Arab countries saying that, "In the current baseline scenario the external financing needs of the region's oil importers is projected to exceed $160 billion during 2011-13."

Goldman noted, "That's almost three years' worth of Egypt's total annual imports as of 2010."

Since Mubarak was overthrown in February, Egypt's foreign currency reserves have plummeted from $36bn to $25-28bn. Last month Tantawi rejected an IMF loan offer of $3bn. claiming he would not accept any conditions on the loans. Instead he accepted $4bn in loans from Saudi Arabia and another $2.34bn from the Gulf States.

And still, Egypt's foreign currency reserves are being washed away. As Goldman explained, the problem is capital flight. Due in no small part to the protesters in Tahrir Square calling for the arrest of all those who did business with the former regime, Egypt's wealthy and foreign investors are taking their money out of the country.

At the Arab Banking Summit in Rome last month, Jordan's Finance Minister Mohammed Abu Hammour warned, "There is capital flight and $500 million a week are leaving the Arab world."

According to Goldman, "Although Hammour did not mention countries in his talk... most of the capital flight is coming from Egypt, and at an annual rate roughly equal to Egypt's remaining reserves."

What this means is that in a few short months, Egypt will be unable to pay for its imports. And consequently, it will be unable to feed its people.

EGYPT IS far from alone. Take Syria. There too, capital is fleeing the country as the government rushes to quell the mass anti-regime protests.

Just as Egyptian and Tunisian protesters hoped that a new regime would bring them more freedom, so the mass protests sweeping Syria owe in part to politics. But like the situation in Egypt and Tunisia, Syria's economic woes are dictating much of what is happening on the ground and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Last month Syrian President Bashar Assad gave a speech warning of "weakness or collapse of the Syrian economy." As a report last month by Reuters explained, the immediate impact of Assad's speech was capital flight and the devaluation of the Syrian pound by eight percent.

For the past decade, Assad has been trying to liberalize the Syrian economy. He enacted some free market reforms, opened a stock exchange and attempted to draw foreign investment to the country. While largely unsuccessful in alleviating Syria's massive poverty, these reforms did enable the country a modest growth rate of around 2.5% per year.

In response to the mass protests threatening his regime, Assad has effectively ended his experiment with the free market. He fired his government minister in charge of the economic reforms and put all the projects on hold. Instead, according to a report this week in Syria Today, the government has steeply increased public sector wages and offered 100,000 temporary workers full-time contracts. The Syrian government also announced a 25% cut in the price of diesel fuel at a cost for the government of $527 million per year.

Boasting foreign currency reserves of $18bn, the Syrian regime announced it would be using these reserves to pay for the increased governmental outlays. But as Reuters reported, the government has been forced to spend $70-80 million a week to buck up the local currency. So between protecting the Syrian pound and paying for political loyalty, the Assad regime is quickly drying up Syria's treasury.

In the event the regime is overthrown, a successor regime will face the sure prospect of economic collapse much as the Egyptian regime does. And in the event that Assad remains in power, he will continue to reap the economic whirlwind of what he has sown in the form of political instability and violence.

What this means is that we can expect continued political turmoil in both countries as they are consumed by debt and tens of millions of people face the prospect of starvation. This political turmoil can be expected to give rise to dangerous if unknowable military developments.

POOR ARAB nations like Egypt and Syria are far from the only ones facing economic disaster. The $3bn loan the IMF offered Egypt may be among the last loans of that magnitude the IMF is able to offer because quite simply, European loaners are themselves staring into the economic abyss.

Greece's debt crisis is not a local problem. It now appears increasingly likely that the EU is going to have to accept Greece defaulting on at least part of its debt. And the ramifications of Greek default on the European and US banking systems are largely unknowable. This is the case because as Megan McArdle at The Atlantic wrote this week, the amount of Greek debt held by European and US banks is difficult to assess.

Worse still, the banking crisis will only intensify in the wake of a Greek default. Debt pressure on Italy, Ireland, Spain and Portugal which are all also on the brink of defaulting on their debts will grow. Italy is Europe's fourth largest economy. Its debt is about the size of Germany's debt. If Italy goes into default, the implications for the European and US banking systems - and their economies generally -- will be devastating.

The current debt-ceiling negotiations between US President Barack Obama and the Republican Congressional leadership have made it apparent that Obama is ideologically committed to increasing government spending and taxes in the face of a weak economy. If Obama is reelected next year, the dire implications of four more years of his economic policies for the US and global economies cannot be overstated.

DUE TO the economic policies implemented by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu since his first tenure as prime minister in 1996, in the face of this economic disaster, Israel is likely to find itself in the unlikely position of standing along China and India as among the only stable, growing economies in the world. Israel's banking sector is largely unexposed to European debt. Israel's gross external debt is 44 percent of GDP. This compares well not only to European debt levels of well over 100 percent of GDP but to the US debt level which stands at 98 percent of GDP.

Assuming the government does not bend to populist pressure and take economically hazardous steps like reducing the work week to four days, Israel's economy is likely to remain one of the country's most valuable strategic assets. Just as economic prosperity allowed Israel to absorb the cost of the Second Lebanon War with barely a hiccup, so Israel's continued economic growth will play a key role in protecting it from the economically induced political upheavals likely to ensue throughout much of the Arab world and Europe.

Aside from remaining economically responsible, as Israel approaches the coming storms it is important for it to act with utmost caution politically. It must adopt policies that provide it with the most maneuver room and the greatest deterrent force.

First and foremost, this means that it is imperative that Israel not commit itself to any agreements with any Arab regime. In 1977 the Camp David Agreement with then Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in which Israel surrendered the strategically invaluable Sinai for a peace treaty seemed like a reasonable gamble. In 2011, a similar agreement with Assad or with the Palestinian Authority, (whose budget is largely financed from international aid), would be the height of strategic insanity.

Beyond that, with the rising double specter of Egyptian economic collapse and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood to power, Israel must prepare for the prospect of war with Egypt. Recently it was reported that IDF Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz has opted to spread over several years Israel's military preparations for a return to hostilities with Egypt. Gantz's decision reportedly owes to his desire to avoid provoking Egypt with a rapid expansion of the IDF's order of battle.

Gantz's caution is understandable. But it is unacceptable. Given the escalating threats emanating from Egypt - not the least of which is the expanding security vacuum in the Sinai -- Israel must prepare for war now.

So too, with the US's weak economy, Obama's Muslim Brotherhood friendly foreign policy, and Europe's history of responding to economic hardship with xenophobia, Israel's need to develop the means of militarily defending itself from a cascade of emerging threats becomes all the more apparent.

The economic storms may pass by Israel. But the political tempests they unleash will reach us. To emerge safely from what is coming, Israel needs to hunker down and prepare for the worst.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on July 15, 2011 at 6:57 AM

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Peace Now's protests the anti-boycott law...for peace!

This week on the Tribal Update, the television on internet satire show brought to you by Latma, the satirical, Hebrew language media criticism website I run we bring you the woes of the mighty Beduin, the princes of the desert, that Israel humiliates with its expectation that they will pay their water bills.

We also bring you Peace Now's finest protesting the newly passed anti-boycott law in typical Peace Now fashion.

Enjoy!

Latma is funded through contributions to the Center for Security Policy in Washington. If you would like to support our efforts, you can contribute by clicking here. It takes you to the online contribution page to the Center for Security Policy through Network for Good. To earmark your donation to Latma, please write "Latma" in the box marked "designation."

As I have mentioned, we formed a non-profit organization in Israel to accept donations from outside the United States. Last week we opened a bank account for our group, the Zionist Incubator.

Here is the information you need to wire contributions to the Zionist Incubator for Latma.

Bank Name: Israel Discount Bank Ltd.

Branch Number: 510

Branch Name: Mevasseret Zion

BIC Code: IDBLILITXXX

Account Number (IBAN 23 digits): IL94-0115-1000-0010-4351-154

Beneficiary's Name: Zionist Incubator

Beneficiary's address: POB 841 Mevasseret Zion, Israel 90805

Posted on July 15, 2011 at 6:48 AM

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The path to the next Lebanon War

Five years ago this week, Iran's Lebanese proxy opened war with Israel. The war lasted 34 days, during which Hezbollah launched more than 4,000 missiles against Israel. Now five years later, under US President Barack Obama, America is pushing a policy that drastically escalates the chance that a new war between Israel and Iran's Lebanese army will break out again in the near future.

Back in 2006, Israel's response to Hezbollah's aggression was swift but incompetent. While Israel scored some blows against the Iranian proxy force, the war ended with Hezbollah still shooting. Israel failed to defeat the terror army. And because Hezbollah survived, it won the war.

This truth is exposed in all its ugliness by the political and military realities five years on. Today, Hezbollah is not simply in charge of Israel's former security zone in South Lebanon.

It is in charge of all of Lebanon. The Hezbollah-controlled government controls all aspects of the Lebanese state that it wishes. These include the military, the telecommunications networks, and the international borders, airports and sea ports, among other things.

Today, Hezbollah has not merely refilled its depleted missile arsenals. It has tripled the size of its missile arsenals. In 2006, IAF strikes in the first 24 hours of the war knocked out all of Hezbollah's long-range missiles. Today, not only have those stocks been replenished, Hezbollah's arsenal includes missiles with ranges covering all of Israel, with larger payloads and many with guidance systems.

The lessons of the war are easy to see. And the Israeli public, which learned them five years ago, still hasn't forgotten them.

GENERALLY SPEAKING, the war taught us three lessons. The first lesson is that you can't convince terrorists to lay down their arms simply by walking away. Israel withdrew from its security zone in southern Lebanon in 2000. The withdrawal was a precursor to its withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. In 2006, Israel was attacked from both territories.

In the lead-up to both withdrawals, Israel's national leadership told the public that the only reason terrorists from these territories were attacking us was that we were there. If we went away, they would stop hating us and we would be safe. We were the problem, not them, so we could solve the problem by giving them what they wanted.

Although then-prime minister Ehud Olmert and then-foreign minister Tzipi Livni continued to push appeasement through their insistence that Israel surrender Judea and Samaria, the war of 2006 showed the public the folly of their plans. And at first opportunity, the public elected the Likud and other right-wing parties - which oppose appeasement - to form the current government.

The second lesson the public learned is that when a nation goes to war against an enemy that seeks its destruction, it must fight to win. You cannot fight a half-war against an implacable foe. And if you fail to win, you lose.

This is not how Israel fought the war of 2006. Partially due to pressure from then-secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and partially due to his own strategic incomprehension, Olmert believed it was possible to fight to a draw without losing.

In the event, there was only one way for Israel to defeat Hezbollah - by regaining control over southern Lebanon. Any other conclusion to the war would leave Hezbollah standing. And simply by surviving intact, as Lebanese Druse leader Walid Jumblatt warned at the time, the road would be paved for Hezbollah to take over Lebanon.

But Olmert - and Livni - wouldn't even consider retaking control of South Lebanon. The option was discarded contemptuously as a delusional recipe for forcing Israel back into the "Lebanese quagmire." The fact that the "Lebanese quagmire" came to Israel after we left Lebanon, and that it will only end when Israel defeats Hezbollah, was completely ignored.

Olmert's and Livni's reason for rejecting the one strategy that would have brought Israel victory is explained by the third lesson of the war. That lesson is that once a leader is ideologically committed to a policy of appeasement, he is unable to allow rational considerations to permeate his thinking.

THE OLMERT government was elected in 2006 on the basis of its plan to repeat the Lebanon and Gaza withdrawals in Judea and Samaria. During the war, Olmert told his supporters that victory in Lebanon would enable him to carry out his planned withdrawal from Judea and Samaria. And this was true. But because of the circular logic of appeasement, there was no way that Olmert could fight to win.

If Israel had retaken control of southern Lebanon, Olmert would have had a chance of convincing the public that unilateral withdrawal was a viable strategy. He would have been able to argue that just as the IDF retook control of southern Lebanon, so it would retake control of Judea and Samaria if the Palestinians used the vacated lands to attack the rest of the country.

But because he was committed to appeasement, Olmert could not fight to win in Lebanon. The appeasement agenda is predicated on the disavowal of the notion of military victory and the embrace of the mantra, "There is no military solution."

If victory is an option, then surrender along the lines that Olmert preached in Judea and Samaria is also an option. That is, surrender is an option, not an imperative, as he claimed. And if victory is an option, then clearly it has much more to recommend it than defeat.

But with their appeasement agenda reigning supreme - as appeasement agendas always do - instead of fighting to win, Olmert and Livni sued for a cease-fire. That is, they sought a diplomatic solution to a military problem. And since by not losing, Hezbollah won the military contest, it also came out the victor in UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which set the conditions of the cease-fire.

Resolution 1701 was a massive victory for Hezbollah. The resolution placed the international terror group run by Iran on equal footing with Israel, a sovereign state. The security arrangements in the resolution were an invitation for Hezbollah to rearm. It was pure fantasy to believe that the Hezbollah-dominated Lebanese government would block Hezbollah's rearmament. And it was utter madness to think that European military forces would lift a finger to prevent Hezbollah from reasserting full control over the border with Israel.

But again, if you accept the circular logic of appeasement - that always puts the burden of proof on the non-aggressor - then you will never learn these, or any other lessons. And as a consequence, appeasers will always and forever foment wars in the name of peace.

THE ISRAELI public learned these lessons and elected a government that understands them. Perhaps if the American people had elected Senator John McCain to succeed George W. Bush in 2008, the US government would have learned these lessons as well. And then maybe together the Israeli and the US governments might have set about fixing at least some of the damage the war caused them both.

But in their wisdom, the American people elected Barack Obama to succeed Bush in the White House. And Obama has learned none of the lessons of the last war. Consequently Obama's current policies are increasing the likelihood of another war between Israel and Iran's Lebanese proxy in the near future.

Far from recognizing the nature of Hezbollah, the Obama administration has tried to wish away its implacability. Last May, Obama's counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan spoke of the administration's plan to cultivate "moderate elements" in the Iranian-run jihadist organization.

The Obama administration's notion that the US can adopt a nuanced approach to the terror group is put paid by Hezbollah's takeover of the Lebanese government, its growing capabilities in the Western hemisphere, its continued devotion to the cause of Israel's destruction, its participation in the killing of Syrian anti-regime protesters, and Iran's clear control over all aspects of the organization's operations. And yet, by all accounts, the administration refuses to acknowledge that there can be no nuance toward Hezbollah.

The dangers of Obama's rejection of these basic truths were exposed this week. Sunday the government approved the demarcation of Israel's territorial waters along the border with Lebanon. The borders will be submitted to the UN.

Israel's move was forced on it by the Obama administration.

The dispute over the sea border arose after Israel discovered massive quantities of natural gas in its territorial waters in 2009. Acting on orders from Hezbollah and Iran, the Lebanese government immediately claimed erroneously that the waters belonged to Lebanon. Last August, Lebanon submitted its claim to the UN.

Israel negotiated its maritime borders with Cyprus in 2007. The same year, Cyprus also negotiated its maritime borders with Lebanon. At the time, Lebanon did not claim the areas in which Israel has discovered natural gas deposits or the areas abutting those areas, which are suspected of similarly containing large natural gas deposits. Lebanon's current claim includes Israel's territorial waters abutting the gas fields it discovered in 2009.

In staking this false claim, as it did with the Shaba Farms on Mount Dov in the Golan Heights in 2000, Lebanon is setting up a casus belli against Israel.

Under the circumstances, the only rational policy that the US can possibly adopt is to loudly and strenuously back Israel's claim and reject all Lebanese contentions to the contrary.

Only by completely rejecting Lebanon's claim can the US deny Hezbollah and Iran the ability to use Israel's gas finds in its territorial waters as a justification for war.

Rather than do this, guided by its appeasement ideology, the Obama administration has refused to take sides. It urged Israel to submit its counter-claim to the UN - where it can bully Israel into accepting arbitration of the dispute by the inherently anti-Israel UN.

More generally, by refusing to take sides, the US is in fact siding with its enemy Iran and Iran's proxy Hezbollah against its ally Israel.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on July 12, 2011 at 2:42 AM

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Rival hegemons in Syria

Last Saturday, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah gave Hezbollah-backed Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati the political equivalent of a public thrashing. Last Thursday, Mikati gave a speech in which he tried to project an image of a leader of a government that has not abandoned the Western world completely. Mikati gave the impression that his Hezbollah-controlled government is not averse to cooperating with the UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon. The Special Tribunal just indicted four Hezbollah operatives for their role in the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.

But on Saturday night, Nasrallah gave a speech in which he made clear that he has no intention whatsoever of cooperating with the Special Tribunal and that since he runs the show in Lebanon, Lebanon will not cooperate in any way with the UN judicial body. As an editorial at the NOW Lebanon website run by the anti- Hezbollah March 14 movement wrote, last Saturday night Nasrallah "demolished Mikati's authority and the office from whence it comes, and used it as a rag to mop up what is left of Lebanese dignity."

The March 14 movement has tried to make the Special Tribunal the litmus test for Mikati's legitimacy, demanding that his government either cooperate with the UN Special Tribunal, or resign. But the fact is that the March 14 movement is no match for Hezbollah. Its protests are not capable of dislodging the Iranian-controlled jihadist movement from power.

Just as it always has, the fate of Lebanon today lies in the hands of outside powers. Hezbollah rules the roost in Lebanon because it is backed by Syria and Iran. Unlike the US and France, Iran and Syria are willing to fight for their proxy's control over Lebanon. And so their proxy controls Lebanon. It follows then that assuming the US and France will continue to betray their allies in the March 14 democracy movement, Hezbollah will be removed from power in Lebanon only if its outside sponsors are unseated.

And it is this prospect, more than the UN Special Tribunal, that is keeping Nasrallah up at nights.

Last month, France's Le Figaro reported that Hezbollah has moved hundreds of long-range Iranian-built Zilzal and Fajr 3 and Fajr 4 missiles from its missile depots in Syria to Lebanon's Bekaa Valley. The missile transfer was due to Hezbollah's fear that Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime is on the verge of being toppled.

And there is good reason for Hezbollah's concern. The breadth and depth of the anti-regime protests in Syria far overshadow the anti-regime protests in Egypt and Tunisia. As Victor Kotsev noted this week in the Asia Times, something like half a million people participated in the anti-regime demonstrations in Hama last Friday. Since, according to Syria's 2009 census, Hama has just over 700,000 residents, the rate of public participation in the anti-regime protests dwarfs anything seen in any other Arab state since the anti-regime protests began last December.

According to Tariq Alhomayed, the editor in chief of Asharq Al-Awsat in English, Assad fired his provincial governor of Hama following last Friday's demonstration for not shooting the demonstrators.

Assad's move is yet another clear sign that he has no intention of compromising with his opponents. He will sooner destroy his country then let anyone else rule it.

And this makes sense. A son of the Alawite sect that makes up just 12 percent of Syria's population, Assad has no serious support base in Syrian society outside his family-controlled military. He has repressed every group in his society including much of his own Alawite sect. As Syria expert Gary Gambill noted in Foreign Policy on Thursday, Assad has no post-regime prospects.

And so he can entertain no notion of compromise with his people.

Like Hezbollah, Assad's ability to survive is also going to be determined elsewhere. To date, the US has backed Assad against the Syrian people and Europe has gone along.

For their part, the Iranians and their Hezbollah proxies are actively working to ensure their favored outcome in Syria. In testimony before the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Tuesday, IDF Intelligence chief Maj.-Gen. Aviv Kochavi repeated his claim that Iran and Hezbollah are actively assisting Assad's forces in killing and repressing the Syrian people.

Kochavi explained, "The great motivation Iran and Hezbollah have to assist [Assad] comes from their deep worry regarding the implications these events might have, particularly losing control of their cooperation with the Syrians and having such events slide onto their own territories."

From Iran's perspective, the prospect of a renewal of the Green Movement anti-regime protests is the gravest threat facing the regime today as it reaches the nuclear threshold. As Iran expert Michael Ledeen wrote this week at Pajamas Media, the Iranian regime itself is plagued by internal fissures due to escalating estrangement and rivalry between President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and supreme dictator Ali Khamenei.

Their infighting can be compared to pirates arguing over the division of their stolen loot as their ship sinks to the bottom of the ocean. Iran's economy is failing. Its inflation rate is around 50%. Its people hate the regime. Lacking the ability to win the public over through politics, since the Green Movement protests in 2009 the regime has simply terrorized the Iranian people into submission.

Their fear of their people has only grown since the anti-regime protests in the Arab world began last December. And in line with this heightened fear, the regime has tripled its rate of public executions since the start of the year.

The Iranian regime understands that if Syria falls, it is liable to lose its ability keep its people down. The Alawite-dominated Syrian military is far more loyal to the Assad regime than the Iranian army is to the Iranian regime. And there have already been defections from the Syrian army among the junior officer corps.

Fearing insubordination in the ranks of its military and Revolutionary Guards, in 2009 the regime reportedly brought Hezbollah operatives to Iran to kill anti-regime demonstrators.

If Assad falls, Hezbollah will lose its logistical supply line from Iran. Moreover, Hezbollah will be so busy fending off challenges from no-longer-daunted Lebanese Sunnis empowered by their Syrian brethren, that its operatives will be less available to kill Iranian protesters.

With the US compliant with Assad and maintaining its policy of appeasing the Iranian regime, the only outside government currently making an attempt to influence events in Syria is Turkey. Although it is being careful to couch its anti-Assad policy in the rhetoric of compromise, given Assad's inability to make any deal with his opponents, simply by calling for him to compromise, the Turkish government is making it clear that it seeks Assad's overthrow. Turkey's talk of sending troops into Syria to protect civilians and its willingness to set up refugee camps for the Syrians from border towns fleeing the Assad regime's goons, make clear that Ankara is vying to expand its sphere of influence to Damascus in a post-Assad Syria.

Ankara's plans are all the more apparent when seen in the context of Turkish Prime Minister Recip Erdogan's moves to reinstate Turkey as a regional hegemon along the lines of the Ottoman Empire. To this end, according to a report this week in The Hindu, since Erdogan's Islamist AK Party formed its first government in 2003, it has been actively cultivating ties with Muslim Brotherhood movements throughout the region. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has deep ties to the Turkish government and the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood branch Hamas has been publicly supported by Erdogan's government since 2006.

In the event that Turkey plays a significant role in a post-Assad Syria, it can be expected that the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood would fairly rapidly take control of the country.

Many commentators have argued that Turkey's anti-Assad stance indicates that the recent warming of ties between Tehran and Ankara, (which among other things saw Erdogan siding with Iran against the US at the UN Security Council), is over.

But things in the Middle East are never cut and dried. While it is true that Turkey and Iran are rival hegemons, it is also true that they're also allied hegemons. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Syria and Gaza have close ties to Hezbollah and Iran as well as to Turkey. Al-Qaida in Lebanon has close ties to Syria and working relationships with Hezbollah.

Then again, if Assad is overthrown, and his overthrow reinvigorates the Iranian Green revolution, given the pro-Western orientation of much of Iranian society, it is likely that at a minimum, Iran would drastically scale back its sponsorship of Hezbollah and other terror groups.

For Israel, Assad's overthrow will be clear strategic gain in the short-and medium-term, even if a post-Assad Syrian government exchanges Syria's Iranian overlords with Turkish overlords. Syria's main threats to Israel stem from Assad's support for Palestinian terrorists and Hezbollah, and from his ballistic missile and nuclear programs. While Turkey would perhaps maintain support for Palestinian terrorists and perhaps for Lebanese terrorists, it does not share Syria's attraction to missiles and nuclear weapons as Iran does. Moreover, Ankara would not have a strong commitment to Hezbollah and so the major threat to Israel in Lebanon would be severely weakened.

Moreover, if Assad's potential overthrow leads to increased revolutionary activities in Iran, the regime will have less time to devote to its nuclear program, and its nuclear installations will become more vulnerable to penetration and sabotage. A successor regime in Iran, seeking close ties with the West and be willing to pay for those ties by setting aside Iran's nuclear program.

In the long-term, the reestablishment of a Turkish sphere of influence in the Arab world in Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority and Egypt through the Muslim Brotherhood will be extremely dangerous for Israel. With its jihadist ideology, its powerful conventional military forces, its strong economy and its strategic ties to the US and Europe, Turkey's rise as a regional hegemon would present Israel with a difficult challenge.

Despite the massive dimensions of the anti-regime protests, it is still impossible to know how the situation in Syria will pan out. This uncertainty is heightened by the US's passivity in the face of the uprising against its worst foe in the Arab world.

Given the strategic opportunities and dangers the situation in Syria presents to it, Israel cannot be a bystander in the drama unfolding to its north. True, Israel does not have the power the US has to dictate the outcome. But to the extent it is able to influence events, Israel should actively assist the non-Islamist regime opponents in Syria. This includes first and foremost the Syrian Kurds, but also the non-Islamist Sunni business class, the Druse and the Christians who are all participating the anti-regime protests. Israel should also oppose Turkish military intervention in Syria and openly advocate the establishment of a democratic, federal government in Syria to replace Assad's dictatorship.

It might not work. But if it does, the payoff will be extraordinary.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on July 8, 2011 at 10:14 AM

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Audacity of Dopes - full episode

This week's episode of the Tribal Update, the television on internet show produced by Latma, the Hebrew-language media satire website I run, we bring you The Audacity of Dopes Band singing Guns, Guns, Guns. We also discuss Israel's continued insensitivity to the feelings of the poor Arabs in Jerusalem and beyond.

Here's the entire show. Please post this and the song which I posted last night freely on your websites and distribute to your mailing lists.

Enjoy!!

Latma is funded through contributions to the Center for Security Policy in Washington. If you would like to support our efforts, you can contribute by clicking here. It takes you to the online contribution page to the Center for Security Policy through Network for Good. To earmark your donation to Latma, please write "Latma" in the box marked "designation."

As I have mentioned, we formed a non-profit organization in Israel to accept donations from outside the United States. Last week we opened a bank account for our group, the Zionist Incubator.

Here is the information you need to wire contributions to the Zionist Incubator for Latma.

Bank Name: Israel Discount Bank Ltd.

Branch Number: 510

Branch Name: Mevasseret Zion

BIC Code: IDBLILITXXX

Account Number (IBAN 23 digits): IL94-0115-1000-0010-4351-154

Beneficiary's Name: Zionist Incubator

Beneficiary's address: POB 841 Mevasseret Zion, Israel 90805

Posted on July 8, 2011 at 2:53 AM

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The Audacity of Dopes Band Proudly Presents: Guns, Guns, Guns

From Latma with love. Please post it far and wide.

Posted on July 7, 2011 at 4:00 PM

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Israel's palace coup plotters

On Monday, saboteurs bombed the Egyptian gas pipeline to Israel for the third time since former president Hosni Mubarak was overthrown in February. The move was just another reminder that Israel today faces the most daunting and complex threat spectrum it has ever seen.

From Egypt to Turkey to Iran to the international Left to the Obama administration, Israel faces a mix of military and political challenges that threaten its very existence on multiple levels. To meet these challenges, it is vital for the government and people of Israel to stand strong, unified and determined. The approaching storm will test our resilience as we have never been tested before.

Unfortunately, even if the government is competent, and even if the nation stands strong, there is reason to fear that Israel will fail to successfully withstand the dangers gathering against it. Unelected, unrepresentative and irresponsible senior government officials are liable to take actions that undermine the government's ability to protect the country and weaken the public's morale and unity of purpose.

Over the past week, we received two reminders of how dire the situation is. The first reminder relates to institutional impediments to the government's freedom of action in preventing Iran from fielding a nuclear arsenal.

Since the beginning of his first term as prime minister 15 years ago, Binyamin Netanyahu has consistently warned that the greatest dangers Israel faces stem from the forces of global jihad generally and the Iranian regime and its nuclear program specifically. After taking office for the second time in 2009, Netanyahu made blocking Iran's rise to nuclear power his top priority. He ordered the heads of the Mossad and the IDF to prepare plans to attack Iran's nuclear installations.

Last Friday, Haaretz reported that former Mossad chief Meir Dagan and former IDF chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi refused to obey his order. Rather than prepare strike plans, Dagan and Ashkenazi warned that such a strike would foment a regional war. That is, rather than do their jobs, they made excuses for failing to fulfill their duty to obey Israel's elected leadership.

Not wanting to take them on directly, Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak decided to wait them out. Dagan and Ashkenazi were both set to finish their terms at the beginning of the year, and Netanyahu and Barak figured they could replace them with commanders who would abide by the government's wishes. Specifically, Barak and Netanyahu believed that by replacing Ashkenazi with his deputy Maj.-Gen. Yoav Galant, they would have a military leader willing and able to take on the central challenge of preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power.

Barak announced last August that Galant would replace Ashkenazi as IDF chief in January. Galant's appointment was approved by the government and by the Senior Appointments Commission. But in late January, the government was forced to cancel it. And this week we received new indications that Galant's appointment fell victim to what has been likened to a palace coup. That is, the government was denied its right to choose its military leader by a group of senior officials who deliberately usurped that power from the government.

In January, we learned that Ashkenazi's close associate Lt.-Col. (ret.) Boaz Harpaz had forged a document that was transferred by Ashkenazi's office to Channel 2. The forgery purported to be a memo written for Galant by the public relations firm owned by Eyal Arad - Kadima's public relations guru. The forged memo detailed a public relations campaign that would discredit Galant's rivals and Ashkenazi, and so pave the way for Galant's appointment as chief of General Staff. Channel 2's broadcast of the memo seriously harmed Galant's public image.

The police opened an investigation, and Harpaz admitted to forging the document. Despite revelations that Harpaz was in intensive, continuous contact with Ashkenazi's wife Ronit and had a longstanding close friendship with Ashkenazi himself, the Military Advocate- General decided not to investigate Ashkenazi or any other officer about their ties to Harpaz and his forged document.

Over the weekend, Yediot Aharonot reported that last week Harpaz underwent two lengthy interrogations by State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss. Harpaz is reportedly divulging information about his connections to Ashkenazi.

Despite Harpaz's own admission that he forged the document, Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein has abstained, to date, from indicting him. Although jarring, Weinstein's actions are not surprising. It was Weinstein who personally overturned Galant's appointment in January.

Harpaz's defamatory memo wasn't the only thing working against Galant's appointment. A previously unknown environmental group called the Green Movement filed a petition with the Supreme Court calling for the cancellation of Galant's appointment because in the past he had used the state lands around his family homestead in Moshav Amikam without permission. Since his actions were administrative infractions rather than criminal acts, the Senior Appointments Commission concluded that he was fit to serve as chief of staff.

Weinstein felt differently. Claiming that he had ethical problems with Galant's behavior, Weinstein refused to defend the appointment to the Supreme Court. Weinstein's announcement forced the government to cancel Galant's appointment.

Ashkenazi's chosen successor,Maj.-Gen. Benny Gantz, whom Barak had previously eliminated from the running, was appointed instead.

Perhaps due to fear that Gantz might not stand up to Netanyahu and Barak as he and Ashkenazi did, Dagan shocked the country last month by launching an unprecedented public attack against Netanyahu and Barak. His clear aim was to discredit the option of an Israeli military strike against Iran.

According to Haaretz, Dagan was motivated by his desire to cover up his failure to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Also according to Haaretz, Ashkenazi, together with recently retired IDF intelligence chief Maj.-Gen. Amos Yadlin, supported Dagan's attacks through off-record briefings.

It is impossible for the public to know what is going on behind closed doors. We cannot know whether a worthy general's rivals' successful campaign to discredit him has doomed the country to another three years of defeatist, incompetent stewardship of the IDF - and what's worse, to a nuclear-armed Iran. What we do know is that a handful of unelected civil servants took it upon themselves to undermine the government's ability to lead the country.

The government is not the only target on the runaway clerks' target list. Members of the nationalist camp are also subject to systematic campaigns of criminalization and demoralization.

This week we were witness to the troubling spectacle of senior rabbis being dragged into police stations for questioning. Their purported crime involves writing blurbs praising a religious book written by another rabbi.

The book in question is reportedly a highly controversial tome that sets out the religious precepts governing the killing of enemies of Israel in times of war and peace. It was authored by Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira from Yitzhar.

Several leftist organizations filed a complaint against the book, claiming that it incites murder of non-Jews. Shapira was arrested and brought before the district court for arraignment in leg shackles and handcuffs last year.

And over the past several days, Rabbis Dov Lior and Ya'acov Yosef have been arrested and questioned by police for the blurbs they authored that were published in the book.

It is hard to know the basis for the complaint. Generally Israeli law stipulates that there has to be a tangible connection between incendiary words and the likely commission of the crime they incite. No such connection seems to exist in the case of Shapira's book.

In the wake of Lior's arrest, his students staged raucous, enraged protests against the State Attorney's Office and the Supreme Court. For their part, senior prosecutors announced that no one in Israel is above the law. And this is true enough.

Unfortunately they do not practice what they preach. In arresting the rabbis, the police were acting in accordance with their instructions from Assistant Attorney-General for Special Projects Shai Nitzan.

The bulk of Nitzan's duties revolve around applying the law in a discriminatory manner against the Israeli Right.

Following Yitzhak Rabin's assassination in 1995, then-attorney-general Michael Ben-Yair established Nitzan's position. The position was specifically geared toward criminalizing Israelis who live beyond the 1949 armistice lines.

Among other things, the assistant attorney general for special projects oversees the operation of an inter-agency group called the Task Force for Law Enforcement against Israelis in Judea and Samaria.

The task force was officially canceled in 1998 by the government, acting on the advice of then-attorney-general Elyakim Rubenstein. Rubenstein argued that the task force's mission of enforcing specific laws against a specific population group was inherently discriminatory.

In breach of the government decision, the task force has continued to meet regularly. Nitzan has overseen its activities since he was promoted to his position in 2005.

In 2009, MK Ze'ev Elkin convened a special Knesset hearing on the activities of Nitzan's task force. According to an Arutz 7 report of the proceedings, he subpoenaed protocols from the meetings and found that its activities were deeply prejudicial and politically motivated. Among other things, the protocols disclosed that the task force members were required to file a minimum monthly quota of five criminal complaints against Israelis in Judea and Samaria suspected of building violations.

The quota system is doubly prejudicial. First, by making investigations an institutional requirement rather than a function of the suspected commission of specific illegal acts, it is an invitation for frivolous prosecutions and official harassment.

Second, inside the 1949 armistice lines, the general practice is to treat building violations as administrative rather than criminal offenses. By using a different practice for Israelis living outside the armistice lines, Nitzan and his team members enacted a separate legal regime for a select group of citizens, thus undermining the foundations of the rule of law.

Elkin's 2009 hearing made no difference. And after Lior's arrest last week, Elkin again demanded its disbanding in accordance with the government decision and the rule of law. And no doubt, the legal fraternity will continue to ignore his calls.

Through their behavior, the legal fraternity is not merely making a mockery of the rule of law. They are undermining the social fabric of the country.

As for the government, the senior civil service's erosion of the governing authority of the political leadership has risen to critical levels. As Galant's scuttled appointment and Dagan's and Ashkenazi's behavior regarding Iran's nuclear program make clear, we have reached the point where due to the subversion of senior officials, our elected leaders are denied the ability to perform their primary function of defending the country.

This state of affairs has simply got to end. The government and the Knesset need to put a stop to it. At the end of the day, the ayatollahs, the sheikhs, the UN and the anarchists are not our greatest challenge. Our leaders and our people can stand up to them. Our greatest challenge is to stand up to unelected officials who have taken it upon themselves to discredit the cause of victory, embrace weakness, and destroy our sense of national purpose.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on July 5, 2011 at 5:16 AM

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Unmasking the "international community"

For many years, the Left in Israel and throughout the world has upheld the so-called "international community" as the arbiter of all things. From Israel's right to exist to climate change, from American world leadership to genetically modified crops, the Left has maintained that the "international community" is the only body qualified to judge the truth, lawfulness, goodness and justice of all things.

Most of those who uphold this view see the United Nations as the embodiment of the "international community."

US President Barack Obama has repeatedly made clear that his chief litmus test for the viability or desirability of a foreign policy is the support it garners in UN institutions.

Obama is so averse to acting against the will of the UN that he is trying to strong-arm Israel into making suicidal concessions to the Hamas-dominated Palestinian Authority. Obama claims that if Israel agrees to accept indefensible borders, then he will be able to convince the Palestinians not to ask the UN to endorse Palestinian sovereignty in September. Since the success of the Palestinian initiative is entirely dependent on the US Security Council veto, by acting as he is, Obama is showing that he prefers sacrificing Israel's future viability as a nation-state to standing up to the "will of the international community" as embodied by the UN.

Furthermore, in a bid to maintain faith with the UN Security Council resolution permitting the use of force in Libya to protect civilians, Obama has refused to articulate a clear goal for the US military involvement in Libya. The fact that the Security Council resolution essentially dooms NATO's military intervention to strategic incoherence stalemate that can lead to the break-up of Libya is unimportant to the US president.

The only thing that is important is that the US abides by the limitations dictated by the UN Security Council resolution.

As to Libya, Obama's decision to send US forces to Libya without congressional permission makes clear that from his perspective, the UN Security Council, rather than the US Congress, is the source of authority for US military action. To the extent that Congress calls for the president to act in a manner that is contrary to the UN Security Council, as far as Obama is concerned, it is the duty of the president to disregard Congress and obey the Security Council.

GIVEN THE totemic stature of the UN in the minds of the American president and the international Left, it is worth considering its nature.

A glance at UN affairs in recent days is revealing.

Last week UN members elected Qatar President of the General Assembly and Iran one of the body's vice presidents. Both countries' representatives will use their platform to advance their regimes' anti-American, anti-Israel and anti-Western agendas.

As Prof. Anne Bayefsky noted in The Weekly Standard last week, their first order of business will be leading the Durban III conference that will take place in New York on the sidelines of September's General Assembly meeting. The first Durban conference was of course the infamously racist and anti-Jewish UN conference in Durban, South Africa, in September 2001. At Durban, Israel was singled out as the only racist, xenophobic country in the world and Jewish people were denied their right to national rights and self-determination. The conference ended three days before the jihadist attacks on the US on September 11, 2001.

In addition to their anti-Jewish conference, the Qatari and Iranian leaders of the General Assembly will reliably advance a General Assembly resolution embracing Palestinian statehood and condemning Jewish statehood.

Perhaps anticipating its new leadership role in the "international community," last weekend Iran hosted its first "World Without Terrorism Conference." Speaking at the conference, Iran's supreme dictator Ali Khamenei called Israel and the US the greatest terrorists in the world. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the US was behind the September 11 attacks and the Holocaust and has used both to force the Palestinians to submit to invading Jews.

Aside from the fact that the leaders from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan - who owe their power and freedom to the sacrifices of the US military - participated in the conference, the most notable aspect of the event is that it took place under the UN flag. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon sent greetings to the conferees through his special envoy. According to Iran's Fars news agency, "In a written message... read by UN Envoy to Teheran Mohammad Rafi Al-Din Shah, [Ban] Kimoon [commended] the Islamic Republic of Iran for holding this very important conference."

According to Fars, Ban added that the UN had "approved a large number of resolutions against terrorism in recent years, and holding conferences like the Teheran conference can be considerably helpful in implementing these resolutions."

When journalists inquired about the veracity of the Iranian news report, the UN Secretary-General's Office defended its position. Ban's spokesman Farhan Haq sniffed, "If we're reaching out and trying to make sure that people fight terrorism, we need to go as far as possible to make sure that everyone does it."

So as far as the UN's highest official is concerned, when it comes to terrorism there is no qualitative difference between Iran on the one hand and the US and Israel on the other. Here it is worth noting that among the other invitees, Iran's "counterterror" conference prominently featured Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir.

Bashir is wanted by the International Criminal Court on genocide charges for the genocide he has perpetrated in Darfur.

The new General Assembly vice president is not merely the world's largest state sponsor of terrorism. It is also a nuclear proliferator. This no doubt is why Iran's UN representative expressed glee when earlier this month his nation's fellow nuclear proliferator North Korea was appointed the head of the UN's Conference on Disarmament.

This would be the same North Korea that has conducted two illicit nuclear tests; constructed an illicit nuclear reactor in Syria; openly cooperated with Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile program; attacked and sank a South Korean naval ship last year, and threatened nuclear war any time anyone criticizes its aggressive behavior.

What these representative examples of what passes for business as usual at the UN show is that the international institution considered the repository of the will of the "international community" is wholly and completely corrupt. It is morally bankrupt. It is controlled by the most repressive regimes in the world and it uses its US- and Western-funded institutions to attack Israel, the US, the West and forces of liberty and liberalism throughout the world.

GIVEN THE utter depravity of the UN and the international system it oversees, what can explain the international Left's kneejerk obeisance to it? From San Francisco to Chicago to Boston; from Stockholm to Paris to London, members of the international Left claim they support the victims of tyranny. They claim they stand for liberal values of freedom and tolerance and human rights. But like the UN, the truth about the international Left shows that its members are the opposite of what they claim to be.

Here, too, a few examples from the past week suffice to tell the tale of liberal intolerance and violence. On Sunday, US Congresswoman and Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann appeared on ABC News' This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Towards the end of her interview, Stephanopoulos informed Bachmann that she can expect the media to begin attacking her family, and specifically the 23 foster children that she and her husband cared for.

As he put it, "I know you want to shield them [the foster children] but are they prepared and are you prepared for the loss of privacy that comes with the president [sic] campaign? And is that something you are concerned about for them?" Stephanopoulos's menacing warning was notable for what it says about the nature of the leftist-dominated media. In a recent interview, first lady Michelle Obama thanked the media for protecting her family from scrutiny. Yet Stephanopoulos had no compunction about threatening Bachmann's family with a journalistic lynch mob.

And this makes sense. As fellow leftists, the Obamas get a free ride. But as a conservative Republican, and as a non-leftist woman, Bachmann - like the Sarah Palin - has no right to expect tolerance for her family's privacy from the enlightened, feminist, liberal media.

Then there was the mob assault on Israeli historian Benny Morris outside the London School of Economics two weeks ago. As Morris described it at The National Interest, on his way to give a lecture at the university, "a small mob...of some dozen Muslims, Arabs and their supporters, both men and women, surrounded me and, walking alongside me for several hundred yards as I advanced towards the building where the lecture was to take place, raucously harangued and bated me with cries of "fascist," "racist," "England should never have allowed you in," "you shouldn't be allowed to speak."

He added, "To me, it felt like Brownshirts in a street scene in 1920s Berlin."

No less appalling than the behavior of the mob was the behavior of the professor at LSE who hosted Morris's lecture. As Morris described it, in his "brief introductory remarks," the professor "failed completely to note the harassment and intimidation (of which he had been made fully aware)..., or to criticize [Morris's attackers] in any way."

In New York last weekend, when conservative television and radio host Glenn Beck went to New York's Bryant Park to watch a movie with his family, they were accosted by the people around them who professed hatred for "Republicans."

THE EXTRAORDINARY intolerance of the Left for Israel is on full display among the participants in the so-called "flotilla." The purpose of the flotilla is to break international law by providing aid and comfort to Hamas-controlled Gaza and to weaken with the intention of ending Israel's lawful maritime blockade of Gaza's Hamas-controlled coastline.

As Ehud Rosen exposed Thursday in a report for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, this year's flotilla is organized by Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood with the active participation of leftist anti-Israel groups.

In their public statements, participants in the Hamas flotilla profess bottomless tolerance for Hamas and its genocidal agenda. And they profess no tolerance whatsoever for Israel or its right to exist.

In their behavior, participants in the flotilla from the Obama-aligned Code Pink group and sister organizations ape the behavior of UN Secretary- General Ban in celebrating Iran's provocative conference on terrorism, and overseeing North Korea's ascension to the head of the UN's Conference on Disarmament' and Qatar's and Iran's leadership of the General Assembly.

While emptily mouthing slogans of tolerance, all these adherents to the rule of the "international community" embrace the agenda of the most violent, intolerant, totalitarian forces in the world. Not only do they embrace them, they serve them.

It doesn't take much to tear off their flimsy mask of sweetness and light. Pity so few can be bothered to do it.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on July 1, 2011 at 12:02 PM

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The Spin Doctors and Gilad Shalit

This week on the Tribal Update, the television on Internet news satire program brought to you by Latma, the Hebrew-language media satire site I run, we present you with one of my favorite guests, Freddie Spin who will discuss the latest Gilad Shalit celebrity escapade.

We also bring you a portrait of the Israeli media's concern for Palestinian "folk trades"

Enjoy the show and then scroll down for a Tom Friedman double whammy.

Latma is funded through contributions to the Center for Security Policy in Washington. If you would like to support our efforts, you can contribute by clicking here. It takes you to the online contribution page to the Center for Security Policy through Network for Good. To earmark your donation to Latma, please write "Latma" in the box marked "designation."

As I have mentioned, we formed a non-profit organization in Israel to accept donations from outside the United States. Last week we opened a bank account for our group, the Zionist Incubator.

Here is the information you need to wire contributions to the Zionist Incubator for Latma.

Bank Name: Israel Discount Bank Ltd.

Branch Number: 510

Branch Name: Mevasseret Zion

BIC Code: IDBLILITXXX

Account Number (IBAN 23 digits): IL94-0115-1000-0010-4351-154

Beneficiary's Name: Zionist Incubator

Beneficiary's address: POB 841 Mevasseret Zion, Israel 90805

Posted on July 1, 2011 at 11:17 AM

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Tom Friedman double whammy

I must admit that I forgot to post the Tom Friedman love song from last week's Tribal Update until this morning when I heard the clip posted below by the great Mark Levin from his show yesterday.

First of all, here's the Tom Friedman love song. Pass around to one and all.

And now, here is Mark Levin's take on Friedman and his newspaper of "record."

Enjoy both!

Posted on July 1, 2011 at 11:12 AM

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Rival hegemons in Syria

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