Caroline Glick

Zionists and long winter nights

Sun, 13 May 2012 09:48:48 -0500

I've received many emails asking for the clip of Prof. Mahali's erudite explanation for long winter nights from The Tribal Update as a separate item.

So here it is.

Also, for those of you who still haven't seen it - or distributed it, here's the English-subtitled version of our Israeli apology to the Danish ISMer who got his nose squeezed last month while interfering with IDF operations in the Jordan Valley.

Enjoy and spread far and wide!

Shaul Mofaz - stand up comic, and Peace Now's profound Zionism

Fri, 11 May 2012 06:36:14 -0500

This week on the Tribal Update the satirical newscast produced weekly by Latma, the Hebrew-language, satirical media criticism website I run, we bring you Shaul Mofaz - stand up comedian on the Bibi Show. We also bring you Peace Now head Yariv Googleheimer - who served in the IDF for three whole years, (mandatory conscription period for men), waxing poetic about his Zionism. Finally, we bring you Oxford Don, Prof. Yousouf Al-Mahali explaining why winter nights are long.

Enjoy the show!

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

If you live outside the US, we formed a non-profit organization in Israel to accept donations from outside the US called the Zionist Incubator.

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

First of all, here is the link to Latma's page for donating by credit card through PayPal.

Second, 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

Professor Netanyahu's lessons

Fri, 11 May 2012 04:23:42 -0500

In all of our many conversations that took place over the better part of the past decade, I never asked Prof. Benzion Netanyahu what led him to become an historian. Certainly it was a function of his concern for his nation and his recognition that our very existence hung in the balance. Certainly, too, it was a function of his insatiable intellectual curiosity.

I don't know whether his decision was the function of a specific event or simply a natural progression of his life's path. But through the lessons that he taught me both directly, and through the books he wrote, I can understand why once he embarked on his journey into Jewish history, the path he eventually took became inevitable.

Netanyahu died last week, at the age of 102.

A good place to begin a study of his long life and its impact on his actions is with his first major work, his biography of Don Issac Abravanel, the leader of the Jews of Spain at the time of Spain's final expulsion of the community in 1492. Abravanel was an extraordinary scholar of philosophy and Jewish teachings as well as a financial genius. The former brought him renown among his people. The latter attracted the monarchs of Portugal and Spain and the leaders of Italian city states.

One of the shocking aspects of the tragic end of the Jewish community is Spain is that Abravanel, and his fellow communal leaders failed to anticipate the expulsion order. For all of his proximity to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, Abravanel had no idea that they were planning to expel the Jews and so was unable to either cancel the expulsion decree or to make preparations for the community to move to another land.

In his biography, Netanyahu described the exiled Jews of Spain as they sought and were denied refuge in port after port.

In his words (translated from the Hebrew edition): "On 24 August 1492 nine caravel ships arrived in the Port of Napoli bearing expelled Jews from Spain. The journey from Spain was one of continuous suffering. The ship owners were unsympathetic, cruel and greedy. The ships were overloaded and lacked sufficient food. The sanitary conditions invited disease, and the plague quickly spread among the passengers. All these conditions left the expelled in a state of abject penury after weeks of suffering. The historian Genovani, who saw some of these exiles when their ship passed through his town's port, wrote, 'It was possible to mistake them for ghosts; they were so hollow; their looks were so frigid, their eyes so sunken in their sockets. They looked just like the dead, aside from the fact that with great difficulty, they were still able to move.'"

Netanyahu proceeded to do the only thing he could, when faced with this description. He made the comparison between the plight of the expelled Jews from Spain, and the Jews of Europe during and after the Holocaust. And from this direct line of suffering, one can begin to understand not only the continuity of the form of Jewish suffering - but the continuity the persecution of the Jews over the course of the long exile that began in 70 CE with the destruction of the Second Temple.

NETANYAHU'S RESEARCH into the life of Abravanel led him to his most important historical discovery. While working in one of the libraries in Spain, he came across the writings of Jewish leaders in Spain from the years leading up to the Inquisition and expulsion in 1492. He discovered that in the early and mid-15th century, the Jewish community hated and feared the former Jews who were forcibly converted en masse to Christianity during the first state offensive against the Jews in 1391.

Until Netanyahu came across these writings, he shared the popular view that the so-called Conversos were heroes who led a double life. On the outside, they were Christian, but they remained Jews in secret.

What he discovered was that this heroic posture lasted at most one generation. The children of the Conversos were enthusiastic Catholics. Many rose to power in the Catholic Church.

Whereas the Jews who remained in Spain after 1391 were by and large a pitiful, impoverished remnant of what had once been a magnificent community, the Conversos quickly became the leaders of Spain, and in so doing, angered their fellow Catholic Spaniards who envied their success.

Netanyahu's findings led to his revolutionary conclusion that the Spanish Inquisition did not target the Jews as a religion, but the Jews as a race. Most of those who died by Torquemada's sword were loyal Catholics whose only crime was their possession of Jewish blood. The real Jews were not killed. They were expelled. His conclusion from his finding was that there was nothing unique or new about the Nazis' racial and genocidal hatred of the Jews.

Netanyahu's intellectual journey shaped and sharpened his perception of the Jewish condition. It fortified his conviction that Zionism is the only means of securing the lives of Jews as individuals and the existence of the Jewish nation.

Netanyahu's Zionism was not a hyphenated one. It was not Labor Zionism, like the Zionism of David Ben-Gurion and his socialist followers. It was not religious Zionism, like that of the Lovers of Zion movement which formed the core of the initial modern Jewish settlement drive in the Land of Israel.

He learned from the early Zionist leader Yehuda Pinsker's seminal pamphlet, Auto-Emancipation, that Zionism rejects utopianism. Netanyahu's own lesson from the Spanish Inquisition is that for Jews, assimilation is as much of a utopian path as socialism. As Pinsker, and later Theodor Herzl made clear, the only way for Jews to be redeemed is by doing it themselves.

In his study of Pinkser from 1944, Netanyahu wrote, "Pinsker thought that normal relations between national groupings are not based on mutual affection but on mutual respect."

According to Pinsker, what distinguished exile Jews from all other nations was the Jews' failure to understand this basic truth. For the Zionist movement to succeed in liberating the Jews, its leaders needed to demand and command the respect - not the sympathy - of other nations.

AS NETANYAHU showed in his 1937 article on Herzl's Zionist doctrine, Herzl, the man who built the diplomatic and legal edifice upon which the State of Israel was created, believed that Zionism rested on two essential foundations: international recognition of the Jews' right to sovereignty over the Land of Israel; and Jewish military capacity to defend those sovereign rights.

Until his death in 1904, Herzl worked feverishly to build international recognition of the Jewish people's right to the Land of Israel in its maximalist borders - from the Nile Delta to the Euphrates River. As Herzl understood, it is much harder to secure international recognition of sovereign rights than it is to give them up, and once they are renounced, they are all but impossible to regain.

What Herzl found was that it was much easier to secure international recognition of the rights of the Jewish people than it is to convince the Jews to muster the courage to demand, seize and defend those rights.

Netanyahu wrote his study of Herzl at the same time as the Zionist leadership in pre-state Israel was debating Britain's Peel Commission's partition plan. Although it provided for the establishment of a tiny, indefensible Jewish statelet, the plan involved Jewish renunciation of their sovereign rights to the overwhelming majority of the land they had lawfully received sovereign title to under the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine. That sovereign title included all of present day Israel as well as Judea and Samaria, and arguably present-day Jordan as well.

Netanyahu argued that the tragedy of Zionism is that the leaders who took over after Herzl's death - first and foremost Ahad Ha'am and Chaim Weizmann - lacked the courage to demand the rights of their nation, preferring to be loved than respected.

Lamenting this failure of will and what it was liable to mean for the future of the Jews as the drums of the next war grew ever stronger, Netanyahu wrote that the one thing that Herzl worked towards but failed to achieve was to change "the character of the nation."

"This change," he wrote, "which Herzl believed was critical, was not manifested in the spirit of its leaders, or more precisely, in the spirit of those, who conducted negotiations in the name of the Jewish people, and afterwards managed its affairs. When it was necessary to demonstrate the courage of a sovereign, which Herzl spoke of, when it was necessary to dare and demand from the world the Jewish State and sovereignty over that state, the nation's representatives issued no such demand."

In the end, despite Netanyahu's reiteration of Herzl's warning, the Zionist leadership accepted the Peel Commission's partition plan, just as 10 years later they accepted the UN Partition Plan.

Fortunately for their ill-served nation, their willingness to renounce the Jews' sovereign rights under the League of Nations Mandate was never binding, because the Arabs rejected the plans and so rendered them null and void. The Jewish nation's sovereign rights to the Land of Israel remain in force today.

In 2005, Netanyahu republished his profiles of Pinsker and Herzl, as well as profiles on Max Nordau, Israel Zangwill and Ze'ev Jabotinsky, which were written between 1937 and 1981, as one collection. He called this book of essays The Founding Fathers of Zionism.

In his introduction to the collection, Netanyahu wrote, "The articles included in this book were written decades ago. They are published here as first written because I saw no reason to correct them...."

And he was right.

Zangwill once wrote, "The past is for inspiration, not imitation, for continuation, not repetition."

The challenges the world Netanyahu departed last week present to the Jews bear striking similarities to those that faced the Jews throughout our history, and certainly since the dawn of modern Zionism. Unlike the options Abravanel had to weigh, since the dawn of modern Zionism, our leaders have had the option of demanding and commanding the respect of the nations of the world and so securing the lives of the Jews and nationhood of the Jewish people in our land.

Today the heirs of the failed utopian movements of the last century have joined forces with the jihadist heirs of the Mufti of Jerusalem to deny the Jewish people our sovereign rights to our land. If they succeed they will finally and irrevocably destroy Herzl's greatest achievement.

The most ardent hope that comes through clearly in Netanyahu's life work is that the Jews find a leader of Herzl's stature, capable of demanding and commanding the world's recognition and respect for our rights, and the ability to finish Herzl's work by convincing the Jewish people that it is our right and our duty to assert and secure our destiny in our land.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

War with Egypt approaches

Wed, 09 May 2012 06:44:31 -0500

One of the achievements of his government that Prime Minister Netanyahu took pride in during a recent speech was the tall fence we're building along the 220KM border with Egypt. Only problem is that from the video below, it is pretty clear that we might want to have a clear path to the Sinai so that we can preempt the millions of Egyptians that are planning on marching to Jerusalem.

I have said for years that our defensive strategy has got to stop being based on defensive military systems.

Our enemies are on the march. We must embrace the only military doctrine that has ever really worked -- preempt them by initiating the war on their territory.

We need at least another full active duty division - preferably mechanized infantry -- in the Southern Command. Stop spending money on defense. We need tanks, APCs, MLRS battalions, the works. We can't afford to be taken by surprise.

There are two obvious lessons from what is happening in Egypt. First, the land for peace formula is crazy. We gave land for peace and now that they have decided to destroy the peace, they get to keep the land. In the clip below they say their path to invasion goes through Gaza. So here too, they show that all the people who said that Gaza had no value to Israel were wrong twice. As the daily shelling from Gaza into Israel shows, our presence in Gaza prevented attacks on southern Israel. And as their declarations make clear, our presence in Gaza blocked a convergence of Palestinian and Egyptian forces in the Sinai which -- with its 220 km border with Israel, is now the preferred launching point for attacks.

The second lesson is of course that all the enthusiasm over "Arab democracy" by Westerners, and particularly by conservatives desperate for a way to make war seem like a redemptive experience or something was irresponsible to the point of maliciousness.

We warned you over and over again that this would turn out badly. But you said we were wrong and indeed, somehow immoral to prefer Mubarak to "the people."

Now I just have a little request for all of you brilliant ones who lobbied Obama to dump Mubarak. No, I don't expect you to apologize. All I ask is that next time you hug your kids, think about the Israeli children whose lives you placed in danger with your irresponsible pontifications.

The clip below is from a campaign rally for the (moderate) Muslim Brotherhood's candidate for Egypt's presidency Muhammad Mursi. Oh, and the Obama administration just transferred another $1.5 billion in US taxpayer funds to Egypt.

First thoughts on the unity government

Tue, 08 May 2012 07:27:07 -0500

Here's a quick first take on Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's unity deal with Kadima leader Shaul Mofaz.

I don't think that this move was either motivated by or will impact Netanyahu's decisions regarding Iran's nuclear weapons program. If the elections had been carried out in September, as we thought, Netanyahu would certainly have been reelected. Obama, concerned about his foreign policy bona fides and the Jewish vote on the eve of his reelection bid, would have been unable to undermine Netanyahu on Iran or just about anything else. So from Netanyahu's perspective, a September election date immunized him from White House pressure.

True, Mofaz has been parroting former Mossad chief Meir Dagan's attacks on Netanyahu, but no one really cares too much about the criticisms. This is particularly true because Dagan, et. al. actually share Netanyahu's assessment of the Iranian threat. They just don't want him to be the man dealing with it because they hate him personally.

They know, and Mofaz knows, and Obama knows that the Israeli public will rally around Netanyahu in the event he orders an attack. So widening the coalition would only impact his decision on Iran at the margins, if at all. I suppose from the perspective of optics, it is nice to go into such a mission with a massive coalition standing with you.

Some on the right have voiced concerns that Netanyahu wants this coalition so he can reinstate negotiations with the Palestinians and withdraw from Judea and Samaria. Maybe. But it's hard for me to believe that Netanyahu will want to go full speed ahead with that. What would he stand to gain? Moreover, the Palestinians are the ones who ended the talks, not Netanyahu. And with Islamists rising to power throughout the Arab world and in Egypt particularly, Mahmoud Abbas has no incentive to return to negotiations.

Aside from that, it is possible that Netanyahu will use the cover he gets from Kadima to destroy homes in Beit El along the lines that the Supreme Court has ordered by July. But he probably would have done it anyway -- or not. It all depends on what he thinks he can get away with. If he decides not to destroy them, it will be easier for him to stand up the Supreme Court, whose decision doesn't pass the laugh test, with a coalition of 94 than with a coalition of 66. And it will be easier for him to bow to the decision of the Supreme Court with a coalition of 94 than a coalition of 66.

Here it is important to note that to a large extent, Netanyahu has built his present power on his refusal to commit seriously to any binding position on the Palestinians. I don't see him sacrificing this winning policy any time soon by following in Ariel Sharon's footsteps and betraying his political camp and ideology completely.

I think the unity deal is an example of a situation in which Netanyahu was presented with an offer he'd be an idiot to refuse. In return for essentially nothing, he built himself the strongest and largest coalition Israel has ever seen. He gave Mofaz nothing but breathing space for a year. Mofaz didn't even get a governing portfolio. And in exchange Netanyahu received unprecedented power and political stability for more than a year.

Kadima was set to lose half its seats in the Knesset in the next election. It may still lose half its seats in the next election. It may split apart. A million things can happen. But Mofaz probably figures that whereas if the elections were held in September he'd be blamed for the loss, by October 2013, he will have figured out someone else to blame for the defeat of his party.

Finally, there is an economic aspect to this decision. By bringing Kadima into his coalition, Netanyahu effectively ensured that his free market economic policies will be maintained and the socialist voices in Israeli politics will be marginalized for the next year or so. With France going socialist, Israel's Left, led by Labor Party leader and Marxist Shelly Yahimovich would have had more resonance in the public for its statist, deficit spending economic platform. Now Netanyahu got another year during which the public will see what those policies are doing to Europe and so make his economic arguments for him.

All in all this is a great day for Netanyahu. I hope that I am right that he won't use his new strength to destroy his political party as Sharon did before him. I don't see any previous action on his part that lends to that conclusion. But certainly the public, and particularly the Likud members who are in politics to represent and advance their values and not just to gain power for power's sake need to think carefully about their strengths and weaknesses. They need to base their actions over the next year on a strategy that maximizes the former and minimizes the latter understanding all the time that they are dealing with an incredibly powerful party leader.

My friend Benzion Netanyahu died yesterday

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 21:46:48 -0500

My friend Benzion Netanyahu died yesterday. I feel such an emptiness and sorrow. I will write about him when I get my head around my thoughts and feelings. For now I just want to say that his memory should be a blessing for his family and for our nation. He was a good friend and a great man. It was a great honor and pleasure to know him. And I am so sorry that his death found me in New York and I missed his funeral.

Post-Zionism is so 1990s

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 14:45:45 -0500

You can learn a lot about a nation's health by watching how it celebrates its national holidays. In Israel's case, compare how we celebrated our 50th Independence Day in 1998 to what celebrations involve today.

During the 1990s, Israel's elite took a vacation from reality and history and they brought much of the public with them.

Then-foreign minister Shimon Peres said that history was overrated. The so-called "New Historians," who rummaged through David Ben-Gurion's closet looking for skeletons, were the toast of the academic world. Radicals like Yossi Beilin, Shulamit Aloni and Avrum Burg were dictating government policy.

The media, the entertainment establishment, and the Education Ministry embraced and massively promoted plays, movies, television shows, songs, dances, art and books that "slayed sacred cows." Everywhere you turned, post-Zionism was in. Post-Judaism was in. And Zionism and Judaism were both decidedly out.

As he is today, in 1998 Binyamin Netanyahu was prime minister, and then as now there were prominent voices seeking to blame him for the absence of peace and every other terrible blight on the planet.

In 1998, the government invested a fortune in marking Israel's 50th Independence Day. The main official celebration was a massive affair called Jubilee Bells that took place at Teddy Stadium in Jerusalem. More than 2,000 performers participated. But rather than serve as an event that unified Israeli society in celebration of 50 years of sovereign freedom, the event exposed just how far Israel's political and cultural elite were willing to go in attacking basic societal values.

The Bat Sheva Dance Troupe was scheduled to participate in the program and present a dance set to the traditional Passover song "Ehad mi yodea," (Who knows one). The song contains 13 stanzas that praise God, praise Jewish law, and outline the Jewish life cycle. In the number Bat Sheva was scheduled to perform, the dancers come on stage dressed as ultra-Orthodox Jewish men and by the end of the song, all they are wearing is underwear.

The choreography enraged members of Netanyahu's cabinet including education minister Yitzhak Levy. They insisted that the program shouldn't contain material that insulted sectors of Israeli society. The organizers tried to forge a compromise. But the dancers chose to boycott the festival.

Israel's cultural and media establishment expressed shock and horror at what they viewed as the government's attempt to infringe on artistic freedom. The Association of Israeli Artists demanded that a public commission be formed to ensure that the government would be unable to interfere in artistic freedom in the future. Major cultural icons declared cultural war against religious Jews.

The question of whether the dance was appropriate for an official, state- financed celebration of Independence Day was never asked. So, too, no one asked whether a dance portraying ultra-Orthodox Jews moving sensuously to a traditional Jewish song while taking off their clothes reflected the values of society.

To understand the distance Israel has traveled since then, consider Tuesday night's Memorial Day ceremony at Rabin Square in Tel Aviv. None of the performers attacked their fellow Israelis. And the best-received artist and song was Mosh Ben-Ari and his rendition of Psalm 121 - A Song of Ascent.

The psalm, which praises God as the eternal guardian of Israel, became the unofficial anthem of Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in 2008-2009. And Ben-Ari's rendition of the song propelled the dreadlock bedecked, hoop earring wearing world music artist into super-stardom in Israel.

IT WAS impossible to imagine Pslam 121 or any other traditional Jewish poem or prayer being performed as anything other than an object of scorn in 1998. Back then, it would have been impossible to contemplate a crowd of tens of thousands of non-religious Israelis reverently singing along as Ben-Ari crooned, "My help is from God/ Maker of Heaven and Earth/ He will not allow your foot to falter/ Your Guardian will not slumber/ Behold he neither slumbers nor sleeps - the Guardian of Israel."

It's not that the crowd would have necessarily booed him off the stage. He simply never would have been allowed on the stage to begin with. The 1990s was the decade that launched Aviv Gefen, the most prominent secular draft-dodger, to stardom.

Israel is no longer in the throes of an adolescent rebellion. It has regained its senses.

True, its celebrities look like Ben-Ari and not like Naomi Shemer. But the message is the same. Israel is a great country and a great nation. Zionism is in. Judaism is in. Post- Zionism is out. Post-Judaism is out.

When last year a group of performers announced they would boycott the Ariel Center for Performing Arts, the public reacted with anger and disgust, not understanding. Fearing a loss of state funding, their theater bosses quickly sought to distance themselves from the performers.

Israel's return to its Zionist roots is the greatest cultural event of the past decade. It is also an event that occurred under the radar screen of the rest of the world. No one outside the country seems to have noticed at all.

The outside world's failure to take note of Israel's cultural shift owes to its failure to recognize the significance of the failure of the peace process with the Palestinians on the one hand and the failure of Israel's withdrawal from Gaza on the other hand. The demise of the peace process at Camp David in July 2000 and the terror war that followed launched the Israeli public on its path away from its radical post-Zionist rebellion and back to its Zionist roots. The failure of the withdrawal from Gaza, and the international community's response to Operation Cast Lead, marked the conclusion of the journey.

The Oslo peace process was based on the radical belief that it is possible to make peace by empowering terrorists and giving them land, political legitimacy, money and guns. To embrace this nonsense, the public had to be willing to tolerate the notion that there was something unjust about the Zionist revolution. Because if Zionism and the cause of Jewish national liberation are just, then it is impossible to justify empowering the PLO, a terrorist movement dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the delegitimization of Zionism.

Most Israelis never adopted the post-Zionist narrative. But they did accept the doctrine of appeasement. And they shared the belief that if appeasement failed, the world would rally to Israel's side.

Consequently, the beginning of society's awakening to the lie of post-Zionism at the heart of the peace process was a function not only of the massive Palestinian terror onslaught that began after Yasser Arafat rejected peace and statehood at Camp David. It was also a function of the August 2000 UN Durban Conference and its aftermath in which the international community rallied to the Palestinians' side. The latter demonstrated that just as Israel's transfer of land and guns to the PLO had endangered the lives of its citizens, Israel's conferral of political legitimacy on the PLO endangered the international standing of the country.

The lesson that Israelis took from the failure of the peace process was that Israel has no Palestinian partner for peace. And until the Palestinians change, Israel has no one to talk to.

While a slight majority of Israelis still support partitioning the land between Israel and a Palestinian state, the overwhelming majority of Israelis believe that Israel has no one to make peace with and therefore no possibility of successfully partitioning the land.

This is not the lesson that foreigners learned. From Bill Clinton to George W. Bush to Tony Blair to Barack Obama to Nicolas Sarkozy, foreign leaders have insisted that the Oslo process had nearly succeeded and that its failure was a fluke.

The most the parts of the international community that are not completely anti-Israel have been willing to grant about the failure of the peace process is that it failed due to a lack of courage. By this telling, the problem isn't the concept of appeasing terrorists with land, guns and legitimacy. Rather the problem is narrow-minded, cowardly leaders. And so the way forward for them is also clear: figure out a more attractive appeasement package for the Palestinians and put Israel's feet to the fire to make it cough up the required concessions.

THEN THERE is the aftermath of the withdrawal from Gaza.

Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza was a traumatic national event. The forced expulsion of thousands of Israelis from their homes led Israeli society to the brink of disintegration.

The move represented the last hope of the peace movement. If the Palestinians won't sit down with Israel, so the thinking went, Israel can still appease them by simply giving them what they want without an agreement.

But not only did the withdrawal bring no peace. It brought Hamas to power. It brought tens of thousands of projectiles down on southern Israel.

Israelis expected the world to recognize the significance of this string of events. But that didn't happen.

Instead of seeing the lengths Israel had gone to appease the Palestinians and side with it when its appeasement failed again, the international community refused to even acknowledge that Israel had withdrawn from Gaza. Condoleezza Rice forced Israel to continue supplying electricity and water to Gaza and providing medical care for Gazans in Israeli hospitals as if nothing had happened. No one accepted that Israel was no longer in charge.

As far as most Israelis were concerned, the final end of our vacation from reality came with the publication of the Goldstone Report in the aftermath of Cast Lead. Here was Israel, forced to defend itself from Hamas-ruled Gaza that was waging an illegal missile war against Israeli civilians. Rather than stand by Israel that had done everything for peace, the UN's commission accused Israel of committing war crimes.

Undoubtedly one of the reasons so few outsiders have drawn the same lessons as the Israeli public from the failure of the peace process and the Gaza withdrawal is because the only Israelis they listen to are the few remaining holdouts from the 1990s. People like former Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) director Ami Ayalon can expect to have every withdrawal-from-territory and destroy-the-settlements op-ed they write published in The New York Times, whereas Richard Goldstone wasn't even able to get the Times to publish his admission that his eponymous commission's conclusions were false.

This open door policy for Israeli radicals was defensible in the 1990s when a significant portion of the Israeli public supported them. Now it constitutes nothing more than an anti-Israel propaganda campaign.

From Obama to J Street to the EU, international actors interested in forcing Israel to make more concessions to the Palestinians cannot understand why their attempts continue to fail. How is it possible that despite their best efforts, Netanyahu remains in power and the Left can't get any traction with the public? For the answer, they need to look no farther than Mosh Ben-Ari, his dreadlocks, and his rendition of Psalm 121. Israel's adolescent rebellion is over.

Post-Zionism is so 1990s.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post

Egypt has felafel

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 14:30:12 -0500

In this week's Tribal Update, the satirical newscast brought to you every week by Latma, the Hebrew-language media criticism website I lead we celebrate Yom Haatzmaut with Halil Majnoun, the Egyptian Minister of Conspiracy Theories. As well, in light of the success of Iron Dome, and the escalation in violent crime against Jews by Beduin in the South, we bring you the Israel Police's latest innovations in crime prevention.

Enjoy the show!

Here is Halil Majnoun's felafel song as a separate clip.

And in light of the massive demand, here, is the separate clip of last week's Israeli apology to Danish International Solidarity Movement's protester Andreas.

If you live outside the US, we formed a non-profit organization in Israel to accept donations from outside the US called the Zionist Incubator.

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

First of all, here is the link to Latma's page for donating by credit card through PayPal.

Second, 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

What happens in Cairo...

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 06:01:46 -0500

So are these Salafists or Muslim Brotherhood members?

I don't mean to be rude or anything but do Western policy analysts think we are stupid?

Reuel Marc Gerecht, who usually writes intelligently on the issue of jihad wrote a stunningly ridiculous article in the Wall Street Journal today in which he says true, the so-called Arab Spring has brought radical Islamic regimes to power. But there's no reason to get all bent out of shape about it. It's just part of a natural process that may one day lead to liberal values being adopted in the Arab world. True, the Arabs won't be allies of the West, but we need to just understand them.

It might be possible to greet all of this with tolerant understanding and patience if the Arabs lived on a different planet. Then they could have their experience with totalitarian Muslim fanatics at the helm of their societies without their embrace of madness and hatred affecting anyone else. But of course, that is not the case, as the video from Australia makes clear.

Gerecht writes for instance,

As is already happening in Egypt, we will see debates revolving around issues that will turn Western stomachs--such as the exclusion of Christians and women from official positions, and the permissibility of clitoridectomy and childhood brides. Though the outcomes may be distressing, this is not surprising.

In fact, he says, it should give us hope because it means that they are engaging in democratic discourse involving the issues they care about. And the very exercise of debate raises the prospect that voices of reason, moderation, humaneness and etc will eventually win the day by the force of their ideas and morality.

As he put it, "But democracy, even if vastly more limited than current Western practice, always introduces a jousting ethic into politics."

Obviously, this is possibility that exists - among others. But the physical and moral devastation these fanatics at the helm can cause in the generation or so that will have to pass before their Arab subjects recognize that they have gotten it wrong is not something we can afford to be indifferent to. It's something we have to fight, with every fiber of our being.

The good news is that even as the Obama administration embraces the Muslim Brotherhood, lots of people throughout the world are fighting hard. For instance I am proud to say that my friends and colleagues in America are doing amazing things to fight back and defend all that is right about this world. Here are just a few examples.

Today The Center for Security Policy is launching a new website called muslimbrotherhoodinamerica.com. The website presents a ten-part course about the Muslim Brotherhood in America, its penetration of the US government, the conservative movement, the Republican Party, and its influence over the Obama administration. The course is taught by Frank Gaffney, the President of the Center for Security Policy.

Here's an overview of the course;

The David Horowitz Freedom Center is hosting a townhall discussion of the Muslim Brotherhood in Los Angeles on May 1.

Pamela Geller from Atlas Shrugs blog has organized the Jessica Mokdad Human Rights Conference that will be held on April 29 in Dearborn, MI. Mokdad was the victim of an honor killing. The conference will explore honor killings and Islamic law in America.

I urge you to support and participate in these valiant efforts.

And now, apropos of nothing, here's a video produced by a young man named David Meyers portraying what auditions for Mel Gibson's planned movie about the Maccabis might look like...

Enjoy the video.

A suggestion to Danish protesters

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 16:26:40 -0500

This week on the Tribal Update, we explore the various facets of the International Solidarity Movement terror booster society's propaganda victory over Israel this week. Among other things, we apologize to the poor innocent bicyclist whose nose collided with Lt. Col. Eisner's rifle butt.

In honor of Yom Hashoah and former Nazi Gunther Grass's recent poem, we also bring you "Sh*t ex-Nazis say."

And much, much more.

Enjoy the show!

If you live outside the US, we formed a non-profit organization in Israel to accept donations from outside the US called the Zionist Incubator.

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

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The elephant of Jew hatred

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 16:09:20 -0500

Hatred of Jews is the central animating feature of the political and strategic reality of the Middle East. It is hatred of Jews that dictates the legal regimes, foreign policies, military aspirations, cultural mores, educational themes and even public health policies of our neighbors from Ramallah to Tehran.

Despite the centrality of Jew-hatred in all aspects of public life in the Arab and Muslim world, our neighbors' unrelenting and irrational abhorrence for Israel and the Jewish people remains a dirty secret that you aren't supposed to mention in polite company. From Washington to Brussels, talk of the policy implications of Arab and Muslim Jew-hatred is prohibited.

Omar Abu-Sneina, a convicted terrorist murderer, is one of the thousand Palestinian terrorists that Israel released from prison in order to secure the release of Israeli hostage IDF Sgt.- Maj. Gilad Schalit. Originally from Hebron, Abu-Sneina was released to Hamas-controlled Gaza.

This week the IDF announced that since his release Abu-Sneina has returned to the terror business. The Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) intercepted a computer memory card he sent his family in Hebron with instructions for how his fellow terrorists should go about kidnapping and holding IDF soldiers hostage. The instructions demonstrate how for Abu-Sneina, Israelis don't even deserve to be treated like animals.

Among other things, he discussed how to hide a hostage. As he put it, "Avoid hiding [the captive soldier] in desolate places, tunnels or forests, unless the aforementioned [captive] is a corpse or a severed head. If the aforementioned is a live human, that must be visited at least once a week and provided with food and drink, it is best to hide him in a house, an agricultural farm, a workplace, etc."

Abu-Sneina's coldblooded cruelty and rejection of the inherent value of the lives of Israelis is not simply a function of the fact that he is a terrorist. It is a reflection of the values of Palestinian society. Those values are continuously expressed and reinforced by Fatah- and Hamas-controlled media outlets, cultural and educational institutions and religious authorities. The ubiquitousness of Jew-hatred in the daily lives of Palestinians is so overwhelming it is difficult to imagine any facet of Palestinian life that isn't inundated by it.

Take grammar lessons. According to a translation provided by Palestinian Media Watch, the Palestinian Authority's Arabic language matriculation examinations for high school students include questions such as "Punctuate the underlined phrase: Do not view the occupier as human." And "Punctuate the underlined phrase: We shall die in order that our land may live."

THIS WEEK, a Palestinian court sentenced Muhammad Abu Shahala to death for selling a home in Hebron near the Cave of the Patriarchs to Jews. Shahala was arrested shortly after several Jewish families moved into the house last month. He was reportedly tortured and quickly tried and sentenced to die by a PA court.

The PA was established in May 1994. The first law it adopted defined selling land to Jews as a capital offense. Shortly thereafter scores of Arab land sellers began turning up dead in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria in both judicial and extrajudicial killings.

Leaders of the Jewish community of Hebron wrote a letter to international leaders this week asking them to intervene with PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and demand that he cancel Shahala's sentence. They addressed the letter to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, President of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy, the director-general of the International Red Cross, Yves Daccord, as well as Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres. In it they wrote, "It is appalling to think that property sales should be defined as a 'capital crime' punishable by death.

"The very fact that such a 'law' exists within the framework of the PA legal system points to a barbaric and perverse type of justice, reminiscent of practices implemented during the dark ages."

They went on to make the reasonable comparison between the PA's law prohibiting land sales to Jews to Nazi Germany's Nuremburg laws that constrained and finally outlawed trade between Jews and Germans. The letter concluded with the question, "Is the Palestinian Authority a reincarnation of the Third Reich?"

The Palestinians of course are far from unique in their obsession with hating Jews. Their hemorrhage of hatred, their obsessive need to reject any move towards peaceful coexistence with Israel, or what the renowned late Palestinian poet Yousuf Al Khatib referred to picturesquely as "the Jewish filth of Europe," is matched in every Arab land. And of course, it is the primary obsession of the Iranian regime.

The parallels between Nazi laws and the laws of the PA and the Arab states that outlaw all cooperation with Israel and make such cooperation a capital offense are obvious and straightforward. Yet generally speaking, anyone who points out this fact is automatically dismissed as an alarmist or an extremist. Given the PA's relative military weakness when compared with Israel and the Arab world's current lack of interest in waging active war against Israel, noting their inarguable ideological affinity with the Nazis is considered socially and even intellectually unacceptable. The fact that they lack the ability to implement their ideology renders it improper to mention it.

The social prohibition on drawing parallels between the threats facing Israel today and those that faced the Jewish people 70 years ago is not limited to the discourse on the Arab world's conflict with Israel. It also extends to polite society's discourse on Iran's nuclear program, which the Iranian regime has repeatedly made clear is aimed at destroying Israel.

In his address to the nation at the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at Yad Vashem on Wednesday evening, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu took aim at that taboo when he attacked those who accuse him of belittling the Holocaust by comparing the annihilation of European Jewry to the threat posed by Iran's nuclear weapons program.

Netanyahu said, "I know there are also those who believe that the unique evil of the Holocaust should never be invoked in discussing other threats facing the Jewish people. To do so, they argue, is to belittle the Holocaust and to offend its victims.

"I totally disagree. On the contrary. To cower from speaking the uncomfortable truth - that today like then, there are those who want to destroy millions of Jewish people - that is to belittle the Holocaust, that is to offend its victims and that is to ignore the lessons.

"Not only does the prime minister of Israel have the right, when speaking of these existential dangers, to invoke the memory of a third of our nation which was annihilated. It is his duty."

NETANYAHU IS right, of course. Unfortunately for Israel, raising the Holocaust in the context of a discussion about contemporary threats to the Jewish people is the rhetorical equivalent of dropping a nuclear bomb. Just as no one is allowed to use a nuclear bomb, no one is allowed to mention the Holocaust. And that means that there is ultimately no way to speak about the violent hatred that animates our enemies in every aspect of their policy making. From the seemingly anodyne issue of property sales to the existential issue of nuclear weapons programs, the Jew-hatred that lies at the foundation of their actions is out of bounds for discussion.

Actually, the situation is both better and worse than that. Netanyahu's rhetorical boldness in drawing the parallel between Iran and the Nazis is arguably the only reason that the EU and the Obama administration have taken any actions against Iran. No, as their feckless negotiations with the mullahs, their foot-dragging in implementing economic sanctions, and their outspoken opposition to military action against Iran make clear, they do not really mind the prospect of Iran acquiring the ability to wipe out the Jewish state. The only reason they have adopted sanctions at all is because Netanyahu's Holocaust rhetoric made them fear that Israel would attack Iran's nuclear installations if they didn't.

On the other hand, when it comes to their direct dealings with Jew-haters, Westerners not only fail to confront them about their prejudice. They enable it. For instance, at a townhall meeting during her visit to Tunisia last month, Hillary Clinton was asked how US leaders can be trusted when during elections, "most of the candidates from both sides run towards the Zionist lobbies to get their support."

Rather than reject the anti-Jewish premise of the question - that Jews exert inordinate control over US politics or that there is something wrong with candidates expressing support for Israel - Clinton treated the question as legitimate.

She said, "A lot of things are said in political campaigns that should not bear a lot of attention."

Clinton even congratulated her anti-Jewish questioner, saying, "I think it's a fair question because I... sometimes am a little surprised that people around the world pay more attention to what is said in our political campaigns than most Americans."

Similarly, a report on the behind the scenes goings on at last weekend's nuclear negotiations with Iran published by Al-Monitor described the friendly discussion that took place at a dinner Friday night between EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and Iranian chief negotiator Saeed Jalili. According to a European diplomat, the conversation was aimed at breaking the ice. And it included a discussion of "political party funding in the US."

It is hard to imagine that such a discussion involved anything other than a group tongue-clucking session directed against the inordinate impact of "Jewish money" on US electoral politics. That is, it is all but impossible to imagine that the discussion involved anything other than Ashton attempting to build a rapport with her Iranian counterpart based on shared hatred or contempt for Jews.

The fact that the West refuses to consider the policy implications of the most powerful force in Arab and Iranian policy-making and political life does not mean that Israeli policy-makers should necessarily expand their discussion of the topic - although it would probably not hurt for them to do so. What it means is that the general policy debate in the West about the nature of Middle Eastern politics is completely divorced from reality.

Because the Americans and the Europeans refuse to acknowledge the elephant of Jew-hatred in the middle of the room, they cannot be trusted to make reasoned or rational policy decisions. And since they cannot be trusted to act rationally, Israel cannot rely on the Americans or the Europeans as allies or partners when it confronts threats from its Jew-obsessed neighbors.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Rick Santorum on Jerusalem

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 04:35:45 -0500

Senator Rick Santorum has an important oped in the New York Daily News today about how the Obama administration is breaking US law by not recognizing that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.

As he writes:

It is actually not well known that the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 made it U.S. law to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and that the waiver provision of the act only applied to moving the embassy to Jerusalem. A letter to President Bill Clinton -- signed by 84 U.S. senators, including me -- articulated this point.

Senator Santorum makes the additional, worrisome point that Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney has refused to explicitly commit himself to moving the US embassy to Jerusalem if he is elected president. Rather than articulate a position on this and other issues, Romney has repeatedly stated that he will advise with the Prime Minister of Israel. As Senator Santorum notes, this isn't a position.

Again, like everyone else, I support Governor Romney against Obama. But I think it is crucial that he tell us definitively what his policy on Israel -- and other salient issues -- would be. And again, the best way to do this would be for him to commit to appointing John Bolton his Secretary of State.

By the way, I happen to think that Senator Santorum is wonderful. The day Latma released our song We Con the World, exposing the media's collusion with the Turkish terrorists who attacked IDF naval commandos aboard the Mavi Marmara, Sentator Santorum was guest hosting Bill Bennett's Morning in America radio show. He gave me a long interview and played the entire song for his audience of more than a million listeners.

He is a wonderful and true friend of Israel and his foreign policy positions have always been clear and wise.

It is pretty clear now that Senator Santorum is not going to be the Republican presidential nominee. But he is a great American and a great friend of Israel and for that he has earned my respect. I hope that he will play a big and influential role in US politics this year and for many years to come.

American Jew hatred on the march

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 03:04:28 -0500

The following is from Lee Whitnum, a Jew hating Democrat candidate for Joe Lieberman's Senate seat.

We should remember that in the Democrat primary in 2006, Lieberman's rival Ned Lamont heavily employed anti-Jewish innuendos, blaming neoconservatives, (that is, Jews), for the war in Iraq. His backers were unabashed in their use of anti-Jewish slurs against Lieberman and his family.

And Lamont WON the primary. And the Democrat Party refused to back Lieberman in the primary.

Obviously, Lee Whitnum the Jew hater featured below decided it makes sense to use her Jew hatred as a campaign asset.

Wonder whether President Obama who heads the Democrat Party will expel this bigot from the party. Wonder if the Jewish community will demand that he do so.

Oh, never mind.

What is the capital of Israel?

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 06:58:08 -0500

This week on the Tribal Update, the weekly satirical newscast produced by Latma, the Hebrew language satirical media criticism website I run we bring you an update on the US government's inability to identify Israel's capital. To discuss the problem we conducted an exclusive interview with President Obama's Reality Perception Adviser John Zelokoreli (John Itsnothappeningtome).

We also feature the Palestinian Minister of Uncontrollable Rage, Tawil Fadiha teaching a course for the media on organizing mass protests. Fadiha was brought on board in light of the media's campaign to reignite the anti-capitalist protests from last summer during this year's summer break.

Enjoy the show and a happy and kosher Passover to all of you.

If you live outside the US, we formed a non-profit organization in Israel to accept donations from outside the US called the Zionist Incubator.

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

First of all, here is the link to Latma's page for donating by credit card through PayPal.

Second, 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

The eternal liberation movement

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 15:59:20 -0500

Jewish liberation is far from complete

Hamas terror boss Fathi Hamad is a notable figure. Hamad is both the director of Hamas's al-Aksa television station and the terror group's "minister" of the interior and national security. His double portfolio is a clear expression of the much ignored fact that for terrorists, propaganda is inseparable from violence.

Hamad's key posts make him a man worth listening to. His statements necessarily indicate Hamas's general direction.

On March 23, Hamad was interviewed by Egypt's Al Hekma television station. The interview was translated by MEMRI.

Hamad made two central points. First, he claimed that the Palestinian war against Israel is the keystone of the global jihad. Second, he said the Palestinians are not a distinct people, but transplanted Egyptians and Saudis.

In his words, "At al-Aksa and on the land of Palestine, all the conspiracies, throughout history, have been shattered - the conspiracies of the Crusaders, and the conspiracies of the Tatars. At al- Aksa and on the land of Palestine, the Battle of Hattin was waged. The [West] does not want this noble history to repeat itself, because the Jews and their allies would be annihilated - the Zionists, the Americans and the imperialists.

"Thus, the conspiracy is very clear. Al-Aksa and the land of Palestine represent the spearhead for Islam and for the Muslims. Therefore, when we seek the help of our Arab brothers, we are not seeking their help in order to eat, to live, to drink, to dress, or to live a life of luxury. No. When we seek their help, it is in order to continue to wage Jihad."

Hamad next explained, "Brothers, half of the Palestinians are Egyptians and the other half are Saudis. Who are the Palestinians? We have many families called Al-Masri, [Egyptians] whose roots are Egyptian. Egyptian! They may be from Alexandria, from Cairo, from Dumietta, from the North, from Aswan, from Upper Egypt. We are Egyptians."

What Hamad's interview tells us is that today Hamas - the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood - is more interested in unity with Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Egypt than with Fatah. Whereas in the past it joined Fatah in obscuring the direct link between the jihad against the Jews and the jihad against the non-Muslim world, today it seeks to emphasize the connection. To this end, Hamas is willing to abandon the myth of Palestinian nativism and acknowledge that the Palestinians are an artificial people, invented for the purpose of advancing the global jihad in the key battlefield of Israel.

Hamad's statements underscore a widespread sentiment among Israelis about the revolutions now tearing apart the Arab world. That sentiment is that while the results of these revolutions will be catastrophic in the medium and long term, in the short term they bring respite to Israel. With Arab regimes - new and old - struggling to consolidate power, they have little time or energy to devote to their war against Israel.

In this situation, the thinking goes, Israel should be able to devote its attention to attacking Iran's nuclear facilities.

Unfortunately for Israel, while the Arab world is increasingly uninterested in the Palestinian war against Israel, Europe and the American Left are more than happy to pick up the slack.

Consider two recent events. First, two weeks ago the UN Human Rights Council voted to launch a commission whose goal is to criminalize Israel for the existence of Israeli communities beyond the 1949 armistice lines.

The council's decision to form a new kangaroo court to criminalize Israel was not the result of the Arab diplomatic war against Israel. It is the consequence of the European diplomatic war against Israel. It is Europe, not the Arabs that has barred Israel from caucusing with its UN regional group - the Western European and Others Group. By barring Israel from the caucus, the Europeans have denied Israel the ability to make its case to other UN member nations.

For its part, the Obama administration pays lip service to the need to end the Human Rights Council's obsessive war against Israel. But at the same time, it has effectively joined that war by legitimizing the anti-Israel council both by joining it, and by refusing to use its membership as leverage to coerce the council into abandoning its campaign against Israel.

Following the council's vote to form a new Goldstone-style commission to attack Israel, the State Department issued a statement in which it claimed that due in part to US membership in the council, the council had been spurred to "action on a series of important human rights situations around the world."

Then there was last Friday's Global March to Jerusalem, in which a consortium of protesters organized by Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Iran and the international Left intended to storm Israel's borders and fill the state with hostile foreigners.

As Ribhi Halloum, the coordinator of the march said last year, the goal of the GMJ was "to move the right of return possessed by Palestinian refugees from theory to practice."

In a press conference in Amman days ahead of the operation, Halloum said that organizers expected for two million people to mass at Israel's borders and attempt to breach them.

In the end, the GMJ failed to mount its planned invasion. The sum total of the day's events amounted to several violent local demonstrations by Palestinians in Judea and Samaria joined by foreign and Israeli leftists. Israel's borders were not breached.

The GMJ's failure to achieve its aims owed to the same pan-Arab distraction that Hamad tried to address in his interview with Egyptian television.

But while the Syrians, Egyptians, Jordanians and Lebanese have more urgent business to attend to, the international Left has intensified its own campaign against Israel.

Leading anti-Israel, (and anti-Jewish) leftists including George Galloway, Desmond Tutu, Mairead Maguire, Noam Chomsky, Jeremiah Wright, Cindy Sheehan and Medea Benjamin served as members of the GMJ's various organizing committees. These self-proclaimed human rights activists had no problem with the fact that the Iranian regime took a central role in organizing the operation or that the clear goal of the campaign's Muslim organizers is the destruction of Israel.

To the contrary, this goal is now openly shared by growing numbers of Western leftists. In an op-ed on the Guardian's online opinion forum, Sarah Colborne, a member of the GMJ's organizing committees and its national coordinator for the UK as well as the director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in the UK wrote, "The struggle for Palestinian rights is at the core of the global movement for social and economic justice."

Judith Butler, one of Colborne's American counterparts, has opined that "understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important."

So just as Hamas's Hamad claims that the jihad on Israel is the key campaign of the global jihad, Hamad's Western partners claim that destroying Israel is the key to the Left's campaign for socialism.

Disturbingly, the international Left is receiving indirect support for its goal of destroying Israel's sovereignty over Jerusalem, (and through it, destroying Israel), from the US government. Just days before the GMJ failed to unravel Israel's physical control over Jerusalem, in a jaw-dropping exchange between State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland and AP reporter Matthew Lee, Nuland refused to say that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.

The US has always been deeply hostile to Israel's sovereignty over Jerusalem. Beginning in 1950 the State Department directed US diplomats to discourage other governments from establishing their embassies in Jerusalem. But while the US has always undermined its own alliance with Israel by aligning its policy on Jerusalem with Israel's worst enemies, under President Barack Obama, the US's willingness to express this hostility has been unprecedented.

This hostility has been demonstrated most famously by Obama's demand that the government stop respecting Jewish property rights in the city.

It has also been given graphic expression by the administration's decision to move the Consular Section of the US Consulate in Jerusalem from an Arab neighborhood in eastern Jerusalem to the site that Israel allocated for a new US embassy.

The site is located in the Jewish Arnona neighborhood in western Jerusalem.

Israel allocated the land to a future US Embassy after Congress passed the US Embassy Act in 1995 which obligated the US government to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The site was chosen, among other reasons, because its location in western Jerusalem put it outside the dispute regarding whether or not Israel will retain sovereignty over eastern, southern and northern Jerusalem in a hypothetical peace treaty with the Palestinians. The US government uses the non-resolution of the Palestinian conflict with Israel as its justification for refusing to accept Jewish property rights in those areas of the city.

The US Consulate in Jerusalem is not subordinate to the US Embassy in Tel Aviv. It presents itself as the unofficial US embassy to the non-existent state of Palestine. By utilizing the site in western Jerusalem allocated for a future embassy as an extension office of the consulate, the Obama administration made clear its rejection of Israel's right to sovereignty over all of Jerusalem. And in light of the US law that recognizes Jerusalem as Israel's capital and orders the government to relocate the embassy to Jerusalem, the Obama administration not only indirectly legitimized the cause of those who seek the destruction of Israel.

It did so in contempt of US law.

****

In truth, there is nothing new about the West's rejection of Israel's right to sovereignty or even to its support and sponsorship for the Arab war for the destruction of Israel. Such animosity predates not only the 1967 Six Day War. It predates the establishment of Israel.

British Col. Richard Meinertzhagen, who served as an intelligence officer in wartime and post-World War I Mandatory Palestine, made this point clearly in his memoir Middle East Diary.

Meinertzhagen wrote that the first Arab terror assaults on Jews under the British military government were instigated by the British military. Just before Easter in 1920, British military authorities contacted future Nazi agent Haj Amin el Husseini and encouraged him to attack the Jews of Jerusalem.

They told him, "He had a great opportunity at Easter to show the world that the Arabs of Palestine would not tolerate Jewish domination in Palestine... and if disturbances of sufficient violence occurred in Jerusalem at Easter, [the British High Commanders] would advocate the abandonment of the Jewish home."

Today, the Jewish people begin their week-long celebration of Passover, the Jewish festival of freedom. This evening we will read in the Haggada that our fight for freedom is an eternal struggle.

When we assess the global nature of the current assault on Jewish freedom and sovereignty in our country, we see the truth of that message.

While our present circumstances give us much to celebrate, the work of Jewish liberation is far from over.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.