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May 18, 2012, 2:33 AM

Let us embrace our friends

Two weeks ago, US Congressman Joe Walsh published an op-ed in the The Washington Times in which he called for the US and Israel to abandon the two-state solution.

After running through the record of Palestinian duplicity, failed governance, terrorism and bad faith, he called for Israel to apply its sovereignty to Judea and Samaria. In his words, Israel should "adopt the only solution that will bring true peace to the Middle East: a single Israeli state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Israel is the only country in the region dedicated to peace and the only power capable of stable, just and democratic government in the region."

The evidence that the two-state paradigm has failed is overwhelming. The Palestinians' decision to reject statehood at Camp David in 2000 and launch a terror war against Israel made clear that they had not abandoned their refusal from 1947 to accept partition of the Land of Israel with the Jews.

So, too, the Palestinians' election of Hamas in the 2006 elections, and their missile war against Israel from Gaza in the aftermath of Israel's complete withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, all made clear that they are not interested in a Palestinian state. Rather, their chief desire is Israel's annihilation.

Consequentially, there is no chance whatsoever that the two state paradigm can work.

Indeed, the fact that there is no Palestinian leader willing to recognize Israel's right to exist makes clear that if a Palestinian state is established in Judea and Samaria - in addition to the de facto Palestinian state in Gaza - that state will be in state of war with Israel. All territory under its control will be used to attack the rump Jewish state.

Given the abject failure of the two-state paradigm, it is abundantly clear that for all the complications that may be associated with the application of Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria, it is a better option for Israel than Israeli surrender of the areas.

Walsh's op-ed is not his first statement of support for Israeli annexation. Last September, ahead of the UN general assembly, Walsh authored Congressional Resolution 394 supporting Israel's right to annex Judea and Samaria in the event that the Palestinians asked the UN to recognize a Palestinian state outside the framework of a peace treaty with Israel. Forty-four other congressmen co-sponsored the resolution.

And this makes sense.

The Palestinians' decision to turn the issue of Palestinian statehood over to the UN constituted a substantive breach of the treaties the PLO signed with Israel. Those agreements stipulated that both sides agreed that their conflict would be solved through negotiations and not through unilateral actions. By ending negotiations with Israel and turning the issue of statehood over to the UN, the Palestinians canceled their treaties with Israel. Consequently, Israel is no longer bound by those accords and is free to take its own unilateral actions, including applying its laws to Judea and Samaria as it did in Jerusalem and the Golan Heights in the past.

FOR HIS unstinting support for Israel, Walsh has been subject to an unbridled assault by leftist American Jews. Ron Kampeas from JTA, for instance, attacked Walsh, accusing him of being no different than Israel's enemies who seek to destroy Israel by ending its ability to define itself as a Jewish state through what they refer to as the "one-state solution."

Kampeas blasted Walsh for suggesting that Palestinians unwilling to live under Israeli rule could move to Jordan which, with its 75-percent Palestinian majority, is effectively the Palestinian state. To back up his condemnation, Kampeas quoted Robert Wright's excoriation of Walsh in The Atlantic.

There Wright wrote, "Offhand, I don't recall a member of Congress in my lifetime saying anything so grotesquely at odds with American ideals about ethnic relations and for that matter basic human rights."

For its part, the Jewish-run anti-Israel lobby J Street is mobilizing its supporters to bring about Walsh's defeat in the November elections by soliciting contributions to his Democratic challenger. J Street executive director Jeremy Ben-Ami wrote that "Walsh's prescription amounts to a call for an end to Israel as the democratic home of the Jewish people."

It is hard to know where to begin a discussion of this assault in which Jewish Americans attacked one of Israel's strongest supporters simply because he had the temerity to recognize reality and call for the US to support an Israeli victory against our enemies who seek our destruction.

First, it is important to consider the claim that Walsh went against the grain of American ideals by suggesting, "Those Palestinians who wish to may leave their Fatah- and Hamas-created slums and move to the original Palestinian state: Jordan. The British Mandate for Palestine created Jordan as the country for the Palestinians. That is the only justification for its creation. Even now, 75% of its population is of Palestinian descent."

The fact of the matter is that the two-state paradigm rests on the assumption that the Palestinian state will be ethnically cleansed of Jews before it is established. Whereas Walsh somehow stands in opposition to American ideals for suggesting that the Palestinians may voluntarily immigrate to Jordan, Kampeas, Ben- Ami and their cohorts have no problem with the concept of a Jew-free Palestine and the forcible expulsion of up to 675,000 Jews from their homes in Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem simply because they are Jewish.

Aside from their pernicious hypocrisy and moral blindness, what stands out in their assaults on Walsh is that they cannot tell the difference between Israel's enemies that seek its destruction through the so-called one-state solution, and Israel's friends, who want it to defeat its enemies and live with security and peace. For the likes of Kampeas and Ben-Ami, there is no difference between Walsh and Israel's worst enemies.

PART OF this problem is their apparent unquestioning acceptance of the myth of a demographic time bomb. They seem not to have noticed that the Palestinian claim that by 2015 there will be an Arab majority west of the Jordan River is a complete fabrication.

The truth is that if Israel applied its laws to Judea and Samaria tomorrow and all the Palestinians in those areas received Israeli citizenship, Israel would still retain a two-thirds Jewish majority. Moreover, all the demographic trends for Israel, including increasing birthrates and positive immigration rates, are positive. And all the demographic trends for the Palestinians, including decreasing birthrates and negative immigration rates, are negative. According to Israeli demographic researcher Yoram Ettinger, by 2030, Jewish will likely comprise 80% of the population of Israel, Judea and Samaria.

So Ben-Ami's argument that Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria means the end of Israeli democracy is simply incorrect.

But aside from their hypocrisy and refusal to accept simple arithmetic realities, what stands out most clearly in these leftist American Jews' assault on Walsh is how they have become addicted to the fable of the two-state solution. Their addiction to this fable - that argues that after a century of Palestinian devotion to the annihilation of Israel, the Palestinians are suddenly willing to meet Israel halfway - is what propels these Jewish activists to attack anyone who points out reality. It is what drives them to brand as a foe anyone with the temerity to suggest a better way forward.

The beauty of the two-state fable is that it puts the onus to make peace on Israel's shoulders.

If it is true that the Palestinians want to make peace, then Israel must make peace. And if all the Palestinians require to make peace is for Israel to quit Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, then that is what Israel must do, together with the 675,000 Jews who live there.

The real tragedy is of course not that the likes of Kampeas and Ben-Ami maintain faith with the fairy tale of Palestinian willingness to live at peace with Israel. The real tragedy is that this myth has been the official policy of the government of Israel for the past 19 years. Since then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin launched the peace process with Yasser Arafat in September 1993, to greater or lesser degrees, every Israeli government has kept faith with the two-state solution lie.

It hasn't mattered that the Palestinians rejected statehood and peace not once, but twice. It hasn't mattered that the Palestinians received Gaza lock, stock and barrel with no strings attached and used the territory to launch an illegal missile war against Israeli civilians. The fact that both Arafat and his supposedly moderate successor Mahmoud Abbas rejected partition and maintained their devotion to Israel's destruction did not stop Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu from bowing to US pressure and embracing this fool's game.

People like Kampeas are the first to bemoan Israel's sorry state in the realm of public diplomacy. They decry Israel's hasbara efforts as pathetic and failed. But what they fail to acknowledge is that it is the two-state trap that makes the construction and execution of an effective public diplomacy strategy impossible.

To maintain faith with this failed policy, Israel's leaders and representatives are not merely required to ignore the history of the past 90 years of Palestinian rejection and aggression.

They are required to ignore current events.

They are forced to ignore not just what happened in 1947, but what happened at 7 o'clock in the morning.

And this brings us back to Rep. Walsh. There may be things to criticize about Walsh's policy argument. For instance, he calls for the conferral of "limited voting power" on the Palestinians under Israeli sovereignty. In truth, there is no reason for them to receive anything but full voting rights.

But you have to be blind to reality to view him as anything other than a friend of Israel.

Happily, not everyone in Israel remains paralyzed. Members of Knesset have launched repeated attempts in recent months to debate legislation calling for Israel to apply its sovereignty over all or parts of Judea and Samaria. Next Wednesday, MK Miri Regev is holding a conference to launch a new Knesset caucus calling for the adoption of this policy.

IN RECENT years, poll after poll has shown that the majority of Israelis do not believe that the two-state paradigm will bring peace or that if a Palestinian state is formed, it will live at peace with Israel.

And yet, because of the choke-hold that Kampeas and Ben-Ami's Israeli counterparts have held over the national discourse, the Israeli people have been given no other option to consider. Rather, we have been told over and over again that giving our enemies a veto over our rights, land and security is the only alternative.

Walsh and the 44 congressmen who co-sponsored his resolution are Israel's friends. We should take heart in their willingness to buck consensus and support us. And we should give careful and responsible consideration to their reasonable and supportive policy recommendations.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on May 18, 2012 at 2:33 AM

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May 11, 2012, 4:23 AM

Professor Netanyahu's lessons

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.

Posted on May 11, 2012 at 4:23 AM

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May 8, 2012, 7:27 AM

First thoughts on the unity government

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.

Posted on May 8, 2012 at 7:27 AM

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April 27, 2012, 2:45 PM

Post-Zionism is so 1990s

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

Posted on April 27, 2012 at 2:45 PM

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April 19, 2012, 4:09 PM

The elephant of Jew hatred

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.

Posted on April 19, 2012 at 4:09 PM

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April 5, 2012, 3:59 PM

The eternal liberation movement

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.

Posted on April 5, 2012 at 3:59 PM

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March 23, 2012, 4:15 AM

Mohamed Merah - Man of the West

The massacre of Jewish children at the Ozar Hatorah Jewish day school in Toulouse presents us with an appalling encapsulation of the depraved nature of our times - although at first glance, the opposite seems to be the case.

On the surface, the situation was cut and dry. A murderer drove up to a Jewish school and executed three children and a teacher.

Led by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, all of France decried the massacre and announced its solidarity with the French Jewish community. World leaders condemned the crime. The killer died in a standoff with French security forces. Justice was served. Case closed.

But dig a little deeper and it becomes clear that justice has not been served.

Indeed, it hasn't even begun to be addressed. The killer, Mohamed Merah, was not a lone gunman. He wasn't even one of the lone jihadists we hear so much about.

He had plenty of accomplices. And not all of them were Muslims.

An analysis of the nature of his crime and the identity of his many accomplices must necessarily begin with a question. Why did Merah videotape his crime?

Why did take the trouble of strapping a video camera to his neck and filming himself chasing eight-year-old Miriam Monsonego through the school courtyard and shooting her three times in the head? Why did he document his execution of Rabbi Jonathan Sandler and his two little boys, three-year-old Gavriel and six-year-old Aryeh?

The first answer is because Merah took pride in killing Jewish children. Beyond that, he was certain that millions of people would be heartened by his crime. By watching him shoot the life out of Jewish children, they would be inspired to repeat his actions elsewhere.

And he was surely correct.

Millions of people have watched the 2002 video of Daniel Pearl being decapitated. Similar decapitation videos of Western hostages in Iraq and elsewhere have also become runaway Internet sensations.

Led by Youssef Fofana, the Muslim gang in France that kidnapped and tortured Ilan Halimi to death in 2006 also took pictures of their handiwork. Their photographs were clearly imitations of the photos that Pearl's killers took of him before they chopped his head off.

The pride that jihadist murderers take in their crimes is not merely manifested in their camera work. US Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who massacred 13 US servicemen at Fort Hood in 2009, showed obvious pride in his dedication to jihad. Hassan gave a presentation to his colleagues justifying jihad. He carried business cards in which he identified himself as an "SOA," a soldier of Allah.

Similarly, Naveed Haq, the American Muslim who carried out the attack at the Seattle Jewish Federation building in 2006, murdering one woman and wounding another five, bragged to his mother and friend about his crime in monitored telephone calls from jail. Haq boasted that he was "a jihadi" and that his victims deserved to die because they were "Israeli collaborators."

The exhibitionism common to all the men's behavior makes it obvious that that their attacks were not the random actions of isolated crazy people or lone extremists. All of these killers were certain that they were part of a global movement that seeks the annihilation of the Jews, the subjugation of the Western world and the supremacy of jihadist Islam. And they were convinced that their actions served the interests of this movement and that they would be viewed as heroes by millions of their fellow Muslims for their killing of innocents.

THIS SITUATION is bad enough on its own. But what make it truly dangerous are the West's responses to it. Those responses together with the crimes themselves expose the depraved and perilous nature of our times. And they show that Merah's death can bring no closure to this story.

There are five interrelated aspects to the West's response to these crimes and the jihadist reality they expose. The first aspect of the West's response is denial.

Time after time, Merah and his ilk throughout the Western world show us who they are and what they want. And time after time, the Western elites, and even much of the Jewish leadership, turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to their cries of murder and calls for the destruction of Western civilization.

In the case of Halimi's murder, for instance, Paris police refused to view his abduction as a hate crime. Despite the fact that Fofana and his followers called Halimi's family and recited Koranic verses while Ilan screamed out in agony in the background, the Paris police treated his disappearance as a garden variety kidnap-for-ransom case.

Even after Ilan was found naked at a rail heading with burns on more than 80 percent of his body and died en route to the hospital, it took French authorities over a week to admit that he had been the victim of an anti-Semitic crime.

On a lesser note, everyone from the media to Jewish communal leaders in the US abjectly refuse to recognize that mainstream Muslim groups like the Muslim Students Association are sympathetically inclined towards Hamas. Moreover, they refuse to recognize that sympathy for Hamas necessarily entails sympathy for Hamas's genocidal platform of annihilating the Jewish people in the name of jihad.

As David Horowitz wrote in a recent article at FrontPage magazine, Jewish student leaders at places such as the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill prefer to attack messengers like himself, than accept the inconvenient truth that Muslim student leaders on campus with them support the annihilation of Israel.

Ignoring and denying the openly expressed aims of jihadists like Merah is of course only part of the problem. The second aspect of the West's effective collusion with these killers is Western elites' justification of their crimes.

After initially pinning the blame for the Toulouse massacre on Nazis, when French authorities finally acknowledged Merah's jihadist identity, they also provided his justification for murder. Speaking to reporters, French Interior Minister Claude Gueant gave us Merah's name and his excuse at the same time.

Gueant told us that Merah was associated with al-Qaida and he was upset about what he referred to as Israel's "murder" of Palestinian children.

It should be unnecessary to note the simple truth that Israel doesn't murder Palestinian children. Palestinians murder Israeli children.

But then, if Merah got his news from the Western media there is a reasonable chance that he wouldn't know that.

EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton was rightly condemned by Israeli political leaders this week for her equation of the actual massacre of Jewish children in Toulouse with the imaginary massacre of Palestinian children in Gaza. But she is not alone in this behavior. US President Barack Obama engaged in similarly outrageous libels when during his speech to the Muslim world in June 2009 he compared the Holocaust with Israeli treatment of the Palestinians.

And the line separating these libels from actual incitement is often hard to find.

French television, which Merah no doubt often watched, is notorious for crossing it. It was France 2 that gave us this century's first anti-Semitic blood libel with its October 2000 tale of Muhammad al-Dura's alleged death at the hands of IDF soldiers.

The France 2 story was exposed as a fraud by an appellate court in Paris in 2008. The appellate court overturned a lower court's libel ruling against Internet activist Philippe Karsenty who wrote on his personal website that the al-Dura story was a hoax.

The appellate court viewed France 2's unedited footage from the scene. That footage showed al-Dura moving after the France 2 cameraman had declared him dead. The footage led the court to overturn the decision of the lower court that had found Karsenty guilty of libel.

Apparently the same French establishment that now declares solidarity with France's Jews is unwilling to part with the al-Dura hoax that incited the spilling of so much Jewish blood in the past decade. Last month, France's Supreme Court overturned the appellate court's ruling and ordered it to retry the case.

As far as the Supreme Court of France is concerned, the appellate court had no right to ask France 2 to provide evidence that its story was true. According to the court, the unedited footage which proved the story was a blood libel should never have been admitted as evidence. The truth should never have been permitted to come to light.

IN ADDITION to denying, justifying and inciting jihadist violence, Western elites and authorities also engage in facilitating it and, after the fact, excusing it. In the case of Merah, although details are still unclear, it has been reported that he underwent jihadist training by al-Qaida in Afghanistan and was apprehended by Afghan authorities.

Despite his ties to al-Qaida, either US or French military authorities decided he should be sent back to France even though he clearly constituted a danger to French society.

Moreover, according to media reports, French authorities knew that he was dangerous and still failed to apprehend him. They had been informed that at least on one occasion, Merah sought to radicalize a 15-year-old Muslim boy. And yet, he was allowed to remain at large.

As the mother of the teenager said, "All these people had to die before they finally arrest Mohamed Merah. What an enormous waste. The police knew this individual was dangerous and radicalized. I complained to the police twice about Mohamed Merah and tried to follow up several times."

In the US, Hasan's colleagues and commanders knew of his sympathy for jihad and his connections to jihadist leader Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. And yet they promoted him to major and sent him to Fort Hood.

The West's complicity with these jihadist crimes doesn't end with their perpetration.

After failing to acknowledge that Halimi was abducted by jihadists who murdered him because he was a Jew, French authorities conducted his murderers' trials behind closed doors. Hidden from public scrutiny, in their first trial, Halimi's killers were given pitifully lights sentences. Fofana was rendered eligible for parole within 22 years. It was only the outcry of activists within the French Jewish community that caused French authorities to hold a retrial.

In Seattle, Haq's first trial for his attack on Seattle's Jewish Federation was declared a mistrial. Seattle's mayor and media went out of their way to present Haq as mentally ill. The prosecution failed to seek the death penalty and didn't bother to present the records of Haq's phone conversations bragging about his crimes until his second trial.

Together, the behavior of proud jihadist warriors of the West like Merah, Hasan, Haq and Fofana, and the depraved silence, indifference and complicity of Western elites with their jihadist aims, form the physical and moral landscape of our time. And it is because of this evil mix of perpetrators and enablers that Merah's death is not a victory of justice.

Originally published in the Jerusalem Post.

Posted on March 23, 2012 at 4:15 AM

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February 10, 2012, 2:29 AM

The Fatah-Hamas peace process

On Monday afternoon, the Palestinians destroyed officially whatever was left of the concept of a peace process with Israel.

When PA Chairman and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas signed a deal with Hamas terror-master Khaled Mashaal in Doha, Qatar, the notion that there is a significant segment of Palestinian society that is not committed to the destruction of Israel was finally and truly sunk.

But before the ink on the agreement had a chance to dry, the peace processors were already spewing bromides whose sole purpose was to deny this inarguable conclusion. Both the Obama administration and the EU claimed that the agreement is an internal Palestinian issue. The EU actually welcomed the deal.

As Foreign Policy Commissioner Catherine Ashton's spokesman put it, "The EU has consistently called for intra-Palestinian reconciliation behind President Mahmoud Abbas as an important element for the unity of a future Palestinian state and for reaching a two-state solution."

The Israeli Left was quick to blame the agreement on Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

In an apparent bid to inject a bit of reality into the delusional discourse, Netanyahu condemned the pact. As he put it, "If Abbas moves to implement what was signed today in Doha, he will abandon the path of peace and join forces with the enemies of peace."

Netanyahu added a personal appeal to his supposed partner in peace saying, "President Abbas, you can't have it both ways. It's either a pact with Hamas or peace with Israel. It's one or the other."

Netanyahu's statement was a nice start. But it didn't go nearly far enough. In speaking as he did, Netanyahu obscured the fact that Abbas already made his choice. He has cast his lot and that of Fatah with Hamas. In so doing Abbas once more exposed the dirty secret that everyone knows but no one likes to discuss: Fatah and Hamas share the same strategic goal of destroying Israel. Fatah is not a moderate force that accepts a peaceful resolution of the Palestinian conflict with Israel. It is a terrorist organization and a political warfare organization. Fatah's strategic goal remains what it has been since it was founded in 1959: The obliteration of the Jewish state.

In truth, Monday's agreement is nothing new. Fatah and Hamas have worked together since at least 1994. In November 1994, Hamas and Fatah signed an agreement in Cairo. The agreement set out each side's sphere of responsibility. Fatah would negotiate with Israel and Hamas would attack Israel.

That Cairo agreement was but the first in a line of agreements between the two groups. Each new agreement in turn reflected both their shared goal of destroying Israel and their changing tactical preferences.

In 2000, for instance, when Fatah returned to active terrorism against Israel, Fatah and Hamas set up joint terror cells they called the Popular Resistance Committees.

In 2007, they signed their first unity government deal after Hamas defeated Fatah in the 2006 legislative elections. That deal not only set the terms for cooperation in the PA. It paved the way for Hamas's inclusion in the PLO. Since the PLO rather than the PA or Fatah is the signatory to the agreements with Israel, the 2007 agreement signaled Fatah's willingness to abrogate its treaties with Israel.

After Hamas ousted Fatah personnel from Gaza in June 2007, the unity deal was left unimplemented. But even as their gunmen shot at one another on the streets, Fatah and Hamas remained strategic allies. Fatah continued to finance Hamas and provide political support for its continued missile and terror war against Israel.

Last May, Abbas signed another unity deal with Hamas. Like the 2007 deal, the pact set the conditions for Hamas's integration into the PLO and so placed the Palestinians on course for canceling all the agreements that the PLO has signed with Israel since 1993. In the months that passed since, the sides have been diligently working out the means of enacting their unity deal. Those contacts brought about another agreement signed in Cairo in December. That pact laid out the steps for integrating Hamas and Islamic Jihad into the PLO. The first step involved setting up a temporary PLO leadership. This step was implemented last month. The transitional leadership is now organizing new elections to the PLO's legislative body, which in turn will appoint the executive.

December's agreement also set out the basis for the interim unity government agreement that was signed on Monday. The sole charge of the transitional PA government is to organize elections for the PA's legislature and its chairmanship.

SO MONDAY'S agreement doesn't represent a break with past Fatah behavior, but a continuation of it. The notable aspect of Monday's agreement is that it shows just how drastically the balance of power has tilted towards Hamas and away from Fatah since 1994.

Since Monday, the usual crowd of peace processors has come up with a number of arguments to deny the significance of the latest Hamas-Fatah rapprochement. One of their favorite claims is that the deal with Fatah is proof that Hamas is becoming more moderate.

For instance, Shlomo Brom, an inveterate peace processor from the Institute of National Security Studies, told JTA, "Hamas is moving away from Syria and Iran, and to a certain degree from Hezbollah, and is repositioning itself in line with the popular movements behind the Arab Spring and the democratization process, particularly in Egypt and Tunisia. A renewed push for reconciliation with Fatah should be seen as part of this reorientation."

To make this claim, Brom had to ignore the fact that "the popular movements behind the Arab Spring" are jihadist movements from the Muslim Brotherhood.

Since December, all of Hamas's leaders have made public statements underscoring that the movement's goal remains the destruction of Israel and that its chosen means of attaining that goal is terrorism and war.

Hamas's leaders have also been clear that they view their current rapprochement with Fatah as a means to overwhelm and defeat Fatah. As the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs' senior researcher Jonathan Halevi showed in recent studies of this week's deal and the December agreement, Hamas's goal in entering the PLO is to abrogate the PLO's treaties with Israel. Its goal in joining a unity government with Fatah is to organize elections. Hamas is expected to win both the PA's presidential and legislative elections in a landslide.

Another argument that the Left is making is that since Monday's deal made Abbas the PA prime minister as well as its president, the agreement is proof that he is strong and therefore, it's terrific. As Haaretz editorialized on Wednesday, Netanyahu is irresponsible and destructive because, "Instead of welcoming the bolstered status of a leader who signed the Oslo Accords and reined in terror in the West Bank, Netanyahu opted to present the deal as a capitulation by the PA to a terrorist organization."

This argument ignores the inconvenient fact that Abbas had no choice other than to take on the title of prime minister because Hamas forced him to fire Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. Both the US and the EU view Fayyad as a moderate and the only way to avoid a backlash from firing him was for Abbas to replace Fayyad with himself.

A THIRD argument that has received substantial attention is that the agreement is nothing more than a survival pact between two weakened leaders. Mashaal, it is argued, was weakened by his forced departure from Damascus. He made the deal to strengthen his position vis-à-vis Hamas's leaders in Gaza.

While it may be true that Mashaal's stature has taken a hit in comparison to Hamas terror master Ismail Haniyeh in Gaza, the shift in power between the two arch-terrorists is immaterial.

With their Muslim Brothers taking power in Egypt, both men are far more powerful today than they ever were before. Moreover, Mashaal's transitional power-sharing agreement with Abbas is remarkably similar to the deal the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood wrought with Egypt's military junta in the lead-up to the recent elections.

Unlike Hamas, Fatah has certainly been weakened by recent events in Egypt. As Mashaal's Egyptian patrons take power, Abbas's chief patron Hosni Mubarak is on trial and dying under house arrest.

What is notable about the claims that the agreement is nothing more than a deal between two weak leaders is that they presuppose that it is perfectly understandable that Abbas would turn to Hamas in his moment of weakness in the hopes of strengthening his position.

From Haaretz's perspective, Abbas is outsmarting Hamas by signing an agreement with Mashaal. According to this line of thinking, Abbas is riding Hamas to increase his power. Since Haaretz is convinced that Abbas is interested in peace, the paper's editorialists are certain that once he gains strength he will renege on his agreement with Hamas. That is, Haaretz thinks the deal is terrific because Abbas is a liar.

The problem is that it isn't terrific that Abbas is a liar. Because what that means is that he can't be trusted to keep his word. Just as Haaretz seems to think he won't keep his word with Hamas, so, Israel has every reason to believe that he won't keep its word with it. And indeed, he has a proven track record of lying to Israel. In 1996, he signed an informal "peace deal" with then-deputy foreign minister Yossi Beilin. The Beilin-Abu Mazen agreement was the basis of Ehud Barak's peace offer to Yasser Arafat in 2000. When Arafat rejected Barak's offer, Abbas denied he had ever signed the agreement with Beilin.

In 2008, Abbas negotiated with Ehud Olmert, giving the premier the impression that he was interested in peace. But after Olmert offered him unprecedented Israeli concessions, not only did Abbas reject the offer, he announced that he does not recognize Israel's right to exist.

The most troubling aspect of Abbas's decision to turn to Hamas in his moment of weakness is what it says about the relative balance of regional forces. Twenty years ago, when Arafat was weakened and isolated due to Israel's defeat of the Palestinian uprising, and Arafat's decision to support Saddam Hussein against the US in the Gulf War, the PLO chieftain decided that the only way to rebuild his strength was to gain recognition from the US. And 20 years ago, Arafat knew that the road to Washington went through Jerusalem. So he agreed to enter into peace talks with Israel.

It is a testament to the weakened state of the US in the region that in his hour of distress, Abbas opted to turn to Hamas. Not only does this signify that Washington is no longer considered a serious power broker. It indicates that for weakened leaders, peace with Israel is a far less attractive option than peace with jihadists.

Like Abbas, Arafat was a liar. The consequence of Arafat's move towards Washington was a two-decade-long phony peace process that left Israel in a strategic position far weaker than that it enjoyed in 1992.

The consequences of Abbas's move towards Hamas will in all likelihood be far worse.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on February 10, 2012 at 2:29 AM

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February 7, 2012, 12:36 PM

Obama's rhetorical storm

The Obama administration is absolutely furious at Russia and China. The two UN Security Council permanent members' move on Saturday to veto a resolution on Syria utterly infuriated US President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and UN Ambassador Susan Rice. And they want us all to know just how piping mad they really are.

Rice called the vetoes "unforgivable," and said that "any further blood that flows will be on their hands." She said the US was "disgusted."

Clinton called the move by Moscow and Beijing a "travesty." She then said that the US will take action outside the UN, "with those allies and partners who support the Syrian people's right to have a better future."

The rhetoric employed by Obama's top officials is striking for what it reveals about how the Obama administration perceives the purpose of rhetoric in foreign policy.

Most US leaders have used rhetoric to explain their policies. But if you take the Obama administration's statements at face value you are left scratching your head in wonder. Specifically on Syria, if you take these statements literally, you are left wondering if Obama and his advisers are simply clueless. Because if they are serious, their indignation bespeaks a remarkable ignorance about how decisions are made at the Security Council.

Is it possible that Obama believed that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin would betray Bashar Assad, his most important strategic ally in the Middle East? Is it possible that he believed that the same Chinese regime that systematically tramples the human rights of its people would agree to intervene in another country's domestic affairs?

Outside the intellectual universe of the Obama administration - where stalwart US allies such as Hosni Mubarak are discarded like garbage and foes such as Hugo Chavez are wooed like Hollywood celebrities - national governments tend to base their foreign policies on their national interests.

In light of this basic reality, Security Council actions generally reflect the national interests of its member states. This is how it has always been. This is how it will always be. And it is hard to believe that the Obama administration was unaware of this basic fact.

In fact, it is impossible to believe that the administration was unaware that its plan to pass a Security Council resolution opposing Assad's massacre of his people - and so jeopardize Russian and Chinese interests - had no chance of success. The fact that they had to know the resolution would never pass leads to the conclusion that Obama and his advisers weren't trying to pass the resolution on Syria at all.

Rather they were trying to pass the buck on Syria.

We have two pieces of evidence to support the view that the Obama administration has no intention of doing anything even vaguely effective to end Assad's reign of terror that has so far taken the lives of between five and ten thousand of his countrymen.

First, for the past 10 months, as Assad's killing machine kicked into gear, Obama and his advisers have been happy to sit on their hands. They supported Turkey's feckless diplomatic engagement with Assad. They sat back as Turkish Prime Minister Recip Tayep Erdogan employed the IHH, his regime-allied terror group, to oversee the organization of a Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Syrian opposition.

Second, the administration supported the Arab League's farcical inspectors' mission to Syria. That mission was led by Sudanese Gen. Muhammad al- Dabi. Dabi reportedly was one of the architects of the genocide in Darfur. Clearly, a mission under his leadership had no chance of accomplishing anything useful. And indeed, it didn't.

AND SO, after nearly a year, the issue of Assad's butchery of his citizens finally found its way to the Security Council last month. Many in the US expected Obama to use the opportunity to finally do something to stop the killing, just as he and his NATO allies did something to prevent the killing in Libya last year.

Ten months ago Obama, Rice, Clinton and National Security Council member Samantha Power decided that the US and its allies had to militarily intervene in Libya to ensure that Muammar Gaddafi didn't have the opportunity to kill his people as Assad is now doing. That is, to prevent the type of human rights calamity that the Syrian people are now experiencing, Obama used the UN as a staging ground to overthrow Gaddafi through force.

Sadly for the people of Syria, who are being shot dead even as they try to bury their families who were shot dead the day before, unlike the situation in Libya, Obama has never had the slightest intention of using his influence to take action against Assad. And faced with the rapidly rising public expectation that he would take action at the Security Council to stop the killing, Obama opted for diplomatic Kabuki.

Knowing full well that Putin - who is still selling Assad weapons - would veto any resolution, rather than accept that the Security Council is a dead end, Obama had Rice negotiate fecklessly with her Russian counterparts. The resolution that ended up being called to a vote on Saturday was so weak that US Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, issued a statement on Friday calling for the administration to veto it.

As Ros-Lehtinen put it, the draft resolution "contains no sanctions, no restrictions on weapons transfers, and no calls for Assad to go, but supports the failed Arab League observer mission," and so isn't "worth the paper it's printed on."

She continued, "The Obama administration should not support this weak, counterproductive resolution, and should also reconsider the legitimacy that it provides to the Arab League - an organization that continues to boycott Israel - when it comes to the regime in Damascus."

But instead of vetoing it, the administration backed it to the tilt and then expressed disgust and moral outrage when Russia and China vetoed it.

The lesson of this spectacle is that it we must recognize that the Obama administration's rhetoric hides more than it reveals about the president's actual policies.

THE FIRST place that we should apply this lesson is to the hemorrhage of administration rhetoric about Iran.

For the past several weeks we have been treated to massive doses of verbiage from Obama and his senior advisers about Iran. The most notable of these recent statements was Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's conversation with The Washington Post's David Ignatius last week.

Panetta used Ignatius to communicate two basic messages. First, he wanted to make clear that the administration adamantly opposes an Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear installations. And second, he wanted to make clear that if Iran strikes Israeli population centers, the US will come to Israel's defense.

The purpose of the first message is clear enough. Panetta wished to increase pressure on Israel not to take preemptive action against Iran's nuclear weapons program.

The purpose of the second message is also clear. Panetta spoke of the US's obligation to Israel's defense in order to remove the justification for an Israeli attack. After all, if the US is obliged to defend it, then Israel mustn't risk harming US interests by defending itself.

When taken together, Panetta's message sounds balanced and responsible. But when examined carefully, it is clear that it is not.

It is far from responsible for the US government to tell its chief ally that it should be willing to absorb an attack on its population centers from Iran. No government can be expected to sit back and wait to be attacked with nuclear weapons because if it is, the Americans will retaliate against its attacker.

Panetta's message was not just irresponsible. It was obnoxious.

And this leaves the first message. Since Obama was elected the US has devoted most of its energies not to preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, but to pressuring Israel not to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. And Panetta's remarks to Ignatius were consistent with this mission.

Some have argued that the US's stepped-up naval presence in the Persian Gulf is evidence that the US is itself gearing up to attack Iran. But as retired US naval analyst J.E. Dyer explained in an essay last month at the Optimistic Conservative blog, the US posture in the Persian Gulf is defensive, not offensive.

The US has not deployed anywhere near the firepower it would need to conduct a successful military campaign against Iran's nuclear installations. The only thing the US deployment may serve to accomplish is to deter Israel from launching a preemptive air strike against Iran's nuclear installations.

It is true that to a certain extent, Israel has brought this escalating American rhetorical storm on itself with its own flood of rhetoric about Iran. Over the past week nearly every senior Israeli military and political official has had something to say about Iran's nuclear program.

But this stream of words does not reflect a change in Israel's strategic timetable. Rather it is a function of the rather mundane calendar of Israel's annual conference circuit. It just so happened that the annual Herzliya Conference took place last week. It is standard fare for Israel's security and political leadership to bloviate about Iran's nuclear program at Herzliya. They do it every year. They did it this year.

And in truth, no one said anything at the conference that we didn't already know. We learned nothing new about Iran's program or Israel's intentions. Had there been no conference last week, there would likely have been no flood of Israeli statements.

We only know three things for certain about Iran. It is getting very late in the game for anyone to take any military actions to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Iran will not stop its nuclear weapons program voluntarily. And Obama will not order US forces to take action to stop Iran's nuclear project.

What remains uncertain still is how Israel plans to respond to these three certainties. The fact that Israel has waited this long to strike presents the disturbing prospect that our leaders may have been confused by the Obama administration's rhetoric. Perhaps they have been persuaded that the US is on our side on this issue and that we don't have to rely only on ourselves to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power.

But as the foregoing analysis of the administration's very angry words on Syria and very sober words on Iran demonstrates, Obama and his deputies use rhetoric not to clarify their intentions, but to obfuscate them. Just as they will do nothing to prevent Assad from continuing his campaign of murder and terror, so they will do nothing to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on February 7, 2012 at 12:36 PM

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February 3, 2012, 4:22 AM

Fool me twice

Former US congressman Robert Wexler is a man worth listening to. Wexler served as then-senator Barack Obama's chief booster in the American Jewish community during the 2008 presidential campaign. He appeared everywhere and said anything to convince the American Jewish community that the same man who sat in the church pews listening to Rev. Jeremiah Wright's anti-Semitic vitriol for two decades, and listed among his closest friends and associates a host of Israel-haters as well as former terrorists, was the greatest friend Israel could ever have.

Once Obama was elected, Wexler continued to serve as his Jewish shill. Wexler traveled to Israel multiple times in the early months of Obama's presidency, to pressure Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to submit to Obama's demand and embrace the cause of Palestinian statehood. After Netanyahu finally announced his support for Palestinian statehood at his speech at Bar-Ilan University in September 2009, Wexler returned with a new demand - that Netanyahu enact a moratorium on Jewish property rights in Judea and Samaria.

In an interview with The Jerusalem Post at the time, Wexler promised that Israel would be richly rewarded if it took the unprecedented step of denying Jews the right to their property in Judea and Samaria simply because they were Jewish. Even if the moratorium were temporary, Obama would view the discriminatory measure as proof of Israel's good intentions.

Moreover, Obama would expect the Palestinians and the wider Arab world to respond to Israel's move by taking steps to normalize their relations with Israel.

For instance, Wexler claimed that Obama had demanded that the Arabs respond to an Israeli moratorium on Jewish property rights by among other things opening trade offices and direct economic ties; conducting cultural and economic exchanges; and permitting Israeli airplanes to overfly their territory.

And in the event that the Arabs refused to rise to the occasion, Wexler proclaimed, "You can rightly say that all bets are off."

Wexler continued, "I want to call their bluff. I want to see, if Israel makes substantial movement toward a credible peace process, whether they are willing to do it. And if they are not, better that we should find out five or six months into the process, before Israel is actually asked to compromise any significant position."

In the event, Netanyahu bowed to Obama's demand and enacted a temporary ban on the exercise of Jewish property rights in Judea and Samaria. And in the aftermath of his stunning move, the Arab world did nothing.

Amazingly, far from calling their bluff, Obama doubled down on his pressure on Israel.

Among other things, since squeezing the first temporary ban on Jewish property rights out of Netanyahu, Obama has demanded that the moratorium be made permanent and be extended to Jerusalem.

As for his vision of the "peace process," Obama has demanded that Israel accept the 1949 armistice lines as the basis for negotiations.

He has used the US veto at the UN Security Council as a means of pressuring Israel to make further unreciprocated concessions to the Palestinians.

And the "pro-Israel" US president has demanded no similar concessions from the Palestinians.

THIS WEEK, Wexler, now the head of the far-left S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace, was back in town. Speaking at the Herzliya Conference, he said that Israel should consider extending the ban on Jewish property rights to within the 1949 armistice lines. Wexler based his claim on then-prime minister Ehud Olmert's 2008 peace offer to Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas.

Olmert's offer, which Abbas rejected, involved a "land swap," in which in the framework of a comprehensive peace deal, Israel would give the Palestinians land from within its 1949 boundaries in exchange for land in Judea and Samaria that Israel would permanently retain. According to media reports, Olmert offered Abbas 4.5 percent of Israeli territory in exchange for a similar amount of land in Judea and Samaria.

While Wexler appeared at the Herzliya Conference as the president of a nonpartisan nonprofit organization, his continued intimate relationship with Obama is well known. Last fall, Commentary's Omri Ceren documented that Zvika Krieger, Wexler's vice president at the Daniel Abraham Center, authored documents for Obama's reelection campaign. Among other things, those documents cited articles authored by Krieger and Wexler in which they championed Obama's record on Israel from their nonpartisan perch at the Daniel Abraham Center.

Given Wexler's close ties to Obama, it is reasonable to assume that his suggestion that Israel cease exerting its national sovereignty over its sovereign territory in the interests of the peace process is not simply his personal view.

There is much to criticize about Wexler's suggestion. But more important than its arrogant, insulting absurdity, and more disconcerting than Wexler's own hypocrisy, is what his suggestion tells us about the dangers inherent in Netanyahu's current negotiations with the Palestinians.

To understand the connection we need to recall the nature of Olmert's offer to Abbas.

Olmert's negotiations with Abbas were based upon the proposition - repeated ad nauseam to the Israeli public - that "nothing is agreed to until everything is agreed to."

The idea was clear. True, on the one hand, the prime minister was conducting negotiations far from the spotlight, and refusing to tell the public what was on offer. But on the other hand, we could rest assured that that nothing he offered would have any significance whatsoever unless the Palestinians agreed to a final-peace deal with Israel. If they rejected peace, then everything Olmert said would become null and void, and be tossed down the memory hole.

In accordance with this basic proposition, when Abbas rejected Olmert's offer, and made no counteroffer, it was naturally assumed that Olmert's proposal was rendered null and void.

Yet four years later, here is Wexler, Obama's surrogate, advocating a policy of unilateral abrogation of Israeli sovereignty over 4.5% of its national territory in order to enable the eventual implementation of an offer that was predicated on the notion that "nothing is agreed to until everything is agreed to" and as such is null and void.

THIS BRINGS us to the current negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. For the past month, under the aegis of the Middle East Quartet, Netanyahu's representative attorney Yitzhak Molcho has been conducting negotiations with Abbas's representatives in Amman, Jordan. Last week, Molcho reportedly outlined the government's general positions on lands it is willing to cede to the Palestinians.

Without presenting any maps, Molcho reportedly said that a permanent agreement would involve most of the Israelis living in Judea and Samaria remaining in Israeli territory. The media interpreted this to mean that like Olmert, Netanyahu expects for Israel to retain perpetual control over large blocks of Israeli communities that take up less than 10% of the overall landmass in Judea and Samaria.

For his part, Netanyahu this week reiterated his position that Israel must maintain a long-term military presence in the Jordan Valley. This has been interpreted to mean that Netanyahu is willing to cede sovereign rights to the area to the Palestinians.

Taken together, what Molcho's statement and Netanyahu's statement indicate is that at a minimum, in exchange for peace, the Netanyahu government is willing to expel some portion of the 350,000 Jews living in Judea and Samaria from their homes and to transfer sovereignty over a significant portion of the territory to a Palestinian state.

From the vagueness of what has been reported, it is apparent that Netanyahu has been far less specific about the scope of the territorial concessions he is willing to undertake than his predecessor was. But then again, Olmert made his offer after conducting negotiations with Abbas for over a year. Netanyahu only entered these talks a month ago.

And while no one in or out of government believes that these negotiations have any chance of leading to a peace deal, the fact is that Netanyahu is feverishly working to ensure that the talks continue. He spent a good part of his day on Wednesday speaking on the phone to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and meeting with Quartet envoy Tony Blair and UN Secretary- General Ban Ki-moon, begging the foreign leaders to convince the Palestinians not to abandon the negotiations.

As he put it in his joint press conference with Ban, "You cannot complete the peace process unless you begin it. If you begin it, you have to be consistent and stick to it."

For his part, Abbas is doing everything in his power to make clear that he does not wish to negotiate, and that even if negotiations continue, he will never cut a deal with Israel. To underscore his bad faith, next week Abbas will travel to Egypt to meet with Hamas terror chief Khaled Mashaal. The two men are set to discuss the means of implementing the unity government deal they signed last May.

Netanyahu is obviously under great pressure to continue with these talks. A day doesn't go by without some US official or European leader talking about the need for talks, or a leftist politician or political activist at home blaming Netanyahu for the absence of peace. But none of this pressure can justify the damage that is done to Israel's position by continuing to engage in these negotiations.

As Netanyahu's own experience with Obama (and Wexler) shows, concessions never bring a respite from the US leader's pressure. They only form the baseline for demands for further concessions.

Beyond the narrow confines of Obama's personal hostility towards Israel, Netanyahu's current engagement in negotiations with the Palestinians is devastating to Israel's position in two ways.

First, it makes it impossible for Israel to extricate itself from the lie of PLO moderation and to start telling the truth about its Palestinian "partner."

Quite simply, as Abbas's continued courtship of Hamas and his open embrace and glorification of mass murderers such as the murderers of the Fogel family make clear, the PLO has returned to its roots as a terrorist organization. It is no longer credible to claim that the PLO has abandoned terror in favor of peace.

By engaging in peace talks with the PLO, Netanyahu renders it impossible to make this critical claim. Consequently, he damns Israel to a situation in which we continue to empower and politically legitimize a terrorist organization committed to our destruction.

The second way continued negotiations devastates Israel's position is by eroding our ability to claim our rights to Judea and Samaria and so extricate ourselves from this fake peace process with terrorists. As Wexler made clear, from the international community's perspective, everything that Israel offers at the negotiating table is catalogued. Regardless of Palestinian bad faith, irrespective of actual prospects for peace, every theoretical Israeli concession becomes the new baseline for further negotiations.

American "friends" like Wexler and Obama play Israel for a fool again and again.

In truth, we should thank Wexler for coming here this week and reminding us of his bad faith, and the bad faith of the president he serves. But it is up to Netanyahu to draw the appropriate lessons.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Posted on February 3, 2012 at 4:22 AM

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Fool me twice

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