Mizrahi Reconstruction

Sar Shalom

Back in June, Matti Friedman published an article at Mosaic titled "Mizrahi Nation" contrasting the prevalent Eurocentric narrative of the rise of the State of Israel with a narrative centered on Middle East-Jewry. While I don't have anything to add to his history of Mizrahi Jews, there was one item missing in the parallel between the two narratives. In describing the Eurocentric narrative, Friedman related that many respond to the narrative of oppressed European Jews reestablishing themselves in their ancient homeland by likening European settlement of the Levant to white colonization of Rhodesia. However, there is no external reference for the Mizrahi-centric narrative. I would like to suggest that the appropriate external comparison should be Reconstruction following the American Civil War.

Making such an effort would require two things. One, it would be necessary to have a chance to convince people that the Jewish reclamation of the Land of Israel resembles Reconstruction. Second, convincing people of that notion would have to have an effect on their perceptions of the conflict. The second component is the simpler one. While there is a risk that such an association would alienated some of our right-wing allies who cling to the old Confederacy, the gains among liberals could be substantial. For any liberal who is convinced that supporting the Palestinians against Israel is equivalent to supporting the Klan in its efforts to undermine Reconstruction, it would be game over with us winning that liberal. For the Jew-hatred über alles crowd, there are only two responses to a comparison between Reconstruction: they could assert that while enfranchising the freed Negroes post-Civil War was a positive goal, disenfranchising the whites in service of that goal went too far, or they could circle the wagons to try to prevent the notion that Zionism is like Reconstruction from gaining traction.

This raises the issue of how bring traction to the Reconstruction-Zionism nexus. A start would be to note what is in common between all three of Reconstruction, Apartheid and present-day Israel: they all feature(d) one group that is/was empowered and one that is/was disenfranchised. The task would be to highlight the differences between Reconstruction and Apartheid and pose the question as to whether present-day Israel is more like Reconstruction or like Apartheid. A few examples. Under Reconstruction, the empowered group was previously disenfranchised and the group that became disenfranchised was previously the overlords of those disenfranchised whereas under Apartheid the empowered group only shared the same space with the disenfranchised as the overlords. In Israel, if you take the perspective of the Mizrahi community, the empowered group was previously disenfranchised and the presently disenfranchised were their overlords back then. During Reconstruction, the disenfranchised began a full-press campaign of terror. While the ANC did occasionally commit acts of terror, there was nothing on the scale of the Klan. Needless to say, Israel is faced with a full-press campaign of terror. During Reconstruction, the southern whites never saw anything wrong with any savagery committed in resistance to Reconstruction, only in the North's calling attention to those crimes. In Israel today, the Arabs and their water-carriers never see any crime in any Arab act of savagery against the Jewish population, only in Jews' calling attention to what the Arabs are doing. A further comparison between Reconstruction and Zionism with no analog in Apartheid is the combination of the formerly locally disenfranchised with outsiders. In Reconstruction, this consisted of Northern carpetbaggers helping to enforce the newly established rights for the ex-slaves. In Zionism, this consisted of European Jews, not all of them Ashkenazic, developing a space where Mizrahi had the full rights of free men.

While there are similarities between Zionism and Reconstruction, the lack of any living memory of Reconstruction will make it difficult to make Reconstruction come to people's minds when they think of what is happening in the Levant. Further, it will take more than the sketchy connections I have outlined to withstand the attacks of those who would deny any connection at all cost. A more robust comparison will requiring delving more deeply into the history of Reconstruction. A few examples I could suggest would include The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War and After Lincoln: How the North Won the Civil War and Lost the Peace.

Follow-up to this Sunday's EoZ post

Sar Shalom

Mike's post this Sunday at Elder of Ziyon raised the important question of what use would an alliance with the Left be for us. In the comments, I pointed out that the Left encompasses those who are irreconcilable, those who are committed to our side, and those to whom we must reach out. Mike replied by asking how I propose to reaching out to that segment of the Left.

To summarize my point from my comment at EoZ, opposition to Israel from the Left generally stems from a combination of a conviction that whatever positions the Left takes, anti-imperialism trumps all, and that Israel is an outpost of Western imperialism. The Left consists of factions that are committed to those two points, factions that are ardently opposed to those two points, and factions that have not made their assessments on either point. In actuality, there is a fourth group on the Left, that which doesn't really care about any of the Left's agenda other than demonizing Israel and Jews, but wants to couch its judeophobia in the language of basic human decency that the Left ascribes to anti-imperialism.

With that, the challenge is to move as many members of the non-committed factions of the Left to one of the factions opposing the notion of anti-imperialism trumps all and/or the notion that Israel is a colonialist outpost. I don't have sufficient information to answer the question of how to reach out to them for that effect. However, I would like to suggest what information would be needed in order to formulate an outreach strategy. The main criterion is interfering with how the BDS activists seek to convince the non-committed elements of the Left to support their side.

Getting more specific about how to reach out to the non-committed factions, there are two possible ways to sway them. One is to convince them that while opposing imperialism is a positive value, it should not trump all other liberal value. This avenue might be tricky because the relative importance of opposing imperialism compared to other liberal values is strictly a matter of opinion. The one suggestion I can offer would be to highlight the motives of those who are pushing the notion that anti-imperialism should trump all. Specifically, we could point to the sector of the Left that does not care about any of the Left's objectives, but latches onto the Left in order to exploit the language of anti-colonialism for the purpose of promoting their judeophobic ends.

The other potential way to sway the non-committed Left would be to challenge the notion that Israel is a colonialist outpost. There is an objective case to be made that Israel is not an imperial entity, but not within the eurocentric narrative. The reality is that for any wrong committed by Europe against us throughout history, including the Holocaust, the BDS activists will claim that answering them by "dispossessing" the "Palestinian people" by the establishment of Israel constitutes answering a wrong with another wrong. What's needed is a focus on Middle-Eastern Jews and their history. The purpose of doing so would be to cast the Middle-Eastern Jews as the historically dispossessed people and Zionism as the movement which as a side-effect brought them dignity.

And Then There Is This:

Michael L.

Assyrians  

Yezidis

Hebrews (i.e. Jews)

Copts

Imazighen

Baluchis

Kurds

I had no idea that we were actually part of a small group of people under domination by a much larger aggressive majority!

But I am willing to go with it.

I have terrific sympathy for the Kurds and the Egyptian Christians (Copts), but in my ignorance I knew nothing of either the Imazighen or the Baluchis.

{Who?}

However, if they represent a non-or-semi-Muslim minority in the Middle East outside of Israel than they are living under oppression.

That much goes without saying.

By the way, I am no longer a big fan of the upward fist thing.  It may have been cool circa 1972, when I was iddy-biddy, but I think that we are done with it.

Don't you?

A Note to Ceylan Özbudak

Michael L.

Ceylan Özbudak is a political analyst on Turkish television and an executive director of Building Bridges, an Istanbul-based NGO associated with the Harun Yahya organization.

I know next to nothing about Harun Yahya and therefore cannot speak to its nature, but I know that Ceylan wrote this to me in a personal email:

"Whoever is using al-Aqsa mosque for provocation, whoever starts a fight in the mosque is shameless, this is not an action Muslims should support. On the contrary, this is an action Muslims should shun. Israel may have malpractices. But I experienced personally many times that whenever we ask them about the details of an incident, they give us detailed explanations and they are open to agreement, they are usually civil people. 

The system is also democratic in Israel."  

This is a friend of the Jewish people and I am going to acknowledge her as so.

We are a tiny minority.

We represent 2 percent of the American population and .2 percent of the world population.

The pro-Israel / pro-Jewish on-line community has accepted both African-American Chloe Valdary and Indigenous-American Ryan Bellerose as great friends.

Because they are humanitarians they do not want to see us persecuted in our own homeland just as they do not want to see their own people harassed.

Black people in the Americas and indigenous Americans know what it is like to be under pressure by a much larger hostile majority population, thus Valdary and Bellerose are friends to the Jewish people.  Our experiences are not identical, but as Black people and indigenous people were people under siege, so are the Jews in the Middle East.

This understanding is important, essential, ignored by the academe when it comes to Jews, and one that needs acknowledgment and encouragement.

Ceylan's note to me came prior to the recent synagogue attack in which anti-Jewish Jihadis brutally killed rabbis during prayer.

I just want to thank her for standing up.

It is not every Muslim woman - not to mention a beautiful television personality in Turkey, for chrissake - who would have the integrity to contact someone such as myself - a Jewish analyst half a world away in the San Francisco Bay Area - in a spirit of universal outreach.

You have my thanks, Ceylan.

Johnny On The Spot Blames It All On Illegal Jews

geoffff




This picture is of an avian specimen very common around here  grabbed at random from Google however  is identical to a creature that prances around the courtyard among the water dragons all day and peers through the glass door of my office most mornings as I type. 

Quaint and nosy  you would think it had no fear but that is only because it is typical of its species and is just too stupid to get out of the way.   In truth, they will startle at sudden movements as easily as any native bird.  The species is notorious for intrusive cloying and other obsessive behaviour if you feed them and this is not recommended. 

The other picture is a common Australian Bush Turkey.

John Lyons appears to have such limited sources for a professional  journalist. He will take as gospel (I suspect literally) anything he is told by one side, even Hamas,  with  perfect credulity while his idea of Israeli input is to pick among  the flash, fury,  flotsam and jetsam  of a free and open society for material for his case.  He regards official Israeli sources with contempt.  He has a tin ear for tales that ring about as true as tinnitus. There is no evidence he has ever sort a contrary view on his favourite themes (settlements, settlers, Jerusalem, international law, etc ) . There is no evidence that he  understands that he is just an instrument of war in that part of the world or he does not care.  As a consequence he makes appalling errors of fact in a dangerous game.

Ergo no credibility.

From his latest piece in the Australian. 

Did a gang of fifty masked men thirsting for revenge for the synagogue massacre burst out of Yitzhar to attack villagers with rocks while Israeli soldiers looked on with guns pointed in support of this blood crazed mob of Klan style fanatics in lynch frenzy, as Lyons claims?

He has seen the tapes, he says.

Well, not really.  Not from the Yesh Din footage Lyons cites with such terror.

 There is a stone fight between two gangs of youths (probably both sides masked but you only see one gang fully.)  Soldiers are trying to suppress one side by pointing weapons.  You can not see what is being done from the other side but there is stuff being tossed about. Perhaps three stones are thrown by the Israelis but they could have been feints and at least two were lobbed at the camera of the Israeli activists there to film (and incite?) the fun.

Not a good look but is this terror?

 A longer video shows soldiers running off an Israeli kid about to toss a rock. Only one kid is lightly injured in the whole incident so the soldiers didn't do too bad job.

And there were closer to ten children in the gang than fifty. ( With Lyons, "settlers" with stones and bad intent are "masked men".  Palestinians are "children").   Nor are they all masked. And the Israelis say the clash had nothing to do with the massacre but was sparked by a crop fire attack. 

Did the mayor of Ashkelon fire Arab labourers in an act of discrimination and revenge, as Lyons says?

Hardly the wrath of Assad but not true anyway. Mayor Itamar Shimoni announced  that he was stopping "until further notice" the work of Arab labourers building bomb shelters in nursery schools in the city  close to the Gaza Strip.  Guards would be posted at about 40 pre-schools near construction sites where Arabs work.

"Whoever thinks this is illegal can take me to the Supreme Court," he told a news crew. "I prefer, at this time, to be taken to the Supreme Court, and not, God-forbid, to be taken to a funeral of a kindergarten child."

Not revenge but a security measure from an elected public official under pressure from a community under pressure. 

Says Lyons

"Over the last week both sides have targeted a place of worship for the other -- last week Jewish settlers set fire to a mosque and this week the two Palestinians rampaged in the synagogue.

Is even that true?

Not that it matters at all but it is not. It was a suspected price tag attack but it is only an allegation. There's a fire in a vacant mosque so it has to be the Jews. End of story. No one hurt but obviously an inflammatory religious thing, like murdering rabbis at prayer, so there's the moral equivalence and the much vaunted  "cycle of violence" rolled into one.

This is how this works. Your crackpot settlers torch a mosque in the night?  They share the blame for the murder of the rabbis and so do you. This is how the Lyons mind works but it gets worse.

Lyons rises to a crescendo

“We won’t let our boy ride his bike outside. We’re worried that settlers who live five minutes away will try to kidnap him.”
The woman’s home is 2km from where 16-year-old Mohamed Abu Khdeir was kidnapped in June before having petrol poured on him and burnt alive. The day before men in a car tried to take a Palestinian boy off the streets but his parents fought them off. The man who led the Khdeir kidnapping told police: “They took three of ours (Jewish youths), let’s take one of theirs.”
A sports club for children in East Jerusalem now has guards in case of further kidnap attempts. Parents of Palestinian children at the French Lycee warn their children not to speak Arabic in public.
One Christian Palestinian executive, who works for the Catholic Church near the Old City, is now frightened to walk into the centre of Jerusalem “in case people realise I’m an Arab”.

I don't believe a word of this.

We are now getting close to the worst.  A  group of thugs carry out an unspeakable crime that shocks the nation. They are quickly hunted down and arrested. But this is the cycle of violence and cancels out the Hamas murders of the abducted teenagers applauded by Palestinians and celebrated by the leadership.

What is missing from this analysis is any concept of the rule of law or indeed common human decency and morality. This is important because it allows Lyons to get to the core. All the settlements including east Jerusalem are illegal anyway and so any "law" is muted or irrelevant to the Jews  over the Green line or it seems who are not. The settlements are the root of all evil. Their illegality poisons the well.  The appalling crime of one or two becomes the crime of all Jews. The murder of Israelis is a lesser crime which some how just does not count.

The whole bizarre and dirty house of cards collapses if the settlements are not illegal. This is why Lyons and those like him can never entertain the thought.  For them, the law has nothing to do with it anyway.  This is politics and ideology. The Jews are illegal. Everybody tells him so especially if they are Muslim.    

Lyons has the usual swamp of words about the settlements and settlers . Outposts. Armed gangs roaming the countryside murdering olive trees. Stolen land. White brick closed communities under guard strangling Palestinian land, poisoning the wells and killing the two state solution.  

Lyons boasts that he is there to see for himself and reprimands anyone  with a view that does not acknowledge his finely lasered expertise.  How would you know about the settlements, he has berated community leaders. You 're in Melbourne.  I'm in Jerusalem. 

He could be on the moon for all I care and sometimes I think he is. However there is another man observing from Jerusalem whose authority and credibility well and truly exceeds that of John Lyons .

This is what Isi Leibler recently said about this. Contrast it with Lyons' report.

The two-state solution is not currently feasible, but as an eventual goal it must not be abandoned. In the long term Israel would lose its identity as a democratic Jewish state if it absorbed millions more Arabs. It is therefore crucial that while enhancing political autonomy and living standards for Palestinians, Israel remains committed to achieving two states for two peoples.

The government must commit to restricting construction to the existing settlement blocs and Jewish East Jerusalem. (In practice, this has been the case: Only 507 units were started in the first half of the year, the lowest rate of construction for several years.) This would conform with the assurances that President George W. Bush gave to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2004, as an incentive to withdraw from Gaza, that in any future settlement America would support Israel’s sovereignty in areas that had undergone major demographic change.
...
We should display unity by supporting our prime minister’s policy of rejecting further territorial concessions until the Palestinian leaders separate from Hamas, engage in negotiations and display flexibility to enable us to achieve our security requirements. We will not be denied the right to construct homes in our capital or in the major settlement blocs, which will remain within Israel. We seek the support of the United States but we must retain our sovereignty.

What does Lyons really want?  The hint is in the last sentences.

Amid the new violence, it seems there is only one chance to end this tragedy -- an urgent political solution for a Palestinian state that would end Israel's control over 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank.

The critics of such a solution argue that this would not guarantee peace -- and they may be right. [may?]

But what is guaranteed is that if current course is continued there will be much more bloodshed. 

Lyons wants an unilateral withdrawal to the green line with no guarantees. He wants the total abrogation of the  "land for peace" formula that has underpinned peace efforts since 1948. He wants the surrender of the land and Jerusalem with no peace. He wants surrender. He wants the suicide  of the state.

Where else could this lead?

This is the "two state solution" that dares not speak its name. It is about time it did. It is about time Lyons and the rest spat it out. 

cross posted  Jews Downunder
                       Geoffff's Joint

Abbas Calls for "Bridges of Love"

Michael L.

In a speech Friday in Ramallah, after accusing Israel of releasing wild and vicious Zionist hogs upon the innocent indigenous "Palestinian" population the Jerusalem Post tells us:

Abbas also called for establishing “bridges of love” with Israelis “instead of the racist separation fence.” He warned once again against the eruption of a religious war and called on Israelis “not to come close to our holy sites, just as we don’t come near your synagogues.”

Abbas added: “The Jews know very well that we seek peace and not war.” 

So, let me get this straight.

Mahmoud Abbas, the illegitimate dictator of the corrupt terrorist organization known as "the Palestinian Authority," claims that he and his people want "bridges of love" to Jews?

He claims that they don't come near our synagogues?

He claims that we actually know that Israeli-Arabs want peace and not war?

Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!!!

I have not had a good laugh like that in days, at least.

They tell their people that we are the children of apes and pigs and their very holy book demands our submission under a system of Islamic Supremacy which we are required to bow down to under pain of death.  When we fight back against their never-ending theocratically-based aggression they go running to the Europeans like a bully complaining to its mother when its intended victim pops him one in the mouth.

There are only something like 1,000 comments beneath the piece, but here are a few for your enjoyment:

Gee • 18 minutes ago

And Simon Peres declares this as a person we can rely on. Time to end the farce and deport the Jordanian colonists.

Not surprisingly there is more and more talk about the transference of Arabs out of Israel due to the simple fact that they have over the course of many centuries proven themselves incapable of living in peace with their Jewish neighbors due to incessant and violent anti-Semitic education within Israeli-Arab culture.

In fact, we lost Ziontruth as a contributor to this very blog over that particular issue.

I, needless to say, have not come out in favor of transference because I cannot see the morality in forcing many hundreds of thousands of innocent people from their homes and I do not know of Israel's ability to weather the international consequences of such a bold act.  I do sympathize, however, and given the many millions of transferred refugees during and after World War II there is historical precedent.  However, I also very much doubt that the Israeli government would seriously consider such a move.

Timearrow • 3 hours ago

"Bridges of love" are for the western audience, the wild boars calumny is for the local consumption. This boorish philistine knows his clients, both foreign and domestic. They will lap up everything.

This is correct and many millions in the gullible west, apparently up to and including the Obama adminstration, think that Abbas is a man of peace and that the Palestinian Authority represents an actual negotiating partner.

"Bridges of Love."

H.L. Mencken famously never said, "No one ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American public" but he did say something quite like that and if anyone knows the truth of it, it is Mahmoud Abbas, not to mention his mentor Yasser Arafat.

"Bridges of Love" my ass.

Marc Salzberger Has Some Words and a Thought on Cultural Theft

Michael L.

Every once in awhile I come across a comment beneath an article that I think stands well enough as a single piece, so I publish it.  The following comment was written beneath a Commentary piece by Tom Wilson entitled, The Dubious Embrace of Palestinian Unilateralism.

Marc Salzberger  - November 20, 2014 at 11:05 am

As a supported of Oslo, the handshake on the lawn and the Clinton, Barak/Arafat peace process, I am heartsick at the outcome.

But it was the right way to go. Events have confirmed that.

My argument at the time, including in a note to Norman Podhoretz, was that I too had deep reservations about the success of Oslo, but still supported it whole heartedly. Because Israel could survive everyone’s distrust and hostility, except that of its own people. With the population split and fighting itself, there was no hope and no future.

Thus Oslo and a sincere and generous offer to the Palestinians was essential. Not to convince the world, but Israelis that their country was in the right (my emphasis), that it wanted to be fair to the Palestinians and wanted peace, that it was doing all it possibly could, that it wore the white hat.

Those who had deep doubts about letting Arafat back in and handing him the WB and Gaza and who suspected that it would not bring peace, like Norman Podhoretz, were proved right. But so was I.

Bad as things are, with the peace prospect a tool for Palestinian PR, and only that, with Europe baying at Israel’s heels, and the US turning hostile, the situation remains manageable. Because Israelis are united. They are not fighting each other. There is no self doubt. Because they know they tried, very hard. They will prove tougher and more enduring than the Europeans and the Palestinians. Oslo, its failure, has given them that strength. (my emphasis)

This is a rather unusual point of view, would you not say?  He seems to be arguing that despite the failure of Oslo and despite the fact that we are now in Terror War Number Three and despite the fact that the European governments blame Jews for Arab intransigence and are reportedly conspiring within one another on how to stick it to the Jewish State and despite the fact that the American president has shown himself to be a supporter of political Islam and, thus, an entirely untrustworthy ally to the Jews, he still thinks that the Oslo peace process was a good thing.

It is hard to fathom.

He thinks that Oslo was a positive thing because it proved to Jewish Israelis, if not most Jews, more generally, that they gave it their best and that's all they could do.  They honestly tried.  Time and again the Arabs were offered a twenty-third state for themselves and time and again they turned it down and blamed Israel, and thus the Jews.

I do not know that I could possibly go so far as to suggest that despite the consequences of its failure Oslo was a positive development, but I do think that Israelis should be able to look at themselves in the mirror and know that they honestly did all that they could do.

In 2000 and 2008, Ehuds Barak and Olmert offered the Palestinian-Arabs the entirety of Gaza, almost the entirety of the "West Bank" with land swaps and the Arab sections of Jerusalem as a capital.

That offer was the most that Israel could reasonably offer and even begin to maintain something that resembles Israeli security.  In fact, it is more than Israel could reasonably offer because forking over a huge chunk of the City of David to a terrorist government is a desecration if not before G-d, then certainly of Jewish history and it is a history that perhaps the Jewish Left should respect more than it has in recent decades.

The fact of the matter is that the Temple Mount represents the historical heart of the Jewish people.

It is the site of the First and Second Temples and Moshe Dayan made the mistake of his life in forking it over to the Waqf.  They should have let the Israeli flag fly and had they done so anti-liberal bigots would not be denying Jewish rights to the Temple Mount today.

What I would love to see Israel do - but which, of course, it won't - is to ride out the current storm, but respond with measures necessary to quell the violence - and once things calm down take over sovereignty of the Mount.

The only reason that Islamic and Arab leadership cares about the Temple Mount is because of millennia-long prior Jewish claims upon it.  The reason they built the Al-Aksa Mosque at its current location is because it is built on the site of the Temples.  Taking over the holy places of other faiths (not to mention the central figures of other religions) and converting them into Islam is a very well established practice within the system of theocratic Islamic supremacism known as al-Sharia.

There is no reason that Jews should respect this beyond bloody intimidation.

If the Jewish Temples had not been there neither would the Al-Aksa Mosque, you can be sure.

What we are discussing, ultimately, is a case of cultural and religious theft against the Jewish people by the larger Arab-Muslim world with the collusion of the Israeli government.  Israel went along with outright racism against the Jewish people in the very heart of Jerusalem in the hopes that it might placate the Arabs.  The idea, presumably, was that if the government of Israel denied Jewish people basic human rights on the Temple Mount - such as the simple right to prayer - then maybe it would help ease irrational Arab and Muslim theocratically-based violent malice toward Jews within Israel.

You will excuse me if I note that it has not worked.

The Third Intifada (Blood Doesn't Lie)

Michael L.

I am getting more than a little tired of constantly having to "absorb" and react to Arab-Muslim violence against my fellow Jews.

Three of the five dead were rabbis praying in a synagogue.

From the perspective of those Arabs and Muslims engaging in these brutal acts of dehumanization and murder against the Jewish people this is a religious war... not a war over land.

They honestly believe that a Jewish presence on the Temple Mount, the holiest site to the Jewish people where David had his temple, is a desecration before Allah and therefore when I went up there a few years ago I was "storming" the very heart of where my people come from.

Many people think that the Jews have it coming for the "Occupation" but there is no occupation.

The word is virtually meaningless in the context of the living of Jews upon Jewish land.

Israel "occupies" Israel like France "occupies" France.

Israel "occupies" Israel like I "occupy" my office.

This is what David Horovitz of the Times of Israel, a moderate by anyone's measure, has to say:

Because the final thing that has to be put in writing, even on a horrible, evil day like this, when the fingers loathe the necessity to tap the keyboard, is that it’s not going to work. Palestinian terrorists, and those who incite them and support them, should know: We are not going to be shot and stabbed and bludgeoned out of here by your brutality and the false justifications you invoke to legitimate it.

We stood firm during year upon year of Second Intifada terrorism, when you were blowing up our buses, malls, restaurants and supermarkets, and pragmatism could have dictated that we do what the terrorism was designed to make us do: flee. We do not insist on maintaining our majority Jewish state to the exclusion of your rights. Anything but. We seek co-existence. But your rights cannot be achieved by denying us ours.

For this is the homeland of the Jewish nation, the only place we have ever been sovereign or sought sovereignty. And what needs writing and saying, most especially on a terrible day like today, is that we will not be driven from it.

Weakness breeds contempt.

I do not have much faith that the Netanyahu government will take the measures necessary to crack down on these insidious, vicious thugs.   The west, after all, finances them and Netanyahu's ability to stand up to Obama and the EU is limited as we have seen over the last few years with these humiliating and futile gestures, like the release of Jewish murderers from Israeli prisons who are then hailed as heroes in Ramallah and Gaza City.

My prediction is that the government of Israel will vacillate because what action should be taken is open to serious question and because however much Arabs seek to murder Jews within our historical homeland the Obama administration demands "restraint."

This is the president's way of telling the Jewish people that we actually have no rights to self-defense and that if Israel wishes to remain in the good graces of the United States it better heel, boy.

In other words, Obama and the EU and the UN and the western-left, as a whole, expect that Jews should get kicked in the face and like it.  If Israel dares to stand up for itself, as we see time and again, their base will scream from the hillsides about "genocide" and "collective punishment" and how the Jews are the "new Nazis" and so forth and so on.

I can write the damn script because I have read it so many times before.

Make no mistake, this is the Third Intifada.  The Third Terror War.  It was questionable for awhile if there was going to be a third one, but here it is.

Blood doesn't lie.

The only question now is, what is to be done about it?  I certainly do not envy Benjamin Netanyahu.  The Jewish-Israeli street is going to demand action, but the EU and the western-left - with Barack Obama leading from behind - will push in the opposite direction.  Bibi is thus trapped between the proverbial rock and a hard place.

Meanwhile Naftali Bennet, Moshe Feiglin, and Avigdor Lieberman are licking their chops.

Given the history of his administration I predict Netanyahu will take half-measures and satisfy almost no one... with Livni sniping from the sidelines.  Much of the Israeli public will see him as weak and the international left will ridicule him and paint him as a savage no matter what he does.

Watch.

.

And when you consider the long Arab war against the Jews bare in mind that after Protective Edge, the latest Gaza operation, progressives condemned Israel for massacre even as Hamas declared victory and danced in the streets.

I am sorry, but they cannot have it both ways.

What is really disappointing is the stupidity and the malice of the Left, but were it not for that stupidity and malice this blog would not even exist, so perhaps I owe them a debt.

4 More Dead

Michael L.

Y-Net reports:

Four people were killed Tuesday morning when two terrorists brutally attacked worshippers in a synagogue and yeshiva in the Har Nof neighborhood in Jerusalem. Seven people were wounded, including two police officers.

At around 7am, the terrorists - wielding massive knives and a gun - entered the Kehilat Yaakov synagogue on Harav Shimon Agasi Street, which includes both a synagogue and yeshiva (rabbinical seminary), and carried out attacks in more than one location.

The two were killed following a gunfight with security forces who arrived at the scene.

The Jews deserve whatever beating we get.

I know because they tell me so on Daily Kos and the Huffington Post and the Guardian.

I know because the Democratic Party thinks that anti-Semitic anti-Zionists deserve a place at their table.

I know because Barack Obama thinks that Jews building homes for themselves in Judea is a crime.

It is early in the morning and I actually have jury duty today, but I bet they are dancing in the streets of Ramallah.

Mahmoud Abbas needs to be imprisoned for incitement to genocide.

It is Simply Not Up to Us

Michael L.

The truth of the matter is that if we end up with two states for two peoples on historically Jewish land depends on the will of the misogynistic Arab majority in that part of the world, not the egalitarian Jewish minority.

We can continue to beg them to accept a state for themselves decade upon decade, but they have refused every such offer since 1937.  Unless you have an interest in setting up democratic Jews for never-ending bullying by authoritarian Arabs and their western-left allies than the status quo is not desirable.  It may be sustainable, but it is certainly not desirable because vicious Arab and western-left malice toward Jews is not desirable, however much Barack Obama may suggest otherwise by pressuring the Jews.

When Barack Obama said that the status quo was unsustainable he did not have Jewish well-being in mind.  He was talking about what he considers a Jewish assault on the "indigenous" Arab population with the implication that the international community - led by the European Union, the Arab League, and the United Nations, with Obama helping to coordinate from the rear - would punish the Jews of the Middle East unless they give in to terrorist demands for Jewish land.

When Barack Obama and John Kerry said that the status quo was unsustainable, what they meant was that unless we Jews know our place that we would get our asses kicked.  If this is not what they meant it is exceedingly difficult to see in what manner the status quo could be unsustainable.  The status quo has been around for one heck of a long time and can continue unless Obama and the EU want to put the screws to the Jews.  In truth, the status quo has been relatively good because it represents Jewish sovereignty and self-defense.

The fact of the matter, of course, is that the small Jewish nation has already given in to terrorist demands by agreeing to allow the vast Arab nation to take a mighty bite out of the tiny Jewish state for the purposes of creating yet another vicious, racist Arab-Muslim dictatorship.  Obama and the Europeans are twisting Jewish arms to accept what we have already accepted for almost one hundred years and, yet, refuse to simply take "yes" for an answer.

It is not enough, apparently, that we agree to allow the Arabs to gobble up Judea and Samaria, the heart of the Jewish homeland, but we must also force Jewish people out of that land according to the racist whims of not only the Arab street and the EU, but also of the Obama administration.

And make no mistake.  We have not seen a presidential administration as racist as this one since the early part of the twentieth century.

The Obama administration supported the Muslim Brotherhood with both money and heavy weaponry and the Brotherhood called for the conquest of Jerusalem.



{Case closed.}

But the larger point is that it is simply not up to us.

The Palestinian-Arabs can have a state for themselves at any time if only their dictatorial leadership would declare the long Arab war against the Jews over with and promote the normal aspirations of economic and social development via education, infrastructure, finance, and diplomacy... in contrast to running Jewish babies down with their automobiles.

The old cliché is that if the Israeli-Arabs put down their weaponry there would be peace, but if the Jews did so there would be a horrific genocide.

This is true.

All the Jews want is to be left the hell alone on their tiny bit of real estate, while political Islamists, filled with visions from the Koran of head chopping, want to see the Jews dead or gone.

So, it is simply not up to us.

Israel is Fortress Israel precisely because the Arabs have made it so with their never-ending Koranically-based malice and violence and in the process they have ruined the lives of perhaps millions of Israeli-Arabs who might otherwise have sought education and prosperity for themselves and their families.

My challenge to those who want a negotiated two-state solution is to explain how it can come about without Arab cooperation?  

And, furthermore, it is for this reason that European and American arm-twisting on the Jewish-Israelis is so cruelly unjust and counter-productive.  They are pressuring the wrong people.

If Barack Obama honestly wanted peace between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East he would pressure the parties responsible for the continuation of the conflict, not the party who has for many decades agreed to two states for two peoples.

A Challenge to Two-State People

Michael L.

I am getting ready to hit the road, so I may not be quite as available as usual, but before I do I have a question for those who still insist upon the two-state solution.

It is this:

Just how the heck do you expect to implement it without Palestinian-Arab cooperation?

Decade after decade we beg them to accept two states and decade upon decade they refuse and we get the blame from people like John Kerry.

Fuck it.

Laurie and I are headed for Baja in celebration of Laurie and Danika's 40th birthday - crazy twins - where I intend to catch many innocent fishes.

Maureen is going to come and stay at the house and take care of Georgy-McPorridge.

Little Snort croaked, by the way, the other day.

At first I thought that the athletic and bouncing-around 3 year old George gave Little Snort a heart attack, but dogs do not get heart attacks.

He was only 8 years old, but he just up and died on Wednesday of symptoms from an enlarged heart.

I feel like G-d just reached down his hand and took this little poooch out of our life.

I loved that little creature and he is just gone.

There is now a Snort-Shaped-Hole in my world.

George, a 65 pound black and white Border Collie, is Fred's worthy successor.

But Little Snort cannot have a successor for the simple fact that there are no other dogs like Little Snort.

{That is, if he actually was a dog and not King of the Hamsters.}

We are going to miss this little guy very much.

I cannot even tell you.

Christ Amighty, they're dropping like flies.

Arab Saves Jew from Lynch Mob in Israel

Michael L.

Tova Dvorin, writing in Arutz Sheva, tells us:

Moshe German, 47, who survived a lynching attempt on the Taibe bridge Sunday night, met the man who saved him from the mob on Monday, in a heartwarming gesture of gratitude.

Majdi Baloum, 37, pulled Moshe from his vehicle after an Arab mob began pelting it with rocks, eventually setting it alight.

Moshe, who recounted his experience in previous interviews to the media, related that he had been hiding under his seat; if Baloum had not pulled him from the vehicle, he likely would have died in the blaze.

Moshe revisited Taibe, meeting Baloum at the Hydraulic Institute where he works, to thank him.

"You don't understand how moving this is," German told Yediot Aharonot. "I went here via the same road where I was almost killed yesterday. I saw the remains of my car, now just ashes. Images of what happened just flash in front of me all the time. They threw rocks at me, concrete blocks and fireworks. I was terrified."

"I thought about my wife, Eina, and my sons Roey (16) and Eitan, who is two and-a-half," he continued. "I thought my family would lose me."

"I tried to hide in my Toyota, but the crowd continued to attack me, and in a moment [Baloum] came up to me yelling, 'come, come!'. I tried to figure out who is calling me, and you pulled me out of your car and into your Jeep. You saved me," Moshe recounted. "I found it hard to comprehend what is happening, but I realized that you were afraid for my life. Even though they threw blocks at your Jeep, you just went faster."

"Did you understand that you were saving my life?" he asked.

Baloum, who is a father of five, replied warmly.

"Calm down," he reassured Moshe. "Friend, you and I are the same. If I were in trouble, wouldn't you help me?"

G-d bless Majdi Baloum and when you see the guys above in their hoods, think the Klan.

Coming Out in Favor of a Single State

Michael L.

{Originally published at the Elder of Ziyon and cross-posted at Jews Down Under.}

For many years I advocated for the two-state solution because I believed that Israel could be a democratic state, a Jewish state, or a single state from the river to the sea, but not all three at once.

This is, of course, the common analysis and it is a perfectly reasonable and logical analysis.

Throughout the Clinton years, I believed that the Palestinian-Arabs wanted a state for themselves in peace next to the Jewish one, but this was before I freed myself from the so-called "Palestinian narrative" or what I have called The Palestinian Colonization of the Jewish Mind.

The obvious problem is that in annexing Judea and Samaria Israel would introduce a large and hostile enemy population as citizens into the country and thereby undermine its ability to maintain itself as the national home of the Jewish people.

So long, therefore, that I understood that the Palestinian-Arabs wanted a state for themselves distinct from their Palestinian-Jewish neighbors, I supported the two-state solution.  Once it became clear to me that this is emphatically not what the Arabs want then I gradually came to the conclusion that president Barack Obama was correct.  After the failure of the first round of non-negotiations Obama said that the sides needed to want peace.

The problem is both sides do not want peace.  The Jewish side mainly wants be left the hell alone to write computer software, litigate against one another, and send Natalie Portman's out into the world.

The Arab side, on the other hand, wants to see Jews either dead or gone from the land that we come from.

Thus there can be no conclusion of hostilities through the implementation of a peaceful, but separate, negotiated coexistence.

The Palestinian-Arabs, unlike the Palestinian-Jews (i.e., Jewish-Israelis), will not accept a two-state solution because that has never been their goal.  If they honestly wanted a state for themselves in peace next to the Jews then the local Arab leadership would have accepted the Peel Commission Report of 1937 which called for two states, but they did not.

The map on the right represents what the Jews reluctantly accepted and what the Arab majority emphatically rejected right before the Holocaust.

Even a tiny indefensible strip of land between Tel Aviv and Haifa to be reserved for Jewish autonomy in the face of genocide was too much for Arab-Muslim pride.  How dare those dhimmitudenous Jews think that they can rule themselves?  How dare they think that they even have any such right?

So, the Arabs turned down Palestinian-Arab autonomy in 1937 and 1947 and 1967 and 2000 and 2008, and I am probably missing a few.  In 2000, of course, Arafat rejected Ehud Barak's offer of pretty much everything as Abbas rejected Olmert's offer of pretty much everything eight years later.  Both Barack and Olmert offered the Palestinian-Arabs the entirety of Gaza, almost the entirety of Judea and Samaria with land swaps, and much of the eastern section of Jerusalem as a capital.

They turned the Jews down flat, but there is no more than we can possibly offer them.

There comes a point wherein one must take "no" for an answer.

Since it is clearly the case that the Palestinian-Arabs - and the rest of the larger Arab and Muslim worlds - have, decade upon decade, rejected the two-state solution, it now becomes incumbent upon Israel to declare its final borders and remove the IDF to behind those borders.  In previous months and years, I have argued that the borders of Israel should be determined by Israeli leadership and it should be, but in previous months and years I stated no preference.

I have now come to the conclusion that the annexation of Judea and Samaria by the state of Israel is probably the best way to go forward.

What has convinced me, aside from persistent Arab rejection of the two-state solution, is the revelation that the numbers of Arabs in Judea and Samaria are significantly lower than the Palestinian Authority reported.

Furthermore, after annexing Judea and Samaria, there is no reason for Israel to give local Arabs automatic full rights to citizenship.  A path to citizenship should be available however and any non-Jew in the area should be afforded rights to citizenship once they have demonstrated an inclination toward peaceful co-existence.  Given the millennia of hostility toward the Jewish people, such a precondition for non-Jewish citizenship is more than reasonable.

I would offer all resident non-citizens of Israel the opportunity of two to three years of national service and those who complete that national service with a good record should be free to apply for, and receive, full citizenship.

It also must be understood that an Arab state in the small Jewish heartland would, in fact, represent a dagger at the heart of Jewish sovereignty, if not Jewish lives, with the full weight of the Arab and Muslim worlds behind that dagger.

In other words, an Arab state superimposed upon the Jewish highlands will not bring peace.  It will merely represent a new phase in the Long Arab War against the Jews.  It will represent a phase characterized by Arab advantage and gain at the expense of Jewish possibilities for survival.  It will also represent a phase wherein the same malicious voices who disparage and demean the Jews of Israel now will continue to do so by claiming that while the Jews used to persecute the Palestinian-Arabs, now they persecute the Palestinian state, as well. Or such is my prediction.

It is unfortunate, but true, that the Oslo Peace Process has failed.

Barack Obama helped kill it through his dogmatic, racist, and counterproductive insistence on forcing Jews out of our traditional heartland.  By insisting upon "total settlement freeze" - and thereby effectively denying Jewish rights to live on traditionally Jewish land - he enforced a policy that was doomed from the start and that gave the Palestinian-Arabs all the excuse that they needed to avoid a peaceful conclusion of hostilities within the two-state paradigm.

Obama, however, only deserves a certain percentage of the blame for the failure of the two-state solution, although it should be noted that if he did not absolutely kill it, he helped and it was done on his watch.

The reason that two-states failed is not primarily because of the Americans or the Europeans or the United Nations or, even, the Israelis.  The main reason that two-states failed is because the Arabs never wanted it to begin with.  They walked out of the United Nations in November of 1948 in order to tell us that Jewish sovereignty on that land is entirely unacceptable to Arab sensibilities.

Such it was then and so it is now.

If they simply will not accept a Palestinian-Arab state in peace next to Israel, then that is what they will not get.  It is not up to us.  It is up to them.

"You Stole Their Land"

"It is Palestinian land and Zionists are squatting on it."

We will never get through to most western liberals with our arguments because not only are hard-line anti-Zionists immune to reason, we're not even making the right arguments for the center.

We all understand that there is a radical vocal element, primarily on the left in the west, that is entirely irrational on this topic and who will despise Israel no matter what it does or fails to do.  Those people cannot be reached.  It does not matter how many times Israelis zoom into Haiti to save lives, people like, say, "Lefty Coaster" on Daily Kos will always-and-forever despise the Jewish people and, thus, despise the Jewish State of Israel.

I am less worried about people like him, I think, than in the political ideological middle.  It is the well-meaning center that concerns me.  Your average American liberal Democrat.  This is a demographic that is highly significant in the American context and anti-Semitic anti-Zionists have been gnawing on them for many years, now.

For the moment, liberal Democrats are maybe 50 / 50 in favorability on Israel and those numbers are probably eroding.

If there is a segment of American society that can be reached via reason, however, this is the segment.  Liberal Democrats in the United States traditionally prided themselves on their capacity for reason, even in politics, so let's give it a whirl.

In a recent video of Caroline Glick discussing her book The Israeli Solution she made the following argument, among others, and it is an argument that goes right to the core of Jewish relations with the liberal west.

What she said was this and I paraphrase:

We look at liberal Democrats (or western progressives, more generally) and we think, "Gee, there is no more liberal and progressive country in that entire part of the world than Israel."  And then we wonder how it is, therefore, that Israel does not have much support among western progressives?  On the contrary, western progressives are far more suspicious of Israel than are their conservative counterparts.

How can this be?  Progressives are pro-feminism and Israel has the best feminist record, by a long shot, than any country in the entire region, if not the world!

It does not matter, you stole their land.

Yes and let's talk about Nobel Prize winners in science and medicine, shall we?  Did you know that Israel has done more, in a shorter period of time, to advance scientific and medical knowledge than any other country in human history?

It does not matter, you stole their land.

And ethics in war?  Anti-Semites spread the blood libel by suggesting that the IDF specifically targets civilians, particularly children - as Lefty Coaster does in the link above - but the fact of the matter is that the Israeli military forces do more to avoid civilian casualties than any army in the history of warfare.

It does not matter, you stole their land.

Alright.  Alright.  Let's talk about who is inclusive and liberal and who is exclusive and authoritarian.  The Palestinian-Arabs want absolutely nothing to do with Jews.  Period.  The Arab-Muslim State of Palestine needs to be entirely Judenrein.  The very idea of Jews living in Judea is an abomination.  Meanwhile, in Israel about 20 percent of the population is Arab and Muslim.  They have greater civil liberties than do Arabs and Muslims anywhere else within the entire Middle East and elect their people to the Knesset.

It does not matter, you stole their land.

You get the idea and Glick is absolutely correct.

If even we agree with the reality of a concept known as "The Occupation of Palestine" then we have no case.  Period.  End of story.

If Israel is occupying "Palestinian" land then we should just pack it up and go home, because there is no argument to be made.  If the truth is - as the Palestinian-Arabs claim and as their western-left supporters agree - that white European Jews marched onto Jewish land and snatched that land from the indigenous Arab population then history should bare this out.

Thankfully, history tells us a very different story.

The eastern coast of the Mediterranean has no more indigenous people than the Jewish people.  We were there thousands of years prior to the Arab conquests.  We were there, in no particular order, before the Romans or the Persians or the Babylonians or the Brits.  There are no other people on this planet, from an historical perspective, who can lay greater claim to the Land of Israel than the people of Israel, the Jewish people.

Is there really any argument to be made that this is untrue?

Can, for example, San Francisco State University professor Rabab Abdulhadi - who is building an academic career based on spreading hatred toward Jews among liberals and progressives - honestly argue that Jews have less claim to Judea than do Arabs?  Arabs conquered and now control 99.9 percent of the entire Middle East and it is somehow unjust that the native Jewish population hold onto any portion of our historic homeland?

It is entirely absurd, but this is the poison that they are selling.

The best and most straightforward manner of dealing with this nonsense is to remind western liberals that Israel is Jewish land.  Just as France is French and England is English and Portugal is Portuguese and China is Chinese, so Israel is Jewish.  The very word "Israel" means the Jewish people.

Now, unlike France, Engand, Portugal, or China, we are willing to share that land, but no one can tell us that it is not Jewish land.

And that, my friends, needs to be our clear and obvious red-line and we need to bang it into their skulls.

And Jerusalem will remain united under Israeli rule.

Am Yisrael Chai!