Category Archives: Israel

Oh, there is no case for Obama, rational or otherwise. That is not to say that he doesn’t have a formula that will attract many votes – he does – but one is hard pressed to formulate cogent arguments why his failed presidency should be carried forward for another four years. He himself seems to realize this, and focuses his speeches on vitriolic distortions of his opponent’s personality and record and scant references to his own achievements in office. It is a strategy dependent on casting so much mud that Mitt Romney looks entirely soiled, and as filthy as the incumbent, in which case the incumbent wins by default.

There is an irony in the agonizing and hypocritical lament about “negative campaigning.” A clear distinction should be made between an accusation that “Romney killed a woman!” who got cancer after her husband lost his job when his business closed (long after Romney left Bain, but what does it matter, and what real relevance does that have anyway) and the contention that unemployment has been over 8% for 42 straight months, that almost 50,000,000 Americans receive food stamps (an increase of more than 20,000,000 since Obama took office), or that the poverty rate in America is the highest since the Depression. Those facts are “negative,” but they go to the heart of the Obama incompetence that is the reason for his failures. Obama’s attack ads are personal; Romney’s attack ads are about business – the business of government.

The failures are evident, and many Obama assertions are markedly laughable. The persistent claim that “we have created 4.2 million private sector jobs” does not withstand scrutiny, and not only because more private sector jobs have still been lost under Obama than found. It is risible primarily because the federal government – i.e., Obama – has not created even one private sector job. If a law firm hires another lawyer, if our shul hires a secretary, did Obama create that job ? If a person opens a store and hires workers, did the federal government create that job? Of course not. The federal government creates public sector jobs by hiring more employees at taxpayer expense, whether or not they are productive, and facilitates the creation of private sector jobs by offering tax incentives to businesses to expand and hire more people. Has that been done? Not to any great extent, and even those tax incentives have been offset by the concern among private businesses of the long term economic impact of Obamacare.

That is why the ludicrous category of “jobs saved” was invented. All that meant is that the federal government borrowed or printed money to supply to municipalities to pay public employees that those communities could no longer afford or did not need, just in order to keep them on the payroll. Thus, “jobs saved.” Of course, those same jobs were then lost a year or so later when the federal money dried up, but nonetheless, the statistic remains on the books: a “job saved”.

Indeed, almost any assertion of success by this administration should be analyzed carefully and skeptically. Take the claim that oil and gas production has increased under Obama. All true, even notwithstanding the denial of permits in the Gulf of Mexico or Alaska and the reluctance to approve the Keystone pipeline that would create jobs and lower the price of gasoline (which has doubled under Obama’s watch). It is true but misleading. Production has increased despite Obama, not because of Obama. The increase is entirely due to the increased capacity and investment of private business, and drilling where federal permits are not required. Wherever federal permits have been required, Obama has mostly rejected them. Yet, he claims credit for the success of private enterprise that he has failed to smother. Shameless.

This brazen boastfulness is a consistent pattern. Liberal Jews who would rather eat on Yom Kippur than vote for a Republican (actually, they probably eat on Yom Kippur too) are contorting themselves like Olympic gymnasts to find reasons to support Obama and to prettify his record on Israel. One note constantly sounded is Obama’s record financial support for Iron Dome, the missile shield that offers partial protection against Arab rockets. Again, all true, in a sense. The full truth is that Obama administration has for the last two years suggested cuts in Iron Dome funding – drastic cuts that would have gutted the program. The money was restored by Congress – on a bi-partisan basis, with large credit due to our outgoing Congressman Steve Rothman (D). Yes, Obama eventually signed that bill – but to claim credit for record funding of a program that you tried to cut and were coerced into supporting?  It is shameless.

Thus, on the economy, Obama is left with two basic assertions: one, he “inherited a mess, the worst… blah, blah, blah.” As I recall, Ronald Reagan inherited a misery index of more than 20% (inflation plus interest rates) and unemployment near 10%. President Bush (Jr.) inherited a recession as well. They ran for office successfully to overcome their predecessors’ shortcomings, or at least to solve leftover problems. Every president is in a similar position. There are always problems to solve. But none of them embraced “blame the prior president” as a permanent mode of governance. In some respects – unemployment, real personal income and poverty – things are worse now than under Bush, and due entirely to Obama’s policies. Which leads to the second assertion: “we averted a catastrophe…things would have been worse but for Obama’s leadership.” Really? How do we know that? What is the metric used to determine what would have happened – if some auto companies were allowed to enter bankruptcy, if some banks were allowed to fail? Maybe the economy would be better today – if not for Obamacare, or the five trillion (!) dollars of federal debt accumulated in just under four years, if not for regulations that are stifling business and creativity.

Neither assertion holds any substance, but not that it matters. The Obama re-election strategy is focused on class warfare – the appeals to different and disparate groups. This is classic Democrat strategy going back to FDR’s time. The hope is that a coalition of blacks, Jews, public employees, liberal women, environmentalists, and now Hispanics will be sufficient to give an electoral majority, even if – especially since – there is no coherent policy that united those groups. Every small group gets what it wants, in the hope that provides a majority that wins – even if the winners cannot then govern or lead in any meaningful or successful way. Add to that group the tens of millions of people now nourished by government money – sadly embracing a life of permanent dependence – and that might be enough, although I sense that it will fall short.

The most critical component in such a plan is to keep each group angry – blacks (against the rich white man who exploits and doesn’t pay his “fair share;” expect the racist card to be played in October and liberal white guilt to be stoked accordingly); federal employees (jobs lost); liberal women (birth control will be taken away and abortion banned); environmentalists (the evil conservatives want to ruin nature and are atheists in the religion of “global warming);” and Hispanics (Republicans want to send you all back to Mexico, even if you’re from Puerto Rico). And Jews? There is no logical reason for Jews to vote for Obama, nor for Democrats even to overtly make an appeal to the Jewish vote. Sadly, it is what Jews do, unthinkingly, since FDR’s time, because, I suppose, Roosevelt was such a god friend of the Jews and made the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust his priority. Sure. Since there is no rational reason for Jews to vote for Obama, there is no necessity to reason with them to vote against Obama. Voting Democrat is a passion, and not subject to reasoned discourse.

It is the appeal to anger that is the most disheartening aspect of the Obama campaign and the primary reason for the negative tone in the campaign. People who are angry go out to vote, but their anger is not assuaged after the election. Was there an angry word even uttered at the Republican Convention ? Not that I heard. Mitt Romney’s essential cheerfulness must grate on the Obamanikim.

In foreign affairs, Obama’s primary failing is that America’s role as leader of the free world has been diminished. This has grave ramifications across the globe. US troops left Iraq, still the locus of weekly massacres, but a Republican president would have done the same in a matter of months. The war in Afghanistan (Obama’s good war) does not appear to be headed for a happy ending. The Taliban is re-asserting control (even murdering 17 people last week for attending a musical concert) and the date of US departure is fast approaching. (Certainly credit is due President Obama for personally executing bin Laden, dumping his body at sea, and returning to DC in time to pose for pictures and reveal classified information about it.) Russia and China are ascendant, and more powerful and influential than in decades.

The deference to the UN has marked America’s retreat from global leadership, the Arab world is rapidly radicalizing with no US response noticeable, Iran laughs at talk of sanctions and merrily nears its nuclear bomb – and Romney’s reference to Israel being thrown “under the bus” chides Obama for forcing Israel to deal with Iran on its own. America’s foes are derisive of Obama, and America’s traditional allies feel abandoned. Foreign policy has been a parade of failures because Obama sees success in the accomplishment of certain definable acts (e.g., withdrawal) but not in the projection of US power, interests, or values.  Short term goals have replaced long term interests.

Obama entered office less prepared for the presidency than any president in history – less accomplished, less skilled, and less able. It shows. A presidency that has failed domestically and abroad is a failure; its continuation will be a calamity. It might happen because the electoral strategy is logical, if repugnant – the cultivation of anger, the shifting of blame, the resort to innuendo, diversions, race, guilt and class warfare.

Of course, there is another side – the virtues of Mitt Romney. That is for another time.

     Here in Modiin, the buzz this week is about the new status awarded to all residents quite suddenly and unexpectedly: the status of “settler.”

     The European Union, in enforcing its segregation of Israeli exports from the “territories,” decided in its wisdom that areas of Modiin (and its conjoined towns of Maccabim and Re’ut) are not really part of Israel but instead “occupied territories,’ no man’s land from the 1948 Armistice agreement that Israel wrongfully seized 63 years ago. Modiin straddles the former Green Line, almost equidistant between Yerushalayim and Tel Aviv, and was meticulously delineated.

     The irony is rich, especially because Modiin – rightfully dubbed the “City of the Future” – is a mixed city of some 80,000 souls, joining together in relative harmony right-wingers and left-wingers, religious and non-religious Jews, a microcosm of all Israel and a model of living together in shared space. The left-wingers are not amused. Those who decry the “occupation” and fantasize about peace erupting in the country/region/world/galaxy/universe the very day after all Israeli settlements are destroyed and the settlers dispersed have now been rudely informed by the guardians of civilization and right-thinking that the bell tolls for them as well.

     This is actually not new. It is widely known that the hotbed of leftism in Israel – TelAvivUniversity and its environs – rests on the land of an abandoned Arab village named Al-Shaykh Muwannis. It doesn’t stop leftists from condemning the settlements in Judea and Samaria, or from criticizing the “occupation.” For some, it might even be the reason why they – those who are bereft of Torah and any sense of Jewish history or nationhood – perceive Israel’s very existence as illegitimate.

      Most people I saw this week were walking a little prouder, with heads a little higher, after the news broke. It is not only solidarity with the residents of Judea and Samaria, but rather the pervasive sense that, to Israel’s enemies in Europe and across the Arab world, all of Israel is occupied territories – pre-1948, post-1948, post-1967, and post-Oslo. To them, Netzarim really is the same as Tel Aviv, and Jews have as much right to Netanya as they do to Bet El. At last, agreement on something has scattered the fog of hatred and political double-talk: the Jewish claim to the land of Israel is either absolute or non-existent. At last, the battle of ideas is joined and honestly confronted. There really is no middle ground.

     This realization actually spawns a great opportunity for Israel, now that the enemy’s intentions – to whittle away Israel’s land until it completely disintegrates – are clear. It is assisted by another recent development that has the capacity to transform the terms of the conflict in Israel’s favor. I refer not to the fragmentation and collapse of Syria on Israel’s northern border, where the massacres of tens of thousands of Arabs do not seem to rile up the celebrated “Arab street” as much as does the construction of a single building in Shiloh or the location of a solitary caravan in Kiryat Arba, nor to the ongoing evolution of Egypt into a fundamentalist Islamic state that will eventually renounce the peace treaty with Israel, but to the findings of the Levy Commission.

      The Levy Commission, charged with investigating and reporting on Israel’s legal rights in Judea and Samaria, found that, indeed, Israeli settlement in the center of its Biblical heartland is…legal. What occupation? How can a nation occupy its own land, as if it is a foreign element? Its findings are dry, historical, and, well, legalistic, essentially reporting that the area in question was set aside multiple times for Jewish settlement, dating back to the 1917 Balfour Declaration. Despite changes in possession due to war- and its illegal and mostly unrecognized occupation by the Jordanians in 1948 and renounced by them 40 years later, the sovereign nation with the strongest and most logical claim to the land is Israel.

     Remarkably, this echoes a report from decades ago, drafted by former US Under Secretary of State Eugene Rostow, who asserted both the legality of the settlements and the superiority of Israel’s claims over those of any Arab entity. He even pointed out that under the prevailing provisions of international treaties and agreements, “the Jewish right of settlement in the West Bank is conferred by the same provisions of the mandate under which Jews settled in Haifa, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem before the state of Israel was created.” That this conclusion has never been formally adopted by the United States, or that even the Levy Commission does not call for immediate annexation of Israel’s heartland, is, ultimately, politics. Political decisions must weigh a number of competing factors, whereas legality rests on more objective judgments. It was Jimmy Carter, in the first manifestation of the Jew-hatred that so obviously afflicts him (but still does not preclude his being honored with an address at the Democratic Convention this year), who first pronounced the settlements “illegal.” President Reagan explicitly repudiated that designation, and but for a blip during the Bush I administration, that has remained US policy – not illegal but “unhelpful to the peace process,” or the nastier “obstacles to peace.” But those were political judgments, not legal ones.

     What can be the result of the Levy Commission findings? For one, it finally restores to Israel the narrative it has lacked since Oslo in asserting its moral, legal, biblical and historical claims to this small territory bequeathed by the Creator to the Jewish people. The Left – Rabin, Peres et al – labored to explain Israel’s legitimate presence in the region, much less in Judea and Samaria. They, and later Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert, et al, embraced the language of “occupation,” foolishly playing into the hands of the Arab enemy who gleefully pocketed this unilateral concession and sought more – the total delegitimization of the State of Israel. Let Israel stake its legal claim to the entirety of the land of Israel – and dispatch its ambassadors and spokesmen across the world to explain why – and the tide will turn. It is not that the other nations will become Zionists overnight; it is sufficient that Israel stop being defensive and apologetic about its existence, its struggles, its enemies’ incessant attempts to destroy it, and its eternal rights to its sacred soil. That is the second bonus of the Levy Commission findings – the pride of purpose, the pep in the step of the average Israeli who need not feel on his own land like a thief and trespasser, whether he lives in Hevron, Tel Aviv, or Modiin.

     The catch, as is frequently the case, these days, is the coyness of PM Netanyahu, who commissioned the report, but now is sitting on its findings, reluctant to adopt it as Israel’s formal policy. He has become a master fence-sitter – alternately freezing settlements and building settlements, alternately absorbing blows and striking back, alternately embracing political adversaries and discarding political adversaries (and sometimes allies). For sure, he is focused on the Iranian threat, which looms large, and senses that in the macabre calculus of the Arab world, the sins of Syria will be forgiven in an instant by the “Arab street” that would be up in arms over the much graver “crime” of legalizing the existing settlements and spurring the development of war.

    All true, but rather than be a status-quo leader, Netanyahu can be a transformative leader, making Israel’s case to the world, and perhaps more importantly, to Israelis themselves. Naturally, the media jumped on a report of 41American –Jewish “leaders” – leftists all – who sent a letter to the Prime Minister urging his rejection of the Levy Commission report. (Oddly, the same media ignored a letter sent by even more American-Jewish “leaders” – I know, because I was a signatory – urging the Prime Minister to immediately endorse the Commission report. Hmm… why would they disregard our letter?)

     The irony of Modiin as “occupied territory” provides such a welcome moment, leaving its inhabitants delighted, horrified or bewildered, and reminding everyone that to our relentless adversaries all of Israel is “occupied.”  It can be a defining moment, if seized, to change the terms of the debate in Israel’s favor.    

     Memo to PM Netanyahu: there is nothing better than striking while the irony is hot.