Category Archives: Israel

Beginning of the End?

Posted on November 26, 2009 | 1 comment

Prime Minister Netanyahu is about to take his administration past the point of no return and down the road to its ruination, for the second time in a decade. Two fateful decisions are before him, and word is his choices will be designed to promote popularity, foreign and domestic, and will therefore likely not succeed.

One decision relates to his apparent concession to American pressure and his agreement to freeze new construction in the “settlements” for nine, ten or whatever number of months. This is wrong-headed on a number of counts. There is an obvious immorality in Jews being directed by a foreign power not to allow Jews to live normal lives in a given geographical area, and becomes even more abhorrent when that policy applies in the Land of Israel. And by freezing construction – even for a brief period of time – he allows the Arab and American narrative to take root: that “settlements” are the obstacle to peace, even though any rational observer and casual student of history remembers that there was no peace even when there were no settlements (1948-1969).

This narrative, once subscribed to by Israel, is a tacit admission that building in the land of Israel is wrong, and something about which Jews should feel guilty. Is there anything that more undermines the very enterprise of Jewish nationalism, and that threatens Yerushalayim – and Tel Aviv ? If only Arabs can build – and illegally at that – and not Jews, then why should Jews feel any confidence in the future of the Jewish state ? To allow the Arabs to essentially dictate the pace and direction of Jewish settlement – unprecedented in the history of Israel – is to give them a veto over the Jewish national idea entirely. Indeed, a cogent argument can be made that only an increase in Jewish settlement will succeed in bringing the Arabs to negotiations, as they will see the clock ticking against them.

Obviously, the freeze, once enacted, can never painlessly be lifted. No American administration will openly admit that the ostensible purpose of the freeze – negotiations with a “successful” outcome – has ever lapsed. That would be tantamount to conceding that the “peace process” has ended, and that will never happen. Ten months can easily stretch into ten years, because the Arabs will gladly wield that cudgel, threatening to halt any negotiations if any home is built. So why make a concession, likely to be permanent, without achieving anything in return ? Well, that question answers itself: that has been Israeli “diplomacy” for decades – the surrender of vital assets and interests in exchange for nothing of substance.

What is even more likely to happen is the continuation of surreptitious building, which transforms Jews from being proud builders of our G-d-given land into liars and cheats who cannot be trusted to uphold any agreement. And doesn’t a freeze pre-judge the outcome of negotiations, by implying that these lands cannot – or should not – remain under Jewish sovereignty ? So why would any skilled negotiator weaken his own position ? Because he is convinced that this will purchase short-term good-will. And it will, just like the expulsion of Jews from Gaza and Northern Shomron made Israel the world’s darlings. Right…

The worst aspect of the freeze is the implication that Netanyahu subscribes to the fiction that peace is possible and that negotiations are warranted, when for ten different reasons the entire “process” is a macabre joke, from the continuation of terror to the risibly weak Palestinian interlocutors who represent no one to the growing sense in the Arab world that Israel’s days are numbered. Netanyahu should be propounding this concept – the impossibility of peace in the current environment – because he would then sound credible, courageous and leader-like. Instead, he is gripped by the illusion that Barack Obama will be his friend if he agrees to this one concession.

That type of vacillation doomed his first tenure as prime minister, and will doom this one as well, with the recognition that, once again, the secular-right in Israel has proved itself incapable and unworthy of leadership.

The second fateful decision is the pending negotiations for the release of Gilad Schalit in exchange for nearly 1,000 murderers of one stripe or another. Most Israelis acknowledge the irrationality of the move, which will only encourage more kidnappings and engender more terror. Prisoners previously released have gone back to their chosen line of work, and have subsequently murdered more than 150 Israelis.

But even people who acknowledge its irrationality and the likelihood of an upsurge in terror support the trade because of something in the Israeli culture, or better said, the Israeli mythology: not leaving a soldier on the battlefield. But these myths – like the hoary one that “Israel does not negotiate with terrorists” – have been shattered in the last few decades. All Israel does is negotiate with terrorists, and soldiers – Katz, Baumol, Feldman, Arad, Pollard – have all been abandoned on the battlefield. So why prop up a failed myth, a myth that will shed more Jewish blood ?

Rabbis and scholars of Jewish law are almost unanimously against this release, on grounds that the Mitzva of Pidyon Shvuyim (ransoming captives) applies only when the price is “reasonable,” and will not encourage future kidnappings. But the Arabs – Hamas and others – boast that they will take more captives until Israeli jails hold no Arab prisoners at all. And is the price “reasonable” ? It does serve as convincing proof that Jewish lives are more precious than Arab ones – apparently, each Jewish life is worth 1,000 Arab lives.

Those who say that soldiers are not typical captives – for they serve a government that has promised to spare no efforts to free them – miss one point: they are soldiers, who occasionally even die in battle, give their lives for their country. If winning the release of one Jew costs the lives of another hundred, then there might as well not be an army. Granted, the anguish of the family must be unbearable – poor Yona Baumol z”l went to his grave never learning of his son’s fate since 1982 – but if the needs of the society in wartime did not trump the rights of the individual, then there would be no justification to send any soldier into battle at any time – because he could potentially lose his life.

The great compassion of Jews is here a tremendous weakness that our enemies willfully exploit. And any parent would do what the Schalits are doing – placing their child’s interests above the national interest. And that is to be expected, and that is quite reasonable and understandable. But it is unacceptable in a leader who must weigh broader concerns, and catering to this phenomenon is no different than a prime minister catering to a mother’s request not to send her son into battle. It is compassionate, it is sensitive – but it is also deadly, and a leader can make other choices.

How about cutting off the entry of ALL food and supplies in Gaza until, at first, Schalit is visited by the Red Cross ? Why accept this gross, Nazi-like violation of international law ? ALL food. Cut off oil, electricity, power. If the Israeli public is suffering vicariously the torment of the Schalit family – let the Gazans (who voted Hamas into power) suffer as well, but really suffer.

How about gradually re-taking the territory from which rockets are fired into Israel ? Each time a rocket is fired, Israel re-occupies that area – slowly driving the Arab inhabitants of that war zone further south (from northern Gaza) and further west (from eastern Gaza). Let them feel the noose tightening, let them feel the grip of the vise around their necks, let them feel the loss of their homes, let them feel the yearning of the Israelis for peace and tranquility.

How about Israel stating unequivocally that until Schalit is released there will be no normalcy in Gaza, and there will be a price of voting into power that band of murderous Jew-haters.

Israel has options; if they choose not to use them and instead the leadership again treads the path of weakness and vulnerability, then undoubtedly the right and then the left will turn on Netanyahu – and before he can right the ship, his term will be over and his government a failure – a second time.

The quest for popularity abroad is an Israeli fantasy, and populist decision-making at home is a recipe for a disaster. Message to Netanyahu: if you want to be a leader, then lead; or get out of the way.

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Posted in Current Events, Israel

A Teachable Moment

Posted on November 13, 2009 | Comments Off

Israel is, again, locked on the horns of a dilemma. Having been indicted by the “world community” (in the guise of the Goldstone report) for alleged war crimes in its conduct of last winter’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, it faces unenviable and unacceptable choices.

Goldstone himself suggested Israel could partly exculpate itself by conducting its own investigation into the conduct of its soldiers. But that presupposes an outcome to the investigation that, presumably, satisfies the world community – and such an outcome is unlikely in the extreme.

If the investigation reveals that the Israel Defense Forces went above and beyond the norms of warfare in its regard for civilian welfare – notifying thousands of civilians in advance of any attack through leaflets, text messages and even cell phone calls – then the conclusions will be dismissed as a whitewash.

If the investigation reveals that some civilians were killed – an avoidable consequence of every war – Israel will be castigated and its soldiers and politicians deemed war criminals and international pariahs. Conventional wisdom would therefore dictate that an investigation is futile – a classic no-win situation – as a biased jury has already prejudged the outcome.

This is underscored by the blatant hypocrisy that fuels the entire process. The contempt that most of the world community has for Israel is so pronounced that it would rather rewrite the rules of warfare than concede that Jews have a right to self-defense – i.e., a right to not have an enemy fire missiles with impunity on the heads of its civilians.

And so the Goldstone report argues, in an unctuous way completely divorced from the realities of warfare, that an attacked party cannot respond if enemy civilians might be harmed – a most novel, unprecedented and bizarre interpretation; one that would revolutionize warfare as we know it and a standard that obviously no nation has any intention of ever applying to any country except to Israel, and certainly not to itself.

It would be the stuff of comedy and farce if the stakes were not so serious.

Nonetheless, handled correctly, we have arrived unwittingly at what President Obama likes to call a “teachable moment,” a moment in which the Jewish people can assume our natural roles as moral educators to the rest of mankind. Stated another way, it is a “J’Accuse” moment – a chance to upend the tables at the anti-Israel festival that is unfolding before our eyes and startle the world with the recitation of uncomfortable truths – as did Emile Zola when he exposed the framing of Alfred Dreyfus.

Israel should investigate its conduct of war – and preface its report with a brief history of the norms of warfare, with the prohibition of deliberately targeting civilians, with the horrific fate of civilians that is so typical in battle, with the challenges of fighting an enemy that utilizes civilians as weapons, and with the conduct in warfare, even recently, of some of Israel’s leading accusers.

The report could cite Sudan, a proud member of the UN’s Human Rights Council, and its murder of millions of innocent civilians in Darfur in the last decade. It could cite Russia, and its brutality against tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Chechnya, and China, whose own civilians are subject to imprisonment and deprivation.

It should note the case of Syria, which leveled its own city of Hama in 1982 and in the process killed approximately 20,000 civilians, and Turkey, which for ninety years has stonewalled its massacre of more than one million Armenians. The report can mention, delicately, of course, the American experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, where thousands of civilians were killed – not because of malice or malevolence but simply because dead civilians are the unfortunate collateral damage of every war.

Less delicately, the report could mention that the atomic bombs detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed civilians almost exclusively – and, ironically, saved both American and Japanese lives, as the human toll taken by a land invasion would have been much greater. Similarly, the Allied bombing of Dresden and other German cities in 1945 killed tens of thousands of civilians, and also hastened the end of the war. Certainly Germany’s record in treating civilians in wartime is well known, except perhaps to the Iranian government, itself a wanton murderer of civilians during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s.

These nations and most others – past and current perpetrators of ferocious violence against civilians they now regard as sacrosanct – deign to sit in judgment of Israel, which never targeted civilians; which fought an enemy that disguised itself as civilians (against international law), used civilians as human shields and hid its weapons and rocket launchers in hospitals, mosques and residential areas; which killed at most several hundred civilians – civilians who had voted into power the despots who launched the incessant war against Israel. Civilians? Yes, for the most part. Innocent civilians? Hardly.

As the report continues, Israel can then refer to the unprecedented measures it took to avoid civilian casualties – the warnings, the notifications – all of which impaired its operational abilities and the successes of its missions as it informed the enemy of the locations of Israel’s counterattacks. It can note, with sadness, that half of Israel’s own war resulted from friendly fire, an even more unfortunate consequence of the fog of war.

Israel should certainly regret its error in surrendering Gaza to the forces of terror – as the “world community” had encouraged, of course, guaranteeing then – then, not now – that Israel would always retain the right of self-defense in case of aggression launched from Gaza.

Israel should then express its pride and admiration at the humanity, morality and skill of its fighting forces, and the inherent difficulty in fighting an enemy that targets civilians and cares not at all about its own except to use them as cannon fodder.

And in conclusion, the report can state what is patently clear to any impartial observer: that this indictment is just another weapon in the Arab war against Israel – a classic attempt by those who are waging asymmetrical warfare to demoralize the people of Israel, and induce it to make additional territorial concessions that will garner short-term praise but engender long-term vulnerability.

Israel should state unequivocally that it categorically rejects the double standard the world is employing and should insist that the judges first judge themselves before sitting in judgment of others.

Israel should declare that it will not play in a macabre game in which the rules change in order to coerce an outcome deleterious to Israel’s strategic position and existence; that “peace” negotiations are not warranted and “peace” itself not feasible in the current, hostile environment; and that Israel will continue – despite the world’s hypocrisy and duplicity – to aspire to moral goodness, and to highlight, as is our divinely-ordained mission, what is right and what is wrong, what is moral and what is immoral, what is the word of God and what is the falsification of the word of God.

The report should not refer at all to any specific acts during the recent battle, as the findings will convince no one and accomplish nothing productive. Israel must reject the impression that it is sitting in the dock, but rather stand with pride behind the preacher’s lectern and lecture a world whose moral compass is severely askew, once again.

Urging this band of haters to look in the mirror may not inspire them to either repentance or honesty, but it will clear our consciences and strengthen us with new resolve for the battles that loom just over the horizon.

Reprinted from www.JewishPress.com

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Posted in Contemporary Life, Current Events, Israel

The Changing World

Posted on October 25, 2009 | Comments Off

The Great Flood is re-visited annually in the Torah reading, and it is often helpful to return to basics and ask a simple question: why did all of mankind (except Noah and family) have to die? G-d promises the “end of all flesh” because of their wickedness, corruption and violence, but why? If a parent has five children, and four misbehave persistently and grievously, we don’t take the four out back and shoot them, and rebuild through the fifth! So why didn’t G-d talk to that generation, negotiate with them, dialogue with them – in our parlance, and try to solve the world’s problems without violence – instead of drowning away all His disappointments, so to speak? The answer reveals as much about our world as it does about theirs.

The story’s hero, of course, is the righteous Noah, but who are the villains? Everybody else? Eventually, yes, but the Torah focuses on two groups that led everyone down the primrose path to destruction. One was called the “Bane Healthy” – literally, the sons of G-d or the sons of the powerful, and they were influenced by the “Nefilim” – literally, the fallen ones, and together the devastated the world. But who were these two groups, and from where did the fallen ones fall?

Finally, G-d ultimately concluded that He must destroy them, because “I have reconsidered having made them.” But how does G-d reconsider anything? What happened that G-d, so to speak, did not anticipate?

There were two major changes that occurred after the flood that explain the “reconsideration” – and both for the identical reason. G-d created man as a being with free will, and with the scales of free choice evenly balanced. Adam stumbled, to be sure, but then man was placed in an environment where he could indulge his soul and pursue spiritual delights for centuries on end. He could sow once and have enough food to last forty years; he was living for 700-800-900 years in perfect health (without fear that politicians – income re-distributionists – would take away his Medicare advantage or otherwise bankrupt Social Security). Every need was taken care of – man had every possible opportunity to nurture the divine image within him – the tzelem elokim.

But it was too much – man had too much luxury and leisure, temptation was too great, and G-d’s moral strictures were perceived as both elective and ephemeral. It did not have to be like that – Noah was proof of that. But after the flood, the power of the instinctual forces were greatly diminished: the land was never again as fertile, and man would have to work, and work, hard, to earn a living; the change of seasons – cold and heat, summer and winter – were all challenges that man had to overcome in order to survive – and survive he would but for dramatically reduced life spans – from the high hundreds to the low hundreds, and then, for most, to less than 100 years. Longevity and leisure were inducements to sin. Nature itself changed – but man could not have survived the turbulence that accompanied the dramatic change of nature – effectively, a “new” creation – so it was a divine act of kindness that G-d took mankind at once in the flood. The global environment posed too difficult an obstacle for man to overcome – except for Noah, and a system that is adhered too by only one person cannot long endure.

And there was another great stumbling block – the Nefilim. Who were these fallen ones? Perhaps the following is plausible: there are, of course, credible accounts of what is called pre-historic man (man pre-Adam), which should not pose any problem to Torah Jews. The Ramban indicates that the unique creation of Adam was that he was a nefesh chaya, infused with a soul, with the divine image, that rendered him an ish acher, a different type of “man, in implied contrast to other beings that possessed a similar form to his – but were not created in G-d’s image. (Thus Chava could eat from the Tree of Knowledge, and give her husband to eat as well, Rashi says, for “fear that she would die and leave Adam to marry someone else.” But who else – the shidduch pool was very small ? And the answer would be one of these human-like creatures that looked the same, but was not endowed with a soul, with a tzelem elokim, and lacked any moral sensibility at all.

These were the Nefilim, “fallen ones” because they had never risen to Adam’s level – but they successfully corrupted the “Bnei Elohim,” the children of G-d, i.e., the descendants of Adam, and for the most obvious reason: a society cannot endure if it has different rules for different people, if the law doesn’t apply equally, if one group (Adam’s descendants) lives with moral restraint and another (the Nefilim) with immoral abandon.

G-d “reconsidered” the ground rules of creation, in the sense that the global environment and man’s social environment were hopelessly corrupted. Man’s “free choice” was mostly incapable of living in luxury and making virtuous choices, and it was untenable, in a sense, to ask beings with free choice and consequences for those choices to live in harmony with beings without free choice and no consequences for those choices. No one likes double standards – and a society that is founded on it cannot long sustain itself.

That is what Roman Polanski has just learned, to his utter surprise, and to the chagrin of the other inhabitants of his amoral Hollywood universe – civilized society does have rules – but that is what Jews live with constantly. And it makes life unpleasant.

What is the Goldstone Report? Rather than admit that Jews have a right to defend themselves, the world would rather completely transform the rules of war – essentially arguing that an attacked party cannot respond if civilians might be harmed (a most novel, unprecedented and bizarre interpretation – and one that no nation has any intention of ever applying elsewhere but to Israel. How obscene is it that Russia, that killed thousand of civilians in Chechnya, and Sudan, that has killed millions of civilians in Darfur, sit in judgment of Israel, and with a straight face, and without a hint of irony or shame. Mind-boggling.

It is hard to live in such a world – hard to maintain any aspirations for moral goodness in such a world. If Israel is to be criticized anyway even though it tried to avoid any civilian casualties, why bother making the effort? Do what all other nations do. It is hard to justify the continued existence of such a world. But Noah was spared, and in a sense, so are we, in generation after generation, century after century, in society after society across the globe, so we can continue to point out – often to the remnants of the amoral Nefilim who surround us – what is right and what is wrong, what is moral and what is immoral, what is the word of G-d and what is the falsification of the word of G-d.

That remains our mission, in this irrevocably hostile world, as Isaiah prophesied, to be “a witness to the nations and a commander to their regimes,” so that eventually they will join us to bring glory to our Creator.

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Posted in Chumash, Contemporary Life, Current Events, Israel

Olympian Failure

Posted on October 8, 2009 | 1 comment

I was stunned – STUNNED – when Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics was rejected apparently with prejudice and contempt – in the first round of voting, no less. And all this in utter disregard of the fact that President and Mrs. Obama had flown all the way to Copenhagen to make this personal appeal.

My assumption was that the choice of Chicago was already a done deal (which was fine with me) and that Obama only went to bask in the glow of this great “victory” for his new, internationalist foreign policy. I assumed that, Chicago style, the money under the table had already exchanged hands and that the votes had been counted. Why else risk the prestige of the American president ?

Now, originally I did not think that such a trip was becoming the American president, notwithstanding that the heads of government of Brazil, Spain and Japan did appear. And that was the point – the United States is not those these middling countries, and its president is not just another leader, primus inter pares (first among many). He is the leader of the free world, the world’s most powerful nation, and the leader who is expected to set the tone and direction of international affairs. So to travel there and make a speech – about himself, mainly – and then to lose ignominiously in the first round was a stinging rebuke to Obama personally and to the United States. And even if he went to satisfy a debt to his Chicago political cronies who stood to make a mini-fortune on these games, the defeat reinforces one unsettling notion about the stagecraft (and statecraft) of this White House: it is amateurish.

Granting that Obama took office with the least experience of any modern president, it is still the responsibility of the White House staff to put the president in positions that enhance his personal – and our national – prestige, rather than dissipate it. I may not care for Obama’s policies, but when the American President can be so easily trifled with – dismissed, as if he were the Prime Minister of, say, Spain – then the United States is hurt. And that is what is happening across the globe. Obama packs no punches, carries no weight, and has to be chided even by… France (!) for a lack of toughness.

Certainly, Netanyahu was able to reject Obama’s demand for a settlement freeze by just saying “no” (as advised in this space several months ago) without any consequences, and to his credit. That is good for Israel. What is bad for Israel – and the free world – is when Obama’s efforts are also summarily rejected by Iran, North Korea, Russia and the list goes on. There is a lack of gravitas, and experience, that might turn out to be frightening. Nations toy with him; he fires a volley of words at them, and they respond – occasionally – with pleasing words to him, that buys time but does not change behavior. That is more than naiveté; that is amateur hour in prime time.

Witness as well this week’s White House visit of dozens of doctors in support of Obama’s health coverage proposals. It is fine for him to rally support – but to dress them all in white coats, as if they were coming straight from their offices ? And for the White House to provide white coats to those who didn’t bring them ? Such a display – hokey beyond description – is a childish and heavy-handed attempt at a photo op and unworthy of an American president.

Every president uses photo ops to reinforce his image or policy goals. But do it with class, with dignity, and with more than five seconds’ of thought. Think Mike Deaver, Dick Morris or Karl Rove, and – like them or not – they knew how to stage-manage a presidency. Amateur hour can have grave consequences, far beyond the joy of watching pole-vaulters and marathon runners alongside Lake Michigan.

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Posted in Contemporary Life, Current Events, Israel