Western ME policy has no learning curve

There is talk in the media about the West cutting its aid to the PA in response to Fatah’s unity agreement with Hamas. Elliott Abrams (The Damaging Deal Between Hamas and Fatah) writes about the various problems that the agreement causes, but ultimately falls back on the hope that “This agreement between Hamas and Fatah may break down in months.”

Based on experience the expectation that Fatah and Hamas won’t be able to follow through on the implementation of the agreement is most sensible. However, there is a good possibility that they need not follow through with implementation, because the agreement is not of substance, but actually a trick to give the West what the Palestinians know it has desperately looked for for quite a while: a pretext to give them a state and to recognize Hamas. The purpose of the agreement is precisely to serve as such a pretext and there is a good chance that it will work.

Indeed, given the lame, if not inexistent reaction by Western governments and media to the latest round of atrocities committed by individual Palestinians (Fogel murders), by Hamas (the school bus missile) and by the PA (the Joseph tomb shooting), the Palestinians have realized that even terror operations against children and unarmed Jews will not deter the West from the delusion that a state is what the Palestinians really want and that their religion inspired genocidal hatred instilled in them for generations will suddenly stop if they just get it.

The West continues to repeat the mantra of the four principles that Hamas must accept in order to be officially recognized (it’s been unofficially recognized for quite a while), but whoever believes that ought to have his head examined. In fact, the members of the Quartet other than the US were already willing to support a Palestinian state even without a formal commitment to those principles. Only because the US did not want to be put in a situation similar to the earlier UN veto one, in which it would have to stand alone against this capitulation and postponed the Quartet meeting, the capitulation did not occur.

The West is oblivious even to open Hamas assurances that it has no intention to commit to the principles. To the contrary, Haniyeh calls on Fatah to renounce recognition of Israel.

Jennifer Rubin’s (State Department won’t rule out aid to a Fatah-Hamas government) provides clear indication that, with its ME policy in tatters, the Obama administration desperately clings to Syria engagement and does not exclude extending it to Hamas in the delusion that this will save it from the ME catastrophe it has created:

As I reported earlier today, there are strong grounds under existing law for banning aid to a Fatah-Hamas government. In 2006, the Bush administration was decisive: Aid was cut once Hamas won the elections. It was reinstated only when the Palestinian Authority separated from Hamas. Nevertheless, the Obama administration is not making itself clear.

…

As for the future, there was no line-drawing. The official would only say, “If a new Palestinian government is formed, we will assess it based on its policies at that time and will determine the implications for our assistance based on U.S. law.”

This is the sort of maddening imprecision that seems to be designed to give maximum encouragement to the Palestinians and produce maximum anxiety for Israel and its Zionist supporters. A savvy Israel watcher on Capitol Hill told me that it seems that with regard to the Fatah-Hamas pact, the administration is “either in denial or hoping it will collapse.” However, though some in the administration might pine for a loophole to continue to support a coalition government that includes Hamas (or Hamas officials), Congress is another story.

Abbas offers precisely such a loophole by claiming that the unity agreement is something between Fatah and Hamas and does not affect the “peace process” and the negotiations between the PLO and Israel. But as Israel National News reports:

Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) member and Fatah party member Fuad Kokali put the lie to PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas' claims he will negotiate with Israel Thursday. In an interview with the pro-'Palestinian' Alternative Information Center, Kokali said "it is a must to have this reconciliation because we need the world to recognize a... Palestinian state and without Gaza ... this weakens our position."

…

"For Hamas there is no other choice so they will go for this [unity]," Kokali said. "But, if we are talking about principles, for example what will be the position with Hamas toward the peace process, or Fatah, this we will continue to negotiate later."

"We will continue to negotiate with Hamas about the peace process, about the peace with Israel, about the resistance, and what kind of resistance we need if peace fails .. this needs more negotiation," Kokali said.

Kokali's admission that Hamas only agreed to unity because it had no choice, and that Hamas' position vis-a-vis Fatah remained ambigous, underscores not only the tenuous nature of the agreement, but also the tenuous permanence any PA-Israel agreement would have.It also buttresses concerns the inclusion of Hamas in the PA may lead to a Hamas takeover of PA areas in Judea and Samaria.

All this notwithstanding, my guess is that Obama is likely to make a catastrophe worse by joining the Quartet and actually dealing with the unity government without insisting on the principles. It is not difficult to guess how it is going to rationalize it and present it as a success: as an “opportunity” created by Syria turmoil that has “forced Hamas to moderate” and join Fatah in the defunct “peace process”. David Ignatius (Syria’s turmoil shakes Iran and Hamas), is often a trumpet for the administration:

U.S. officials see signs that Syria’s embattled president, Bashar al-Assad, has concluded that to survive the massive protests against his regime, which continued today across the country, he will have to distance himself somewhat from Iran. The protesters have largely been Sunni Muslims who have criticized Assad’s alliance with the Shiite Muslim leadership of Iran. That anger grew last week after U.S. intelligence reports revealed that Iran had secretly supplied Assad with tear gas, anti-riot gear and other tools of suppression.

…

Similar problems have beset Hamas, which has its roots in Gaza but is officially based in Damascus. The radical Palestinian group has been pushed toward its merger this week with the more moderate Fatah organization because of strains in its relationship with Assad, according to an Arab source whose information was confirmed by a senior U.S. government official. Newly vulnerable in its Syrian base, Hamas made several important concessions to Fatah in the unity deal.

…

As evidence of Hamas’s weakness in the Egyptian-brokered unity negotiations, a U.S. official cited its acceptance of two Fatah demands: First, Hamas reversed its longstanding position against signing a 2009 Egyptian reconciliation text without modifications; and second, it accepted a plan for a government of “independents” not affiliated with the group, which hasn’t accepted Israel’s right to exist and is officially branded by the United States as a terrorist organization.

Some Obama administration officials believe that despite Israeli worries, a weakened Hamas may provide new opportunities for peace negotiations, but that question isn’t yet resolved within the White House. President Obama has delayed a speech on the Middle East that had been planned for next week — in which he might lay out U.S. “parameters” for negotiating a peace deal— to weigh the impact of the Hamas-Fatah accord.

God save us, and I am an atheist.

Israel cannot appease her way out of destruction

Caroline Glick (Netanyahu must choose) column is a must read to understand the predicament in which the last 7 governments since Oslo have trapped israel..

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's response to the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority's peace deal with Hamas would be funny if it weren't tragic. Immediately after the news broke of the deal Netanyahu announced, "The PA must choose either peace with Israel or peace with Hamas. There is no possibility for peace with both."

Netanyahu's statement is funny because it is completely absurd. The PA has chosen.

...

Now the PA has again made the choice by signing the newest peace deal with Hamas.

IN A real sense, Netanyahu's call for the PA to choose is the political equivalent of a man telling his wife she must choose between him and her lover, after she has left home, shacked up and had five children with her new man.

It is a pathetic joke.

But worse than a pathetic joke, it is a national tragedy. It is a tragedy that after more than a decade of the PA choosing war with Israel and peace with Hamas, Israel's leaders are still incapable of accepting reality and walking away. It is a tragedy that Israel's leaders cannot find the courage to say the joke of the peace process is really a deadly serious war process whose end is Israel's destruction, and that Israel is done with playing along.

There are many reasons that Netanyahu is incapable of stating the truth and ending the 18- year policy nightmare in which Israel is an active partner in its own demise. One of the main reasons is that like his predecessors, Netanyahu has come to believe the myth that Israel's international standing is totally dependent on its being perceived as trying to make peace with the Palestinians.

According to this myth - which has been the central pillar of Israel's foreign policy and domestic politics since Yitzhak Rabin first accepted the PLO as a legitimate actor in 1993 - it doesn't matter how obvious it is that the Palestinians are uninterested in peaceful coexistence with Israel. It doesn't matter how openly they wage their war to destroy Israel. 

Irrespective of the nakedness of Palestinian bad faith, seven successive governments have adopted the view that the only thing that stands between Israel and international pariah status is its leaders' ability to persuade the so-called international community that Israel is serious about appeasing the Palestinians.

For the past several months, this profoundly neurotic perception of Israel's options has fed our leaders' hysterical response to the Palestinians' plan to unilaterally declare independence.

...

Since 1967, the Europeans have consistently been more pro-Palestinian than the US. Now, with the Obama administration demonstrating unprecedented hostility towards Israel, there is no way that the Europeans will suddenly shift to Israel's side. So when European leaders tell Israelis that we need to convince them we are serious about peace, they aren't being serious. They are looking for an excuse to be even more hostile. If Israel offers the store to Abbas, then the likes of Cameron, Merkel and Sarkozy will not only recognize "Palestine" at the UN, (because after all, they cannot be expected to be more pro-Israel than the Israeli government that just surrendered), they will recognize Hamas. Because that's the next step.

...

It would seem that Israel's leaders should have gotten wise to this game years ago. And the fact that they haven't can be blamed on the second factor keeping their sanity in check: the Israeli Left. The only group of Israelis directly impacted by the BDS movement is the Israeli Left. Its members - from university lecturers to anti-Zionist has-been politicians, artists, actors and hack writers - are the only members of Israeli society who have a personal stake in a decision by their leftist counterparts in the US or Europe or Australia or any other pretty vacation/sabbatical spots to boycott Israelis.

And because the movement threatens them, they have taken it upon themselves to scare the rest of us into taking this ridiculous charade seriously. So it was that last week a group of washed-up radicals gathered in Tel Aviv outside the hall where David Ben-Gurion proclaimed Israeli independence, and declared the independence of "Palestine." They knew their followers in the media would make a big deal of their agitprop and use it as another means of demoralizing the public into believing we can do nothing but embrace our enemies' cause against our country.

...

And it is well past time for our leaders to stop playing this fool's game. We don't need anyone's favors. Abbas has made his choice.

(Read it all)

 

 

Rosner stating the obvious

7 quick comments on Palestinian unity

1.
Yes, Palestinian unity threatens American aid to the Palestinian Authority - but it also threatens to be yet another reason for American-European divide on the Palestinian issue. Will the Quartet - ready to support the Palestinian state - go along with Congressional policies aimed at curbing this new Palestinian unity government? I doubt it. Bottom line: Obama might have to choose between Congress and Europe.

2.
Are you surprised by Palestinian unity? Was the Obama administration surprised? I see no reason for such surprise - here's what American experts, including current members of the Obama team, wrote four years ago:

"While Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has declared an end to the national unity government, I have little doubt that he will be talking to Hamas in the relatively near future," wrote Dennis Ross, former special U.S. envoy for the peace process who knows Abbas as well as anyone in the West. "We should not be fooled by Abbas' rhetoric. Sooner or later he will be forced to pursue new power-sharing arrangements between Hamas and Fatah and restore unity among Palestinians," wrote Robert Malley and Aaron David Miller, two other former members of the Clinton team, who rarely agree with Ross.

3.
Let me be blunt with this one: Palestinian unity means that the leaders of the Palestinian Authority just told Obama to get lost. They don't care anymore for what he says.

4.
Did you read the Newsweek interview with Abbas? Read it again if you're looking for more clues that will help you understand Abbas' moves:

Abbas told me he thought the push Obama gave Mubarak was “impolite” and imprudent. “From day one, when it started with Mubarak, I had a telephone call with Madame Clinton. I told her, ‘Do you know what are the consequences? Either chaos, or Muslim Brotherhood or both,’?” he says. “Now they have both.”

5.
Expect Jewish wars to resume. Israel will argue that Hamas-Fatah unity is dangerous. Most mainstream America-Jewish organizations would agree. J Street will be the usual party-pooper. Here's how J Street reacted when Palestinians were having unity talks two years ago:

We are pleased to hear that Palestinian officials are making progress in their effort to form a unity government by the end of March. While there is a long way to go before such an agreement is final, steps toward Palestinian reconciliation are steps in the right direction as there will be no meaningful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict until the Palestinian people speak with a unified voice.

6.
Looking at this Fareed Zakaria post from two days ago I must ask: Is it not time for American experts (and Israeli ones for that matter) to realize that in today's Middle East one should be very careful with ones analysis? What one writes today might look oddly off-the-mark tomorrow, especially in those cases when one has very little understanding of ones subject-matter (in this case: Israel's political system). Take a look - this is Zakaria writing just the other day about the Israeli-Palestinian arena:

... I’m not particularly hopeful that there will be much more happening in the coming months. I don’t see some game-changing event on the horizon...  a majority of Israelis would like to see peace and are willing to make fairly painful sacrifices to have that happen. But Israel’s political system right now does not reflect that majority. It over-represents the minority who are opposed to any kind of deal with the Palestinians.

7.
And 2 quick questions:
But is it good for the peace process? - What peace process?
And what does it mean for Palestinian statehood? - see comment number 1.

Watcher's Council Submissions

Welcome to the Watcher's Council, a blogging group consisting of some of the most incisive blogs in the 'sphere, and the longest running group of its kind in existence. Every week, the members nominate two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council. Then we vote on the best two posts, with the results appearing on Friday.

Council News:

This week, The PostWest, The Grouch, Maggie's Notebook and Capitalist Preservation took advantage of the generous offer of link whorage and earned honorable mention status.

You can, too. Want to see your work appear on the Watcher’s Council homepage in our weekly contest listing? Didn’t get nominated by a Council member? No worries.

Simply e-mail a link at rmill2k@msn.com with the subject heading ‘Honorable mention’ no later than Monday 6PM PST to be considered for our honorable mention category, and return the favor by creating a post on your site linking to the Watcher’s Council contest for the week.

It's a great way of exposing your best work to Watcher’s Council readers and Council members. while grabbing the increased traffic and notoriety. And how good is that, eh?

So, let's see what we have this week....

Council Submissions

• The Colossus of Rhodey – Greg Mortenson -- meet Rigoberta Menchu
• VA Right - Breast Cancer Survivor Humiliated and Sexually Molested at Richmond, VA Airport
• The Noisy Room – National Day of Incitement and Intimidation
• Joshuapundit-Obama's Real Easter Message
• The Political Commentator – The Reality Of Airport Insecurity!
• Right Truth – I don't care any more. Yes I do. No I don't...
• Simply Jews – Disraeli, Move Over, Bibi Is Coming. And More About Some Women
• GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD – Decline And Fall Of Pakistan
• Snapped Shot – Out Of Proportion
• The Razor – It's 1979 - Just With Worse Music
• Bookworm Room – What happens when government (state or federal) is pathologically hostile to business
• New Zeal – Red Reps 8 Hansen Clarke: Michigan Freshman Congressman’s Hard Core Communist Connections
• Rhymes With Right – What Must We Consider With Regards To Terry Jones?
• The Glittering Eye -The Mall Parking Lot Poll

Honorable Mentions

• The Grouch - Oil - The Energy Source of the Future
• Maggie's Notebook - Cultural Marxism: The Doom of Language
• The Post West - The Illusion of Power
• Capitalist Preservation - Campaign 2012: The Titan of Entitlements

Non-Council Submissions

• The Adam Carolla Show – In Defense of Terry Jones... Sort of submitted by The Colossus of Rhodey
• Yid With Lid – AGAIN!!! Palestinians Desecrate Joseph's Tomb With Murder and Fire submitted by VA Right
• Survival Blog–33 Way To Encourage Atlas To Shrug submitted by The Noisy Room
• Caroline Glick -Obama's Altruistic Foreign Policy submitted by The Political Commentator
• Barry Rubin – How the West Is Being Turned into a Version of the Middle East submitted by Joshuapundit
• Just A Conservative Girl -Et Tu, Stacy McCain submitted by Right Truth
• The Passing Parade – AND FLIGHTS OF ANGELS SING THEE TO THY REST, UNLESS YOU'RE FLYING COACH submitted by Simply Jews
• Foreign Policy Online/Michael Oren – The Ultimate Ally submitted by GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD
• Big Journalism/Ron Futrell – More Media Disconnect on High Gas Prices submitted by Snapped Shot
• Pajamas Media/Will Collier –Thanks to Obama, Gas Jumps in a Flash submitted by The Razor
• myWest Texas.com-Could a three-inch lizard collapse the West Texas oil industry? submitted by Bookworm Room
• RBO – Do You Live In a One-World-Government ‘Sustainable’ Community Yet? submitted by New Zeal
• Big Jolly Politics – Deja Straus all over again submitted by Rhymes with Right
• The Belgravia Dispatch – The Syrian Leadership's Shame submitted by The Glittering Eye
• Sarah Palin – America Deserves Libya Explanation submitted by The Watcher
• Seraphic Secret – Passover, 2011: In Every Generation submitted by The Watcher

Enjoy!

US demise is all too obvious

Reader's Allen Z. Hertz comment to the article on the delusional Obama Syria policy has one of the best description of the collapse of the US induces by incompetence and mismanagement. The comparison to the 1930's Europe--which I have argued for a long time--is particularly apt:

Thoughts of a Canadian in China: Whether due to sheer ineptitude or by sinister design, the disaster that is current USA foreign policy in the Middle East will probably soon invite other players to seize this historic opportunity of USA mismanagement and decline.  In this regard, there are only too many parallels with the 1930′s. Iran is Nazi Germany. Israel is Czechoslovakia. Obama plays the role of Neville Chamberlain. The Europeans are cast as their feckless selves. The fact of weakness and the perception of weakness are together often one of the principal causes of major wars. Round the world Obama is feared perhaps only in Israel. However, what some USA pollsters call “the political class” inhabit an ideological bubble, wherein there are all the answers and nothing but praise for Obama (“the dear leader”) who is imagined to be intelligent, wise and capable. But, in Beijing, Moscow and Tehran nobody of any weight thinks that Obama is intelligent, wise and capable. For those outside “the political class,” there has been enough time to take the measure of the man, and consequently the enemies of the USA are greatly emboldened. At home, perhaps too many Americans are still distracted by economic woes. Nonetheless, there have been some recent opinion polls showing that confidence in Obama’s handling of foreign policy is beginning to slip. And to be sure, there will probably be lots more bitter criticism in the months to come as the USA struggles to deal with the fallout from the growing international disorder that the Obama administration seems to consistently encourage. Can it possibly be that such a great country as the USA is unable to produce a solid candidate worthy of the presidency? With an eye to 2012, this can be asked of both Republicans and Democrats. However, in the nature of things, the burden is today on the Republican Party to get serious and find an experienced standard bearer fully qualified to lead the USA in the very troubled times ahead.

Fatah-Hamas reconciliation gives the West a unity pretext for Palestinian state, with disregard to Israel

Note that while Mubarak has worked tirelessly to achieve a reconciliation, he failed. What does the succes of the new Egypt say about it?

If true--and experience suggests skepticism is warranted--note what this will do: The West will create a state with two Hamas borders with Israel linked by the narrowest section of central Israel, in the context of a hostile Egypt, two Israeli northern borders with Iran and a Jordan whose internal problems may well push it to join the hostile camp.

The Palestinians (and Iran) had a strategy and Oslo was compatible with it. Israel  had delusions, not a strategy, and Oslo was one of them.

Hamas and Fatah to Kiss, Make Up?

Egyptian officials claim delegations from Fatah and Hamas have hammered out an agreement to form an interim Palestinian Authority government and fix a date for elections, Reuters reports.


"The consultations resulted in full understandings over all points of discussions, including setting up an interim agreement with specific tasks and to set a date for election," Egyptian intelligence said in a statement.


On Tuesday a Hamas delegation was reported to be in Cairo for talks on Fatah-Hamas reconciliation.


The Hamas delegation met with Egyptian Foreign Minister Nabil Elaraby and members of the ruling military council in Cairo while, at the same time, PA President Mahmoud Abbas sat down with an Egyptian diplomat in Ramallah.


According to WAFA, Abbas told Egyptian Ambassador to the PA Yasser Othman, "Egypt is the backbone of our people's aspirations toward having an independent state with Jerusalem as its capital."


Whether the reported reconciliation between bitter rivals Hamas and Fatah is sustainable is a dubious proposition.


The Fatah-Hamas rivalry became entrenched after Hamas won big in the last PA elections, which resulted in Abbas purging Hamas officials from the PA stronghold in Ramallah and Hamas violently seizing control of its own stronghold in Gaza.


The announcement comes as Abbas lobbies for the unilateral declaration of a PA state by the United Nations in September.


Many security officials have warned allowing Hamas to return to prominence in the PA would lead to a Hamas take-over in Judea and Samaria in addition to Gaza.


Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu responded to the report saying the PA could have peace with Israel or Hamas - not both.


(IsraelNationalNews.com)

Note Netanyahu's response: No peace with Israel if peace with Hamas. OK, but how exactly will that work for Israel?

Some explications by Barry Rubin (Fatah-Hamas Agreement: Another Nail in the “Peace Process’s” Coffin) and Omri Ceren (Hamas, Fatah initial a fake agreement).


I will add that this will also allow Hamas to build itself in the West Bank and either win the elections, or do what it did in Gaza and take it over by force--Fatah doesn't stand a chance. And the West will have no compunction to deal with Hamas and give them a state. All the talk about stopping aid to the PA is wishful thinking.

Mubarak's fall was, indeed, a game changing event: Fatah has lost its main Arab supporter and, due to Obama's incompetence, has not produced any results from the peace process; and Hamas has gained a critical supporter in its war with Israel.

The US has already revealed  what its position will be, which was predictable:

State officials told Ynet that the new agreement sends a message that in the absence of apeace process and amid Mideast unrest, the PA can also walk the road of radicalization."The details of the agreement must be examined. The PA is sending a message which can be problematic for Israel and is aimed at stressing that without a peace process, the Palestinians have other options that are not necessarily in Israel's interest," one state official said.

In other words, instead of objecting to unity with Hamas, the US  prefers that Israel capitulates and agrees to all PA demands , knowing full well what will happen if Israel does.

UPDATE: US disconnected from reality:
  
After Fatah-Hamas reconciliation, US plays it cool

Krystalnacht London 2011

Who is with me?

One sunny afternoon a group of locals decided it was time to tell the world that their town was no place for businesses owned by Jews. The group met outside a local Jewish-owned shop. They were determined to shut it down, they brought with them signs to remind people that Jews were baby killers, that they were murderers and thieves who could not be trusted, that they stole from their neighbours and ruined their livelihoods. Standing outside the store, the group spent hours shouting at people as they entered the shop, chanting and intimidating the workers inside. The shop remained open, but the owners decided it was time to hire some extra security. The locals decided they would not stop until the store was run out of town.

Week after week the group met outside the shop continuing their tirades and making every possible effort to discourage people from going in the store. The shop began losing business, the employees began to lose morale – they hoped their gentile neighbours would support them. After all, they had been good neighbours and only wanted to service their customer so they could support their family. As it turns out, their neighbours were not so interested in supporting them, they were losing business too and they wanted the weekly bullying to stop. Sure, it’s too bad that your shop is being targeted, but it is hurting our bottom line. Those Jews are causing trouble wherever they go, they should only sell their goods through catalogues, if at all. They talked amongst themselves and came up with a solution: it was time for the Jews to go. The entire street would be better off without them. Jews bring trouble wherever they go. So the neighbouring businesses complained to the landlord – can’t you do something about these pesky Jews and their little shop? It is hurting our business and we do not want them here! And the landowner agreed. It was time for the Jews to go. He would not renew their lease. And that was the end of the Jewish owned shop. And all the shop owners and all the townspeople rejoiced, they had finally gotten rid of the Jews.

This was not a Jewish owned shop in Warsaw in 1935, this is an Israeli owned store in London in 2011. As regular readers now, SMW has been following the BDS movement’s efforts to shut down London’s Ahava store since the regular protests began after Operation Cast Lead. These bi-weekly events were initially small, but they grew in numbers and ferocity – you can read coverage of them here. After over a year of regular protesting, the Ahava store in Covent Garden has been forced to close its doors. The landowners refuse to renew their lease. And their neighbours are happy to see them go:

Colin George, manager of clothes shop The Loft, next door to Ahava, said:

"I'm pleased Ahava is leaving. It's brought the street down. I've complained to the landlords, as has everyone here. Everyone would like them to leave. I wish they had left two years ago.
"Protesters are just going to follow them around, wherever they go. Maybe they should be an online business instead."

During the 1930s, countries across Eastern Europe became increasingly hostile towards their Jewish populations. Aside from anti-Semitic rhetoric coming from the pulpit and the press, generally the first active steps taken against the Jewish community were numerus clausus laws (law regulating the number of Jewish students allowed in schools) and boycotts of Jewish owned businesses. These movements, combined with a turbulent economy led to the pauperization of many Jewish communities. However restrictions on education and economic isolation were not enough to satisfy the anti-Semitic fever sweeping the region, and so they were followed by the removal of Jews from public service, medical and legal professions, some beatings, some killings, a pogrom here, a pogrom there, the complete and utter delegitimizing of the Jew’s right to exist, and six million Jews starved, shot, gassed, burned, beaten, and suffocated to death. Their neighbours were not there to help them, in many cases their neighbours were more than willing to round Jews up and lock them in a burning barn or hand them over to the local police; the Jews were bringing the whole neighbourhood down and something had to be done.

After the Shoah public anti-Semitism was not so stylish, but it still existed, it was just undercover. Europe did not and for the most part still does not want to talk about the Shoah. Sure some monuments have gone up here and there, a nice token to remember those dead Jews, and a rather sanitized Holocaust curriculum is taught in some countries, but for the most part it is a blip on Europe’s collective memory. It is there, it happened everyone knows that (with some notable exceptions), but the details are fuzzy. Anti-Israel films are churned out by art houses on a regular basis; however it took a full 68 years before a movie about Opération Vent Printanier (perhaps one of the most taboo events in France’s recent history) was made. This is not an accident.

In the 21st century it is not acceptable to be identified as an anti-Semite, but it is du rigeur to be anti-Israel, or as the kids call it a ‘social justice advocate.’ And so within the BDS movement there is a convergence of various groups; the Hamas loving terror supporters, the democracy hating socialist-communists, the women’s libbers who turn a blind eye to how women are treated in Israel’s neighbouring countries, the student activists who believe whatever their professors tell them as long as it is anti-Israel and anti-American, the gay rights groups who don’t care that Hamas’ sugar daddy hangs gays from cranes, the social justice activists who are so busy condemning Israel they forgot to protest women being stoned to death in Afghanistan, and a few randoms. But they all have something in common: they hate Israel and they want Israel as it is to cease to exist. They want Israeli businesses to suffer. If you suggest there is a touch of anti-Semitism lingering in the BDS air, or compare BDS to the boycotting of Jews before the Shoah they will accuse you of using the Holocaust to shield Israel from criticism. The thing is I don’t think these groups want all Israeli businesses to suffer, just the ones that are owned by the Jews. Delegitimizing Israel helps a number of groups work towards their goals, and it gives Europe a chance to ease its post-Shoah guilt, ‘hey all these years those Jews have been trying to make us feel sooooo bad about the Holocaust, but they got their own country and look what happened – they are the new Nazis….maybe it’s a good thing we got them out of Europe.’ And the Arab world wants them out of Israel.

The closing of London’s Ahava store is a victory for the BDS movement, one that will embolden them. They did not need a big budget, large crowds, or massive support – all they needed was a few dozen people to show up outside the store for a couple hours every Saturday and stir up trouble. The cowardly behaviour of Ahava’s neighbouring businesses and landlords only strengthened their stance. What is to stop them now from targeting every Israeli owned business in London, one at a time, until they are all shut down? What is to stop them from going into Waitrose every week and smashing up their Israeli produce until they stop stocking it?

Most people who read this will shake their heads and sigh, ‘that is so terrible’ and then go to the next link and forget about it. This is not acceptable. Doing nothing is not acceptable unless you want to keep being the loser. The only reason I ever went to Monmouth Street (where the Ahava shop is) was to buy Ahava products. It is in a very touristy area and it is just not my favourite place. I will never, ever again shop at ANY store on this street and I will certainly never again step in the door of The Loft where the staff are apparently ready to cheerlead for a 21st century Kristallnacht. More importantly – tomorrow I am going to be purchasing a boxload of Ahava products. I don’t care if fascist bullies stand outside every store I shop at, I will not turn a blind eye to this thuggery, I will not be intimidated and I will not back down.

Who is with me?

Editor's Note: Just to clarify any confusion - the Ahava store in Covent Garden remains open until their lease expires. So far now, you can still head down there and give them some business. I am stocking up on Ahava products today.

UPDATE: Apparently Colin George of The Loft has had a change of heart.....or he was misquoted by The JC.....or the flood of emails complaining about these ridiculous alleged statements caused him to rethink his position......or all of the above. Call me a cynic but I am not sure how one goes from I wish they had left two years ago, to I love Ahava. But hey....take from this what you will....

Syria Massacre: Hey, Samantha Power, where are you?

Max Boot (Syrian Protesters Shot Down while Shouting “We Are Peaceful” )

Given that the U.S. launched a military intervention in Libya to prevent such slaughter from occurring in Benghazi, what, I wonder, will we do about these atrocities in Syria where more than a hundred people have been killed in this weekend alone? Again no one is advocating military intervention, but why aren't we leading an international push to sanction the Assad regime, to freeze its assets, and to bring war crimes charges against its leaders? Why, at the very least, aren't we recalling our ambassador from Damascus? How can President Obama champion the rights of Tunisians, Egyptians, Libyans--and turn his back on the people of Syria who are in open revolt against one of the region's most anti-American dictators? Perhaps if the president watches this video clip, he will be spurred into action.

PowerLine (If only Obama knew!):

Consider that the government of Syria is Iran's strategic ally. That it is the proud host of Hamas and Hezbollah and a state sponsor of terrorism. Consider further that the government of Syria is a sworn enemy of the United States, responsible for the death and maiming of many Americans.

Consider also the role of the government of Syria in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri in Beirut in 2005. You know, the assassination that prompted President Bush to withdraw the American ambassador to Syria. Consider the fact that butchery is a key element of the Assad family business.
Somehow, "If only Obama knew!" doesn't quite do justice to the case.

UPDATE: Here's the pathetic West and UN to whom Obama wants to defer:

European push for UN condemnation of Syria fails

Peres, the Israeli left and the Oslo syndrome

I titled an earlier post about Israel's President Shim'on Peres "Israel's Jimmy Carter" and claimed that he is a useful idiot.

Kenneth Levin, the psychiatrist author of THE STOCKHOLM SYNDROME, has also written THE OSLO SYNDROME: Delusions of a People Under Siege which applies the former syndrome to Israel. It is not surprising that all its 13 readers who reviewed it on Amazon gave it 5 stars. Here's one review:

This book is problably the most detailed and researched book ever written on the history of how liberalism has infected and destroyed the State of Israel. Through the constant appeasment of its enemies who want nothing but the death of Israel, Israel has backed itself into a corner from which even the author (I infer) feels it has little chance of recovering. This book is a must read for anyone who cares about Israel!

Emphasis mine. Note that the reviewer concurs with my Peres argument. as well as my claim for years that Oslo has been a fatal strategic blunder by Israel. Here's Benny Morris (Palestinians Dupe West):

Palestinian strategy is rather simple (and not particularly clever, though it does manage to take in a surprising number of Westerners): Because of the demographic threat (an Arab majority in a Jewish state) and because of international pressure for self-determination for the Palestinians and an end to Israel's military occupation, Israelis will eventually accept, however reluctantly, a Palestinian state encompassing the Palestinian-majority territories of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. Israel will eventually unilaterally withdraw (as it has already done from the Gaza Strip). So why offer or give the Israelis recognition and peace in exchange?

Rather, once this mini-state is achieved, unfettered by any international obligations like a peace treaty—and having promised nothing in exchange for their statehood—the Palestinians will be free to continue their struggle against Israel, its complete demise being their ultimate target. Inevitably, the armed struggle—call it guerrilla warfare, call it terrorism—will then be resumed. And, alongside it, so will the political warfare—the delegitimization of the Jewish state and, most centrally, the demand for the refugees of 1948/1967 to be allowed to return to their homes and lands (what the Palestinians define as the "Right of Return"). The refugee issue plays well with public opinion in the West, which somehow fails to notice that such a return will mean that Israel proper will become an Arab-majority territory, i.e., no more Jewish state. In democracies, what publics accept or support eventually becomes what leaders advocate.And, on the military and political levels, no one will be able to fault the Palestinians.

They will have broken no treaty and violated no solemn agreement. They won't have signed a "no further claims" clause or a "no more war" commitment, as Barak, Clinton and Olmert had demanded as essential components of a two-state peace settlement. They will have received their mini-state, a launching pad for further assault on Israel, without giving anything in return. 

The West is not necessarily duped -- that's what they really want.

UPDATE: The delusion that has been defeating Israel:

Dozens of protesters gathered in front of the Israeli embassy in Egypt’s capital, Cairo, on Wednesday and demanded that Egypt sever ties with Israel and end gas exports to it, AFP reported.

According to the report, the protesters got together on a bridge next to the high-rise building where the embassy is located and chanted: “the people demand the cancellation of normalization” as well as “the gas must stop,” referring to Egypt’s exports of natural gas to Israel.

One of the protesters was left-wing blogger Hossam el-Hamalawy, who claimed the demonstration came in response to recent remarks by Israeli President Shimon Peres, who praised the Egyptian revolt that toppled the government in February and caused former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to step down.

AFP quoted el-Hamalawy as saying that “Peres issued a statement recently calling on Egyptian youth to normalize (with Israel), and this is the Egyptian youth's response.”

The BBC a useful idiot? Noooooooooooooo, really?

WikiLeaks Accuses BBC of Being Part of ‘Propaganda Media Network’ for Al Qaeda

The BBC could be a part of a ‘possible propaganda media network’ for al-Qeada, according to the leaked U.S. files on the Guantanamo detainees, published by WikiLeaks.

A phone number of someone at the BBC Bush House, the headquarters of the BBC World Service, was found in phone books and programmed into the mobile phones of a number of militants seized by the U.S. forces.

“The London, United Kingdom, phone number 0044 207 XXX XXXX was discovered in numerous seized phone books and phones associated with extremist-linked individuals,” according to the assessment on one of the detainees at the Guantanamo camp, dated 21 April 2007. “The number is associated with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).’

The U.S. assessment file said forces had uncovered many ‘extremist links’ to the BBC number – indicating that extremists could have made contacts with employees at the broadcaster who were sympathetic to extremists or had information on ‘ACM’ (anti-Coalition militia) activities.

It says: “Analyst Note: Numerous extremist links to this BBC number indicates a possible propaganda media network connection. Network analysis might provide leads to individuals with either sympathetic ties to extremists or possibly possessing information on ACM operations.”

The BBC number appears in the file of Turki Mishawi Zaid Alj-Amri, a Saudi who was “assessed to be a member of al-Qaeda, who travelled to Afghanistan to participate in jihad.”

The leaked U.S. file says Alj-Amri had “stayed at al-Qaeda facilities, received training at an al-Qaeda camp, and served under al-Qaida leadership in Tora Bora, AF. Detainee’s pocket litter links him to significant Anti-Coalition Militia (ACM) personnel and groups.”

It says: “Many of the telephone numbers in his pocket litter have been associated with multiple ACM personnel, indicating he may have played a greater role in multiple activities than previously assessed.” He was repatriated to Saudi Arabia in November 2007, along with 13 other men.

In February 2009 the Saudi Government published a list of the 85 most wanted suspected terrorists, which included an individual named Turki Mashawi Al Aseery.

The BBC number listed on the file is now dead, according to the Daily Telegraph (UK), but the revelation could further dent the broadcaster’ reputation for impartiality. It has for years faced claims it is biased towards the left.

But this is the first time the BBC has been linked to Islamic extremism. In September 2006, BBC chairman Michael Grade held an ‘impartiality summit’ to assess whether there was a left-wing bias.

A leaked account of the meeting showed that executives admitted they would broadcast an interview with Osama Bin Laden, the founder of al-Qaeda. They said they would give him a platform to explain his views, if he approached them.

Former BBC political editor Andrew Marr later said that “BBC is not impartial or neutral. It’s a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people. It has a liberal bias not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.”

A spokesman for the BBC said: “Independence and impartiality are at the heart of all BBC World Service output. The service has interviewed representatives of organisations from all sides involved in the Afghan conflict so it would not be surprising that a number believed to relate to the BBC Pashto service was in circulation.” [via Daily Mail (UK) and The Telegraph (UK)]

 

 

Howard Jacobson: The new anti-semitic strategy

Ludicrous, brainwashed prejudice

So that's Passover almost done with for another year.

Except that Passover is never done with. To me it's the greatest Jewish festival because the story is so good. We sit around the Seder table and relate, over and over, as though we still can't believe it, our escape from Egypt. Every depiction of the Last Supper shows Jesus relating the same story.

There's a song Jews sing at Passover – "Dayenu". The word means "it would have been sufficient", or "enough already". It would have been sufficient had God only done this for us, and stopped there. Each verse records what he did next, insisting that that, too, would have been enough. It is written in the hypothetic-preconditional tense, imagining a lesser deliverance which we would have settled for, while at the same time acknowledging that we aren't out of the woods yet. As a boy I felt fraught during the Passover service because it seemed that even as we celebrated a narrow escape from one disaster, we were preparing for the next. A Jew has either to be ignorant of his history or mad to suppose that what has happened before won't happen again.

Myself, I wouldn't bet heavily on there being good times ahead for Jews. Anti-Zionists can assure me all they like that their position entails no harm to Jews – only witness how many Jews are themselves anti-Zionist, they say – I no longer believe them. Individually, it is of course possible to care little for Israel and to care a great deal for Jews. But in the movement of events individuals lose their voice. What carries the day is consensus, and consensus is of necessity unsubtle. By brute consensus, now, Israel is the proof that Jews did not adequately learn the lesson of the Holocaust.

Forget Holocaust denial. Holocaust denial is old hat. The new strategy – it showed its hand in Caryl Churchill's Seven Jewish Children, and surfaced again in Channel 4's recent series The Promise – is to depict the Holocaust in all its horror in order that Jews can be charged ("You, of all people") with failing to live up to it. By this logic the Holocaust becomes an educational experience from which Jews were ethically obliged to graduate summa cum laude, Israel being the proof that they didn't. "Jews know more than anyone that killing civilians is wrong," resounds an unmistakably authorial voice in The Promise. Thus are Jews doubly damned: to the Holocaust itself and to the moral wasteland of having found no humanising redemption in its horrors.

It matters not a jot to me that the writer/director of The Promise is a Jew. Jews succumbing to the age-old view of them and reviling what's Jewish in themselves has a long history. Peter Kosminsky would have it that his series is about Israel, not Jews, but in The Promise Israel becomes paradigmatic of the Jews' refusal to be improved by affliction.

In a morally intelligent world – that's to say one in which, for starters, Jews are not judged more harshly than their fellows for having been despatched to concentration camps – The Promise would be seen for the ludicrous piece of brainwashed prejudice it is. Ofcom's rejection of complaints about the drama's partiality and inaccuracy was to be expected. You can't expect a body as intellectually unsophisticated as Ofcom to adjudicate between claims of dramatic truth and truth of any other sort. And for that reason it should never have been appealed to. That said, its finding that The Promise was "serious television drama, not presented as a historical and faithful re-creation", is a poor shot at making sense of anything. You can't brush aside historical re-creation in a work of historical re-creation, nor can you assert a thing is "serious television" when its seriousness is what's in question. A work isn't serious by virtue of its thinking it is. Wherein lies the seriousness, one is entitled to ask, when the drama creaks with the bad faith of a made-up mind.

I'm an art man, myself. Aesthetics trump the lot. And "seriousness" is an aesthetic quality or it's nothing. But you will usually find that bad intentions makes bad art, and bad art, while it might be solemn and self-righteous, forfeits the right to be called serious. From start to finish, The Promise was art with its trousers round its ankles. Yes, it looked expensive, took its time, was beautifully shot and well acted. But these are merely the superficies of art, and the more dangerously seductive for that. "Gosh, I never knew such and such had happened," I heard people say after one or other simplifying episode, as though high production values guarantee veracity.

One-sidedness is a failure of imagination; aesthetically, The Promise failed because it couldn't conceal the dramatic monotony of its bias. Just about every Palestinian was sympathetic to look at, just about every Jew was not. While most Palestinians might fairly be depicted as living in poor circumstances, most Israeli Jews might not be fairly depicted as living in great wealth. The family life of Palestinians, when it was not rent with fear, was loving and considerate; family life among the Jews consisted of spitting words of violence against Arabs and callous socialising around a pool built on appropriated land. Juxtaposition counts for much in art, and when every juxtaposition – of beauty, wealth, humanity, kindliness, suffering – favours one party to the conflict at the expense of another, the simplicity of view begins to show itself in uninventiveness and repetition. Though I, too, have found Palestinians to be people of immense charm, I could only laugh in derision at The Promise every time another shot of soft-eyed Palestinians followed another shot of hard-faced Jews.

As for the politics, they were as transparently simple-minded as the casting. An act of violence carried out by a Palestinian was shown to be no different in motive and ambition from an act of violence carried out by a Jew, but the same understanding was not extended in the other direction, though if A resembles B, then B must resemble A.

But then of moral equivalence of any sort, except when anti-Jewish propaganda required it, The Promise was bare. Therefore, I say to Ofcom, no, the drama was not serious. It only looked serious because it said what the consensus says. The truth is now nailed to the floor. Jews went through hell only to build a hell for others. Trying arguing otherwise and you are an apologist for that hell.

We have been here before. Dayenu: it would have been enough had God done no more than help us out the last time. But it won't ever be enough.

Obama Doctrine: Leading from behind

In the New Yorker Ryan Lizza (The Consequentialist):

Obama’s reluctance to articulate a grand synthesis has alienated both realists and idealists. “On issues like whether to intervene in Libya there’s really not a compromise and consensus,” Slaughter said. “You can’t be a little bit realist and a little bit democratic when deciding whether or not to stop a massacre.”

Brzezinski, too, has become disillusioned with the President. “I greatly admire his insights and understanding. I don’t think he really has a policy that’s implementing those insights and understandings. The rhetoric is always terribly imperative and categorical: ‘You must do this,’ ‘He must do that,’ ‘This is unacceptable.’ ” Brzezinski added, “He doesn’t strategize. He sermonizes.”

Unlike his immediate predecessors, Obama came of age politically during the post-Cold War era, a time when America’s unmatched power created widespread resentment. Obama believes that highly visible American leadership can taint a foreign-policy goal just as easily as it can bolster it. In 2007, Obama said, “America must show—through deeds as well as words—that we stand with those who seek a better life. That child looking up at the helicopter must see America and feel hope.”

In 2009 and early 2010, Obama was sometimes criticized for not acting at all. He was cautious during Iran’s Green Revolution and deferential to his generals during the review of Afghanistan strategy. But his response to the Arab Spring has been bolder. He broke with Mubarak at a point when some of the older establishment advised against it. In Libya, he overruled Gates and his military advisers and pushed our allies to adopt a broad and risky intervention. It is too early to know the consequences of these decisions. Libya appears to be entering a protracted civil war; American policy toward Mubarak frightened—and irritated—Saudi Arabia, where instability could send oil prices soaring. The U.S. keeps getting stuck in the Middle East.

Nonetheless, Obama may be moving toward something resembling a doctrine. One of his advisers described the President’s actions in Libya as “leading from behind.” That’s not a slogan designed for signs at the 2012 Democratic Convention, but it does accurately describe the balance that Obama now seems to be finding. It’s a different definition of leadership than America is known for, and it comes from two unspoken beliefs: that the relative power of the U.S. is declining, as rivals like China rise, and that the U.S. is reviled in many parts of the world. Pursuing our interests and spreading our ideals thus requires stealth and modesty as well as military strength. “It’s so at odds with the John Wayne expectation for what America is in the world,” the adviser said. “But it’s necessary for shepherding us through this phase.”

A couple of points arise. First, 'leading from behind' is a contradiction in terms that sounds like an attempt to rationalize failure to lead as adjutment to American decline (which Lizza seems to realize).

Second, how does one reconcile

The one consistent thread running through most of Obama’s decisions has been that America must act humbly in the world.

 with  Brzerzinki's: 

"The rhetoric is always terribly imperative and categorical: ‘You must do this,’ ‘He must do that,’ ‘This is unacceptable.’ ” Brzezinski added, “He doesn’t strategize. He sermonizes.”

The reality is that Obama came to the job with the doctrine of "acting humbly in the world" that was ideological, not a realist realization of American decline. And on more than one occasion he has revealed considerable ignorance and shalowness. PowerLine (Obama as political historian):

Barack Obama is a creature of the modern university and therefore an amazingly shallow man. I have written about his historical howlers in the New York Post column "Anti-terror oops," in the Weekly Standard column "The Kennedy-Khrushchev conference for dummies," and in the Power Line post "Obama veers into the Daily Ditch."
Obama's historical ignorance could be a full time beat for somebody who does this work for a living, and it tells us something truly important about Barack Obama. His ignorance is as broad as it is deep [NB: There have been economics and foreign policy too]. Not that you couldn't deduce that on your own from his performance on the job.

Yet Obama has been impressed with his own brilliance and audacity (ability to "lower the oceans"?). This is a result of sailing smoothly and rapidly up through the political process, protected by the media, without much effort and challenges and without any record of achievement whatsoever (I prefer to refrain from explaining why), essentially just speechifying.
That is bound to induce a sense of superiority.

It would be easy for Obama, under the circumstances, to expect that sheer speeches about America's humility and "engagement" would be enough for the world to be as ecstatic about him as the American public and act in accordance to his preferrences. It must be a terrible shock that, instead, he was interpreted by both America's enemies and allies--correctly, I think--as lacking in substance and seriousness, and weak.

Christopher Dickey (Obama's Middle East Head Spin):

Surely President Obama can do better than that. Or perhaps not. The drama—the tragedy—increasingly apparent at the White House is of a brilliant intellect who is nonetheless confounded by events, a strategist whose strategies are thwarted and who is left with almost no strategy at all, a persuasive politician and diplomat who gets others to crawl out on limbs, has them take big risks to break through to a new future, and then turns around and walks away from them when the political winds in the United States threaten to shift. It’s not enough to say the Cabinet is divided about what to do. Maybe the simplest and in many ways the most disturbing explanation for all the flailing is offered by veteran journalist and diplomat Leslie H. Gelb: “There is one man in this administration who debates himself.” President Obama.

These patterns of behavior and their consequences have been on horrifying display in the blood-drenched streets of Misrata, Libya, where the population has begged for more support from NATO and the United States. But they did not begin with Libya, or with the surprise uprising in Tunisia in January or the stunning fall of Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak in February. They were evident from Year 1 of the Obama presidency in his excruciating deliberations over the Afghan surge, in the hand extended ineffectually to Iran, and the lines drawn in the sand, then rubbed out and moved back, and further back, in the dismal, failed efforts to build a Palestinian peace process. But in Libya the crisis of American tentativeness has grown worse almost by the day. Muammar Gaddafi holds on, despite Obama’s demand for him to leave, and the civilians that the Americans, their allies, and the United Nations vowed to protect are being slaughtered.

I suspect that the imperative language may well reflect the gap between belief in his own brilliance (I don't know if Dickey is serious or facetious) and persuasive power and the catastrophic consequences of his policies (or lack thereof).

UPDATE: I recommend JoshuaPundit (Obama's Real Easter Message)

PA Police Shoot on Car of Worshippers, Killing One and Wounding 4 Others

They're ready -- Give them a state!

CAMERA: Early Sunday morning, Palestinian Authority police officers shot at a group of 15 Breslev Hassidim leaving a prayer service at Joseph's Tomb in Nablus. Ben Yosef Livnat, a married father of four who is a nephew of Knesset member Limor Livnat, was shot dead and several others were wounded, some seriously. The shooting took place as the three carloads of Hassidim left Joseph's Tomb in PA controlled territory. They had not coordinated their visit in advance with the IDF. According to the head of the Samaria regional council,, Breslev hassidim routinely attempt to enter Joseph's Tomb without coordination. He said that the Palestinian Police are familiar with this regular occurrence, and would have no reason to shoot at the worshippers. After the incident, Palestinians rioted and set fires near Joseph's tomb. Read about it here and here.

The burning question on Israelis' minds is how such an incident bodes for Israel's security and freedom of worship under a Palestinian state?

UPDATE: Jonathan Tobin (Murder at Tomb Illustrates the Future of Jewish Holy Sites in a Palestinian State)

Today’s attack on Jewish worshippers at Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus needs to be understood as something more significant than just another unfortunate instance of violence between Jews and Arabs. It is nothing less than a warning of what will happen once Palestinians achieve full sovereignty, as the Obama administration appears to be demanding, over all of the West Bank.

 UPDATE:

A group of Breslov Hassidim’s regular twilight visit to Palestinian controlled Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus came to a tragically violent end Sunday: According to one of the Breslovers, Palestinian police officers fired at the convoy as they were on their way in to the Tomb.

“When we got back to the vehicles the police shot at the vehicles, they were screaming ‘Allahu Akbar’. It was crazy, they were shooting to kill. I screamed at the driver to drive out of there quickly. When we got to Har Bracha we attended to the wounded.”

For a history of similar incidents see  Jeff Dunetz (Palestinians Shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ As They Desecrated Joseph’s Tomb With Murder and Fire)

You can't buy brains at the supermarket

H/t Elder of Zyion



JoshuaPundit (Islamophobia)

Why the IDF can't win

What happens when you assign an academic philosopher to draw the moral code to guide the military operations of your army, which fights against a genocidal enemy that is also genocidal towards its own population. And even when your army adheres to the code, it, not the enemy is condemned for genocide.
And the enemy knows it.

Or "How to instill hope in your enemy that you'll be defeated and give him the facilities to achieve it in a moral way".

The Moralist
David Horovitz

Tel Aviv University philosophy professor Asa Kasher co-authored the first IDF Code of Ethics and continues to work on the moral doctrines that shape the parameters of our army’s actions.

He has taught at the IDF colleges since the late 1970s and for a long time was the only professor talking to officers about military ethics. When the IDF decided to try writing a Code of Ethics, he was approached and appointed head of a team of generals that wrote a draft and then the final version of the 1994 code, which was approved by chief of staff Ehud Barak and prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.

In the wake of Richard Goldstone’s belated withdrawal of the accusation that Israel deliberately targeted civilians in Operation Cast Lead, and the fresh round of moral argument the judge’s climbdown has provoked, I contacted Kasher to discuss the IDF’s ethics. I wanted to understand the thinking that underpins IDF dos and don’ts, the problematics of grappling with enemies that do not follow any such rules, and the gaping discrepancy, Goldstone’s reversal notwithstanding, between most Israelis’ certainty of the IDF’s morality and the international diplomatic, media and legal community’s relentless opprobrium.

I also wanted to put to Kasher specific criticisms of IDF actions in Gaza, including some that have been penned by columnists in this newspaper. Among them: the assertion that Israel was unwarrantedly heavy-handed in Operation Cast Lead, that the “kill ratio” of Israelis and Palestinians indicates a disproportionate Israeli response, and that we can hardly complain about Hamas fighting out of uniform and from within residential areas when it is Hamas that was under attack from an invading Israel in that operation, and it naturally defended itself as effectively as it could.

These are not criticisms, I should add, for which I feel any sympathy. But they are widely invoked, they will be raised again if, or rather when, the IDF is next drawn into conflict, and I wanted the IDF’s guiding moralist to address them.

Kasher said much that I might have anticipated, but a great deal more, too, that placed Israel’s recent wars in a context that I had not fully drawn before. I was particularly struck by his explanation for the change in IDF approach over recent years to the endangering of its soldiers – the altered balance it has drawn, prompted by Kasher, when it comes to the safety of its personnel, on the one hand, and the “non-dangerous neighbors” of terrorists, on the other.

People think, he said, “that soldiers are there to be put into danger, that soldiers are there to take risks, that this is their world, this is their profession. But that is so far from the reality in Israel, where most of the soldiers are in the IDF because service is mandatory.” When it comes to Israeli soldiers, “I, the state, took them out of their homes. Instead of him going to university or going to work, I put a uniform on him, I trained him, and I dispatched him. If I am going to endanger him, I owe him a very, very good answer as to why. After all, this is a democratic state that is obligated to protect its citizens. How dare I endanger him?”

Prof. Kasher, I want to talk to you about the nature of the warfare Israel has been drawn into in recent years – the fact that it’s not army against army. Israel is now fighting against enemies that maintain their offensive capabilities in the heart of residential areas, and that fire into our residential areas.

As someone central to drafting the IDF’s moral code, I want to ask you about the moral considerations that underpin the way Israel fights these wars. And I want to know whether you believe we are capable of continuing to defend ourselves, practically and morally, against enemies that often have no moral compunctions. Are we capable, that is, of surviving, protecting ourselves, without sinking to their level?

I was very struck, in 2006, when I interviewed the thenair force commander Eliezer Shkedy, and he told me the Gaza Kassam crews often took kids out with them when they went to fire on Israel. I asked him whether we regarded these children as combatants, and thus were prepared to fire at them. He was offended by the question. He said that of course the IAF wouldn’t fire on them. What it had done, he said, was improved its accuracy so that it could target the Kassam crews more precisely without hitting the children. (“If we know that [the terrorist] is holding his son’s hand, we do not fire,” Shkedy said then. “Even if the terrorist is in the midst of firing a Kassam, and the Kassam is aimed to kill. We do not fire. You should know that.”)

I want to know whether we are still that careful, whether we’re still prepared to follow that kind of framework. I wonder whether it is moral not to fire when a Kassam crew is about to fire on Israeli civilians but a child that the crew has brought with them is too close and might therefore be hit.

But let’s begin with this question: Can we survive here, facing enemies that use immoral methods, without sinking to their levels?

Our responsibility is to maintain our moral standards. That’s a very important starting point because in matters of war it can sometimes get blurred. People are always talking about factors like international law, public opinion, the Western world – that is, outside factors that we’re supposed to match up to. No, I say we have to uphold our own standards.

What are those standards?

We take decisions that reflect our acceptance of some aspects of international law; other parts, we have not accepted. The prime question, in these fields of morals and ethics, is what I see when I look in the mirror – not when I watch the BBC.

When the enemy becomes more ruthless and harsher than it was in the past, then we have to protect ourselves in smarter and different ways, but still according to the standards that we have set for ourselves.

You can use the analogy of a police officer at a bank robbery. If he sees that the robber is holding a toy gun, he won’t shoot him. He’ll simply catch him. But if it’s a real gun, and the robber has already killed hostages and he’s about to kill more, and the only way to stop him and save the hostages is to shoot him, the policeman will shoot him.

That robber’s actions have required me to protect myself from him via harsher measures. It’s not a case of: he’ll shoot so I’ll shoot, or he’ll do terrible things so I’ll also do terrible things, or he doesn’t care about killing hostages so I won’t care about killing robbers. That’s absolutely not the point at all. He doesn’t care about killing hostages, but I do care: I don’t want to kill him unless there’s truly no alternative.

This robber is threatening people’s lives, so we will shoot him if there is no other alternative. If we can catch him without firing on him at all, excellent. If we can catch him by injuring him, without killing him, excellent. If there’s no alternative, it’s a tragedy to hit him, but that’s what has to be done.

And that broadly is what is happening with our enemies today. If our enemy would fight on the battlefield, on open ground, in uniform, carrying his weapons openly, then it would be a case of an army facing off against a force that behaved like an army, and children and other non-dangerous people would not get hurt. But the enemy has changed the way it fights. So we have no choice. We have to protect ourselves as necessary.

Now there’s a basis to what we have to do: We are a democratic state. And that means two things. One, we are obligated to effectively protect our citizens from all danger. So we have a police force, to protect against crime. A Health Ministry, to protect against medical dangers. A Transportation Ministry, against the dangers on the roads. And we have a Defense Ministry, to protect us against the dangers our enemies represent.

The state cannot evade this obligation. It can’t say, “I am busy, I have more important things to do.” There is nothing more important than protecting citizens’ lives. Nothing.

A democratic state wants to deal with all kinds of other things, all kinds of agreements, citizens’ rights, elections, free media and so on. Okay, fine. But to enjoy all or any of that, you have to be alive. Before you get to any of that, to protect any of that, you have to protect my life. A state is obligated to ensure effective protection of its citizens’ lives. In fact, it’s more than just life. It is an obligation to ensure the citizens’ well-being and their capacity to go about their lives. A citizen of a state must be able to live normally. To send the kids to school in the morning. To go shopping. To go to work. To go out in the evening. A routine way of life. Nothing extraordinary. The state is obliged to protect that.

At the same time, the moral foundation of a democratic state is respect for human dignity. Human dignity must be respected in all circumstances. And to respect human dignity in all circumstances means, among other things, to be sensitive to human life in all circumstances. Not just the lives of the citizens of your state. Everybody.

This applies even in our interactions with terrorists. I am respecting the terrorist’s dignity when I ask myself, “Do I have to kill him or can I stop him without killing him?”

And I certainly have to respect the human dignity of the terrorists’ nondangerous neighbors – who are not a threat. We always talk about “innocents,” but “innocence” is not the issue here. The issue here is whether they are dangerous. So the correct translation is “non-dangerous.”

As in, non-threatening?

Yes, that’s the significance. If they are “not dangerous,” that means I don’t have even the beginning of a moral right to harm them deliberately.

Okay, so that’s some of the theory. Now relate that to Operation Cast Lead.

Fine. We have to protect our citizens and we have to respect human dignity. But when it comes to a war like Operation Cast Lead, those two imperatives are likely to clash. I am obligated to protect my citizens, but I have no way to protect them without the non-dangerous neighbors of the terrorists becoming caught up in the conflict. What am I to do?

Two things: First, you decide what is more important in the given situation. And second, you do whatever you can so that the damage to the other side is as small as possible: Maximizing effective defense of the citizens; minimizing collateral damage.

How do I decide which of the conflicting imperatives is more important? People don’t like this idea, because they don’t understand it: They think it is immoral to give priority to the defense of the citizens of your state over the protection of the lives of the neighbors of the terrorists. They don’t understand that the world is built in such a way that responsibility is divided.

Please elaborate.

We are responsible for the residents of the State of Israel. Canada is responsible for the residents of Canada. Australia, for Australia. And that’s just fine. We are not responsible for the lives of Canadians in the same way as we are for the lives of Israelis and vice versa. This is completely accepted and completely moral and no one questions this. We don’t have one world government that is responsible for everything. We have states with their own responsibilities.

Now from this stems the fact that when you have clash of imperatives, this responsibility for one’s own citizens takes precedence over the other responsibility to the non-dangerous neighbors. This isn’t anything to do with us being Israel, or Jews. The same applies to the United States or to Canada or to any other country.

I cannot evade my prime responsibility to protect the well-being of the citizens of my country. Now, among all the means I could use to protect them, I will choose those that are better morally – better from the point of view of the effectiveness of the protection and the minimalization of the damage to the neighbors of the terrorists.

And what do we do to minimize the harm done to the neighbors of the terrorists?

We can’t separate the terrorist from his neighbors. We can’t force the terrorists to move away, because they don’t want to move away. That’s their whole strategy: To be there. The Hamas terrorists in Gaza, Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, they want to work from within. The terrorists have erased the difference between combatants and non-combatants.

They live in residential areas. They operate from within residential areas. They attack civilians. And they won’t leave when I tell them to leave. No one has the power to move them from where they are without conquering the entire area, which requires special justifications.

But if we can’t force the terrorist out, we can make the effort to move his neighbors. He won’t move away from his neighbors, but maybe his neighbors will move away from him. And experience shows that this kind of effort succeeds. That is, very many non-dangerous neighbors do move away from terrorists if they are warned.

So Israel, the IDF, carries out very intensive warning operations. Unprecedented. There are those who don’t like the term, “the most moral army in the world.” I think it’s a very complex phrase, and one has to make all kinds of professional diagnoses. You can’t just blithely invoke it. But let’s look at that claim in this particular context.

Who tries harder than we do to warn the neighbors [to leave a conflict zone]? Who does it better than we do? I don’t know if the public realizes this, but we recently carried out precisely such an act of warning – by publishing a map of Hezbollah positions in south Lebanon. Israel released details of hundreds of villages where Hezbollah has a position deep inside the village. From there, they’ll fire on us if and when they want to, and we will have to protect ourselves. That means we’ll have to fire into the village.

The publication of this map is a warning: We know, it says, that Hezbollah is intertwining its terrorists with non-dangerous neighbors. Understand that to protect ourselves in this situation will mean endangering the populace. The populace has to know that it is in a dangerous situation.

What to do in this dangerous situation? We don’t know. We’re telling those non-dangerous neighbors to give it some thought. Try to kick out Hezbollah? That is apparently very difficult. Move away from the Hezbollah position? Perhaps that is possible. Get away when the time comes? That may sound theoretical at present, but when the time comes, who knows? The fact is, this is an advance warning.

Now let’s come to Operation Cast Lead in this context. We distributed leaflets [to Gaza civilians, telling them that they should leave a potential conflict zone]. It may be that we can do that better – distribute better leaflets, more detailed, with more precise guidance on how to get away. We broke into their radio and TV broadcasts to give them announcements, to warn them. That can be done still more effectively.

We made phone calls to 160,000 phone numbers. No one in the world has ever done anything like that, ever. And it’s clear why that is effective. It’s not a piece of paper that was dropped in my neighborhood. The phone rang in my own pocket! Yes, it was a recorded message, because it’s impossible to make personal calls on that scale. But still, this was my number they dialed. It was a warning directed personally to me, not some kind of general warning.

And finally, we had the “tap on the roof” approach. The IDF used nonlethal weaponry, fired onto the roofs [of buildings being used by terrorists]. That weaponry makes a lot of noise. It constituted a very strong, noisy hint: We’re close, but you still have the chance to get out.

What we don’t use is nohal shachen (the “neighbor protocol”). I recently read comments by a British general, a commander in Afghanistan...
 
Col. Richard Kemp?

No, this was someone else, saying at a press conference, how moral his forces are. And then he described their policy, which was nohal shachen, as the symbol of the morality of British soldiers.

What did he say, specifically, that they do?

He said that when they are facing a terrorist hiding out in a building with non-dangerous neighbors, they make one of the neighbors telephone or speak through a loudspeaker to the Taliban terrorist who is in this building, and say that rather than killing him and the neighbors and destroying the house, he should surrender and that he’ll be taken away with various guarantees. This British commander was very proud of this ostensibly humane procedure – a procedure that the courts here forbid us to do. We don’t do it.

We issue warnings in an unprecedented way – not one warning, but many. We make enormous efforts to get the neighbors away from the terrorists.

Now there’s one more thing that maybe we could do, and there’s an argument surrounding it: send soldiers into the building. Send in soldiers to check that maybe someone has stayed. I am against this. Very against this.

So there’s a difference between what we did in Jenin [during Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, where 13 soldiers were killed in an ambush] and what we did in Gaza?
Yes, we changed our approach. The approach is more appropriate now. I think what we did in Jenin was a mistake. There was a primitive conception that “it’s all right to endanger soldiers.” Every time there was a dilemma like this – soldiers here and non-soldiers on the other side – the soldiers were endangered.

Why was that wrong?

You need, to a certain limit, to warn the people to get out. At a certain point, the warnings are over and there are two possibilities. That people have stayed because they don’t want to leave or because they can’t leave. If they can’t leave, despite all the warnings, despite the possibilities to get them out, even to send ambulances to get them out, that’s interesting to me, and we’ll come back to that.

But if a neighbor doesn’t want to leave, he turns himself into the human shield of the terrorist. He has become part of the war. And I’m sorry, but I may have to harm him when I try to stop the terrorist. I’ll do my best not to. But it may be that in the absence of all other alternatives, I may hurt him. I certainly don’t see a good reason to endanger the lives of soldiers in a case like that.

Sometimes people don’t understand this. They think of soldiers as, well, instruments. They think that soldiers are there to be put into danger, that soldiers are there to take risks, that this is their world, this is their profession. But that is so far from the reality in Israel, where most of the soldiers are in the IDF because service is mandatory and reserve service is mandatory. Even with a standing army, you have to take moral considerations into account. But that is obviously the case when service is compulsory: I, the state, sent them into battle. I, the state, took them out of their homes. Instead of him going to university or going to work, I put a uniform on him, I trained him, and I dispatched him. If I am going to endanger him, I owe him a very, very good answer as to why. After all, as I said, this is a democratic state that is obligated to protect its citizens. How dare I endanger him?

Even in uniform, he is still considered one of those citizens that the state is obliged to protect?

Yes, he is one of the citizens that I have an obligation to protect. But somebody has to do the protecting. So each generation produces its soldiers. Now it’s this generation. Before that it was their parents. After this, it will be their children. Their turn. Their generation.

But even now that it’s this generation, that these are the people in uniform, I need a very strong reason to send them somewhere dangerous.

Why do I conscript them to the army? Two words: No choice. Given the threats around us, a volunteer, standing army would not be sufficient.

And why did we send them to Gaza? Because for eight years before Operation Cast Lead, we tried all the other options. It didn’t help. There was no choice. We sent the army to Gaza because there was no choice.

And why did we send them to that particular theoretical house we’ve been discussing? Because there were armed terrorists in it who were attacking Israel. There was no choice. But now you want to send soldiers into that house just in case, by chance, there’s still someone inside, who doesn’t want to leave. You want me to send in soldiers to pull him out? Why? Why do I owe him that? I have issued so many warnings and this man has refused to come out. I haven’t got a strong enough reason to tell that soldier he has to go in. This man has been warned five times and decided not to leave. Therefore he took the danger upon himself. After all those warnings, one has to act against the terrorists and those of his neighbors who have decided not to leave, and not endanger the lives of the soldiers.

And what, now, of the issue of civilians who are prevented by the terrorists from leaving a conflict zone?

This has to be handled in a graduated fashion. I’ll explain. Let’s imagine a fictitious situation, whereby the terrorists have forced 20 children onto the roofs of every single building in Gaza that has been marked as a target because it has terrorists in it. That’s what I see in my reconnaissance photographs. Every single roof is covered with children.

That means that I can’t fire on those buildings. But they’re firing at me from those buildings. There are 20 children on the roof, and from the house the terrorists are firing. It’s the same in every house. If I can’t fire on any house because there are children on the roof, I have lost my capacity to protect myself. There is nothing I can do.

Always in those circumstances, people say, “Well, make peace.” Fine. Great. I want peace. We have to seek peace. But right now I’m facing these houses and they’re firing at me. Talking about a peace conference now is not really the point. Or people say, as with the cop facing the murderous bank robber, “Don’t shoot him. We need to clean up the neighborhood so that the people have jobs and don’t turn to crime.” Again, great, yes, that’s true. We have to create a situation where there aren’t criminals in that neighborhood, but right now I’ve got an armed robber in the bank and he’s threatening to kill his hostages. So, right now I have to protect the citizens of my state, and if I don’t fire at any of the houses that have children on the roof, then I won’t be able to protect my civilians. And that’s unthinkable, out of the question.

So, what I have to do, and it’s tragic however you look at it, is fire at one of those houses. The first place that they fire at me from, even though there are children on the roof, I will immediately fire on it, and some of those children will be killed – because I have no choice, because I have no other means to protect myself. The terrorists took away from me the normal means of self-defense. It’s out of the question that I not protect myself, so I hope the terrorists will take the children off the roofs, and I will wait for them to take the children off the roofs in order to defend myself against the terrorists, but if they don’t take the children off the roofs, I will continue. I have no choice. A state cannot say “I will allow my citizens to be killed because the enemy has placed children on all the roofs and I will not kill children.”

That brings me back to what you mentioned at the very beginning about your interview with former air force commander Shkedy and the circumstances when Israel will fire and won’t fire.

I can always ask myself, in all kinds of circumstances, maybe there’s a different way to stop this terrorist or that attack. Maybe I have more time. If there’s time, if there’s an alternative means, then that’s fine. When he was IDF chief of staff, Moshe Ya’alon once said that he prevented a targeted strike at [Hamas military commander Salah] Shehadeh when his daughter was right next to him. (Shehadeh was eventually killed in a targeted strike in 2002, in which 14 other people were killed, including his wife and nine children. Thenprime minister Sharon later said he would have aborted the operation had it been realized that it would cause those other fatalities.) Ya’alon evidently knew there would be another opportunity and that he could take the risk of waiting longer to strike. It wasn’t now or never.

But when it’s now or never, there is no choice. I wouldn’t sleep after giving an order which involved killing not only terrorists but also the daughter of a terrorist. If there is a choice, you have to use it because of your imperative to respect human dignity. But sometimes there’s no choice.

Is Israel facing more and more such dilemmas? Are there more and more situations in which commanders would find it hard to sleep?

We will always be obligated to protect our citizens. We will never relinquish that obligation. This is very profound. This is Israel. This is the state of the Jewish people.

I was born here and my parents came here long before World War II. I didn’t go through the Holocaust. My wife did. My wife is a survivor. What lesson do I learn from World War II? That we cannot rely on anybody else. That when it’s time to protect ourselves, there’s no one else we can rely on. And we have no exemption, ever, from thinking about how best to protect ourselves. And if the enemy puts children on all the roofs of the buildings from which it fires on us, we will not capitulate to them. It’s a tragic situation, but we won’t capitulate.

This also requires leadership that is capable of explaining to the soldiers why they have to do this – why they have to do something totally counter-intuitive.

Absolutely. And the package of measures that we take to minimize the harm to those who are not dangerous to us is truly without equal anywhere else.

When we carry out targeted killings, the approvals process is exhaustive. Then there’s a stage when it goes through “operational research.” A model of the situation is created in order to determine the most appropriate weaponry, the most appropriate plane to use, the most appropriate angle so that there’s a high likelihood that the terrorist will be hit but that the collateral damage will be as low as possible. And what Shkedy told you about targeted strikes is confirmed in the statistics. The numbers for collateral damage in such strikes are very, very small nowadays.

Now let’s say, in one such strike against a key terrorist, the pilot has fired his missile and in those few seconds before it hits the pilot suddenly sees a school bus appear on the scene. He doesn’t need anyone’s permission to abort the mission and detonate the missile elsewhere, harmlessly. He decides not to attack, in order not to cause collateral damage.

Obviously they would never seek out a yellow school bus, as was done a few days ago [in the Hamas missile attack near Kibbutz Sa’ad in which Daniel Viflik, 16, was killed]. We make immense efforts to minimize the damage on the other side, to minimize the harm to people who do not constitute a threat.

These Palestinians and Hezbollah, they’re playing this win-win game and it’s depressing to see. If Israel doesn’t fire at them, they’re very happy, and I can understand that. But if Israel does fire on them, and children are hurt, they’re also happy. They celebrate. I believe that these losses destroy the mothers and the fathers. But the community is ostensibly happy: “Great, we’ve got something nasty to say against Israel. Israel kills children.”

And you have this whole community, including parts of the international media and some Israelis, who look at these episodes with one eye. This community sees only the poor children who have been killed. And they really are pitiful children. What’s the emerging narrative? That Israel kills children and doesn’t care about it. Such aggressors. Such barbarians. And all the thousand things we do precisely to avoid such situations are ignored.

This community and various international political bodies tell us, “Yes, you’re entitled to defend yourselves. We can’t take that away from you. The right to self-defense is in the charter of the United Nations. So yes, you have to protect yourselves. But you mustn’t harm anybody who isn’t dangerous.” There is no such reality. Not in Iraq, not in Afghanistan.

Well, they ask that Israel not be disproportionate, that it not be too heavy-handed.

It’s good that you mentioned that. The world in general doesn’t have a clue what proportionality is. Proportionality, first of all, is not about numbers. The question of proportionality, according to international law, is whether the military benefit justifies the collateral damage. And secondly, also according to international law, it is a consideration for the commander in the field, because only the commander in the field can make the judgment: What does he gain from what he’s about to do and what is the collateral damage he is likely to cause? With Israel, we fire and two minutes later, the UN secretary- general is already accusing us of using disproportionate force. On what basis does he make that assumption? How can he possibly know?

And, finally, this whole concept of proportionality exists in international law only in situations where you know that you’re going to harm non-dangerous people. It’s not relevant in other circumstances. This is designed for situations where noncombatants will be hurt and in those circumstances the commander in the field must weigh the benefits and the damage. The questions of proportionality are clear only at the extremes. Between those extremes, only the commander in the field can weigh the balance. It’s very hard to give him a formula.

I want to put to you some of the criticisms that have been raised about why and how the IDF conducted Operation Cast Lead, including objections raised by columnists in this newspaper. It’s been asserted that we, Israel, invaded their territory, and they were defending themselves against us. The kill ratio, of approximately 100 to 1, has been highlighted as ostensible evidence of the IDF’s disproportionate use of force. It’s been argued that, of course Hamas didn’t engage in open, conventional conflict with us – army to army, in uniform – because they would have lost. Their only chance was to fight from within residential areas. And it’s been asserted, again as evidence of an ostensible Israeli overreaction, that while Israel sustained a little over two dozen fatalities from their attacks on us between 2005 and 2008, their losses in that period totaled 1,250.

First of all, it’s absolutely ridiculous, and I have no other word, to say that we invaded their territory and therefore they were defending themselves from us, as though we stormed in out of the clear blue sky and they were protecting themselves. The true picture is that they attacked Israel non-stop and Israel was defending itself from their relentless attacks. If they had not relentlessly attacked us, the IDF would not have gone in.

Yes, but they offered a kind of cease-fire at the last moment.

But they always breach their ceasefires. They fire on us and then they declare a cease-fire so that we won’t be able to protect ourselves against their next attack, against their next attack on a school bus. Out of the question.

Self-defense does not only mean the Iron Dome anti-rocket system. Self-defense constitutes a lot of other things as well. Iron Dome-style is a case of, okay, he fired on me, I intercepted the missile in mid-air and so he didn’t succeed in hurting me. That’s great. But self-defense means that I need to silence him – to cause him not to attack me next time, in a few moments, with the means that he’s used to attack me now.

I have to deny him the capacity to do that?

Yes. Not in the widest sense of what that might entail, but by means that are appropriate for the situation.

Look at the Second Lebanon War. It began with the kidnapping of soldiers and the killing of soldiers. Does that mean that I am allowed only to kidnap or kill a few Hezbollah soldiers? No. I have to ensure that Hezbollah is not able now or in the near future to carry out a similar action. Self-defense extends to attacking the source of the attack he has just carried out and from which he would be able to attack me again in a moment. If I don’t take action, he will presumably attack me again. He always wants to attack me. I have no reason to think that there will only be one Kassam or Katyusha. He’ll fire another.

So, coming back to Cast Lead, this was certainly not our invasion and their defense. When facing the armies of the United States and the Soviet Union in World War II, did the Germans have the moral right to self-defense because those armies invaded their country? The entire invasion of the allies into Germany was self-defense against Nazi Germany. To claim that, in Gaza, they are defending themselves against our invasion is really a not-serious objection.

Now, as to the matter of kill ratio. That’s not the point. It’s not a sporting contest. You ask yourself, “What is he doing to me?” – not in terms of the damage but in terms of the danger.

Look at what happened with the recent attack on the school bus. Only one child was killed. “Only one.” One too many. But if the terrorist had fired five minutes earlier, there would have been dozens of children killed. The fact is that there’s a danger to the lives of children traveling in a school bus on the roads of Israel. That [most of the children] were lucky this time, that one child was killed and the rest not, does not enter the equation.

Let’s say I have the ultimate Iron Dome system and nobody is being killed from their attacks. Am I therefore barred from attacking those who are firing on me? Of course not. I have to be concerned for a dangerous situation in which Iron Dome doesn’t work, or doesn’t work properly, or I don’t have enough Iron Dome batteries in service. I need to silence the source of the danger and therefore I am permitted to attack it.

As for the numbers of those killed on the other side, that needs to be examined without any connection to how many were killed on our side. Hamas today admits to having lost very high numbers of people who were directly connected to Hamas. All those “policemen” [killed in IAF attacks at the start of Cast Lead] were not policemen in the Western sense of the word. Those weren’t people employed to give speeding tickets. Information published soon after Cast Lead detailed their combat deployment, the role each of them was to play when the IDF came in. This was a support force for the Hamas army. We hit them legitimately.

Now, there were 200 people who were not dangerous who were killed.

Just 200?

Yes, 200 who had no link to Hamas. All the rest had a clear tie to Hamas. And each of the cases in which those 200 were killed must be checked. Those 200 are, of course, 200 too many. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have carried out the operations of Cast Lead as we did. But it does mean that if there’s a Cast Lead II, we’ll have to use approaches that mean there won’t be the 200 – that there’ll be the fewer the better.

We can learn from each of the circumstances in which the 200 were killed. On the margins, some of those deaths stemmed from a lack of professionalism, where a soldier didn’t do what he should have done. Obviously there are things to correct.

But I would stress that to have the military police question hundreds of soldiers after an operation like this, while I understand the political effect, is not good for the army. It won’t save lives. You have to rely on the probes that the army itself carries out.

People think the ideal treatment is to send in the toughest police investigators and mete out the heaviest punishments. You can give any punishment you like. But it won’t solve problems that stem from a lack of professionalism, or mistakes in judgment, or misunderstandings, that cause people to get killed. Some of our soldiers were also killed, by our own fire. No one on our side wanted to kill our own soldiers, but it happened. They were killed. So obviously there are things to correct on the level of professionalism. Simply punishing people won’t help in any way.

Internal army investigations are the correct forum for addressing this, initially at least. If it turns out to be necessary, you have a military prosecutor and it becomes a legal matter.

There was a case in the military courts of two Givati soldiers, from a combat engineering unit, who took a Palestinian kid and told him to open a suspicious bag. What’s extraordinary about this story – and I’ve read all the court papers – is that these soldiers were standing right next to him. If the kid had set off an explosive, they would also have been killed. And when the kid could not open the bag, they fired at it. Again, if it had exploded, they would all have been killed. And these were soldiers whose military expertise was in handling explosives. So this was a failure of judgment by soldiers who hadn’t slept, I was told, for three days. Unprofessional work.

Now, of course, this was inexcusable. They were rightly tried and punished for taking and using the child in this way. But the main problem was that they acted unprofessionally. That’s what needs to be corrected.

I want to return to those Hamas policemen who were killed on day one of Cast Lead. On that day they weren’t engaging in terrorism. They were at a graduation ceremony. And yet you say it was morally acceptable to kill them?

When you enter a place, you have to think about not only who is firing on you, but on who will be firing on you. That’s the rationale behind the laws of war. In this case, those forces certainly had the potential to hurt the IDF. Gaza is a very small place. This is Hamas. These were the forces that were helping Hamas. And therefore it was clear that tomorrow they would be joining up with the forces trying to hurt the IDF.

What about the argument that Hamas would obviously be defeated by the IDF in a conventional war and therefore its only chance is to fight from within residential areas?

Listen, we’re not living in the Middle Ages. These are not wars between knights, where it’s not fair if one has a big spear and the other has a little dagger. This is about the obligation to provide effective protection for my citizens. The fact that you are weak militarily does not exempt you from the measures I have to take to protect my citizens.

If you take steps toward peace, then we won’t be firing at each other. So, at a diplomatic level, I will tell you that I want peace. But there was a disengagement. I left your area altogether. What do you want from me? Israel left completely. It wasn’t easy. Part of the public felt terrible pain. Personally, it didn’t pain me to leave areas that we conquered in 1967. But to see that after 30 years we were destroying all the homes and pulling out the children who were born there, my heart ached for those children.

So we left, and what have we got? The Hamas Charter, which says you have to destroy Israel. Gilad Schalit, and no allowing the Red Cross to get near him.

Israel will protect itself in the light of the way that it is attacked. If the enemy doesn’t have tanks, then it won’t be a battle of armored forces against armored forces. But it will be a battle, and I will protect myself against whatever you use to attack me. The fact that you don’t have tanks and planes does not justify terrorism. That’s no moral justification. Moral justification is not a function of the means you have. It relates to the limitations on the means that you use.

And yet there is a lot of international empathy for the notion raised, among others, by Ted Turner a few years ago, that they have no weapons apart from their bodies. (“The Palestinians are fighting with human suicide bombers, that’s all they have,” said the CNN founder in 2002.)

Well, they could make peace. When did the suicide bombers start? After Ehud Barak made his offers to Yasser Arafat and Bill Clinton [in 2000], and Arafat rejected them. If negotiations fail that doesn’t mean you say, “It’s over, now we have to start shooting.” If negotiations fail, you prepare better for the next round of negotiations. It’s okay for Arafat to say “no” at some stage. That’s how negotiations work. You can say no over and over, but you keep negotiating. Instead of that, that the suicide bombers start coming? Why is there sympathy for that?

People sympathize with that until it happens to them. When it happens to them, they all change. All those countries – Britain, Spain, Sweden – the moment they face terrorism, they change.

But they don’t change. In Britain, for example, after the 2005 London quadruple suicide bombing, people blamed Tony Blair. They said Britain was being attacked because he was too supportive of Israel or too supportive of George Bush in Iraq...

But in practice, in Britain too you now have the Terrorism Act which allows them to do all kinds of things to fight terrorism. Britain is actually the most similar to us because it lived with Irish terrorism for so many years.

But I still don’t see any empathy for Israel.

In my dealings with the representatives of foreign armies, I don’t come up against any opposition to the principles I’ve set out for you. No opposition, except maybe among the Dutch. The Dutch don’t think of themselves as an army – more as a force for policing peace.

Yet international public opinion is hostile, and that influences political opinion, which impacts the international climate, which ultimately can limit Israel’s capacity to protect itself...

Let’s dissect that concept of public opinion and governments and the international climate. Governments follow their own interests. When they have an interest in criticizing us, they criticize us. When they have an interest in defending us, they defend us.

When the Goldstone Report was published, I immediately said that we had nothing to fear from the point of view of implementing international law – because we are more moderate than the rest of the world, and if those were the standards, we would not be able to do anything to protect ourselves, but neither would the US or NATO or anyone else in Iraq or Afghanistan. And therefore the US and NATO could not allow that report to have a practical impact. Now that Goldstone’s written his article, shifting a little, that’s even more the case.

Would Israel have carried out all these investigations without Goldstone?
Yes. And look how few indictments were served in the end. It would have been the same without Goldstone.

So you have these governments whose actions are a function of their interests. You have the Human Rights Council of the United Nations – excuse me, but if people don’t think this is all about politics, just look at this body, which was chaired by Libya and 80 percent of whose decisions are against us. Everyone’s talking differently about Libya today, but this Libya they’re all attacking now is the same Libya that acted against us all the time.

And you have all this talk about occupation, as though we’re the only people on earth in this situation. The situation of occupation is very problematic. But China has been in Tibet for longer. And the former Soviet Union, in those islands north of Japan – also longer. And the world makes no fuss. There are no demonstrations anywhere about the fact that those Japanese islands are under Russian sovereignty. China has raped Tibet, killing monks and nuns, destroying the Tibetan monasteries. No fuss.

It’s all a function of politics. Speaking out against us, it’s because of political interests. And by the way, criticizing us isn’t necessarily anti-Semitism. It can be a function of other issues, of oil issues, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Iraq, I don’t know – all kinds of considerations.

As for the international media being largely against us, there are lots of explanations for that. You have to recognize it, and put it in proportion. How important is it what The Guardian says? Now, with the Conservative government in England, who cares what the Guardian says? Does it influence the prime minister? That’s hard to believe. It might matter a bit more shortly before elections. The public, at the margins, may be influenced by the newspapers, but the importance of newspapers in influencing politicians is limited.

Why is it deemed important what the newspapers say? Because they influence public opinion? And why is public opinion important? We have no genuine access to the public’s real opinions. We don’t know exactly what the public is thinking. And you’d have to prove to me that it is important. The public’s influence on politicians is limited.

But the fact is that Israel feels itself increasingly isolated, and there are potential practical implications.

Really? What potential for practical consequences? We as Jews – and I understand this, but we have to stop it – are acutely sensitive to every attack on us. Not only when it’s anti-Semitism or anti-Israel. Even when someone attacks us for this or that government’s politics. The lights go on. “They’re attacking us.” It seems to us to be absolutely terrible. I understand that feeling. We don’t have a history of being loved by everyone. Quite the reverse. But some perspective is required. Obviously we have to be active on all fronts. The international media is a front. So you have the IDF Spokesman. You have the Ministry of Public Diplomacy. Everyone must do what they can to improve this situation. But it’s not that important.

Look what happened after Operation Cast Lead. European leaders and the US president came here. That was a sign of solidarity with Israel. So I don’t think there’s a danger of us becoming [a pariah state] like South Africa.

Practical consequences: This fall, the Palestinians may well take a resolution to the UN General Assembly seeking statehood. And over 100, 120, 130, I don’t know, nations will support it, possibly backed by a “uniting for peace” resolution that carries the potential for non-binding sanctions and boycotts.

First, I don’t know what practical implications there would be. Second, we know that in situations like this we sometimes only have the US and Micronesia with us, and we’ll survive. And third, and most important, we do have to work on the question of Palestinian statehood. With more alacrity than we are doing.

I don’t need to wait for a Bar-Ilan speech by Prime Minister Netanyahu, and for all kinds of interesting observations from prime minister Sharon, to recognize that it is essential that there be a Palestinian state. The State of Israel, in its Proclamation of Independence, recognized the Palestinian state. It declared that “the right of the Jewish people to establish their state is irrevocable. This right is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign state.” Like all other nations! The Zionist mainstream supported the Partition decision, which provided for a state for the Jews and a state for the Palestinians. We recognized a Palestinian state from the very start.

That’s nothing new. That’s not doing a favor to anyone. The question is under what circumstances will a Palestinian state be established. I don’t have to help in the establishment of something that wants to wipe me out. But that the Palestinians have the right to be a people in their own state, in their territory somewhere between the river and the sea, goes without saying.

I want to come back to the objections to what the IDF did in Gaza. You note that we pulled out all our people, but the objection is that we didn’t free Gaza. We still prevent products going in. We still control the borders. We haven’t given them full control.

Since they are arming themselves relentlessly, via weapons-laden ships, via the tunnels, my self-defense requires those controls. I don’t want to have to depend on Iron Dome to shoot down the missile. I want the missile not to reach Gaza from Iran in the first place. So I maintain the sea blockade, which is unquestionably legitimate according to all the laws of war at sea, to prevent them from bringing in the weaponry. And the same goes for the land crossings. We don’t allow free access, because it is likely to endanger us.

We have “effective control” at the borders – on what goes in and out. But we don’t have effective control inside. Hamas is the de facto government of Gaza; Hamas has effective control there. And therefore Hamas is responsible for the fact that there are terrorists mixed in with their non-dangerous neighbors. They carry the responsibility for that.

Apart from that, we take care that there not be a humanitarian disaster in Gaza from the point of view of food and medicines and needs.

Is existing international law on wars appropriate for the kinds of situations we’ve been discussing, or does it need amending?

International law was created for other purposes. It was created amid assumptions that war was a case of army against army. Uniformed forces. Civilians at the side. In those circumstances, what’s accepted internationally is acceptable to us. By and large people respect this. These are laws that apply to classic war situations.

But now, when we are in a war with organizations, not states, all the assumptions collapse. Why are states signed up to international treaties? For reasons of political prudence, not high morality: If I don’t harm his civilians, he won’t harm my civilians, and we’ll both benefit. If I won’t kill his prisoners, he won’t kill my prisoners; I won’t fire chemical weapons at him, and he won’t fire chemical weapons at me. It’s all reciprocity.

But now, in our situations, there is no reciprocity. Israel is always trying to minimize the collateral damage it causes its enemies, and its enemies are always trying to maximize the damage – not collateral; they are really aiming for the citizens.

This takes us back to where this interview started: It doesn’t mean Israel will now act in the way its enemies do. But you see now that Israel has to act according to its interests and its standards, and not according to some kind of picture that is common to Israeli and its enemies. This whole notion of reciprocity has disappeared.

And then there’s the question of the practicalities underpinning the rules of war, which requires distinguishing between combatants and non-combatants. It used to be very simple: soldiers have uniforms, with US Army or Marines or IDF written on them. Weapons are carried openly. You’re either in uniform or you’re not. It’s very crude. And it works. It’s clear who are the soldiers and who are not.

Now, it’s a mish-mash. Now, you have citizens with good intentions and citizens with bad intentions. No one can tell you to preserve the distinction between combatants and non-combatants. We preserved it effectively, because it was easy to draw the distinction. Not any more.

I’m not saying we need to change the rules of war. But we need to widen them. Don’t cancel anything, but understand that in these new wars, you need something else. Something else that rests on the same moral basis: to “alleviate the calamities of war,” as someone put it in an international document two hundred years ago.

How do you alleviate the calamities of war? First of all, have no war at all, if possible. But if war erupts, let’s ask ourselves how to realize those principles, how to protect ourselves and warn the non-dangerous neighbors, alleviating the calamities of wars. We need doctrines, in the spirit of international law, that tell us what to do in certain circumstances that are not the classic war situations. And remember, these certain circumstances are always changing. We need a doctrine that is appropriate for every situation.

In the first years of the 2000s, we fought against a civilian organization that dispatched suicide bombers from a political entity – the Palestinian Authority – but not from a state.

Then we had the Second Lebanon War, with Hezbollah, a semi-military organization, supported by the Iranian and Syrian armies, sitting on the territory of the state of Lebanon, and some of its activities were terrorism, and some were guerrilla activities against soldiers.

Then came Operation Cast Lead. Again, not against a state – the PA is in charge, but it’s not a state – but against a semi-military organization, getting support from the same places, from Iran and from Syria, and it is the de facto government. Which was not the case in the two previous cases.

And now, if there’s a Third Lebanon War, Hezbollah sits in the Lebanese government. It is no longer a militia sitting in south Lebanon. It is a party in the Lebanese government. So if it fires on us, we’ll need a different doctrine covering what to do. The Lebanese government includes a party that has a militia that is firing on you. It’s not the Lebanese Army that is attacking you, but you are being attacked by a force that is in the government.

These appropriate doctrines must be informed by the same spirit: we are a democratic state, we must protect our citizens, we respect human dignity, we must minimize collateral damage in every effective means...

And people are working to produce these new doctrines?

[Former IDF Military Intelligence chief] Amos Yadlin and I wrote a doctrine that dealt with targeted killings, in the mid-2000s. Every army that fights needs its doctrine.

Are people working on other aspects?

People are comparing notes. And every international situation is different. But if I look at the way democratic states are grappling with their situations, it’s very similar. So there’s a kind of process. There are treaties that the world has signed up to – Geneva, Hague and so on. And then there is customary international law. The world is full of non-democratic state bodies which don’t interest me. But it seems that the democratic world...

Is following practical doctrines that are very similar?
Yes. I was in Germany not long ago, at a conference on targeted killings. It was an audience of officers. One speaker was a fourstar German general. One was from the International Red Cross. And I was there to detail the Israeli reality. And I presented the approach we have discussed regarding targeted strikes, which Yadlin and I and many others developed in the mid-2000s. The audience accepted it. The man from the Red Cross didn’t object to it.

In the subsequent working groups, the German general said he understood the Israelis. They were in a different situation from the Germans fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. If the Germans were forced to operate in similar circumstances to Israel, they would do the same. And remember that today’s Germany is super-democratic.

I hear the same thing everywhere in democratic states. I’ve been to something like 15 of them, from India to Canada. There is no one who will say I don’t have to protect my civilians and to minimize the damage [to the other side]. There is no one who will say I must not harm the other side and minimize the damage to my civilians. No one will say that. No one. Nowhere.

Have there been things that Israel has done, that the IDF has done, that do trouble you?

We do need to greatly improve our professionalism – not only in terms of operating weaponry, but in terms of better understanding the principles I’ve set here.

I’ll give you an example: I heard a certain person say, during Operation Cast Lead, that we have to cause the other side to understand that ba’al habayit hishtagea – that Israel has “gone crazy.” That’s absolutely unacceptable. In fact, we have to cause them to appreciate the very opposite: that Israel is anything but crazy. That Israel acts aggressively only because it has no chance. It hits people only because it has to. It hits non-dangerous people only in a case of collateral damage, while making immense efforts not to harm them.

And if some minister or other says something so unacceptable, because he is irresponsible or because he lacks understanding, that doesn’t mean our soldiers should think that. Their commanders need to explain this to them. They need to understand this.

If the degree of understanding of the key principles I’ve laid out here was greater, it is possible that there would have been fewer than 200 fatalities among the non-dangerous people who were killed in Operation Cast Lead. We don’t explain enough and we don’t understand enough. People perform better when they understand what they are doing.

What do you think of the Israeli media’s coverage of Operation Cast Lead and of the local NGOs, including the rush to highlight the subsequently discredited Rabin military academy allegations in March 2009 that soldiers had deliberately targeted civilians?

Local media is guilty of sensationalism and a lack of responsibility. Haaretz has an agenda and skews everything in the service of that agenda. And others, like Yediot and Ma’ariv, are just sensationalist. There is no connection even between their headlines and the content.

I read the protocol of that discussion in the Rabin academy. I also read everything that the Breaking the Silence soldiers said. I read the full document. That full document emerged only after the international media came to me for a response to the alleged summary that had come out a few days earlier. From that summary, you might have thought they had exposed a huge wave, a tsunami, of war crimes, which it was very hard to believe could be possible. And in fact, it wasn’t possible. Everything was skewed in that report. This is a political body with a political agenda which is legitimate, but it uses methods in my opinion that are not legitimate in terms of media ethics and NGO ethics.

As for B’Tselem, and international NGOs like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty, they all have double standards. For them, there is the poor, pitiful side and the strong side. Testimony that comes from the pitiful side is taken at face value. Whatever comes from the strong side is tainted – “it’s a spokesman, it’s a whitewash.” Radical suspicion for one side and virtually an unlimited readiness to accept everything that comes from the other. That’s a double standard and it creates an utterly skewed picture. I don’t rely on them.

On the other hand, it doesn’t matter where an accusation comes from, the IDF must take a look at it. The IDF must look into every story from B’Tselem, every story from Machsom Watch, every story from Amnesty International. Not because I rely on them. I don’t. But you don’t have to rely on them to do your work properly. Look into every story. There’s a tiny, microscopic proportion that has some basis, so look, check, find out..