Showing posts with label Vic Rosenthal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vic Rosenthal. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 21, 2020

Vic Rosenthal's weekly column



The Zionist Organization and its parliament, the Zionist Congress, were established by Theodor Herzl in 1897 (the “World” was added to their names later). Their function was to develop and implement a program of Jewish settlement in Eretz Yisrael. The Zionist Congress included delegates from a wide range of ideological streams; the bottom line was a Jewish home in our historic homeland (although other locations were considered in the early years), but the nature of that home – even whether it should be a sovereign state – was subject to dispute.

Today’s World Zionist Congress (WZC) appoints the heads of several organizations that control large amounts of property and funds that come from Jewish charities abroad and the Israeli taxpayer. These include the Jewish National Fund (JNF) which manages most of the land in Israel, the Jewish Agency which facilitates Jewish immigration to Israel, the United Israel Appeal which raises funds, and others.

These organizations are closely connected to the government of Israel, but they are independent bodies. This can be confusing. For example, someone applying to make aliyah to Israel must deal with both the Jewish Agency (the sochnut) and the Israeli consulate.

The most important fact about the WZC is that its sub-organizations spend about $1 billion annually. These organizations, whose utility ended on 14 May 1948, have hundreds of employees (many of whom are politically connected individuals), and hundreds of contractors and programs are supported by them. To the extent that they perform useful functions, they could and should be done by the government of Israel. The waste of funds that come from the high taxes paid by Israelis and the generous donations of diaspora Jews is colossal. Many highly-paid functionaries do essentially nothing, and are there because somebody important owed them a favor.

But in addition to being wasteful, these organizations are dangerous, because they represent an easily-opened door to infiltration by those who not only want to benefit from the fruits of the Jewish state, but to attack it in the process.

Recently many diaspora organizations, particularly in the US, which were originally established to benefit the Jewish people as a whole, the State of Israel, or individual Jews, have been pressured to include representatives of anti-Zionist groups like J Street. In 2012, “Open Hillel” was formed in order to try to change the guidelines of college Hillel houses for acceptable programs, in the words of one reporter, to “legitimize and include groups that advance anti-Israel (and sometimes anti-Semitic) agendas in mainstream Jewish campus life.”

In 2014, J Street applied to become a member of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, and was turned down after an acrimonious debate. Last week, a guy that previously worked for Bernie Sanders, and previously was the State Department’s liaison to Congress to promote Obama’s Iran deal, became Executive Director of the American Jewish Congress.

The WZC has also become a focus of conflict between right-wing and left-wing factions. Delegates from the Diaspora are chosen by elections, while Israelis are apportioned according to the parties in the Knesset. Although the Left was battering at the gates here as well, a new group of American delegates has recently been added, a slate called “Eretz Hakodesh” that appealed to non-Zionist Haredim. It’s platform did not include the words “State of Israel” or “Zionist.” A campaign in the Orthodox and Haredi communities gave the religious and right-wing bloc a slight edge over the Reform/Conservative/Left bloc among the total of 521 delegates (complete results by country are here, in Hebrew).

It’s possible to take comfort in the fact that the American Hatikvah slate, which included such “Zionists” as Peter Beinart, got only ten seats. It’s absurd that they or anti-Zionist Haredim should be represented at all.

The largest delegation from the US is the one representing the Reform movement, with 39 seats. Together with Reform delegates from other countries, they hold a total of 63 seats. Considering that “Reform Zionism” means misinformed American Jews telling Israelis how to run their country (because the US is doing such a good job at home), they too are not in the “helpful” category.

72 years after the founding of the state, Zionism as an ideology is still relevant. But the World Zionist Organization is not.

Indeed, it’s long past time to end this jobs program for shady politicians that didn’t make it into the Knesset, former mayors that were not re-elected, and so forth. The unnecessary bureaucracy only makes life harder for people who must interact with it, like prospective olim. And just like Israel’s bloated unity government with its 36 ministers – at least 18 of which are unnecessary – it is obscene to shovel cash into a black hole when Israelis and diaspora Jews are struggling in a wretched economic environment.



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Thursday, October 15, 2020

Vic Rosenthal's weekly column

Information Warfare in the West

The “Information War” is the struggle to attack or defend the image of the State of Israel in the consciousness of the world. It is truly a world war, but the two main active fronts today are the Arabic-speaking world, where for the first time there are signs of pro-Israel initiatives, and the West.

A striking feature of the Information War in the West is the imbalance between the resources of the two sides. The pro-Israel list is much shorter. We have sporadic and uncoordinated attempts at hasbara (public diplomacy, or “propaganda,” if you prefer) by the Israeli government, the most recent of which is the allocation of funds to the Ministry of Strategic Affairs (MSA) to fight BDS and delegitimization. In 2019, MSA granted about $5.3 million to individuals and organizations. As of September 2019, it had 32 employees (Hebrew link). Al Jazeera alone has about 100 times as many.

The most important and well-known private individuals that support pro-Israel messaging, of course, are Miriam and Sheldon Adelson. Their family foundation has given millions to Birthright Israel. They  are also involved in other causes, such as Holocaust education, that are only tangentially related to the cognitive conflict over Israel’s image. Other Jewish philanthropists give large amounts of money to Jewish and Israeli causes (Jewish education, hospitals, Magen David Adom, etc.), but little for hasbara.

There are also a few private organizations. Some conservative think tanks like the David Horowitz Freedom Center give grants and fellowships to pro-Israel writers. Its 2018 Form 990 shows total expenses of about $6.8 million.  Considering its wide range of activities, its contribution to specifically pro-Israel hasbara is small.

Evangelical Christians that support Israel have some positive effects. Christians United for Israel had a budget of about $1.3 million in 2018, a surprisingly small amount given that group’s status as a bête noire for liberal American Jews.

Many large Jewish organizations, such as the Jewish Federations of North America, the ADL, and the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) do publically oppose BDS and anti-Israel extremism (misoziony), but because of their need to appeal for funding from a wide political spectrum, take positions that are bland at best and negative at worst (e.g., the URJ’s failure to oppose the JCPOA, President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran). Their net contribution to pro-Israel hasbara is zero.

Turning to the other side, the mainstream media in North America and Europe is almost unanimously critical of Israel, with many important media channels – the New York Times, the BBCAl JazeeraMSNBCNational Public Radio (see also something I wrote about NPR 10 years ago) and the AP in the US – clearly on the anti-Israel side. And we mustn’t forget what has been called (video link, 1:36:00) the “first blood libel of the 21st century,” the false report by Charles Enderlin of France 2 on the alleged killing of Muhammad al Durah.

The United Nations and its agencies are a potent source of anti-Israel propaganda. There are countless anti-Israel resolutions passed by its Human Rights Council, the General Assembly, UNESCO, and even the Security Council. There is a “Division for Palestinian Rights” which does such things as organizing international conferences, conducts “training programs,” and puts on the annual “International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.” I have no idea of how to put a dollar value on its work – for the Palestinians, it’s priceless.

The European Union, collectively and from its members, has provided tens of millions of Euros to NGOs hostile to Israel, which are responsible for demonization and delegitimization in the information sphere, and lawfare against Israel. It also provides practical aid supporting illegal Arab colonization in Area C of the territories, which is supposed to be under full Israeli control according to the Oslo agreements. In the past nine years, the EU has even granted 38 million Euros to NGOs linked to EU-designated terror groups. All this is in addition to its own political activities, like demanding that Israeli products from the territories be given special labeling to facilitate boycotters.

There are major charitable foundations, like the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF), the Ford Foundation, and groups linked to George Soros’ Open Society Institute. Together these foundations funnel tens of millions of dollars into groups and activities that support BDS or simply produce anti-Israel propaganda. For example, the RBF has made grants to IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace, two BDS-supporting groups in the US, and to dozens of other anti-Israel actors.

These groups are linked together. For example, the Foundation for Middle East Peace (FMEP), which paid misozionist writer Peter Beinart $110,000 in 2018 as a “consultant,” also received a contribution of $135,000 from the Alex Soros Foundation (Alex is the son of George). Perhaps the idea was to make the Soros-Beinart connection less obvious.

The FMEP, incidentally, while a small player in the Israel defamation racket, is quite active in the realm of social media, as well as producing lectures, presentations, op-eds, and so forth.

Finally, there are the direct donations from Arab countries and Iran to Western universities, primarily in the US and the UK, but also in Canada and on the continent, amounting to billions of dollars. That is not a typo: one country, Qatar, gave $1.4 billion to American universities between 2012-2018. Of course these countries have other goals in addition to defaming Israel, but still there is no doubt that a great deal of the influence they are buying is directed to the cognitive war against the Jewish state.

Given all this, and considering the tepid support for Israel from liberal Jewish communities in North America, I’m surprised that so many Americans say they support Israel (I’ve been unable to find a poll of Canadians that is fair and reasonably recent). There is a red flag: support for Israel seems to weakest in younger people, getting stronger with age. I speculate that this could be related to the increasing bias in the educational system, both schools and colleges – the product of the massive investment made by Arab countries.

Although we can’t dream of matching the investment being made by our enemies, there are a few things we can and should do.

First, we can make their propaganda activities a major issue in our normalization negotiations with Arab nations. They are not doing us a favor by normalizing; if they want our economic and military cooperation they will have to end all of their information warfare against us. That means direct propaganda, but also financial support for groups that are working against us – even if it is a department of Middle East studies in a university.

We can’t make antisemitic Europeans change their attitudes. But we can shut off the flow of their money into our country that goes to anti-state organizations. Just as we (finally) have started barring BDS supporters from entering the country, we can bar their Euros too. Let “Breaking the Silence” and the others survive on contributions they get from Israelis – if they can.

News organizations live and die by access. It should be withheld from hostile reporters and organizations. They will scream bloody murder, but ultimately they will see that we only want fairness. Or they’ll have to do their coverage from outside.

There is nothing that we can do about the UN. We are probably better off not resigning from it. Someday it will collapse from its own worthlessness.

We can’t afford to imitate Al Jazeera. But we can set up internet news and culture channels in several languages, professional in every respect. Countries used to spend huge amounts of money on shortwave broadcasting with all of its technical problems. Today we have the means to deliver high-quality content all over the world at reasonable cost. People are curious about Israel – why do we leave it to our enemies to tell them about us?



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Wednesday, October 07, 2020

Vic Rosenthal's weekly column

Time to take a break from giving and receiving abuse on Twitter and do some work.

Last night we watched the Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma.” It’s about the big tech companies and how their systems manipulate us into giving them what they want, which is our time and attention.

About 25 years ago I was stuck in the airport in Reno, Nevada, where there were slot machines available for waiting passengers to entertain themselves. I recall watching a woman play one, rhythmically swaying back and forth to the musical accompaniment from the machine as she pulled the lever over, and over, and over. I could see from her glazed eyes that she was in a trance, one with the machine. I wondered if she would succeed to pull herself away in time when her flight was announced, or if indeed she would even hear the announcement. Later, I recognized the same look in the eyes of someone scrolling through Facebook or Twitter on their phone.

These systems, which although they have been developed by humans, work autonomously and learn from experience how to control the behavior of their subjects. Their developers only care about getting us to sit still and eat the ads we are “served” (I love that locution), but of course it has destructive side effects. The creation of ideological bubbles, the dispersion of fake news, and the encouragement of extremism are some of them, but there are other, deeper changes that are not obvious, like the contraction of the subject’s attention span, the forced withdrawal from normal social activities, the decline in risk-taking, and the abysmal waste of time.

The abuses of political correctness, cancel culture, and the wide popularity of absurd, self-contradictory theories and ideologies are all epiphenomena of the ubiquity of social media. They would not be possible without the ability to disseminate emotion-loaded stimuli widely and instantaneously to groups of like-minded people, people who are often in the receptive trance-like state engendered by the medium.

How, for example, did the Israeli-Palestinian conflict come to take over the mind-space of the Western world? Almost none of my Twitter abuse comes from actual Arabs or Palestinians. Most of the folks accusing me of supporting “land theft,” apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide of Palestinians live in the US or Europe, places which have their own problems. And yet they care so much about the Palestinians!

The Palestinization of the Western mind is a long story. It started with the KGB, who wanted to find a lever to get support for its Arab clients in the Middle East. It continued via the massive inputs of Arab oil money into Western educational institutions and “human rights” groups. It got a big boost from 2001’s Durban Conference on Racism, where the popular theme of anti-racism was successfully applied to Israel – a remarkable feat of reality inversion, since the Arab rejectionism that underlies the conflict is at bottom a particular rejection of Jewish sovereignty, and a desire to ethnically cleanse the region of Jews.

But the advent of the Internet multiplied – exponentiated – everything. It first became available in universities in the 1980s with email and Usenet newsgroups (like mailing lists) facilitating the democratization of the distribution of information. The first rudimentary social networks like Compuserve and America Online arrived in the 1990s. The dam burst with the creation of Facebook and others in the early 2000s.

The universities have always been repositories of misoziony, extreme and irrational Israel-hatred. This is because of the general leftward tilt of university faculties, who were fertile soil for the Soviet anti-Israel propaganda that began in the late 1960s and continued through the dissolution of the USSR. There was also the effect of the aforementioned Arab oil money donated to create departments of Mideast studies that were little more than indoctrination units. Students and faculty, early adopters of new technology, used it to organize and propagandize for all of their causes, including the increasingly popular Palestinian one.

Some important characteristics of social media that particularly affect cognitive warfare in this conflict are the immediacy of transmission of information, its bias toward emotional content, its tendency to create opinion bubbles, its encouragement of extremism, and the effect of numerical superiority of one side or another in a dispute. Let’s see how this works.

One of the propaganda techniques used against Israel is the “spaghetti test,” in which false accusations are rapidly thrown against the public in the hope that they will stick. By the time the information to refute them has been collected, the damage has been done and new accusations have been launched. The ability of social media to plant an idea in numerous receptive minds instantaneously with no filtering (such as is at least supposed to occur in traditional media) greatly increases the effectiveness of this.

It is well known that emotional content makes a story memorable, as well as serving as a motivation for action in a way that factual information cannot. Social media tends to be biased toward the transmission of emotionally affecting content, since that is what drives a person to share or retweet an item. Emotionally moving items (“IDF soldiers shoot Palestinian children for fun”) tend to dominate the timelines of its targets, arriving faster and more frequently than factual, but boring, corrections (“nobody was shot”).

The opinion bubbles prominent on social media, in which a person tends to collect “friends” and followers with similar political opinions means that propaganda will be repeated and amplified by the echo chambers formed by the bubbles. As it bounces around in an eagerly accepting environment, it creates anger and indignation, as well as accumulating greater authority (everyone is talking about the murder of Muhammad al-Dura, so the story must be true).

A participant in a social media opinion bubble is a player in a social game in which points are won by being first with the most shocking information. The “alphas” in the group are the ones whose opinions are the most exciting, which usually means that their positions are the most extreme. This forces the window of discourse in the direction of extremism, which is why it seems so shocking when it escapes from the bubble. The group “Canary Mission” often exposes social media posts in which students and academics express themselves against Jews or Israel in a way which is acceptable within their group but appears (and is) appallingly vicious to an outsider.

Jews and Israelis are a small minority compared to their enemies, and defenders of Israel are an equally small minority on social networks. The numerical advantage on one side makes it possible to “pile on” to a person and overwhelm them with verbal abuse. It seems that the Palestinians and their supporters are using social media much more effectively than those on the Israeli side. I am not sure if this is simply a consequence of their numerical advantage, or something else.

Technology of this kind has made everyday life much more convenient. Can you imagine life without Google? As the documentary points out, social media has reunited families and made it possible to become acquainted with people that one would otherwise never know. It can provide a lifeline for shut-ins, especially in this time of pandemic.

But – as its effects in facilitating cognitive warfare in our own sphere show – it has changed the world in ways we are just beginning to understand, and have made no effort to control. It has increased political polarization in general, fostered extremism, and seriously damaged traditional journalism.

No, I don’t want to be without Google (I think). But I wouldn’t cry if Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. disappeared.




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Thursday, October 01, 2020

Vic Rosenthal's weekly column



I got up a few minutes before 0400 this morning to watch the American presidential debate. Things have changed a great deal since the previous campaign, because I can’t recall anything even close in verbal viciousness from the candidates themselves. Biden called Trump a clown, a racist, and a liar, and told him to shut up. Trump, for his part, continually interrupted Biden and talked over him, somewhat like political discussions on Israeli TV.

More immediately relevant for Israel is what PM Netanyahu told the UN General Assembly (text and video) in a ten-minute pre-recorded speech yesterday. There was a dramatic disclosure of the location of a Hezbollah missile depot or factory (in pictures and with GPS coordinates) in the middle of a civilian neighborhood in Beirut, next door to a gas company’s tanks. A similar installation in southern Lebanon exploded just last week, following the massive Beirut explosion, which was caused by explosives-grade ammonium nitrate kept at the port by Hezbollah. Bibi suggested that the folks who live around there might try to pressure Hezbollah to dismantle it before it, too, blows up. Unfortunately, nobody in Lebanon can stand up to Hezbollah.

Lebanon is a tragedy. It’s suffering from a rapidly growing outbreak of Coronavirus, although it is still behind Israel in serious cases and deaths. Its economy was already in flames before the explosion that destroyed its largest port, most of its grain reserves, and a third of its capital. Like Covid-19, Hezbollah is a parasitic organism that, in this case, is killing its host.

This parasite, however is controlled and nourished from Iran, as Bibi noted in his speech. It is the perfect remote weapon. By embedding its weapons in the midst of the population, the Iranian regime protects them from the IDF – and unlike Hamas, which also uses human shields, it doesn’t even have to endanger its own population to do so!

The other important thing that Bibi said was that in our estimation – and Israel’s intelligence in this area is quite good – Iran is expected to have enough enriched uranium in “a few” months to build not one, but two, nuclear bombs. Iran has been working on the rest of the technology for bombs for years, as well as missiles capable of delivering them. This is a real threat that must not be minimized, and – I must remind those who so strongly criticize Netanyahu – he has focused on this danger. We will not be taken by surprise by Iran.

The US under the Trump Administration has proven to be a valuable ally against Iran. By ending the JCPOA and re-imposing American sanctions, Trump has increased the pressure on Iran and made it harder for the regime to fund Hezbollah. Trump’s support helped enable the normalization agreements with the UAE and Bahrain, and perhaps others yet to come. Trump approved the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s “Quds Force.” Soleimani controlled Iranian operations around the world, and especially in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, as well as being active in suppressing internal dissent. His loss was very painful to the regime.

When I watched the debate this morning, with its insults and posturing, I wondered if the Iranian leaders were watching as well. I am sure they were. And I am sure that they are rooting for Biden, who has promised to re-enter the JCPOA, reduce sanctions, and engage in further negotiations with Iran (which made fools of Obama’s negotiating team). Worse, Biden will likely pick up some of the same advisors that guided the Obama Administration. Wendy Sherman and Jake Sullivan may be back talking to the Iranians. And of course Biden supports the failed two-state solution with the Palestinians, which guarantees that there will be no progress and continued terrorism on that front.

But maybe the Iranians are making a mistake. On the one hand, a Trump victory will probably see a continuation of the policy of “maximum pressure” on Iran. In the long term, it may succeed in weakening the regime enough that it can be persuaded to back down on its nuclear weapons project. Israel will continue monitoring Iranian activities and working with its new Arab allies to increase diplomatic pressure on Iran.

On the other hand, if Biden wins it may become clear to Israeli planners that there is a very short window of opportunity to pursue a military solution to the problem of Iranian nukes. Once Biden comes in, any Israeli actions would be off the table, just like in the days of the Obama Administration.

So either Trump wins, or the Iranians should expect a very warm November or December.



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Thursday, September 24, 2020

Vic Rosenthal's weekly column


This morning (Wednesday) Israel’s Health Ministry announced that in the past 24 hours there were 6,861 new cases of Covid-19 detected in 59,169 tests, an 11.5% positive ratio. This ratio has been steadily increasing, which is an indication of the explosive spread of the disease.




This is the worst ever for Israel, which has had the greatest average number of new cases per day per million population in the world for several weeks now. The Health Ministry’s “point man” on Corona, Dr. Ronni Gamzu, predicted that within a week the number of serious cases that require hospitalization will exceed the capacity of the system. When that happens, the system will stretch a bit. One hospital converted a parking garage into a Corona facility in a remarkably short time; the IDF is setting up field hospitals. But if the numbers continue to increase, soon there will be no more flexibility. Doctors will have to decide whom to treat and whom not. People will die who could have been saved.

Last week Israel began a second partial lockdown. Its effect will not be felt for another week, but it’s doubtful – based on the various loopholes left in it for political reasons and a general lack of observance of the rules – that it will be enough to reduce the spread of the disease significantly.

There is a lack of good information available about how to reduce the number of infections, but it seems clear that crowds are bad, crowds indoors are worse, and masks – if properly worn – help, especially if both the infectious person and the one at risk wear them. It also seems that the amount of virus that a person picks up can affect whether they will be infected and how seriously; so the amount of time spent in a dangerous situation is important.

The strategy (as it appears today) of the Health Ministry is to apply restrictions to reduce the daily number of new cases to the point that it will be possible to track the contacts of each infected person, test them, and quarantine anyone who is positive or who has had direct contact with someone who tests positive. That is called “breaking the chain of infection.” But that can only happen if the number of new cases is manageable. Once that is achieved, it should be possible to gradually release the restrictions and return the society to normal without causing a new spike in infections. Estimates of how low it must go vary widely, between 100 and 1000 new cases per day.

The objective in applying restrictions is to restrict those behaviors that facilitate the spread of the virus as much as possible, while doing the smallest possible damage to the economy. And here we run into the problems of politics and attitudes.

Yesterday and today the “Corona Cabinet” – a committee of government ministers from relevant ministries – has been discussing the tightening of restrictions that will be needed. One of the biggest conflicts concerns two activities which involve large crowds, including numerous people without masks who do not observe “social distancing,” and which have zero impact on the economy. It would seem obvious that these would be the first to be restricted.

But the activities we are talking about are the weekly raucous, theatrical, and sometimes obscene demonstrations outside the Prime Minister’s residence in Jerusalem, and his home in Caesarea; and the coming synagogue services on Yom Kippur.

The Left believes that there is nothing more sacred than the right to demonstrate. An attempt to shut down or even limit the numbers of demonstrators is met with fury on the street and from opposition politicians. It’s claimed that would “destroy democracy.” The Attorney General, who in Israel is more a functionary of the legal establishment and the Supreme Court than of the government, says that the government would have to get the Knesset to pass a special law if it wants to stop demonstrations.

Observant Jewish Israelis, of course, insist that it is unacceptable to forbid Jewish prayer in a Jewish state. And both sides are right, but they are both wrong in their insistence that they get their way in the face of the fact that both demonstrations and packed synagogues are known to effectively spread the virus.

The tracking mechanism of the Internal Security Service (Shabak) that is being used to track exposure and locate people violating quarantine is ineffective in these cases, since both demonstrators – just for that reason – and synagogue-goers leave their cellphones at home.

The government could not stand against the pressure, so it punted and appointed a “professional” committee to come up with limitations on demonstrations and public prayer that would allow both to continue. Unfortunately, these rules will be broken, because a large segment of each group does not respect any rules that come from the government. The police are outnumbered, and even though they can impose fines, have a hard time enforcing rules – and the more complicated they are, the harder it is.

Much of the Haredi educational system is operating, including schools for children and yeshivot and kollelim for adults, despite the closings decreed in “red zones.” Limits on the number of congregants in synagogues were widely broken during Rosh Hashana. Dozens of anti-Bibi and anti-lockdown protestors set up tables in front of the PM’s residence and had a festive meal. Over the weekend, a large group held what was essentially a beach party, allegedly under the rules permitting “demonstrations.”

In the Arab towns on both sides of the Green Line, the problem has been massive weddings, which sometimes go on for several days with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of participants. Mayors of Israeli Arab towns imposed nighttime curfews, which may have helped, although weddings are then sometimes held during the day.

In anything less than a Chinese-style totalitarian system, laws are upheld primarily by the willingness of citizens to obey them, with enforcement only needed for egregious violators. That mechanism is breaking down in Israel. A recent survey showed that 68% did not trust PM Netanyahu to manage the response to the virus, and 41% did not trust Dr. Gamzu. And Israelis tend to ignore people and rules that they don’t respect.

This is literally a question of life and death, both for Israelis and for their economy. A two-or-three week lockdown is bad enough, but two or three months would be intolerable. Either we get a handle on this epidemic, or we will be facing the choice between economic disaster or hundreds of deaths every day (today there were 31). Or if we are indecisive enough, maybe we’ll get both.

What needs to happen is that the government has to make simple rules, stick to them, and enforce them with severe penalties. No demonstrations, period. Close the synagogues, period. No weddings, period. And the people, Arabs and Jews both, need to follow the rules. In a few weeks, we can break the back of the epidemic, and then return to something closer to normalcy.

Continuing to take two steps forward and three steps back as we’ve been doing will only earn us a bunch of funerals – and no economy, either.




We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

Thursday, September 17, 2020

Vic Rosenthal's weekly column



The most interesting thing about the normalization agreements that Israel signed with the UAE and Bahrain is not what is in the written agreements, which are sparse on detail. It is not even the speculation about the unpublicized understandings about such things as F-35s and for how long the extension of Israeli law over parts of Judea and Samaria and the Jordan Valley will be delayed. It is, rather, one specific item that is not in them: there is no explicit mention of a “two-state solution” of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Indeed, the agreements don’t mention borders, Jerusalem, settlements, or refugees, which always appear in such texts. One commentator even said that it seems that these Arabs are “less pro-Palestinian than the Europeans,” who always mention these things in their pronouncements about the conflict.

Here is all the UAE agreement says about the Palestinians:

Recalling the reception held on January 28, 2020, at which President Trump presented his Vision for Peace, and committing to continuing their efforts to achieve a just, comprehensive, realistic and enduring solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict;

Recalling the Treaties of Peace between the State of Israel and the Arab Republic of Egypt and between the State of Israel and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and committed to working together to realize a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that meets the legitimate needs and aspirations of both peoples, and to advance comprehensive Middle East peace, stability and prosperity;

The agreement with Bahrain is even more vague, leaving out the reference to other treaties. So no wonder the PLO reaction was to declare a “day of rage,” while Hamas attacked the Israeli cities of Ashdod and Ashkelon with rockets during the signing ceremony!

Why is this important? We need to keep in mind the Palestinian interpretation of “two-state solution,” a temporary condition in which a sovereign “Palestine” from which all Jews have been expelled exists next door to an “Israel” which must agree to absorb millions of Arab “refugees.” Unification as an Arab-majority state would soon follow.

Although some left-wing Israelis have endorsed a two-state solution, they generally accept the “two states for two peoples” paradigm, which leaves room for a Jewish state. But no Palestinian leader has ever countenanced such a thing, even arguing that there is no such thing as a Jewish people, and so no Jewish right of self-determination.

This systematic ambiguity has led some to say that the conflict is easy to settle; it’s only necessary to work out the details of a two-state deal that both sides would accept. But of course the sticking point comes down to whether there will be a Jewish state or not. That isn’t a detail, and it’s not something that can be compromised.

Although Israelis have come to understand this, Americans have almost always seemed to miss it. The Clinton and Obama administrations beat their heads against the wall trying to reconcile the directly contradictory positions. Left-leaning organizations like J Street and the Reform Movement continue to call for a two-state solution, not understanding – or maybe understanding but not caring – that the Palestinian version of two states implies that neither state will be Jewish.

The breakthrough represented by Trump’s “Deal of the Century” (DOC) was to stop trying to find a way to meet Palestinian demands without endangering Israel, an impossible task. Rather, the DOC includes a plan to allow the maximum amount of Palestinian autonomy consistent with Israeli security. Naturally, the Palestinian leadership, which has been promising to kick out the Jews and lead its people back to “their homes” in Israel for generations, finds this unacceptable.

Until now, the Palestinians have enjoyed seamless support from the entire Arab and Muslim world. They believed that all they needed to do was stand pat, and the world would force the Jews into making concessions, until the Jewish state was so weakened that it would fall apart – or could be destroyed by an attack by its Arab neighbors, or in a proxy war waged by Iran via Hezbollah.

But now at least two – and possibly a few more – Arab states have recognized several important facts: 1) Israel is too strong to be forced to make significant concessions, 2) they find themselves on Israel’s side in the regional conflict with Iran, which wants to gobble them up, and 3) the benefits of normalization with Israel outweigh whatever they would get from Israel’s enemies for continuing to support Palestinian demands.

It might even be the case that they realize that the Palestinian people themselves have been ill-served by their leaders, who have exploited them since 1948 as an excuse to funnel huge amounts of money from Western donors into their pockets.

In any case, these agreements put the PLO on notice that it can no longer expect blanket support for its intransigent policies. Indeed, last week the Arab league rejected a Palestinian resolution to condemn the UAE-Israel deal.

One of my greatest concerns about the coming American election is that a Democratic victory could bring back some of the people and policies of the Obama Administration concerning the Middle East. Joe Biden has already promised to try to re-activate the JCPOA, the nuclear deal with Iran that in fact protects the Iranian nuclear weapons project rather than stopping it. It’s likely that he would also want to resuscitate the Obama/Kerry two-state plan. Of course a Trump victory would prevent these things; but failing that, the next best thing would be a united Israel-Arab front against Iran – and for a truly just solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.



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Thursday, September 10, 2020

Vic Rosenthal's weekly column


Not long ago I wrote about one of Israel’s “soft enemies,” who choose to fight the Jewish state with money rather than bullets and explosives: the European Union. Indeed, the European Union has just demonstrated its hostility by threatening to torpedo (see also here) the bids of Serbia and Kosovo to join the EU if they persist in their intention to open embassies in Jerusalem.

Now, when the formerly impenetrable anti-Israel solidarity of Arab and Muslim nations has finally begun to crumble, our soft enemies seem to be pursuing the war against Jewish self-determination even more aggressively.  Today I want to discuss yet another one, this time one that weaponizes American dollars: the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

The Rockefeller fortune began with John D. Rockefeller, certainly the richest American in history, and indeed one of the most wealthy humans ever. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil in 1870, and before he died in 1937 (at the age of 98), he donated enormous sums for various charitable purposes, in the areas of education, health, scientific research, and causes connected to his Baptist faith. He established various foundations during his lifetime to facilitate the disbursement of his wealth. Very much a free-market conservative, he nevertheless took seriously his personal commitment to those less fortunate than himself and his family. He had four daughters and a son, J. D. Rockefeller Jr. “Junior” continued his father’s philanthropy, including founding the Rockefeller Museum in eastern Jerusalem (the site of a 1967 battle, now operated by the Israel Antiquities Authority).

John D. Rockefeller Jr. had a daughter and five sons. One was Nelson, who had a long career in public service, serving as Governor of New York from 1959-73, and Vice President under Gerald Ford from 1974-77. Nelson was socially liberal and considered a moderate on economic issues; he was the paradigmatic “moderate Republican.” Another was David, who was Chairman and CEO of the Chase Manhattan Bank from 1969-81, and was a director of the influential Council on Foreign Relations from 1959.

The Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF) was started by “Junior’s” five sons in 1940, who were its first trustees. It received large endowments from J. D. Rockefeller Jr., in 1951, and David Rockefeller, who gave it $225 million in 2006.

Note that there is also a Rockefeller Foundation (started by J. D. the patriarch in 1913), and a Rockefeller Family Fund (started by younger family members in 1967). They are not the subject of this article.

The RBF gradually moved politically leftward as time went by, especially after Stephen Heintz became its president and CEO in 2001. Ironically, it divested from investments in fossil fuels – the original source of Rockefeller money – in 2014.

It has strongly advocated for and funded advocates of the JCPOA – the nuclear deal with Iran – and criticized US President Trump for exiting from it. Armin Rosen notes that “Between 2012 and 2015, RBF gave $4.4 million to the Ploughshares Fund,” which then “led the public campaign in favor of the [Obama] administration’s Iran diplomacy. Ploughshares … gave National Public Radio $100,000 toward its coverage of the Iran nuclear issue.”

In 2011, RBF began its “Peacebuilding” program, and it started to make grants related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Today it supports various organizations and programs whose goal is to eliminate the Jewish state. It funds the group “Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP),” which supports boycott-divestment-sanctions (BDS) of Israel, and which was called one of the top 10 anti-Israel groups in America by the ADL. It has made grants to IfNotNow, the BDS-supporting student organization. It supports the American Friends Service Committee, which also promotes BDS, and numerous other BDS-supporting groups, including the umbrella organization for BDS in the US, the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR). The USCPR is deeply involved in the successful campaign to get the “mainline” Protestant churches like the Presbyterian Church USA and the United Church of Christ to adopt BDS. USCPR also pushes the absurdly false but popular idea that the movement to destroy Israel is analogous to the American civil rights movement.

At this link is a partial list of grants made by RBF to groups that are to a greater or lesser extent involved in activities to demonize and delegitimize the Jewish state, in “lawfare” against it, or even which have connections to anti-Israel terrorist organizations. One of the largest recipients of RBF money is J Street, the phony “pro-Israel” lobbying organization which has consistently taken positions opposed to Israeli interests. Other recipients include Zochrot, an Israeli NGO that wants to “dezionize” the state, Breaking the Silence, which defames IDF soldiers, and Adalah, a group that works to radicalize Arab citizens of Israel and incite them against the state. There are dozens of other groups, each of which has its own particular angle to attack Israel.

It’s unlikely that David Rockefeller, also a moderate Republican, would have approved of the uses to which his bequest was put. His Chase Manhattan Bank was the agent for Israel Bonds in the US, making it a target of the Arab boycott. And unlike another tycoon, Henry Ford, there is no evidence that the founder of the dynasty, John D. Rockefeller was antisemitic.

One of the notable images used by Jew-haters from 19th-century Europe, through the Nazi period, and including today’s European and Middle-Eastern antisemites is the hook-nosed Jewish spider sitting in the center of his web, pulling strings that stretch his malign power throughout the world. But in reality, the opposite is true: there are a number of anti-Israel puppet masters, pulling the strings – and streaming money – into the literally thousands of loci of misozionist hate around the world. Money that originates in the European Union, the RBF, the Ford Foundation*, and George Soros’ Open Society Foundation and its satellites, flows into the numerous anti-Israel NGOs, student organizations, propaganda organs, Middle East Studies programs, and so forth.

Think about it. It’s truly marvelous. Has there ever been another enterprise like this in history? All this, aimed and concentrated against one tiny country, my country!
_________________

* The Ford Foundation funded many of the same organizations as the RBF until 2013, when it was convinced to stop supporting anti-state NGOs in Israel. It still provides funds for international groups like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Oxfam, etc. that are strongly biased against Israel.



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Wednesday, August 26, 2020

Vic Rosenthal's weekly column


I’m not looking forward to writing this, or to reading the responses that I will surely get from various quarters. But here it is.

The Breslov Hasidim venerate Rabbi Nachman of Breslov (1772-1810), a kabbalist, scholar, and founder of a movement that stresses joy and the personal closeness of a Jew to Hashem. Israelis are familiar with the Breslov trucks that drive around playing loud, rousing music, sometimes stopping for the passengers to get out and dance in the street with passers-by. Some see their approach as a welcome infusion of life and spirituality into what can be a dry and forbidding faith; others see their attitude toward Rabbi Nachman as avoda zara (worship of something or someone other than Hashem).

The Breslov Hasidim have developed a tradition in recent decades of visiting Uman (in Ukraine) where he died and where his grave is located, on Rosh Hashana. This pilgrimage has included tens of thousands of Israelis and others over the years. While for most of the pilgrims the goal of the trip is increased spirituality, there is also an element that treats it like the American college students’ Spring break, lubricated by alcohol and spiced up by prostitution.

The advent of the Coronavirus pandemic has (maybe) put a damper on the phenomenon. Israel’s numbers of serious cases and daily deaths from Corona are about as high as they have ever been, and its total number of cases per million population is 19th in the world (out of 213). Ukraine is also suffering an increasing number of new cases, although it ranks only 87th in cases per million. Last month, Ukraine decided to bar Israelis from the pilgrimage after the EU placed Israel on its “red list” of countries unsafe to visit.

Since then, pressure has been applied to authorities in Israel and Ukraine, both for and against the event. As one can imagine, tens of thousands of visitors mean a huge amount of income for the relatively small town of Uman. On the other hand, the danger of spreading Covid-19 at this kind of happening, where there will be large crowds and little social distancing, is very great. As Prof. Roni Gamzu, the Corona coordinator of Israel’s Health Ministry, recently pointed out, travelers to Uman will have to be placed in quarantine when they return home. A few thousand could be placed in hotels, but there is no way to quarantine and keep track of tens of thousands. Gamzu wants the government to forbid Israelis from flying to Uman. He also communicated his feelings to Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

In response, former Health Minister and present Housing and Construction Minister Ya’akov Litzman, himself a member of a (different) Hasidic sect, was infuriated and called for Gamzu’s resignation. The most recent development has the Ukranian President announcing that the pilgrimage would be “significantly restrict[ed]” although no precise details were given. Zelensky said that he was responding to a request made by PM Binyamin Netanyahu, but the PM’s office denied that he had made such a request, and said only that travelers should follow health instructions (proving yet again that at least in the case of Bibi, physical courage in youth doesn’t necessarily translate into moral courage in maturity).

I don’t know what will come out of this for Gamzu, who recently implied that he would resign if “not given the tools to bring down morbidity.” Gamzu, who has been properly trying to balance the medical demands of the epidemic with the need to protect the economy, has been stymied at almost every turn by politicians.

Why is an advanced, small country like Israel doing so poorly in managing the epidemic? There are several reasons. One is the fact that government decisions are being made on the basis of political interests, and not from medical or economic considerations. The pilgrimage to Uman is only one example. Another is that the Haredi and Arab sectors, where the virus has spread the most, institutionally resist authority, and ignore the rules. And finally, last but definitely not least, is the lack of leadership from the one person that should pull everything together, the Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu is more concerned with keeping the support of Litzman’s Haredi faction to keep him in power and out of jail, than with the threat of a major outbreak of the virus and concomitant economic disaster. Netanyahu has systematically kept his rival Naftali Bennett on the political margins. Bennett is one of the few politicians who has demonstrated real creativity in dealing with the present crisis, but he was forced out of the Likud by Bibi, reportedly because Mrs. Netanyahu dislikes him.

Recently the government managed to avoid falling and precipitating yet another election when it negotiated an internal compromise to delay voting on a budget. This is the best thing this pitiful government is capable of accomplishing: saving itself by not doing something essential.
Thanks to the irresponsibility of our politicians, people are dying of the virus. And the ones who don’t die are out of work.

After three elections in one year, Israelis have no appetite (or half a billion shekels) for another one. But the people have had it. We are sick of the endless crises of their own making, while the country misses opportunities like the application of sovereignty to the Jordan Valley, while the southern part of the country absorbs blow after blow from Hamas (yesterday their incendiary balloons started 30 fires), and while the number of seriously ill increase daily as the politicians dither.

Recently the entire government of Lebanon resigned, after an ongoing economic meltdown was followed by a massive explosion that destroyed large chunk of their capital. I don’t envy the Lebanese their economy or their explosion, but our government should follow their example.

Thursday, August 20, 2020

Vic Rosenthal's weekly column

 


Since January, I’ve been participating in a daf yomi program. That means that every day, 7 days a week, I study a page (actually, two facing pages), of Talmud.

The fact that someone like me, who grew up in a secular home and did not have a Jewish education, has the opportunity to do this is a new development. The Talmud itself, for those who don’t know, consists of passages from the Mishna, the Oral Law first written down around 200 CE in Hebrew, and the Gemara, a much larger body of commentary on the Mishna that was compiled over a period of several hundred years afterwards. The Gemara is written in Aramaic, a language close to Hebrew, but the writing is condensed and elliptical. It also includes notes by Rashi and others commenting on and explaining the text. Until recently there was simply no way a modern reader could approach this without a great deal of preliminary study with knowledgeable teachers.

But in the last three decades, scholars have produced translations of the Aramaic texts along with detailed commentary to fill in the gaps for ignoramuses like me. In particular, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, z”l, who died earlier this month, created a monumental translation of the entire Babylonian Talmud (there is also a Jerusalem Talmud, but the one compiled in Babylonia is considered more authoritative) into modern Hebrew, which in turn has been translated into English. More than just a translation, Rabbi Steinsaltz interpolated explanations and context into the text, so that it’s possible to read it almost like a novel. There are even diagrams, which my wife says remind her of computer games.

The Talmud is not an orderly exposition of Jewish law. Rather it is a record of the deliberations and conversations of generations of sages, in which arguments are given for multiple interpretations of the Mishnaic texts, which themselves are an attempt to elucidate the commandments of the Torah and apply them to everyday life. Sometimes the Gemara will say “the halacha is such-and-such” but most of the time, all you have are the arguments. There are also stories, ridiculous medical advice, superstitions, insults – including some passages that have been used by Jew haters throughout the years as evidence for our evil ways. During the Middle Ages, non-Jewish authorities sometimes ordered printed copies of the Talmud to be censored or even burned.

The seven years it takes read the whole thing are daunting. When I started the daf yomi program, I didn’t believe that I would last more than a few weeks. But I’ve become more and more interested and involved as time goes by. I have even learned a few useful expressions in Aramaic, for example in yesterday’s daf, pok t’nei l’vara! (“go, take that teaching outside”). I’m convinced that if I live long enough (b”h), I will finish the project. I will never be either a scholar or very observant, but this study brings me closer to Judaism and Jewish history.

I think that this would not have happened if I still lived in a non-Orthodox community in the USA. In Israel, Judaism and Jewish history are in the air. I am continuously made aware of who I am, by the language, the holidays, the symbols of the state, the biblical geography, and the fact that I am surrounded by Jews. There are neighborhoods in Brooklyn in which I would also be surrounded by Jews; but even there, the consciousness of living as a small minority in someone else’s country is inescapable (not to mention the reminders provided by the growing number of antisemitic incidents). And I would miss the diversity of Israeli Jews, Jews of every color and culture.

But don’t I know that one of five Israelis is an Arab? Of course. There is room for an Arab minority. Nevertheless, there are also dangers – not directly from the presence of the Arabs, but from those that want to use their presence as a reason to weaken the Jewish state. Meir Kahane believed that the Arab citizens of Israel posed a demographic threat. Their birthrate was higher than that of the Jews, and so he predicted that the Jewish majority would ultimately be eroded. Today the birthrates of Jewish and Arab citizens are not far apart (I think the high Haredi birthrate is a greater threat to a functional state).

The real problem is an ideological one, posed by those (Jews and Arabs) who want to replace the state of the Jewish people with a state of its citizens. 62 members of the Knesset understood this when they passed the Nation-State Law to guarantee the continued Jewish character of the state. Right now there are attempts to weaken the law by inserting language to guarantee “equal rights.” We should be aware that the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty is already interpreted to guarantee equal civil rights to individual Jews and Arabs; and it is not necessary or desirable to weaken the provision of national rights that is made by the Nation-State Law to the Jewish people alone.

I am also not at all diffident about calling for Jews everywhere to make aliyah, despite the difficulties. You can certainly study Talmud in the diaspora, whether by subscribing to the daf yomi or by studying at one of the numerous yeshivot or other institutions of Jewish learning there. But you cannot, even in deepest Brooklyn, breathe Jewishness with every breath, as you can in the Jewish state.

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