Book review: The Weapon Wizards - How Israel Became a High-Tech Military Superpower

Yaakov Katz, editor of the Jerusalem Post, and Amir Bohbot of Walla, have published a fascinating history of Israel's modern military, entitled The Weapon Wizards.

The book is divided up into chapters that could each stand alone as excellent magazine articles. It starts off with an overview of how necessity was the mother of invention, specifically a secret bullet manufacturing facility under the noses of the British becoming Israel Military Industries and a brief description of the beginnings of Israel's air force.

The following chapters each concentrate on the history of specific technologies that Israel is now a leader in: drones, adaptive armor (as well as the Merkava tank), spy satellites, anti-missile systems like Iron Dome, intelligence capabilities, and cyber-warfare. These are followed with a chapter about how Israel's arms exports have helped Israel diplomatically.

The Weapon Wizards sticks to one major theme throughout: Israel's innovation is the result of decisions taken early in the state's history to concentrate on qualitative advantages on the battlefield, meaning creativity and decentralized decision-making at war as well as the desire not to be dependent on anyone else for Israel's security. Entire sections of the army are dedicated to nurturing the brightest people to come up with brilliant solutions to problems that most nations haven't had to deal with - yet. And the army itself allows and encourages independent thinking and challenging ones superiors.

In may ways, this book is a mirror-image of the now classic Start-Up Nation, just concentrating on how the army produces people that help the IDF innovate, beyond those who use their knowledge to become successful entrepreneurs. But the IDF isn't an island, and in cyberwarfare it is partnering with Israel's cutting edge cybersecurity private sector as well.

I would have loved if the book had spent more time on future innovations, a topic barely touched on in its concluding chapter. It mentions unmanned warplanes and patrol vehicles, and a couple of other things that most students of Israeli weapons technologies already know about.

As a whole, The Weapon Wizards is a fascinating and ultimately exhilarating celebration of Israeli innovation, creativity, smarts and chutzpah in defending herself.

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Book Review: Religion, Politics and the Origins of Palestine Refugee Relief

Religion, Politics and the Origins of Palestine Refugee Relief
Asaf Romirowsky & Alexander H. Joffe

This is a meticulously researched book that concentrates on a very small bit of history: the time period from 1948-50 when the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group, was organizing refugee relief in Gaza.

Before UNRWA, the UN created the United Nations Relief for Palestine Refugees (UNRPR). It outsourced refugee relief to three other groups: the International Committee of the Red Cross, the League of Red Cross Societies, and the AFSC, which had won accolades for its non-political relief activities during the 1930s and 1940s.

The AFSC was in charge of relief for some 200,000 refugees in Gaza. Even though it was not fully successful in keeping itself above the fray of Middle East politics, it did an admirable job with very few resources in providing food, medical care and even education to this huge population that fled Israel. In fact, the 25,000 native Gazans were in worse financial shape than their 200,000 forced guests.

The AFSC initially wanted the refugees to be repatriated to Israel, but eventually it accepted that the majority would have to be resettled in Arab countries. Of course, the Arab countries did not want to settle them.

The AFSC is interesting in a number of ways. The Quakers, alone among the UNRPR NGOs, actually tried and to a large extent succeeded in performing a census of the refugee population, foiling the elaborate schemes that the Arabs used to inflate the numbers of members of their families (sending kids from one home to another to be counted multiple times, not registering deaths, and so forth) in order to maintain a fair and equitable distribution system. Even so, they allowed some additional food parcels to be distributed, as the food rations created a mini-industry of trade in the camps.

An AFSC member realized early on that some 200,000 of the then-assumed 670,000-700,000 refugees were not refugees at all, having lived on the other side of the Green Line the entire time, but they applied for refugee relief to take advantage of the free food.

The group also emphatically did not want to be stuck in the Middle East forever. They set a deadline by which they would leave, and UNRWA exists partially because of that ultimatum. The AFSC was keenly aware of the facts that the refugees themselves did not want to resettle at that time, and their desire to "return" was predicated on Israel being destroyed first. The refugees also felt that the aid that they were receiving was their right, and they blamed the UN as being responsible for their homelessness and therefore responsible to house and feed them until they return victoriously to their homes.

The AFSC quickly realized that this was a quagmire that they did not want any part of. The AFSC noted, prophetically, that withdrawing aid is actually the best thing that could happen to the refugees as the alternative of perpetual aid "contributes to the moral degeneration of the refugees and may also, by its palliative effects, militate against a swift political settlement of the problem."

As they left and handed over the reins of Gaza relief to UNRWA, the FSC members naively thought that now a professional organization would be able to do things that they could not - but they quickly realized that UNRWA officials were completely incompetent and often political hires who thought that the assignment was to drink scotch all day with Egyptian officials.

For a short time the AFSC was an UNRWA contractor to help the transition. One mentioned in a letter that the Egyptians had taken over the education of the Palestinian children under UNRWA in 1950, where "the kids are learning reading, writing and bombing tactics."

The AFSC is also, as the authors point out, a precursor to today's powerful and very political NGOs. The Committee itself became very political in the decades since, taking on US involvement in Vietnam and the Cold War, and in recent decades they became implacably anti-Israel, which some but not all of their volunteers were in 1948.

The book is dense with facts and footnotes, and it is often difficult to keep track of all the players. It places the AFSC in context of the many American, mostly Protestant groups with ties to the Middle East, whose members were often antisemitic (and many of whom ended up working for the State Department.) But it tells a story that simply had not been previously told about the history of the refugee problem and how it turned from something that might have been solvable into today's intractable problem of descendants of the original refugees still stateless, still pawns and still believing that they are entitled to free food, medicine and education forever.

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Book review: "Winning a Debate with an Israel-Hater"

"Winning a Debate With an Israel-Hater" was released earlier this month, and it is a nice addition to anyone's reading list.

Dr. Michael Harris, a member of StandWithUs, sees first hand the anti-Israel protests in the San Francisco Bay area. He brings years of experience to explain how to confront and make fools of the haters.

The book itself is relatively short, more a handbook than a reference work.

The focus of the book is not to explain everything about the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is very specifically to show the audience of any public encounter between pro- and anti-Israel forces that the haters have no consistent position, except hate itself. So therefore he concentrates more on demolishing the actual types of people who mindlessly spout anti-Israel slogans, whom he calls PIDS (People with Israel Derangement Syndrome,)

That being said, there is a short history lesson so that those who want to defend Israel know the basics.

Most of the arguments would be familiar to readers of this blog. But  this is not a book on how to fisk the more clever haters who write articles and books.

Harris is somewhat irreverent and brings a light tone to the book. He includes a humorous "Palestinese Lexicon" in one chapter, for example.

Harris shows how to make the haters admit that they really want to destroy Israel, which is enough to win the debate (in the US at least.) He points out hypocrisy in their arguments, and describes how the UN is biased,  He smartly tries to stay away from explicitly accusing the haters of anti-semitism. There are chapters about BDS, the "one state solution" and he briefly shows how many of the more visible anti-Israel "intellectuals" are corrupt.

The book is clearly written to use liberal arguments for Israel, which is a good strategy in San Francisco. But it brings up one of its faults,, which is that Harris doesn't go after J-Street, making them look more misguided than evil. (I mentioned that to him and he replied that he agonized over that decision, but this way fit better with the aim of the book.)

I wish the book was better formatted and that it had an index to quickly look up the proper rebuttals to various points. But altogether, while is it a short read, it is a worthwhile book to get.

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Book review: Michael Oren's "Ally"

"Ally," Michael Oren's new book in the headlines, is not the book you expect it to be.

Especially if you have been reading Michael Oren's daily articles to promote his book - most notably his article in the Wall Street Journal last week, that began:

‘Nobody has a monopoly on making mistakes.” When I was Israel’s ambassador to the United States from 2009 to the end of 2013, that was my standard response to reporters asking who bore the greatest responsibility—President Barack Obama or Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—for the crisis in U.S.-Israel relations.

I never felt like I was lying when I said it. But, in truth, while neither leader monopolized mistakes, only one leader made them deliberately.

I read his book with this sentence in mind. How did he back up his statement? I'd like to know the inside story of how President Obama purposefully distanced himself from supporting Israel.

Oren mentions plenty of events that showed that President Obama wanted to kowtow to the Muslim world. He mentions that Obama chose to call Mahmoud Abbas before then prime minister Ehud Olmert upon entering office. He talked about how Obama's much heralded speech in Cairo tied Israel to the Holocaust rather than thousands of years of history in the land, and then chose not to visit Israel but went to Buchenwald instead as if to underscore the point. He talks about how Obama ignored the Bush/Sharon letter of understanding that Israel would hold onto major settlement blocs and instead steamrolled his way to declaring that the "1967 lines" were the basis for negotiations - and how that emboldened the Palestinian negotiators to be more intransigent and less likely to seek a negotiated agreement. But none of this is a smoking gun. On the contrary, Oren describes Obama's later speeches to AIPAC and his later visit to Israel in glowing terms, filled with optimism that Obama had finally understood what had eluded him about Israel in his early years in office - and that he had something to do with it.

Then, in the last chapter, with Oren leaving his position, things turn for the worse again. Netanyahu speaks in front of Congress and Iran fools American negotiators. Without Oren, we are led to believe, things are going to pot again.

In fact, and I hate to say this, "Ally" is not so much a description of how Obama betrayed the US-Israel relationship as much as how Michael Oren has transformed from an esteemed historian who is scrupulous in his dedication to truth...to a diplomat who reluctantly understands that he sometimes has to bend the truth...to a politician who disregards the truth to reach his goals...to a salesman trying to pump up his book to a potential audience by deceiving the public as to what the book is about.

I am profoundly disappointed.

A small anecdote towards the end of the book, when Oren has decided to run for Knesset in the Kulanu party, is what disillusioned me most. He talks about Netanyahu's supposedly racist rant on the day of the election - and takes it at face value, so much so that he says he was proud that his party denounced it. Even though, he says, he had never heard Bibi say anything that could be construed as prejudiced in the slightest.

Oren, the former historian, and who only a few months earlier would have checked out the context and defended Bibi, had turned into a politician who didn't even bother to read the other Facebook posts that were written that day on Netanyahu's page that explained what he meant, and that were more consistent with the Bibi that Oren knew so well.

But now he was Michael Oren, politician and rival to the Likud, so his former dedication to the truth became a casualty to politics.

The bulk of the book, of course, describes Oren's experiences as ambassador, and the difficulty of the job (and it is indeed a superhuman position.) Oren is self-deprecating and it is mostly an enjoyable read. While the best anecdotes have already been published in the media, there are still some choice stories. Oren knows he has to mention his family to make it more personal but he generally keeps their stories at arm's length, even though his wife suffered both breast cancer and a burst appendix while he was ambassador.

What about his insights into Obama? He certainly believes that Obama is naive about the Middle East. He even quotes, ironically, three separate Obama speeches where the president said "I'm not naive."

In fact, the best way to describe the impression that Oren has of  President Obama's views of Israel  comes from a more recent statement of Obama himself, speaking to Jeffrey Goldberg:

And I care deeply about preserving that Jewish democracy, because when I think about how I came to know Israel, it was based on images of … kibbutzim, and Moshe Dayan, and Golda Meir, and the sense that not only are we creating a safe Jewish homeland, but also we are remaking the world. We’re repairing it. We are going to do it the right way.

This is like saying that Americans are nostalgic for the version of America shown on Ozzie and Harriet. An idealized world where black people could only hope to get jobs as Pullman porters, where women who went to work were considered a little abnormal, where mental health issues were causes of great shame. Wasn't that great?

Israel in the 1950s and 1960s is no less idealized, and was no less flawed. It was a nation with a second class Sephardic community. It was also a time when Israel's Arab population were indeed discriminated against by law (until 1966, they were under martial law.) Moshe Dayan happily stole priceless archaeological treasures. And, of course, Israel was under constant threat to its very existence.

Nostalgia for the Israel of yesteryear reflects nothing less than sheer naivete - a naivete that much of the liberal Jewish population in America seems to share today.

This is the best description I can give for how Michael Oren thinks of Obama in this book, quite a difference from how he described him last week in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. The book most emphatically says that Obama is not anti-Israel, especially the Obama towards the end of Oren's time as ambassador. Oren describes an Obama who didn't hesitate to help his  idealized Israel in danger - from the raging Carmel forest fire or the crisis in the Egyptian embassy. But Obama would not show interest in the real Israel - the Israel that voted for Netanyahu so many times.

Oren himself notes early on that Obama's positive gestures towards Israel were received as "chibbuk," a hug that was not meant to show affection but was rather meant to immobilize. That explains the money Obama throws at Israel for defense as well as the leaks from the White House on Israel bombing Syria - the administration spent more energy in blocking an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities than it did on stopping Iran from getting a bomb.

In the end, extreme naivete is arguably just as dangerous as malice, especially when coupled with egoism. I don't see Obama having learned anything from his years in office concerning Israel except for optics (he no longer ties Israel to the Holocaust in speeches, for example.)

Oren's book does have value. Although he is more centrist than Netanyahu he offers a pretty good defense for Israel keeping settlement blocs, and he describes countless examples of how he defended Israel from clueless media and other diplomats. He offers a rare glimpse into the world of diplomacy which is certainly valuable. But it is still a disappointment to me.

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Book Review: "Catch the Jew"

I mentioned recently that I was reading Tuvia Tenenbom's "Catch the Jew" and that it was great.

Tenenbom, who grew up Haredi in Bnei Brak and left Judaism and Israel, returned to Israel to write this book of his impressions as he met people around the country.. He goes where the wind (and his stomach) takes him, usually playing a German journalist, asking innocent and simple questions from people who aren't used to being questioned at all.

Arabs, upon hearing that he is German, often welcome him as a fellow antisemite. To an extent, so do some of the  never ending stream of Europeans who visit Israel and the territories to spend money against Israel. And that is exactly what they are doing - not trying to help Palestinians but to hurt Israel.

The book is amazing. It beautifully deconstructs the current culture of the Israel-hating crowd, from within and without Israel.

Every page has examples of malicious Europeans, lying Arabs and clueless (or self-hating) Israeli Jews. Here are only a tiny percentage of the many anecdotes that Tenenbom mentions - each of which would be worth an entire blog post or article.:

• An Al Quds University professor tells Tenenbom that Israel won't allow the university to paint a small spot on the ceiling, and hours later he sees that the Israel is allowing the EU to spend 2.4 million euros to refurbish a Turkish bathhouse in east Jerusalem. 
• As he walks from the Mount of Olives to Gethsemane, he sees the remains of thousands of Jewish gravestones lining the road, with Hebrew letters still visible.
• Hanan Ashrawi says that Palestinians have lived there for "hundreds of thousands of years." She also gets upset when Tenenbom asks her why the Christian population has diminished so quickly under PA control. 
• A PA spokesman, when asked for his definition of Palestinian culture, says "Tolerance and coherence." Tenenbom then asks him why he cannot smoke in public on Ramadan. "It is about respect." Tuvia then tells him that Ashrawi said that twenty years earlier, Christians could smoke on Ramadan in the daylight.
• A Palestinian woman describes how Israel oppresses her but then mentions that she got free university education in Israel.
• He relates to a Jewish liberal lady how intolerant the Arabs in Ramallah are, She insists that he is lying. He asks her how many times she's been in Ramallah and the answer is zero.
• An Israeli leftist professor says she has studied Judaism for years and years. He then asks her a basic Bible question that stumps her.
• Tenenbom sees multi-million dollar mansions in Hebron, with plaques outside saying that they are being paid for by the EU.
• Gideon Levy describes how wonderful Palestinians are and how terrible Israeli Jews are. But he admits when questioned that he does not have a single Palestinian friend.
• The Palestinian Antiquities Minister, when asked, makes it clear that she really wants all Jews to leave Israel even if she can't say it out loud.
• There is an  EU-funded trip to Yad Vashem hosted by an "ex-Jew" who tells his tourists that Israelis just as bad as the Nazis were - and that Herzl died of syphilis.
• Jibril Rajoub tells Tanenbom that the reason the EU funds "pro-Palestinian" NGOs is so that they won't get terror attacks like they did in the '70s.. (He backtracks when asked to clarify.)
• Rabbi Arik Asherman, of "Rabbis for Human Rights," is exposed as being ignorant of the basics of the Torah, lying about his organization being apolitical, and shown to simper as the Arabs he pretends to love mercilessly treat him like dirt.
• Tenenbom goes to Al Quds University to attend a "human rights competition" but finds out that it is a scam - the EU pays for competitions that are never held. (After this book was published, I saw that one was held the following year.)
• An ICRC spokeswoman gets caught in a lie when she says she saw Israeli soldiers beat up a diplomat with her own eyes, then admits she wasn't anywhere near the alleged event.(In fact, the diplomat attacked the IDF.)
• A movie house in Jenin is generously funded by Europeans, but has practically no customers.
• A highly educated Jewish couple are told by their Arab friends that soon the land will be free of Jews, one of them had been gang-raped by an Arab gang and an old Arab friend had sexually abused their granddaughter. But the husband insisted that they really wanted peace. (After prodding, the wife admitted that they were fools.)
• After much discouragement, Tenenbom visits.a run-down Bedouin shack in the Negev, and finds that while the outside is ugly, the inside is like paradise.

Tenenbom sees all of this and is amazed, and eventually angry. He exposes diplomats who behave the exact opposite of how diplomats should act, journalists who don't ask the simplest questions, and NGOs who pretend that they care about oppressed people yet would never, ever give a dime to a poor or oppressed Jew (or Egyptian or Yemeni, for that matter.)

The entire situation is quite literally theater, where everyone plays their parts and everyone denies the obvious - because the truth would destroy the illusions that so many people have invested their lives in. Tenenbom's genius is to expose the obvious to the players themselves, who react with anger or denial. Their world is surrounded with like-minded unthinking drones and they cannot abide a truth-teller, often reacting by accusing Tuvia of being a Jew. It is very clear that they would not act the way they act  or say the things they do initially if they knew he was Jewish. (At one point, a Norwegian asks him "Are you a J-" and Tenenbom lets the question hang there for a minute before saying he is German. The man, who had claimed that he is there because of a long tradition of Norwegian care about the poor and downtrodden, then admits that his country collaborated with the Nazis and deported their Jews, who were presumably not poor or downtrodden.)

The author also exposes Jewish charlatans and extremists, but his main target remains the self-delusional (or knowingly deceptive) Leftists and Arabs.

In the end, Tenenbom is pessimistic about the long-term prospects of Israel, given that he has seen so many Jews who have aligned with their enemies. However, he does not seem to realize that his methods of research - while very entertaining - are not a representative sampling of Israelis (nor Arabs.) Most Israeli Jews who are proud of their country and work to make it successful are not the ones who are hanging around in areas Tenenbom frequents. Most Israelis are normal and see quite clearly what kind of neighborhood they are in; but they are not as entertaining as the hypocrites at Haaretz or the latte-drinkers in Tel Aviv, so there was less effort to reach them.

All in all, this book is a must-read.

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Book Review: Making David into Goliath

Making David into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel by Joshua Muravchik is a wonderful overview of the history of how Israel went from being the darling of the left in 1967 to becoming the victim of the UN's infamous "Zionism is Racism" resolution in 1975.

Muravchik expertly identifies, and dissects, the factors that turned the Left against Israel in such a short time.

It isn't pretty.

Muravchik identifies a number of key factors that caused this stunning public relations victory for the anti-Israel crowd. The first is Yasir Arafat, who brilliantly modeled the PLO after the anti-colonialist movement of Algeria and then cultivated, and took advantage, of relations with communist China and the Soviet Union, which crucially provided the PLO with extensive propaganda support that started bleeding into Western leftist journalist writings. Suddenly, the Arab cause turned from one explicitly geared towards destroying Israel into a "Palestinian" struggle against colonialism and imperialism. These "progressive" codewords were eagerly taken up by Western socialists and leftists, especially in Europe.

The second factor in giving the PLO legitimacy was, ironically, terrorism. Muravchik enumerates every airline hijacking and airport attack in the late 1960s and early 1970s, exposing how easily European leaders caved to the hijackers' demands, in the hope that they would be left alone next time.

The twin to that strategy was the Arab oil embargo that started in 1973. The EEC (precursor to the EU) responded with a pro-Arab position  on the Middle East: calling on unconditional full Israeli withdrawal from lands gained in 1967 without negotiations or border adjustments envisioned in UNSC 242 and did not call on Arabs to make peace with Israel.

In other words, during these two crucial tests of European nations to either stick to their principles or to cave to blackmail, the European nations caved.

Psychologically, one does not want to think of oneself as a craven hypocrite who knuckles under to threats.So the only way to not fall into self-loathing is to find "human rights" justifications for cowardice.

Muravchik also details how the Non-Aligned Movement took over the UN, and brought the Palestinian issue as the single biggest agenda item in that body. He also highlights how Jewish born antisemite Bruno Kreisky, chancellor of Austria and vice president of the Socialist International, singlehandedly turned that body from pro-Israel to anti-Israel.

Finally, Muravchik details how the academic Left fell under the spell of a fraud: Edward Said. Said managed with his one work, Orientalism, to seduce generations of students into the romantic ideal of the East as being ruthlessly exploited and subjugated by the West. Said later admitted was really meant specifically to help Palestinian nationalism.

The remaining favor that the Left held towards Israel disappeared when it elected its first non-Labor government, led by Menachem Begin, a figure that most on the Left disliked viscerally. Even after the peace agreement with Egypt they didn't warm up to him, and the Lebanon war solidified the direction that they were already going in.

The book then goes on to describe how Israeli post-Zionism started to affect both Israeli and international views of the Jewish state. he goes into detail on how B'Tselem was founded and how it tried to be both a human rights organization and an political advocacy group - which is contradictory. Muravchik describes the importance of Israel's "New Historians" on Israel's self-image as well as how the world looked at the state. And he shows how Ha'aretz is complicit in demonizing Israel from the inside.

The author then masterfully takes apart the hypocrisy of the new Left's organizations that have taken on their anti-Israel cause. He dismantles the ISM, exposes HRW's insane anti-Israel stance (pointing out how their MENA head Sarah Leah Whitson went out of her way to praise Moammar Qaddafi,) and destroys Walt and Mearsheimer and their ideological cousins from Richard Falk to J-Street.

The remarkable penultimate chapter lays out the best liberal pro-Israel arguments against its critics, going from the outbreak of the second Intifada through the building of the separation barrier (and the bias of the ICJ,) the Lebanon war, Operation Cast Lead, Goldstone and beyond. The very arguments raging today against Israel in Gaza are all discussed and masterfully defeated.

Making David into Goliath is one of the best liberal defenses of Israel ever written.

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Book review: The Israeli Solution by Caroline Glick

One thing that Jews and Americans have in common is the desire to find solutions to problems. It is almost a pathology - if problems exist, we are hopelessly optimistic that solutions also exist.

Usually the solutions offered to the Arab-Israeli conflict come from the Left - Israeli offering more concessions in exchange for presumed goodwill that never materializes, but is still assumed. Some solutions come from the Right as well and they are usually dismissed without a consideration.

There has been some attention given to Caroline Glick's "one state solution" plan that she unveiled with the release of her book, The Israeli Solution. The plan, if I may oversimplify it for this review, is this:

• Israel annexes Judea and Samaria, but not Gaza. 
• Arab citizens are given full rights across the board.
• The demographic problems will not materialize because the population figures we have been given from Palestinian Arabs have been grossly exaggerated.
• At most, Arabs would take up one third of the population.
• Palestinians wouldn't have any viable options to counter this.
• Arab states won't care enough to do anything about it. 
• Europe might offer some severe economic and diplomatic responses, but Israel could survive them.
• Americans and Israelis should embrace this plan since it solves almost all the problems.

The book is divided into three sections.

The first is a good overview of the history of the region and of the peace process. There is a lot of good research here and, if expanded, it could make a fine book on its own.

Glick is also at least as critical of George W. Bush's Middle East policy as she is of Bill Clinton's and Barack Obama's. After all, Bush was the first president to declare openly that the US goal was to create a Palestinian Arab state.

The second section details the plan itself, while the third discusses potential fallout.

This is an important book because it breaks out of the "two-state" straitjacket that Israel - and the world- finds itself in. It does not cower at the supposed demographic time bomb that seems to cause Israeli politicians to panic and make unilateral offers. It is crucial to have a smart, fearless voice on the right that tackles the sacred cows of the "peace process" and that expands the discussion beyond the boundaries that are considered acceptable by the conventional wisdom.

Unfortunately, the book is also flawed. Some might not find the flaws to be that bad, and I agree that the importance of having the arguments out there may outweigh the problems, but they bother me a great deal.

Glick brings a wealth of facts to support her position. Many are new to me and I hope to turn some of them into standalone posts. But sometimes she plays fast and loose with those facts, sacrificing honesty for her arguments.

For example, on page 184 she says something astounding. In 2012 there was a poll of both Israelis and Palestinians on how they would view an Israeli plan "to unilaterally withdraw from Judea and Samaria, in a bid to advance a two state solution." 44% of Israelis supported it with 49% opposed, but she says 35% of Palestinians supported it and 59% opposed it. "That is, the Palestinians were much more opposed to an Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria than were the Israelis."

This seemed fishy to me, so I looked up the poll. The suggestion was not a unilateral plan to withdraw from all of Judea and Samaria, but only from the parts east of the fence (give or take.) In other words, the Palestinians weren't opposed to the pullout - they were opposed to any remaining land of the territories being in Israeli hands. The result is quite different from how Glick represented it, and this is most disappointing.

On page 212, Glick says without qualification that "ethnic Palestinians constitute 80 percent of the population" in Jordan. She gets this figure from Mudar Zahran, a writer I respect but one who has an agenda. The truth is that there have been no censuses in Jordan to determine how many Palestinians live there; most experts assume between 50% and 70%. 80% seems very high, and it really has no support except by Zahran's assertion, and he has an interest in inflating the figures.

Less important but still problematic are things like Glick's assertion (p. 145) that Palestinian law supports older Jordanian laws that forbid selling land to Jews on penalty of death. In reality, that is almost accurate, but the law as written is really aimed at Israeli Jews, not all Jews (there was another Jordanian law to make it very difficult to sell land to non-Arabs, making it effectively but not officially impossible to sell land to Jews. Still, accuracy is paramount.)

There is also an apparent typo on page 76 saying that European Court of Auditors determined that $27 billion in EU aid to the PA was unaccounted for between 2008 and 2012. The real number is $2.7 billion.

Some of these are minor quibbles but I expect a book of this caliber, making important and novel arguments, to be very careful in its wording and arguments. Unfortunately Glick is not as careful as she should be, forcing one to double check every fact.

Even in her main thesis Glick skates over facts a little too much for my taste. I am no demographic expert, but I know that there are some demographers who disagree with the rightist demographers Glick relies on for the bulk of her argument. Those criticisms are ignored and the demographers Glick relies upon are not given a chance to defend their position on a deeper level, which is what I would like to see. Betting the future of Israel on biased statistics is a bad idea no matter which way the statistics may be biased. I, for one, would love to see a decent academic debate on this topic, and this book missed an opportunity by not going the extra mile to dig deeper instead of uncritically only reporting one side.

This is a pattern throughout the book. Obviously, Caroline Glick has a viewpoint and no one can begrudge her the opportunity to showcase it in her book , but when she ignores evidence that contradicts her theses it weakens her points significantly. This is a real shame, because even small errors will be magnified by the Israel haters to delegitimize the good points she makes.

Finally, I have a problem with Glick's key argument. Even if we allow that her demographics are correct and 67% of Israelis would be Jewish under her plan, that is not as healthy a majority as it may appear.

Since Israel is a parliamentary democracy, one only needs a bloc of 51% of the seats in Knesset to rule. In theory, if all Arabs (33%) vote as a bloc, then they could form a coalition with a mere 18% representing Jewish far left parties - meaning that Arabs could be a significant majority of a ruling coalition!

Is it that far fetched that far -Left parties would jump at the chance to be in the ruling coalition - and would agree to, say, limit aliyah or replace Yom Haatzmaut with Nakba Day to appease the Arab majority?

Even with these criticisms (and I have many others - I especially don't think that she considers all possible reactions to her plan), I want to emphasize that this is an important book and one that is worth reading. You will definitely learn things you didn't know before.

More importantly, it is critical that the discussion of potential solutions are not limited to the artificial framework that the Western world has imposed on Israel.

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Book Review: The Eyes of Abel

I've rarely reviewed works of fiction here, but The Eyes of Abel, by Daniel Jacobs, is worth reading.


Set in the very near future,  The Eyes of Abel  starts off with a terror attack on a plane over San Francisco, where the terrorist sneaks the bomb aboard while wearing a burka. While most Americans are upset at the political correctness that allowed the authorities to let her board without proper security checks, liberal Pulitzer-winning journalist Roger Charlin is more concerned that profiling Middle Eastern-looking people at airports would create many more terrorists. To prove his assumption, he pretends to be an Arab and tries to get past El Al security in a New York airport, which is where he meets agent Maya Cohen, a (naturally) beautiful and brilliant agent who sees through his disguise and more.

The plot is relatively typical of the genre. The Eyes of Abel follows the pair as they fall in love and then work to save the world from an impending war centered on Israel but really planned by an alignment of big energy players and the politicians who are in their pockets.

Yes, it is somewhat formulaic. Yes, you have to suspend disbelief a bit. (Charlin manages to go through three months of the narrative without seeming to file a single story.)

But that doesn't mean that the book doesn't work, and it is difficult to put down once you start. Luckily, it is pretty short - less than 200 pages - so you can finish it in an afternoon.

What is most appealing, however, is that while the book works well as a Dan Brown-lite type of thriller, it also discusses the thorniest points of the Arab-Israeli conflict in a refreshingly honest way. Charlin and his colleagues are reflexively anti-Israel and Maya does a great job as she explains Israel's perspective and slowly changes Roger's mind. Media bias as well as the automatic anti-Israel bias of the world community is exposed nicely and pretty accurately, without getting in the way of the story. Plus, as the author emphasized to me, the book exposes the relationship between petrodollars and the war machines that align against Israel - and how the decline of the influence of oil could possibly bring peace.

If you need a good beach read, you can't do much better than The Eyes of Abel. And if you want to ensure that people understand Israel's point of view, you will recommend it to your friends.

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Book review: "The Road to Fatima Gate", Michael Totten

Lebanon is a very complicated place.

You literally need a scorecard to keep track of all the different groups that make up Lebanon's political scene and their shifting loyalties. The three main groups are,of course, the Christians, the Shiites and the Sunnis, but each of those groups have splinter groups that may or may not be aligned with their co-religionists at any time. There are also the Druze and smaller groups, whose very survival depends on being able to anticipate which way the wind is about to blow and jump on the side of the winning team.

Add to this that these are not just political groups but they all generally were parts of militia in the 1970s and 1980s. Sometimes they have to take out their weapons to defend their towns and villages.

And add to this the entire recent history of civil war. Plus the collective memory of being effectively controlled by Syria, by Israel or (more recently) by Iran. Not to mention the French influence on Lebanese culture and the fact that it is a favorite vacation spot for decadent, rich Saudis. More ingredients in Lebanon's ratatouille is the generally liberal and Western-style of downtown Beirut compared with the poverty of the south and the traditionalism in other areas.

The resulting dish is dizzying in its complexity.

Michael Totten, in his great book "The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel ," explains it all (or at least a lot of it) in a wonderful first-person journalistic style.

We learn about Lebanon as Totten does. We follow him as he interviews Shi'ite, Maronite and Sunni leaders and ordinary people as well. We tag along as he gets threatened by people with guns and eventually finds that he is somehow safer with armed people around.

Unlike many journalists who speak as if they are omniscient, Totten lets us see his mistakes and how he learns from them.

He takes us on his journey during the Israel/Hezbollah war of 2006 and mini-civil wars precipitated by Hezbollah in afterwards. He speaks to many people on most sides, and lets us know when he doesn't believe what they say. He and his friends get into dangerous situations that are inconceivable to Western eyes - but he knows that and explains it so the audience gets it.

Totten often uses that skill to great effect. For example, he mentions that he asks Eli Khoury, a leader of the March 14th movement, "What is the solution?" Totten then goes on to tell his readers that this is a very American question, one that he soon learned not to ask, because the Lebanese know that there isn't one. However, Americans are solution-oriented and cannot grasp that basic concept that is so integral to survival in the Middle East.

We cannot solve the problems. We can only manage them as best we can, today.

One other talent that Michael Totten has is the ability to see the entire picture and relate to it. It is easy to get lost in the minutiae, especially in Lebanon where there are so many groups competing with each other and none of them are in the majority. But Totten is always there to remind us what the real danger is. It is Iran, using Hezbollah as its proxy. All of the desire to be pacifist or pan-Lebanese is doomed as long as Hezbollah, effectively an arm of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, has effective veto power over the Lebanese government and controls its own state within a state. No one can confront Hezbollah militarily nor politically, and as a result Iran is extending its hegemony over the region.

Totten's journalistic style is especially appreciated in the Lebanese arena. While most other journalists will meekly follow whatever restrictions their interview subjects impose on them, Totten reports on the entire context of his interviews, letting us know that if he cannot find out a piece of information it is not because he didn't try. He also lets us know when his subjects are not being entirely truthful.

Totten was not in Lebanon for all the events he covers so he relies on his friends to fill in the personal stories. Also, he didn't talk much about the Palestinian Arab experience in Lebanon outside of broad historical strokes; there is no interview with the Arabs in refugee camps and the Nahr al-Bared fighting is glossed over as a "sideshow." While this is probably true, there are  about as many Palestinian Arabs in Lebanon as there are Druze, and demographics do matter. I would love to have seen him highlight Lebanese discrimination against them across the board as well as what they have done to help destroy Lebanon from inside.

These are minor points, though. The Road to Fatima Gate is a brilliant combination of memoir and journalism, and it is highly recommended.

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Book Review: Palestine Betrayed

Efraim Karsh's "Palestine Betrayed" is an answer to the "New Historians'" view of Israel during the War of Independence. In it, Karsh makes a strong argument that the vast majority of the tragedy of the "naqba" was because of Arab, not Jewish, actions.

Karsh makes a startlingly effective case for the fact that the mainstream Zionist leadership wanted to live with their Arab cousins in peace. He brings quote after quote, from Herzl  to Jabotinsky to Ben Gurion, that shows that the plan of ethnic cleansing that we are told so incessantly about by Arabs today is simply a fiction. He goes into some detail about Arab-Jewish cooperation immediately after the Balfour Declaration - and before the Mufti.

Much of the blame for the severe deterioration on the relationship between the communities goes directly to Hajj Amin Husseini, who almost single-handedly led the Palestinian Arabs to disaster - as Mufti of Jerusalem, as president of the Supreme Muslim Council, and as president of the Arab Higher Committee. His unwavering anti-semitism combined with his positions of power and his ability to outmaneuver his rivals created an atmosphere where compromise was unthinkable. Karsh also shows that Husseini, far from being a nationalist, was always more interested in a pan-Arab nation - first as part of Greater Syria, but even later he viewed the Arab Palestine as being a stepping-stone to pan-Arab unification. Karsh follows his career from Jerusalem to becoming a Nazi sympathizer.

The centerpiece of the book is the description of the fighting and Arab flight during the first part of the War of Independence. Karsh puts forth a strong argument that the vast majority of Arabs fled their homes as a result of fear, and often in spite of Jewish entreaties to stay put. He goes into detail of the flight of Arabs from Haifa and Jaffa, into the complete breakdown of Arab leadership and the almost non-existence of a unified Arab front, neither within Palestine nor without.(A fascinating detail from Haifa: the Arab flight occurred during Passover, and the rabbinate of Haifa gave a special dispensation for Jewish bakers to bake bread for Arabs during that time to help them out as their infrastructure evaporated.)

According to Karsh, the only expulsion that Israeli forces did to a major urban Arab area was for Lydda, where the Haganah feared that a potential rear-guard fighting force could jeopardize their forces' advances. He does mention a few smaller villages that were depopulated by the Jewish forces, and he gives the military justification for some.

In fact, Karsh provides an appendix listing how many Arabs fled every town and village, roughly 600,000 refugees in total, somewhat less than the UN and Arab claims at the time, which Karsh shows were often inflated.

Karsh also shows pretty clearly that even if the Arabs had won the war, there would be no Palestine today, as Egypt, Transjordan and Syria planned to carve up whatever they could capture. King Abdullah of Transjordan was willing to allow an autonomous but tiny Jewish presence to remain around Haifa.

While Karsh delves into the details of the first phases of the Arab exodus, until roughly June 1948, he all but ignores the next stages that went on until November. This seems to be a shortcoming, as Benny Morris does go into those in detail. Yet even while Morris acknowledges that while there were what he terms atrocities, they were the exception and that most Arab flight occurred from panic even in the latter stages of the fighting.  It is just that the detail he gives is so numbing that it appears that the unsavory acts were far more common than they were in reality.

Another seeming shortcoming of Karsh's book is that he seems to downplay the role of the Irgun and the Stern Gang. While his argument of the conciliatory nature of the Haganah leadership seems well grounded, it appears that Karsh is embarrassed about the undeniably terrorist acts of the Irgun, at times justifying them as reprisals and other times minimizing their importance. However, it seems to me that this needs to be dealt with more forthrightly - both in terms of denouncing their terror as well as in the fact that their acts precipitated much of the Arab flight (and, arguably, the British decision to quit Palestine.) War is never 100% clean.

Karsh's epilogue draws a direct line from Husseini to Arafat and beyond, showing that Arab intransigence has not changed much although it has been packaged differently.

A truly dispassionate history of the conflict is probably impossible to write. Karsh's biases are no less obvious than Segev's or (early) Morris', but they are a necessary counterpoint to the prevailing conventional wisdom. Karsh's arguments are well done and well notated, and he unearths a large number of previously unknown primary sources, especially from British archives. The same events can be used to draw different conclusions, and it is ultimately up to the reader to determine whether the author succeeded in buttressing his point of view with solid facts. For the most part, Karsh succeeds.

The Zionist narrative is at least as valid as that of the revisionists (and far more than that of the Arabs) and it needs to be regarded as such. As such, Karsh's book is invaluable.

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Book Review: "Start-Up Nation"

Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle is a remarkable book by Dan Senor and Saul Singer. It details what has allowed Israel, a besieged nation with few natural resources and under political and military pressure from birth, to become an incubator for a hugely disproportionate number of successful entrepreneurial enterprises compared to any other nation. It also asks what other nations could learn from Israel's success.

Senor and Singer describe how Israeli engineers literally saved Intel by badgering its executives incessantly to change how they create their chips. The book details how a tiny Israeli firm showed PayPal a completely new method of fraud detection that did in a week what PayPal couldn't do with thousands of analysts in years. It reveals little known items such as the fact that Google Suggest, where probable search requests are shown in real time as you type into the Google Search box, was using Israeli ingenuity.

The book uncovers many factors that contribute to Israeli success in creating startups as well as being crucial to the continued success of giants like Microsoft, Cisco and Berkshire-Hathaway.

One major reason is the Israeli army. The IDF gives its soldiers an instant network across different parts of Israeli society, it actively pursues high-achieving students to join its most challenging programs, it provides cross-disciplinary training, it forces young soldiers to take responsibility for split-second, life-or-death decisions, and it does not punish failure as long as everyone can learn from mistakes. The IDF rewards creativity and frowns upon the rigid hierarchical structure that other armies make mandatory. Soldiers are expected to question everything they are told, and not to rely on the attitude that "this is the way it has always been done." Even more importantly, the IDF resume is critical to getting a job in Israel (something that hurts Israeli Arabs and haredim, a topic discussed briefly.)

All of these factors translate into a successful entrepreneurial spirit. While American companies often do not know what to make of a resume that mentions military service, Israeli companies know exactly how the skills learned on a battlefield translate into the business world. And while corporate America tends to punish people who fail in any new venture, Israelis do not look at failure as a negative; rather it is essential experience.

The army is not the only factor behind Israeli success. Other factors include Israel's embrace of immigration as a catalyst for growth, noting that immigrants are natural risk-takers, as well as government encouragement of the nation's start-ups. It took a group of forward-thinking people to create Israel's venture capital industry. The authors even mention that Jews, from centuries of studying the Talmud, naturally ask questions and challenge their teachers.

One factor that permeates the book, that would be more difficult to reproduce in other nations, is a deep-seated patriotism. Israelis don't just want to succeed, they want to davka succeed - they want to succeed despite, and in spite of, the obstacles that the world puts in their way. Israel's defense industries sprung up partially because Charles de Gaulle stopped sending French jet planes to Israel on the eve of the Six Day War. When Saddam Hussein showered Scud missiles on Israel, Intel Israel employees kept all their manufacturing deadlines at a critical time for Intel - even though the government asked people to stay home and employees all came voluntarily. They knew that for Israel to be taken seriously as a major player, it had to be perceived as a reliable partner for major corporations and divorce the reality of war from meeting commitments.

When Warren Buffett invested in Iscar, he didn't think that the possibility of the factory being destroyed by Katyusha rockets was a catastrophic risk: factories could always be rebuilt; his main investment was in the people.

Even back before the state was born, Palestinian Jews turned the Arab boycott against them into an advantage, as they opened up export markets and ended up doing better than before the boycott.

When Israelis think about how to solve a problem, they aren't only thinking about how it would help their careers - they are thinking about how it would help Israel itself, how it would help their companies, and, often, how it would help the world.

For Zionists, this is an exhilarating book to read; it shows how Israelis turn adversity into advantage. For businesspeople, it gives insight into how to reward risk-takers and innovators.

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Book review: Good Arabs

Good Arabs is Hillel Cohen's followup to his earlier book, Army of Shadows (review here.) Army of Shadows detailed the relationship between Jews and Arabs in Palestine before the 1948 war mostly from the viewpoint of early Zionist intelligence agencies. Good Arabs continues on this theme, looking at how the Israeli military and police establishments interacted with Israeli Arabs from 1948 to 1967.

As with the earlier book, Good Arabs is filled with variants of the pejorative term "collaborate." It seems probable that Cohen, who wrote the word in Hebrew, agreed with this translation of the Hebrew word "פעולה". However that Hebrew term has two translations: "collaborate" and "cooperate." When reading the book and mentally replacing the former with the latter, an entirely different impression is given.

To be sure, the Arabs living in Israel during those nineteen years did not have it easy. Most of them were under military rule and many of them saw their lands expropriated from them. Cohen looks at the phenomenon of Arabs who cooperated with the Israeli authorities and finds many reasons for their actions.

Some were opportunists; trying to ingratiate themselves with the strong horse. Some were realists, who felt that Israel wasn't going anywhere and the best strategy was to give the Jewish leaders what they wanted. Some wanted the perks that the Israelis would give to those who helped them - often guns and jobs. Some were, in fact, ideologically inclined to support Israel. Others played both sides of the fence, or, as in one case Cohen brings, played Israel, Egypt and Jordan against each other.

Based on voluminous declassified Israeli police material, much of which quoted the testimony of collaborators against Arabs who were deemed a threat to the state, Cohen attempts to reconstruct the psyche of the minority citizens of Israel during that time, concentrated mostly in the 1950s. Israeli authorities, often heavy-handedly, attempted to stop any "nationalist" discourse and replace the Palestinian Arab narrative with the Zionist narrative in Arab schools. Many Arabs resisted these attempts, others went along with it.

To his credit, Cohen does not try to generalize. He seems wedded to the Palestinian Arab narrative (it is jarring to see him use the word "Nakba" as if the term existed in the 1950s) but he willingly brings anecdotes about the Arabs who genuinely wanted to work with the Jews.

He goes into details about the Communists, who attracted many Arabs in the Triangle and northern regions and who were nominally supportive of Israel's existence but very much against the idea of a Jewish state. The Israeli authorities were keenly interested in Communist sympathizers among the Arabs and used their carrot-and-stick approach to minimize their influence.

As in the last book, Cohen uses the word "nationalists" a bit too freely; most of his examples do not seem to support the type of Palestinian Arab nationalism that we have become familiar with since 1967, but rather pan-Arabism.

Most Palestinian Arabs, especially before the rise of the PLO, cared far less about nationalism than they did about taking care of their families in honor. This simple fact is supported by Cohen's anecdotes, but he doesn't quite seem to grasp it himself. For example, he looks at the difficulty that Israel had to instill a strong Zionist ethos into their thinking as a failure, when in fact it is just the other side of the same coin of the apathy of Arabs towards their own nationalists. After all, the older generation of the 1950s Arabs had already lived under Ottoman, British and Israeli rule; to them their families were a far more permanent part of their lives than their rulers. This is why they worked hard to re-unite their families who were separated by the war. Sometimes this was done by smuggling them in and breaking the law; sometimes by being exceptionally cooperative with the Israelis who let a not-insignificant number return, and sometimes it was a combination of the two - bringing them in illegally and then appealing to past cooperation with Israelis, especially in 1948, to allow their relatives to stay.

The rise of Nasser and the seeming strength of the United Arab Republic union of Egypt and Syria convinced many Israeli Arabs that Israel would soon be destroyed; these Arabs tended to think in terms of how they could optimize their situations given that scenario playing out. Others analyzed the same facts and concluded that Israel was the power they needed to cooperate more with. These pragmatic issues usually trumped the ideological, and it does not appear likely that anyone thought that an Arab Palestine that would result from the Arabs sweeping the Jews into the sea would be any more independent than the West Bank Jordanians were. (One interesting footnote mentions that the Arabs of the Triangle were very happy when they ended up in the Jewish state after 1948, because the Iraqi fighters who had occupied their towns had a nasty habit of rape.)

Cohen also goes into detail into the different attitudes of the Druze, the Ciracassians and the Bedouin to the state, especially in terms of becoming members of the IDF. He notes that Israeli policy was to divide these groups and treat them separately from the mostly Muslim Arabs, which could be a method to help minimize the amount of danger that a united minority group could bring. However, he mentions that Israelis themselves justified this policy by accurately noting that the only reason there was any unity among those groups to begin with was because of the British policy of playing the Jews against the other minorities.

One shortcoming of the book is that after many specific examples of cooperation/collaboration throughout the 1950s by Arabs under Israeli military rule, Cohen dismisses the 1960s with a single paragraph mentioning that Israel's military government power waned, Israel's Arab citizens won more freedoms and then the military government apparatus dismantled in late 1966. There are no details, no examples, no discussion of how this affected the cooperators and the Israelis, especially on the eve of the Six Day War. He mentions that a significant number of Israeli Arabs were actively offering to help Israel on the eve of the war, even after the military government was gone and they were much closer to being equal citizens of the state. The entire seven years should have gotten more detailed attention.

Good Arabs sheds much light on 1950s Israeli Arabs and it demolishes some myths. As with Cohen's previous book, it is an important addition to understanding recent history and it gives us some lessons for today.

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Book review: "The Strong Horse"

Lee Smith is a reporter, commentator, author and visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute. Immediately after 9/11, he flew to Egypt to find out "why the Arabs hate us."

His conclusion, after years of living in Cairo and Beirut, is not so much that Arabs hate the West as it is that their own sectarianism is the driving force behind their actions.

The Strong Horse: Power, Politics and the Clash of Arab Civilizations is a combination of memoir and analysis of his time in the Arab world since Al Qaeda's attack. The name of the book is based on a quote by Bin Laden, where he says "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse."

Smith's book shows that this is close to the truth in the Arab world. While many Americans tend to support the underdog, Arabs will gravitate - not necessarily like, but gravitate - towards the stronger party.

Smith goes through the history of Arab sectarian violence. He convincingly shows that, to the Arab world, tribalism is still far more important than anti-Americanism or anti-Westernism. The hatred between the many players in the Middle East - Sunnis, Shiites, Salafis, Alawites, Maronites, and many others - is the driving agenda behind most Arab actions. His asides detailing the history of these groups are worth the cost of the book itself.

To Smith, the existence of despotic Arab regimes seems a necessary evil as the Arab world moves into an unknown future, a transition that is still being violently played out. If Syria and Egypt were not so heavy-handed in their treatment of the various Arab groups, the result would be - Lebanon.

It is indeed ironic that the most liberal Arabic-speaking country, the one that the West would think is the closest to a Western-style democracy, is also the most unstable and the possibly most dangerous. Smith believes that the imposition of a strong leadership in most Arab nations not only forces stability from without but also from within, as the Arab people themselves will tend to side with the group - the government - that shows the most power.

Smith tends to blur the differences between Arab thought and Islamism, seeming to put the latter is a specific form of the former, which is not quite true. His organization of the book is a little jumpy as well, and he ignores the Maghreb countries altogether. Nevertheless, his arguments are compelling if not altogether persuasive. For example, he meets with Natan Sharansky at the end of the book, and although much of his argument is that Sharansky is wrong and that the Arab world does not yearn for real democracy, he doesn't attack Sharansky's arguments head-on.

He also touches upon Israel's role as a de-facto strong horse, but doesn't go into much detail on the topic. His final chapter on Israel, meant to be the culmination of his argument, is disappointing.

However, there is no arguing with the fundamental theme of the book. In the days after 9/11, Al Jazeera - representing pan-Arab thought - lionized Bin Laden. As the US and Western allies marginalized went after Al Qaeda, though, Bin Laden's popularity has gone way down. No one is loving the West and they might rail against Western interference in Arab affairs, but their respect for the Western allies has certainly increased.

This attraction to being on the winning side is, in many ways, the real threat from Iran to the Middle East. Whether the US likes it or not, it has become a major player in the Arab world. Its only real counterbalance is Iran, whose leaders are keen on expanding their influence. If the US wavers in its commitment to its Arab allies - and even to Israel - Iran will gain an extraordinary victory.

I am not a big fan of US aid to Israel. I would prefer to see Israel be more economically independent, and freer to act in its own interests. Unfortunately, the truth is that if the US would "punish" Israel by even symbolically withholding aid, the reverberations throughout the Arab world would be far-reaching. If pro-US Arab governments would perceive that the US commitment to Israel's security was not as strong as it has been, they would be extraordinarily nervous about the US commitment to their own security. They would naturally want to look for other patrons to align with - and Iran is the only other game in town (since publicly allying with the Jewish state is unthinkable.)

The Middle East is a mess that many Americans naturally would like to abandon, but the downside of doing so would be catastrophic. Like it or not, America is the "strong horse," and it is not a role to be relinquished without serious thought about its consequences.

This may be the single most important lesson from Lee Smith's thesis.

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Book review: "Fromms: How Julius Fromm's Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis"

(I was sent this book for review.)

Julius Fromm was Germany's condom king between the two world wars. He innovated the manufacture and quality control of the product and became fabulously successful.

But, he was Jewish.

The book, "Fromms: How Julius Fromm's Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis" is an English translation of a book published two years ago in Germany. It is a quick read, less than 200 pages of actual text. Even at this short length, it feels as if the authors padded it as much as they could.

It is a story of an eastern European Jewish family, headed by a brilliant businessman, who tried to assimilate into German society and failed.

It is difficult to know what the aim of the book is. In the beginning, it is a description of the burgeoning sexualization of Germany in the 1920s; it then turns into a short biography of Julius Fromm and how he built his business, and then finally into a relatively detailed review of how his business was systematically dismantled by the Nazis (and, to an extent, by the Germans and Russians after the war, refusing to compensate the family.)

This last part is the most interesting. Fromm was forced to sell the company to Herman Göring's godmother at a fraction of its value in 1938. It also describes the "Jew auctions" that would be held regularly in Berlin to sell off the possessions of the expelled, the doomed and the dead. The finest objects would be confiscated by the Nazi elite; only the second and third tier possessions made it to these auctions, and a majority of Berliners took advantage of them.

Another interesting chapter deals with one of Fromm's brothers who was shipped to Australia from England on the Dunera along with many other Jewish refugees and prisoners of war.

Julius Fromm himself managed to escape Germany before the war with most of his family and a small part of his fortune. Although he died only days after the war ended, reportedly of excitement at the chance to start his business anew, it is hard to feel empathy for him as he rode out the war in relative luxury in England.

For serious Holocaust historians, the book adds a bit of detail that has been so far unexplored about the fate of Jewish-owned businesses before, during and after the war. Otherwise, the main parts of the book can be gleaned from the Wikipedia article on Fromm.

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Book review: "Saving Israel"

Daniel Gordis of the Shalem Center has written an intriguing book with an ambitious goal: to save the Jewish State and, by extension, Judaism.

The full title is "Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War That May Never End."

For most of the book, Gordis describes the problems facing Israel, and the problems seem insurmountable: peace with Palestinian Arabs is a chimera, young American Jews no longer identify with Israel and have increasingly become immersed in anti-Israel leftism, the ability of Jews to articulate the reasons that Israel is needed is deteriorating, Israel will never be at peace as long as Hamas and Hezbollah and similar groups exist, the number of prominent people who are against the very existence of Israel keeps increasing, Iran and increasing technology ensures that Israel will always live under a cloud of worry about total annihilation, Israel's Arab minority is increasingly radical and hostile to Israel's existence, Israelis themselves have lost passion for Zionism, and an Israel that doesn't embrace its Judaism has little chance of survival.

The problems are laid out well. Gordis doesn't pull any punches and he doesn't hide from any problems. He acknowledges and does not try to minimize the real pain that Palestinian Arabs have and the real problems in Israeli society today. He explores and pokes holes in simple solutions and stopgaps that people have suggested (like Israel trading the Wadi Ara area for settlement blocs to help reduce the demographic problem - even anti-Israel Arabs that live there would end up moving elsewhere in Israel rather than become members of a Palestinian Arab state.)

His description of the problems is so good that they are almost overwhelming.

Gordis brings up two disheartening stories that set up his solution. In one, his son is paired up with a non-religious Israeli at a post-high school class where they taught Talmud. The subject was the very first page of the first tractate in Brachot. The teacher wanted them to go through the daf and list all the questions they could, and the non-religious Israeli's first question was "What's the Shema?" A Hebrew-speaking Israel went through all his years of schooling without knowing the most basic information about Jewish life.

The other story was about a girl from Sderot who was sent to America as a respite from the incessant rocket attacks. Upon her return, she was angry - asking why she had to go to California to see a havdalah ceremony for the first time in her life.

The Zionism of early Zionist poets and thinkers was explicitly anti-religious. Gordis mentions a children's song written by famed Chaim Bialik, about a see-saw, which actually denies the existence of God due to its playful use of a Mishnaic phrase (mah le-ma'alah, mah le-matah? "Who is above and who is below?") He brings other examples of rabid anti-religious sentiment in major early Zionist leaders.

So what does Gordis suggest? He wants the very definition of what it means to be Jewish to change. He wants Israel to become a central part of diaspora Judaism and he wants Judaism to become the central part of Israeli life. He is equally upset at how Israeli schools ignore all Jewish history between the Bible and the birth of Zionism as he is at how the Chief Rabbinate of Israel ignores the opportunities to lead the entire country in debates about the religion, choosing instead to concentrate only on the religious sector.

Only when Judaism returns as the centerpiece of the Jewish state can Zionists articulate the purpose of Israel. Only a people who know who they are and how they became that way can justify their existence and their self-defense.

Gordis, ordained as a conservative rabbi, couches his suggestions in a pluralistic Jewish way. He doesn't refer to his beliefs in the book and one could argue that Conservative or Masorti Judaism has not exactly inspired masses of Jews in America. Nevertheless, his ideas make sense. Israelis need to become Jewishly literate and there need to be public debates about every difficult issue not (only) from a Western perspective but from the rich Jewish tradition. The divide between the religious Zionist, the haredi and the secular Israelis is too large and the religious have been too insular. Gordis shows that non-religious Israelis seem to want to learn more about Judaism as well but all too often do not have the tools.

Although he doesn't suggest it, there should be TV shows in Israel where Jews of all denominations debate current issues from a Jewish perspective. What is the proper Jewish response to Gilad Shalit's kidnapping? Should Israeli shops sell chametz (leavened products) on Passover? What is the balance between defending Israeli lives and the lives of enemy civilians? How much separation should there be between Jewish and Arab Israelis? The number of topics is endless and it can start a real debate, as well as encourage a Jewish renaissance in Israel. This renaissance might not be traditionally Orthodox but it is far preferable to raising a generation of Jewishly illiterate Israelis.

It is certainly possible to be passionate about Judaism even if one is not Orthodox, and the Orthodox should not be afraid to publicly debate others if they are confident about their own beliefs.

Do these suggestions solve the problems that Israel has? Hardly. Gordis' questions are better than his answer. But his ideas are a prerequisite to solving Israel's problems. Israeli Jews need to be confident enough and conversant enough in their own Jewishness to rely on it to inform their decisions. Without that, the Jewish State could, God forbid, turn into just a Hebrew-speaking America that has nothing unique to offer the world and world Jewry.

It is curious that this book was published in the US and Canada, but apparently not yet in Israel. He doesn't spend much time on what can be done in the diaspora to revive Judaism as well as Zionism among Jewishly illiterate youngsters. Perhaps he is uncomfortable with the fact that most outreach in the US is done by the Orthodox and that Conservative Judaism has largely failed in that regard. Nevertheless, this is a large and glaring omission in this book.

His arguments are centered on what Israel needs to do, and he needs to make these arguments to Israeli society, not English-speaking Jews. Those arguments are compelling.

Saving Israel might overreach a bit in its goals, but that doesn't make it any less important as a starting point in creating a framework that could indeed save Israel.
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A good interview with Gordis can be found here, and his webpage is here (h/t joe5348)

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Book Review: Myths, Illusions and Peace

On Friday I received my free reviewer's copy of Myths, Illusions and Peace: Finding a New Direction for America in the Middle East, by Dennis Ross and David Makovsky.

This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the possibilities of diplomacy in the most intractable conflicts of this decade, those between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs and those between the US and Iran. Ross and Makovsky's goals are to find and support a clear-eyed but sober diplomatic means to manage these conflicts, and they take on both the neoconservative viewpoints of people like Norman Podhoretz and the "realist" viewpoints of Walt and Mearsheimer.

Myths, Illusions and Peace is a work of nuance, of recognizing that problems are not easily solved and of the importance of looking at context. It is difficult to review the book properly as the authors develop their arguments over many pages and anything I write will be necessarily simplistic representations of those arguments. It is not easy to find important concepts that they skipped.

The book starts off with a tour de force in demolishing the idea of "linkage," that is, the utterly fallacious idea that solving the Israel/Palestinain Arab conflict is the key to solving all the problems of the Middle East. Ross and Makovsky call it "the mother of all myths" and demonstrate that it has been used by the Arab world to deflect responsibility and for Arab leaders to deflect criticism.

They then go on to show how the US has traditionally approached a related linkage argument, going back to FDR and Saudi king Abdul Aziz al-Saud, that US relationships with the Arab world would be irreparably damaged by supporting Israel. Ross and Makovsky prove that Arab regimes tend to act in their own self-interest and not at all in concert with this linkage argument, and prove that even the high-water mark of the concept - when OPEC embargoed oil to the US in the wake of the Yom Kippur War - actually disproves linkage, as the embargo was lifted before the US did any concrete moves to placate Arabs. Arabs have consistently acted in their own self-interests and not in the interests of Palestinian Arabs, and the US should have no fear that this would ever change, although Arab nations will be sure to ratchet up their rhetoric to make it appear so - as this has been one of their more effective levers.

This chapter is also a very good overview of Israel/US relations through the years, from the nadir of 1956 to the close relationship between the two allies in more recent decades. It includes fascinating details about major events, such the Nixon/Kissinger maneuverings in choosing not to send weapons to Israel during the crucial early days of the Yom Kippur war, a strategy that was nearly catastrophic for Israel. We also learn that Jimmy Carter was so smitten with the idea of a comprehensive Arab/Israeli peace agreement - an idea that gives any Arab regime effective veto power over the entire package - that he almost publicly criticized Sadat for his unilateral decision to go it alone in making a peace treaty with Israel. The book has a wealth of such details.

In the end, the authors show that the idea of linkage has harmed US interests in the region, not enhanced them.

Ross and Makovsky then go on to take on the myths that the neocons and the "realists" have about the peace process. Their arguments are fearless and they take on each point of both sides honestly. For example, they look at the neocons' conviction that the Palestinian Arab moves towards peace are only an illusion, a manifestation of Arafat's "phases" plan to take whatever land they can get and use it to leverage gaining more. The authors ask, if Arafat was really so committed to the phased destruction of Israel, why he spurned the Camp David offer which would fulfill that plan? And they go into more details of Podhoretz' answers and their rebuttals. They similarly look at the mistakes of the Bush administration in its hands-off approach to Middle East peacemaking for much of its term and its muddled approach towards the end. Other neoconservative arguments are similarly tackled.

Similarly, they take on the "realists" arguments that Israel is primarily responsible for the conflict, that the US should impose a solution from without, and that the US friendship with Israel is costly and that the US does Israel's bidding and does not offer its own solutions.

Finally, the authors offer their own solution, which they call "engagement without illusions," that the US must act as go-betweens in order to clarify what each side's beliefs and red lines are to the other side. Fatalistically assuming that peace is impossible is unacceptable to Ross and Makovsky, as is the myth that we can impose a solution without caring about or even understanding what each party really wants.

They go one to address other critical issues. They believe strongly that Iran needs to be engaged but, again, with our eyes open. Ross and Makovsky place much faith in a fax that the US received from Iran in 2003, said to have been approved by Iran's Supreme Leader, Ali Khameini. That fax seemed to show panic at the prospects of US military action against Iran and offered to work with the US on disarmament, regional security and economic cooperation, as well as agreeing to end development of WMDs if given access to Western technology. This is evidence that Iran can be motivated by other than purely ideological considerations, and that means that a system of carrots and sticks can be devised to steer the Iranians to go in a productive direction. Again, Ross and Makovsky are not willfully blind and they address the very significant concerns about these ideas; in some ways they are more hawkish than the Bush administration that backed off of some red lines in accepting Iran's relentless push towards the bomb. They also astutely note that not only must we understand Iranian thinking - difficult enough as that may be - but we must also understand how Iran thinks about us. A particularly scary point they make is that it is unlikely that Iran is developing fail-safe mechanisms at the same time they are developing the bomb, although for some reason they think that a European country talking to them about that might somehow be an incentive for them to slow down their nuclear weapons program.

Ross and Makovsky also add a welcome chapter to describe the importance of Israel to American interests, and conversely the problems that would ensue if the US would abandon Israel - not only for Israel but for the world that depends on America to act consistently and stand by her friends. They include another chapter that discusses the importance of promoting democracy throughout the world, and how the Bush administration fumbled that ball badly.

It is understandable that Dennis Ross would believe so strongly in diplomacy. He was directly involved in the heavy-duty negotiations between Israel and the PLO during Oslo and the last-gasp attempts in the dying days of the administration. He is clearly emotionally invested in both the idea that peace is possible and that diplomacy is the most effective way to solve the conflict. (He also completely skips over the Clinton years in his history of US/Israel relations when talking about linkage.) His attachment to these ideas causes him to make a single false argument that I could detect, in which he compares the number of Israel fatalities during the Oslo process with those during the first years of the intifada, concluding that the fact that there was an active peace process is what kept the fatalities comparatively low during the 1990s as compared to the 2000s. This is a shocking misinterpretation for at least two reasons: the second intifada started while negotiations were still taking place, and the number of fatalities on both sides in the years before Oslo were significantly less than during Oslo. To his credit, this example is the only bad argument I noticed in a book that is chock-full of arguments. But his bias does mean that one needs to be especially careful in evaluating their merits.

I am not as optimistic as Makovsky and Ross about the prospects of real peace. They believe in strengthening the PA, in the US pushing a thoughtful bottom-up and top-down approach towards Palestinian Arabs, and in not engaging with Hamas and Hezbollah unless they change their goals and belief systems. They address some but not all of the elephants in the room but the ones they address they seem to believe are not as significant a roadblock as others do.

My biggest problem with the book is that, as comprehensive as it is, it seems to look at peace treaties as the ultimate prize. No one should discount the importance of those treaties but once that goal is achieved, there seems to be no incentive to work for true peace. Two countries that have peace treaties with Israel are the most anti-semitic countries in the world, according to a Pew poll a couple of years ago: Egypt and Jordan. This is not just a problem; it is a reflection of the divergence between peace treaties among states and real peace among countries. It means that while Israel may not be under any existential threat from its neighbors at the moment, nothing is being done to address the underlying problem of real Arab antipathy towards Israel even as they grundgingly accept it as reality. Arabs (and Jews) tend to look at things in terms of centuries, not years, and it is hard to think that Arab nations have any incentive to work towards real peace and acceptance of Israel. The treaties make sense now; but they are tactical.

Diplomacy doesn't care much about real peace; after agreements are signed there are other crises that need to be addressed. Diplomacy cannot truly affect the attitudes of hate that still come out of the media in Jordan, Egypt and the PA. Carrots and sticks can convince states to act rationally but they cannot change their beliefs.

One sad example brought in the book is that of the Qualified Industrial Zones between Jordan and Israel. The QIZ's allow Jordanian textile workers to use Israeli content and sell the products to the US without tariffs. The result is that there is now a new $1.5 billion Jordanian industry, some 15% of Jordan's GNP, creating over 30,000 jobs - all due to peace with Israel. And yet, the authors note that Jordanians never hear that this is a peace dividend. Facts that could materially affect the quality of the relationship between Arabs and Israelis are kept silent. While pan-Arabism is dead as a political philosophy, it still lives in this shared antipathy towards Israel and the very idea of a Jewish state.

One other issue that is all but ignored are how to fight radical Islam on a philosophical level. The authors say that only Muslims will be able to convince other Muslims not to act in extreme ways, and again a system of carrots and sticks can push populations towards the more moderate side (for example, Palestinian Arabs seeing that the West Bank is prospering and Gaza is foundering.) But this does not address the actual belief systems, just today's situations. If Hamas gains ascendancy in its social services it will again have the upper hand, and no one is trying to see if radical Islam can be discredited from within the framework of Islam itself. This is again outside the realm of diplomacy but it is no less important if true peace is going to be lasting. Unfortunately, it is unclear whether such a Quran-based opposition to radical Islam is feasible.

The same can be said for the honor/shame mentality in Arab society. It is not mentioned in the book; while presumably the authors feel that this is part of understanding the grievances of the Arab side the very existence of that mindset is a barrier to true coexistence. To put it bluntly, the idea that Arabs could accept an Israel that humiliated them so thoroughly is as foreign as the idea that an Arab would become co-husbands with his wife's lover. Diplomacy can theoretically manage such attitudes but it cannot solve them.

One other thought came to mind as I was reading this book. In two separate contexts, the authors mention where the United States backtracked on its commitments to Israel: once in 1967 when the Johnson administration didn't even seem to even be aware that the Eisenhower administration has pledged to keep the Straits of Tiran open to Israeli boats, and once when the Bush administration started to backtrack on promises made to Sharon (a move that has accelerated under Obama.) It brings up the question - if allies cannot be trusted to stand by their own commitments to each other, how much trust can one have with one's enemies? This is another problem with the diplomacy-based approach that is not addressed in a book which is, in many ways, a paean to open-eyed and skillful diplomacy.

I need to stress that these criticisms are minor in the context of this book's goals. Myths, Illusions and Peace is on almost all levels a brilliant treatise and I fervently hope that it becomes a part of the White House and State Department reading lists.

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