Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

The Toynbee-Herzog Debate

From Ha'aretz in 2007:

Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) was an important British historian, who through his controversial theory on civilizations found a place in Israeli and Jewish awareness as an "anti-Semite." According to his theory, civilizations, like human beings, have life cycles that are marked by rises and falls. But the story of the Jewish people, who were determined to survive 2,000 years in the Diaspora only to rise again as a modern nation, did not suit his theory. Thus Toynbee described the Jews as a historic "fossil" - not dead, true, but also not really alive.

When he published his theory at the beginning of the 1960s, he was invited to a debate. The person who invited him was Dr. Yaakov Herzog, at the time Israel's ambassador to Canada, son of the former chief rabbi Yitzhak Herzog and the younger brother of Chaim Herzog, a brilliant scholar and diplomat. Many of Foreign Ministry officials were wary of this debate, which was reminiscent of the mythological word battles in the Middle Ages between Jews and Christians. In the end, however, all those who were present at the debate that took place in January 1961 in Montreal were convinced that Herzog had won.

An email correspondent brought this to my attention and asked if I could find the transcript of that debate. Well, not quite, but the Canadian Jewish Chronicle summarized the entire debate point-by-point, and even though it occurred nearly forty years ago, Toynbee's criticism of Israel sounds exactly the same as those of today's critics - except that Toynbee actually had some regard for the truth. Herzog's successful counter- arguments apply today as well as they did then.

Here is their description of the debate:

Professor Arnold Toynbee and Israel`s Ambassador to Canada, Yaakov Herzog, met in debate at Hillel House on Tuesday, January 31 at noon. At issue were the contentions which Dr. Toynbee had put forth in answer to the student body at an informal session held there last week.

During the course of his observations. Dr. Toynbee had compared the Israeli treatment of the Arabs during the War for Independence in 1948 with that which the Nazis had done to the Jewish people. He also questioned the legal right of the establishment of the Israeli state in a territory which was predominantly Arab.

Ambassador Herzog began addressing himself to the initial issue raised by Professor Toynbee. This point of view he had initially expressed in a book published in l954 wherein he made the comparison between the treatment of the Jews by the Nazis and the manner in which the Israelis dealt with the Arabs during the course of the Arab war to frustrate the United Nations’ decision to partition mandated-Palestine into Jewish and Arab states.

At the very outset, Dr. Toynbee audibly agreed with the Ambassador that, in question of magnitude between the between these two events, there was no possible comparison. The Ambassador in turn, agreed with the point of view which Dr. Toynbee had put forth....that the answer to the human dilemma [between] the preservation of man or the destruction of the race lies in the willingness to take a moral leap which must oome from a deep sense of moral commitment.

‘What was the exact situation in newly-partitioned Palestine? Mr. Herrog asked. With the announcement of the United Nations decision in 1947, Radio Cairo promised a war of extermination and massacre. Even before the actual partition took place, vicious attacks on the Jewish settlement had become the order of the day. Inevitably, in every struggle, individual groups of military have been guilty of atrocities towards civilians. That this was never the attitude of the Israeli people has been fully established by subsequent history, the Ambassador continued. "We resisted in self- defence.' But the moment the war was at an end, the 200,000 Arabs within the country were fully integrated into the life and economy and enjoy full and equal privileges with all other citizens of the state.

Professor Toynbee agreed, in his address, with the Ambassador that in magnitude. there was a profound distinction between what happened to the Jews under Nazi control and the treatment accorded the Arabs. While insisting that in essence, the extensiveness of an atrocity is not
the determining factor, he conceded that this action was probably taken by military forces representing independent groups rather than by the regular forces. But what about the occupation of Arab-owned property?

Ambassador Herzog pointed out that 70 per cent of the land occupied hy the Israelis had not been privately owned. These were crown lands under Turkish control and with the establishment of the mandate, the rights were assumed by the British government. He also underscored Israel's constant willingness since the armistice to engage in definite negotiations promising full compensation to the former owners. These had fled from Palestine in response to the radio urgings from Egypt to leave during hostilities in order to return with the victorious Arabs.

If we are to think in humanitarian and moral terms, the Ambassador asked, how can we justify the action of the Arab states in putting the refugee problem in a political and demagogic framework?

Dr. Toynbee admitted that he, too, had asked the same question of Arab leaders and that he roundly condemned their refusal to participate in the resettlement of their fellow-countrymen who are now in camps within their borders. At the same time he underscored his conviction that the continuing displacement of the Arab refugees remains a grave moral issue.

To this, the Ambassador responded in practical tems. The Israelis have been willing since the
close of the fighting to negotiate a settlement including full compensation to those who left property and home behind. Thus far, the governments involved have adamantly refused to do anything about it. Furthermore, is it good political logic to ask Israel to take back peoples who left with the expectation to return with conquering, victorious armies and, who have, for the ensuing years, lived with the notion of hatred and revenge? To admit these peoples is tantamount to national suicide. ‘Is this to be expected of any state?

Finally. Mr. Herzog raised thc controversial issue of Professor Toynbee's reference to the Jewish people in terms of a “fossilized civilization." The Professor explained that he had merely applied this term in want of a more appropriate word fof description to indicate those civilizations which, while continuing to live, had temporarily ceased to function. "A fossil doesn`t die," the Ambassador objected. “but also doesn`t live." That this is not applicable to the Jewish c1vilization, he offered these distinct points in evidence. A civilization has survived which would be acceptable today to the very men responsible for its creation these two millenia ago. A national existence has been reborn. There has been an ingathering of peoples from seventy lands who have discovered spontaneously a common cultural link, that has assumed democratic forms in keeping with the best of western traditions and the only nation in the Middle East to have attained this stature. Finally, its own technological advancement has been a source of help and guidance to a great number of newly-formed states. This, he concluded. was ample proof that the Jewish civilization is not to be included in a fossil-labelled category.

The debate, which at the outset assumed the form of a high-level dialogue, concluded on the same cordial note, with expression; of good-fellowship on the part of both participants.

At least one newspaper, the Ottawa Citizen, agreed that Herzog's arguments won the day:

Two vignetttes from 1953

The cool thing about news archives is that you can find out details of history that are virtually unavailable anywhere else.

Take this throwaway part of an article in the Canadian Jewish Chronicle from 1953:

So in the aftermath of the 1948 war, you could not enter Egypt or Lebanon if you were Jewish. How many years did this apply to Jordan, Syria and "other Arab states?"

But how many times have we been told that Arabs were not anti-semitic, only anti-Zionist? Even though we know what happened to Jews in Arab countries after 1948, the hatred that Arabs had towards Jews even extended to foreign Jews - a not insignificant detail.

The only reason I found that out was because I was stumbling onto this one:

This was in 1953, when the Gulf was a few trillion dollars poorer than it is today. Yet instead of this same point being more relevant today, as it should be, it is all but ignored.

George Will on the "two state delusion"

Worth reproducing in full here:

'Twas a famous victory for diplomacy when, in 1991 in Madrid, Israelis and Palestinians, orchestrated by America, at last engaged in direct talks. Almost a generation later, US policy seems to have succeeded in prodding the Palestinians away from their recent insistence on "proximity talks" -- in which they've talked to the Israelis through American intermediaries -- to direct negotiations. But about what?

Idle talk about a "binational state" has long since died. Even disregarding the recent fates of multinational states, binationalism is impossible if Israel is to be a Jewish state for the Jewish people. No significant Israeli constituency disagrees with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu: "The Palestinian refugee problem will be resolved outside Israel's borders."

Rhetoric about a "two-state solution" is de rigueur. It also is delusional, given two recent searing experiences.

The only place for a Palestinian state is the West Bank, which Israel has occupied -- legally under international law -- since repelling the 1967 aggression launched from there. The West Bank remains an unallocated portion of the Palestine Mandate, the disposition of which is to be settled by negotiations. But with constructive bluntness, Michael Oren, Israel's ambassador to America, puts aside diplomatic ambiguity:

"There is no Israeli leadership that appears either willing or capable of removing 100,000 Israelis from their West Bank homes -- the minimum required to make way for a viable Palestinian state even with Israel's annexation of its three main settlement blocs. [Those blocs function as Jerusalem's suburbs.] The evacuation of a mere 8,100 Israelis from Gaza in 2005 required 55,000 IDF [Israel Defense Forces] troops -- the largest Israeli military operation since the 1973 Yom Kippur War -- and was profoundly traumatic."

Twenty-one Israeli settlements were dismantled; even the bodies of Israelis buried in Gaza were removed. After a deeply flawed 2006 election encouraged by the United States, there was in 2007 essentially a coup in Gaza by the terrorist organization Hamas. So now Israel has on its western border, 44 miles from Tel Aviv, an entity dedicated to Israel's destruction, collaborative with Iran and possessing a huge arsenal of rockets.

Rocket attacks from Gaza rose dramatically after Israel withdrew. The number of UN resolutions deploring this? Zero. The closest precedent for that bombardment was the Nazi rocket attacks on London, which were answered by the destruction of Hamburg, Dresden and other German cities. When Israel struck back at Hamas, the "international community" was theatrically appalled.

Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Yaalon says, "Our withdrawals strengthened jihadist Islam," adding, "We have the second Islamic republic in the Middle East -- the first in Iran, the second in Gaza: Hamastan."

Israel's withdrawals include the one that strengthened the Iranian client on Israel's northern border, in southern Lebanon. Since the 2006 war provoked by Hezbollah's incessant rocketing of northern Israel, Hezbollah has rearmed and possesses up to 60,000 rockets. Today, Netanyahu says, Israel's problem is less the Israel-Lebanon border than it is the Lebanon-Syria border: Hezbollah has received from Syria -- which gets them from Iran -- Scud missiles capable of striking Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. A leader of Hezbollah says, "If all the Jews gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide."

Because upward of a million immigrants have come from the former Soviet Union, today a sixth of Israelis speak Russian. Russian Israelis are largely responsible for Avigdor Lieberman's being foreign minister. Yoram Peri, professor of Israeli studies at the University of Maryland, says these immigrants "don't understand how a state that can be crossed in half an hour by car would be willing to even talk about relinquishing territories to its seemingly perpetual enemies." These immigrants know that Russia's strategic depth defeated Napoleon and Hitler.

Netanyahu, who's not the most conservative member of the coalition government he heads, endorses a two-state solution but says any West Bank Palestinian state must be demilitarized and prevented from making agreements with the likes of Hezbollah and Iran. To prevent the importation of missiles and other arms, Israel would need, he says, a military presence on the West Bank's eastern border with Jordan. Otherwise, there will be a third Islamic republic, and a second one contiguous to Israel.

So, again: Negotiations about what? And with whom?

The yarmulka goal

Last week, Yerushalimey sent me a link to this video showing an Israeli from Hapoel Tel Aviv scoring a goal against Red Bull Salzburg in Austria and then putting on a kipah in celebration:

From JTA:

The stunt earned [Itai] Shechter a yellow card and apparently garnered attention in Israel, where the gesture was widely interpreted as a triumphant gesture against the Nazi history of Austria’s past. Ynet reported that the kipah was given to Shechter by a cancer patient and a longtime Hapoel T.A. fan.

In an interview with One sport, declaring that he “would have put the kipah on even if they had put me in prison,” Shechter said the following (my translation from the Hebrew):

"I wasn’t trying to anger anyone. A young tzaddik gave [the kipah] to me in the airport. I told my friend that I’d put it in my sock and if, G-d willing, I score, I’ll wear it; I didn’t think this was a provocation. I wanted to say Shema' Yisrael. What was going on in my mind was that, 'I know that there are may Jews that are watching me from their home and are happy.'

The player received a yellow card for unsportsmanlike behavior, and I cannot understand why this is more offensive than any of the elaborate goal celebrations I have seen.

Anne Frank tree falls

From Reuters:

A giant chestnut tree that comforted Dutch diarist Anne Frank as she hid from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic during World War Two collapsed in heavy wind and rain on Monday.

No one was hurt and the 150-year old tree fell across a fence, missing the Anne Frank House, which has been turned into a museum and was full of tourists.

"It broke off like a match. It broke off completely about one metre off the ground," a spokesman for the house said.

The tree was one of the few signs of nature visible to the Jewish teenager from the concealed attic she hid in for over two years during World War Two and it is mentioned in the diary which became a worldwide best-seller after her death in a concentration camp in 1945.

"Our chestnut tree is in full blossom. It is covered with leaves and is even more beautiful than last year," she wrote in May 1944, not long before she was betrayed to the Nazis.

The tree had developed fungus and was set to be felled in 2007 due to concerns for the safety of the 1 million people who visit Anne Frank's house each year.

But officials and conservationists later agreed to secure it with a steel frame to prolong its life and saplings from the tree were planted last year in an Amsterdam park and other cities around the world.

A Dutch tree foundation, which fought to keep the tree alive with another support group, said horticulturalists had estimated the tree could still have lived for dozens of years.

Arnold Heertje, a member of the Support Anne Frank Tree group said there were no plans to plant a sapling on the site or preserve the tree's remains.

"You have to bow your head to the facts. The tree has fallen and will be cut into pieces and disappear. The intention was not to keep this tree alive forever. It has lived for 150 years and now it's over and we're not going to extend it," he said.

Hezbollah/Pasdaran

I just came across this graphic in a Lebanese newspaper:

The left is Hezbollah's logo. The right is the logo of the Pasdaran, known better in the West as Iran's Revolutionary Guards.

Nothing surprising, although I do wonder who came up with their logo first.

The Arab "refugee" playbook hasn't changed since 1948

In the light of the recent news about how Lebanon slightly eased its onerous restrictions on Lebanese Palestinians, it is worthwhile to look back and see exactly how the Arab world's use of the Palestinian Arab issue has stayed exactly the same over six decades.

Here's an article from the Herald Tribune news service from August, 1958. Little has changed in the past 52 years.

Ralph Galloway's words are as true today as they were in 1954: "The Arab states do not want to solve the refugee problem. they want to keep it an open sore, as an affront to the United Nations, and as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders don't give a damn whether the refugees live or die."

There is one difference between 1958 and today: in 1958, people were still trying to find a way for Palestinian Arabs to be integrated in their host countries, or at least into the Arab world. Now, the world has given in to years of Arab intransigence and abuse of their "guests" and ignores the problem altogether.

No UN agency is tasked with solving the problem of stateless refugees. UNRWA long ago gave up on that idea. The world's collective head is in the sand, hoping that somehow these stateless millions will magically disappear if there is only peace between Israel and the Arab world. Yet even if there was a peace treaty, the problem would not go away, and the way that UNRWA has defined it, it will keep getting bigger and bigger.

No one is willing to stand up and say publicly that it is time for the Arab world to stop treating the Palestinian Arabs as cannon fodder against Israel. It is time for them to accept their responsibility for taking care of the people in their midst, the vast majority of whom have never lived in Palestine.

The Arab world is still keeping the Palestinian issue alive for one reason: to ultimately destroy Israel. That has not changed over the years. It has been obfuscated, it has been buried, but if you read this article and look at the debate in Lebanon over their Palestinians you can see that it has not changed.

Every Palestinian Arab who was born in an Arab country should automatically become a citizen of that country. Without this simple rule, no amount of treaties will defuse this looming crisis. It is a simple implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, article 7:

1. The child shall be registered immediately after birth and shall have the right from birth to a name, the right to acquire a nationality and. as far as possible, the right to know and be cared for by his or her parents.

2. States Parties shall ensure the implementation of these rights in accordance with their national law and their obligations under the relevant international instruments in this field, in particular where the child would otherwise be stateless.

Why has this been so roundly ignored by NGOs? Why has the world accepted Arab abuse of their Palestinian "brethren" as normal? Mostly, why does the world still blame Israel for the plight of people who are born in misery, raised in misery and die in misery in Arab countries under Arab rule suffering from Arab laws meant to keep them stateless and dependent?

The Arabs created today's "refugee" problem, and the Arabs are the ones than can solve it. Until the world opens its eyes to this simple truth and starts to exert pressure to that end, everyone is in danger.

A kibbutz in Rwanda

From the Rwanda News Agency:

It had been the longest journey.

Through desert sands, visa lines, bus rides and the pressing patience of waiting, Natty Mitali arrived at the gates of Zion. The young guitarist had taken the bus from Cairo, dusty and hard-skinned, a journey that had begun further south, near the heart of Africa.

“Like the old Israelites,” says Mitali, who goes popularly by Natty Dread in Rwanda, where he is one of the country’s most famous Rastafari musicians. “Right up to the border.”

It was 1983, and the world was looking dangerous. Israel had just gone to war in Lebanon. The Americans were pushing the Soviets. Mitali was fleeing problems of his own. Tensions between Tutsi and the majority Hutu were surging in his tiny sundrenched home of Rwanda.

His family had grown up as refugees in Uganda, and as tremors of ethnic violence pulsed Rwanda, Mitali moved to nearby Kenya and soon applied for an Israeli visa.

“It was my destiny,” he says.

THINGS IN RWANDA took a turn for the worse.

When the president’s plane was shot down in 1994 it sparked a genocide that in three months wiped out nearly one million Tutsi – including 18 members of Mitali’s family.

From afar in Israel, Mitali grew up, toiling as a farmhand and playing guitar at the Soweto Club on Rehov Frischmann. When there wasn’t enough money, he did like many, and took to the land. Mitali says his time working on the kibbutzim throughout the country – from Na’an to Amirim, Ein Gedi to Achziv, and Shefayim, where he met his first wife – gave him a sense of self, a sense of worth.

Now he has come back, part of a surging Tutsi diaspora flooding home with money and purpose to rebuild a new Rwanda on top of the ruins. They are the followers of President Paul Kagame, who grew up, like Natty Mitali, in Uganda before leading a rebel group to end the genocide.

Deep in Rwanda’s south, between banana plantations and tea fields, Mitali is making his own contribution, the thing that helped him through the darkest times – his own self-styled kibbutz, the Amahoro Youth and Cultural Village.

DESPITE ALL OF Rwanda’s economic progress – its economy grew by 11% in 2008, and it is considered one of the least corrupt countries in Africa – much of its countryside remains poor, and very young.

On over 15 hectares along the southern tip of Lake Kivu in between Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo including two islands, Mitali is setting up a school for some of Rwanda’s most vulnerable – orphaned children, kids taking care of younger siblings with no one else to help, AIDS victims, and child survivors of the Rwandan genocide.

From carpentry to tourism, courses in ecology and music, Mitali is seeking to at once resuscitate life and help develop the country.

Over 70 students, in an admittedly Zionist – and Rastafari – fashion, will work, learn and live together, trying their best to live off the land.

“My time in Israel enlightened me,” Mitali says. “Kibbutzim, collective farms, that’s how the State of Israel was born. Seeing people homeless, with no relations, no orientation, helpless in our present world, I felt the kibbutz kind of solution was the answer to the suffering.” Amahoro means “peace” in local Kinyarwanda, and Mitali envisions a sanctuary – top-notch facilities from a medical clinic to agricultural farms, basketball courts to an eco-lodge. Students won’t just be taught in classrooms, they will receive vocational training.

The plans are coming along nicely – land has been donated by the government, a senior minister is helping advise the project, and architectural designs are being reviewed.

“We are looking forward to it,” says Fabien Sindayiheba, the mayor of Cyangugu district where the school will be. “It will create employability for its graduates, especially for the youth.”

True to the Rwandan spirit not to depend on handouts, Mitali argues, the school will be offering something to the outside. Students will spend time mastering nature conservation and eco-tourism, hallmarks of the national development strategy. A guest house and lodge will be run by the school on one of its islands in Lake Kivu.

“We are socialist on the inside and capitalist on the outside,” says Mitali. “The kibbutz will be a great weapon for fighting poverty.”

Who is burning land in the West Bank again?

Palestinian Arabs and Israel bashers routinely claim that Israeli "settlers" are burning and uprooting Palestinian Arab crops and trees. Some of the stories are probably true, but the chsrges are often made with no evidence.

Yisrael Medad, however, came across some real burned crops and fields, and took pictures of the damage. Yet you won't read about this in any newspaper nor will you see any condemnation of this from any NGO.

Guess why.

Just another day in Gaza

Firas Press reports that Bashir Hammad, a Fatah leader in Gaza, was returning from an outing to the beach with his family when his car was stopped by Hamas troops.

The took him out of the car and shot him in both legs, in front of his wife and kids.

These sort of events seem to be on the increase again.

Hungry or not? Mainstream media's hypocrisy on Gaza

The mainstream media and NGOs were the the main purveyors of the myth of Gaza was suffering form a humanitarian crisis - a myth that goes back to the early 90s at the very least.

Since the Gaza Mall opened, we have seen on a few occasions the people who have made a living talking about how miserable life is in Gaza take a step back and re-frame their arguments. They cannot deny the truth, but they don't want to retroactively look like liars - which is what they effectively have been for nearly two decades.

So, one by one, they are reframing the Gaza meme to try to save face and make sure that people still blame Israel for Gaza's problems.

Gaza is still miserable, these newly-sophisticated and nuanced journalists are saying, but it is not because the Gazans are hungry, or poverty-stricken, or cannot get basic items. Forget all those thousands of articles over the years that we wrote, forget us uncritically quoting Jimmy Carter about how Gazans are "literally starving" or being "starved to death." No, the problems with Gaza are not so much physical but a state of mind, you see.

Previously, we mentioned Slate's backtracking, admitting that there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza and no hunger. Instead, Slate quotes an official, it is a "crisis of dignity."

Oh, I see. So how does Gazans' dignity stack up against, say, that of poor Egyptians or Yemenis or even Saudi Arabia's lower class? We don't know, and we won't know, because reporters much prefer to hang out in Gaza where they can visit the Roots restaurant than to go to poor Arab villages in other parts of the world.

Time magazine's reframing of Gaza sounded like this:

Gaza's residents will concede that there is no hunger crisis in the Strip. Residents do love the beach, and the store shelves are stocked. But if you're focused on starvation, they say, you're probably missing the point. To them, the word prison speaks more to the effect that years of conflict and political and economic isolation have had on the Gaza psyche. "We are talking about continuous stress and ongoing trauma," says Hasan Zeyada, a psychologist at the Gaza Community Mental Health Program (GCMHP), the territory's main psychological treatment and research NGO. "It's not one incident, but all of the time. We are at a continuous level of high stress and human-rights violations and traumas through Israeli invasions and war."

Oh, so we are missing the point if we focused on starvation? Then why did Time magazine's Gaza correspondent write, in 2008, "As you sit down to a Thanksgiving feast, please spare a thought for the starving Palestinians of Gaza. There are 1.5 million of them, most of them living hand to mouth, or on UN handouts, because Israel has them under siege."

Now, the latest to join the hypocrites is Ethan Bronner of the New York Times. Two years ago he didn't hesitate to state as a fact:

Militants have tried to infiltrate the border crossing into Israel five times in recent weeks. That has led Israel to keep the border closed more often, further reducing supplies and worsening the already severe humanitarian crisis there.

No nuance there, Gazans were in a "crisis," the exact same way one would describe sub-Saharan Africa or parts of Bangladesh.

Now, however, Bronner has caught onto the new Gaza meme, talking about the Gaza mall:

To the commentators who have never been here, certain points need to be cleared up. To those who contend the mall is proof that Gaza has construction materials: the building is 20 years old. To those who have described the mall as “gigantic” and “futuristic”: it is small and a bit old-fashioned. To Danny Ayalon, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, who wrote that the mall “would not look out of place in any capital in Europe”: it would.

But the broader point many of these advocates are making — that the poverty of Gaza is often misconstrued, willfully or inadvertently — is correct. The despair here is not that of Haiti or Somalia. It is a misery of dependence, immobility and hopelessness, not of grinding want. The flotilla movement is not about material aid; it is about Palestinian freedom and defiance of Israeli power.

On at least 14 occasions the New York Times described the ships that try to sail to Gaza as "aid ships."

Bronner is not only trying to willfully change the Gaza meme, but in the paragraph above he is showing his own support for the illegal breaking of a legal blockade. He is not quoting a Free Gaza official as to the purpose of the ships, he is stating their purpose from his own perspective - "Palestinian freedom and defiance of Israeli power." He is all but publicly admiring their aims and goals.

However, the fact is that both the media and the anti-Israel activists have used the "starvation" meme as a convenient fiction to focus the world on demonizing Israel. Their current re-framing to change it instead to "dependence, immobility and hopelessness" is nothing more than an attempt to not look like fools and not admit that they have been lying to the world for years.

If they cared about Palestinian Arab "hopelessness" they would be spending much more time in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. They would be interviewing Mahmoud Abbas about why he has yet to dismantle a single "refugee" camp in the West Bank - all of which are under Palestinian Arab control.

No, these hypocritical reporters are not interested in revealing truths about how Gazans live. They have been dining in fine restaurants in Gaza and staying in fancy hotels - they knew the truth for years. They are equally not interested in Palestinian Arab suffering and deprivation - because by any measure, the Arabs in camps in Lebanon envy the Gazans. These hypocrites hammer away at Gaza for years because they want to blame Israel for Gaza's problems, nothing more. They'll occasionally leaven their prodigious Gaza output with an article about Hamas abuses of Gazans, but their focus has been unrelentingly on Israel.

The unraveling of the "humanitarian crisis" meme just shows how deeply the mainstream media has been in bed with NGOs and anti-Israel activists and how easily they parrot false statistics and claims.

Any way you look at it, the media has been lying to you about Gaza for years. Why should you believe them now?

When Ted Kennedy visited the West Bank

From AP, January 8, 1967:

Sen. Edwards Kennedy, D-Mass., toured three refugee camps in Jordan in November as part of a fact-finding tour, without arousing any apparent resentment among the Palestinians.

One patriarch, however, confronted and harangued the senator. "The Jews have killed your brother as they killed Jesus Christ," the refugee told the solemn-faced Kennedy.

Of course, the real irony of that statement was not realized until Kennedy's other brother was assassinated.

Airport delay open thread

I am stuck waiting for a flight that has been delayed 2 1/2 hours (so far.)

All I can say is thank G-d for 3G coverage with my carrier who usually has spotty coverage, for my now-obsolete Android phone having a hotspot feature so I can easily use my laptop, and for finding an electric outlet before the mad rush.

Also, for last minute $59 upgrades to first class instead of the center seat I was going to be stuck in.

Here's an open thread to celebrate my misfortune.

If AFP had decent editors....

It is too bad this AFP article is so poorly edited.

Here's the version that would have been decent:

KIBBUTZ KARMIYYA, Israel — Dana Chetrit, her husband Alain and their two young children in August 2005 reluctantly left their home in the northern Gaza settlement of Elei Sinai, never to return.

They were among 8,000 Israeli settlers evicted by their own government from 21 settlements in Gaza, in a move heralded as ending 38 years of Israeli occupation and as bringing closer an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

To Chetrit, a 36-year-old art teacher, the pullout brought broken dreams, broken promises and a broken marriage.

Five years since soldiers ordered settler Dana Chetrit out of her home, she is still living in temporary accommodation at the Karmiya kibbutz just across the border in Israel.

Her marriage collapsed under the strain of the move.

As a 22-year-old newly-wed in 1996, she had found her ideal home in the small settlement of Elei Sinai, just inside the Gaza Strip and about five kilometers (three miles) from where she now lives.

"It was our first home, it was the home we had been looking for," she said. "We wanted to live in a communal community, it was cheap, there were other young couples there, everyone was like us."

The idyll was shattered in October 2001 when Hamas gunmen cut through the settlement's perimeter fence and shot dead a 19-year-old girl and her 20-year-old boyfriend. Another 15 Israelis were wounded before the attackers were shot dead in a gun battle with soldiers.

Chetrit said the incident only strengthened her attachment to the settlement and her commitment to her neighbours.

But in 2004, then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced the withdrawal of Israeli troops and settlers from Gaza. On August 18, 2005, the Chetrits were turfed out of their home.

The violence, however, followed them across the border to the small kibbutz collective farm, where she and the boys now live in a five-roomed prefabricated house.

Gaza militants regularly fire rockets across the border. In February 2006, a Qassam rocket, produced in the workshops of the Palestinian territory, thudded into a neighbour's house, destroying it and blowing a toddler out of the playpen in which he had been sitting.

The injured child recovered but the traumatised parents moved out the same day.

"Rockets had fallen before but this was a direct hit," Chetrit said. "If you had seen the house, you would have been amazed that anybody could come out of it alive."

In a separate attack, a rocket fell on the kibbutz football pitch, injuring two people, she said, adding that there were plenty of near misses as well.

Of around 50 families from Elei Sinai who were initially housed at Karmiya, only about 20 remain today, some driven out by fear of more rockets.

Chetrit, who has been promised land on which to build a home in the nearby village of Talme Yafe, said the bureaucratic wheels are turning very slowly.

"We haven't yet received a plot," she said. "By the time we get building permits ... it could be another four or five years."

She is not going to move again until she has a permanent home. "Qassams or no Qassams, I'm not leaving again ... I can't see myself packing up again and moving house," she said.

Instead, AFP threw in a "balanced" set of paragraphs about Arabs in Gaza with no consistent viewpoint and some questionable quotes, breaking up the narrative and changing the article from something pretty good into a nonsensical mishmash.

Why is it so against wire service editorial standards to have a story exclusively from an Israeli perspective? They sure do it for Palestinian Arabs enough.

Hamas fumes at Ramadan skit

Last week, PA TV broadcast a skit on a satirical program that made fun of Hamas leaders - and Hamas reacted angrily.

In the skit, Hamas leaders Haniyeh and al Zahar are waiting anxiously at the Gaza border for curvaceous Lebanese diva Haifa Wehbe to arrive. They are holding signs that say that "the siege is made of Iron, but only Haifa can melt it." When she arrives, she goes into Haniyeh's car and puts on a veil.

The skit continues with Haniyeh being so distraught at her eventual departure from Gaza that he cancels a reconciliation meeting with Egypt and Fatah.

The satire not only makes fun of Hamas hypocrisy but also of Arab celebrities who latch onto Gaza as a cause in order to further their careers (Wehbe was planning to join the women's ship from Lebanon before Hezbollah nixed the idea, according to reports.)

The same program has also made fun of PA leaders and corruption, but Hamas did not take kindly to its airing, accusing the PA Ministry of Information of broadcasting "black propaganda in support of the Israeli propaganda." It was to the "detriment of all Islamic morals and values of the Palestinian National movement, to the point of libel and slander." They said it was "making fun of the leaders of the resistance and the martyrs who gave their children."

I think it is time for a Hamas comedy channel!

(h/t Ali for translation help)

Arabs suffering power outages, water shortages. No flotillas coming.

Some Egyptian areas are suffering from power outages, and as a result there are also water shortages. These are mostly affecting the governorates of Fayoum and Damietta.

The minister of iand energy is pleading with citizens to cut back their electricity usage during the current heat wave.

Affected citizens are starting to hold protests.

Not only that, but basic food staples are in short supply as well.

Of course, this is not news. There are no pictures in the wire services of little Egyptian kids eating their Iftar dinners in candlelight or of people queueing up to get clean drinking water. Because this is not Gaza and no one can possibly blame the Jews for the problems - so they might as well be invisible.

Col. Richard Kemp on the dangers of withdrawal from the territories

From JCPA:

To stand any real chance of success, every insurgent or terrorist movement needs a safe haven to operate from - one that is outside the control of the state being targeted and preferably in a land that is free from interference by the target state or its allies, whether due to geography, the protection of a friendly regime, or operating within a failed state. The Vietnam conflict was a classic example of the use of a safe haven. More recently, in the Iraq campaign, Sunni extremists had a safe haven in Syria which was their main logistic support base and a pipeline for suicide bombers flowing into Iraq. They also used extensive support networks in Iran, which also provided a safe haven for Shi'ite insurgents attacking coalition forces, as well as through the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Hizbullah, which provided training, organization, munitions, and direction.

Today the Afghan Taliban's safe haven and support base is in Pakistan, although the second largest extremist group engaged in Afghanistan, Hizb-i-Islami, has its main base in Iran itself. In March, General Petraeus, the Head of U.S. Central Command, in testimony to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, revealed that Tehran is letting al-Qaeda leaders travel freely between Pakistan and Afghanistan, effectively using Iranian territory as a safe haven, while permitting them also to hold meetings in Iran to plan terrorist attacks against U.S. and other Western targets.

Israel has had more than a flavor of what it can mean to leave hostile groups in control of lands adjacent to its own borders in southern Lebanon and in Gaza. Any similar move to totally cede control to the Palestinians of the West Bank or a part of Jerusalem may have considerable attraction for any peace process, and that is certainly the view of many in the international community. But both prospects would carry immense risk from the perspective of asymmetrical activities against Israel.

Some might argue that a modern high-tech state can monitor hostile activities outside its borders. Yet we've seen many failures of intelligence in relation to offensive activities by conventional forces and war plans by nation-states which are generally relatively easy to identify and monitor. But surveillance and intelligence collection against a deeply embedded, secretive, extremist network operating within a dense civilian population is the most difficult target, and no national intelligence organization can be confident that it will have a high success rate against such a target.

Despite many spectacular successes, including the killing in Pakistan of al-Qaeda's number three, Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, the unrivalled technological supremacy of the U.S. military has failed to effectively dent the Taliban's ability to smuggle munitions and infiltrate large groups of fighters across the Afghan border. I do not for a moment underestimate the difficulties this entails. Jordan's support or effectiveness in countering extremist activity directed at Israel from the West Bank could not be counted upon, and extremists would also seek to destabilize Jordan, an important stepping stone to the destruction of Israel.

...

It has been suggested that an international force, perhaps a NATO force should replace the IDF presence in the West Bank. While I would not exclude that idea in principle, it raises a number of very serious questions. First of all, where are the NATO troops going to come from and how long are they going to stay? Let us not forget the difficulties that NATO has had for years and still has in mustering forces for the war in Afghanistan - and this is for a campaign that is NATO's declared main effort and its only real, current, live operation. Many of the troops that are there are restricted by significant national caveats, including restricting deployments to the safest areas. Some nations are simply not prepared to put their troops into undue danger. Unfortunately, undue danger goes hand in glove with war and with the toughest peacekeeping operations, and the West Bank would fall clearly into that category. Some NATO nations can't operate after dark and they leave the insurgents to control the night, with all the implications that this has.

There is a significant risk that in trying to develop and maintain good relations with all parties, the peacekeepers would instead become the enemy of both sides. Potential contributors to the international forces would know that. What would happen to those who were prepared to take part when the going got tough, as it inevitably would? ...

Just how sure could we be that the electorates in contributing countries would allow their militaries to remain deployed in the West Bank under these kinds of pressures, and how effective would NATO be as a peacekeeping force in the demanding circumstances that we are considering? The only previous success that NATO is able to claim in this field, and it is by no means uncontroversial, was in Kosovo, which also in practice was a far less complex situation.

... Would a NATO mission be ready and able to take on insurgents, and if not, to what extent would they then get in the way of a vital Israeli effort to do so to protect their own people?

In many ways peacekeeping is far tougher and more challenging than fighting as combatants. It is one thing to act robustly against people that are attacking you and your comrades. It is quite another to put your troops' lives on the line when it is not them but others who are in danger. Dutch forces have fought gallantly and effectively in Afghanistan. They've been brave and they've taken many casualties, but Srebrenica cannot be forgotten. More than 8,000 civilians were massacred there in 1995 under the eyes of Dutch UN peacekeepers.

To conclude, I would neither exclude the possibility of an IDF withdrawal from the West Bank nor their replacement with a NATO force, but before either can be seriously contemplated there are some fundamental questions to be resolved. These issues are critical to NATO, the West as a whole, and the entire Middle East because a failed NATO mission and a West Bank under extremist control, flourishing under a security vacuum there, would encourage and strengthen violent jihadists everywhere in the world.

Read the whole thing.

Fatah website accuses Hamas of killing people for their kidneys

Firas Press reports that a Hamas doctor has killed a mentally-handicapped man in order to harvest his kidneys.

Firas normally rips off their stories from other sources, but I could not find the original story, just a copy in a Fatah forum quoting "Kofia Press" which I am unfamiliar with but looks to be a Fatah website.

While it sounds like a wild rumor, what makes this story so interesting is the amount of specificity: it names the doctor, the victim, the dates, and the place of the alleged crime:

The perpetrator is a doctor named Mohammed Rashid Abdul Hamid Deeb, belonging to Al Qassam Brigades, who lives in the Nasr district, near the Turquoise towers in Gaza City, with identity number 900336215, who was born on September 12, 1974 and works in the Ministry of Health. The victim is mentally handicapped citizen named Anwar Hassouna - known as Anwar Abbas - from Beach Camp he was thirty-eight years old.

Anwar was kidnapped on 15.06.2010 and then [Deeb] killed him with an air injection into a vein leading directly to death, for the removal of his kidney, and the victim's body was disposed of in the area of Wadi Gaza.

The article goes on to say that this case indicates that other "natural" deaths in Gaza could have been murders by Hamas.

Abbas angry at Clinton's invitation "without preconditions"

Last Friday, Hilary Clinton invited Israel and the PA to Washington for direct talks. “These negotiations should take place without preconditions and be characterized by good faith and a commitment to their success,” she said.

According to Asharq al-Awsat, Mahmoud Abbas was furious at the announcement.

The newspaper says that Abbas went "mad" when he heard Clinton's words, because he wanted there to be a statement from the Quartet before the negotiations to confirm that they support a solution based on the 1949 armistice lines.

His angry reaction caused much consternation in Washington, and the White House made three separate phone calls to Abbas in an hour in order to calm him down, according to the report, in order to convince him not to abandon the talks.

US support of the LAF is counterproductive

A "news analysis" in the New York Times by Robert F. Worth comes, unsurprisingly, to a conclusion that the US must continue and perhaps increase aid to the corrupt and ineffective Lebanese army. Its flaws are obvious, starting with the beginning:

Earlier this month, Israeli soldiers were pruning a tree on their country’s northern border when a firefight broke out with Lebanese soldiers across the fence, leaving one Israeli and four Lebanese dead.

The skirmish seems to have been accidental.

And Worth's ability to ignore basic facts just keeps going. He mentions

The Lebanese Army, meanwhile, has been so intent on preserving its status as the country’s one neutral institution that it is now largely impotent. During the fighting in May 2008, for instance, soldiers sat in their American Humvees and watched, unwilling to take sides.

Yet he concludes that if the US wouldn't fund the LAF, then Hezbollah would take over Lebanon.

This "analyst" clearly hasn't spent five minutes reading the statements of mainstream Lebanese, including LAF leaders, concerning the border incident with Israel. Their reaction was identical to Hezbollah's - no one is the least bit critical that they sent a pre-planned ambush to murder Israelis, complete with tipping off a large number of reporters that a routine and legal tree-cutting was going to turn into major headlines. Their hatred of Israel far exceeds their hatred of Hezbollah. The liberal idea that funding states somehow magically turns them into friends has been proven time and time again to be laughably false, but it has become a major foundation of US foreign policy.

Everyone who reads Worth's worthless piece should also read the following, written by EoZ contributor Zvi.

Abdul Rahman Al-Rashid provides a fairly sensible commentary on the Lebanese Armed Forces' attempt to seek donations to fund procurement in the wake of the loss of $100M from the United States. Although one provably fallacious phrase has been added (the claim that the tree was in southern Lebanon is "malarky"), the rest of the column is quite sensible.

The crisis with the Lebanese army is not due to it being ill-equipped, nor does this concern the army's need to develop, but rather the problem is the army's position in the structure of the state, and the lack of it being acknowledged as the only state instate with the right to bear arms.

In other words, the problem is that the government of Lebanon is not a sovereign government, according to the definition of sovereignty. It does not have supreme, independent authority over Lebanon, because it cannot control territory held by Hezbollah or by the Palestinians. It does not enjoy a monopoly on the use of force, and cannot enforce its authority throughout the state.

Al-Rashid concludes,

One of the reasons that may have prompted the Americans to spend so generously to equip the Lebanese army – having invested more than $600 million to date – is because they think that the army will one day be strong enough to eliminate militias such as Hezbollah. However this is unrealistic when looking at the current situation in Lebanon; for the army will remain weak without a political agreement on granting the military powers, not just weapons.

Any western support for the LAF is pointless and misguided. Recent events demonstrate that while the LAF cannot and will not solve any of Lebanon's problems, it can easily make them worse. With this in mind, and despite my respect and affection for the people of Lebanon, the United States and other western powers must not support or contribute to the LAF.

Who do you trust more to understand Lebanese politics: a New York Times columnist whose conclusions were set in stone before he did any research, or an Arab who has studied Lebanon for years?