How Israel Could Get a Stable Government (Vic Rosenthal)

Vic Rosenthal's weekly column

The challenges facing the state today are enormous. Although the vaccination project has been a success, the more-contagious mutations are spreading among groups that haven’t been vaccinated, and there are worries that new strains for which the vaccines aren’t as effective may develop. The health-care system is past peak capacity now. The economic impact on some segments of the population has been exceedingly painful already, and the costs for the vaccines and lost productivity will ultimately be felt throughout the economy.

At the same time, the IDF is asking for more money, in part to prepare for the possibility that it will be necessary to neutralize the Iranian nuclear capability by military means. That also would involve conflict with Hezbollah and Iranian militias in Syria and possibly Iraq, as well as involvement from Hamas. There still is no 2021 budget, and since the Knesset has been dissolved in preparation for the fourth election in two years, there is no possibility of passing one until there is a new government. The election is scheduled for 23 March, and then there is the interminable process of forming a coalition after that – assuming that a coalition can be formed.

The “unity” government that has just fallen apart was very expensive, since it was put together by bribing various politicians to join it with ministerial portfolios; since there weren’t enough to go around, a bunch of new ministries were created, for a total of 35. In addition, it was ineffectual: since the main partners were PM Binyamin Netanyahu’s bloc and a bloc made up of anti-Netanyahu politicians (with no other ideology besides a desire to depose him), they were permanently at each other’s throats.

In recent years Netanyahu has become obsessed with protecting himself from the corruption indictments against him. As a result, he has been unable to stand up to the Haredi parties that hold up his coalition. Their constituents seem to believe that they are Rabbi Akiva and the government which is trying to enforce the rules to contain the epidemic is the Roman Empire. Their acting as an autonomous group within the state has always been a problem, but with the advent of Covid it has become much more serious. Recently they have engaged in violent riots against the police.

Bibi has always insisted on managing everything himself. Ministers often find that their authority is very limited, limited to precisely what Bibi wants them to do. Their individual initiatives are stymied, something very frustrating to people like Naftali Bennett, who have ideas and energy but are kept on a tight leash. Bibi is tremendously competent and able to do many things at once, but this sometimes results in particular areas being neglected. And lately this problem, too, has become more serious.

Everything the government has done to control the epidemic except for the vaccination program has been poorly planned, poorly timed, and poorly executed. I judge that this is because the PM wants to control everything, but lacks the power – and perhaps also the focus – to exert that control.

Finally, the temporary vacation from American pressure that Israel enjoyed under the Trump Administration has come to an end. Biden’s promise to return to the Iran deal means that sanctions on Iran will be removed and (almost certainly) limitations will be placed on Israel’s freedom to act against Iranian bases in Syria and the transfer of weapons to Hezbollah. Israeli officials believe this makes conflict with Iran much more likely.

In the Palestinian arena, too, Biden and his Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, have reiterated their belief in the necessity of a sovereign Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria. They have said that they will restart payments to UNRWA, the Palestinian refugee agency that exists to nurture the growth of a population of stateless refugee descendants – now more than 5 million – that is a hothouse of terrorism, and which the Palestinians and their supporters demand be allowed to live in Israel. Biden also intends to reopen the PLO mission in Washington.

The administration hasn’t done much that affects Israel yet, and I would like to be optimistic about the future. But some of his appointments are troubling. For example, his new Senior Director for Intelligence Programs at the NSC, is former Obama Administration staffer Maher Bitar, a Palestinian activist who worked for UNRWA and supports BDS. Bitar will “coordinate intelligence between the White House and the intelligence community, receiving material from intelligence agencies, informing the intelligence community of White House policy, and deciding who gets access to secret information.”

All this requires a government that can pay attention to multiple issues at the same time, a coalition that can work together, and a PM that is not on trial for corruption.
How can we get one? The last three elections have been almost deadlocked. Twice no governing coalition could be formed, and the last election produced the Frankensteinian “unity” government that was almost worse than no government at all (I have discussed the technical issues in our electoral system here).

Based on recent polls, if we leave out the non-Zionist Arab parties, who will neither be invited into a coalition nor wish to be, and the Haredi parties, then neither the right- nor the left-wing blocs will be able to form a government. The Right, which has a majority of the Jewish vote, is split between pro- and anti-Netanyahu factions. With the Haredi parties, Netanyahu is very close to 61 seats – precisely the situation we were in the last time. But if he succeeds, the government will be weak, dependent on the Haredim, and will continue to be a one-man show. The Left has no chance, even with the support of the Arab parties from outside the coalition. Of course there are all kinds of imaginative solutions involving partners that would normally not be together that I haven’t mentioned. But they are unlikely.

I would like to see a fundamental restructuring of our system, but that is not going to happen under a caretaker government in the next two months. But there is one thing that could radically change the picture, and it is something that should happen in any event:

Binyamin Netanyahu should voluntarily step down as head of the Likud. This could unify the Right, and enable a solid majority right-wing coalition – without the Haredi parties, whose ability to bring down the government at will has made it possible for the Haredim to act like a state within a state.

This does not solve all of our problems. It doesn’t fix the imbalance of power between the legal establishment and the elected Knesset, for example. But it does at least make it possible to have a reasonably lean government with a unified ideological perspective that will be able to act on the problems at hand.

Since I’m dreaming, there is one other thing I would like: as part of the deal, all charges against Netanyahu – some of which are legitimate, and some fraudulent – should be dropped, in view of his service to the state.

There are only a few weeks to go before the election. Can our politicians, starting with Bibi, put aside their plans for personal glory and their thoughts of revenge, and agree to do the right thing for the Jewish state? I’m hoping they can.

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What President Biden Will Mean for Israel (Vic Rosenthal)

Vic Rosenthal's weekly column

As I write this, preparations are underway for the swearing-in ceremony of a new President of the US. Nobody truly knows what this will mean for us in Israel. Caroline Glick, who can be depended on to see the dark side – often, unfortunately, correctly – finds Biden’s appointments of numerous former Obama officials, some of whom are demonstrably anti-Israel, to be evidence that the new administration will return to the almost maliciously anti-Israel policies of the Obama Administration.

On the other hand, as Bret Stephens notes (in a masterful piece that I hope will be required reading for Biden and his people), the situation has drastically changed since Obama pursued his diplomatic assault on Israel. Everything is different (except perhaps the Palestinians). Israel, Iran, the Arab nations, and the situation in the USA have all undergone significant changes. The damage to American interests from continuing Obama’s policy today would be even greater than in 2008-2016.

But not all politics is rational, as history amply demonstrates. Bad regimes sometimes follow policies dictated primarily by the misapprehensions, prejudices or even obsessions of their leadership rather than the interests of their nations. The Obama Administration was one of those.

Indeed, its interpretations of the intentions of the Palestinians and the Iranian regime – which could be determined simply by paying attention to their words – were so far from reality that I often found myself asking, “stupid or evil?” Did American officials really think that the Palestinians would be satisfied with a peaceful state alongside Israel if only the right concessions were forced out of us? Did they really believe that the agreement with the Iranians would prevent them from getting nuclear weapons, or even significantly slow them down?

There was also an ideological element, a clear affinity of Obama himself to the Muslim opponents of Israel that was demonstrated by the speech he delivered in Cairo shortly after his inauguration. There was his comparison of the Palestinians to black Americans, one of the worst possible analogies. And there was his antipathy for our Prime Minister, which he famously shared in an off-mike chat with the French president. Taking all this into account, one can be excused for thinking that one of the deliberate objectives of Obama’s policies was to weaken and hurt Israel.

While these personal characteristics of Barack Obama do not apply to Joe Biden, he does seem to believe in the traditional (and wrong) principles of American Middle East policy, such as the primacy of creating a sovereign Palestinian state in bringing normal relations to the region. He agrees with Obama that Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria are “illegitimate and an obstacle to peace,” a position that the State Department reversed under Trump.

American policy toward the Palestinians, going back to the Clinton Administration, has always been to provide ample financial aid to them and get Israel to make concessions up front, both territorial and practical (like freeing jailed terrorists). And Obama’s Iran policy was heavily front-loaded with financial benefits to Iran. One would think that professional diplomats would understand why this strategy failed over and over. Both the Palestinians and the Iranians have objectives that they cannot be paid to give up. Giving them presents only made them ask for more, and in both cases they used the money to pay for terrorism.

The non-professionals of the Trump Administration did understand this. They reversed course and applied economic pressure to both the Palestinians and the Iranian regime, in order to create leverage for negotiations. Unfortunately, the policy hasn’t been in place long enough to tell if it will work, but the desire to be “not-Trump” may cause the new Administration to end sanctions on Iran and re-fund the PA and UNRWA – making failure a certainty. Biden has already promised to restore Trump-suspended payments to UNRWA, the Palestinian refugee agency, thus continuing the decades-long growth of a hostile population of heavily indoctrinated, stateless welfare clients.

We can also expect a resumption of objections from the US against Jewish construction in Judea/Samaria and Eastern Jerusalem, joining the chorus from Europe. It wouldn’t surprise me if another unannounced but near-total freeze on construction will soon go into effect.

In more encouraging news, recent comments by Anthony Blinken, Biden’s nominee for Secretary of State, indicate that he doesn’t intend to reactivate the Iran deal immediately. Nevertheless, we should watch for any loosening of the Trump-applied sanctions on Iran as an indication of the likely direction the administration will take.

Israel has been engaged in a “war between the wars,” against Iranian installations in Syria. The Trump Administration did not interfere. I expect that attacks against these targets will be less frequent under the new administration. A warning sign will be if they stop entirely.

I had hoped that Israel would utilize the last weeks of Trump’s term to destroy the Iranian nuclear installations, perhaps even with American help; but apparently our PM and the IDF believe that their lower-level activities are effective enough that such an ambitious project wasn’t needed. We might regret this later; I will be very surprised if it happens under Biden.

All of the above is based on the assumption that the “moderates” in Biden’s administration, including Biden himself, will be in control. And here is where the real scary stuff begins.

Biden is 78 years old, older than any other American president at the time of his inauguration (Trump was 70 and Ronald Reagan was not quite 78 at the end of his second term). He certainly does not appear to me, admittedly a non-professional, to be at the top of his game … or worse. Even if he remains as president for a full term, it’s hard to imagine that he will be calling the shots. His vice president, Kamala Harris, is an unknown quantity in the area of foreign affairs. And there are strong forces that will be trying to exert their influence on the administration – unfriendly ones.

One is the left wing of the Democratic party, which supported Bernie Sanders for the presidency, and which is strongly anti-Israel. The other is the Obama organization.

When Barack Obama left the White House, he did not retire from politics and retreat to his home state, like so many other ex-presidents. Rather, he bought a home in walking distance to the White House, and transformed his highly effective campaign fund-raising organization into a social action group, with both domestic and foreign policy goals. It’s hard to believe that he will not try to exert influence over the new administration.

I believe that Israel will be able to work with an administration that is somewhat less friendly than that of Trump, as long as it is honestly interested in regional peace. Israel will present the evidence – which is overwhelming – that Iran wants to develop nuclear weapons; indeed, is developing them now. Together with its new allies in the Arab world, it will argue that continued maximum economic and diplomatic pressure is the most effective way to stop Iran, short of war.

I believe also that Israel will be able to convince such an administration that the real reason for the lack of progress with the Palestinians is their refusal to accept the existence of a Jewish state with any borders. We will explain that the development of Israel’s relations with other Arab states means that Palestinian sovereignty can be delayed indefinitely, until the Palestinians are prepared to accept the legitimacy of the nation state of the Jewish people.

But if the American administration undergoes a sharp turn toward the left, either as a result of a takeover by the left wing of the Democratic Party or from the influence of the Obama organization, we could see a return of Obama-era pressure for concessions, restrictions on our actions, and appeasement of Iran.

We’ve made a great deal of progress in the past four years. It would be a shame if it were reversed.

We’ll find out in the next few months.

-- Victor

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But What About the Palestinians? (Vic Rosenthal)

Vic Rosenthal's weekly column

This morning I received a robo-call from the Rehovot city government to tell me that, as a senior

 

citizen, if I had trouble getting an appointment for my Coronavirus vaccination, they would help me, and here is how to contact them. I remembered that some months ago I got a call from a human social worker employed by the city, who wanted to know how I was, how we were getting our food (this was during our first full lockdown), did we have local family to help us out, and so on.

I’ve had my differences with the city from time to time, but I am really impressed by this. They are using our tax money (Israelis pay local taxes based on the size of their homes and other factors) to provide services to the citizens! I realized how little I’ve come to expect from government, so this seemed like a big deal to me. But it’s still remarkable that they have programs in place to help those of us who are no longer “productive citizens” in an economic sense.

And then there is the vaccination program itself. The State of Israel paid a premium price for vaccines, and set up a system to distribute them. The logistics are complicated because the Pfizer vaccine, the first to arrive here, must be kept at -70 degrees C (-94 F) and then used within several hours of being warmed. As of Tuesday, 1,700,000 Israelis had received their first vaccination, including my wife and me.

We went to the designated location, where the four HMOs that all Israelis belong to had set up stations to give vaccinations; waited only a few minutes in an open area, and received our shots (for those who speak British, “jabs”). Information was immediately entered into the nationwide computer networks of the HMOs, and our appointments for the second dose set. This was much more efficient than anything I have ever experienced in any bureaucratic setting either here or in the US, even in the IDF.

Of course Bibi is taking credit for the whole thing, as our next expensive, unnecessary election approaches. But in truth he does deserve credit for making the deals with the pharmaceutical corporations that got us large quantities of vaccine early, even while the HMOs put together the system which is expected to vaccinate the entire population by the end of March.

So this morning I have a feeling that this country cares about me, and about the rest of its citizens. The institutions like the national and local governments and the HMOs are doing their jobs, at least in this connection. They government has not done so well in managing the lockdowns, especially the last, partial one, which seems to have hurt small businesses badly while doing little to slow the spread of the virus. There are plenty of other things to criticize, but still, I am proud of my country.

But the response of the world media to Israel’s relative success in fighting the epidemic has been more hostile than anything I recall since the last time Israel was forced to defend herself against deadly rocket attacks from Gaza. “What about the Palestinians,” they screamed. Why aren’t we vaccinating them, too? “It’s because Israel is an apartheid state!”

The accusation is everywhere, in mainstream and social media, from the human rights organizations, and even from Jewish groups like J Street.

And it’s nonsense. First, Arab and Jewish Israelis, as well as Palestinian residents of Jerusalem are treated precisely the same. Second, the PA and Hamas are responsible under international law for vaccinating their citizens. The PA has said they have ordered vaccines from several manufacturers and are awaiting their arrival. Israel has promised to give surplus vaccine to the PA after our campaign is over. Israel’s public broadcaster KAN reports that Israel already gave the Palestinian Authority some 100 doses of the vaccine for “hardship cases” (probably the big shots in the PA). And Elder of Ziyon has debunked some of the accusations against Israel made by “human rights” NGOs here and here.

One of Israel’s greatest national concerns is the question of how it can become a better state, one that better performs the basic function of a state, to protect its citizens against man-made and natural dangers, and to provide economic and cultural opportunities for them. This is the purpose of our health care system, the IDF, and our Knesset, judicial system, central bank, and so forth. Although there is a certain amount of corruption it is incidental to the functioning of the overall state.

The vaccination project has been a positive force in our lives, illustrating that we need not always be passive and accept the blows that fall on us. And it shows that our big institutions (the HMOs are independent organizations, but closely controlled by the Health Ministry) can work smoothly when they have to.

The Palestinian Authority and Hamas are entirely different. Although they have government ministries, a health-care system, and many other services, they do not exist to protect their people and enable them to fulfill their economic and cultural potential. They have two functions alone: to enrich those Palestinians who are “connected,” and to fight the war against Israel with which they are obsessed. Corruption is essential, not incidental. Funds that don’t go into the pockets of the rulers go to prepare for war or to pay the soldiers. Palestinians know this and hate their rulers, but there is little they can do because the dictatorships under which they live don’t hesitate to use force against them. And in many cases, they are also slaves to their obsessive hatred of Israel.

Palestinian governments continue to encourage, pay for, and perpetrate terrorism against Israel, while “ordinary Palestinians” throw rocks at cars containing Jews, a pastime that has caused several deaths and countless serious injuries. A few weeks ago, an “ordinary Palestinian” viciously beat an innocent woman to death. Right now the concern in Ramallah is not how to vaccinate millions of Palestinians, but rather how to ensure that terrorists will continue to get paid despite Israeli restrictions on Palestinian banks.

Israel struggles to be better. Palestinians struggle to be worse. And yet, which side do the media, the Jewish Left, and the human rights industry take?

***

Sheldon Adelson died on Tuesday. He was one of Israel’s greatest supporters. He loved this country, and contributed massive amounts of his own money to make it better and to help improve its relationship with the diaspora, including hundreds of millions of dollars to Birthright, which has probably done more to counteract the hate campaign against Israel in the universities than all other PR initiatives put together. He also gave large sums to AIPAC, the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, Yad Vashem, and the Israeli-American Council. He and his Israeli-born wife, Miri, were the major donors to a new medical school at Ariel University. He donated several Magen David Adom ambulances and mobile ICU vehicles, including some that were armored to protect them against terrorist attacks. He started the free newspaper Israel Hayom (Israel Today), which is today the paper with the largest circulation in the country, shattering the almost total monopoly on news media in Israel held by the Left. His influence on Donald Trump was partly responsible for Trump’s pro-Israel policies.

Miri Adelson will certainly continue his philanthropy, but the Jewish people and the State of Israel have lost a friend that won’t easily be replaced. BDE.

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Iran Strategy and “Newer Jews” (Vic Rosenthal)

Vic Rosenthal's weekly column

I just watched an interview of the new Israeli Ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely. She was interviewed by Colin Shindler, a historian and professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Shindler, despite his qualifications as a specialist in the history of Israel, displayed the typical bias against that country of most British academics, but Hotovely did an excellent job, demonstrating that a former firebrand politician can become a diplomat.

I found one question in particular interesting. Do you think, Shindler asked, that Israel’s recent normalization of relations with several Arab states will make war with Iran more or less likely? Hotovely’s response was that this was a positive development, and that it showed that Israel wasn’t the only country in the Middle East that was worried about Iran. But she didn’t answer specifically whether it made war more or less likely.

I suspect Hotovely thought, as I did, that it was unnecessary to add that of course it reduced the chance of violent conflict. After all, Iran’s attempt to expand her sphere of influence in the region, especially by trying to encircle Israel with armed proxies, is the typical behavior of an aggressor that will lead to war unless the aggressor can be deterred. And certainly an alliance between the potential victims of aggression has a deterrent force. So what on earth was Schindler thinking?

Here is another example: a recent CNN “analysis” included this: “Even if Biden is willing to return to the terms of the Iran nuclear deal, the case for diplomacy has been weakened by the Trump-ordered US strike that killed [Iranian General Qassem] Soleimani.”

Weakened? By killing Soleimani, Trump took an action that reduced Iran’s ability to take extra-diplomatic actions (read: terrorism or war). That strengthened the American negotiating position, making it more likely that the Iranians would make concessions. But the writer seems to believe the opposite. It should be obvious that achieving agreement in negotiations is much more likely when one side sees no alternative but to agree. If Biden wants to negotiate over Iran’s nuclear program, Trump did him a big favor by killing Soleimani and by applying tough sanctions.

I suspect it is a particular kind of illogic that seems to be common among those with a certain kind of historical ignorance, and in the case of Jews like Shindler, a certain psychological syndrome.

What motivates regimes? For good regimes, it is primarily the national interests of their countries; for bad regimes, it is the personal and political interests of the leaders. Motivations almost never include moral considerations or ideas of fair play or justice. Regimes are sometimes slightly influenced by fellow-feeling for their linguistic and religious fellows, as in the “special relationship” between the US and the UK, the Russian connection to other Slavic peoples, or the support for the Palestinians by fellow Muslims. But interests still predominate, and presidents, dictators, and kings get up in the morning and think about how they can promote them, and what might stand in their way. When an enemy backs down or shows weakness, they push forward. It would be irrational to follow suit in backing down, and usually they don’t.
A national leader has to play both offense and defense, in American football terms. They need to move their interests forward, while frustrating the designs of their enemies. Direct conflict is expensive and risky, so their offensive actions are usually incremental, and in proportion to what they can get away with. Defensive actions take two forms: direct defense, like antimissile systems; and deterrence, which is calculated to make the enemy’s possible offensive actions so expensive that they will not be justified in terms of interests. Both kinds of defense are necessary.
The Trump Administration’s strategy against Iran is classically rational. The high-level goal is to prevent Iran from taking control of the Middle East and its natural resources, and in particular to prevent the regime from getting nuclear weapons which would facilitate that takeover. This is accomplished by wielding the massive economic power of the US. The powerful American military functions as a deterrent against Iran’s using its favored weapon, proxy terrorism, in response. I have little doubt that if the Trump policy were continued, Iran could be forced to back down without open conflict.

The Obama Administration acted differently, either because it did not understand Iranian goals, or because its own objectives were not to frustrate Iranian expansionism, or because it was incompetent (or perhaps a bit of all three). Despite America’s enormous economic and military advantages over Iran, it negotiated as if from a position of weakness.

Israel today does not act with complete rationality for various reasons. For one thing, there is widespread disagreement about national goals. For example, as a “right-winger” I believe that it should be a national goal to achieve Jewish sovereignty over all the land of Israel, and that Israel should be the nation-state of the Jewish people. There are also Israelis that believe that Judea and Samaria should be under Arab sovereignty, and that Israel should be a “state of all its citizens” like the US; and there are Israelis who would take intermediate positions.

As a result, the (very democratic) Israeli regime has difficulty in implementing policy consistently, because it is pulled back and forth by various constituencies. From a military point of view, it relies too much on direct defense, like Iron dome and sophisticated barriers, and not enough on deterrence, which must be exercised from time to time in order to maintain credibility. But for various reasons, in part the fear of interference from outside powers, it is loath to do so.

There is also another issue, more of a spiritual problem: because Israeli Jews have lived so long in an antisemitic world, they are unsure of the legitimacy of their very existence. As Kenneth Levin explained in his book, The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege, Jews have come to accept the antisemitic judgment that their persecution is their own fault, and believe that they can influence their enemies by becoming “better” people. The effect is to prevent them from taking strong action when needed. Oslo Syndrome sufferers often echo the complaints of antisemitic Europeans and the “human rights industry.”

Ben Gurion and Jabotinsky hoped for a “new Jew” to replace the ones that cowered in the ghettos of Europe. Although they created a generation of Jews that were capable of fighting for their lives and to establish a state, it has been hard to repair all of the damage from the millennia of diaspora existence. Ben Gurion’s New Jews believed that they didn’t need religion, which they saw as part of the weakness of the old Jews. But the danger was that without it, once they succeeded in establishing a state and securing the Jewish people against persecution, they would forget why the Jewish people needed a Jewish state. And this has to a certain extent happened.
But there is also a new generation that represents a synthesis, Jews that are both strong enough to fight and spiritual enough to know why they need to. Call them “Newer Jews.” And the interview that prompted this post, which pits a member of this new generation of Jewish leaders, Tzipi Hotovely, against a Jew fatally stricken with Oslo Syndrome, Colin Shindler, is a good way to see the difference.

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Jonathan Pollard is a Litmus Test. But for What? (Vic Rosenthal)

Vic Rosenthal's weekly column

The arrival of Jonathan Pollard in Israel 35 years after his arrest for espionage on Israel’s behalf has made me think about the position of the Jew in the diaspora, particularly in America.
There are facts about Pollard’s case that are shrouded in mystery (for example, the still-secret Caspar Weinberger memo that in part convinced the judge in his case, Aubrey Robinson, to abrogate his plea bargain and sentence him to life imprisonment).

There is very little impartial material written about his case. Did he do what he did out of Zionist motives or did he do it for the money (or both)? Was Judge Robinson influenced by accusations that Pollard had aided the apartheid South African regime? These questions are discussed here (from a pro-Pollard perspective). Was the sentence outrageously unfair or, as some say, was it too light? Was his sentence, like the one given to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, intended as a warning to disloyal ‘cosmopolitan’ Jews? It is possible to find documentation of various degrees of trustworthiness to support disparate narratives.

It is certain that Pollard provided a great deal of useful information to Israel about her regional enemies that had been withheld by the US. It is also certain that Pollard was abandoned by Israel, expelled from the embassy in Washington where he sought asylum, into the arms of the FBI. And it is certain that he received the harshest sentence by far ever handed down to someone for spying for an American ally, harsher yet than what some who spied for the Soviets received.
Early Wednesday morning, Pollard was met at the airport by PM Netanyahu, who said the shehecheyanu with him and personally handed him his Israeli identity document. This of course immediately made him a political football in Israel, to the extent that he wasn’t already. But that’s not what I want to discuss.

What interests me today is the attitudes of American Jews toward Pollard, and what that tells us about how they see themselves and their position as diaspora Jews.

The diaspora has generally not been a friendly place for Jews since their expulsion from Judea after the defeat of the Bar Kochba revolt by the Romans on Tisha b’Av, 135 CE. Always outsiders, they were often exploited, expelled, oppressed, and even exterminated by their hosts. But – especially between the end of WWII and the beginning of the 21^st century – the USA has been different. Although there are examples of anti-Jewish riots and lynchings, and discrimination in employment, education, and residence, the position of Jews in America for a long period has probably been as good as or better than anywhere else in the diaspora.

Like Homer Simpson, an American Jew has two tiny creatures that sit on his or her shoulders and whisper. One says, “you are an American like other Americans, even if you are Jewish. This is your home. You have rights here.” And the other says, “never forget that you are a Jew. Your existence is precarious. Keep your suitcase packed.” I think that American Jewish attitudes toward Pollard are derived from the interaction of these voices.

On one occasion, a friend told me that “Pollard should have been executed, like the Rosenbergs.” This from a liberal American Jew who, I’m certain, opposes capital punishment in general. “America was good to him and he spit in its face,” he continued. “He was a traitor both to his country and to other Jews, who will always be suspected of having dual loyalties.”

This particular Jew is more knowledgeable than most Americans about Israel, a strong Zionist and supporter of causes related to Israel. But at the same time he was one of the approximately 69% of American Jews who voted for Barack Obama’s second term, when it should have been obvious to anyone that he was far from a friend of Israel (unlike his opponent, Mitt Romney). Needless to say, President Trump’s remarkably strong pro-Israel stance doesn’t sway my friend from his strong antagonism to the president.

When I listen to him, I hear both voices. My friend is proud of being American and takes what he sees as patriotic American positions. His center of gravity is in the US. But at the same time, there is that other small voice, the one that reminds him that as a Jew, he is less than entirely secure in America. He worries that Pollard’s actions might cause an increase in antisemitism among non-Jewish Americans. And maybe sometimes at 3 AM, he wonders if he shouldn’t have a packed suitcase under his bed.

So it is very important for him to let everyone know that American Jews in general, and he in particular, are good Americans. Maybe better Americans than some non-Jews.
This is a position fraught with cognitive dissonance.

There are American Jews that strongly support Pollard. Some (unlike my friend) are Orthodox Jews, like Rabbi Pesach Lerner, the former head of the National Council of Young Israel, an organization of Orthodox synagogues. Lerner visited Pollard in prison countless times, and helped obtain financial support for him after his release when he was unable to work. Pollard “got religion” in prison, and that may be part of it. But I have also heard some Orthodox Jews strongly denounce Pollard in words like my friend’s. And, on the other side, the Reform Movement passed a resolution to ask President Clinton to commute Pollard’s sentence in 1993; its president, Rabbi Rick Jacobs (whom I usually love to criticize), visited him in prison along with representatives of the Conservative movement.

Pollard is a litmus test of some sort, but it is not either one for Right vs. Left or Orthodox vs. (religiously) liberal. It’s something else. I know that my grandmother, who lost siblings in the Holocaust and from whom I inherited much of my sensibility, would have instinctively stuck up for Pollard, despite the fact that she was very proud of the paper that said she was an American citizen.

I think it’s related to what I called “center of gravity” above. If your center of gravity is in the diaspora you have to worry that someday you will be uprooted. If it’s located with the Jewish people, you may be less comfortable in the diaspora, but you have fewer illusions.
Where is your center of gravity?

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The Biden Administration and the “War of Return” (Vic Rosenthal)

Vic Rosenthal's weekly column

Judging from the few public statements made so far and what is known about his appointees, the Biden Administration will take up the same stance toward Israel and the Palestinians as the last Democratic administration, led by Barack Obama.
That means that it will return to the idea of establishing a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria more or less on the pre-1967 lines. It will go back to financing the Palestinian Authority, which will find a way to pay terrorists and support their families while pretending not to, in order to circumvent the Taylor Force Act which requires the US to deduct such payments from aid to the PA. The administration will likely close its eyes to the subterfuge. It will go back to funding UNRWA, the agency that supports the exponential growth of a stateless population made up of the descendants of Arab refugees from the 1948 war, despite the fact that it exists to perpetuate the problem posed by this population, not to solve it.
I believe that it will return to the principle that the main reason the conflict has not ended is that Israel has not made enough concessions to the Palestinians, and that the way to end it is to pressure Israel to give in to Palestinian demands: for Jew-free land, for sovereignty without restrictions, for eastern Jerusalem, and perhaps even for the “return” of the refugee descendants. Although not directly part of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it will probably reduce pressure on Iran and possibly even return to the JCPOA, the nuclear deal.
It’s too early to tell if it will also adopt the open hostility to the Jewish state that characterized Obama’s reign. That will depend on who influences Biden, both among his official advisors as well as the numerous think tanks, lobbies, and pressure groups that have an interest in the conflict – including the one operated by Barack Obama himself.
I suspect that the administration will have its hands full with other matters and so will not immediately launch a new “peace” effort. But one never knows. Sometimes rationality goes out the window when the subject turns to the Jews and their state.
Although nothing can be done with those who take a position because they see it as a step in the direction of the ultimate elimination of our state, there are still “people of good faith” who believe that the Land for Peace paradigm that inspired the Oslo Accords does provide a path to ending the conflict. If the new administration is dominated by the latter type of people, there is hope that correcting their fundamental misapprehensions might lead to a more productive policy.
These misapprehensions are spelled out persuasively in a recent book, The War of Return, How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream has Obstructed the Path to Peace, by Adi Schwartz and Einat Wilf (All Points Books, 2020). Schwartz and Wilf fall on the left of the Israeli political spectrum (Wilf was a Member of the Knesset for the Labor Party), and they still favor a two-state solution. But unlike most of their comrades, they have listened to the Palestinians, and understand their actual concerns and objectives. In their book, they explain why the traditional approach has failed and propose the initial steps that are necessary for any settlement of the conflict.
All previous Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations have miscarried because Israelis and Western interlocutors have failed to realize the paramount importance of one issue – the “right of return” demanded by the Palestinians. This is possible because they have systematically misunderstood the language – whether English or Arabic – used by the Palestinians. The “constructive ambiguity” that often characterizes diplomatic language and allows parties that don’t quite agree with each other to nevertheless sign agreements has made it possible for the same words to have diametrically opposed meanings when uttered by Westerners or Palestinians.
The prime example of this is the phrase “a just solution to the refugee problem.” To an Israeli or Westerner, this can include the normalization of the refugees* in their countries of residence, their emigration to other countries, or their resettlement in a Palestinian state, should one be created. This has been the approach taken by the international community to the numerous refugee populations, including Germans living in Eastern Europe after WWII, Holocaust survivors, Jews who were forced out of Arab countries after 1948, and so on. But the Palestinian position is that there is only one “just solution”: anyone with refugee status has the inalienable right to “return” to his “home” in Israel if he wishes to do so, or to receive compensation if he prefers. And that is what this phrase means when they use it.
Naturally, given the numbers of Arabs who claim this “right,” such a mass return would change Israel into an Arab-majority state, even assuming Jews were prepared to leave their homes and peacefully give them to their “rightful owners.” The absurdity of the demand is evident. Yet Yasser Arafat walked away from Camp David precisely because Israel would not agree to it.
Another phrase whose ambiguity has prevented agreement is “two-state solution.” Virtually every Israeli that favors this understands it as “two states for two peoples.” But the Palestinians want one totally Jew-free Palestinian state, and one state in which the right of return for Arab refugees has been implemented (and which theoretically might contain Jews, at least for a while). They have never accepted the idea of any Jewish sovereignty between the river and the sea, and hence reject the formulation “two states for two peoples.”
Schwartz and Wilf explain that Western and Israeli negotiators have always assumed – perhaps because the demand is so extreme – that the right of return was a bargaining chip that the Palestinians would cash in for the currency of borders, the removal of settlements, or rights in Jerusalem. But they were wrong. The demand for “return” is the essence of the Palestinian movement.
Palestinian children learn about it, down to the particular locations to which each has the “right” to return, in UNRWA schools where they are taught by Palestinian teachers (99% of UNRWA’s employees are Palestinians). Someday, they are told over and over, they will return. Guaranteed.
Everything UNRWA does is geared toward increasing this population of angry people, convinced that a massive injustice has been done to them, and that the only solution will be for them to return, and through this return, wipe the Jews from the face of the land they are convinced we stole from them.
UNRWA was created after the 1948 war with the intention of providing temporary assistance to the refugees until they could be resettled and normalized the way all other groups of refugees had been. But the only country that cooperated was Jordan, which gave the Palestinians citizenship and allowed them to integrate into their own populations. In Lebanon there were especially harsh restrictions and poor conditions. Little by little, the Arab nations changed the temporary UNRWA into a permanent tool to mold a refugee army that they hoped would ultimately do what their conventional armies could not: eliminate the Jewish state.
Today UNRWA is the main obstacle to solving the refugee problem. But it need not be. Schwartz and Wilf provide a relatively detailed, step by step program for phasing out UNRWA in the various places that it operates, and providing solutions for the refugees from the host countries and other agencies. For example, in the Palestinian Authority areas, they propose shifting both the responsibility for the refugees, and the money that supports UNRWA, to the PA. Former refugees would study in PA schools, go to PA health clinics, and so on. There are similar programs for Gaza, Syria, and Lebanon where the remaining refugee “camps” (today mostly neighborhoods on the outskirts of cities) are located.
Real peace can only be achieved when the consciousness of the Palestinians changes and they understand that the dream of return will not be realized. This would be a long and difficult process that could only begin with the elimination of UNRWA. But it has to start before it can finish. It will require cooperation of all of the Western donor countries that have been supporting UNRWA. Perhaps the fact that from a financial standpoint UNRWA will soon be unsustainable (after all, the number of “refugees” is growing exponentially) will encourage them to cooperate.
In the short term, it’s essential that everyone involved in relations between Israel and the Palestinians understand the real issues that underlie the conflict. And it would be a good thing if all parties could agree to use words the same way. Schwartz and Wilf say that “constructive ambiguity” should be replaced by “constructive specificity.” If the European Union, for example, believes that the State of Israel should be replaced by a Palestinian state, it should say so. Otherwise, it should unambiguously oppose a right of return, and work to dismantle UNRWA as quickly as is practical.
Back to the incoming Biden Administration. I hope it will resist the attempts of the anti-Israel Left to revive the hostility of the Obama days, and instead choose to be a force for real peace.
To that end, I will be sending Joe Biden a copy of this book, with a suggestion that he read it and pass it around among his foreign policy team.
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*From here on, I use the word “refugees” by itself, although it refers to those descendants of the approximately 550-700,000 original refugees who have been granted this status by UNRWA. There are more than 5 million of them today, and the number grows every day. No such refugee status has been granted to any other population; the UNHCR agency which takes care of all non-Palestinian refugees, grants refugee status to those individuals who cannot return to their country of origin due to well-founded fear of persecution (see the full definition here), and to their children. Unlike UNRWA’s refugee status, it is not hereditary.

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Are Israeli Jews “Betraying” Americans by Liking Trump? (Vic Rosenthal)

Vic Rosenthal's weekly column

Here we go again. Another yawning gulf between Israelis and American Jews, “a rupture that threatens Jews everywhere, the trust between Jews in Israel and the Diaspora, and in the long run, Israel,” say Evan Morris and Dennis Jett.
It’s not bad enough that the Israeli religious establishment does not show respect for Reform “Judaism,” or that we can’t appreciate how much Barack Obama really “[had] our back,” or that we keep electing “right-wing” governments with Bibi Netanyahu as PM, or that we keep failing to understand how an enemy state in mortar range of our center of population and our single international airport would actually be good for us.
It’s much worse than any of that. In fact, we are “going off the rails” and have “betrayed our American cousins.”
We did this by preferring Donald Trump to Joe Biden.
Oh sure, Trump did what no American president cared to do, carried out the will of the Congress and moved the embassy to the capital of the Jewish state. Clinton, Bush, and Obama loved to talk about our “unbreakable relationship,” but when it came down to the legitimacy of our presence in Jerusalem, they religiously signed that waiver every six months. Trump even instructed the oft-antisemitic State Department to allow those born in Jerusalem to have “Jerusalem, Israel” on their passports. Compare that to the Obama Administration’s refusal to say what country Jerusalem was in – they even scrubbed “Jerusalem, Israel” from official websites.
No big deal, Morris and Jett said. “Trump is not a reliable ally and could never be … Given the right circumstance or perceived slight, Trump would turn on Israel.” So then Trump went and recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and sponsored the development of a peace plan that was for the first time based on reality, rather than Henry Kissinger’s 1974 promise to the Arabs to reverse the result of the 1967 war.
Trump did even more. He spurned the view that the Palestinians should be given unlimited aid regardless of their behavior, and enforced the Taylor Force act that demanded aid be reduced when it was used to pay terrorists. He ended the perpetual support for the descendants of the Arab refugees of 1948, and disproved the idea – expressed by John Kerry (ironic video) in 2016 – that appeasement of the Palestinians was a precondition for normalization with the larger Arab world.
And now, although already a lame duck, Trump continues to promote normalization between Israel and multiple Arab and Muslim countries. We’re still waiting for him to “turn on us.” Are you surprised that Israelis overwhelmingly prefer Trump to Biden, who promises to re-enter the Iran deal and go back to giving the Palestinians a free pass in an interminable “peace process?” How could it be otherwise?
Nevertheless Morris and Jett insist that Trump is Bad For The Jews. They say he represents “emerging Fascism.” And how do we know this? Because Trump “alternately excused and encouraged” “the white supremacists that marched in Charlottesville.” In fact, he did no such thing. The accusation is a perfect example of the Big Lie technique: it has been repeated countless times, and has now entered the realm of conventional wisdom. But it still isn’t true.
Morris and Jett say Trump supporters “promulgate conspiracy theories based on antisemitic lies.” Maybe some do, just like some of the remarkably vicious members of the American Left who are on the other side. Israelis are not in touch with the details of American politics, nor do we follow the swirling winds of accusations thrown at each other by the two sides. But I have yet to hear anything antisemitic from Trump himself.
Antisemitism is clearly burgeoning in America, and that is rightly a serious concern for American Jews. But the attempt to blame Trump for it – while ignoring the anti-Trump extremists like the Pittsburgh shooter, the Farrakhanists, the Black Hebrews, and the misozionist Left – is dangerously mistaken, despite its wholesale adoption by the Trump-hostile media.
Apparently Morris and Jett think as little of Netanyahu as they do of Trump, calling our PM “boorish” for waiting about 12 hours after other foreign leaders to congratulate Biden on the election. This is the cheapest shot imaginable, considering that the official announcement came on Shabbat, 7 November, and Netanyahu tweeted his congratulations on Sunday.
The piece concludes with an accusation that Israelis are “willing to ignore the very real threat to our democracy, to our way of life and safety, just to help advance [their] own parochial needs.” I admit to being struck almost dumb by this. The Iran deal and the conflict with the Palestinians could have existential consequences for Israel. America has enormous power and influence, which its presidents often wield in our region, sometimes to our great disadvantage, as in the case of President Obama. Israel, on the other hand, has little power to influence America; PM Netanyahu pulled out all the stops to derail the pernicious Iran deal, without success. Perhaps our concerns are “parochial,” but they are quite serious. And I remind them that Donald Trump received more votes than any previous American presidential candidate, even if he did not win the election.* So the vileness of Trump is not a forgone conclusion.
The entire article has an unfriendly, even threatening tone, as if to suggest that if we don’t fall in line with the 77% of American Jews who voted for Biden, we’ll be sorry.
The two authors are not just a pair of idiots, as the content of the article suggests. Morris is a specialist in biomedical engineering and radiology and a psychiatrist who teaches at Yale. Jett is a former ambassador who had a long career with the US State Department, and now teaches International Affairs at Penn State. Both were Fulbright scholars who worked in Israel.
But they share the arrogance of Americans who don’t understand the interests and apprehensions of Israelis, and who would prefer that we play our role as a banana republic that is an American satellite, quietly.
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* No, I’m not going to comment on whether the election was fair.

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Good Morning, Here is the News from Israel (Vic Rosenthal)

Vic Rosenthal's weekly column

The first batch of Pfizer Corona-virus vaccine landed in Israel today. PM Netanyahu announced that he will be the first to get it, live on television, in order to build public confidence. Although it’s impossible to get Covid from it, there is still a possibility of other side effects, and many people would prefer to let others be the pioneers with the arrows in their backs. Even the Israeli Doctors’ Union has insisted on reviewing the research data (Hebrew link) on the vaccines before medical staffs receive it. “We don’t want to be guinea pigs,” said a spokesperson (literally, “experimental rabbits”). The plan is – assuming the doctors are satisfied – is to immunize them first, followed by older citizens. I suggested that bus and taxi drivers, who are both at risk to catch the disease and to infect others, should be included, but apparently they didn’t listen to me.

This first shipment is small, only about 3,000 – 4,000 doses, intended to test the methods of shipment and distribution. Later this month there will be a larger shipments, up to 4 million doses. By the Spring, there should be enough for all of Israel’s population. The Health Ministry was waiting for the American FDA to approve it before giving the final go-ahead, and that occurred yesterday.

Meanwhile, people are still getting sick, some are dying, and the dysfunctional government is still flailing ineffectually as we approach our third wave. A nighttime lockdown was supposed to go into effect today, but at the last moment the Justice Ministry announced that such a lockdown would have “legal problems” because it would “limit the motion of citizens.”

This encapsulates the absurd situation perfectly: a nighttime lockdown would have minimal effect on the epidemic, because people have nowhere to go at night anyway, with restaurants and bars closed. But it would be an obstacle to the continued anti-Netanyahu demonstrations in front of his residences in Jerusalem and Caesarea, so Bibi’s government wants it. On the other hand, the Minister of Justice, who is the former head of the Histadrut labor federation and a bitter foe of Netanyahu, wants the demonstrations to continue. No lockdown. Such dedication on both sides!

I wasn’t going to write about politics, but I should note that the process of dissolving the Knesset and calling new elections is proceeding apace. A preliminary motion to do so passed last week, and a Knesset Committee set the next vote (there need to be three more) for this coming Monday. At the same time, Netanyahu’s biggest rival in the Likud, Gideon Sa’ar, announced yesterday that he is quitting the Likud and starting a new center-right party, which has already attracted several heavy hitters from the opposition. A snap poll showed that Sa’ar’s party would get the third greatest number of seats if the election were today. Most of his support would come from Netanyahu’s party.

A sidelight: the party may be named “New Hope,” which immediately brought up comparisons to Star Wars and the appropriate campaign music (video) for the new party.

This has completely upended everyone’s calculations, since that kind of performance in the election would mean that Netanyahu and the Haredi parties would not come close to the 61 seats needed to form a government. There will now be a huge amount of maneuvering and dealing both before and after the election, which will make it even less likely that the parasites government ministers will be able to spend time on their actual jobs, for which they are very well paid by the citizens. It’s too early to predict, but I am hoping that this will break the deadlock and we will get a real government, instead of this “unity” government in which the various members are more interested in cutting each other’s throats and not being jailed than governing.

In other news, an Emirati billionaire has bought 50% of the Beitar Jerusalem Football [soccer] Club, which has a fan base that includes a sometimes violent anti-Arab group called “La Familia” which insults Arab players on opposing teams and has made it impossible for Arabs to play on the team (even non-Arab Muslims didn’t last). I’m making no predictions here, either.

Finally, speaking of Star Wars, a well-respected Israeli scientist who was head of Israel’s space security program for many years has published a book in which he says that aliens have a contract with the US government and an underground base on Mars, where they are working with American astronauts. According to Prof. Haim Eshed, they have not revealed themselves to us yet because “humanity is not ready.”

He got that part right.

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Wokeism, Jew-hatred, and Misoziony (Vic Rosenthal)

Vic Rosenthal's weekly column

You hear about it, but you don’t really believe it.

What is happening in American universities to Jewish students, and particularly those who support Israel even to a small degree, is appalling, and it hasn’t diminished as courses have moved online during the pandemic. Misoziony, “new antisemitism,” and plain old Jew-hatred that doesn’t even try to disguise itself have become part of the everyday experience of Jewish students in a way that would have been unimaginable for me or for my children when we were students. Read Blake Flayton’s article at the link above. You can say that it’s just a collection of anecdotes, but they are characteristic of the atmosphere at most universities.

One of the more distressing aspects of it is that it is not just coming from other students, but often from faculty and administrators. The adult authority that is expected to protect students goes missing when the victims are Jewish. Administrators that are exquisitely sensitive to reports of microaggressions against “people of color” or sex/gender minorities, often act as though Jewish students do not deserve protection, because after all they are the most privileged of the privileged. In the event that they are not properly anti-Israel – they don’t even have to identify as Zionists – they are vilified and discriminated against in multiple ways for supporting a “racist apartheid state” that can only be repaired by allowing its enemies to overrun it. Those staff members that do sympathize with Jewish concerns or Israel are often afraid that they will be targeted if they don’t stay quiet (see here, here, here, here, etc.)

Campuses are pervaded by a postmodern ideology, which permits free speech only for those that support it, and a postcolonial one that institutionalizes racist attitudes against “whites,” by which they mean (somewhat incoherently) anyone that does not belong to one of a variable collection of “oppressed” groups. Jews, despite a history of millennia of pogroms, expulsions, and genocides, are never included.

Unfortunately, the postmodern/postcolonial ideology (“wokeism”) is not limited to the universities anymore. The so-called “cancel culture” that pervades progressive media is derived from postmodern ideas like truth being a social construct while feelings are a priori valid. The willingness of both the Left and the Right to simply invent “facts” – because the irrefutable “truth” of their narrative overrides any possible falsification by reality – comes from the same place. The ideology has spread to k-12 education, too. And, surprisingly, even the corporate world is becoming suffused with it, as shown by the obsession with various forms of sensitivity training and “anti-racism education.”

This is not surprising, because the woke penetration in the universities has been going on for at least two decades, and graduates now work for the biggest corporations, media, law firms, ad agencies, local and national government, and public and private education. One misses the 19^th century robber barons who were interested primarily in money, and didn’t have social objectives like the management of Google or Twitter.

Elements in the black community also seem to find wokeism congenial, because the idea that they are a colonized population makes it possible to argue that all the problems that they face in the larger American society are due to the structural racism inherent in it. That implies that they are owed something in addition to equality of opportunity, because of what was taken from their ancestors by slavery and continues to be taken from them by institutional racism. Unfortunately, the anti-Jewish aspects of woke culture fit in with the historical antisemitic bias of the black community, which was introduced by the Nation of Islam as early as the 1930s, and today is represented by Louis Farrakhan. The racial disturbances and controversies of the 1960s (like the New York teachers’ strike) sharpened the differences between blacks and Jews in urban areas.

Other groups in American society, such as the non-Evangelical Protestant Churches have also adopted a great deal of the woke ideology. Evangelicals, with their belief in absolute biblical truth, and traditional Catholics and Orthodox Jews who also reject the idea of the relativity of truth, have rejected it.

The woke generation adopts various causes that they believe oppose injustice. They are somewhat arbitrary in their choices: although they devote a lot of attention to racism against black people in the US, they almost entirely ignore the phenomenon of black slavery in Muslim countries, which seems to primarily interest conservatives. Of course one of the most prominent causes – far more prominent than is justified by the number of “victims” of oppression and the degree to which they are oppressed – is the Palestinian one.

I would argue that the Palestinian cause, which might better be called “the anti-Jewish sovereignty movement,” actually favors injustice, as its pretense of promoting Palestinian self-determination is easily shown to be a smokescreen for ending Jewish autonomy. Such things as the violence of the Palestinian side compared to the defensive actions of the Jewish side; the vicious racism and religious prejudice of the Palestinians; their poor treatment of women and LGBT people; economic inequality; cruelty to animals; neglect of the environment; oppressive, undemocratic government; and other characteristics that are normally anathema to the woke are completely acceptable when the perpetrators are Palestinian.

One reason for the popularity of their cause is the large number of Arab and Palestinian students in American universities. Google “scholarships for Palestinian students in the USA” and you get a surprising number of results. There are numerous organizations (including the US State Department) that offer them, and some like the FMEP and AMIDEAST, which would be expected to seek out political activists. Many of these students are activists, and they tend to be highly focused on their goals. Many lead chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and similar groups.

Since the 1970s, Arab countries pumped millions into American universities to establish departments and endow chairs of Middle East Studies – by which they meant Arab/Muslim studies – which often became centers for political activism.

Devotees of the Palestinian cause are found throughout American society, among the woke population as well as more traditional liberal segments. The degree of misinformation that these people have absorbed can be stunning. Recently, liberal/progressive icon Barack Obama published a book in which he presented a short discussion of the Israeli-Arab conflict and its history. It was remarkable for the number of falsehoods and biased statements it contained, clearly aimed to justify aggression against Israel and to damage the legitimacy of the Jewish state. Did he honestly believe this tissue of lies for the eight years that he was President of the US? Or did he simply write them into his book to justify his anti-Israel policies and to influence his successors? I’m not sure it matters.

American Jews are in a difficult position today. The traditional violent Jew-hatred that was mostly expressed by uneducated people is still there, and social media has given it a new life, resulting in several murderous incidents. At the same time, the misoziony of the overeducated class, which is trickling down to the average American, often spills over into antisemitism. Jews in urban areas (that’s most of them) also have to face hostility from many of their black neighbors as well.

Finally, Israelis need to realize that the pendulum of public opinion in the US, especially among the decision-making class, is swinging against the Jewish state. The Arab and Iranian strategy of introducing money and activists into Western universities has been hugely effective in changing the national perception of Israel for the worse. The change took some years, but with the help of other social and political trends, is now rapidly accelerating.

We had a brief respite with the Trump Administration, which strongly opposed wokeism and also was truly pro-Israel in a way that few previous ones were. But that was an anomaly. In the past, an anti-Israel president had to contend with a generally pro-Israel public, and a Congress that reflected that view.

The future will be different.

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Biden Brings Back Cognitive Dissonance Over Israel (Vic Rosenthal)

Vic Rosenthal's weekly column

Binyamin Netanyahu and Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by prize recipient Lord David Trimble, who got it in 1998. Trimble was honored for his part in negotiations leading to the Good Friday Agreement that brought relative peace to Northern Ireland.

In my opinion, the Abraham Accords represent the first ray of light in the darkness of the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1948, and if I were a Nobel recipient I would have nominated Donald Trump and Jared Kushner as well.

Of course the chances of Netanyahu receiving anything but abuse from the “international community” of which the Nobel committee is a pillar, are close to zero. The United Nations and the human rights industry, much of it set up in direct response to the industrial murder of European Jewry by the Nazis and their enthusiastic helpers over almost all of Europe, have ironically embraced the would-be genocidaires of the PLO, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the revolutionary Iranian regime. Especially since the year 2000 (see this brilliant analysis by Mark Pickles and Richard Landes), international institutions and NGOs have picked up and carried the flags of misoziony and Judenhass relinquished by the Soviets and the Nazis.

The USA was more or less neutral with respect to Israel (although its Jewish community strongly supported her) until the 1973 war, when it adopted Israel as its Cold War proxy. But soon after, thanks to OPEC’s devastatingly effective “oil weapon,” US policy became ambivalent. Henry Kissinger negotiated multifaceted agreements with the Arabs which resulted in ending the oil boycott; but one of the conditions was that the US would work to restore all territory conquered by Israel in 1967 to Arab control. Until Trump’s presidency, this was firm American policy, followed by relatively pro-Israel presidents like Clinton and Bush II, less friendly ones like Bush I, and anti-Israel ones like Carter and Obama alike.

The policy required a certain degree of cognitive dissonance from American politicians (not to mention the liberal Jews that supported them). It was necessary for them to advocate the transfer of strategically essential territory from Israeli to Arab control, while still at least appearing to support Israel’s continued survival. This they did by providing military aid. A master stroke, the massive aid package for Israel and Egypt that began with the Camp David agreement got Israel out of the Sinai, provided the US with leverage to control Israel’s behavior, and enriched American defense contractors. Later, it served as a fig leaf to hide the dangers of withdrawal inherent in demands for Israel to leave Gaza, the Golan, and Judea and Samaria.

Anti-Israel politicians like Barack Obama had less of an internal struggle than friendly ones. With the help of the Israeli Left, he argued counterfactually that security would come from territorial concessions. His policy was to weaken Israel while pretending to help her, for example by phasing out the portion of the military aid that could be used to buy from Israel’s own military industry. No matter what he did to damage Israel’s strategic position, he could always point to those billions of dollars in military hardware as proof of his support for the Jewish state. But whether an administration was friendly or not, the policy was always fundamentally incoherent. It also distorted internal Israeli politics, leading to disasters like the Oslo Accords.

Trump turned everything upside down. New technology that increased oil production in North America and various other developments had defused the oil weapon. In addition, some of the important Middle Eastern oil producers were worried about Iranian expansionism and its nuclear program, and realized that Israel could be an indispensable ally in opposing it. American interests were now seen to lie with a strong Israel, in truth and not just in rhetoric.

So for the first time since 1973, Trump’s administration was able to introduce a reality-based policy, affirming the rationality of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights and Jerusalem, and ending the obsequious treatment of the frankly terrorist PLO and its dictatorial Palestinian Authority. Under the Trump plan, the Palestinians would be required to give up their maximalist demands and make real compromises, if they wanted a state of any kind.

But as almost everyone finally admits, the clock has run out. There will not be a second Trump Administration. The new one, depressingly, seems firmly wedded to the old paradigm. Although most (not all!) of his appointments do not appear to be overt enemies of the Jewish state, Biden seems likely to restore the traditional deference (and funding) to the Palestinians, as well as to try to reopen negotiations about the JCPOA with Iran, which at the very least implies that sanctions on Iran will be reduced.

This is not because Biden and his people are idiots. They are fully aware that things have changed, and that the oil weapon no longer threatens America. But now the pressure comes from the home front. They can’t afford to alienate the misozionist left wing of the Democratic party, which has grown stronger in Congress. They don’t worry about American Jews, for whom Israel has little weight when they vote. They can ignore the Evangelicals, who will support Republicans anyway over social issues like abortion and LGBTx rights. And of course, they want to wipe out any traces of Trumpism. Staying in power and achieving domestic objectives is more important to them than logical consistency, or the negative consequences for America’s allies in the Middle East.

So we will go back to hearing platitudes about the “unbreakable” US-Israel relationship, while the administration complains about Israel building apartments in Jewish neighborhoods of eastern Jerusalem. What appeared to be a real possibility that Israel would extend sovereignty to the Jordan Valley – an area of extreme strategic importance – will fade away. We’ll watch as the US goes back to pretending that the failed and antisemitic United Nations can play a positive role in any sphere, and that the PLO can be made into a peace partner. Sanctions on Iran will be relaxed, emboldening the regime to push ahead on the ground and with its nuclear and missile programs.

A dark picture. Israel has a difficult four or eight years ahead of her, at least. There will be little room for mistakes and missed opportunities. It looks like we will shortly go through yet another round of elections. Is it too much to ask that we end up with a government equal to the task?

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