Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: Vic Rosenthal

Showing posts with label Vic Rosenthal. Show all posts

Thursday, November 04, 2021

A Drastic Proposal (Vic Rosenthal)

Weekly column by Vic Rosenthal

In my morning paper there is a discussion of the home front defense drill that will be taking place today, simulating an all-out war with Hamas and Hezbollah. Warning sirens will be activated in various places, and note will be taken of whether schoolchildren and others are able to reach shelter in time. My personal situation is good compared to that of most Israelis; there is a shelter on every floor of the apartment building I live in, and we get about a minute’s warning of rockets from Gaza (flight time is 90 seconds). Rockets from Hezbollah will take a bit longer.

Unfortunately, only about 42% of Israelis (according to my newspaper) have shelters in their homes. That means that they can’t possibly make it to the nearest public shelter in time, so they end up spending long hours or even days in them when there are rocket attacks. Or they depend on the somewhat dubious protection of stairwells. Even a shelter in the basement of a multistory building takes too much time to reach.

Iron Dome and other antimissile systems have provided good protection during the small conflicts that we’ve had in recent years, but in a war with Hezbollah, which is said to have some 130,000 rockets aimed at all parts of Israel, including some dozens of rockets with precise guidance systems that will be targeted at airbases, power stations, fuel depots, and other critical infrastructure, there will not be enough systems to protect most civilians.

There is money budgeted to fix this, but nowhere near enough, and the process is slow and (of course) bogged down by bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, the prospect of a conflict with Iran draws ever more likely as the Iranian regime plays for time with the Western powers. Unless something unexpected happens, like a revolution in Iran, the moment is near when Israel will have to decide: do we permit Iran to become a nuclear power or will we go to war? There is no third option.

War with Iran will involve Hezbollah, which has no other reason for existing. It will certainly trigger Hamas, and the other terror providers in Gaza. It will probably include missile and drone attacks on Israel from the territory of Syria and Iraq, and possibly directly from Iran. Estimates are of more than 1,000 rockets per day; the worst damage will be to border communities, which are in range of Hezbollah’s massive mortars. There will be ground incursions in the north, to try to overrun military installations and civilian communities, kill people and take hostages. We can expect a wave of terrorism from Judea and Samaria, and perhaps even the participation of Palestinian Authority “security” forces. Finally, terrorists among Israel’s Arab citizens will certainly join in, as they did in the last small war with Gaza.

Such a war would extremely traumatic for Israel’s home front, maybe worse than any of her previous wars. Nobody would be safe, and the country would not be the same afterwards, even if we win.

At the same time, war, no matter how it starts, would be portrayed in the international media as a vicious attack by Israel on helpless Lebanese, Gazans, and others. The international anti-Israel conspiracy – there is no other expression that adequately describes the coalition of organizations dedicated to the extirpation of the Jewish state from the world – will launch a coordinated antisemitic campaign throughout the world. This isn’t speculation: we’ve seen it in action every time Israel has acted to defend herself against rocket attacks from Gaza. The objective will be to pressure the international community to prevent an Israeli victory and allow our enemies to prepare for the next round.

I expect that the Biden Administration, like that of Barack Obama, will try to embargo shipments of essential weapons and ammunition to Israel. I believe that the overall climate in the administration and Congress is more anti-Israel today than in the days of Obama, although they have tried to avoid direct public confrontations so far.

What, then, is the best strategy for Israel in this situation?

Can we avoid war by appeasement? We can only delay it. The Iranian leaders do not want a conventional war at this time; the regime prefers to wait until it has prepared its nuclear shield. Once it is in place, it can unleash Hezbollah against Israel while deterring us from retaliating directly against them.

But even without war, a nuclear Iran would be disastrous for Israel. Iran would proceed to establish a sphere of influence over the entire region. It would gain economic and political power. The regime could demand concessions from Israel – a Palestinian capital in Jerusalem, prisoner releases, withdrawal from all or part of Judea and Samaria, an airport in Gaza – and Israel, without allies, would be forced to comply. Each time, the alternative would be war; conventional war, but backed by a nuclear threat.

Little by little our sovereignty would evaporate, foreign investment and trade would dry up, Israelis with foreign passports would leave – and then there would be more demands. It would not be as dramatic as nuclear bombs on Tel Aviv, but just as final.

Israel needs to act soon, and with overwhelming force, against both Iran and Hezbollah simultaneously, in order to prevent massive damage on our home front. Their military capabilities and leadership must be destroyed, and very quickly, before they can strike back and before the US and Europe can intervene. I am talking about a few days, not weeks. It might be that the only way to do that is with unconventional weapons. We need to be prepared to use them.

I understand that this is a drastic proposal. Do you have a better one?

Refuting the Narrative and Winning the Tribal War (Vic Rosenthal)

Weekly column by Vic Rosenthal

Last week, Elder of Ziyon described an interesting conjecture on the origin of the word “Palestine”: that it is derived from the Greek word for “wrestler,” which is part of the name taken by Jacob when he wrestled – “isra” – with an angel of God, “El.” So “Palestine” means “Israel.”

Is it true? Who knows? But it is ironic in the light of the assertions of the Palestinian Arabs that they are “natives,” an indigenous people that were “colonized” by the European Jews who, according to them, are not even a people but just a religious sect.

This is the heart of the Palestinian narrative that is presented as a justification for their violent struggle to expel the Jews from Eretz Yisrael. The post-colonial ideology that is current today, especially on the part of European former colonialists, demands that colonists turn control of the lands they exploited over to the indigenous residents. If the colonists refuse to do the right thing, then the natives are – if not entirely justified in turning to violence – at least understood and sympathized with. The Palestinians even make the absurd claim that the UN Charter, which permits victims of aggression to defend themselves, approves.

The oldest indigenous people on the land, and the most legitimate claimants for aboriginal rights, are the Jewish people. The fact that they won their battle – against British and Arab colonists of their ancestral land – does not change that. The fact that Jews may have been a minority in the land on any particular day from biblical times to the present, does not change that. The fact that most of the Jews living in Israel today are descended from Jews that had been living in exile in Muslim countries, Europe, Africa, India, and other places, does not change that.

The Palestinian Arab claim to being an aboriginal people that was invaded and colonized is false in two respects: first, specifically Palestinian peoplehood did not exist to a great extent before the mid-1960s, when it developed in opposition to Zionism. And second, few Palestinian families have a connection to the land that extends more than a couple of generations before the arrival of the Zionists.

Prior to the appearance of Palestinism, which was catalyzed by the KGB-advised PLO in the 1960s, Arabs in the land primarily viewed themselves as members of their extended families or tribes. The land itself was considered “southern Syria,” and there are numerous quotations from Palestinian Arab leaders, as late as 1977, that deny the existence of a Palestinian identity in favor of a pan-Arab one.

There may be Palestinian Arabs that are descended from people that lived in the land during biblical times, or arrived in the Arab conquest of the 7^th century. But almost all came no earlier than the invasion of Syria (which included Eretz Yisrael and Lebanon) by Muhammad Ali (not the boxer) around 1830, and many of them migrated from the surrounding countries to take advantage of the economic development of the land by the Zionists and later the British Empire. When the UN defined “Palestinian refugee” in 1948, it included “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948…”, to include numerous recent migrants.

The last time Eretz Yisrael was governed by its indigenous inhabitants was during the Hasmonean Dynasty (140-137 BCE), the folks that gave us Hanukah. Since then, it has been ruled by a succession of invaders, including the Romans, Byzantines, Persians, Arabs, Crusaders, Mamelukes, Turks, and British. Until the advent of the Palestinian Authority in 1993 and the Hamas takeover in Gaza, there has been nothing approaching Palestinian sovereignty anywhere.

A recent NY Times hit-job on Israel inadvertently made the oppositional nature of Palestinism clear. Asmaa Azaizeh, an Arab citizen of Israel and an intellectual, was quoted thus:

“Being a Palestinian is a way of resisting injustice,” she said. If there was nothing to resist, “I wouldn’t care if I was Palestinian or Egyptian or Lebanese or Jordanian.”

Palestinians are Arabs and they share the language, religious beliefs, and customs of Arabs in the surrounding countries. What makes them specifically Palestinian, as Ms. Azaizeh says, is their opposition to Zionism and the Jewish state. It doesn’t need to be said that in comparison, the Jewish people have a unique language and religion, as well as a relationship to this particular piece of land that goes back for millennia. As explained in the Torah, this land is inseparable from Jewish identity.

***

As I wrote last week, we are engaged in a conflict of tribes over the land. Regardless of the justice of their position, the tribe that prevails will have the land, and the loser will disappear.

The Arabs that call themselves Palestinians understand the importance of the land to their ideology far better than secular Jews do. That is why, with all the divisions and rivalries among them, they can agree almost single-mindedly on their goal of recovering their land and their honor.

One of the biggest mistakes that Israel makes in dealing with Arabs is in failing to understand the importance of maintaining her own honor. In the Middle East, honor is the greater part of deterrence. There is a Bedouin story about a rich man with many animals, several wives, and a number of sons. One day he sees someone steal a goat, and does nothing. He has many goats; maybe the thief is hungry, he thinks. The thief is emboldened and brings his friends. Little by little they take everything the man has. He has lost his honor, and without honor has no rights. Soon he finds his animals gone, his sons murdered, and his wives raped. He is left sitting outside the tent that used to belong to him.

Every time a Jew is humiliated on the street, every time they steal a car, burn a centimeter of land or make us afraid to walk on it, the Arabs move forward, closer to their goal. Every time a Jew moves away from the periphery of the country because of crime and insecurity, we lose ground. When we allow Arabs to shoot at us, or God forbid, kill us, without taking revenge, they gain and we lose.

There is a strategy for us to win in this conflict. It is to push forward in all parts of Eretz Yisrael to fully control the land, to make the Arabs understand that they have no hope of driving us out. It means increasing Jewish presence and control at the Temple Mount, and not the opposite, as has been happening since 1967. It means ending the no-go zones inside our capital. It means adopting a death penalty for terrorist murderers, and meeting Bedouin banditry in the south with overwhelming force. It means crushing the genocidal regime of Hamas, even if it requires a military occupation of Gaza. It means stopping the flow of money from the EU into illegal Arab building in Judea and Samaria, and encouraging hundreds of thousands of Jews to move there. It will probably also mean targeted killings and expulsions.

Life would not be as easy or pleasant for the Jews of Israel as it is now if they take on this task. It would require more military service, and it would cost money and lives. The state would have to become less open, liberal, and democratic. There would be opposition from the Israeli Left, Europe and America. The special position of the Jewish state as “the Jew of nations” ensures that, even if the nations of the world generally went out of their way to intervene on the side of justice, they would not choose our side.

On the other hand, if we don’t do it, if we allow the Arabs to continue their incremental gains and their erosion of our sovereignty, the day will come that we find ourselves outside our tent with no sons, wives or camels. There isn’t another alternative.

There is no doubt in my mind that we have the resources and the ability to win, to assert Jewish dominance over all of Eretz Yisrael. The harder question is this: how can we develop the will and the unity required to do it?

It's a tribal conflict (Vic Rosenthal)

Weekly column by Vic Rosenthal

Humans have always arranged themselves into families, extended families, and tribes. After all, they are primates, and many other primate species act similarly. Sometimes tribes clash over a piece of territory. Maybe the ground is fertile or the hunting is good. When that happens, the tribes fight. If there are other tribes nearby, each side may seek allies to help them win. This is the way human beings behave. We think we are different today. We are not.

Usually one tribe is the aggressor and one is the victim. The goal of the aggressor is to take what the victim has: property and land, and sometimes to enslave the useful members of the victim tribe. Some tribes have been very successful in serial aggressions, even building empires as they sweep across the land, employing techniques of aggression that they improve with successive conquests. The Arab conquests of the 7^th century and the Mongols of the 13^th come to mind.

Sometimes the aggressor wins, and sometimes the intended victim beats the aggressor off, or even destroys him. Sometimes there are repeated conflicts with no clear winner over a long period.

When one tribe achieves a conclusive victory, the other tribe usually disappears. They are killed, enslaved, expelled, females raped, and their genetic material fades into the background noise. The culture of the aggressor becomes the dominant culture in conquered areas. Their language and their religion replace those of the losing tribe.

In modern times tribes have coalesced into nations. Sometimes – rarely these days – a nation is comprised of primarily one tribe or a group of closely related tribes. Such a nation is Japan. Other nations are dominated by one tribe, but have significant national minorities, like China or Russia. Usually the more stable nations are the ones that are homogeneous or the ones whose dominant tribes are solidly in control, which in part explains why China and Russia sometimes behave in ways that are considered oppressive to their minorities.

An example of what can happen when there are large national minorities is Lebanon. Lebanon was an experiment in modern politics in which political structures were built to balance the power of the multiple Christian, Muslim, and Druze factions (i.e., tribes). Great care was taken to ensure that no tribe would be dominant. This, it turns out, is precisely the formula for instability – which was exploited by outside forces like the PLO, Syria, and Iran. Today the nation has been reduced to failed third-world state status, without a functional currency or electric power grid. Worse, it has been made into one massive remote-controlled missile launcher for Iran, and will be forced to absorb even more blows if (when) war breaks out between Israel and Iran.

Muslim minorities in non-Muslim states are particularly destabilizing. This is because Islamic ideology contains several concepts that lead to conflicts between Muslim and non-Muslim neighbors. Islamic doctrine holds that women and non-Muslims have fewer rights than male Muslims, something that creates friction in modern liberal cultures. And they believe that it is unacceptable for Muslims to live under a non-Islamic regime, which results in noncompliance with laws and rebelliousness. We can see these phenomena in Europe today.

Israel is in a particularly difficult position, with an extremely large national minority of Muslim Arabs (about one in every five Israeli citizens). In addition to the religious factor they have developed a sense of grievance and a narrative of dispossession and loss of honor. This is a formula for trouble, and indeed it has broken out into open insurrection several times; most notably in the two intifadas, and in the “disturbances” (anti-Jewish pogroms) in cities with mixed Jewish and Arab populations this May during the recent war with Hamas in Gaza.

Recently Arab alienation has taken the form of contempt for the laws of the state, with crime rampant in Arab areas – and spreading outside of them. In particular, Israel’s strict laws regulating the possession of firearms are massively flouted, with Arabs obtaining weapons stolen from the army, smuggled across the border from Lebanon, or even manufactured at home. Some illegal weapons also find their way into the hands of terrorists.

Israelis are worried. Even leaving aside the conflict with the Arabs of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza who have been educated by their remarkably evil leaders over the past several generations to incandescently hate Jews, what can be done to preserve the Jewish state with its increasingly restive Arab Muslim minority?

Back in 2006, a group of Arab intellectuals, citizens of the state of Israel, told us what they thought in a document called “The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel.” The writers were academics, politicians, and social activists, people from the intellectual elite of Arab Israeli society, chosen to represent “different political beliefs and thought schools.” It was a serious project, sponsored by the National Committee for the Heads of the Local Arab Councils in Israel. The final product represented their consensus of opinion.

The document affirms the narrative of Israel as a European colonial project, involving the “Judaization” of the land and the “destruction of Palestinian history.” It asserts that Israel is an “ethnocracy” and not a democracy. The writers demanded that the state “acknowledge responsibility for the Palestinian Nakba” of 1948, and recognize its Arab citizens as an “indigenous national minority” and an essential part of the greater “Palestinian people.” They demanded that the State of Israel redefine itself from a Jewish state into a binational one, with equal political representation for Jews and Arabs, including granting Arabs a veto power over state policies. They demanded “corrective justice … in order to compensate for the damage inflicted on the Palestinian Arabs due to the ethnic favoritism policies of the Jews.” And naturally they called for “Guaranteeing the rights of the Palestinian Arabs in issues obliterated in the past such as the present absentees and their right of return.”

Even much of the Israeli Left was shocked. Such a binational state would in short order make Lebanon look like a success story. Despite the language of human rights that suffuses the document, it represents a demand for the Jews to reverse the outcome of the 1948 War of Independence, and submit to what would quickly become Arab domination. And that in turn – as is normal among primates – would end in murder, slavery, expulsion, and rape, and the final end of the Jewish people in the Middle East and perhaps in the world.

The centrist Zionist position is that it is possible to buy the Arabs off by making it possible for them to have the “good things in life,” like nice cars and fast internet service. After all, they already have the highest standard of living of any other Arab population in the Middle East. In some respects they live better than many Jewish Israelis (compare the large mansions in Arab towns to the cramped apartments of the Jews). But there are some things that we are not prepared to give them: land – they want it all – and their honor, which they believe we took from them in the Nakba. Their honor demands that we become subservient to those whom former MK Haneen Zouabi called “the owners of the homeland,” the Palestinian Arabs. Unfortunately, these are the things they really want, not cars and internet service.

There is no middle ground, just as there is no mutually acceptable “two-state solution” for the Arabs of Judea and Samaria, and no prospect of peace with Hamas. This is a struggle between tribes. And although we are a majority in our state, our tribe is a tiny minority in the region and the world, so it is also a struggle for our continued existence.

This is a kind of struggle that liberal societies are not good at. We want to compromise, to find win-win solutions. There aren’t any here. One side has to win and the other lose. And if we lose, we disappear; so we’d better win.

Two Principles (Vic Rosenthal)

Weekly column by Vic Rosenthal

All of my writing is informed by two principles. The first, both logically and rhetorically, is that there is no moral principle more important than the value of preserving the Jewish people. This is axiomatic for me: if we don’t agree on this, then there is no point to continue the discussion.
This means that preserving the Jewish people is more important to me than anything else, including democracy or even considerations of human rights. Not that I think that there is a conflict between the continued existence of this people and the legitimate rights of others; I do not. But if, in any particular case, I have to choose between Jewish survival and the good of others, I will choose Jewish survival.

Some say that this disqualifies me as an “objective” observer of events. Actually, it makes me like everyone else. We all have loyalties that override universal obligations to humanity. Who would sacrifice their immediate family in order to protect the rights of others?

The second principle is the necessity of a Jewish state. If the Jewish state were to disappear, so – in short order – would the Jewish people. Unlike the first principle, this is an empirical one. The early Zionists who called for a Jewish state did so to a great degree because the history of the treatment of the Jews in the Christian and Muslim worlds impelled them to the conclusion that a sovereign state was necessary to ensure the continuance of their people despite persecution and assimilation. Subsequent events – the Holocaust among them – provided evidence that they were correct.

So what are the consequences of these principles?

Here is an example: Hezbollah has 130,000 rockets aimed at Israel. If they were to be launched, they would kill thousands in Israel and imperil the continued existence of the state. Therefore I believe that a preemptive attack on the launchers, even if it would kill numerous innocent Lebanese civilians, is morally justified (whether such an action is a good idea from a military or political standpoint is another issue, which I am not discussing at this point).

Another example: the geographic characteristics of the State of Israel require that she maintain control of the high ground of Judea and Samaria and the western ridge of the Jordan Valley in order to have defensible borders. Therefore, regardless of political considerations, these areas cannot be transferred to Arab sovereignty. If you believe that Israel’s holding on to these territories poses a demographic threat to her Jewish majority, then you must find the solution in reducing their Arab population rather than in Israeli withdrawal.

I do not believe that the Arabs who call themselves “Palestinians” have a valid legal claim on the area called Eretz Yisrael. But even if I did, I would be opposed to them realizing it, because it is in direct opposition to the continued existence of the Jewish state. In other words, I am not impartial on this question. I do not give equal weight to Jewish and Arab aspirations in our little land.

That’s enough for many people to declare me a “racist” whose opinions are worthless. But there is no human being who does not privilege some group over others, even if it’s just their immediate family. The ideal of valuing all human beings equally always breaks down at some point. This is unsurprising. We are not abstract entities, we are animals, and like all living creatures we function according to evolutionary rules established by forces far more powerful than our reason (incidentally, this isn’t an anti-religious statement: halacha was developed with this in mind). Family feeling, tribalism, and peoplehood are not things that can be erased.

Here is the reality: it is not Jewish paranoia to think that much of the world opposes Jewish self-determination, and sometimes the existence of Jews themselves. It is not paranoid to notice that Jews living in the diaspora are facing more antisemitism and anti-Jewish discrimination and even violence from day to day. And neither is it paranoid to think that the Palestinian Arabs would kill, enslave, or expel all the Jews from the land if they had the ability to do so. Indeed, they’ll gladly tell you so.

I am not going to argue for the value of the existence of the Jewish people. And we don’t need to convince anybody. What matters, as Ben Gurion said, is not what the nations think, but what the Jews do.

Ein Breira - There is no choice on Iran's nukes (Vic Rosenthal)

Weekly column by Vic Rosenthal

Recently I have been hearing that Israel can’t stop Iran’s nuclear program, and America is our only hope. For example, here is Daniel Gordis:

[Former PM Ehud] Barak wrote that Israel no longer has a viable military option for preventing Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold, and that the Mullahs are marching steadily forward on their quest. Israel needs the US to develop military plans to stop Iran (Barak said that not only does the US have no such plans, it also has no interest in developing them); furthermore, he said, Israel is going to have to recognize its increased dependence on the US, and to work hard to deepen its ties to America.

But Barak does not draw the appropriate conclusion from the facts that he presents, and neither does Gordis, who thinks that Israel must “mend fences with American Jews” to help influence the US “to do the right thing” and act against Iran. Barak’s argument (Hebrew link) actually implies that we cannot depend on America.

Barak wrote that Iran’s “breakout time” – the time it will take to produce enough enriched uranium for a bomb once Iran has decided to do so – has been reduced to about 30 days. Of course there are other technological hurdles to pass before that uranium can be made into a deliverable weapon, but still, Israel’s moment of decision is closer than ever.

There is a lot of discussion of whose fault this is, with Barak and others placing the blame on Netanyahu and Trump. I don’t want to expend too many words on this, but I disagree. Trump is accused of precipitously ending the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran (with Netanyahu’s encouragement), which allowed the Iranians to increase their uranium enrichment activities significantly. But Iran was already violating the too-weak deal, and Trump’s policy of “maximum pressure” – both economic and covert, as in the assassination of Qassem Soleimani – was causing the regime great distress. The policy’s failure was assured by its early termination: Trump was not reelected, and Biden chose to scrap it. But it doesn’t matter who’s to blame; the question is what to do about it.

Barak suggests that the Iranian regime intends to develop all of the pieces of a nuclear weapon, starting with the necessary fissionable material, without immediately assembling one. Technically Iran will not be a nuclear state, but it will be able to become one in a very short time, perhaps measured in days or even hours. By remaining a “threshold state” and not assembling or testing a weapon, the regime can protect itself diplomatically, while for all practical purposes having a nuclear capability. And Barak correctly notes that the US Administration does not see this situation as sufficiently threatening to American interests to require a military response.

And here I need to say a few words about America. I’ve said a lot of this before, so I’ll summarize.

First, support for Israel among US elites is waning, due to the success of the campaign of cognitive warfare that has targeted the American educational system since the 1970s, when massive amounts of petrodollars were recycled into contributions to universities and think tanks, departments of Mideast Studies were established, and professorial chairs endowed. Money also flowed from organizations linked to billionaire George Soros and left-leaning foundations like the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, into anti-Israel groups targeting sectors of the population, like Jews and Evangelicals, that had traditionally provided the backbone of support for Israel. More recently, the broad Left, which includes numerous student groups, “racial justice” movements, and left-leaning members of Congress, have universally adopted anti-Israel positions regardless of their relevance to their causes.

Second, the officials responsible for Iran policy, prominently represented by special envoy to the nuclear negotiations Robert Malley, are associated with a policy of appeasement of Iran rather than coercion (either economically or by force). Malley also has a history of taking anti-Israel positions in the Palestinian arena.

Third, especially after the debacle in Afghanistan, the US is wary of becoming involved in any military activity in the Middle East, either unilateral or cooperative. The best that Israel can hope for is that if she decides to take action against Iran, the US will not intervene in some way against Israel, such as by leaking information that might compromise an Israeli attack on nuclear sites.

Fourth, the US has its own problems which are rapidly getting worse. Led by an incompetent president who is incapable of being a unifying personality, the nation is wracked by social conflict (which I believe is to a great extent instigated by cognitive warfare being waged against it by external enemies). The collective mind space of the elites is occupied by mass-psychotic aberrations about gender and race. The media are no longer trusted or trustworthy; people get their news in social-media bubbles where they are easily manipulated. The bubbles, where the more radical an opinion is, the more it is valued, create extremists and amplify outlandish ideas. But reality is out there, and while Gen. Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, worries about “white rage,” China prepares to take Taiwan. And it won’t stop there.

I think it is a foregone conclusion that the US will not take military action against Iran, especially if Iran remains a threshold state. Further, it is clear that the Biden administration will not even follow the path of Trump and impose strong sanctions; it is moving in the direction of appeasement. And the Iranian regime is so close to their nuclear goal that they can taste it.

The diplomatic track followed by the US is counterproductive from Israel’s point of view. No deal that the regime will agree to make with the US will prevent Iran from becoming a threshold state. A deal will simply give it time to continue development while protecting the nuclear program from Israel, who would be cast as a rogue state if she acts. This, I think, is why Netanyahu forbade his government to discuss parameters for a deal with the Americans: no possible deal is a “good deal” for Israel.

Therefore there is no reason for Israel to “recognize its increased dependence on the US, and to work hard to deepen its ties to America” as Barak and Gordis suggest. The opposite is true: Israel must realize that she is almost alone in her struggle with Iran, and she must develop a plan to eliminate the threat by herself, with whatever help she can get from her Arab allies in the Gulf. And it’s painful to say this, but Israel must also be wary of a US effort to sabotage her plans.

Barak describes the difficulties and dangers inherent in an Israeli attack on Iran. They are indeed formidable. But there is no solution to be found in America. The alternative to stopping Iran is to give up the future of the Jewish state, or, in other words, there is no alternative. In Hebrew, ein breira.

David Ben Gurion is not my favorite personality in Israel’s history. If I hadn’t been 5-1/2 years old at the time, I would have preferred to be on the deck of the Altalena than on the shore shooting at her. But unlike Barak, Ben Gurion understood that when there is no alternative, you do what you have to do. He knew that the moment he declared the state, it would be at war. He knew that the new state would be weak and outnumbered. But his approach was to declare the state and find a way to win the ensuing war.

We have some number of months before Iran effectively becomes a nuclear state. Dealing with Iran is a technical problem, and technical problems are soluble. We have no choice but to solve this one. Ein breira.

American Liberal Judaism Saws off the Memetic Branch it’s Sitting On (Vic Rosenthal)

Weekly column by Vic Rosenthal

Islam is on track to become the world’s most widespread religious faith and will probably surpass Christianity in number of believers by 2070.

There are many reasons for this. One way to explain the growth or decline of a religious population is to look at the religion as a set of memes, mental entities that spread from one mind to another. These memes reproduce and change like life-forms, struggling with the forces of natural selection in their environment, the 7.9 billion human minds on planet Earth.

For example, here is a somewhat unfriendly answer to the question “why is Islam growing so rapidly?” in memetic terms. The pseudonymous author cites Islam’s built-in features that protect the memes that are part of Islam from changes that might weaken them, and facilitate its spread. Some of these features are common to other religions, but some seem to be unique to Islam. For example,

Islam commands its followers to create a government that supports it. … Other groups of religious people have had political aspirations, but no other major religious group orders its followers — as a religious duty — to create a government that follows its own system of law.

There is also the duty to take part in jihad, the doctrine that lands that have become Islamic must always remain so, the very concrete description of the joys of paradise that await good Muslims (and especially martyrs), and the numerous practical advantages that accrue to Muslims in Islamic lands. And of course, Islam is a veritable Hotel California: it is remarkably easy to join, but the penalty for leaving is death.

Other religions, like Christianity, engage in proselytizing and (at least in the past) facilitated their spread by conquest. Christianity too, in the relatively recent past, enforced disadvantageous conditions on non-Christian residents of Christian countries, including special taxation, limitations on occupations, even persecution and expulsion. Both Islam and Christianity have protected themselves with blasphemy laws and prosecutions, although generally speaking Christianity has been moving in a more moderate direction at the same time that radical Islamic practice has become more common.

Judaism, since the destruction of the Temple and until the reestablishment of the State of Israel, has been a diasporic religion. Its memes became adapted to an environment in which Jews were a minority, and temporal authority was always in the hands of non-Jews who displayed varying degrees of hostility. Since Biblical times, Judaism has not expanded by conquest; and until recently proselytizing has been minimal and conversion to Judaism difficult. Lacking temporal power, Judaism was unable to provide material advantages to converts, even if it had wanted to.

If the memes of Islam and Christianity were adapted to expansionism, Judaism was tuned to self-preservation. It needed to be, because the Christian and Muslim worlds where most Jews found themselves could be cruel and dangerous. Diaspora Judaism did undergo changes and evolved in different directions, but although customs and degrees of observance varied widely, the top priority remained survival, which meant maintaining separation from the non-Jewish majority. Jews are sometimes criticized for being “clannish,” tending to prefer the company of their own, favoring other Jews as employees, choosing Jewish lawyers and doctors, and so on. This is self-protective behavior.

When Reform Judaism appeared in the early 19^th century, its de-emphasis of ritual observance (particularly Shabbat and kashrut) and its denial of the divine origin of the Torah was a radical departure from tradition, and indeed it weakened the self-protective nature of Judaism. Nevertheless it was still conservative (small “c”) in its understanding that the Jewish people were set apart from others – even if it was now possible for Jews to have lunch with Germans, they did not want their daughters to marry them.

This began to change with the migration of large numbers of Jews to the United States. After the beginning of the “Golden Age of American Jewry” around the end of WWII, Jews in the US felt less insecure. Little by little, barriers against Jews in housing, education, and employment disappeared. Jews began to take a disproportional part in American culture. Intermarriage increased, although until recently, even the Reform movement officially discouraged mixed marriages. Today it doesn’t take an official position on the question, although it encourages mixed couples to join its congregations and raise their children as Jews. Some Reform rabbis perform mixed marriages and some do not. As far as I know, the movement still requires rabbis to be married to Jews, although this might change.

But another mutation in the memeplex that is Judaism, which has occurred in the American Reform community very recently, has ripped out its “gene” for self-preservation, possibly disastrously for American Jews. To see what has happened, we need to consider the history of the movement.

Until the mid-1960s, early 1970s, American Reform Judaism was dominated by “classical Reform,” which aggressively tried to downplay the spiritual elements of Judaism, which it considered primitive. But American Jews who had been strongly affected by the radical cultural changes of the period found the experience of Reform worship empty and boring, and began to desert Reform Judaism for other streams of Judaism, Eastern religions, or secularism. Some even joined the “Jesus Freaks.” While their parents and grandparents believed it was important to maintain a connection to the Judaism of the past, even if it was attenuated, the boomers and their children didn’t see the point.

Reform Judaism responded in several ways. It tried to reintroduce traditional practices and customs, such as Hebrew prayers and Torah study, although its congregations lacked the Jewish background required or the attention span needed to obtain it. It became more welcoming to intermarried families. And it began to redefine Jewish observance, which previously meant performing the commandments defined in traditional halacha (Jewish law), as liberal social action. This strategy reached its peak with the appointment of politically progressive Rabbi Richard (Rick) Jacobs as URJ President in 2012.

But history moves on and the golden age of American Jewry is coming to an end. The traditionally antisemitic extreme Right hasn’t gone away, but more importantly the newly ascendant progressive Left, imbued with postmodern/postcolonial ideas, and “critical theory” of various kinds, has turned against liberalism, free speech, equality of opportunity, and Israel. And no surprise: they don’t like Jews much, either.

The new Reform Judaism, led by the so-progressive Rabbi Jacobs, has been caught out. Social action no longer means liberalism, which implies tolerance to all religious and ethnic groups, but the support of movements that are explicitly racist, anti-American, and antisemitic. This style of Judaism, which has been adopted by some 90% of affiliated American Jews, no longer functions to protect Jews as a minority within a more and more hostile culture.

Today it seems that American Orthodox Jews are bearing the brunt of antisemitism, because of their greater visibility. But if the “Cultural Revolution” continues in the direction that it has begun to go, then there is no doubt that life for liberal Jews will become far more difficult. Orthodox Jews, who have maintained their traditional self-protective culture, are better prepared to weather the storm. I strongly doubt that Judaism will ever morph into an expansionist religion like Islam or Christianity. But it looks as though the liberal Jews of America may have sawn off the branch they were sitting on.

Our Existential Choice (Vic Rosenthal)

Weekly column by Vic Rosenthal

In my previous post I asked why Israel only “plays defense” in recent times. Why do we only bat the rockets away with Iron Dome, instead of ending our enemies’ ability to launch them? Why do we bomb empty Hamas installations in Gaza in response to incendiary balloons and machine-gun fire that are intended to burn and kill? Why did we allow Hezbollah to rearm? Why do we allow Hamas to mount its human wave attacks against the Gaza border? Why do we always let our enemies strike first? When they score a goal, why do we give them back the ball and tell them to try again?

I argued that this was not the case in the pre-state period or during the War of Independence, when our military and diplomatic policy was aggressive and creative, despite our relative military and economic weakness. I suggested that this was because in the past, the nation had a single overriding objective – the establishment of a sovereign state, and there was general agreement that there was no option other than success.

Now the nation has no national objective, such as the one the Palestinian Arabs strive for (our disappearance), or the imperial ambitions of the Iranian, Russian, and Turkish regimes. Israel today wishes only for a quiet time in which its people can cultivate their own gardens. Just let us alone, please, we say.

Unfortunately, that isn’t the way the historical development of nations works. Struggle is necessary for national survival. Complacency is the precursor of death. If you snooze, you lose.

The bloody fighting of WWII paradoxically revitalized American society after the Depression, and the struggle against Soviet communism focused its energies in the 1945-1990 period. It could have become the champion of the Western world against the armies of Islam that almost immediately threw down the gauntlet after the passing of the Soviet Union; but it chose not to do so. Perhaps because it saw itself as a secular nation, it was unable to grasp the meaning of the first WTC attack, the one against the USS Cole, the Khobar Towers bombing, and of course 9/11. It chose to shut its eyes to the challenge, and hasn’t reopened them yet.

I think Americans have a hard time seeing that they are involved (whether they want to be or not) in a long-term historical struggle with the Islamic world in part because their society functions primarily in the short term. Their politics are short-term, with a rapid changing of the guard every eight years or less. Their idea of history is short-term as well; they see the birth of their nation as the beginning of a brand new, even messianic age, and nothing that came before has the power to impinge upon it. Their enemies, though, take a very long view: 9/11 was the 318^th anniversary of the Muslim defeat at the Battle of Vienna. They remember.

America’s complacency is enabled by the knowledge that it is massively powerful, protected from invasion by broad oceans, and at least in the past, had an industrial engine that could be turned to military purposes quickly to greatly outproduce its enemies.

On the other hand, Israel is tiny, has limited manpower and little strategic depth, is surrounded by enemies, and is dependent on the US for resupply. Complacency is not an option. But a large and powerful minority in Israeli society has turned to fantasy. This group, which includes the intellectual elite of our country, also shut their eyes: they shut them to the narratives and objectives of our enemies. They believe that our enemies think as we do that the greatest good comes from peaceful economic and social progress. Nothing could be more wrong; and yet, nothing that our enemies say or do can disabuse them of the notion that if only the right formula (always involving our giving up land, control, money, honor, etc.) can be found, then the conflict will be over, and we can all cultivate our gardens.

Most Israelis don’t belong to the deluded minority. But that minority holds a veto power over our politics, as well as a lock on our media, legal system, and culture. And so while they don’t have the ability to precipitate national suicide – though they almost succeeded with the Oslo Accords – the state is paralyzed and can’t act effectively against its enemies.

Because the minority believes that appeasement is the path to peace, they try to ensure that we don’t create permanent hard feelings on the part of our enemies. But the rest of the nation demands action against terrorism or rocket attacks. So as a compromise, we have adopted the strategy of “painless retaliation,” in which something is bombed, while great care is taken that nobody is hurt.

The rest of the nation understands that we are involved in a zero-sum situation. Either we will push our enemies out or they will push us out. Most of us understand the erosion of Jewish sovereignty in Judea/Samaria as well as in the Negev, the Galilee, and Jerusalem, as a sign that we are losing. But the fantasizing minority thinks that the Jewish presence in Judea/Samaria and especially eastern Jerusalem is “an obstacle to peace.” So as a compromise, we allow Jews to live there, but limit the construction of housing for them.

Human societies live or die by struggle. Struggle creates vitality, while lack of struggle breeds weakness. Sooner or later a culture that has stopped fighting is conquered by one that hasn’t. Our defeatist minority wants to stop; indeed, its spokesperson could be former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who said in a 2005 speech to the Israel Policy Forum that “[w]e are tired of fighting, we are tired of being courageous, we are tired of winning, we are tired of defeating our enemies…” He actually said that.

Unlike Iran, Russia, and Turkey, we don’t desire to create a caliphate or an empire. But we are facing an existential choice: we can fight for what is ours, Eretz Yisrael, and at the same time strengthen and revitalize our society. Or, on the other hand, we can give up, like tired Ehud Olmert.

The Post-American Age and Israel (Vic Rosenthal)

Weekly column by Vic Rosenthal

The American debacle in Afghanistan is bad for America, and bad for Europe. The jihadists of the Middle East have received a huge gift of military equipment. They may even receive “humanitarian aid” from the US, in return for releasing some of the Americans still in Afghanistan. The Americans may call it aid, but everyone knows it is ransom for the release of hostages.

Psychologically, this is a massive boost to Islamic militants everywhere. Their belief that Allah is on their side has been confirmed. While I am probably too old to see them marching into the Vatican, unless present trends are reversed, my children probably will. Maybe they will find our Menorah, the one that Titus looted from the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE.

America’s defeat is also bad for Israel, and not just because of the American-made arms that the Taliban is selling to Iran and to every swaggering group of savages who believe they have a divine mandate to loot and rape. Even before the disaster in Afghanistan, the forces of jihad here have been feeling the wind of history at their backs, and have become drunk with their power to make demands and have them met by a government which is always willing to choose, as Churchill said, dishonor over war – and which, like Britain under Chamberlain, got war anyway.

So when six murderous terrorists from the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and Fatah organizations escaped from an Israeli prison on Monday, their parent organizations threatened violence. Hamas, apparently feeling left out, also made threats of escalation and launched incendiary balloons across the border. The tension has been growing for the past few weeks, as Hamas makes demands for loosening of restrictions on the entry of building materials and financial aid from Qatar, and Israel tries vainly to satisfy them with concessions.

Recently, Israel agreed to “loan” the Palestinian Authority about $150 million, in order to “strengthen the PA against Hamas.” This is a strange “loan:” the source of the money is about $186 million of funds that were collected by Israel on behalf of the Palestinian Authority, for Palestinian taxes on imports that pass through Israeli ports. Israel, however, withheld the money from the PA because of an Israeli law that forbids transferring money as long as it is used to pay stipends to imprisoned terrorists or the families of “martyrs.” The Palestinians have refused to stop paying their heroes, so the transfer is called a “loan” in order to bypass the law. Wrap your head around that.

I know, it’s complicated. There is the PIJ, there is Hamas, and there is the Fatah-dominated PLO which in effect constitutes the PA. But here’s a rule to make it simpler: they are all waging jihad (even Fatah, which is officially secular), they are all deploying terrorists against us, and they are all dedicated to the idea that if they kill enough Jews the rest of us will pick up and go back to Poland, or wherever they believe we come from.

The new government is not quite as dysfunctional as the preceding one, but because of the inclusion of left-wing parties and even an Arab Islamist party – that’s right, a party whose ideology is that Israel should be ruled according to the principles of Islamic sharia is part of Israel’s governing coalition – it seems to be unable to deal with the escalating chutzpah of its Palestinian enemies.

The Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett, is someone with a solid right-wing ideology, at least he has always expressed himself as such, but I believe that he is not able to call the shots in a government whose majority is center-left and left. Incidentally, and I know I will get a lot of objections to this, I think he is a courageous person who has sacrificed his political career – I doubt that his party will even get into the Knesset in the next election – to extricate the country from an endless series of elections and caretaker governments. The present situation is not good, but it was worse before. For this, I am grateful to him.

But now is not the time for concessions. America is leaving the Middle East, starting with Obama’s tacit decision to allow Iran to get nuclear weapons (as long as the breakout happens after his presidency), continuing through his inaction when Bashar al-Assad crossed his “red line” by using chemical weapons, and now being concluded by the empty suit in the White House. It should be clear to every American ally in the region, especially Israel, that it is impossible to count on support from America. Of course Israel doesn’t need American troops to fight for it, or even military advisors. But political developments in America make it uncertain if it will continue to support Israel diplomatically, with military aid, or even by selling her weapons for cash.

I don’t want to be even more negative than I have to be, but there is a fundamental cultural instability in America that seems to be becoming more intense with time. I suspect that Americans will soon be concerned more with their own personal security, even their physical safety, than anything else. Maybe it looks worse from here than it is, but I visualize it as an engine revved far beyond its redline, and holding there. At any moment it will fly apart.

We are living at a major historical inflection point, with America withdrawing her influence everywhere. Unfortunately the beneficiaries of this are Iran and the Islamists of all stripes, as well as the totalitarian Chinese Communist party, nuclear-armed Pakistan and North Korea, and others.

The end of the Roman Empire was followed by the Dark Ages, which aren’t called that for nothing. It's going to be hard for everyone.