Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, December 10, 2009

The joys of being spontaneous

Actually, I am not a very spontaneous person, but it struck me today that right now is the best time for me to visit Israel, and that if I don't go now I won't have an opportunity to go for a couple of years.

So, I'm leaving on Sunday, for ten days!

To Arabs, the Green Line is a green light - into Israel

An interesting catch by MEMRI:

The Syrian daily Teshreen attacked the EU's decision on Jerusalem, stating that the city is the eternal capital of Palestine and that it must not be divided, and that its division constitutes a step towards harming the right of return and other rights.

I guess the Green Line is only sacred in one direction...

"Civilians" a hit in French

The French Philosemitism blog has taken my video and my team's research and put together a nice illustrated article on "civilians" in Gaza, a post that has been reproduced on other French sites and which is causing a bit of a bump in my pageviews.

The lesson is that people are more interested in videos than in text, and if I want to cause a splash I need to find the time to make more videos. (Roger Simon recently pointed to another one of mine, about how crowded Gaza is, and then Michael J. Totten picked up on it.)

All I want for Chanukah is six extra hours every day....

Goldstone report inaccuracies part 24

Martin Kramer noticed a bizarre statistic in the Goldstone Report:

I've been reading through the part of the Goldstone Report treating the economic impact of Operation Cast Lead—a part that hasn't gotten much attention. It's largely a crib of a March 2009 report compiled by the Palestinian Federation of Industries, whose deputy general-secretary, Amr Hamad, was interviewed three separate times by the mission. The mission deemed both the report and Hamad's testimony to be "reliable and credible."

The most important sentence in this section of the Goldstone Report is this one: "Mr. Amr Hamad indicated that 324 factories had been destroyed during the Israeli military operations at a cost of 40,000 jobs" (paragraph 1009). I did a double-take when I read that: 40,000 would be astonishing in an economy like Gaza's. This is what Hamad said in his testimony (June 28, Goldstone in the chair):
The industrial sector that was destroyed, for example, the 324 factories that were destroyed, that we[re] destroyed used to employ four-hundred thous-, uh, 40,000 workers. And these have lost their uh, jobs, uh, forever.
So that's the source of the number. But if you return to the report of the Palestinian Federation of Industries, it puts the job losses at these 324 factories not at 40,000, but at 4,000. That's an order-of-magnitude misrepresentation by Hamad of his own organization's findings. The Goldstone Mission should have wondered at the figure, checked Hamad's testimony against the Palestinian Federation of Industries report, detected the discrepancy, and gotten it right. But it didn't. Perhaps the mission members, hearing the word "factories," thought that 40,000 jobs sounded credible. In fact, more than a quarter (88) of these 324 "factories" employed five people or less, and over half (189) employed from five to twenty people (Federation report, p. 12). The vast majority of these "factories" should really be described as "workshops." Only three employed a hundred or more people.

In fact, that is not the only misrepresentation that Amr Hamad made of his own organization's report. He told Goldstone that 324 factories were "destroyed" but his report says that 324 were "damaged," and 56% of them were "totally damaged." So the number of destroyed "factories"/workshops was closer to 181, not 324.

Again, Goldstone could have easily checked the facts, and decided not to.

Quick link

Charles Ettinson notes a wrongheaded initiative by the Israeli Finance Minister to ban importing Arabic books from enemy Arab states like Syria and Lebanon.

Opposing this bill seems nothing less than discriminatory and unjustified. Here is a large, linguistic and ethnic minority who want books in their own language. Provisions exist to ensure that hate materials don't make it into the country, what's the problem? ...

Books are vehicles for culture, for knowledge and for understanding. Preventing their import because they come from the wrong side of a line, punishes a minority who should be allowed to read in their first language, but also means that the culture (including Jewish-Israeli culture) and exchange that could normally have taken place in a mutually beneficial way, is being held up.

In addition to the reasons he states, it is wrong simply because Israel wouldn't want these same states to ban Israeli items, even though they do.

(I will not use this post, criticizing an Israeli minister, to claim that I am now "even-handed" :-)

Gaza swine flu spreads

Another 15 cases of swine flu have been announced in Gaza, with one more death.

Israel has announced that it will send an additional 30-40,000 vaccines to Gaza.

Despite the panic, Hamas is still hell-bent to have a huge rally to commemorate its anniversary, a move being strongly criticized. (Other organizations have cancelled their own events because of the flu.)

Tony Judt's insanity

Tony Judt again finds a venue for his longstanding view that Israel should be destroyed and replaced with a "bi-national state," this time in the Financial Times. He uses Shlomo Sand's book that attempts to deny the existence of a Jewish nation as a springboard.

Judt has argued the same things before Sand's book, and it is curious why such a stupid idea is still respected enough to be published. His similar 2003 essay in the New York Review of Books gets into more detail about how such a state would work - it would require an international police force to stop Arabs from killing Jews! ("The security of Jews and Arabs alike would need to be guaranteed by international force.") Yeah, a state that requires outside help to police its own citizens is really viable! His idea is apparently to return to the good old days in the 1930s when the British were forced to deal with an Arab intifada and "intrafada" that killed hundreds of Arabs as well as many Jews - and British as well.

Critiques of the 2003 article can be seen here, and the comments section of FT has plenty of other interesting criticisms, pointing out that Judt seems to hate only one particular type of nationalism enough to want to eradicate it even though his arguments would pretty much demolish every nation state if applied equally.

The Sand connection is tenuous. I'm not going to go into the details of Sand's sensationalistic and bizarre book here (a good critique can be seen here, and my main question to him would be whether the phrase " מי כעמך ישראל גוי אחד בארץ " predates the nineteenth century) but Judt doesn't even use Sand effectively to help his argument, saying that somehow if all the Jews of Israel weren't exiled in the first century CE ... Israel shouldn't have been created. There are a lot of unwritten assumptions in that ellipsis.

Briefly, Sand points out that many, or most, Jews did not leave Israel immediately after the Roman conquest. This is well known. After all, the Jerusalem Talmud was written inside the borders of the Land of Israel centuries after the destruction of the Temple. Judt bizarrely seems to be claiming that if the Jews weren't forcibly expelled, then they have no right to want to return. He might want to glance at the lyrics to Hatikvah to gain a more sophisticated, nuanced and accurate view of the point of Jewish nationalism:

Our hope will not be lost,
The hope of two thousand years,
To be a free nation in our land,
The land of Zion and Jerusalem.

The operative word is חופשי, free.

(The reference to Jerusalem must really drive him crazy.)

There's plenty more to criticize with Judt, but one more point to ponder: if Jewish nationalism, an unbroken idea that spans millennia, is a myth, how real is Palestinian Arab nationalism?

Quick link - on the new Right

The Long Island Jewish Star, which serves a modern Orthodox community, wades into the blogosphere's turmoil over Little Green Football's public break with the right-wing. I generally stay away from these issues, but I imagine that many "9/11 Republicans" are equally uncomfortable with some of the rhetoric that is coming out of the American Right nowadays, and the hypocrisy from people who were rightly upset at the Left's demonization of Bush while they happily encourage the exact same kind of disrespect for a sitting American president. Both sides tend to be hijacked by extremists when not in power. (Don't expect me to dwell on this topic.)

British historian decries Foreign Office bias against Israel

Melanie Philips reproduces a remarkable speech given by historian Andrew Roberts, going over the history of British-Zionist relations and showing how the British Foreign Office, even worse than the US State Department, has always tilted towards the Arabs. Here are some highlights:

One area of policy over which the FO has traditionally held great sway is in the question of Royal Visits. It is no therefore coincidence that although HMQ has made over 250 official overseas visits to 129 different countries during her reign, neither she nor one single member of the British royal family has ever been to Israel on an official visit. Even though Prince Philip’s mother, Princess Alice of Greece, who was recognized as "Righteous Among the Nations" for sheltering a Jewish family in her Athens home during the Holocaust, was buried on the Mount of Olives, the Duke of Edinburgh was not allowed by the FO to visit her grave until 1994, and then only on a private visit.
"Official visits are organized and taken on the advice of the Foreign and Commonwealth office," a press officer for the royal family explained when Prince Edward visited Israel recently privately - and a spokesman for the Foreign Office replied that [quote] ‘Israel is not unique" in not having received an official royal visit, because [quote] ‘Many countries have not had an official visit.’ That might be true for Burkino Faso and Chad, but the FO has somehow managed to find the time over the years to send the Queen on State visits to Libya, Iran, Sudan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Jordan & Turkey. So it can’t have been that she wasn’t in the area.

Perhaps Her Majesty hasn’t been on the throne long enough, at 57 years, for the Foreign Office to get round to allowing her to visit one of the only democracies in the Middle East. At least she could be certain of a warm welcome in Israel, unlike in Morocco where she was kept waiting by the King for three hours in 90 degree heat, or at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Uganda the time before last, where they hadn’t even finished building her hotel.

The true reason of course, is that the Foreign Office has a ban on official Royal visits to Israel, which is even more powerful for its being unwritten and unacknowledged. As an act of delegitimization of Israel, this effective boycott is quite as serious as other similar acts, such as the academic boycott, and is the direct fault of the FO Arabists. Which brings us on to Mr Oliver Miles.

One of the reasons I’m proud to be an historian is that there are scholars of the integrity and erudition of Prof Sir Martin Gilbert and Prof Sir Lawrence Freedman who also write history. If people as intelligent, wise and incorruptible as they choose to be historians, then it must be an honourable profession. Let me quote to you, therefore, word-for-word, what a former British Ambassador to Libya and Greece, Mr Oliver Miles, wrote in The Independent newspaper less than a fortnight ago, commenting on the composition of the present Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War:

‘Both Gilbert and Freedman are Jewish, and Gilbert at least has a record of active support for Zionism. Such facts are not usually mentioned in the mainstream British and American media. … All five members have outstanding reputations and records, but it is a pity that, if and when the inquiry is accused of a whitewash, such handy ammunition will be available. Membership should not only be balanced; it should be seen to be balanced.’

Ladies and gentlemen, if that’s the way that FO Arabists are prepared to express themselves in public, can you imagine the way that they refer to such people as Professors Gilbert and Freedman in private? For the balance that Mr Miles is talking about here is clearly a racial balance, that only a certain quota of Jews should have been allowed on to the Inquiry.

Of course there’s a reason why ‘Such facts are not usually mentioned in the mainstream media’, of course, and that is because it is a disgraceful and disgusting concept even to notice the racial background of such distinguished public servants, and one that wouldn’t have even occurred to most people had not Mr Miles made such a point of it.

Because there are 22 ambassadors to Arab countries, and only one to Israel, it is perhaps natural that the FO should tend to be more pro-Arab than pro-Israeli. [There is] an FO assumption that Britain’s relations with Israel ought constantly to be subordinated to her relations with other Middle Eastern states, especially the oil-rich ones, however badly those states behave in terms of human rights abuses, the persecution of Christians, the oppression of women, medieval practices of punishment, and so on.

It seems to me that there is an implicit racism going on here. Jews are expected to behave better, goes the FO thinking, because they are like us. Arabs must not be chastised because they are not. So in warfare, we constantly expect Israel to behave far better than her neighbours, and chastise her quite hypocritically when occasionally under the exigencies of national struggle, she cannot. The problem crosses political parties today, just as it always has. William Hague called for Israel to adopt a proportionate response in its struggle with Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2007, as though proportionate responses ever won any victories against fascists. In the Second World War, the Luftwaffe killed 50,000 Britons in the Blitz, and the Allied response was to kill 600,000 Germans – twelve times the number and hardly a proportionate response, but one that contributed mightily to victory. Who are we therefore to lecture the Israelis on how proportionate their responses should be?

Read the whole thing.

The PA's heroic fight against - nylon?

From Ma'an:

Two tons of plastic nylon bought from Israeli settlements were confiscated by customs officers in coordination with the Palestinian police on Wednesday in Salfit.

Abdul Hamid Mezhar, head of the customs department at the Ministry of Economy, said that products manufactured on illegal Israeli settlements threatened Palestinian traders and the economy.

The customs officers said that the confiscated nylon would be destroyed in front of the media.

If the nylon was manufactured in the territories, chances are pretty good that Palestinian Arabs work there. And items manufactured in the territories would not "threaten Palestinian traders and the economy" any more than goods created to the west of the Green Line.

I cannot find a single Palestinian Arab manufacturer of nylon.

Once again, Palestinian Arab leaders are still thinking in terms of what would hurt Israel rather than in terms of what would help their own people.

I'd love to get a video of the destruction of two tons of nylon, though. Perhaps they will hand out candy on the occasion of actually winning a battle, if the fumes don't overpower them.

Secret US plot to prevent the Mahdi's return

From UPI:

The United States is doing whatever it can to prevent the coming of the Muslim savior, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says.

The Iranian news Web site Tabnak reported that Ahmadinejad, while speaking to survivors of soldiers killed during the 1980's war against Iraq, asserted that U.S. officials believe the Mahdi -- or the Hidden Imam whom Shiite Muslims believe will be ultimate savior of mankind -- is coming and they are working to prevent it from happening, al-Arabiya said Tuesday.

"We have documented proof that they (U.S. leaders) believe that a descendant of the prophet of Islam will raise in these parts (the Middle East) and he will dry the roots of all injustice in the world," the Web site quoted Ahmadinejad as saying. "They have devised all these plans to prevent the coming of the Hidden Imam because they know that the Iranian nation is the one that will prepare the grounds for his coming and will be the supporters of his rule "

See how rational Ahmadinejad is?

Today's PalArab news (12/8/09)

Asharq al-Awsat is reporting that George Mitchell is floating a plan to Mahmoud Abbas where Netanyahu will freeze all construction for five months but won't announce it publicly, and asking Abbas to negotiate under those circumstances. Abbas, for his part, continues to say that any solution must involve total capitulation by Israel to all his demands, and he told Lebanese officials that the Palestinian Arab "guests" there must remain there until the "refugee" problem is fully resolved by Israel.

The official swine flu death toll in Gaza has risen to five in three days, and Gazans are starting to panic. Newspapers reported that star anise, cinnamon and honey help prevent the flu, and now there are shortages in Gaza of star anise. Gazans are also wearing masks in public, avoiding hospitals and keeping their children home from school. Hamas is still trying to minimize the threat, possibly for the reasons I reported yesterday.

The moderate government of Mahmoud Abbas sentenced a man to death by firing squad for "collaborating" with Israel.

Hamas continues to arrest Fatah members in Gaza, with three more abducted today.

Another PalArab newspaper misquotes Ha'aretz as saying that Israel plans to demolish the Al Aqsa mosque on March 16, 2010.