Caroline Glick: Bennett's diplomatic tsunami
Naftali Bennett's government's diplomatic policies came into full view in recent weeks and were put to the test at the UN climate conference in Glasgow this week. The results are unmistakable.
Under Bennett's government, Israel's foreign policy is predicated on making far-reaching concessions – first and foremost to the Palestinians, and second to the international Left. Four such concessions stand out.
The first concession is Zionism. Last week, Defense Minister Benny Gantz abandoned the central tenet of Zionism – redemption of the land of Israel through land purchases for Jewish settlement. After it liberated Judea and Samaria from Jordanian occupation in 1967, the Eshkol government chose to administer these areas through the military while maintaining Jordanian law as the governing law of the areas. The military government issued orders that updated the laws from time to time to align the legal regime in the areas with basic principles of civil rights.
Jordanian law contains several racist provisions. One of the most prominent racial laws is Jordan's land law, which bars non-Muslims from purchasing land. In 1971, Israel's military government amended the law to permit non-Muslim owned companies – but not private non-Muslim citizens – to purchase privately owned land in Judea and Samaria. The amendment required these companies to register the deals with the Civil Administration.
After the Palestinian Authority murdered a number of Palestinian land owners following the registration of their land sales at the Civil Administration, the Defense Ministry and IDF legal advisers recommended amending the law again to permit private citizens who are not Muslims to buy land from private owners.
Gantz refused to enact the recommendation. His refusal caused two Israeli NGOs to petition the Supreme Court to require Gantz to enact the recommendations, which are geared toward ensuring the property rights and the lives of Palestinians Muslims and Israeli Jews.
Gantz told the justices that he chose to bar Jews from purchasing land from Palestinians to avoid angering the Palestinian Authority, which is engaging in the wholesale murder of Palestinian land sellers. He also doesn't want to tick off the international community which, in an expression of unbridled antisemitism, rejects Jewish property rights in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem.
The Caroline Glick Show: Ep25 : From Glasgow to the War to Destroy the West | Guest: David Wurmser
In the latest episode, Caroline was joined again by David Wursmer. They discussed Tuesday’s off-year elections and what they tell us about the future of the Biden presidency. They then moved to the UN Climate Summit in Glasgow and what it tells us about America’s shrinking posture on the world stage.
Caroline and David then moved to Israel and its government’s wholesale abandonment of core principles of Zionism. The discussed the central role Israel plays in the left’s war on Western civilization and what Israel must do to save itself – and the free world as a whole.
Einat Wilf: Let’s lay the myth to rest: Rabin wouldn’t have brought peace.
There is a reigning myth that when Yigal Amir assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on November 4, 1995, he also assassinated peace. It is, like many myths, at once comforting and entirely wrong.PreOccupiedTerritory: We Must Blame Religious Zionists For Rabin’s Assassination To Prevent Division And Hate By Ofir Tzfonbon (satire)
This myth is comforting because it reinforces the kind of foundational story that Western civilization is based on, from Christ to the modern superhero. In these stories, a savior figure or leader shapes history through sheer force of will and against all odds. Transplanted to the Middle East, this foundational myth sets the stage by casting peace between Israelis and Palestinians as requiring an end-of-times salvation. And Yitzhak Rabin is the savior who could have brought about salvation and peace on earth had he not been martyred.
But this myth also reinforces another foundational Western trope, in which Jews are always cast as having an outsized role in shaping human affairs. This is why Jewish agency is always elevated over Palestinian agency in the context of the Middle East. Had Rabin been alive there would have been peace, the myth goes, and since Rabin was assassinated by a Jew, there is no peace. Thanks to the addition of the Jewish trope, the actions, goals and world view of Palestinians have no bearing on the possibility or impossibility of the attainment of peace. Rabin's contribution was recognizing us as partners. Don't erase his. by the Forward
Rabin’s contribution was recognizing us as partners. Don’t erase it.
But the reason to be suspicious of the myth of the Rabin assassination killing peace is not just because of how neatly it fits into the wishful thinking of Western storytelling. The myth has persisted for another reason, too: because it rests on the belief that we cannot know what would have happened had he lived.
But we actually do: When he died, Rabin was already on his way to being trounced in direct elections by the up and coming Benjamin Netanyahu. Rabin was going to lose because there was a cavernous gulf between the handshakes on manicured lawns following elevated speeches about peace on the one hand, and the bloody massacres carried out by Palestinian suicide bombers against Israeli civilians on the other. And this gulf did not endear Israelis to the cause of peace. In the highly unlikely case that Rabin would have won the elections, the Israeli public would have pressured him to put the breaks on the so-called peace process, and there is evidence that he was already planning to do so.
Moreover, the shock of the assassination actually swung Israelis to the left, nearly preventing what was a secure Netanyahu victory. Israelis swung so much to the left that a few short years later, Ehud Barak was elected on a platform for peace more far reaching than anything imagined by Rabin. Ehud Barak said yes to the Clinton Parameters that would have created an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, with its capital in east Jerusalem, including the Old City. It was Arafat who walked away from this opportunity with no criticism from his people.
Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination that Saturday twenty-six years ago drove home a point that I and my like-minded colleagues had been arguing – and continue to assert: extremism will be the death of the Zionist enterprise, which is why we must adopt the extreme tactic of assuming the worst about anyone whose background, at a cursory glance, resembles that of Yigal Amir. We must ostracize, shame, and shun them from civic life, and make them regret being born into, or joining, the religious Zionist community, the overwhelming majority of which would never in their worst nightmares consider such a heinous act to prevent undesirable political developments, or to further favored policies, but that’s not important: we see the same thing in them because they dress the same way. So out of civic life they must go. In the name of tolerance and reconciliation, to prevent extremism.
Too many of us have let this important lesson fade as the years pass. But with the passage of the decades the responsibility to ensure a tolerant, open society devoid of fascist crocheted-yarmulke-wearers grows, not lessens. Those of us who lived through the trauma bear responsibility to convey this existential principle to the younger generation, who will never know the religious Zionists cannot be trusted, let alone allowed to engage in leadership roles or public life, unless we inform them in the starkest, uncompromising terms. They will never know what can happen unless we impress upon them the dangers inherent in such people participating in our democracy, which, I need not remind you, is perpetually at death’s door unless we ACT NOW to save it, much like the planet, which we have destroyed how many times now? The younger generation will never realize how dangerous those religious Zionists are even if they examine religious Zionist behavior and policy goals, which we must depict as monolithic and destructive if we take this threat with the seriousness it deserves.
Otherwise we will become intolerant, which is what they are.