The next Intifada is about to begin
I’ve argued elsewhere that the entire Palestinian predicament is the outcome of three very different Arab-Israeli wars which began in 1947, 1967, and 2000. It’s not an intuitive historical argument to make, as these three wars have so little in common. The first began as an Arab-Jewish civil war fought village by village, which then expanded into a multi-state war across four borders lasting a year and a half. The second was a rapid but conventional military conflict fought in less than a week. And the third was a low-intensity armed conflict characterised by frequent terrorist attacks and counterinsurgency operations by an occupying army which took about five years to peter out.Daniel Greenfield: An Anti-Israel Op-Ed Accidentally Exposes the Bias Machine
All three were preceded by a wave of righteous ecstasy on the Arab side. All three ended in a disastrous defeat for the Arab side that irreversibly worsened the political and economic situation of the Palestinians. And all three defeats were followed by the collective erasure of any memory of the excitement before the conflict. They instead became stories of distilled victimisation, almost ensuring a repeat performance a generation later.
Why does this keep happening? It’s not that Palestinians are uniquely irrational; nor are the Palestinians the only nation birthed by the collapse of an old imperial order. The Irish, Bulgarians, Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Poles, Ukrainians and many others formed modern states on a mix of historical claims and very modern myth-making throughout the 20th century, frequently in conditions of war and displacement, and always with unanswered territorial claims. Some of these were the basis for lingering resentments and conflicts for generations.
Yet none except for the Palestinians rejected statehood when it was on offer because it didn’t include all their territorial claims. And this includes the Israelis who accepted the UN partition plan on roughly half of what was left of the original British Mandate. Zionists accepted a state that didn’t even include Jerusalem, the focal point of Jewish longing for two millennia and already then, as for a century before, home to a Jewish majority. This is the difference between a movement for national liberation and a movement for the elimination of another nation. In the former, even a very difficult compromise can be understood as an achievement (however partial or internally controversial). In the latter, a compromise that leaves this unwanted presence is still an unacceptable defeat.
The Arab war against Zionism has been a central organising political fact of Arab politics for over a century. This self-destructive passion hit its peak in the mid-20th century, dragged numerous Arab states into repeated military catastrophes and saw nearly every Jewish community in the Arab world completely erased, some after a continuous presence of more than 2,000 years. Anti-Zionism serves the same totemic function for broad circles of activists and intellectuals in the West too. Accepting that Israel is not a state whose policies may merit severe critique, but one whose existence is a crime, is now the price of entry to the community of the good.
This is how the “Arab-Israeli” conflict morphs into the “Israeli-Palestinian” conflict, which then morphs into just “the occupation” and now increasingly “apartheid”. The first transition denied the scope of the conflict and effaced the reality of a tiny Jewish minority being marked for destruction by the Arab world as a whole. The second denied that there was a conflict at all, and rendered the entire situation as an extended outcome of an Israeli sin. The third eliminates even the possibility that such a sin can be expiated; it instead holds Israel’s existence as inherently evil. Between these two external forces, and with all the internal dysfunction of Palestinian politics, it is nearly impossible to expect the Palestinians to do what every other national liberation movement has done: seek political freedom and build a society from there. After three catastrophes in three generations, there is not even a hint of an alternative.
Three destructive and unnecessary wars put the Palestinians in the lamentable place they now inhabit. It’s impossible to know what the fourth will look like, but it’s unlikely it will resemble that or any of the previous three. The current violence has not sparked that war yet, but unless something dramatic changes in the political trajectories of both parties, something eventually will. And when it does, Israelis will pay a heavy and avoidable price — and the Palestinians an even larger one.
Nadav Ziv fails to disclose that this was a response to the murder of two young men who were stuck in traffic in Hawara followed by celebrations in the Muslim village. One of a series of murders and assaults.Jonathan Tobin: The ADL’s woke war on the right won’t stop antisemitism
I’ll let Shmuel Sackett, an activist who lives in the area, tell the rest of the story. “1,600 Jewish families live in Har Bracha, Yitzhar, Itamar and Elon Moreh and their only way home, from the main Tapuach junction, is via this town. Every day, yes! – every single day – at least 20 Jewish cars get stoned while driving through Hawara. I highly doubt that this has ever happened to Rabbi Hauer… It’s important to note that “stoning cars” is not what you think. None of the violent Jew haters are throwing pebbles. They are throwing bricks and dropping cinder blocks from rooftops.”
Imagine a young mother with 3 children in her car, driving home from the supermarket. As she is driving, a brick comes crashing through her windshield. The shock of what happened is enough to give her a heart attack! The children start screaming, there is broken glass everywhere, but she cannot stop for help… because she’s in the middle of Hawara with a mob just waiting to finish the job.
This is not an exaggeration. This happens every day and the murder of Hillel and Yagel Yaniv was something that Hawara residents live for. After the brutal murder, candies and sweets were handed out, cake was distributed, and people were singing.
I’m going to be writing about Hawara elsewhere. Ziv’s ugly and dishonest op-ed is interesting for a whole other reason.
A LinkedIn with that name reveals that he appears to be an employee of 90 West: a strategic communications firm that are “committed to working with mission-driven organizations and individuals whose work aligns with the issues we believe are central to creating a more just, equitable, and sustainable future.”
What’s Ziv’s job at 90 West?
“I research and write op-eds with a focus on climate change, diversity, and taxes; conduct research on the clean energy transition with a focus on grid reliability and offshore wind; and help clients crystallize their research into coherent and engaging prose.”
Founded by an associate of former MA Governor Deval Patrick, the firm is currently tied to Squad member Rep. Ayanna Pressley. One of its missions is “assisting U.S. companies and organizations seeking to engage in Israel.”
The Los Angeles Times op-ed failed to disclose any of that. Instead, it just states that, “Nadav Ziv is a writer whose work includes essays about Judaism, antisemitism and Israel” While a chain of associations isn’t solid evidence, the failure to disclose that Ziv writes op-eds for a leftist strategic comms firm with a focus on Israel is a serious red flag.
Was the vile op-ed written for a 90 West client and planted in the LA Times to make it appear organic? If so which one? I’ve reached out to both Ziv and LA Times editorial page editors to get a response, but I suspect that there won’t be one.
Anti-Israel basis is systemic, but it’s also fed by a network of not only activist groups, but comms operations, many of which are disguised to appear Jewish or even pro-Israel, because that makes them more plausible. These operations are invisible to most people unless you do some digging. And when you do, what turns up is highly revealing. There are organic participants in an anti-Israel movement, but much of it is planted, bought and paid for with the complicity of the media which chooses not to reveal the machine behind the bias.
Sometimes, the most important questions are the ones that aren’t asked about the issues that generate the most concern. That’s certainly true with respect to the widespread and justified concern about a rising tide of antisemitism that has spread across the globe to the United States. There, the question that isn’t being asked is whether the information we’re being fed by the Anti-Defamation League is illuminating the problem or actually doing more to confuse and distort the discussion about its core mission of fighting Jew-hatred.
Though the partisan tilt of the organization under its current CEO and national director Jonathan Greenblatt has been amply documented, it is still treated by the mainstream corporate media, as well as most of the Jewish community, as the authoritative voice on the subject. So when the group issues a report on the issue, as it did this week with a study on “White Supremacist Propaganda,” the world pays attention. The thrust of that document was the claim that the number of “white supremacist events” rose to an all-time high in 2022. That was treated as fodder for alarmist headlines that stoked the fears of Jews that the United States is in danger of being overrun by neo-Nazis.
But like many of the ADL’s reports in recent years, when reading beneath the headlines, the details don’t quite justify the fear-mongering that drives the group’s successful fundraising efforts. The key data point is that the group counted 170 “events” of white supremacist propaganda in 2022 as opposed to 108 in 2021. By “events,” they don’t reference actual attacks on Jews but rather the distribution of antisemitic fliers and stickers or posters or banners displayed publicly.
Any instance of far-right hate is one too many. Moreover, the memory of the murderous attacks on synagogues in Pittsburgh in 2018 and in Poway in 2019 is deeply embedded in the consciousness of Jews who have now sadly grown accustomed to the sight of armed guards at their places of worship. Anyone who has witnessed any of these “events” is entitled to be angry and concerned.
Yet while vigilance is necessary, the idea that even 170 such instances in a nation of 336 million people constitute a genuine surge of neo-Nazi hate cannot be taken seriously. The voices of far-right extremists are amplified by the Internet, and digital technology has also enabled them to communicate and organize in ways that were impossible a generation ago.
Yet the evidence doesn’t back up the idea that this is the principal threat to Jewish security. That was illustrated by what happened on Feb. 25.
Although many American Jews feared the worst when the news spread last month of a network of neo-Nazi groups planning a “National Day of Hate,” what happened was much like the “events” that the ADL puts forward as proof of a surge of far-right activity. The much-ballyhooed alarmism fell flat when that Saturday proved to be something of a virtual stunt with little, if any, neo-Nazi activity observed. This showed that although they get a lot of PR and attention from the ADL and the liberal media, their numbers remain tiny, and they have no political support for their efforts.
That is, of course, not the case with the intersectional left; it promotes a different brand of antisemitism that doesn’t seem to generate the same kind of threat among American Jewry. The demonization of Israel and its Jewish supporters, who are branded as the beneficiaries of “white privilege” and the oppressors of Palestinian “people of color,” is widespread and routinely published in mainstream publications like The New York Times and broadcast outlets like MSBC, and, as CAMERA pointed out this week, in overseas outlets like France24.