Thursday, May 04, 2023
From Ian:
Will the Senate press the new US ambassador to Jordan about Malki’s killer?
Alan Dershowitz: Israel Is Being Attacked by Political Short-Sellers
Will the Senate press the new US ambassador to Jordan about Malki’s killer?
This morning in Washington, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will hear from President Biden’s nominee for Ambassador to Jordan.The New Herodians
Yael Lempert is a highly qualified and experienced nominee who deserves to be confirmed and given the chance to serve as the American people’s representative in Amman. However, it will be a missed opportunity if senators on the Committee fail to press her for greater clarity on the Biden Administration’s position on a key issue of concern not only to the US-Jordanian relationship but to the basic practice of American justice.
For more than a decade, one of the F.B.I.’s most-wanted and highest profile perpetrators of terrorism, Ahlam Tamimi, has been living freely in Jordan, loudly celebrating the murder and maiming of American citizens she spearheaded and encouraging others to do the same. Instead of extraditing her to the United States to face justice, as is required under the valid extradition treaty, Jordan has refused to hand her over – while eagerly siphoning billions of dollars in aid from American taxpayers.
On August 9, 2001, a human bomb exploded inside a Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem. Tamimi selected the site as her target with great care as she has explained in numerous appearances in the Arabic-language media, and deposited the bomb-carrier at its entrance before fleeing to safety.
Fifteen innocents were murdered, eight of them children, with 130 injured.
Our daughter Malki, just fifteen years old, was one of two Americans among the dead. A third American, a young mother lunching with her toddler, remains in a coma still after all these years. We know Tamimi had the key role in the bombing on behalf of Hamas. We know she chose the pizzeria because of its popularity with young people. We know she sees this as the crowning achievement of her life.
We know these things because she has boasted publicly over and again and again of the unfathomable evil she unleashed that day.
In its increasingly tense encounter with the American empire, the modern State of Israel finds itself confronted with an ancient choice: whether to continue as an independent state or whether to become a fractured Levantine client of a great power, governed by a Herodian faction. Rooted in the geography of the region and also in the historical experience of the Jewish people, the choice of how Israel positions itself now is likely to have extreme consequences for the future of the first Jewish state in over two millennia.
The choice of Israel’s elites, as expressed through a month of street demonstrations and an ongoing media campaign against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his proposed judicial reforms, is clear. Their strategy is to position themselves as a modern-day version of the Herodians, the famous allies of Rome whose preeminent king, Herod the Great, built the Second Jewish Temple in Jerusalem as well as the great fortress of Masada. Renowned during his lifetime and even 2,000 years after his death as a master builder, Herod not only ruled over the largest Jewish kingdom since the Iron Age, but managed to insinuate his relatives into the corridors of imperial power. Herod’s grandson was educated in Rome in the circles of imperial princes who befriended him, and his great-granddaughter Berenice was the lover of the future emperor of Rome—a liaison that, if consummated in marriage, might have fused Judaism and Rome at a much earlier juncture in history, and with what could have only been a very different effect, than Constantine’s conversion to Christianity.
Yet for the Jews, the reign of Herod and his family was but a way station on the path to disaster, culminating in the destruction of Herod’s Temple along with all vestiges of Jewish national independence for the next two millennia. It didn’t take long following Herod’s death for Judea to come under direct Roman rule as a province. Unrest would commence within a generation. By the time of his great-grandson, the destruction of the Jewish kingdom that Herod once ruled was so complete that the Jews became the world’s reigning metaphor for a stateless people, and the rise of Zionism, 19 centuries later, appeared to many, Jews and Christians alike, as nothing less than a modern-day miracle.
The Herodian pitch for Roman backing against their internal foes was not only not unique to their faction, but also in no way a particularly Jewish fault. The habit of local factions seeking external intervention defines the fractured societies of the Levant—Lebanon and Syria, as well as the stateless Kurds and Palestinians—who are unlikely ever to be sovereign. Such internally splintered polities have been the Levant’s structural characteristic going back for millennia, resulting from and contributing to its historical standing as “the crossroads of Empire”—i.e., a battleground for the armies of more stable and successful cultures.
Since its rebirth as a modern state, Israel has stood as an anomaly in the Levant: a cohesive and militarily powerful nation-state in a region where stability is hard to find. To ensure its independence, Israel became a nuclear power—attaining a destructive capability that only a few advanced states possess, and which would appear to serve as a potent hedge against conventional attack. According to some estimates, Israel now possesses either the fourth- or the fifth-most-powerful military in the world.
As I said, the depths the left plumbs keep getting lower.
— Caroline Glick (@CarolineGlick) May 4, 2023
Here are leftists protesting with flag draped coffins outside the IDF draft office at Tel Hashomer.
These women and the deep pockets that bought them their matching t-shirts, flags, coffins, strollers and megaphones aren't… https://t.co/oiJS9Nhnas
Alan Dershowitz: Israel Is Being Attacked by Political Short-Sellers
So this columnist plans to increase his investments in the Jewish state.
The newest weapon in the campaign against the ill-advised and overreaching judicial “reforms” being advocated by some Israeli politicians is the equally ill-advised and overreaching effort by some opponents to endanger Israel’s economy.
They claim that the judicial reform proposals, if enacted, would make Israel a less attractive venue in which to invest. There is, though, nothing in the proposals themselves that would have any direct negative impact on Israel’s economy in general or on the “startup nation” aspect of its high-tech sector.
It is the false claim itself — not the true workings of the economy — that is affecting the economic standing of the nation-state of the Jewish people. This is an example of a self-fulfilling prophecy, in which the prediction itself, even if baseless or overstated, can hurt a company or a country.
Short sellers have long been aware of this phenomenon and some have used (misused?) it to their unfair advantage. They spread false rumors in the hope and expectation that they will lower the prices of stocks they are shorting. That is analogous to what some opponents of judicial reform are trying to do in an effort to create pressure against the proposed reforms.
It may be working, at least in the short run. Some companies have threatened to pull their investments, and Israel’s credit rating has been downgraded. These actions are not a direct result of the judicial reforms themselves, which have not even been enacted. They are more a function of the alleged instability reflected in the demonstrations and counter-demonstrations.
And also in the frequency of Israeli elections and the appointment of extremists to the recently organized Netanyahu government. These alleged manifestations of “instability” are the best evidence that Israel is a thriving democracy. France too has demonstrations and extremists but they are not seen as reasons to doubt that country’s democratic character.
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