Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, June 20, 2024

It Took Only 150 Years To Revise The Reputation of General Sherman. How Long Will It Take For Israel? (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

“Those people made war on us, defied and dared us to come south to their country, where they boasted they would kill us and do all manner of horrible things. We accepted their challenge, and now for them to whine and complain of the natural and necessary results is beneath contempt."
General William Tecumseh Sherman

General William Tecumseh Sherman was one of the most notable Union generals of the Civil War, famous for his "scorched earth" policy requiring destroying anything useful to the enemy. That was arguably Sherman's main claim to fame -- or infamy.

General Sherman's military career in the Civil War does seem to have some interesting parallels to the current Israel-Gaza War -- beyond the above quote about his view of the South's challenge to the North. His policy for conducting the war has been challenged over 150 years for being destructive and brutal. General Sherman was arguably responsible for committing war crimes:

Major General William Tecumseh Sherman’s actions after the capture of Atlanta and his subsequent March to the Sea are sometimes seen as anticipating the pattern of total war in the twentieth century. Some have claimed that Sherman was a war criminal, authorizing plunder and looting of civilian property. But the matter is more complex than either of these charges indicate. In fact, Sherman’s actions were the culmination of a Union policy toward civilians that evolved during the course of the war.

But his reputation appears to be going through a makeover. That redemption gained steam in 2014, as reflected by this marker:

The marker was erected by the Georgia Historical Society and the Georgia Battlefields Association:

On November 15, 1864, during the Civil War, U.S. forces under Gen. William T. Sherman set out from Atlanta on the March to the Sea, a military campaign designed to destroy the Confederacy’s ability to wage war and break the will of its people to resist. After destroying Atlanta’s industrial and business (but not residential) districts, Sherman’s 62,500 men marched over 250 miles, reaching Savannah in mid-December. Contrary to popular myth, Sherman’s troops primarily destroyed only property used for waging war – railroads, train depots, factories, cotton gins, and warehouses. Abandoning their supply base, they lived off the land, destroying food they could not consume. They also liberated thousands of enslaved African Americans in their path. Sherman’s “hard hand of war” demoralized Confederates, hastening the end of slavery and the reunification of the nation.

The media covering the marker at the time picked up on this revision of Sherman's reputation. We can only wonder if the analysis offered just 9 years ago would be made today:

Historians have increasingly written that Sherman’s plan for the systematic obliteration in late 1864 of the South’s war machine, including its transportation network and factories, was destructive but not gratuitously destructive. Instead, those experts contend, the strategy was an effective and legal application of the general’s authority and the hard-edged masterstroke necessary to break the Confederacy.

In other words:

o The force used by the general was proportionate.
o It targeted military -- not civilian -- infrastructure.
o And it did not contravene the law.

This is not to deny the inevitable excesses one expects in war but focuses on the intent of Sherman and his troops.

And what about the accounts of the deliberate brutality of Sherman's troops?

[Experts] have described plenty of family accounts of cruelty as nothing more than fables that unfairly mar Sherman’s reputation.

“What is really happening is that over time, the views that are out there are being challenged by historical research,” said John F. Marszalek, a Sherman biographer and the executive director of the Mississippi-based Ulysses S. Grant Association. “The facts are coming out.”

Family accounts?

Apparently, Hamas terrorists are not the first to recognize the effectiveness of the use of civilian accounts for blackening the reputation of its enemies.

But this is not to say that Sherman's redemption is complete. The South still is bitter over what they view as the war crimes of General Sherman.

Not surprisingly, the battle over Sherman can also be found on college campuses. A professor at the University of Georgia notes that there is a change in attitude where he is teaching:

“You all the time run into college kids who don’t know which side Sherman was on — and their parents and certainly their grandparents would be aghast to know that,” he said. “It’s not just a matter of education. It’s a matter of being the blank slate that younger generations present for revision or education that older generations don’t because they’re steeped in the mythology of their ancestors.”

Has there ever been a time when university students were not blank slates for those with an agenda?

Another interesting parallel appears in Wikipedia, quoting authors who believe that Sherman's conduct of the war influenced the Democratic Party and the elections:

Sherman's success caused the collapse of the once powerful "Copperhead" faction within the Democratic Party, which had advocated immediate peace negotiations with the Confederacy. It also dealt a major blow to the popularity of the Democratic presidential candidate, George B. McClellan, whose victory in the election had until then appeared likely to many, including Lincoln himself. According to Holden-Reid, "Sherman did more than any other man apart from the president in creating [the] climate of opinion" that afforded Lincoln a comfortable victory over McClellan at the polls.

The "progressives" of that time who parallel today's "Ceasefire Now" advocates did not push for a definitive victory over the South. Similarly, McClellan's position on the war is reminiscent of Biden's position on the Israel-Gaza War and the problems that is causing him.

According to ChatGPT:

[McClellan's] platform, as adopted by the Democratic Party, called for an immediate cessation of hostilities and a negotiated peace with the Confederacy. However, McClellan personally distanced himself from the more extreme peace elements of his party, asserting that any peace settlement must include the restoration of the Union. Despite this, his campaign was seen as an attempt to end the war through compromise rather than military victory.

But none of this helps Israel.

General William Tecumseh Sherman died in 1891. There have been over 130 years for the dust to settle, for some degree of objectivity to set in, and for a re-examination of Sherman and his actions to begin to be re-evaluated.

It will be a long time before analysis of Israel and its modern history approaches anything near objectivity.

(Hat tip: PreOccupied Territory)

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

It is not only October 7 and hostages: Hamas violates many international laws that the UN, media and NGOs ignore

The New York Times publishes a backgrounder:

Note the subhead: "The armed Islamist group committed war crimes on Oct. 7, experts say, and continues to do so by holding hostages."

This is true. And it is enormously misleading.

When the media, the UN or NGOs accuse Hamas of war crimes, they limit their criticism to October 7 and the continued holding of hostages. This article is no exception.

But Hamas violates many laws of war that are not being even mentioned in the thousands of articles, reports and speeches about Gaza.

Here are some:

1 Misuse of Ambulances with Red Cross/Crescent markings- Hamas uses ambulances as limousine services to transport its fighters. Under Article 23(f) of the 1907 Regulations annexed to the Hague Convention IV Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, which reflects customary international law, it is ―especially forbidden…[t]o make improper use of a flag of truce, … as well as the distinctive badges of the Geneva Convention.. Article 44 of the First Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armed Forces in the Field (1949) also provides that: ―… the emblem of the Red Cross on a white ground …may not be employed, either in time of peace or in time of war, except to indicate or to protect the medical units and establishments…"

2. Misuse of Medical Facilities - Hamas used hospitals and medical facilities as spaces for weapons caches. It used electricity and infrastructure from hospitals in tunnels underneath them. It fought battles from hospitals. Rule 28 of Customary IHL says, "Medical units exclusively assigned to medical purposes must be respected and protected in all circumstances. They lose their protection if they are being used, outside their humanitarian function, to commit acts harmful to the enemy."

3. Staging of Attacks From Residential Areas and Protected Sites: The Law of Armed Conflict not only prohibits targeting an enemy‘s civilians; it also requires parties to an armed conflict to distinguish their combatant forces from their own civilians, and not to base operations in or near civilian structures, especially protected sites such as schools, medical facilities and places of worship. As the customary law principle is reflected in Article 51(7) of Additional Protocol I: '―The presence or movements of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular attempts to shield military objectives from attacks or shield, favour or impede military operations."

4. Use of Civilian Homes and Public Institutions as Bases of Operation - Hamas has placed weapons caches in schools and mosques, it has put thousands of tunnel entrances inside residential homes. See (3) for citations.

5. Booby-trapping of Civilian Areas - Hamas has placed bombs in residential homes to kill IDF soldiers. See (3) for citations.

6. Blending in with Civilians - Hamas doesn't even pretend to wear uniforms. All their videos show them wearing civilian clothing. Since they positioned weapons caches all over civilian areas, they shoot weapons and then leave them so they can feign being civilians and enjoy protected status as civilians. Additional Protocol I defines perfidy as “acts inviting the confidence of an adversary to lead him to believe that he is entitled to, or obliged to accord, protection under the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, with intent to betray that confidence”. Perfidy includes "simulation of civilian status because civilians not taking a direct part in hostilities [that] may not be the object of attack ."

7. Use of Human Shields - As the ICRC rule states, "It can be concluded that the use of human shields requires an intentional co-location of military objectives and civilians or persons hors de combat with the specific intent of trying to prevent the targeting of those military objectives." This is the basis of Hamas' entire military strategy. Gazans are literally used as shields - mere objects meant to protect Hamas military tunnels and bunkers from Israeli airstrikes.

8. Interference with Humanitarian Relief Efforts - Hamas has fired rockets at the Kerem Shalom crossing where humanitarian goods are brought into Gaza. It has diverted aid trucks for its own needs. It taxes the incoming aid meant to be given for free to Gazans. All of these actions violate the Law of Armed Conflict, which requires parties to allow the entry of humanitarian supplies and to guarantee their safety. Article 59 of the Fourth Geneva Convention requires parties in an armed conflict to "permit the free passage of [humanitarian] consignments and shall guarantee their protection." Article 60 of the same Convention protects the shipments from being diverted from their intended purpose.

9. Using the uniform of the enemy - This was done on October 7. Additional Protocol I prohibits the use of enemy flags, military emblems, insignia or uniforms “while engaging in attacks or in order to shield, favour, protect or impede military operations”.[3] Under the Statute of the International Criminal Court, “making improper use … of the flag or of the military insignia and uniform of the enemy” constitutes a war crime in international armed conflicts when it results in death or serious personal injury.[4]

10. Hamas‘ rocket attacks directed at Israel‘s civilian population centers deliberately violates the basic principle of distinction. (Additional Protocol I, arts. 48, 51(2), 52(1).) It is well accepted in customary international law that ―[i]ntentionally directing attacks against the civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking part in hostilities constitutes a war crime. (Rome Statute, art. 8(2)(b)(i)).

11. Indiscriminate attacks - Besides targeting civilians and civilian objects, Rule 11 of the ICRC CIHL states flatly that "Indiscriminate attacks are prohibited." By definition, every rocket attack is by its very nature indiscriminate. Note also that the rockets are built to spread shrapnel as far and wide as possible.

12. Violence aimed at spreading terror among the civilian population - Rule 2 of ICRC's Customary IHL is "Acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited." It quotes Article 51(2) of Additional Protocol I prohibits “acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population”. Hamas rockets are aimed not only at killing civilians, but at spreading terror among Israelis. In addition, Hamas and Islamic Jihad are continuously attempting to mount terror attacks from the West Bank to terrorize Israelis.

13. Advance Warning - Rule 20 of the ICRC CIHL states "Each party to the conflict must give effective advance warning of attacks which may affect the civilian population, unless circumstances do not permit." In the past, Hamas has used the media and SMS calls to threaten Israelis, so it is clear that they have the ability to warn before every rocket attack. Their failure to do so is a violation of IHL.

This is all in addition to the other Hamas violations against the hostages beyond keeping them in captivity - not respecting the dead and sexual abuse. Also, Hamas military strategy is to capture more hostages, an additional war crime even when done against soldiers.

There is also evidence of Hamas directly attacking its own civilian population, as well as the many rockets that fell short in Gaza in the first months of the war causing casualties.

I would also argue that Hamas' using of the Gaza health ministry as a propaganda tool to spread lies also is a violation of misusing medical facilities for military purposes.

While the media, including this NYT article, goes into great detail on alleged Israeli war crimes, they ignore virtually all of these Hamas war crimes. It is hard to escape the conclusion that they only mention the worst of the worst of Hamas crimes to pretend to be even-handed, but they have little interest in discussing the many other war crimes of Hamas. It is interesting to note that rocket fire was the fig leaf used by NGOs in the past to pretend that they are also criticizing Hamas, not just Israel, but even though Hamas continues to shoot rockets when it can, those war crimes are hardly even mentioned anymore.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

This story, broken by UN Watch on May 29, did not get the publicity it deserves.

The Arab group of states today pulled their draft resolution condemning Israel at the WHO’s annual assembly after an amendment was adopted that called for the release of all hostages held in Gaza and condemned the use by armed groups of hospitals and ambulances.

The initial 4-page draft resolution, written by the Palestinians and Syria, and submitted to the 77th World Health Assembly by Iran, Syria, China, Russia, Cuba, Egypt, Pakistan, Qatar and others, accused Israel of “using starvation as a weapon of war,” “wanton destruction of the Palestinian health system,” and causing “forcibly internally displaced civilians.”

All of this was withdrawn by the Arab states, however, after Israel successfully amended the text to introduce a single sentence that “Calls for the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages held in Gaza, including children, women and older persons, and condemns the use, by armed groups, of health facilities, including hospitals and ambulances, that endangers the civilian population.”

The Israeli-backed amendment was adopted by a vote of 50 to 44, with 31 abstentions. All Western democracies voted in support — except for Belgium, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway and Slovenia, which abstained.

Egypt then took the floor on behalf of the Arab Group to withdraw the entire resolution, in opposition to the amendment that called for the release of the Israeli hostages in Gaza.

Five Western democracies could not support a single sentence added to a virulently false and anti-Israel 4 page resolution that called for hostages to be released and condemns terrorists using hospitals.

In Belgium, the Jewish newspaper Joods Actueel reported,

Ambassador Pecsteen de Buytswerve, permanent representative for our country at the WHO, informed Joods Actueel by email that he did not act arbitrarily but followed the instructions of the Federal Public Service Foreign Affairs, “a normal procedure” according to him.

The spokesperson for the FPS Foreign Affairs then said that “Israel's text contains a political message and that Belgium will always continue to behave in accordance with the highest moral and ethical values. This Israeli amendment is contrary to international law,” it continues.

So the 24 European countries that voted to include this single sentence are acting against international law?

By not adopting this amendment, whether intentionally or not, these five countries are saying that they agree with Hamas that the hostages should not be freed and that Hamas has the right to hijack the Gaza health system.

Every Muslim-majority country voted against the amendment.

(h/t Rudi)

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

06/19 Links Pt2: Conspiracy Theories About Israel Do Not Come From the Fringes; Learning from Menachem Begin; Eden Golan on Facing the Mob at Eurovision

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The Return of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine

Last month, in an unprecedented show of support to the terrorists responsible for the current bloody conflict, Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib gave a surprise speech at a Palestinian conference in Detroit that was endorsed and promoted by the PFLP, and for which the PFLP provided prominent speakers including the keynote. Tlaib’s enthusiastic embrace of a conference connected to a terrorist organization and celebrating the butchers of Hamas who currently hold American hostages turned surreal when she used her address to attack President Biden to the whooping and cheering crowd.

In truth, however, the PFLP’s big comeback was years in the making thanks to the secular canonization of two of its terrorists: Rasmea Odeh and Leila Khaled.

Khaled has become a left-wing icon in the manner of Che Guevara. She was involved in two hijackings, one in 1969 and one in 1970. She was captured carrying out the latter, a coordinated hijacking of four planes to be taken to Jordan, spurring a fellow terrorist to hijack a fifth plane a few days later in order to bargain for her release. The 1970 incident threw a lit match on the tinderbox of Palestinian-Jordanian tensions and led to what became known as Black September, when the Jordanian army was tasked with evicting the Palestine Liberation Organization from its territory. Outside the U.S., Khaled still draws crowds—and the occasional shoutout from progressive anti-Zionist academics like Marc Lamont Hill.

Rasmea Odeh, meanwhile, was still drawing crowds in the U.S. until she was deported in 2017. Odeh was convicted in Israel in 1970 for her participation in a bombing that killed two people. She was released in a PFLP prisoner exchange a decade later and eventually settled in the U.S. before her conviction for immigration fraud. Odeh was embraced by anti-Semitic activists like Linda Sarsour and in progressive and leftist spaces from The Nation to Jacobin to Harvard Law (and yes, of course, Marc Lamont Hill).

The PFLP was largely responsible for the strategic direction of the Palestinian national movement after 1967, when it argued that a long-term guerrilla war was the only way to offset Israel’s technological superiority. The PFLP’s approach, according to Palestinian intellectual Yezid Sayigh, was that “the Arabs should rely on their advantages of human and geographic depth to neutralize [Israel’s] superiority and drain its resources in a lengthy conflict.” That lengthy conflict continues, on American soil, to this day thanks to the progressive organizers, academic institutions, and members of Congress openly aiding the PFLP’s revival.

Eli Lake: Learning from Menachem Begin

Begin’s greatest triumph as prime minister was Operation Opera, the code name for Israel’s 1981 strike on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor. The parallels to Israel’s current efforts to stop Iran’s nuclear program are striking. For example, the Mossad had begun to sabotage Iraq’s nuclear program as early as 1979, when it detonated a shipment of reactor equipment in France that was destined for Iraq. In 1980, Israel ordered the assassination of Yahya El Mashad, an Egyptian nuclear scientist who was working with Iraq — much like when Israel assassinated Iran’s chief nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, in a daring operation in 2020.

Begin knew, however, that such steps would only delay Saddam Hussein’s plans to acquire an atomic bomb. He tasked the air force with a secret mission to destroy Osirak. As today, Israel’s actions led to international censure and isolation. Even the United States, under President Ronald Reagan, voted in favor of a UN Security Council resolution that condemned the Jewish state for its aggression.

History vindicated Begin. After the U.S. military drove Iraq out of Kuwait in 1991, then Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney presented Israeli Ambassador David Ivri, who at the time of Operation Opera had been the Israeli Air Force chief of staff, with a signed satellite photo of the remains of Osirak. It said, “For General David Ivri, with thanks and appreciation for the outstanding job he did on the Iraqi Nuclear Program in 1981, which made our job much easier in Desert Storm!”

The genius of Begin is that he understood himself and his country to be links in the chain of Jewish history. Begin was proud of that history. He lived his life by a code that traced back to ancient glory even though he was born into the perils of the European continent between the great wars.

American Jews today have had the good fortune of not knowing the misery of statelessness. We have not seen the same pogroms, blood libels, and dispossession that our forebears knew. This is why the solidarity with Hamas on college campuses, the double standards when it comes to acceptable speech, the stunning rise in antisemitic attacks, and the sudden need for security at every Jewish institution and event come to many of us as a shock.

Begin would not be shocked. He understood the persistence of Jew-hatred, and how to match it with hadar. We should do the same.

Seth Mandel: Stop Pretending This Isn’t Happening

In world affairs, the strategy of “just pretend it isn’t happening” has an extremely poor track record. Nor is it true that, as the chief of medicine on Scrubs once put it, “if you don’t look for a mistake, you can’t find one.”

Now that the world has been forced to admit that there is no famine in Gaza, it has been made clear that Israel is letting plenty of food aid into the strip. Which means it’s time to admit something is happening to that food, and it isn’t Israel’s fault. From the Wall Street Journal:
Officials from the United Nations, the largest distributor of aid in Gaza, say that people are looting trucks when they reach Gaza, making it unsafe for their employees to deliver aid. By midafternoon on Monday, no U.N. trucks arrived to pick up aid from the Kerem Shalom crossing, where on Sunday Israel began a daily pause to fighting from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. along a key north-south road used to deliver aid throughout much of Gaza. The Israeli military said 21 other trucks picked up supplies on Sunday.

“We need to keep people safe,” said Scott Anderson, the Gaza-based director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, a key group tasked with managing aid distribution in the Strip.

An official with the World Food Program, another U.N. agency that delivers aid to Gaza, also cited looting en route to WFP warehouses as hindering deliveries.

So UN trucks are allowed into Gaza, it’s just that the UN drivers don’t want to go because they fear Palestinian violence.

There are two possibilities here regarding who is committing that violence, and neither makes the international community look very good. Indeed, Israel’s critics would have egg on their face—if only the UN would agree to deliver the eggs.

Either Palestinian civilians are looting the aid, or Hamas (and Hamas-aligned gunmen) are doing so. Which means, to the UN delivery drivers, there isn’t functionally any difference: It’s still not safe enough to go.

The foot-dragging by the UN, however understandable it might be from a safety perspective, is in fact what Israeli officials have been pointing to for months. And what the UN and the Biden administration and our European allies have been pretending isn’t happening. But it is happening. And it has been happening all along.

Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.

It comes up every time someone wistful about peace discusses the two-state solution. “I have to believe” or “I must believe” they say in regard to two states for two peoples. When I hear another robotic pronouncement insisting they must or have to believe in the two-state solution, or peace itself, I always think, “Why must you believe? Why do you have to believe something so obviously false?”

There won’t be a two-state solution, because none of the actual players want this. The Arabs don’t want a two-state solution and neither do the Jews. By the end of October 2023, in fact, support for the two-state solution had dipped to 28.6% of Israeli Jews, while 24% of the Arabs Palestinians supported a two-state solution, down from 59% in 2012. By now, that support—on both sides—will surely have dropped even further.

That’s because two states for two peoples doesn’t solve anything. It is only a nonstarter idea imposed by people who live outside the arena where this longstanding war against the Jews is taking place. The Arabs don’t want two states. They want one state, Judenrein. The Jews don’t want two states, because why should they be required to give up sovereign Jewish territory at all, let alone to those who plague them? That would not be a “solution” but a form of capitulation and subsequent suicide.

Despite the polls and the nonsensical nature of the two-state solution concept itself, liberals continue to proclaim that they “have to” or “must” believe that peace is possible, and that only two states for two people can get us there.

Take the recent hour-long podcast “’I Was Wrong About Antisemitism.’ Sheryl Sandberg on Waking Up,” on Honestly with Bari Weiss. I found myself enthralled, listening to the conversation between these two liberal, intelligent Jewish women, as they discussed Sandberg’s documentary, Screams Before Silence, October 7, Judaism, antisemitism, and politics. The two women had clearly both undergone a sort of culture shock to witness their colleagues’ indifference to the plight of Israeli victims of sexual abuse. It was worse for them still, to hear allowances and excuses made for rapists, in the case where the raped are Jews:

No matter what you believe, we have to stand united against clear use of sexual violence, and then people were still not believing it so I helped organize a conference at the UN where we brought these witnesses who stood there and cried and said “Here's what I saw, what I saw with my own eyes,” and then I took those same witnesses to parliaments in Europe where I certainly think they need to do this, and then we still were having some denial and a whole bunch of silence and some people speaking out, “It's never so black and white.”

Sandberg had worked hard for women’s causes over the years, but now that Jews were the victims, all the women she’d supported and believed were turning their backs, and worse. Some of them were blaming the victims. The general consensus? Believe all women, except when they are Jews. It was a painful revelation for Sandberg. And it woke up something in her Jewish—and liberal—consciousness.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Sheryl Sandberg (@sherylsandberg)

But that consciousness, thus far, only goes so far. Bless Sheryl Sandberg, truly, for documenting sexual violence on and in the wake of October 7. You can see that something changed for Sandberg in the days and months after the massacre, that drove her to do the film. And still, and perhaps all the more so, she “has to believe” in a two-state solution—stubbornly persists in believing what will never be (emphasis added):

What I would say is I think it's made me realize how much harder it's going to be to get to the solution that I still have to believe in. I don't think there's another solution other than two states, but it has to be two states run by people who want their neighbors to live in peace and prosperity.

It flies in the face of all Sandberg has faced and learned since October 7, and yet she persists in forcing herself to maintain hope in a lie, a false dynamic. Why? How does it serve her?

But Sandberg is not unique in insisting on believing something that in reality is a nonsense idea. Ehud Olmert, who served as Israel’s prime minister from 2006-2009, and who served 16 months of a 27-month prison sentence on corruption charges besides, also feels compelled to believe a fictional fairytale is true, or so he says. Rolf Dobelli, founder of WORLD.MINDS interviewed Olmert in 2023 for Politico, and brought up the subject of the two-state solution (emphasis added):

Dobelli: You’ve been a proponent of the two-state solution for a long time. Do you think the time has arrived to finally implement it?

Olmert: First of all, I think that it is the only real political solution for this lifelong conflict between Israel and Palestinian states. There is no other. Therefore, I have to believe that this is possible.

Olmert did more than pay lip service to the insane idea of a two-state solution. In 2008, he promised to give the Arabs up to 94 percent of the land they wanted for a state of their own. Naturally, the Arabs spurned Olmert’s attempts to woo them with land. For the Arabs it’s all or nothing. One state for one people, and they don’t mean Jews.

It doesn’t seem to matter how smart you are, or highly placed. People have this need to believe in what will never, and can never be, two states for two people living side by side in peace.

Take Condoleezza Rice, US Secretary of State at the time of Olmert’s temerarious 2008 offer. In 2011, looking back at that time, she wrote: “The conditions were almost ripe for a deal on our watch, but not quite. Still, I have to believe that sooner or later, there will be a two-state solution. There is no peaceful alternative.”

It wasn’t the first time Rice had said this. Here’s an excerpt from the transcript of a meeting she had with President Mahmoud Abbas in 2005 (emphasis added):

Remarks With Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas After Their Meeting
Secretary Condoleezza Rice
The Muqata
Ramallah
February 7, 2005

SECRETARY RICE: Well, I would just note that in the Palestinian national elections, President Abbas got numbers that would have made any American president extremely happy. It was a very strong vote for his program of a peaceful resolution to the conflict, of peace with the neighbor Israel, of democratic reform and of reconstruction and development to improve the lives of the Palestinian people. I have to believe that what the Palestinian people were responding to is the opportunity to have their children grow up in an environment of peace and opportunity and that is what the president won his election on. We are going to be supportive partners for him and for his leadership as they try and realize that vision for the Palestinian people.

Tom Phillips, British ambassador to Israel from 2006-2010, also pled to believe in a falsehood, in an undated article appearing in The JC:

“If you look at the Palestinian story and the depth of their sense of victimhood — ‘we lost our homes, we have a right of return’ — they must compromise as well. Each side must compromise on an issue that touches its identity. That is going to require great leadership on both sides. I have to believe there is the leadership to do that,” said the ambassador.

But why? Why does anyone “have to believe” there is Arab leadership with the will to make peace, when no such leadership exists?

On October 24, 2023, Jake Tapper of CNN, interviewed Roy Yellin, director of public outreach of the fifth column anti-Israel organization B’Tselem. Yellin too, is delusional, forcing himself to believe what can never be. It’s almost like he’s trying to persuade himself (emphasis added):

I have to believe that in order to stay here. And I do believe that, the only option is to find a way to live with Palestinians, as equal. That I do believe that only we provide people on the other side with full, complete human rights, future, equality, democratic norms. Only like that we can live together.

Academics, too—people you’d expect to be at least slightly intelligent—spout the mantra, resolved to believe a whopper. Here is Janet Freedman of the Brandeis University Women’s Research Center, writing on Feminism and Zionism in 2017 (emphasis added):

I have found that when I offer my definition of Zionism – the right of Israel to exist as a state – those with whom I am speaking usually agree with me. Yet in recent times, there are those who do not, and as eager as I am to embrace coalition politics on a wide range of issues, if a person or group does not support this basic assumption, I will seek others with whom to work toward a resolution of the serious, but, I must believe, still resolvable Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

In seemingly every sphere of society, you can find people pledged to believe something that is not true. Jared Stein, for example, a senior account executive with Customer.io, a "customer engagement platform for tech-savvy marketers" wrote a kumbaya-style essay for LinkedIn about how he chooses to perceive the post-October 7 anti-Israel protesters (emphasis added):

I have to believe that the people marching across the world want the same thing that I do for Israelis and Palestinians - self-determination. Security. Peace. We're all on the same team and should be marching together.

Just try it Bub, and see what happens. Presumably with a name like “Jared Stein,” you won’t last very long—and probably not long enough to realize the extent to which you are self-deluded.

Tova Leigh is a mommy blogger. Or at least she was until she turned 40. That’s when she released her first book, ‘F*cked at 40: Life Beyond Suburbia, Monogamy and Stretch Marks’ in which “Tova takes the reader on her journey of rediscovering who she is after motherhood and beyond the norms society forces upon women, whilst encouraging them to break free and just be themselves.”

Leigh, too, has fallen sway to the demented self-assertion that she really should believe something stupid and untrue (emphasis added):

There is distrust between these two people that runs so deep that sometimes I wonder if it will ever be bridged.
But I want to believe that the people who are ripping down posters of kidnapped babies or chanting "gas the Jews" do not represent the majority of Palastinians, just like I'd like to believe that the people chanting "make Gaza a cemetery" do not represent the majority of Israelis.

Why? Because I would rather believe that more people are good than bad, otherwise I can't function in this world.

Tova? Methinks thou dost profess too much.

But at least Tova Leigh is honest. She simply can’t handle the truth—her brain can’t take it in. Leigh needs to believe a lie in order to function.

There seems to be a lot of that going around. Even or especially now, when the two-state solution has never been less desired by the relevant parties, and has never been so far away. People need to and must believe what they don’t really believe, or they wouldn’t be working so hard to persuade themselves. But it takes more than a will to believe to generate any real hope for the future, or the promise of a better, more peaceful life for Arabs and Jews.

Belief, manufactured or otherwise, won’t cure the Arabs of the enmity they have for the Jews. Two states, ten states, one hundred states won’t slake the Arab lust for Jewish blood. In the end, peace can only come when we acknowledge evil, look it squarely in the face, and banish it from the world.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

06/19 Links Pt1: ‘Obama’s Law’ is bringing destruction and death to most of the Middle East; Hamas is like Boko Haram, says Kemi Badenoch; Rafah: 'No home without a tunnel,'

From Ian:

‘Obama’s Law’ is bringing destruction and death to most of the Middle East

Edward Luttwak — soldier, strategist, historian, rancher — calls it Obama’s Law: “Iran may attack all, but none may attack Iran.”

The Biden administration has followed Obama’s Law in the same fumbling, shambolic way as an apparently catatonic Joe Biden followed Obama’s cue to leave the stage at a June 15 fundraiser in Los Angeles. The result is Iran on the verge of the bomb, Israel attacked from all sides and chaos and war across the Middle East.

The Biden administration is now trying to prevent full-blown war between Israel and Hezbollah – or, rather, continuing to stop Israel from responding fully to the war that Hezbollah launched last October.

Since 2006, according to the State Department, the US has given $2.5 billion to Lebanon’s official army, the Lebanese Armed Forces. The object is to create an “institutional counterweight to Hezbollah”, the real power in the land. The money is supposed to be spent on four areas: sovereignty, border security, internal security and counterterrorism.

A 2022 report by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies found that only in counterterrorism had the LAF developed its capacity. In every other area, Hezbollah had continued to advance its conquest of Lebanon.

As with its subventions to the Palestinians, no one really knows where the money ends up. As with American support of the Palestinians, a policy that is intended to support “moderates” has in effect given diplomatic and financial cover to terrorists.

Hezbollah has ignored UN Resolution 1701, which ordered the demilitarisation of southern Lebanon. The US has looked the other way. Some 80,000 Israelis are refugees in their own country, yet the Biden administration pressures Israel not to respond.

Obama’s Law is also in operation in Gaza. The Biden administration does not want Israel to destroy Hamas. It wants Israel to domesticate Hamas. The administration claims to believe that a genocidal Islamist group will not only accept the existence of a Jewish state; Hamas will also accept a piddling non-state as a pay-off.

This lunacy is nothing more than the logic of the “two-state solution”, played out in reality. The West expects that the Palestinians can be bribed into becoming a shoddy version of Israel, a pluralist, Western-style democracy with the rule of law. Both states can then be integrated into an American-run regional architecture.

This is delusional and dangerous.

The Return of Peace Through Strength

Si vis pacem, para bellum is a Latin phrase that emerged in the fourth century that means “If you want peace, prepare for war.” The concept’s origin dates back even further, to the second-century Roman emperor Hadrian, to whom is attributed the axiom, “Peace through strength—or, failing that, peace through threat.”

U.S. President George Washington understood this well. “If we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known, that we are at all times ready for war,” he told Congress in 1793. The idea was echoed in President Theodore Roosevelt’s famous dictum: “Speak softly, and carry a big stick.” And as a candidate for president, Ronald Reagan borrowed directly from Hadrian when he promised to achieve “peace through strength”—and later delivered on that promise.

In 2017, President Donald Trump brought this ethos back to the White House after the Obama era, during which the United States had a president who felt it necessary to apologize for the alleged sins of American foreign policy and sapped the strength of the U.S. military. That ended when Trump took office. As he proclaimed to the UN General Assembly in September 2020, the United States was “fulfilling its destiny as peacemaker, but it is peace through strength.”

And Trump was a peacemaker—a fact obscured by false portrayals of him but perfectly clear when one looks at the record. Just in the final 16 months of his administration, the United States facilitated the Abraham Accords, bringing peace to Israel and three of its neighbors in the Middle East plus Sudan; Serbia and Kosovo agreed to U.S.-brokered economic normalization; Washington successfully pushed Egypt and key Gulf states to settle their rift with Qatar and end their blockade of the emirate; and the United States entered into an agreement with the Taliban that prevented any American combat deaths in Afghanistan for nearly the entire final year of the Trump administration.

Trump was determined to avoid new wars and endless counterinsurgency operations, and his presidency was the first since that of Jimmy Carter in which the United States did not enter a new war or expand an existing conflict. Trump also ended one war with a rare U.S. victory, wiping out the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) as an organized military force and eliminating its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

But unlike during Carter’s term, under Trump, U.S. adversaries did not exploit Americans’ preference for peace. In the Trump years, Russia did not press further forward after its 2014 invasion of Ukraine, Iran did not dare to directly attack Israel, and North Korea stopped testing nuclear weapons after a combination of diplomatic outreach and a U.S. military show of force. And although China maintained an aggressive posture during Trump’s time in office, its leadership surely noted Trump’s determination to enforce redlines when, for example, he ordered a limited but effective air attack on Syria in 2017, after Bashar al-Assad’s regime used chemical weapons against its own people.

Endangering Israel’s Security – and Our Own

Prior to the Oct. 7 attacks, the Biden administration lacked any sort of realistic perception of the situation in the Middle East. Mere days before the attacks, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters, “The [Middle East] region is quieter than it has been for decades.”

This misperception led the Biden administration to divert critical assets away from terrorist groups like Hamas – ultimately leading to the failure to anticipate or disrupt the events of Oct. 7. In November, senior administration officials admitted that, following 9/11, U.S. intelligence agencies almost completely stopped spying on Hamas and other violent Palestinian groups, believing that Hamas constituted no direct threat to the U.S.

Indeed, Washington deprioritized the Middle East as a whole. After the Biden administration’s takeover, the Central Intelligence Agency decided to reduce the number of civilian intelligence analysts tasked with monitoring the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the aftermath of Oct. 7, more than a dozen current and former U.S. officials, lawmakers, and congressional aides testified that this deprioritization of the Middle East had left the U.S. vulnerable and unable to anticipate the attacks.

The Biden administration also spent significant resources in a misguided attempt to appease Iran – a policy that directly led to the Hamas attacks and regional escalation. Less than a month before the Oct. 7 attacks, the Biden administration announced it would issue a waiver giving Iran access to $6 billion that had been previously blocked by U.S. sanctions.

By unfreezing Iranian assets, the administration presented the world’s largest state sponsor of terror with unprecedented resources, allowing it to direct, fund, arm, and train Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the myriads of other terror groups currently attacking U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria. This both enabled Oct. 7 and allowed for increased attacks from groups like the Houthis, an Iranian-armed terrorist group that has been disrupting shipping in the Red Sea, causing shipping delays and increased costs to ordinary consumers.

The Biden administration also provided U.S. adversaries with valuable resources in the form of international aid. For example, the administration reversed Trump’s funding cuts and restored more than $200M in aid to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), an organization with direct ties to Hamas – as demonstrated by the alleged involvement of 12 UNRWA employees in the Oct. 7 attacks and kidnappings.

President Biden’s approach to national security poses a stark contrast to that of President Trump. Biden reversed nearly all of Trump’s foreign policies, opting to alienate Israel and appease Iran – a policy that has endangered both the U.S. and its allies.

Absent aggressive congressional oversight to assess the Biden administration’s intelligence priorities – and to investigate its handling of the Israel-Palestine conflict, including the recent decision to withhold information and weapons from Israel – the situation will only get worse. Failure to accept responsibility for the national security malpractice – as demonstrated in Afghanistan, Ukraine, and now the Israel-Palestine conflict – will create present and serious consequences for Americans.

Under the Biden administration, rising foreign instability and conflict escalation have become routine. America needs to change course immediately and return to policies that foster peace and stability – both abroad and at home.

How stupid is Thomas Friedman? (How wet is water?)

I generally don't bother reading Thomas Friedman's columns. He is insufferably smug, thinks he knows what he is talking about when he doesn't, and writes as if he is the center of the universe.

But sometimes, someone sends me a link to hsi latest idiocy, and sometimes I end up reading it.

My estimation of Friedman keeps going even lower.

From his latest idiocy:

Yes, yes, I can hear the criticism from the war hawks right now: “Friedman, you would let Hamas’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, come out of his tunnel and declare victory?”

Yes, I would. In fact, I wish I could be at the news conference in Gaza when he does, so I could ask the first question:

“Mr. Sinwar, you claim this is a great victory for Hamas — a total Israeli withdrawal and a stable cease-fire. I just want to know: What existed on Oct. 6 between you and Israel, before your surprise attack? Oh, let me answer that: a total Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and a stable cease-fire. If you don’t mind, I’d like to stick around for a few days to watch you explain to Gazans how you started an eight-month war — causing the destruction of roughly 70 percent of Gaza’s housing stock and leaving, by your count, some 37,000 Gazans dead, many of them women and children — so you could get Gaza back to exactly where it was on Oct. 6, in a cease-fire with Israel and no Israeli troops here. Another Hamas victory like this and Gaza will be permanently unlivable.”

I have a news flash for Tom Friedman: Gaza is not a democracy. Yahya Sinwar has never given a press conference in his life and he never will. He isn't afraid of reporters' questions because he would kill any reporter who manages to publicly ask him something that would make him look bad.

Every reporter in Gaza knows this, but somehow the great award-winning Tom Friedman hasn't quite grasped that

And to Israelis who would ask, “Friedman, are you crazy, you would let Sinwar run Gaza again?” my answer would again be — yes, for now.

And who, pray tell, would remove Sinwar sometime in the future? I guess that's a "day after" question that he doesn't need to answer.

The only people who can defeat Hamas are the Palestinians of Gaza. They, too, need better leadership, and if they find it, we should help them rebuild. But until then, Israel would be crazy to want to stay in Gaza and be responsible for its reconstruction. That honor should go to Sinwar.

Moron. That "honor" goes to the UN and EU NGOs who are happy to pick up the pieces, every time, and reward Hamas terror without doing a thing to effect change.

I believe that the morning after the morning after Sinwar emerges from his tunnel, many Gazans will want to pummel him for the disaster he has visited on them. And if not, Sinwar and Sinwar alone will be responsible when the water doesn’t flow, when the building materials don’t arrive, when the sun doesn’t shine — not Israel.

And if he is so foolish as to restart the war with Israel or attempt to smuggle in weapons instead of food and housing for his people, it will all be on him.

Sinwar doesn't give a damn about what Gazans think of him - he is openly dismissive of their concerns and their lives.

Not only that, but Sinwar knows something that Friedman does not grasp: Israel is always blamed. Israel has been blamed for every shortage in Gaza and is blamed today when the UN refuses to distribute aid. Israel is blamed when Egypt refuses to accept injured or fleeing Gazans. Israel is blamed when the Palestinian Authority restricts medicine or paying for electricity for Gaza. Only Israel is blamed, never anyone else.

Friedman is thoroughly under the spell of the if/then fallacy - the assumption that Palestinians would act according to rational Western standards when given a choice. The idea that they overwhelmingly support terror, or that they are overwhelmingly antisemitic, or that they overwhelmingly support Hamas even during this war, is utterly foreign to self-declared "experts" like Friedman.

Friedman apparently is unaware of every single poll of Palestinians since October 7. Hamas' popularity has soared since the massacre. Some individuals are on video blaming Hamas for Gaza misfortune, but the majority of those polled agree with Hamas' handling of the war. Sinwar's approval rating in Gaza is at 60%, compared to Joe Biden's 38.4%.

Friedman, even more than most media personalities, cannot distinguish between his own wishful thinking and the truth.

Truth is an endangered commodity when it comes to Middle East analysis.

(h/t Scott)

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Rampant cigarette smuggling—fueled by high prices for tobacco—has become the latest manifestation of a breakdown in law and order that is slowing the delivery of lifesaving assistance.

A group of Palestinian men approached a United Nations warehouse in central Gaza last week and demanded access to aid stored inside. The gang wasn’t interested in food, fuel or medicine. It wanted something it considered far more valuable: contraband cigarettes hidden in the humanitarian cargo.

Aid trucks and storage depots have become targets for Palestinian smugglers seeking to retrieve illicit smokes stashed inside shipments by their accomplices, say U.N. and Israeli officials. Other local criminals are also attacking vehicles they suspect have cigarettes hidden somewhere on board, they say.

Cigarettes sell for as much as $25 apiece in isolated Gaza, so getting hold of even a pack can be enormously profitable.

Prices have soared for smokes since Israel limited imports into Gaza to essential goods—which doesn’t include cigarettes—after the Oct. 7 attacks in which Hamas militants and others poured into southern Israel and killed around 1,200 people, according to authorities.

Trade in cigarettes managed to continue for months, with smokes surreptitiously making it through the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza, which Hamas-backed authorities controlled. But when Israeli forces seized control of that crossing on May 6, the door was slammed shut on cigarette deliveries. Cigarette smugglers found another route through the Kerem Shalom crossing between Israel and Gaza but were unable to pull trucks aside to unload their contraband, as they had at Rafah.

Criminal attacks on aid convoys have become so severe that over a thousand truckloads of aid have been left sitting on the Gaza side of the Kerem Shalom border crossing with Israel.

Before May, Gazans could smuggle in cigarettes through Egypt.

Which means that they could also smuggle in (small) weapons and ammunition that could also get past inspectors.

Israel stopped the smuggling trade. Apparently, completely. Not only that, but Israel also stopped the criminals and Hamas from controlling the incoming aid and diverting it,.

These are unanticipated secondary problems, but they are proof that Israel is making things better, rather than continuing with the corruption and thievery embedded in Gaza's very fabric.

Are the additional problems from Gaza's criminals Israel's fault? Would things be better if Hamas was back in control, taxing the cigarettes, importing weapons and preparing for the next October 7?

Israel has allowed commercial trucks to enter Gaza, which is what is alleviating the food crisis. Enterprising Gaza businesspeople could negotiate to bring in cigarettes and any other goods that have shortages. This is a more efficient way to provide more goods for everyone. I somehow doubt that the UN and other aid groups were officially importing cigarettes.

The free market is a better way to distribute goods to Gazans than having aid agencies - often corrupt and colluding with Hamas themselves - do all the logistics. Commercial imports could also include medical equipment and medicines - it would be easier for aid organizations to buy the goods locally rather than arrange to transport them themselves. They could also provide food vouchers to residents who do not have enough food, allowing them to choose what and how much to buy, rather than being told to make do with too much rice and not enough juice.

In other words, the cigarette black market indicates that things are getting better in all other ways, and it points to a way to fix this problem using the free marker as a more efficient way to bring much-needed goods into Gaza.

Gaza still needs a decent governing body that cares more about the residents than about its military. It would need that anyway, just none f the dozens of NGOs in Gaza ever cared enough to complain about how Hamas had taken the entire population hostage. To fix gaza, Hamas has to go, and unfortunately the only way to get rid of Hamas is to get rid of the entire infrastructure it built to hide its military assets, which is the entire area. When there is a tunnel entrance in every other house, they all need to be destroyed.

People who disagree are tacitly saying that Hamas must be allowed to do whatever it wants.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

"Humanitarian" argues against saving hostages

The New York Times discusses the failure of the US-built pier in Gaza that was meant to bring in humanitarian aid.

There are a number of bizarre parts of the article, like "military officials are now warning aid organizations that the project could be dismantled as early as next month, a looming deadline that officials say they hope will pressure Israel to open more ground routes." This implies the lie that Israel is limiting aid into Gaza when in fact there are hundreds of trucks of aid that the UN has not picked up or distributed - the bottleneck is not the existing land routes.

Not to mention how bizarre it is that the looming dismantling of an aid pier that never brought in significant amounts of aid should pressure Israel.

This doesn't compare to the jaw-dropping statement by an official from Project HOPE:

Earlier this month, the Pentagon rejected claims on social media that the pier had been used in an Israeli raid that freed four hostages but that led to the deaths of scores of Palestinians.

In the hours after the rescue, video circulated online showing an Israeli military helicopter taking off from the beach with the U.S. pier in the background.

After the videos emerged, U.S. Central Command said in a statement that the pier and “its equipment, personnel and assets were not used in the operation to rescue hostages today in Gaza.”

Last week, Maj. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, denounced “inaccurate social media allegations” that the pier was part of the rescue, but said that “there was some type of helicopter activity” near the pier during the operation.

Arlan Fuller, the director of emergency response with Project Hope, said the image of “the helicopter taking off from the beach really was contravening to the overall use of the humanitarian space.” He added that the image “muddies the waters” and could put humanitarian workers on the pier in greater risk.

Israel apparently used a helicopter on a beach near the pier to rescue civilian hostages from Hamas. The pier had nothing to do with the rescue, except, perhaps, that it was an area already secured from potential attack since the IDF is responsible for securing the pier for the US troops there.

According to this NGO, however, having a pier in the background of an unconfirmed video of rescuing civilian hostages "was contravening to the overall use of the humanitarian space."

What, exactly, is more humanitarian than saving people's lives?

Apparently, the answer is "optics." Israel not only has to be concerned with actual logistics of rescuing people, but it must also guard against how Jew-haters will lie about the rescue and is therefore responsible to ensure that antisemites cannot come up with more conspiracy theories.

No, Israel should have instead brought the helicopter to a place where an RPG could bring it down and kill the hostages. Or better yet, it should not rescue hostages at all.

This is how the head of a humanitarian mission views things. And it reveals that in today's world, Jewish lives simply do not matter.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

I watched much of the Munk Debate on Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism that was held on Monday night in Toronto.

Douglas Murray and Natasha Hausdorff argued that anti-Zionism is antisemitism; Mehdi Hasan and Gideon Levy argued against.

Murray and Hansdorff won the debate handily, with the audience supporting their side 66% to 34%. But I didn't really see where they refuted Hasan's main argument that he made in his opening statement; much of the debate got sidetracked in discussions about Gaza and college campus protests.

Hasan was loose and fast with the facts. He took quotes by Arthur Balfour and Theodor Herzl out of context; (Hansdorff had the real Balfour quote and showed how Hasan lied.)

But Hasan's main argument did not seem to be addressed directly by the other side. So, I'll do it.

Here is what Mehdi Hasan said:

In 1917, over 100 years ago, Arthur Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, a card carrying anti-Semite, a man who had denounced the evils of Jewish immigration into the UK, a man who referred to Jews as an alien and hostile people.

Balfour was not an antisemite and he did not refer to Jews as an "alien and hostile people." He wrote, in his forward to Nahum Sokolow's History of Zionism, that antisemites refer to Jews that way, calling Zionism "a serious endeavour to mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilization by the presence in its midst of a Body which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile,." (The idea that Sokolow, in a book surveying Jewish peoplehood and nationalism from 1600 to 1918, would allow an antisemite to write the forward only makes sense in the minds of antisemites.)

He issued his Balfour Declaration, which promised a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.

It was the first time a major world power had come out in favor of Zionism, which at the time was a pretty new and pretty controversial movement, calling not just for a Jewish homeland, but for the building of a Jewish majority state in Palestine.

And yet the only Jewish member of the British cabinet at that time, a man named Edwin Samuel Montague, adamantly opposed both Zionism, which he called a mischievous political creed, and the Balfour Declaration, which he referred to as anti-Semitic and a rallying ground for anti-Semites in every country in the world.

The only Jewish member of the British cabinet. That is what he said.

And yet tonight, here in Toronto, over 100 years later, we are being asked to vote for a motion that would damn Montague as the anti-Semite while praising Balfour as the champion of Jews and Judaism.

That's ridiculous.

Another false argument Mehdi and others use is to argue that Jews before 1948 who were ambivalent or argued against Zionism are comparable to today's anti-Zionists. That is false. Before 1948, there were valid arguments about whether a Jewish state would be good for the Jews - some Jews were concerned that their host countries would expel them if there was a Jewish state, for example.

But once Israel became a fact, wanting to see an existing country get destroyed is a much different and extreme idea than not wanting the country to be set up to begin with. No one talks about dismantling Pakistan or Syria or China; only Israel. And the only reason for that is because it is the only Jewish state.

In fact, this entire motion tonight is ridiculous, disingenuous, ahistorical. It says. "Be it resolved, anti Zionism is anti-Semitism."

It doesn't say some anti Zionists engage in anti-Semitism, which I don't disagree with.It doesn't say some anti-Semites hide behind the cloak of anti Zionism, which again I don't disagree with....

The motion says anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.

No ifs, no buts, no caveats, no exceptions.

Anyone, anyone who takes an anti-Zionist position is automatically, inherently, unavoidably anti-Jewish, an anti-Semite, a racist.

Throughout this statement, Mehdi relies on a straw man argument. Saying that anti-Zionism is antisemitism does not mean that everyone who has an opinion against Zionism is an antisemite. Some people become anti-Israel out of ignorance or from believing propaganda; the bar for calling a person an antisemite is much higher than calling anti-Zionism itself antisemitism.

[The debate is] about the legitimacy of anti-Zionism.

Whether you can be anti-Zionist, opposed to Zionism, which remember is a political ideology, a nationalist movement, not a religion, not a race, not a protected class. Whether you can be anti-Zionist, without being smeared, tarred, demonized as an anti-Semite.

And I want to be clear tonight, you could be the most pro Israeli person in this room tonight, the most proud and ardent Zionist here, and still vote against this motion with a clear conscience.

Still vote with our side, the right side.

Because this motion is not about whether you are pro Israel or pro Zionist.

It's about whether the rest of us have the right, the freedom to take a different view, on Israel, on Zionism, on Benjamin Netanyahu, even without being silenced, without being told we're racists. We're not.

Everyone has the right to be anti-Zionist just as everyone has the right to be antisemitic. There is no law against it. No one is being silenced. It is another straw man. Hasan wants the right to make antisemitic arguments and not be called out on it.

Anti Zionism is not anti-Semitism. I'll tell you three reasons why.

Number one, if you vote for this motion tonight, you're throwing logic, history and the English language under the bus. Because anti-Semitism is hating Jews, the people, and Judaism, the religion.Anti Zionism is opposing Israel, the state, and Zionism, the ethno- nationalist ideology that underpins that state.

Zionism is not Judaism. It's a very modern, secular political ideology movement that was founded less than 150 years ago by an atheist named Theodor Herzl,....

Hasan is right that Zionism is not Judaism, although Judaism is Zionist. However, anti-Zionism is not being a critic of Zionism - it is a fanatic obsession, a pure hate that can only be compared to classic antisemitism.

Anti-Zionists keep trying to find new ways to make others hate the Jewish state. Whether it is "colonialism" or "ethnic cleansing" or "occupation" or "apartheid" or "genocide" or "Jewish supremacism" - all of these are falsehoods meant to make antisemitism palatable.

Hasan wants to look at anti-Zionism in a vacuum, but it is part of a continuous tradition of hate for Jews that has morphed over time to be identical to whatever is most unpopular in every age. Only after the Holocaust has naked antisemitism become unfashionable, hence the arguments that Israeli Jews (never Israeli Arabs) "Zionists" are the worst people in the world, which is merely an update of the Nazi racial antisemitism and the Russian conspiracy theory antisemitism, the "philosophical" antisemitism of Voltaire and the rabid Christian antisemitism of Luther. Just as with the earlier versions, the practitioners of the new antisemitism have a missionary zeal to convince the rest of the world that Jews in Israel and their Jewish supporters in the Diaspora are uniquely immoral and evil.

Notably, before and soon after Israel was reborn, Arab antisemites claimed to be anti-Zionist in international forums, but they made clear that they were boycotting Jews, not Zionists, from every country. This is the DNA of BDS.

...[Herzl] ho said, and I quote, "The anti-Semites will be our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries, our allies." His words, not mine.

Herzl was writing in his diaries about a fantasy he had that Jews in the Diaspora should turn antisemites into friends, by having the Jews liquidate their assets in their host countries when they leave to go to Israel, so the antisemites couldn't argue that they are taking national treasures with them.

Just as with the Balfour quote, this is the opposite of what Hasan is claiming.

#2 If you vote for this motion, you're throwing Palestinians as a people under the bus.

You're telling an occupied people, a dispossessed people, to accept their own occupation, their own dispossession meekly in silence.

Otherwise they're racists.

As my friend Yusuf Munayyer the Palestinian American activist, says to ask Palestinians not to be anti Zionist is to ask Palestinians not to be.

Well, every poll shows that Palestinians are indeed the most antisemitic people there are. That's reality. No amount of whitewashing can obscure that fact. They overwhelmingly support the most vicious terror attacks against Jews (way before October 7.) Look at Palestinian Media Watch. And then see of you can find Mehdi Hasan ever condemn Palestinian or other Arab antisemitism.

And #3.

Last but not least, if you vote for this motion you throw a lot of Jews under the bus as well. If you vote for this motion tonight, you'll say my debate partner Gideon Levy, whose grandparents were killed in the Holocaust, who served for Shimon Peres, who's written for Haaretz for over 40 years, just won Israel's top journalism prize three years ago - he's an anti-Semite.

You're saying the Satmar, the world's biggest Hasidic Jewish sect, which says it is fighting God's war against Zionism, is anti-Semitic.

You're saying Jewish college students on campus, maybe some of them your kids, members of If Not Now and Jewish Voices for Peace, they're anti-Semites.

You're saying some of the most respected Jewish voices in the world, like Abraham Berg, the former speaker of the parliament, Miriam Margonis, the actress from Harry Bloody Potter. They're all anti-Semites.That is what you are saying.

No, although some of them undoubtedly are. We are saying that today's anti-Zionism is the modern manifestation of antisemitism.

And again, it is worthwhile to look at the history of antisemitism. The original racial antisemites swore they had nothing negative to say about Judaism, just the inferior Jewish race - they were more cultured than Christian antisemites. Nazis justified their antisemitism as a defense against Jews polluting their pure Aryan blood. Every single flavor of antisemitism justified its hate for Jews as logical and even sophisticated - just like today's version which justifies its hate on the basis of creating false and twisted definitions in the lexicons of human rights and international law.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!