Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Saturday, June 21, 2008

Arab honor, prestige and relevance

Much has been written about the honor/shame psyche that the Arab world has. The seminal work on the topic in the blogosphere was written by Dr. Sanity back in 2005 and has been touchedupon in many places, including on this blog.

One aspect of this mindset that has perhaps been overlooked one specific component of honor: prestige. At first glance it would appear that prestige is almost identical to honor, but they are not quite the same. People who want honor will do everything to avoid shame, while those who crave prestige will want to avoid irrelevance.

Much of recent Arab history is the story of Arab leaders doing everything they can to prove their own importance and to avoid irrelevance. Yasir Arafat, Saddam Hussein, Hafiz Assad, as well as Gamal Nasser all strove to get into positions where their decisions would reverberate worldwide, and where they become key to decisions made by superpowers.

In Arafat's case, he used any means possible to remain relevant. Two times in his life he was faced with irrelevance - once during the first intifada when the Palestinian Arab national movement seemed to leave him behind, and secondly when he decided to launch the second intifada and he was shunned by all world leaders. He managed to co-opt the first intifada but never recovered from the second, although he still maintained prestige among his people despite his corruption and counterproductive decisions.

Likewise, Assad and Hussein enjoyed placing themselves in positions where they could wreck any plans by their enemies, usually through terror.

Terror is in fact one of the favored tools of those who fear irrelevance. One well-placed bomb can destroy a peace treaty, and the importance of dealing with those who have such abilities makes them, perversely, powerful.

Israel's current government has recently given incredible gifts of prestige and relevance to two parties who deserve it least: Hamas and Syria. By negotiating with Hamas and Syria, Olmert has elevated their statures immensely. In the space of a month, Hamas has gone from being viewed as an illegal terror organization into the de facto leader of 1.5 million people with defined borders, and Syria has changed from the despised sponsors of terror in Lebanon into someone whose favor is desired.

Similarly, Condoleeza Rice has given similar prestige to Hezbollah, bringing its own grievances against Israel to the forefront and effectively recognizing it as governing Lebanon, even to the point of claiming that Syrian meddling in Lebanon is what the Lebanese people want.

There has been little given back to the West for these gifts. Terrorists and their supporters have been catapulted back into the positions they most desire; for free. None of them are likely to moderate as a result; on the contrary, they have just been hugely rewarded for their years of causing chaos by being elevated on the world stage.

The West needs to understand the psychology of its enemies, of people who daily call for its destruction. Boosting them is exactly the wrong thing to do, as it empowers them and gives them incentive to up the ante in behaving like spoilers.

This month has been a huge setback for those who want to eradicate Arab terror, and reverberations will be felt for years.

Hamas leader's life of luxury

Palestine Press Agency published pictures from Israel's Channel 10 showing Khaled Meshaal in a luxury hotel in Abu Dhabi:

Life is really tough when you are forced to keep your people miserable while you are forced to enjoy such depravity.

By the way, the US Consulate to Jerusalem is located in the Western part of the city, within the Green Line.

I've discussed other interesting things about the US Consulate to Jerusalem and how it exclusively caters to Palestinian Arabs previously.

CORRECTION: A commenter points out that the consulate is indeed in East Jerusalem.

CORRECTION 2: Indeed the main office is in West Jerusalem; there is a separate leased satellite office in East Jerusalem.

The bicycle and the kite

The relative calm in Gaza gives us a chance to look yet again at how news photographers and editors use their biases to either evoke a mood or subtly tilt a story. They use a combination of selecting the photos and choosing the captions to get their point across.

Here are two pictures from Gaza:

In the first picture we see a a young man flying a kite on top of a ruined building. The second shows a man riding a bicycle in what appears to be a fairly idyllic town.

The caption for the first:

A Palestinian boy flies a kite as he stands on a building destroyed in recent years of conflict with Israel in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, Thursday, June 19, 2008. Guns went quiet as a six-month truce between Israel and Gaza Strip militants took effect early Thursday, but there was widespread skepticism about its ability to hold. The cease-fire, which Egypt labored for months to conclude, aims to bring an end to a year of fighting that has killed seven Israelis and more than 400 Palestinians — many of them civilians — since the Islamic militant group Hamas wrested control of Gaza a year ago

In what is almost certainly a staged photo, the youth chooses to fly a kite in a place where he cannot easily run and the kite could probably get caught in a building or pther ruin. The caption together with the contrived photo subtly make the point that Palestinian Arab youths just want to play like all kids, but Israel has created a situation where that is all but impossible.

How about the second photo? It can certainly be used to evoke the same idea, that of Palestinian Arab lives slowly returning to normalcy during the cease fire. But it was taken a month ago, before the cease-fire, and its caption means to blame Israel for something else:

A Palestinian man rides a bike with his child on board in the Jebaliya Refugee Camp, northern Gaza Strip, Tuesday May 20, 2008. Defiant Gaza residents are persistently finding ways around Israeli-imposed fuel restrictions. Owners of gas-run cars are converting to liquid gas. Drivers of old diesel cars use vegetable oil mixes, and two engineers converted a car to run on electrical batteries - and are now open for business.

Did no Palestinian Arabs ride bikes before fuel shortages? Did none of them fly kites before the cease-fire?

The implication in both cases is no, they did not. They are forced to ride bikes because of Israel and they were all cowering in fear before the cease fire.

For further indications of media bias, do a Google image search on "Jabalya refugee camp." You will see many violent images - bombed out buildings, people firing guns. You will be hard-pressed to find any images like the one above, of a clean, wide residential street with no visible damage, in what looks more like a small town than a refugee camp.

When photographers want to blame Israel for all of Gaza's problems, they will make sure that their photos reflect the idea that all of Gaza is a war zone with constant fear of Israeli bombings. But when one wants to blame Israel in a different frame of reference, his image of Jabalya is suddenly different - we are accidentally seeing a side of Jabalya that almost certainly represents how it really looks and that few news photographers would ever purposefully reveal.

Egypt grabs more weapons meant for Gaza

Part of the "truce" between Israel and Hamas includes a halt to all smuggling of arms to Gaza. At least that's what Israel's negotiator is claiming:

Gilad described the conditions according to which the terror organizations were to be judged during the ceasefire. "We need a total ceasefire – all included. If tomorrow morning one single rocket is fired, it will be a violation of the agreement. There is no room for interpretation, and no mediating body is needed. We will not accept the firing of even one Qassam.

"Egypt, on its side, is committed to preventing the smuggling activity from Gaza. It's simple; Egypt has a border with Gaza, through which weapons and terrorists are smuggled. Smuggling is a serious violation of the terms. Any such infraction will lead to a change in Israel's stance from the way in which it was presented to the Egyptians," he said.

Well, Hamas didn't seem to waste any time in trying to break that condition. From AFP:

Egyptian authorities on Friday found a large cache of weapons and explosives hidden in the mountains of the Sinai peninsula, a security official told AFP.

North Sinai authorities found "25 anti-aircraft missiles, 12 anti-personnel and anti-armour grenades, eight mortars, as well as five surface to surface and surface to air missiles," the official said.

"A large number of gun barrels and large amounts of detonators used for explosives and mines were also found," the official added.

For every cache found by Egypt, how many are missed?

Likely terrorist's family donates his organs to Israelis

Ma'an reports:

The family of an 18-year-old Palestinian civilian, who died after being shot by Israeli security guards a few weeks ago, have donated his organs to save the lives of six Israelis.

Patient "A" was clinically dead when he was transferred to the intensive care unit in Shiba medical center in Tel Hashomeir. But doctors were unable to resuscitate him.

The Hebrew daily newspaper Ma’ariv reported that his family decided to donate his organs to those who needed them, regardless of their race, religion or identity.

The National Center for Organ Transplants promised to keep information concerning his identity confidential for the safety of his family who live in the Palestinian Authority area. The families of the recipients were told about the identity of the donor but have also agreed to keep the information confidential, according to the newspaper.

On Wednesday evening the Patient "A"'s father had an emotional meeting with the patient who received his son’s heart.

Patient "A"'s father described his son as "a great person who was loved by everyone. He was big-hearted and I didn’t hesitate to donate his organs to needy patients, even though he was killed by Israeli security guards.”

“At first it was hard for me, but God inspired me to take the right decision to help the patients by donating my son’s organs. I’m happy with this decision and I don’t differentiate between Jews and Arabs. All I care about is saving people's lives. That’s why I didn’t ask about the patients' identities,” he added.

My best guess is that this is how the man was killed (from PCHR's weekly reports of Palestinian Arabs killed and arrested by Israel):

on 9 May, a Palestinian civilian was shot dead and another was arrested by the guards of “Ofra” settlement, northeast of Ramallah. IOF claimed that the victim attempted to get close to the settlement in order to fire at it from a hunting rifle.

This is the only West Bank death I could find that remotely fits the description in the Ma'an/Maariv article, so it appears that "Patient A" was a terrorist who tried to kill as many Jews as possible - and his family ended up saving them.

UPDATE: More details on the Ofra incident from Ma'an:

A Palestinian gunman was killed and another detained in Ein Yabrud village north-east of Ramallah on Friday after an alleged attack on five Israelis.

Unofficial Israeli sources told Ma'an that five Israelis were vacationing in the mountains near Ein Yabrud village when they were attacked by a Palestinian gunmen who opened fire on them. Israeli armed men then responded and opened fire on the gunmen. One was seriously injured and later bled to death. Another Palestinian was arrested.

Official sources have still not confirmed the details of the incident.

The Al-Aqsa Brigades affiliated to Imad Mughniyya later claimed responsibility for the attack. They told Ma'an that their resistance fighters survived the counter attack, but that the Palestinian who was killed and the other who was detained were bystanders and were not part of their armed group.

They said in a statement that the Brigades opened fire on a group of settlers and clashed with them in Ein Yabrud.

Amazing video of smuggling tunnels in Rafah

From Israel's Channel 10 (in Hebrew).

It shows a tunnel 20 meters deep and 900 meters long, used for smuggling. It also shows the construction of another.

The Gazans repeat a claim I've seen lately that Egypt is pumping poison gas in the tunnels and killing people, although I have never seen anyone specify who exactly was killed in such a way.

Gaza groups criticize journalists - then shoot one

A political forum was held in Gaza today called "The role of media intellectuals in the dialogue and the restoration of national unity." Hamas spokesman - and former newspaper editor - Ghazi Hamad said that "the Palestinian media has become part of the problem rather than a solution" and they are too negative and partisan.

Almost as if to underscore how bad journalists are in the minds of some Gazans, a prominent media personality, Mostafa Alsua, the editor of the Journal of Palestine, was shot in his office in Gaza City today.

That'll teach 'em!

Hezbollah goes back to its roots

More recently, in the aftermath of the 2006 war, Hezbollah has stated that it only uses weapons for the "resistance" and implied that this was a temporary state of affairs:

"No army in the world will force us to drop our weapons, force us to surrender our arms, as long as people believe in this resistance," said Hassan Nasrallah, who claimed Hezbollah victorious in the fighting.

But he added, "We do not wish to keep our weapons forever," because they should not be part of domestic life.

"When we build a strong and just state that is capable of protecting the nation and the citizens, we will easily find an honorable solution to the resistance issue and its weapons," he told the flag-waving crowd gathered in Beirut's bombed-out southern suburbs.

Hezbollah has, for years, used the Shebaa Farms as its excuse to keep its weapons, saying that part of Lebanese soil is still being "occupied" in spite of the UN ruling otherwise. And its constant harping on the issue has gained them apparent support from the US State Department:

US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice spent the weekend in Israel and on Monday made an unannounced visit to Lebanon, where she said "the time has come" to deal with the Shebaa Farms, an area occupied by Israel and claimed by Lebanon. Hizbullah has long cited the liberation of the Shebaa Farms as a reason for its men to keep their arms...

So when the issue is put back on the table, what does Hezbollah say?

The Shiite movement Hezbollah said on Thursday that Lebanon would still need its armed presence even if Israel finally quit the disputed Shebaa Farms district in the south.

"Any Zionist retreat from the Shebaa Farms would be a big achievement for the 'resistance' for this would be the result of its role and its pressure," Hezbollah MP Hassan Fadlallah was quoted as saying by the state-run National News Agency.

But any retreat "will not change the fact that Lebanon needs the resistance," he said.

Resistance against what?

Rice, as all people who suffer from wishful thinking about Arab terror groups, is not looking at the big picture. She is not taking into consideration Hezbollah's own stated objectives, listed at its founding over two decades ago. Like all terror groups, Hezbollah espouses a philosophy that needs to be revisited in order to understand its actions.

In Hezbollah's case, its guiding principles were formed in 1985 with a letter called "The Hezbollah Program" which enumerated three objectives:

(a) to expel the Americans. the French and their allies definitely from Lebanon, putting an end to any colonialist entity on our land;
(b) to submit the Phalanges to a just power and bring them all to justice for the crimes they have perpetrated against Muslims and Christians;
(c) to permit all the sons of our people to determine their future and to choose in all the liberty the form of government they desire. We call upon all of them to pick the option of Islamic government which, alone, is capable of guaranteeing justice and liberty for all. Only an Islamic regime can stop any further tentative attempts of imperialistic infiltration into our country.

Because of Hezbollah's constant anti-Israel rhetoric, people think that it will just disappear if its enemy surrenders. But Israel is only a part of Hezbollah's program, and its real goal has been to replace Lebanon's multi-ethnic government with an Islamic state (and eventually a pan-Islamic ummah that includes Palestine, Syria and probably Jordan as well.) Its weapons are a critical part towards achieving this goal, and it will not hesitate to use them (all in the name of Lebanese "unity," of course.)

Rice is utterly ignorant of Hezbollah's real positions and goals, and she is willing to sacrifice America's best friend yet again in order to support her ignorance.

Minor victory in Google News

Uruknet.info, one of the most virulent anti-semitic and pro-jihadi sites on the Internet, has finally been removed from Google News as a legitimate news source.

The People's Voice, a similar rag that we have written about before, is freaking out:

One of my Associates, Uruknet.Info, is once again the victim of Google’s zionist inspired polices. Just a month ago, the co-founder of Google was in Israel to ‘celebrate’ its 60 years as an occupying power… he obviously was inspired by his visit as his Company’s policies seem to have shifted even more to the right than they were before his trip.

Uruknet has been hacked, taken of Google News indexing and now, the latest… taken off Google completely. How can this be done? We really don’t know, but we do know that Google has refused to respond to the thousands of requests by readers to reinstate Uruknet on Google News. They came up with a response after weeks only to the site itself where it “reasoned” that Uruknet was “only” an aggregator. All of us know that it is an exceptionally important aggregator, but it is far more than that! It contains original material, has editorial choices and space for commentary and it presents for an international public much material that otherwise would not be translated or disseminated.

Indeed, uruknet is pretty much the major place on the Internet to disseminate direct translations of Osama Bin Laden's audio tapes. Whether they do this as news or as a mouthpiece for OBL is a different story.

The writer is not even competent enough to know how to use Google, as clearly uruknet.info is available through Google search. But its exclusion from Google News is welcome and much overdue, and The People's Voice and similar pro-terror rags should hopefully follow.

Why Americans support Israel

A very nice article in Foreign Affairs shows quite well that Americans have overwhelmingly supported the right of Jews to have a state, well before modern Zionism, and that this is why America has had pro-Israel policies - not because of the "Israel lobby" or an influential Jewish minority.

Highlights:

The story of U.S. support for a Jewish state in the Middle East begins early. John Adams could not have been more explicit. "I really wish the Jews again in Judea an independent nation," he said, after his presidency. From the early nineteenth century on, gentile Zionists fell into two main camps in the United States. Prophetic Zionists saw the return of the Jews to the Promised Land as the realization of a literal interpretation of biblical prophecy, often connected to the return of Christ and the end of the world. ...
Other, less literal and less prophetic Christians developed a progressive Zionism that would resonate down through the decades among both religious and secular gentiles. In the nineteenth century, liberal Christians often believed that God was building a better world through human progress. They saw the democratic and (relatively) egalitarian United States as both an example of the new world God was making and a powerful instrument to further his grand design. Some American Protestants believed that God was moving to restore what they considered the degraded and oppressed Jews of the world to the Promised Land, just as God was uplifting and improving the lives of other ignorant and unbelieving people through the advance of Protestant and liberal principles. They wanted the Jews to establish their own state because they believed that this would both shelter the Jews from persecution and, through the redemptive powers of liberty and honest agricultural labor, uplift and improve what they perceived to be the squalid morals and deplorable hygiene of contemporary Ottoman and eastern European Jews. As Adams put it, "Once restored to an independent government and no longer persecuted they would soon wear away some of the asperities and peculiarities of their character and possibly in time become liberal Unitarian Christians." For such Christians, American Zionism was part of a broader program of transforming the world by promoting the ideals of the United States.
In 1891, these strands of gentile Zionists came together. The Methodist lay leader William Blackstone presented a petition to President Benjamin Harrison calling on the United States to use its good offices to convene a congress of European powers so that they could induce the Ottoman Empire to turn Palestine over to the Jews. The 400 signatories were overwhelmingly non-Jewish and included the chief justice of the Supreme Court; the Speaker of the House of Representatives; the chairs of the House Ways and Means Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee; the future president William McKinley; the mayors of Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington; the editors or proprietors of the leading East Coast and Chicago newspapers; and an impressive array of Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Roman Catholic clergy. Business leaders who signed the petition included Cyrus McCormick, John Rockefeller, and J. P. Morgan. At a time when the American Jewish community was neither large nor powerful, and no such thing as an Israel lobby existed, the pillars of the American gentile establishment went on record supporting a U.S. diplomatic effort to create a Jewish state in the lands of the Bible.

The United States' sense of its own identity and mission in the world has been shaped by readings of Hebrew history and thought. The writer Herman Melville expressed this view: "We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people -- the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world." From the time of the Puritans to the present day, preachers, thinkers, and politicians in the United States -- secular as well as religious, liberal as well as conservative -- have seen the Americans as a chosen people, bound together less by ties of blood than by a set of beliefs and a destiny. Americans have believed that God (or history) has brought them into a new land and made them great and rich and that their continued prosperity depends on their fulfilling their obligations toward God or the principles that have blessed them so far. Ignore these principles -- turn toward the golden calf -- and the scourge will come.

Both religious and nonreligious Americans have looked to the Hebrew Scriptures for an example of a people set apart by their mission and called to a world-changing destiny. Did the land Americans inhabit once belong to others? Yes, but the Hebrews similarly conquered the land of the Canaanites. Did the tiny U.S. colonies armed only with the justice of their cause defeat the world's greatest empire? So did David, the humble shepherd boy, fell Goliath. Were Americans in the nineteenth century isolated and mocked for their democratic ideals? So were the Hebrews surrounded by idolaters. Have Americans defeated their enemies at home and abroad? So, according to the Scriptures, did the Hebrews triumph. And when Americans held millions of slaves in violation of their beliefs, were they punished and scourged? Yes, and much like the Hebrews, who suffered the consequences of their sins before God.

This mythic understanding of the United States' nature and destiny is one of the most powerful and enduring elements in American culture and thought. As the ancient Hebrews did, many Americans today believe that they bear a revelation that is ultimately not just for them but also for the whole world; they have often considered themselves God's new Israel. One of the many consequences of this presumed kinship is that many Americans think it is both right and proper for one chosen people to support another. They are not disturbed when the United States' support of Israel, a people and a state often isolated and ostracized, makes the United States unpopular or creates other problems. The United States' adoption of the role of protector of Israel and friend of the Jews is a way of legitimizing its own status as a country called to a unique destiny by God.
Besides a direct divine promise, two other important justifications that the Americans brought forward in their contests with the Native Americans were the concept that they were expanding into "empty lands" and John Locke's related "fair use" doctrine, which argued that unused property is a waste and an offense against nature. U.S. settlers felt that only those who would improve the land, settling it densely with extensive farms and building towns, had a real right to it. John Quincy Adams made the case in 1802: "Shall [the Indians] doom an immense region of the globe to perpetual desolation ... ?" And Thomas Jefferson warned that the Native Americans who failed to learn from the whites and engage in productive agriculture faced a grim fate. They would "relapse into barbarism and misery, lose numbers by war and want, and we shall be obliged to drive them, with the beasts of the forest into the Stony mountains."

Through much of U.S. history, such views resonated not just with backwoodsmen but also with liberal and sophisticated citizens. These arguments had a special meaning when it came to the Holy Land. As pious Americans dwelt on the glories of ancient Jerusalem and the Temple of Solomon, they pictured a magnificent and fertile land -- "a land flowing with milk and honey," as the Bible describes it. But by the nineteenth century, when first dozens, then hundreds, and ultimately thousands of Americans visited the Holy Land -- and millions more thronged to lectures and presentations to hear reports of these travels -- there was little milk or honey; Palestine was one of the poorest, most backward, and most ramshackle provinces of the Ottoman Empire. To American eyes, the hillsides and rocky fields of Judea were desolate and empty -- God, many believed, had cursed the land when he sent the Jews into their second exile, which they saw as the Jews' punishment for their failure to recognize Christ as the Messiah. And so, Americans believed, the Jews belonged in the Holy Land, and the Holy Land belonged to the Jews. The Jews would never prosper until they were home and free, and the land would never bloom until its rightful owners returned.
The Prophet Isaiah had described the future return of the Jews to their homeland as God's grace bringing water to a desert land. And Americans watched the returning fertility of the land under the cultivation of early Zionist settlers with the astonished sense that biblical prophecy was being fulfilled before their eyes. "The springs of Jewish colonizing vigor, amply fed by the money of world Jewry, flowed on to the desert," wrote Time magazine in 1946, echoing the language of Isaiah.

...One thing, at least, seems clear. In the future, as in the past, U.S. policy toward the Middle East will, for better or worse, continue to be shaped primarily by the will of the American majority, not the machinations of any minority, however wealthy or engaged in the political process some of its members may be.

Read the whole thing.

Go crazy

I once had a coworker who would occasionally erupt in anger during department meetings and start yelling at the boss about something. He was a friend and he explained to me that these episodes were deliberate - designed to keep our boss on edge and to create an environment where he would be treated with kid gloves.

As he was an essential member of the team and the boss was relatively weak, this strategy worked perfectly. The boss would give my friend a wide berth and would not push him too much, out of fear.

In this case, my friend used the threat of acting irrationally in a rational manner, to put himself in a better negotiating position. And it was effective.

The reason I am thinking of this is from this quote from Ehud Olmert:

"I send a warm hug to all of the residents of the south, who have withstood the long and difficult months, and years, with great courage and strength, facing the daily threat and allowing the government to act in an intelligent, restrained, and responsible manner," he added.

Israel has been doing a lot of acting in an "intelligent, restrained, and responsible manner," mostly with an eye to keeping its Western audience happy. But Israel's opponents have no such restrictions on their behavior, and this gives them a competitive advantage in any interaction.

When Hamas knows that Israel is likely to act in a predictable way, it can use that knowledge to calculate exactly how much damage it can cause and how many Jews it can target on any given day without great fear of serious repercussions. They know that Israel will not target their leadership, they know that Israel will try to stay away from bombing residential areas, they know that Israel will not re-occupy land. This knowledge gives them great latitude in deciding how to act.

The Arabs, on the other hand, make their own assumed irrationality a central part of their collective psyche when trying to gain more concessions from the West. I have called this the "diplomacy of fear," and it is so ingrained in our thought processes that it has become accepted as fact. We are always in fear that the Arabs of Muslims will act crazy and we subconsciously adapt to it by pandering to them - and pressuring the rational side to do the same.

If the West isn't going to start treating Arabs as responsible human beings whose actions have consequences, then perhaps it is time for Israel to start acting a bit less rationally to even the playing field.