Yourish.com

10/09/2009

Portraying Hamas

Filed under: Hamas, Israel, Media Bias — Tags: — Soccerdad @ 8:00 am

Barry Rubin writes about a recent Washington Post article about Hamas:

Here’s a good article on Hamas and how it’s a barrier to peace, with no illusions about the group moderating or being misunderstand. The article also points out how Hamas is responsible for continuing sanctions on Gaza and is uninterested in trying to improve the living standards of is own people.

Perhaps I’m nitpicking but I wasn’t so impressed with the article. There were two paragraphs that bugged me.

First, in the middle, there was this:

Hamas, which was founded as an Islamist alternative to the Palestine Liberation Organization and whose charter calls for Israel’s destruction, is considered a terrorist group by the United States for its sponsorship of suicide attacks and the launching of thousands of missiles and mortar shells from Gaza into Israel. The group draws financial and material support from Iran and Syria. Hamas says its attacks on Israel are defensive and a legitimate tactic in Palestinian efforts to establish a homeland.

“[I]s considered a terrorist group?” It is, by definition, a terrorist group for precisely the reasons stated. Second, when the reporter uses the term “legitimate tactic,” he allows that claim to stand unchallenged.

At the end of the article we read:

According to officials from Hamas and analysts of the group, those conditions are unlikely to be accepted, cutting as they do to the core of the group’s ideology and strategy. Just as there is no sense that the language of Hamas leaders has come close to meeting those requirements, despite talk of a possible compromise, there has been no obvious effort by Mitchell’s team to try to reshape the conditions.

What does “reshape the conditions” mean? And why does the article seem critical that Mitchell won’t? I’d understand the term to mean “water down the demands” and I see no reason for Mitchell to do so. And why should Mitchell “reshape the conditions?” So Israel will be forced to deal with an unrepentant terrorist organization?

Finally, the reporter, Howard Schneider compares Mitchell’s work here with his work with the IRA. There’s one important difference. The IRA wanted England gone from Northern Ireland; Hamas (and Fatah, for that matter) want Israel gone. Period.

I can’t disagree that Schneider hit on the points that Barry Rubin emphasized. I still find his packaging problematic.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad

07/31/2009

The President’s teachable Mideast moment – the Washington Post vs. the New York Times

Filed under: Israel, Israeli Double Standard Time — Tags: , , — Soccerdad @ 9:00 am

The Washington Post surprised yesterday with an editorial Tough on Israel:

But the administration also is guilty of missteps. Rather than pocketing Mr. Netanyahu’s initial concessions — he gave a speech on Palestinian statehood and suggested parameters for curtailing settlements accepted by previous U.S. administrations — Mr. Obama chose to insist on an absolutist demand for a settlement “freeze.” Palestinian and Arab leaders who had accepted previous compromises immediately hardened their positions; they also balked at delivering the “confidence-building” concessions to Israel that the administration seeks. Israeli public opinion, which normally leans against the settler movement, has rallied behind Mr. Netanyahu. And Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, which were active during the Bush administration’s final year, have yet to resume.

Naturally J-Street’s MJ Rosenberg (via memeorandum) started name calling:

Of course, the Washington Post is not an Israeli paper so its defense of even the most indefensible Israeli policy — the refusal to freeze settlements — is just weird. Fred Hiatt (the editorial page editor), neocon hero Charles Krauthammer and columnist Bill Kristol consistently defend Israeli policies with a zealousness they last demonstrated when pushing for war with Iraq.

Where was Rosenberg six months ago when the same Hiatt was questioning whether Israel ought to be fighting a war of self defense or giving op-ed space to Hamas apologists? I realize that Rosenberg considers anyone who isn’t as reflexively anti-Israel as he is to be pro-Israel and out of the mainstream. However the Post’s measured criticism of the President can hardly be considered a sign of it’s being pro-Israel.

If the Post’s editors are taking this stand, I think that a lot of it has goes back to their meeting Mahmoud Abbas two months ago. AS Jonathan Tobin recalls:

As Mahmoud Abbas, the supposedly moderate head of the Palestinian Authority, recently told the Washington Post, he has no intention of dealing with Israel. Instead, he will sit back and wait for Obama to keep applying the screws to America’s only democratic ally in the region.

Jennifer Rubin extrapolates:

Well, that wasn’t so hard, was it? Perhaps others in Congress and those still spinning so furiously for Obama (Alan Dershowitz included) can at least concede that whatever Obama thought he might be able to achieve by alienating our ally has proven to be counterproductive. He has lost the trust of the Israelis and encouraged intransigence among Palestinians and Arab states.

Israel Matzav adds that the President has lived down to expectations.

The editors of the New York Times, though, are all in favor of President Obama’s approach. Though initially concerned with Abbas’s performance, they seem to have gotten over it. Today they applaud the President’s pressure and beg him to keep it up in The Settlements Issue.

Mr. Obama and his negotiator, George Mitchell, have focused on settlements after prying loose a commitment — highly caveated — from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to a two-state solution. The Palestinians insist they won’t return to talks until all construction halts. The Americans have decided that a freeze is needed to show Palestinians and other Arabs that Israel’s conservative government is serious about peace.

Given the makeup of the “moderate” Fatah party that Israel is supposed to make peace with, focusing on whether PM Netanyahu said the magic words seems to be a bit of misdirection. The following paragraph lets us know how dishonest the editors of the Times are:

Less visibly, but we hope just as assertively, the administration is pressing the Palestinians and other Arab leaders to take concrete steps to demonstrate their commitment to a peace deal. Those must clearly contribute to Israel’s sense of security.

“[W]e hope just as assertively…” If the pressure was “visible,” it could be just as assertive. The fact that it’s being applied privately (if at all) shows that it is clearly not as assertive. And as the editorial itself acknowledges towards the end, it hasn’t been effective at all.

President Obama and Mr. Mitchell claim they are making progress, but so far there is little sign of it. Saudi Arabia, which has pushed Washington hard to revive negotiations, has been especially resistant. Mr. Mitchell would do well to remind them that a prolonged stalemate will only feed extremism across the region.

So the Times supports the President’s “visible” pressure on Israel even though it acknowledges that the policy is yielding no diplomatic benefits. The editorial conclude:

Israeli leaders do not often risk being at odds with an American president, but polls show broad support for Mr. Netanyahu’s resistance. President Obama, a skilled communicator, has started a constructive dialogue with the Islamic world. Now he needs to explain to Israelis why freezing settlements and reviving peace talks is clearly in their interest.

The broad support is for PM Netanyahu’s policies so far which represent the views of the majority of the Israeli electorate.

Obama is a skilled (if overrated) orator. He is not a skilled communicator as he often does not listen to others. He hasn’t started a “constructive dialogue with the Islamic world,” as much as he as assured them and demonstrated to them that he intends to pressure Israel to accommodate their demands, while paying only lip service to the demands he makes on them. Naturally that has led to a hardening of their positions.

President Obama doesn’t need to explain to Israel why “freezing settlements and reviving peace talks is to Israel’s benefit. Plenty of diplomats, politicians, journalists and academics have been explaining things to Israel for the past 40 years. Since 1993 has heeded most of this advice only to see its security undermined and its diplomatic position in no way enhanced.

Perhaps what the President needs to do is to use his vaunted communication skills to convince the Arabs that they have more to gain by making peace with Israel even if Israel doesn’t accede to every demand of the Palestinians.

We’ve just seen a “teachable moment” in the history of Middle East diplomacy. The editors of the Washington Post seem to have learned something; the editors of the New York Times and the President seem not to.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

03/12/2009

Two Freeman myths busted

Filed under: Anti-Semitism, Israel, Israel Derangement Syndrome — Tags: , — Soccerdad @ 10:00 am

With a summary like

Washington’s lobbying machine deprived Barack Obama of a valuable adviser.

I’m not going to bother with David Broder’s Chas Freeman’s withdrawal is a loss for the country.

However on the op op-ed page the editors of the Washington Post weigh in on Chas Freeman failed nomination with a fantastic editorial. (via memeorandum) I’m often critical of Hiatt and co. but today they were right on.

It wasn’t until Mr. Freeman withdrew from consideration for the job, however, that it became clear just how bad a selection Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair had made. Mr. Freeman issued a two-page screed on Tuesday in which he described himself as the victim of a shadowy and sinister “Lobby” whose “tactics plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency” and which is “intent on enforcing adherence to the policies of a foreign government.” Yes, Mr. Freeman was referring to Americans who support Israel — and his statement was a grotesque libel.

While the editors of the Post seem now to have been bothered by the appointment, they found Freeman’s statement on his withdrawal confirmation of his unfitness. This is an important point. That statement was vicious and as Jake Tapper noted, it was in response to a pretty standard debate over a candidates fitness. Is there any Freeman supporter who read that statement and said, “Gee, this guy really is extreme?” If there were any, I haven’t read them yet. This gives further credence to the thought that Freeman’s supporters were driven more by his anti-Israel stands than for his “contrarian” views.

The Post scores another hit:

For the record, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee says that it took no formal position on Mr. Freeman’s appointment and undertook no lobbying against him. If there was a campaign, its leaders didn’t bother to contact the Post editorial board. According to a report by Newsweek, Mr. Freeman’s most formidable critic — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — was incensed by his position on dissent in China.

Damn that Chinese democracy lobby! (The Post’s reporter, Walter Pincus reported that an AIPAC official gave reporters negative information about Freeman when asked for background on the appointee.)

And this:

But let’s consider the ambassador’s broader charge: He describes “an inability of the American public to discuss, or the government to consider, any option for U.S. policies in the Middle East opposed by the ruling faction in Israeli politics.” That will certainly be news to Israel’s “ruling faction,” which in the past few years alone has seen the U.S. government promote a Palestinian election that it opposed; refuse it weapons it might have used for an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities; and adopt a policy of direct negotiations with a regime that denies the Holocaust and that promises to wipe Israel off the map. Two Israeli governments have been forced from office since the early 1990s after open clashes with Washington over matters such as settlement construction in the occupied territories.

The editors conclude:

But several of his allies have made themselves famous (and advanced their careers) by making such charges — and no doubt Mr. Freeman himself will now win plenty of admiring attention. Crackpot tirades such as his have always had an eager audience here and around the world. The real question is why an administration that says it aims to depoliticize U.S. intelligence estimates would have chosen such a man to oversee them.

Yes, they did become famous, didn’t they?

And Jennifer Rubin adds:

And that is where the story now leads us, they correctly note. How was it that Blair placed him in this role? And why should we now have confidence in his judgment?

And as far as Freeman’s famous contrariness, consider what James Fallows wrote:

For any of those roles, a man like Freeman might not be the prudent choice. But as head of the National Intelligence Council, my friend said, he would be exactly right. While he would have no line-operational responsibilities or powers, he would be able to raise provocative questions, to ask “What if everybody’s wrong?”, to force attention to the doubts, possibilities, and alternatives that normally get sanded out of the deliberative process through the magic known as “groupthink.” As Dan Froomkin of NiemanWatch wrote in an item that called Freeman “A One-Man Destroyer of Groupthink,”

He has… spent a goodly part of the last 10 years raising questions that otherwise might never get answered — or even asked — because they’re too embarrassing, awkward, or difficult.
For him to be put in charge of what [Laura Rozen of Foreign Policy] calls “the intelligence community’s primary big-think shop and the lead body in producing national intelligence estimates” is about the most emphatic statement the Obama Administration could possibly make that it won’t succumb to the kind of submissive intelligence-community groupthink that preceded the war in Iraq.

Actually the website is called Nieman Watchdog. But I read Froomkin’s interview with Freeman there and his description of Freeman. I saw nothing to distinguish Freeman’s views there. I saw one Bush critic, Froomkin, admiring another Bush critic, Freeman. Their views were pretty standard anti-Bush views. I’m not sure what impressed Fallows so much.

On the Post’s electronic op-ed page, Charles Lane makes the same point in the Real Chas Freeman.

Now, you can agree or disagree with Freeman’s take — I think it’s rubbish. But one thing it definitely is not is original. Susan Sontag said more or less the same thing just after September 11, 2001. You can get some version of this “analysis” any day of the week in the blogosphere or the Middle East Studies programs of our major universities.

As best I can tell, what distinguishes Freeman from other retailers of these clichés is attitude. It’s not just that he believes what he believes, he insists on sneering at or questioning the intelligence and good faith of those who disagree — while trumpeting his own supposed intellectual bravery. This has its ugliest manifestation, of course, in his embrace of conspiracy theories about the “Israel Lobby.”

So while the MSM today seems to be missing the point about the Freeman controversy, the editorial pages of the Washington Post are home to some good points.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

02/15/2009

What could be worse than Hamas?

Filed under: Israel, Israel Derangement Syndrome, Media Bias — Tags: — Soccerdad @ 9:00 am

Three years ago in advance of Palestinian elections, the Washington Post heralded the participation of Hamas, in “Pre-election turmoil“:

Already, too, democracy is showing its benefits. Faced with the possibility of defeat by Hamas, Fatah has been forced to overhaul the aging and corrupt cadre left behind by Yasser Arafat and install young reformers at the top of its legislative list. Their leader, the Israeli-imprisoned Marwan Barghouti, published a remarkable letter in Palestinian newspapers Friday apologizing for Fatah’s mistakes and asking voters for another chance. Hamas itself is showing some pragmatism: Its newly elected council members supported the election last week of a Christian woman as mayor of Ramallah, the most important West Bank town. A senior Israeli army official recently predicted that if Hamas did win the elections it would continue to curtail attacks on Israel.

(I pointed out back then the hollowness of these “benefits.”)

When Hamas won in Palestinian elections three years ago, the Washington Post hailed the result as presenting new “opportunities” in “Hamas’s Choice.”

THE VICTORY of Hamas in the Palestinian elections creates fresh opportunities as well as dangers in the Middle East. The Islamic fundamentalist movement will now come under extraordinary pressure to cease all acts of terrorism, help restore order in the turbulent Gaza Strip and moderate its rejection of Israel. The pressure will come not only from Western governments and aid donors but from its own constituents. Hamas’s leaders had hoped to use a minority position in the Palestinian legislature to exercise a veto over peace talks with Israel while avoiding disarmament and wider responsibility. As leader of the cabinet that will be formed under President Mahmoud Abbas, the Islamists will find their straddle of democracy and terrorism far more difficult to maintain.

The Post even gave Hamas honcho Mousa Abu-Marzook the space to opine, “What Hamas is seeking.”

We appeal to the American people’s sense of fairness to judge this conflict in light of the great thoughts, principles and ideals you hold dear in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the democracy you have built. It is not unreasonable to expect America to practice abroad what it preaches at home. We can but sincerely hope that you use your honest judgment and the blessings of ascendancy God has given you to demand an end to the occupation. Meaningful democracy cannot flourish as long as an external force maintains the balance of power. It is the right of all people to pursue their own destiny.

So the election of Hamas and the subsequent disengagement from Gaza, gave Hamas the opportunity to rule territory, Gaza, and subsequently turned it into a source of terror against Israel. Anyone familiar with Hamas would have concluded that this was the likely path Hamas would take. If the Washington Post has regretted its promotion of Hamas or felt let down, its editors haven’t been that explicit. However what really bothers the Washington Post, is the result of the Israeli election as they let us know today in “Israel’s Step Backwards.”

ISRAEL’S ELECTION last week propelled the country back in time to a political era when the parliament was sharply divided between parties that favored or opposed a two-state settlement with Palestinians. As in the 1980s, the right has the upper hand: Likud party leader Binyamin Netanyahu appears to have the best chance to become prime minister, even though his party finished second behind the centrist Kadima. Americans who remember Mr. Netanyahu’s last stint as prime minister in the 1990s — and there are several in the Obama administration who were working on Mideast policy then — have to be concerned that he would repeat his strategy of seeking to delay or undermine all peace negotiations with the Palestinians. He might also press for Israeli or American military action against Iran, and he has promised to “topple” and “uproot” Hamas from the Gaza Strip.

As I pointed out the other day, Netanyahu was vilified for insisting that Arafat stick to his agreements. Apparently then the Post recognizes no obligations that the Palestinians have towards Israel (or even their own people). All that the Post requires for peace is Israeli acquiescence to international pressures to withdraw from ever more territory.

If the Post had published such a comparable editorial before the election of Hamas, it would have concluded,
“Hamas might also continue launching terror attacks against Israel.” In that case it would have been correct. Instead it presented terror as once of the choices before Hamas and expressed the vain hope that it would choose democracy.

Mr. Netanyahu has said that he hopes to form a broad government including Kadima and possibly even the left-wing Labor party, which finished fourth behind an ultranationalist ticket. That would mimic the Israeli governments of the 1980s, which paralyzed the peace process but not the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Kadima and Labor, which favor continued talks on a two-state deal with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, would be wise to stay out of a Netanyahu-led government.

Was the paralysis during the 1980’s really so bad? Israel made progress (by the Post’s reckoning) in the 1990’s and was rewarded with increasing terror. It’s also interesting that the Post abhors a Netanyahu government and yet dismisses the idea of having more leftist parties join the Likud. So does the Post really favor a right wing government in Israel? Finally, just remember that the Post welcomed the inclusion of Hamas in the Palestinians government but positively fears a centrist government run by Likud. It says a lot about how the editors of the Washington Post judge concepts such as “extreme” and “moderate.”

Having promised more active diplomacy in the Middle East, the Obama administration will have to grapple with how to advance its aims despite what could be fundamental disagreements with Israel’s new leaders. One way to do so is to push for the conclusion by the outgoing Israeli government of a cease-fire with Hamas. Egypt was reported last week to be close to brokering a deal that would promise an 18-month halt in hostilities, the freeing of a captive Israeli soldier as well as hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, and the opening of Gaza border crossings. Such a deal could forestall the renewed military attack on Gaza that Mr. Netanyahu has been hinting at. It might also lead to an agreement between Hamas and Mr. Abbas that would restore a single Palestinian government.

BTW, it doesn’t appear that the outgoing Israeli government is the snag to a new ceasefire. Why isn’t the Post recommending that the new administration push Hamas? Or are pressure and concessions only applicable to Israel. And of course, the Post recommends restoring the Palestinian government by including Hamas.

The largest obstacle to these deals lies not in Israel but in Syria, where the hard-line leadership of Hamas is based. President Obama has promised a restored U.S. dialogue with Syria; a request for cooperation on Hamas would be a useful opening test of Damascus’s intentions. The administration may also be able to cooperate with the new Israeli government on improving the economy and security forces of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

So Israel gets pushed and the terrorists of Hamas (who are honored with op-eds in the Washington Post) should get a “request for cooperation.”

At the same time, the Obama administration should not adopt the Bush administration’s practice of accepting Israeli positions as givens. Whether or not the new government favors negotiations on a Palestinian state, Mr. Obama should challenge it to continue the process started by outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Mr. Abbas. If Israel does not comply with its own commitments to dismantle illegal West Bank settlements, the administration should hold it accountable. Neither Israel nor the United States can afford another government that obstructs a Middle East peace.

Wow finally in the last sentence the Post gets it right! Neither Israel nor the United States can afford more Palestinian obstructionism! (I don’t think that’s what the Post meant.)

The Post mocks the Bush administration for “accepting Israeli positions as givens,” but in the 1990’s when the Clinton administration didn’t do that (especially when Netanyahu was Prime Minister – when it accepted the Palestinian positions as givens) that didn’t improve the prospects for peace. Looking at the end of the Clinton administration we can say that it did quite the opposite.

It’s ironic that the Post is more concerned with “illegal West Bank settlements” than with illegal terror. Or that it believes that only Israel ought to be held “accountable” but never the Palestinians. Or that only Israel needs to be “pushed” or “challenged.”

If the Oslo Accords had worked as advertised, Netanyahu would never have been elected in 1996 and Sharon never would have been elected in 2001. If the disengagement had worked Kadima would have won a decisive victory this year. This isn’t a matter of Israel moving to the right; it’s a matter of Israelis responding to terror threats. These have increased, not diminished since 1993. For the Post to pretend that Israel is the main reason that there’s no peace in the Middle East is ludicrous and counterfactual.

Last week I criticized a Washington Post report for equating Likud with Hamas. The Post’s editorial page goes further; it considers Likud worse than Hamas.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

02/11/2009

The worst paragraph in post Israeli election coverage

Filed under: Israel, Media Bias — Tags: — Soccerdad @ 9:00 am

From the Washington Post:

In many ways, the deep split in the Israeli electorate mirrors the split within the Palestinian government, between the Fatah party that controls the West Bank and the Hamas organization that controls the Gaza Strip. Fatah favors a negotiated settlement with Israel; Hamas rejects Israel’s existence. Israeli and Palestinian societies are so divided, with such politically weak leaders, that few believe either the Israelis or the Palestinians can muster the will to reach a deal.

Fatah on one hand is headed by a Holocaust denier and another “moderate” who denies the historical Jewish ties to the land of Israel. There is no evidence that Fatah has fully rejected its terrorist past. Hamas is more explicit of its hatred towards Israel.

On the other hand, governments of Likud, Labor and Kadima have all ceded land and given resources to the PA to create their own state.

There is no mirror between the sides. This is not reporting but editorializing.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

01/12/2009

Leave Hamas alone

Filed under: Hamas, Israel — Tags: — Soccerdad @ 11:00 am

Since Israel’s war against Hamas has started, the editorial position of the Washington Post has been that Israel has a right to defend its citizens, but it’s better off not doing so. Yesterday’s staff editorial, Crossroads in Gaza is more of this approach.

Israel’s leaders are on the verge of giving Hamas its wish. Its top leaders also rejected the U.N. cease-fire resolution passed Thursday night; now they appear to be debating whether to throw thousands of reserve soldiers into a street-by-street battle. It’s not clear what the aim of the new offensive might be. Some Israelis are calling for the overthrow of Hamas’s rule in Gaza; others urge a more limited operation to seize a strip of territory along the border with Egypt, which would allow Israel to more directly attack tunnels through which Hamas smuggles weapons.

The wish of Hamas, according to the Post, are higher civilian casualties so that Hamas can win the propaganda war. But as David Horovitz writes, the fighting is taking a huge toll on Hamas.

Israeli ministers were told on Sunday that at least some of Hamas’s leaders in Gaza are desperate for a cease-fire, on almost any terms. Hamas has sustained significant losses. Some of its fighters are going AWOL. Others have been captured. Amir Mansi, Gaza City’s Kassam commander, was reduced to firing his own rocket at Israel on Saturday, and was killed by the IDF in the process.

More and more Gazans, the intelligence briefing went on, though overwhelmingly blaming Israel for their plight and redoubled in their hostility, are nonetheless also furious with Hamas for having built bunkers and tunnels but not bomb-shelters; for looting aid supplies; for using civilians as human shields while the leadership hides away.

Two things to note about this. One is that Israel is successfully degrading Hamas’s ability to inflict terror on its population. And the second is that Hamas is losing political support. It’s hard to understand why either of these is a bad development, but the Post tells us that they are.

Either operation would probably do Israel more harm than good — while raising the already considerable political cost of the war for the United States as well as for Egypt and the Palestinian Authority, Israel’s de facto allies against Hamas. Israeli officials have rightly been wary of taking action that would leave their troops bogged down in Gaza — but several of the options being considered would do just that. For now, there is no responsible Palestinian party to which Israel could hand control of Gaza or even the land near the Egyptian border; the Palestinian Authority, even if willing, remains too weak. Nor is it clear that Israel is capable of stopping either the smuggling or the rocket launches by military means. During the last several years before Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, it was unable to do so.

That last sentence is extremely misleading. No Israel couldn’t stop all the smuggling before 2005. But since then and since Israel surrendered the Philadelphi corridor the smuggling got much worse. What the Post doesn’t appreciate is that Israel faced a threat and is now fighting to reduce the threat. If the Post objects to that, it might as well admit that Israel ought not to defend itself instead of hiding behind such transparent arguments.

But by looking to what will follow the fighting, the Post misses an essential point that Barry Rubin makes.

In addition, Israelis know that Hamas is totally dedicated to their personal and collective destruction. The group will not moderate, cannot be bought off, and will not respect any agreement it makes. As a result, the usual kinds of diplomatic tools–concessions, confidence-building, agreements, moderation resulting from having governmental responsibilities, will not work. Any solution short of Hamas’s fall from power will bring more fighting in future.

Rubin lays at six reasonable gains Israel can make from the current fighting. While he acknowledges that some of the positive results may be temporary. Still the chances of there being any long term gains if Hamas remains in power are virtually zero.

And yet it appears that the Washington Post wants Hamas to remain in power, ensuring ongoing instability.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

01/05/2009

Saving Hamas by diplomacy

Filed under: Israel, Media Bias — Tags: — Soccerdad @ 9:00 am

Shortly after Hamas won the PA elections, nearly three years ago, the Washington Post ran an editorial, Hamas’s Choice. The editors of the Post wrote:

Many Palestinians who voted for Hamas don’t support the Islamists’ fundamentalist agenda: Polls show that large majorities want an end to violence and a resumption of peace talks with Israel. Wednesday’s vote was not an embrace of extremism, but — as President Bush suggested yesterday — a rejection of the corrupt and incompetent clique of leaders left behind by Yasser Arafat. Since Arafat’s death more than a year ago, his Fatah movement had been unable to reform itself or control its violent elements, despite the good intentions of Mr. Abbas. Now, perhaps, a new generation of secular leaders will be able to purge Fatah and prepare to offer Palestinians a better alternative, while crooks and armed thugs are cut from the government’s payroll. Mr. Abbas himself should remain in office, as Mr. Bush urged yesterday, and will retain considerable power to check a Hamas-led government.

This is actually false, as Khaled Abu Toameh recently wrote:

Back then, Hamas ran in the parliamentary election under the banner of Change and Reform. Its leaders promised the Palestinians good government and an end to financial corruption. But Hamas also promised the Palestinians that it would “pursue the resistance against the Israeli enemy.” It also pledged never to recognize Israel’s right to exist in this part of the world.

To its credit, Hamas did not hide its agenda. Its leaders were very clear in the messages they sent to the Palestinian public and the international community. Hamas’s message was the same in Arabic and English.

Despite evidence to the contrary, at the time, the editors of the Post persisted in claiming that the election was about Fatah’s corruption not about Hamas’s commitment to destroy Israel. So later they wrote:

Hamas’s eagerness to avoid hard choices was evident in the swiftness with which its leaders proposed yesterday to form a “unity” government with Fatah despite the Islamists’ control of 76 of the 132 seats in the legislature. The two parties will have to forge some agreement on security, since each effectively controls its own armed forces, with those of Fatah now funded by the government; war between the two is a danger.

For the editors of the Post Hamas had a hard choice to make. After all they supported the election that brought Hamas to power. But if the editors of the Post thought that Hamas would have to choose between peace with pragmatism and continued terror, they were deluding themselves. An organization does not readily cede its raison d’etre.

Yesterday’s editorial, Escalation in Gaza, shows the same self-deception is still in play.

The problem is that Israel probably cannot end the rocket fire by military means alone. Nor, without toppling the Hamas government and reoccupying part or all of Gaza, can it unilaterally ensure that Hamas does not rebuild its arsenal once the current fighting ends. To win this mini-war, Israel will have to rely on the United States, Egypt, Turkey or possibly European governments to broker a settlement. By that measure, a victory for Israel still appears uncertain — and the ground attack may not help its cause.

Allowing Hamas to compete in the elections is one of the causes of the current violence. Hamas, in its campaign showed that it was not interested in accepting the niceties of democratic government. It won’t be easy for Israel to win, but defeating Hamas will have to be part of the solution. Diplomacy hasn’t worked.

Hamas is unreceptive because it hopes to replicate what it sees as the success of Hezbollah during its 2006 battle with Israel in Lebanon. The Shiite militia gained political power in Lebanon and prestige around the Middle East simply by surviving the Israeli assault. Israel has been drawn into escalating its offensive so as to force Hamas to settle. On Thursday and Friday it began bombing the homes of Hamas leaders, killing one senior figure; yesterday armored columns drove across the border to begin what will likely be a costly battle with entrenched Hamas fighters. While justified by Hamas’s continuing attempts to kill Israeli civilians, the invasion heightens the risks that Israel has faced all along. Even a defeat of Hamas on the ground might not end the missile threat, and it could be forced into a full-scale occupation of Gaza. That outcome would be a serious blow to Israel’s larger interests — and those of the United States.

Instead of conceding that a defeat of Hamas woujld be good for Israel (and for American interests) the Post’s editors fret about what would happen if Israel would re-occupy Gaza. I’m not convinced that that would be the disaster the Post’s editors feel that it was, but would it be worse than the disengagement was?

A defeat of Hamas, including the killing or capture of its leadership would be the first step. No it may not stop all rocket fire. On the other hand an organization that loses its leadership and specialists will be hard pressed to continue operating at top efficiency. Diplomacy, until now, is what’s allowed Hamas to build its threat against Israel. Recall that in late 2006, Israel was hesitant to open up all of Gaza’s border crossings.

Although tunneling in the area is as old as the border itself, Israeli military officials say higher-grade weapons are flowing through the passages to various Palestinian militias, whose arsenals until now have been relatively modest.

“These groups are constantly trying to expand and improve their weapons,” said Capt. Noa Meir, an Israeli military spokeswoman. “It would not be incorrect to say they are learning from Hezbollah.”

The Israeli military has presented little tangible evidence to support the claim. Palestinian officials say the military is citing the tunnels to argue for a large operation in Gaza that could help rehabilitate its reputation after the Lebanon experience. Israel’s security cabinet earlier this week ordered the military to prepare plans for a large operation.

Try as the Post’s reported did to dismiss Israel’s fears,the Israeli claim has been substantiated by events. Israel gave in to diplomacy and opened the Philadelphi corridor and that hampered its ability to stop the flow of weaponry into Gaza. So it is diplomacy and inaction that led to this war. Had Israel not had its hands tied from preventing the arming of Hamas, Israel’s citizens would not be under the threat they are now under. And Hamas would have neither the power nor the resources it now has. Those must be degraded for Israel to be safe.

It’s a little late in the game to hope that diplomacy will save Hamas. It is diplomacy that has strengthened Hamas and made it a threat to hundreds of thousands of Israelis. The editors of the Post have learned nothing.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

01/01/2009

The Post improves

Filed under: Israel — Tags: , , — Soccerdad @ 11:00 am

After using its editorial pages to criticize and undermine Israeli claims for several days the Washington Post comes out today with two excellent defenses of Israeli actions.

First is Ephraim Sneh’s Why Israel is bombing Gaza. Sneh, though a former general, is also one of most dovish members of the Israeli government. The op-ed seems to be a statement of the Israeli government’s position. Sneh starts off with an excellent timeline:

In September 2005, Israel vacated Gaza, dismantled all the settlements in the Gaza Strip and did not leave a shred of a presence there.

In January 2006, rule over Gaza passed to the Hamas government under Ismail Haniyeh. Instead of bringing investors to Gaza, the Hamas government brought the guerrilla-warfare trainers of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Instead of launching economic projects, this government launched rockets every day at Israeli towns and villages across the border. They smuggled in vast amounts of explosives, weapons and rockets; they prepared themselves for battle.

In June 2007, in a brutal and bloody military coup, Hamas took control of Gaza and soon killed or chased out the leaders of President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement. Gaza became nothing less than a military base for Iran.

After making the case that even Palestinians in Gaza have tired of Hamas rule (something we don’t usually read in the news sections) Sneh writes what Israel is demanding:

Yet there is another way. Those demanding a cease-fire must produce a comprehensive solution, a “package” containing the following elements:

· Full dismantling of the military power of Hamas in Gaza, including destruction of all stockpiles of rockets and missiles.

· Transfer of control over border-crossings between Gaza and Egypt and between Gaza and Israel to the Palestinian Authority government of Salam Fayyad.

· Until the elections to the Palestinian parliament and the presidency in January 2010, Gaza is to be run by a civilian administration appointed by the government in Ramallah.

· Augmented Egyptian supervision of the border between Gaza and Egypt.

· The return of kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

While I’m not crazy about trusting Fatah, this is a pretty tough set of demands. The third one means that Hamas is an illegitimate government and must be treated accordingly. I don’t have a problem with that. (And I wouldn’t have a problem if Israel demanded the surrender of Haniyeh and the rest of the Hamas leadership for trial either.) However, I can’t imagine that Hamas would approve that. And of course, the chorus of “but they were democratically elected, how can you claim that you respect democracy if you oppose the results of free and fair elections?” I suppose the response to that is “Hamas used its time in office to engage in terrorism rendering itself illegitimate. If you feel that Hamas ought to remain in power despite having engaged in such activity it means that you support terror against Israel.”

The second op-ed is Hard Truths about the Conflict by Robert J. Lieber. In the middle of the op-ed Lieber makes four points; the second and third are especially good.

Second, what we are witnessing is not a “cycle” of violence. The IDF airstrikes are a reaction to the unrelenting rocket and mortar attacks against the Jewish state. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 in the hope that the Palestinians would use the opportunity to prepare for an eventual agreement and a two-state solution in which they would live side by side in peace with Israel. Since then, there have been more than 3,500 such attacks aimed at areas of southern Israel, including over 200 launches since Dec. 19, after Hamas chose not to extend a six-month truce. The expanding range of these missiles now covers an area populated by as many as 700,000 Israelis.

Third, Israel and Hamas have profoundly different aims. Israel has accepted the principle of a two-state solution as the basis for ending the conflict. Hamas, by contrast, rejects this. Its language of “resistance” or “ending occupation” (even though no Israelis, civilian or military, other than the kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit, have “occupied” Gaza for the past three years) is but a veiled expression of Hamas’s actual objective: destroying Israel and creating an Islamist Palestinian state in its place. Credulous observers may see more peaceful purposes, but Hamas leaders periodically reassert these objectives, whether in the Hamas covenant or, in the words of a prominent Hamas cleric, Muhsen Abu ‘Ita, speaking on Al-Aqsa TV and calling for “the annihilation of the Jews here in Palestine.”

The points about the threat to Israel and the sincerity of Hamas are both important and too often get lost in media efforts to equate Israel with Hamas.

While it doesn’t undo the damage the Post has done the past few days, still it’s encouraging that the Post has finally opened its op-ed pages to a debate.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

12/30/2008

Did a Hamas lie find its way into a Washington Post headline?

Filed under: AP Media Bias, Israel, Media Bias — Tags: — Soccerdad @ 11:00 am

Noah Pollak observed about a headline in the Washington Post alleging that Israel had rejected a truce with Hamas:

But nothing of the sort happened; no truce has been offered by anyone involved, least of all Hamas, and there is nothing in the story that even begins to substantiate the claim made in the headline. The headline is simply fabricated from whole cloth, a piece of naked propaganda designed to portray Israel as an unreasonable aggressor.

Mere Rhetoric, Meryl and Elder of Ziyon noticed something else: The AP uncritically reported a false claim of Hamas that Israel had violated a truce understanding over the weekend.

This raises the question: Did the Washington Post’s headline writer decide to insert his own take on the conflict into the headline based on the false AP report?

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

The media assault against Israel

Filed under: Gaza, Hamas, Israel, Israel Derangement Syndrome, Israeli Double Standard Time, Media Bias — Tags: , — Soccerdad @ 9:00 am

The American media is doing all it can to undermine Israel’s case for war. I’m not just talking about those anti-Israel bloviators whom Noah Pollak amusingly call the “juicebox mafia,” but the opinion pages of major American newspapers have been mobilized to condemn Israel.

Following up on his paper’s poorly argued editorial criticizing Israel yesterday, Jackson Diehl weighed in with Olmert’s Final Failure:

Israel’s new battle with Hamas in Gaza means that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will be remembered for fighting two bloody and wasteful mini-wars in less than three years in power. The first one, in Lebanon during the summer of 2006, punished but failed to defeat or even permanently injure Hezbollah, which is politically and militarily stronger today than it was before Olmert took office. This one will probably have about the same effect on Hamas, which almost certainly will still control Gaza, and retain the capacity to strike Israel, when Olmert leaves office in a few months.

It’s astonishing that anyone, presumably as informed as Diehl – who was once the Post’s Jerusalem bureau chief – could write something so unserious. (Richard Boudreaux of the LA Times highlights a number of differences between Israel’s justified attack against Gaza with its justified attack against Hezbollah. via memeorandum)

Israel struck at Gaza not for some frivolous reason, but because the situation was intolerable. Wtih roughly 250,000 of its citizens in rocket range from Gaza and Hamas having used a ceasefire to improve its ability to strike at those citizens, Israel had to act. The point of the attack isn’t to force another ceasefire – that would be frivolous as the failure in Lebanon turned otu to be – but to significantly degrade Hamas’s abilities. I expect that part of what Israel will need to do before it stops is to kill the likes of Haniyeh, Zahar, and Abu Tir.

The end of the op-ed is disturbing too. In the next to last paragraph, Diehl writes:

Worst of all, Abbas followed in a long tradition of previous Palestinian leaders by reacting to a far-reaching Israeli offer with an uncourageous demurral. Olmert has never publicly disclosed the terms he discussed with Abbas, but sources say he went well beyond what Israel agreed to at the Camp David talks of 2000, previously the closest approach to a deal. I’m told Olmert offered to support the groundbreaking concession of allowing thousands of Palestinian refugees to “return” to Israel over a period of years; he also agreed to divide Jerusalem between Israel and Palestine. Abbas, like Yasser Arafat at Camp David, refused to sign on to a compromise that the world would have hailed.

This is Olmert’s failure. How could he go further than Camp David? The Palestinians would be rewarded for their refusal to accept the terms of Camp David if Abbas had had the guts to accept Olmert’s offer. But Diehl whitewashes what went on. If this report is correct, Abbas “refused” to make peace. That’s hardly Olmert’s fault. It doesn’t occur to Diehl that even the “moderate” Palestinians might not be committed to a peaceful resolution of their conflict with Israel. Finally Diehl concludes:

So Olmert, like Ehud Barak eight years ago, will end his term as prime minister by bombing rather than liberating Palestinians. He will be remembered for his wars — but it may be many years before Israel again has a leader as willing to make peace.

If the current fighting leads to an actual victory over Hamas then Olmert will get a small measure of credit in an otherwise dismal record. But Diehl ought not to mourn the lack of an Israeli leader willing to make peace, when he has noted that it was Abbas who refused Olmert’s stupidly generous terms. The lack of peace doesn’t result from the lack of (misplaced) Israeli efforts.

It’s a measure of how awful and ill-informed Diehl’s op-ed was that it was endorsed by anti-Israel and antisemitic pundit, Helena Coban.

But the Post isn’t done. Today it features an op-ed by Palestinian “moderate” Daoud Kuttab, Has Israel revived Hamas?, Kuttab starts with:

In its efforts to stop amateur rockets from nagging the residents of some of its southern cities, Israel appears to have given new life to the fledging Islamic movement in Palestine.

“Nagging?” What an immoral declaration. OK, this fellow was “nagged” to death. The Post ought to stick to allowing terrorists op-eds instead of phony “moderates.” Kuttab’s all too predictable argument is that by attacking Hamas Israeli has succeeded in making Hamas more popular. Maybe he spoke too soon. The question is whether Israel will fight to win or not. If Israel fights to win, then Kuttab would do well to remember:

Take, for example, Israel’s targeted assassination of Hamas leaders Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, and Ismail Abu Shanab in 2004. With its top leadership eliminated in a span of only a few months, Hamas was in utter disarray. Specifically, after Yassin’s death, Hamas never found a religious leader to fill the void. His death made Hamas increasingly vulnerable to the widely held perception that it was simply a group of violent terrorists with no religious mandate.

Israel can defeat Hamas if it kills the right people and sufficiently degrades Hamas’s offensive capabilities. Kuttab isn’t serious, but he served the needs of the Post’s editorial staff by adding one more voice of objection to Israel defending its citizens.

The editors of the Post, unwilling to leave bad enough alone, have added an unsigned editorial to their campaign against Israel, Divided on Gaza.

If the Lebanon war is any indication, the bloodshed in Gaza — which is being endlessly looped on Arab satellite channels across the region — will strengthen the Iranian camp at the expense of the secular Sunni forces. Thousands of people joined pro-Hamas rallies in Beirut, Cairo and Amman, Jordan, yesterday. Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader whose popularity soared after he survived his battle with Israel, delivered a fiery speech in which he demanded that Egypt open its border with Gaza “and help Gazans in their struggle.” The weak and unpopular government of President Hosni Mubarak allowed some aid deliveries yesterday and will find it hard to resist further concessions if the fighting continues.

Of course allowing the Iranian camp to declare victory strengthens it. As I argued yesterday, the Post should be using its reportorial abilities to expose the Iranian threat and leave the fighting to Israel. (The Post can’t even bring itself to mention that Israel, too, is allowing emergency deliveries into Gaza and treating the wounded in Israeli hospitals.) If Israel defeats Hamas and kills some of its leaders, those street demonstrations will prove nothing.

Israel was offering upbeat assessments of its air offensive yesterday even while warning that it could continue for some time and possibly expand to ground operations. Yet, as in Lebanon, no decisive military victory is likely: Israel will not be able to topple Hamas unless it fully reoccupies Gaza, and it will probably not be able even to stop the rocket attacks on its cities without some kind of political settlement. For that, Israel will need the mediation of Egypt, Saudi Arabia or other Sunni states. Israel must be careful not to allow its military campaign to undermine its own diplomatic end game — or to hand another political victory to an Iranian regime that remains a far greater threat to Israel than Hamas is.

Maybe no decisive military victory is possible. But my guess is that Israel has some specific goals in mind and that when it achieves them – and only then – will it stop. Even it achieves its goals would the Post grant Israel the victory? My guess, based on its current offensive, is that it won’t. Maybe the Post’s editors ought to stop shedding so many crocodile tears. Based on the editorial’s they’ve run and the op-ed’s they’ve commissioned, it’s clear that they object to Israel defending itself.

The New York Times has finally weighed in too with War over Gaza. Surprisingly, it’s marginally less hostile to Israel than the Washington Post has been. Still it suffers from its own bit of silliness:

We hope he does not mean a ground war. That, or any prolonged military action, would be disastrous for Israel and lead to wider regional instability. Mr. Barak and Israel’s foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, both candidates to succeed Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in elections set for February, must not be drawn any further into a competition with the front-runner, Benjamin Netanyahu, over who is the biggest hawk.

If a ground war defeats Hamas, it won’t lead to greater regional instability. Hamas and other Iranian proxies are sources of instability. Defeating them is a good thing. And Barak, Livni and Olmert are hardly hawks.They are doing what they see as being necessary to defend their citizens. The imputation of cynicism is disappointing if not unexpected.

(The NYT actually had a somewhat sympathetic op-ed towards Israel by Benny Morris.)

What are the antidotes to this editorial poison?

Read Sderot under Siege by David Keyes. David Bernstein’s takedown Glenn Greenwald is excellent. Jack’s got a second roundup and is working on a third. Israelly Cool and the Muqata are still liveblogging. And while not all posts are about Israel, I’ve put together a link to the best pro-Israel blogs through Google Reader here.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

12/29/2008

Covering for Iran

Filed under: Iran, Israel, Media Bias — Tags: — Soccerdad @ 8:00 am

There is no kind way to describe today’s Washington Post editorial Israel Strikes with a subtitle:
Hamas suffers a serious blow — but the real winner may be Iran.

ISRAEL’S AIR offensive against the Gaza Strip yesterday should not have been a surprise for anyone who has been following the mounting hostilities in the region — least of all the Hamas movement, which invited the conflict by ending a six-month-old ceasefire and launching scores of rockets and mortar shells at Israel during the past 10 days. The initial Israeli strikes appeared to deal a punishing blow to the Islamic movement, reportedly killing several of its leaders and dozens of other militants and security force members. Inevitably, however, civilians were among the more than 200 reported Palestinian dead, and renewed Palestinian rocket fire against Israeli cities killed at least one person. While Israel could justifiably describe its action as one of self-defense, it’s far from clear that it will end up improving the country’s security — even as it risks a wider conflict.

What’s missing here?

Hamas did not invite the conflict by ending the ceasefire. It invited the conflict by using the ceasefire to build up its offensive capabilities against Israeli civilian targets. More than a year and a half ago the New York Times reported:

The concerns of Shin Bet and the army, their officials say, include the following: as much as 30 tons of weapons-grade explosives smuggled into Gaza from Egypt, either through tunnels or through the desert; new rocket-building expertise from non-Gazans smuggled into Gaza or from Gazans who received training from Hezbollah or in Syria; a small but unknown quantity of better antitank missiles, of the general kind used so effectively last summer by Hezbollah against Israeli armor and Israeli troops sheltering in houses; a small number of ground-to-air missiles; and the construction of Hezbollah-style concrete bunkers and tunnels in crowded Gaza that will make any Israeli infantry operation harder to carry out.

And while the tone of the article is “Israel says this …” rather than “Hamas has done this …” it’s interesting to note that the beginning of the article reports:

The commander, who gave the briefing at the request of The New York Times and spoke on condition of anonymity, said that Hamas’s improved rockets had a range of about 10 miles, which would allow them to hit the Israeli town of Ashkelon.

This assessment has proven all too true, so it’s reasonable to assume that the rest of the Israeli security assessment has been on target.

Furthermore, Barak Ravid’s important article in Ha’aretz makes clear that Operation Cast Lead was not some hastily drawn up attack launched for electoral advantage, but rather a carefully designed attack aimed at reducing Hamas’s ability to threaten tens of thousands of Israelis. The IDF’s catalogue of Hamas controlled targets provides further evidence of the care that went into planning the attacks.

So while the Post may note “… Inevitably, however, civilians were among the more than 200 reported Palestinian dead …” it is silent on who’s at fault. That silence may be fairly equated with excusing Hamas for its tactic of placing its troops and munitions among civilians.

Israeli officials say the aim of the attack is a modest one: to force Hamas to return to the uneasy and informal truce, under which Palestinian rocket and mortar fire was curtailed if not entirely stopped and Israel relaxed but did not lift its economic blockade of Gaza. Hamas’s Damascus-based leadership, which ordered an end to this “calm,” as Israel calls it, also seems to have a relatively limited objective. It demands an end to all Israeli (and Egyptian) restrictions on movement in and out of Gaza in exchange for more quasi-peace. One considerable obstacle to such an outcome is that Israel is engaged in an election campaign in which the various candidates — including the serving defense and foreign ministers — are staking out hawkish positions. The outgoing Bush administration, for its part, was quick to offer support to Israel yesterday and to blame the conflict on Hamas.

And good for the Bush adminstration for doing so. And shame on the Post for covering for Hamas.

Over time, however, a fight in Gaza could be costly for Israel. Military commanders have repeatedly warned that it could lead to punishing attacks on Israeli cities, spread to the West Bank or Lebanon, or force a ground invasion that would cause thousands of casualties and leave Israeli troops stranded without an exit strategy. Israel cannot stop rocket attacks by military action alone; eventually a political deal will be needed. And any hopes its leaders have of overthrowing Hamas’s government in Gaza are probably illusory, unless a long-term reoccupation of the territory is undertaken.

Yes, a long term fight in Gaza could prove costly to Israel. But there comes a point when any responsible government must say, “no more” and protect its citizens. I think that the Israeli government waited way too long, the Post disagrees. But an “exit strategy” is hardly Israel’s biggest problem. The Post lauded Israel’s “exit strategy” from Gaza in 2005. But as Eric Rozenman of CAMERA noted:

… according to the editorial, the success of the Gaza disengagement depends not on Abbas stemming terrorism from the Gaza Strip but on Israel clarifying that it will make “further territorial concessions” regardless of what the Palestinian Arabs do.

If the editors of the Post were truly concerned with peace in the Middle East, they’d be as demanding of the Palestinians as they are of Israel. But of course, the onus falls on Israel, and the “exit strategy” of 2005, has now led to an “entrance strategy” 3 and a half years later.

One of the great untold stories of the “Aqsa intifada” is that Israel defeated it. Yes it was costly. But when Israel defeated Fatah, in Operation Defensive shield, it greatly reduced terror attacks. As I’ve noted previously:

What did work? The military solution as Moshe Arens recalled last week:

But once the Israel Defense Forces and the security services began to seriously tackle Palestinian terror, following the massacre at the Park Hotel in Netanya in the spring of 2002, it quickly became clear that terror could be defeated by force. As a matter of fact, it could be defeated only by the use of force. The terrorists view any hints of Israeli willingness to give in to a portion of their essentially limitless demands as a sign of weakness, which only serves to encourage further acts of terror.

Noah Pollak, who linked to Arens, observed:

The extent to which Israel’s military victory in the intifada is simply not acceptable for discussion in enlightened quarters is amazing as a matter of cultural psychology. But this refusal also has a crippling effect on Israeli politics, as the military option against Hamas is continuously framed as a foreordained failure.

Operation Defensive Shield, did roll back the terror capabilities of Hamas and Fatah. It also was very costly in terms of lives. But that doesn’t mean that it was a failure; the actions that necessitated Defensive Shield were the problem.

The Post certainly isn’t concerned with Israeli casualties or exit strategies, it is caught up in its own myopia about the ineffectiveness of military operations when launched by Israel, so it presumes military operations – even carefully considered ones – will never work and then comes up with a few boilerplate terms to justify its objections.

While the fighting lasts — and Israeli officials were warning yesterday that it could be prolonged — Hamas’s principal sponsor, Iran, will have achieved a tactical success. Israeli diplomats have been working feverishly in recent weeks to focus international attention on the Iranian nuclear program as the Obama administration prepares to take office. They’ve been warning that the new U.S. president will have to act quickly if an Iranian bomb is to be stopped. Now, for weeks or possibly months to come, all eyes will be on Gaza — on the fighting, the continued suffering of civilians and the need for a fresh settlement. Israel might have avoided this fight, and gained a diplomatic advantage of its own, by relaxing the economic blockade. Now it will be embroiled in a costly battle that, in the end, is a distraction from the most serious threat it faces.

The illogic of this final paragraph is astounding. First of all, just because Israel faces a threat from Iran, doesn’t mean that the threat from Gaza doesn’t exist. Second of all, Israel’s failure to destroy Hezbollah in 2006 strengthened Iran’s hand in the region and emboldened Hamas to imitate Hezbollah’s success. Hamas’s efforts to build its terrorist infrastructure were copied from Hezbollah.There’s no need for a “fresh settlement” unless one believes – as apparently the editors of the Washington Post do – that terrorists who threaten innocents ought not to be defeated but given an “exit strategy.”

Worse, the Post’s editors claim that there’s an “either … or” here that will allow Iran to escape scrutiny for its atomic program. Maybe the Post could devote more resources to determining how close Iran is to developing an atomic weapons and fewer towards finding fault with Israel’s efforts to defend its citizenry. In other words, the Post has the power to scrutinize on Iran’s mischief, but since that would require some real reporting instead of simply finding critics of the Bush administration. It takes a special level of chutzpah for the Post to blame Israel for diverting attention from the Iranian threat, when its own reporting on the threat has been incredibly superficial.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

12/23/2008

Eyeless on the Potomac: the WaPo tells Israel to defend itself with the goodwill of Hamas

Filed under: Gaza, Hamas, Israel, Israeli Double Standard Time, Media Bias — Tags: — Soccerdad @ 10:00 am

Israel has some tough choices ahead. Amos Harel of Ha’aretz writes:

According to leaks from Jerusalem Sunday, a decision has been made for an extensive military action, and a ground operation is not out of the question. At this stage, Israel apparently prefers other options. First, the air force will go in, striking not only rocket-launching cells but also attempting to hit the manufacturers, suppliers and commanders. Targets might also include Hamas bases, offices, and if there’s an escalation, assassinations of senior Hamas officials.

As for a ground operation, the question is how to get Hamas to go back to the understandings in place at the beginning of the cease-fire without risking all-out fighting that would begin with rockets on Ashdod and Be’er Sheva and end with the return of Israeli armor to Gaza.

But as Harel noted earlier:

Israel’s leaders seem to be realizing their error of recent weeks vis-a-vis Hamas. Hamas concluded from Israel’s declarations that we want peace and have no intention of taking over Gaza; that it is free to strike at the Negev as much as it wants because Israel is afraid of an entanglement.

In other words if Hamas thinks that it will suffer no consequences, it will attack Israel.

On the other hand.

A point the media has missed over the past few days is that most of the rockets are being launched by Islamic Jihad and smaller factions, which Hamas has stopped reining in. If Hamas goes into action, there could be 100 rockets a day instead of dozens.

Understand then, what Harel is saying, is that Hamas allowed the rockets to be fired into Israel. The problem is that if Hamas actually gets involved in rocket firing, the violence against Israel will be greater.

Yaakov Katz of the Jerusalem Post writes about what Hamas has accomplished in the past six months

Since the unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005, Hamas has been involved in one of the most intensive military buildups – for a terrorist group – in modern history. It, everyone knows, is no longer a small terrorist group just capable of building explosive belts for suicide bombings.

While Hamas used the past six months of a “cease-fire” to train its forces, it also took advantage of the suspension in IDF operations to fortify its military posts in the Gaza Strip. According to one high-ranking security official, Hamas has dug dozens of kilometers of tunnel systems throughout Gaza that will be used by fighters to move from one place to another undetected.

Knowing this renders today’s Washington Post’s nostalgic editorial More Rockets From Gaza even more lame than it appears at first glance. The subtitle of the editorial is “Israel must protect its citizens — but can it do so by military action?” and, as you can guess the answer is “It depends how you define ‘must’ and ‘no.’”

The Post’s editors lay out:

Neither side seems to want such an all-out fight — particularly not Israel, whose defense minister has pointed out that an invasion could cost hundreds of lives and leave thousands of Israeli troops stranded in Gaza without an exit strategy. But neither Israel nor Hamas has been satisfied with the informal cease-fire they reached in June with the help of Egypt. During the summer and fall, the rocket fire from Gaza diminished but never entirely stopped. Israel, in turn, allowed only a modest increase in the flow of goods into Gaza, which has been under virtual siege since last year, and frequently sealed off the strip entirely in response to fresh attacks.

Notice the equivalence between Israel’s blockade and Hamas’s targeting civilians. Unfortunately the Post uses the inflammatory language of “virtual siege” when in fact it has been nothing of the sort. First of all, Gaza abuts Egypt too. If there’s a siege of Gaza it’s something that Egypt participated in too. Second of all, these past six months Hamas has been importing weaponry and construction material through their infrastructure of tunnels. If civilian supplies are short, it’s because Hamas has chosen Qassams over butter.

The editorial spends a lot of time concentrating on Hamas’s popularity and uses that supposed popularity as an argument against an Israeli military campaign. Of course, if they’d been paying attention, the editors would know that Hamas’s popularity has decreased lately and would lose elections to Fatah. And of course worries about Hamas’s popularity should come second to protecting Israeli citizens, so saying that Israel shouldn’t attack Gaza.

Overall the editorial fails to acknowledge that Hamas has used the quiet to re-arm and protect its infrastructure against Israeli attack. This has now put the Negev – possibly even as far as Be’er Sheva – into rocket range. So the basic flaw in the editorial is a failure to take Hamas’s threat to Israel seriously.

But more troubling is this. Nearly three years ago at the time that Hamas won the legislative elections, the editors of the Post welcomed the victory:

Having prescribed democracy as an essential condition for a Palestinian state, the Bush administration can hardly stand in the way of electoral participation by a movement that represents a large fraction of Palestinians. It must hope that Hamas eventually will embrace democracy as the sole means of advancing its agenda, rather than as a mere tool to prevent its own disarmament or any Palestinian concessions to Israel, and that it will feel obliged to moderate its tactics and agenda while serving in government. Whether or not that happens, a Palestinian Authority backed by Hamas may be able to restore a semblance of order to Gaza. In the dismal present circumstances, that would be a step forward.

The problem then, as it is now, is that Hamas – regardless of the fact that they won a majority votes – is not a democratic movement. It is a terrorist organization devoted to the destruction of Israel. The only order that Hamas brought to Gaza was its own. It brutally drove out (and killed) Fatah’s people and used Gaza as a base to launch attacks against Israel. Now, as Ha’aretz and the Jerusalem Post report, they’ve used the territory they control to build a military infrastructure that threatens a significant portion of Israel’s Negev. Now having seen that Hamas has parlayed its electoral win into an improved positions for its terrorist operations, it’s disingenuous for the Post’s editors to tell Israel, well, they ought to trust the electoral process again.

When I saw this editorial, I figured I wouldn’t be the only one who would be bothered by it. So in these troubled economic times, I did what any other enterprising capitalist would do: I outsourced the fisking of this editorial to some friendly bloggers. The do great work, and what’s more they work for cheap. Joshuapundit brought a military perspective to his response, Mere Rhetoric a rhetorical and political perspective and Elder of Ziyon marshaled the facts that contradict the Post’s assumptions.

JoshuaPundit:

I can just imagine the sort of ‘Israeli thinkers’ the WAPO has in mind..probably the same sort of people who thought Arafat could be trusted, totally retreating from Gaza was a great idea and that a six month respite for Hamas to build up its military was an even better one.

Another ‘ceasefire’ is going to bring Hamas around? Wasn’t that the idea of the last one? Worked well, didn’t it?

I’ve got a small bit of news for these people. An all out war against Hamas would not ’strengthen radical factions’ it would kill and defeat them.But only if it were an all out war,that included shutting down the Israeli-supplied electricity and taking out the power plant and Gaza’s infrastructure as well as targeting Hamas’ military and its leadership for annihilation.

It won’t easy or pleasant, but the longer Gaza festers the more costly it will get. The Palestinians will not do a damned thing to dismantle Hamas. Israel will have to do so itself.

Mere Rhetoric quoting and then skewering the editorial sentiment:

After six months of relative calm, hostilities once again are escalating between Israel and the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. Between Friday and yesterday some 60 rockets were fired from Gaza at Israel, whose air force responded with strikes against the launchers. So far there have been no serious injuries on the Israeli side, and one Palestinian has been reported killed.

That’s a blase way of putting it. I would have written something like “over the weekend Palestinian soldiers rained down explosives on Israeli schools and hospitals, reaching Israel’s largest port city, scoring direct hits on homes, and turning southern Israeli into a warzone.” But I guess “some 60 rockets were fired from Gaza” adequately conveys the situation. And I do appreciate how they’re using the passive voice / active voice trick – “rockets were fired” / the Israeli “air force responded.” It’s been a mainstay of anti-Israel bias since before I began blogging and I give a little sniff of nostalgia every time I see it.


Elder of Ziyon:

Wow. Israel sent in daily deliveries of goods essentially every day from August through October, truckloads of food, medicine, fuel, clothing, building materials, and other goods. In return, Hamas built up an arsenal of more rockets, imported tons of explosives, gathered more money by taxing smuggled goods, didn’t lift a finger to take administrative responsibility of Gazans’ daily lives (leaving that to Western money filtered through Fatah institutions,) and created an infrastructure to kidnap more Israeli soldiers. And the wise old men of WaPo now say that Israel should do exactly the same thing again?

UDATE: A number of other bloggers joined in. Daled Amos mixed a reference to domestic politics in with Washington Post: Israel Should Give Hamas A Bailout Too and uses sarcasm to good effect:

Please join me in a moment of silence out of respect for Hamas in Gaza and their long history of searching for a peaceful end to the war they have declared on Israel. Or has nobody at The Washington Post read the Hamas Charter?


Boker Tov Boulder observes:

The Washington Post does not revile HAMAS terrorists, it lends them credibility. And it warns Israel not to respond militarily to the rocket attacks -timed just so, to hit children on their way to school- because “a war would only strengthen the movement’s most radical factions.” Instead they urge that Israel feed their enemy and make certain they have plenty of medicine and fuel, as if on a full stomach, in good health and with their tanks all gassed up, HAMAS would somehow be more palatable… or less dangerous.

And My Right Word fisks selected quotes in WashPost is really dumb. The naive silliness of the editorial is emphasized by updates at the end of the post on the latest escalation by Hamas against Israeli civilian targets.

And finally Meryl points out the Post is doing Hamas’s work for them:

Second, they want the fiction of the truce so that idiots like the editorial writers at the Washington Post will chastise Israel for refusing to supply her enemies with the means of her destruction, rather than chastise the terrorist group that wants to destroy Israel.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

10/06/2008

A 16 year old lie

Filed under: Israel, Israel Derangement Syndrome, Media Bias — Tags: — Soccerdad @ 9:30 am

In an editorial, the Washington Post writes:

AFTER ISRAELI Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was voted out of office in 1992, he gave an interview in which he revealed he had never been serious about peace negotiations with the Palestinians. His real intention, he said, had been to drag out the talks for a decade while settling hundreds of thousands more Jews in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Well actually, that wasn’t the context that Shamir meant his comments. It was, of course, par for the course at that time that Shamir’s comments were construed like that.

According to a translation in an article published in the Jerusalem Post this is what Shamir said:

“I would have conducted autonomy negotiations for 10 years, and in the meanwhile we would have reached a half million people in Judea and Samaria,” Shamir said in an interview in Ma’ariv. Currently, an estimated 120,000 settlers live in the territories.

(Source:SHAMIR PLANNED TO DRAG OUT TALKS UNTIL ISRAELI CONTROL OF AREAS WAS IRREVERSIBLE, David Makovsky. Jerusalem Post. Jerusalem: Jun 28, 1992. pg. 01. Yes that title perpetuated the myth of what Shamir had said.)

Does that mean that his intent was to drag out negotiations or that that’s how long he expected that they’d take? There was at least one other person at that interview, the interviewer himself. And this is his take:

The Maariv journalist, Yosef Harif, said the remarks were made, but he added that he did not think Mr. Shamir was trying to drag out the peace talks to avoid autonomy.

What Shamir was saying was that he expected talks on autonomy to last at least ten years, not that he sought to drag them out. Given that more conciliatory successors have failed to satisfy Palestinian demands over the past fifteen years, Shamir’s observation looks accurate, if not a little optimistic.

Now, of course, in 1992 the talk was about autonomy,not statehood. And remember at the time that even the late PM Yitzchak Rabin, sounded a bit like what would be called a right wing extremist nowadays.

Mr. Rabin has repeatedly refused to be drawn into discussions about which specific settlements he defines as “political” and which he would continue to support as necessary for Israel’s security. In general, he has defined security zones as the Jerusalem area, the Jordan Valley and the Golan Heights.

The point that the Post was making was to compare Shamir’s comments with those of Ehud Olmert last week.

Last week, Ehud Olmert, who served in Mr. Shamir’s cabinet and believed in his dream of a “greater Israel,” gave a similar truth-telling interview at the end of his own stint as prime minister — only the message was very different.

“We have to reach an agreement with the Palestinians, the meaning of which is that in practice we will withdraw from almost all the territories,” Mr. Olmert told the newspaper Yedioth Aharonot. Of his long record as a supporter of keeping and settling those lands and Arab East Jerusalem, Mr. Olmert said, “For a large portion of these years, I was unwilling to look at reality in all its depth.”

The Post is willing to acknowledge that Israel has changed a lot in the intervening years.

Mr. Olmert’s words are one measure of how far Israel has changed politically in 16 years. Before 1992, acceptance of a Palestinian state or even direct negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization were unacceptable to the parliamentary majority; now a former leader of the right-wing Likud party can say that Israel must withdraw from all but a small part of the territories captured in the 1967 war.

But the editorial is dishonest when it claims:

Mr. Olmert’s position is pragmatic: He says that the territorial concessions are necessary to prevent Israel from becoming a “binational state,” with an Arab majority. Judging from polls, a majority of Israelis agree with him.

It’s as if Israel had never withdrawn from Gaza or from any cities in Judea and Samaria. The question since 1996 or so hasn’t been whether Israel will maintain control over millions of Arabs, but what the final shape of the Palestinian state will be. By taking this approach, the Post is giving a “peace veto” to the Palestinians. (Olmert is too, for that matter.) By the Post’s reckoning, as long as negotiations do not satisfy the Palestinians, Israel is still occupying them.

And it’s hard to find what poll shows that a majority of Israelis agree with Olmert. Here’s a recent poll that shows that only 26% of Israelis consider the “demographic” threat significant. Here’s another one showing that only 7% of Israeli Jews consider that there’s a demographic threat. And this shows a majority of Israelis – apparently having learned from Gaza – opposing further disengagement from Judea and Samaria.

However polls of Palestinians continue to show a rejection of the idea of a Jewish state.

Finally the Post takes the approach of any number of Olmert’s detractors:

What’s changed in Israel is the willingness of the political mainstream to accept, in theory, a Palestinian state along territorial lines that most of the world (including most Arab states) would accept. What hasn’t changed is the steady pace of settlement construction that is slowly but surely making that solution more difficult to carry out — and the unwillingness or inability of Israeli leaders to stop it. Mr. Olmert tried to make history with his parting words; sadly, they were deeply at odds with his actions.

So Israel has changed politically but the “settlements” remain the single biggest obstacle to peace. Aside from the fact that Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza has strengthened Hamas and encouraged terror, what makes the Post’s editors think that Israeli “occupation” is the primary obstacle to peace? (The same could be said about Lebanon and Hezbollah.)

Isn’t the biggest problem that the lack of change on the Palestinian side?

The Post’s editors dredge up and misconstrue a statement made by Yitzchak Shamir in 1992 to make their point, but they’ve been awfully incurious about comments and actions from the Palestinian leadership showing a lack of commitment to peace.

For example right before he died, highly regarded “moderate” Faisal Husseini didn’t sound so moderate:

Similarly, if we agree to declare our state over what is now only 22 percent of Palestine, meaning the West Bank and Gaza — our ultimate goal is [still] the liberation of all historical Palestine from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] sea, even if this means that the conflict will last for another thousand years or for many generations.

In short, we are exactly like they are. We distinguish the strategic, long-term goals from the political phased goals, which we are compelled to temporarily accept due to international pressure. If you are asking me as a Pan-Arab nationalist what are the Palestinian borders according to the higher strategy, I will immediately reply: “from the river to the sea.”

Palestine in its entirety is an Arab land, the land of the Arab nation, a land no one can sell or buy, and it is impossible to remain silent while someone is stealing it, even if this requires time and even [if it means paying] a high price.”

And before that (but after Oslo) there was Arafat’s famous speech in a Johannesburg mosque:

This agreement, I am not considering it more than the agreement which had been signed between our prophet Mohammed and Koraish, and you remember the Caliph Omar had refused this agreement and [considered] it a despicable truce.

And what about Arafat’s incitement ahead of the ‘tunnel riots” in 1996?

And there is ample documentation that the “Aqsa intifada” was not a spontaneous outburst of violence, but planned by Arafat in advance.

Event the current “moderate” hope of the peace processors, Mahmoud Abbas has gotten in on the act.

In her press conference yesterday with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that Israeli-Palestinian talks would continue, despite claims of a boycott by Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas’s boycott came after he accused Israel of committing “more than a holocaust” in Gaza.

The Abbas boycott and his reprehensible accusations follow a pattern established well before the current escalation in Gaza. Last month, for example, Abbas’s Palestinian Authority declared a three-day mourning period for PFLP leader George Habash, who was associated with the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics and with the assassination of Israeli cabinet minister Rehavam Ze’evi.

In case anyone might think that the PA is only remembering past “glories,” Fatah, the faction that Abbas heads, issued a poster displaying a map of “Palestine” that included all of Israel, a machine gun and a picture of Yasser Arafat. Incitement against Israel, including the glorification of “martyrdom,” continues through Abbas-controlled PA television, and PA educational institutions, such as schools and camps.

Last month Abbas showed even more chutzpah as he sought a meeting with convicted child murderer Samir Kuntar.

It’s remarkable that the Post has two data points – a misinterpretation of a statement by Yitzchak Shamir from 16 years ago and the continued existence of settlements – to show that Israel is dealing in bad faith with the Palestinians, but ignores mountains of evidence that Israeli concessions over the past 15 years have done nothing to moderate the Palestinian population’s antagonism towards Israel. So while the Israeli position regarding the Palestinians has changed dramatically, there’s been no reciprocal movement on the part of the Palestinians.

And of course that escapes the notice of the sharp eyed editors of the Washington Post.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

06/27/2008

Re-posting

Filed under: Hamas, Israel, Israeli Double Standard Time, Media Bias — Tags: — Soccerdad @ 7:00 am

Taking its cue from the NY Times that recently introduced “Op-classics,” the Washington Post is inaugurating a feature called “Re-posted.” (I like the name Op-Classics better, but the idea is still a good one.)

Here’s the deal:
This RePosted article comes at the suggestion of a reader, Howard Schmitt of Pittsburgh,
who recently came across a 1999 Post essay about the perils of cheap gas and praised it for its prescience. That essay, originally published in The Post’s Outlook section, is “reposted” below, along with the article that originally accompanied it.

We’re grateful for Mr. Schmitt’s generosity. He also got us thinking: What other columns or editorials from The Post’s archives would you like to read again? Are there past opinion pieces that you think are newly relevant? Do you remember editorials or columns that were spot-on — or dead wrong? Do you wonder what the Post had to say about a particular historical event that might shed light on what’s happening now?

Send your suggestions to reposted@washingtonpost.com.

We don’t expect you to recall headline, byline and date. And we can’t promise that we’ll get to every request. But give us as much guidance as you can — and explain why you think it would be helpful or interesting to read again now. Then we can start digging through the archives.

Here’s my suggestion: Charles Krauthammer wrote a column “The end of the illusion” on March 7, 1996. The column started:

This is peace? “Israelis Unnerved by Peace That Kills ,” says a Washington Post headline, March 5. Peace that kills ? This is an absurd oxymoron. If peace means anything, it means at its very minimum an absence of violence. After all, “armistice” and “truce” — lesser forms of peace — mean cease-fire. Peace must mean at least that .

This Orwellian conjunction of peace and violence demonstrates the state of hypnosis that Americans and Israelis have placed themselves under since the September 1993 Handshake on the White House lawn. What followed has been called a peace process. It has been nothing of the kind. The Palestinian war on Israel has been unrelenting. More Israeli civilians have been massacred since the handshake than at any time in the entire history of the country.

The ” peace process” is in fact nothing more than a unilateral Israeli withdrawal. The Palestinians have gotten Gaza, West Bank autonomy, huge influxes of foreign aid, international recognition, their own police force, their first free elections ever (something their Turkish, British, Egyptian and Jordanian rulers never granted them).

In return Israel has gotten what? Pats on the head from the United States. The occasional trade mission from Tunisia. And, from the Palestinians, death. This is peace?

I already criticized the Post’s coverage of Hamas’s breach of the ceasefire it concluded with Israel last week. In short, the Post’s correspondent Griff Witte departed from straight reporting in his portrayal of Hamas’s bad faith.
1) He termed the firing of rockets at Israel as “rattling” neither “breaching” nor “violating” the ceasefire, and thus downgraded the seriousness of the action.
2) He failed to report (unlike the New York Times) that a leader of Hamas claimed that the organization had no obligation to stop the firing on Israel.
3) He reported Hamas’s claim that Israel’s renewed closure of Gaza was a violation of the truce, effectively declaring Hamas the good guys.
4) He termed those who criticized the truce as “hard-liners,” and then quoted an Israeli critic. The critic, Gen. Moshe Yaalon was correct when he called the truce unstable, largely because Hamas will not stop the smuggling of weapons as it committed to and, as mentioned, won’t stop the firing on Israel.

Just as the Post’s correspondent (I think Barton Gellman) 12 years ago declared “peace” where an extremist group was violating its terms, (then it was Fatah,) now Witte pretends there is a ceasefire or truce when an extremist group (now Hamas) was violating every one of its terms.

I don’t expect that the Post will follow my advice; it seems averse to self criticism. But what the heck, I’ll give it a shot.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

05/15/2008

Half witte

Filed under: Israel, Media Bias — Tags: , , — Soccerdad @ 9:00 am

As the successor to Scott Wilson, the Washington Post’s Israel correspondent Griff Witte had some mighty low expectations to meet in terms of reporting objectively. Witte has very quickly managed to establish himself the equal of Scott Wilson in terms of adopting the Palestinian narrative. A recent Q & A about Israel’s 60th birthday is very revealing.

The first question he actually handled quite well.

Silver Spring, Md.: Mr. Witte, you write that “Israel remains an unfinished project” and I am frankly glad that it is. Can any nation on the face of this earth truly be deemed a “finished project”? Wouldn’t that mean stasis and stagnation? But please do not attribute this status of Israel to the lack of a constitution — Israel is far from alone among the nations of the world to operate without a constitution. Great Britain, for one, comes to mind.

Griff Witte: An excellent question, so thank you. You’re right that no nation ever truly is finished, but I think there’s more debate in Israel than there is in most places about the nature of the state. What are Israel’s borders? How does Israel handle the Palestinian territories? Are its neighbors friend or foe? Is Israel just for Jews, or is it multireligious? Within Judaism, how does Israel balance the needs of the ultra-Orthodox against the needs of the secular?

All of these are questions I hear being batted around this Independence Day. Of course, Israel’s relative youth may account for a good part of the uncertainty.

Another possibility is that Israel has a very strong and vocal left wing that has its own newspaper.

But then we get to the second question.

Oslo, Norway: A common complaint against Israel is that they “kicked out the Arabs.” Not only do Arabs still live in Israel, but there are more Arabs living in Israel now than in any other time in history. What is the reason for the continuation of this myth?

Griff Witte: I don’t know that this is a myth. It has been well established by historians that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to leave their homes — either directly or through intimidation from the advancing Israeli forces. They ended up in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and many other places beyond.

It’s also well-established, and hardly a secret, that there’s a significant Arab minority still living in Israel. About 20 percent of Israel’s population is Arab.

No mention that most of the Arabs left on their own accord or were encouraged by their leadership to leave their homes.
(more…)

Powered by WordPress