With Israel in the grip of domestic anarchy and under attack from Palestine-Gaza, it is difficult to maintain a dispassionate perspective. So, I tell myself that this conflict began before I was born before even Israel was reborn. That Arab opposition to the idea of a Jewish national homeland in Eretz Israel dates back over 100 years.
If
you are Jewish and oppose political Zionism and believe Israel never had a
right to be born or that we were born in original political sin of the Balfour
Declaration, I have nothing to say to you. I do not engage in polemics with
Jews for Jesus, Scientologists, messianic Chabadniks, or Jewish quislings.
What's the point? Disappointed? Get your relief here: https://youtu.be/ohDB5gbtaEQ
However,
if you are stuck in the density of the forest and can't see the wood for the
trees, you need to know that the Arabs are engaged in a zero-sum,
winner-take-all game. They do not countenance our presence. They utterly reject
the legitimacy of our claims to any part of this country. No Arab leader says
Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state. The millennial generation of
Palestinian Arabs was raised on a narrative of victimization, taught to
demonize us by a generation that had already canonized the Book of
Intransigence. The most moderate Palestinian Arab member of Israel's Knesset
sees us as colonial interlopers and as the "occupation." An
occupation, they’d say, that in 1967 we extended to the West Bank and Gaza.
In
2005, we unilaterally pulled out of Gaza, but their line is that we didn't.
Indeed, we supply Gaza with its electricity and water. Ours is a Kafkaesque
relationship with Palestine-Gaza, which is simultaneously at permanent war with
Israel and in permanent dependency to Israel. Through COGAT https://www.gov.il/en/Departments/faq/faq_gaza
we try to square what really can't be squared.
Palestine-Gaza
should be the Singapore of the Middle East. Instead, it is more like
Hezbollah-Lebanon. That is the choice of the Islamic Resistance Movement,
popularly known as Hamas. And if free elections were held in Gaza and in the
Palestinian Authority on the West Bank, surveys show Hamas would win. So, the
choice to turn Sunni Gaza into Iran's rabid lapdog of Shi'ite imperialism is a
price Palestinian Arabs are willing to pay in their vitriolic hatred of Israel.
Now,
I want to zoom in on the events of the past several weeks.
This
did not need to happen. It caught us with our pants down.
The
conflict finds us at a point where tribalism is superseding Israelism. We have
what amounts to a caretaker government. Many key ministerial positions are
unfilled or are held by ministers who barely speak with the prime minister.
Voters
keep going to the polls – in 2015, twice in 2019, in 2020, and in 2021. The
Binyamin Netanyahu-led Likud keeps winning a plurality but can't muster or
maintain a governing majority. There are two main blocs: pro-Netanyahu and
anti-Netanyahu. The anti-Netanyahu camp is comprised of disparate parties and
personalities that run the gamut of Israel's political spectrum.
Now,
the country is on its way to a fifth round of elections.
If
Netanyahu had the country's best interests at heart, he would step aside so
that Likud colleagues Nir Barkat or Tzachi Hanegbi, or Israel Katz could become
acting prime minister and form a broad-based Emergency Unity Government whose
goal would be to uproot the Islamic Resistance Movement from operating as a
military force in Palestine-Gaza.
But
Netanyahu's biggest bet has been on Hamas. Every month he funnels $100 million
of Qatari money into Gaza to keep Hamas afloat. "Success Has Many Parents,
Failure is an Orphan." His wager failed. It will go down in history as
Netanyahu's Oslo. Like Oslo, if the stars had been perfectly aligned it might
have delivered de-facto peace for a generation. It is too bad Bibi’s gambit has
proven a colossal mistake.
Zooming
in further: Netanyahu's appointment in May 2020 of the utterly incompetent Amir
Ohana as Public Security Minister (he has paltry security experience compared
to more talented alternatives) set off a series of unintended consequences that
undermined the public's faith in law enforcement during the COVID-19
epidemic.
Ohana
and Netanyahu then selected Kobi Shabtai, a not-ready-for-prime-time policeman,
to become Israel's top cop. His primary qualification for the job is that he is
not unsympathetic to the prime minister's legal (i.e., criminal)
predicament.
The
Ohana-Shabtai team first brought us Meron, and now this.
Last
night, Arab mobs driven by primeval religious fervor again ran murderously
amok. These are Arab citizens of Israel, so the dilemma of containing their
violence without resorting to live fire is real. Now Netanyahu is planning to
empower the IDF to operate against the Arab insurrection inside the Green Line.
An army is not a police department. If the IDF is fielded, it will not be to
give out parking tickets.
No
Arab Knesset member or sheik or imam seems to have any influence over the Arab
youths who are on the rampage. They've tried. Some Arab analysts say the
violence has been egged on by powerful Arab criminal syndicates that hold sway
in many Arab townships and cities. The analysts point out that Israel allowed a
criminal infrastructure to take root so long as it was only Arabs killing Arabs
(and they were with abandon). Now the chickens have come home to roost.
Whether
instigated or lobotomized, a violent genie has been released from the Seventh
Circle of Hell intent on "defending" the hemispherical golden shrine
known as the Dome of the Rock and the nearby Al Aksa mosque situated on the
Temple Mount inside Jerusalem's Old City meters from the Western Wall.
And
if you're wondering, no – Israel does not constrict Muslim worship at these
shrines. However, we do not allow them to be used as staging areas for attacks
against the Western Wall. To my knowledge, Islamic prayer does not call for
rocks or bullets in any of its five daily services.
Historically,
false Muslim Palestinian Arab claims that the Haram esh-Sharif or the Temple
Mount compound is in danger have been exploited to set off anti-Zionist
violence since the 1920s. These tempests sporadically erupt when burning
politics mixes with scorching air over blistering terrain. To paraphrase Robert
Zimmerman (aka Bob Dylan), "you don't need a weatherman to know which way
the wind blows."
As
for this particular eruption – why now? The answer is Sheikh Jarrah.
All
of us are paying the price because a group of ultra-nationalist-orthodox true
believers and their misguided financial patrons in the US (none of whom
consider themselves fanatics) wanted to swing their dicks around (beg your
pardon, ladies). Here is my earlier take on Sheik Jarrah https://onjewishcivilization.com/2021/05/07/sheikh-jarrah-because-we-can/
We
were stupid. They are lying. There is no government policy to drive Arabs out
of their homes or out of Jerusalem. Nearly 40 percent of the population is
Arab. The city’s current mayor is trying to rectify the municipality’s laissez
faire attitude about service delivery in the Arab sector. Yet it would help if
the Jerusalem Arabs exercised their right to vote instead of boycotting as both
the PLO and Hamas demand.
In
ordinary times coexistence – sometimes cordial, other times grudging – prevails
not just in Jerusalem and the West Bank but throughout Israel. It was a glimmer
of hope, sometimes strongly felt sometimes less so. And, frankly, there’s no
viable alternative. In fact, adding to the convergence of factors that has
hurled us toward calamity, Hamas may have been worried that Knesset Member
Mansour Abbas, a Hebrew University educated dentist and head of the United Arab
List would lead his Islamist party into, or support from the outside, the next
government. He was being courted by both Netanyahu and the anti-Netanyahu camp.
Hamas needed to torpedo that because it undermined the narrative that Arabs who
did not flee during the 1948 War of Independence were living under
“occupation.”
But
there’s no sugarcoating it – Sheikh Jarrah was the spark. The Arabs rioted
atop the Temple Mount last Friday night under the mistaken conviction that
Sheikh Jarrah was somehow the final bulwark before the Shrine itself was
breached. That elicited a fathomable but imprudent police response. If the
police had professional guidance, they might have found a better way to handle
the violent onslaught. In the event, they lobbed stun grenades at Arabs who were
throwing rocks (and worse) from inside the Shrine.
Let
me pause to remind you that the Palestinian Muslims who manage the Shrine take
the position that any Jewish presence in the compound is pollution and a
desecration. It is a religious chauvinism that cosmopolitan Europeans and
progressive Americans conveniently dismiss with a bat of an eye.
The
Israeli Police response ignited uncontrollable rioting that spread throughout
Israel and presented Hamas with an opportunity it was incapable of resisting –
or maybe helped orchestrate from the get-go.
In
any event, toward the end of Ramadan, it all blew up on Jerusalem Day shortly
after Netanyahu dithered about whether it was a good idea to allow Jewish young
people to have a celebratory march around Jerusalem's Old City walls.
Further
darkening our skies, in response to runaway and asymmetrical Arab violence,
Jewish louts festering on the underside of our own society – whether in
benighted football fan clubs or on hilltops where apocalyptic antinomian
mindsets prevail and instigated by their duly elected Knesset representatives
and God-inspirited clerics – took the law into their own vigilante hands.
They
smashed Arab-owned shop windows, tried to lynch random Arab passersby, and
taunted frantic and aggrieved worshippers outside their mosques.
In
other words, these Jews signaled that they had no faith in the legitimate
institutions of the Zionist state – if that is not post-Zionism, then what is?
Netanyahu
gave the Haredim autonomy, and we saw the lamentable results during COVID. He
gave the Arabs autonomy when he took a hands-off approach to "honor
killings" and runaway criminal behavior within the Arab sector. He allowed
Hamas to build its arsenal as long as it didn't shoot at us. In the short term,
all this bought quiet.
I
am not finished….
On
the military front, the IDF cannot stop Hamas from launching rockets on our
cities and settlements. Unless we were to play by Assad Rules, doing so is
militarily impossible. Now, Gulf Arabs wonder if their bet on us as a "strong
horse" against Iran was smart after all.
Presently,
a ground incursion into Gaza looks like it might be on the offing. Maybe that
is what Hamas wants. We go in. They capture one of our boys (or hold on to a
fresh body), and we are in another Gilad Shalit nightmare. Paradoxically, some
of the Palestine-Gaza leaders now running the show were released by Netanyahu
in a 2011 prisoner exchange.
We
Israelis enabled Netanyahu’s bad bet on Gaza. It was quiet in most of the
country. We turned away from our fellow Israelis who lived along the border
with Palestine-Gaza and suffered the “occasional” booby-trapped explosive
balloon, mortar, or rocket attack.
The
Sheikh Jarrah intifada has allowed Hamas to make political strides at the
expense of Arab Knesset members and the PLO in Ramallah. To the untutored it
looks as if there are no Green Line/Israeli Palestinians or West Bank
Palestinians or Gaza Palestinians or Diaspora Palestinians. There is only one
Palestinian people with Hamas as its champion. By forcing the demilitarized PLO
out of any political role in east Jerusalem, by forbidding Jerusalem Arabs to
send in postal ballots in the now canceled Palestinian Authority elections
Israel created a political vacuum filled by Hamas.
Moreover,
do not discount the fact that the PLO in Judea and Samaria has not turned its
guns on the IDF. Better to have a modus operandi with a faction that dreams of
our phased destruction than with the Islamic Resistance Movement which is
lobbing thousands of rockets at us. If we take Iran at its word why do we not
take Hamas at its word?
As
we approach Shabbat and the Shavuot holiday, the Biden administration has
blocked a one-sided Security Council resolution sponsored by the Europeans.
Thank you, Mr. President. But instead of appreciating their efforts,
Netanyahu's churlish UN diplomat said it was not enough because the State
Department made some noises to which no one was paying attention.
Now,
worryingly, the president, the German Chancellor, and other European leaders
all say that "Israel has a right to defend itself." Whenever I
hear that sort of Diplo-speak I know there’s a “but” coming down the line.
If
you pray, pray the IDF has time to defang Hamas.
Erev Shavuot Addendum
The New York Times
has an expose today (16 May) fed to it by an Israeli foreign-funded NGO
operative. It turns out that on Israel Memorial Day Eve 13 April, which
coincided with the first day of the violence-prone Muslim holy month of
Ramadan, Israeli officials blocked Islamist clerics atop the Temple Mount from
blasting loudspeakers from “four medieval minarets” during a Jewish memorial
service below. The President of Israel
was speaking, and authorities did not want his remarks to be drowned out.
Perhaps in an
alternative universe the Times might carry a story headlined: “Muslim
Clerics Lower Volume of Loudspeakers Out Sensitivity to Jewish Mourners.”
In this universe, we
Israeli Jews engage in lots of soul-searching. And I do it in my blog above. It
is crucial to keep an open mind ... just not so open that your brain falls out.
Besides the
Loudspeaker Expose, on Saturday, the Times and several other
unfriendly-to-Israel media outlets expressed chagrin that the IDF spokesman may
have fed them disinformation on Israeli troop movements -- which they duly
disseminated -- only to discover that it might have been part of an Israeli ploy
to expose the whereabouts of enemy forces
I know this is hard
for the Woke Community to get their head around, but Marquess of Queensberry
rules are not honored anywhere in the Middle East. Israel will not be the first
to introduce Marquess of Queensberry rules to the region.
The US can pack up
and leave Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam and abandon its former allies to fend
for themselves. You gotta do what you gotta do. I get that.
And we gotta do what
we gotta do.
Look at it this
way: If we hitched our survival to the
whims of The New York Times editorial board the result would be that
Jewish Americans might have to add extensions to their Holocaust museums and
memorials – alas, another Six Million Jews gone. Tsk. Tek.
They’d recall, tearing
up, that as the Zionists went down they recited Mahatma Gandhi's catechism:
"An eye for eye only ends up making the whole world blind."
Jewish America would
be so very proud of the example Israel set.
Yet committed Jewish peoplehood
we Israelis prefer to defend our homeland. The price we pay is the UN Security
Council -- with the People's Republic of China in the president's chair -- will
denounce us as human rights violators. The Times and the Woke Community will
get to enjoy the moral high ground from the slopes of Manhattan’s West Side. Our
image as the neighborhood bully of the Middle East will be reinforced.
It is a price most
Israelis are willing to pay.
Did you see opinion piece in Saturday’s WSJ on evictions in Jerusalem? It might shed new light why they are not similar to abandoned homes by Arabs in Jerusalem in 1948
ReplyDelete