Minutes of War

The October 6th anniversary of the 1973 Yom Kippur War was accompanied this year by the unexpected release of war cabinet minutes by Israel's State Archives covering the opening days of the fighting. There were no startling revelations; certainly no references to Israel's purported nuclear capabilities; or confirmation that defense minister Moshe Dayan told prime minister Golda Meir that "the Third Temple is in danger." Still, the publication of the protocols reopened old wounds and temporarily threw "start-up nation" Israel into an existential funk.

Though there have been countless war histories, memoires by key participants, and the official findings of the Agranat Commission -- which blamed David Elazar, the country's top general, for allowing the army to be taken by surprise -- the cabinet transcripts provided a fresh sense of immediacy. Here was Meir worrying aloud that the dangers Israel faced were even greater than those it confronted during the 1948 War of Independence. The publicly unflappable Moshe Dayan is in despair telling the cabinet that the war was being lost; that Syria and Egypt could conquer Israel; that Jordan would likely open-up a third front. "I didn't sufficiently appreciate the strength of the enemy" and overestimated the IDF's ability to cope with this kind of attack, he admits. The Soviet-supplied surface-to-air missiles are taking a devastating toll on the air force. There is talk of calling up older high-school students, long-retired reservists, even enlisting Diaspora Jews. Meir offers to travel secretly to Washington where she would throw herself at Richard Nixon's mercy.

The released minutes created a hue and cry even though the peril Israel faced during those dark days is no secret. Elazar partisans press again for his full public rehabilitation; after all, the minutes show him cool-headed, wisely urging -- against Dayan's recommendation -- a full IDF mobilization. Some columnists take Dayan to task for his willingness to abandon wounded soldiers to their fate after Egyptian forces overran the Bar-Lev Line fortifications. His daughter Yael tells Israel Radio that her late father had written openly of his regrets in his memoirs.

Post-Zionists relish the harm done to Dayan's image -- another Zionist icon punctured. For Israel's left, the message of the minutes is about the limitations of Israeli military power. The current cabinet is urged to pursue compromise over political stagnation and more war. Security hawks draw other lessons. By the morning of October 6, 1973 Israel had compelling, albeit imperfect, intelligence to recommend a preemptive attack. Meir worried that if Israel struck first, the international community would blame the Jews for the war: “The world’s nastiness is plain to see. They won’t believe us."

The protocols strike a chord with Israelis who know that for all their country's technological prowess and despite its Western standard of living, the existential dangers the Jewish state faced 37 years ago are no less real today. Iran is intent on developing nuclear weapons and unequivocal about its genocidal intentions toward the Zionist enterprise. Hezbollah has transformed Lebanon into an Iranian satellite. Syria, aligned with Iran, is a constant menace. Hamas controlled Gaza is also in Iran's orbit. Meantime, even moderate Palestinian Arabs reject the mantra: "Two states, one Jewish, one Arab, living side-by-side in peace."

Israelis know, too, that an all-out war nowadays, when missiles pose a near-insurmountable danger, could devastate Israel's civilian population concentrated along the country's narrow coastal plain. Fortunately, a combination of determination and healthy denial provides ordinary Israelis with the coping mechanism necessary to go about their daily lives.

The minutes inform contemporary decision makers that intelligence about enemy intentions especially in wartime is imperfect. Fortunately, the Syrians and Egyptians hadn't grasped the extent of Israel's unpreparedness and did not press their advantage. Perhaps their goals were limited in the first place. In any event, the minutes challenge the notion that the diplomatic fallout of a preemptive attack makes it smart policy to absorb the first blow. If that were the case, UN Security Council Resolution 338, which ended the war, would have given Israel credit for waiting to be attacked and suffering 2,656 dead and 7,000 wounded.

Israel's current top general, Gabi Ashkenazi, writes that the nation has taken on board the main lesson of the Yom Kippur War: never to underestimate any enemy and never to allow intelligence to lead to false certainties.

-- October 2010

The unlovable Avigdor Lieberman

Avigdor Lieberman's September 28th speech at the UN General Assembly – delivered in English and broadcast live by Al-Jazeera – was not well received. The doyen of Israeli left-wing columnists, Yediot Aharonot's Nahum Barnea, dismissed his country's foreign minister as a "clown." Haaretz editorialized for Lieberman's resignation. Britain's Daily Telegraph characterized the address as "inflammatory.”

And dismissing Lieberman as "a West Bank settler" not "committed to peacemaking," the Los Angeles Times editorialized that Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak Rabin would never have allowed a foreign minister of theirs to articulate views that contradicted government policy. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must either be duplicitous, in implying Lieberman's address did not have his backing, or politically enfeebled, the newspaper adjudged.

There is no disputing the fact that the speech was "off-message" -- differing from the accommodationist tone Netanyahu has set – and delivered by a reviled envoy. What is debatable is whether Lieberman's unhelpful address deserved the opprobrium heaped upon it; and whether the claim that foreign ministers loyally adhere to the political line set by their premiers is factual.

First to the substance of Lieberman's speech which began by stating the obvious: Israel's political arena is not divided between those who want peace and those who prefer a Greater Israel. Instead, Israel's majority is divided over how to secure peace. The Arabs controlled the West Bank and Gaza for nearly two decades and "no-one tried to create a Palestinian state," Lieberman pointed out. Yet, later, settlements notwithstanding, "peace agreements were achieved with Egypt and Jordan." There being no trust between Israelis and Palestinians and with policy differences as knotty as they are, Lieberman recommended that the parties aim for "a long-term intermediate agreement" rather than an absolute resolution of the conflict in a matter of months.

More controversially, he argued that "the guiding principle for a final status agreement must not be land-for-peace but rather [an] exchange of populated territory." Conflicts elsewhere, he stated, which had involved competing national and religious narratives -- post-communist Czechoslovakia and of East Timor, for instance – had been eased by redrawing boundaries. "Let me be very clear," Lieberman said, "I am not speaking about moving populations, but rather about moving borders to better reflect demographic realities."

Lieberman's plan may be geographically unworkable, as veteran Israeli journalist Yaron London has convincingly argued. Few imagine it will ever garner Palestinian approval. Yet on a purely moral plane, it would be hard to argue an exchange of populated territory is inherently a more nefarious idea than advocating a complete Israeli withdrawal to the hard-to-defend armistice lines in effect between 1949 and 1967 – Abba Eban's "Auschwitz borders."

Lieberman's decision to present his scheme at the General Assembly highlights a structural anomaly in Israel's political system. The job of foreign minister is a patronage appointment. Prime ministers usually have to tap rivals from within their own party or from among requisite coalition partners. As a result, foreign ministers seldom see themselves as loyal-bound to a premier. Moshe Sharett vehemently disapproved of David Ben-Gurion's security policies. Moshe Dayan represented Menachem Begin only to the extent that their views coincided. Shimon Peres offered territorial concessions to the Palestinians without first clearing them with Yitzhak Rabin. Tzipi Livni sessions with Ahmed Qurei were a sideshow to Ehud Olmert's bargaining with Mahmoud Abbas. Silvan Shalom was hardly Ariel Sharon's vicar of foreign policy any more than David Levy or Shimon Peres were for Yitzhak Shamir. Thankfully, during the crisis years of the second intifada, Sharon and Peres worked mostly in tandem because they agreed on the overriding need to quash Palestinian aggression.

It was therefore not all that odd for Netanyahu's office to distance itself from Lieberman's speech, to state that the foreign minister had not coordinated his address with the premier, and to recall that Netanyahu – not Lieberman – is actually heading negotiations with the Palestinians. Some will seek Machiavellian explanations for the speech and the premier's response to it, perhaps giving the two more credit, as politicians and statesmen, than they deserve.

What would it take for Israeli foreign policy-makers to speak with one voice?

Nothing short of jettisoning Israel's electoral system of pure proportional representation, and empowering premier's to dismiss wayward cabinet ministers without grievous political cost. Plainly, it is easier to lash out at the unlovable Avigdor Lieberman than muster the integrity and energy necessary to fix what is really wrong.

-- October 2010

Introducing Ed Miliband

The newly elected leader of the British Labor Party, 40-year-old Ed Miliband, pledged during his campaign to visit Gaza, the West Bank and Israel to see first-hand "what is happening on the ground." But Labor's first Jewish leader is expected to make Britain's budget and debt burden – not foreign affairs – his top priority. Though union support gave Ed Miliband his narrow margin of victory over brother David, he has moved quickly to jettison his "Red Ed" moniker.

What to make of Miliband's Jewishness? He makes no effort to deny his origins; neither is there any sentimentality for Jewish civilization. His parents fled Europe as Jews but raised their children to embrace exclusively "progressive" values. His Polish-born mother is an ardent pro-Palestinian activist. His late Belgian-born father was said to have evinced early Zionist sympathies before becoming permanently enamored with Marxism.

Plainly, Miliband will be no particular asset to Britain's 262,000-plus Jewish community. Likewise, his frosty attitude toward the Jewish state is not likely to undergo metamorphosis. He has described himself as a “critical friend of Israel” who opposes "blanket boycotts of goods from Israel." As a Euro-liberal he acknowledges Israel's right to self-defense purely in the abstract. For Miliband, even Israel's "right to exist" is implicitly conditioned on its ability to deliver "justice for the Palestinians." No wonder that party hard-liners fixated by the Palestinian Arab cause gravitated to his campaign.

Miliband takes the helm of a party that has always been of two minds about Zionism and Jews, its early association with the urban Jewish working classes notwithstanding. Nowadays, demographic and class shifts – there are fewer Jewish cabbies and more Jewish lawyers – have left Jews without influence in unions and their political loyalties mostly split between Labor and the Tories.

Founded in 1900, Labor began as an amalgamation of the Fabian Society, trade unions and a precursor socialist party. This did not automatically translate into tolerant attitudes toward Jews. The unions, for instance, supported passage of the 1905 Aliens Act aimed at restricting Jewish immigration from Czarist Russia. In 1911, trade unionists carried out a pogrom in Wales that forced out local Jewish merchants. On the other hand, in 1917, Labor warmly championed Jewish settlement in Palestine. And in 1922, Labor sent its first Jewish member, union leader Manny Shinwell, to parliament.

In the dark days before World War II, Labor only grudgingly accepted the necessity of rearmament against Nazi Germany. In opposition in 1944, Labor's platform was friendly toward Zionist aspirations; and in 1945 the party was calling for an end to Britain's heartless barring of Jewish immigration to Palestine.

All that changed within months of Labor's sweeping post-war election victory as foreign secretary Ernest Bevin, a former labor organizer with strong anti-Jewish prejudices, totally embraced the Arab line. The party remained hostile toward the Zionist enterprise until end of mandate and beyond. Paradoxically, this same Labor electoral victory sent an astounding 26 Jews to parliament. But as Prof. Geoffrey Alderman makes clear, not only did they not form a Jewish caucus, only six could be cajoled to venture the slightest public opposition to Bevin's catastrophic Palestine policies.

After Israel's War of Independence, the Labor government petulantly withheld diplomatic recognition until February 1949. Similarly, in 1956, Labor's Jewish MPs, then in opposition, refused to break ranks with party leader Hugh Gaitskell over his nasty criticism of Israel during the Sinai Campaign.

By the 1960s Labor's hard-left factions were on the ascendant. Yet even moderate prime minister Harold Wilson was cold to Israel's entreaties in the lead up to 1967 war. After Labor's 1979 defeat by Margaret Thatcher, the party only barely adjusted its leftward drift replacing Michael Foot with Neil Kinnock. The moderates regained control over the party when Tony Blair led "New Labor" to power in 1997. During Blair's long reign hostility toward Israel – and oftentimes obliquely toward Jews -- by Labor's supporters in the media, unions and academia became viral. Though Blair incessantly lobbied Washington to extract strategically costly diplomatic concessions from Israel during the second intifada, his continuing opposition to the Jewish state's de-legitimization tarred him as a philo-Zionist among leftists.

That era ended in May when Conservative David Cameron defeated Blair's successor Gordon Brown. Now, Miliband's victory makes it official: New Labor is finished.
Miliband is a radical optimist with a pragmatic streak. The new leader's hardheaded assessment may be that Israel-bashing provides few political benefits against an incumbent premier whose lack of empathy for the Zionist enterprise parallels his own.

-- September 2010

No Kudos to Castro

Castro's Conversion

I suppose for an entire generation, Fidel Castro is a harmless old baseball fan, and maybe a former principled Latin American revolutionary.

Forgotten is the fact that he tried to instigate a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States that would have cost millions of people their lives – though he's apologized for that, kind of.

And put aside that Castro deprived the people of Cuba of their liberty, tortured opponents and forced hundreds of thousands of Cubans into exile.

Realizing that his days on this earth are numbered and that he will soon go to meet Marx, he is in the process of rehabilitating his image.

And what better way to begin that process than by calling in a liberal Jewish American journalist (and an old Castro-hand, Julia Sweig of the Council on Foreign Relations) to have an extended conversation about Jews, Israel and Iran among other things.

The old dictator had read Goldberg's recent Atlantic article which argued – mistakenly in my view – that it was just a matter of time before Israel went to war against Iran to stop the mullahs from deploying atomic weapons.

Castro – now reinventing himself as some kind of humanist -- is all of a sudden worried about the danger of a nuclear conflagration.


So Castro drops Goldberg a couple of nuggets.

Does he think that Israel has a right to exist?

Uncle Fidel answers: "Si, sin ninguna duda" -- "Yes, without a doubt."

Gosh. I'm glad we got that out of the way.

And what about Jews, Goldberg asks? Does Uncle Fidel have a soft spot for Jews?

"I don't think anyone has been slandered more than the Jews. I would say much more than the Muslims. They have been slandered much more than the Muslims because they are blamed and slandered for everything. No one blames the Muslims for anything."

Not bad for a guy who kept equating Israelis with Nazis.

And what about Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial?

"The Jews have lived an existence that is much harder than ours. There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust," Castro tells Goldberg.

Goldberg: "I asked him if he would tell Ahmadinejad what he was telling me."

Castro: "I am saying this so you can communicate it."

It gets better.

Now that Castro has dissented from Ahmadinejad, Goldberg reports that Venezuelan leader, Hugo Chavez, has announced that he too, felt great "love and respect" for Jews."

Well, I suppose it's better than a slap in the face.

But let's get down to cases.

I do not like to see Castro air-brushing out the bad he has wrought. He's not getting a pass from me.

Castro is not an anti-Semite in the classical sense. Certainly, as a "dialectical materialist," he rejects Christian-rooted theological Jew-hatred. He admires Jews in history, most prominently Marx.

But his record of warfare – political, diplomatic, and military -- against the Jewish state is damning.

You can't want to snuff-out the Jewish state yet claim to love the Jews.

It would be like saying you love Muslims but want to destroy each and every one of the 57 Muslim states in the world because, maybe you think Islam is just a religion so Muslims don't deserve political states.

What follows is part of what Castro did against the Jewish state. And remember, he had no reason. Israel is on the other side of the world. We never did boo to him.

Castro began to train Palestinian Arab terrorists in Cuba in 1966. Keep in mind that there were no "occupied territories" in those days.

He did not break diplomatic relations with Israel in 1967 following the Six Day War along with the rest of the Soviet client states.

He did so only in the wake of 1973 Yom Kippur War at a solidarity with the Palestinians meeting of the so-called non-aligned nations in Algiers.

Cuban military instructors trained Palestinian Arabs gunmen in Middle East countries starting in the 1970s.

That's when the Palestinians patented airline hijacking, slaughtering Olympic athletes and leaving bombs in supermarkets.

You may think 9/11 was the start of the terror campaign against airports around the world. But it was the Palestinian terrorists who got that ball rolling.

Anyway, in 1973 and 1974, Cuban MiG and helicopter pilots were actually based in Syria. I think they even engaged in dogfights with Israeli planes.

Castro granted diplomatic relations to the Palestine Liberation Organization and in 1974 and allowed the PLO to establish an "embassy" in Havana.

Bear in mind that at this stage the PLO did not even claim to recognize Israel or to accept a two-state solution. Nowadays it at least makes believe it does.

But in those days it behaved like Hamas does today.

Still Castro extended his support to a movement dedicated to "liberating" Palestine from the Jews.

In 1974, he stationed a tank brigade on Golan Heights. That same year, as many as 3,000 Cuban soldiers were based in Syria working for Assad I.

This is what Castro said in 1975: "It is no secret to anyone that at any given moment of danger and threat to the Republic of Syria, our men were in Syria."

By 1976, the CIA estimated that 300 Arab fedayeen were training in Cuba.

In 1977, Nayef Hawatmeh of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (an outfit set up to allow Christian-born Arabs who were Marxists to fight Israel alongside the Muslims) visited Cuba.

All along, mind you, Castro ostensibly claimed to support direct negotiations between parties.

In 1978, he hosted Yasser Arafat and George Habash of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Arafat's "state" visit to Havana was to discuss terror training not coexistence with Israel.

Fast forward to 1991: Cuba voted against a U.N. Resolution to revoke the infamous 1975 General Assembly Resolution that the Arabs pushed through besmirching Zionism (the national liberation movement of the Jewish people) as "racism."

In 2001, just as Arafat had launched his second intifada that would claim 1,000 Israeli lives, Castro called on the delegates attending the -- incongruously titled -- U.N. World Conference "Against Racism" in Durban, South Africa to "put an end to the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people."

"Genocide"???!!

Now, fast forward to …today.

Cuba's Communist Party newspaper still "reports" on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict purely in black and white terms. Hence the headline:

"Palestine Refuses to Negotiate If Israel Resumes Colonization."

Look, I am delighted that Castro is not a Holocaust-denier, these days you can't take anything for granted. But he's still a defamer of Israel.

What would it take for me to bury the hatchet?

I want to see him take responsibility for what he did to Israel all these years.

I want him to stop Cuba from automatically voting with the Arab and Muslim bloc at the UN.

I want him to re-establish diplomatic relations with Israel.

Let him prove that his interview with Goldberg was the substantive beginning of a trend, not just an old commite trying to spin his image.