Stockholm Gets Drawn into the War of Civilizations

A Baghdad-born, British-educated Islamist suicide bomber holding Swedish citizenship killed only himself after apparently stumbling on an icy patch and accidentally detonating two of the three explosive devices he had brought to a bustling Stockholm shopping district. Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt leader of the Moderate Party reacted placidly to the attempted mass murder saying that Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly's behavior was "unacceptable" and urging Swedes not to jump to conclusions about any jihadist connection.

That may prove tricky. Before the attack al-Abdaly emailed an audio recording to the media in which he declared himself a jihadi. While admitting that it was unaware of al-Abdaly, the Swedish domestic security agency SÄPO estimated that there are some 200 violent Islamists in the country.

Sweden has been neutral since the early 1800s managing to sit out both world wars that ravaged Europe. Yet, paradoxically, it appears destined to be inexorably drawn into the Islamist war against Western civilization. Even during the Holocaust Sweden sought to avoid entanglement though, ultimately, in 1943, it offered itself as a haven to Jews fleeing Nazi-occupied Denmark. Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg stationed in Budapest rescued many Jews from Hitler's clutches only to disappear when the Soviets liberated the city.

It was another Swede, Emil Sandstrom, who in 1947 headed the UN committee which recommended the partition of Palestine into two states, one Arab, one Jewish. The Arabs said "no" and tried to strangle Israel at its birth. So Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN envoy to the Mideast, offered a peace plan that would have rolled back Israel's newly gained sovereignty. He was assassinated in 1948 by Zionist militants. Later, Swedish diplomats Dag Hammarskjold and Gunnar Jarring also sought to mediate between Arabs and Israelis.

Many Swedes are sympathetic to Israel, according to Manfred Gerstenfeld a Jerusalem-based analyst of Scandinavian affairs, citing the example of Hokmark Gunnar, a Moderate Party member of the European Parliament and chair of the Sweden-Israel Friendship Association. Since the 1960s, however, the Swedish left has been hostile. The late Social Democrat prime minister Olof Palme even compared Israel’s policies to those of the Nazis. The left dominates the diplomatic corps, the Lutheran church, most newspapers and non-governmental organizations even though a center-right coalition narrowly holds power.

Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt is mostly indifferent toward Israel, while Foreign Minister Carl Bildt (a former Moderate Party premier) is frequently antagonistic castigating every Israeli self-defense measures as counterproductive. In Istanbul, Bildt brazenly visited Swedish extremists who had taken part in the Turkish flotilla to Hamas-controlled Gaza. Sweden has also been an unhelpful voice against Israel in the EU, pushing for recognition of east Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine. While the latest EU foreign minister's declaration did not -- as threatened -- give the Jewish state just a year to yield to Arab demands or face recognition of "Palestine" along the 1949 Armistice Lines, the tone of the announcement left little doubt which side the EU blamed for the current stalemate. Doubtlessly, Sweden would have been pushing for an even harder-line on Israel.

When in 2009, the country's largest tabloid Aftonbladet carried a contemptible calumny about Israeli soldiers harvesting the organs of Palestinian youths, the Sweden's political leaders obstinately refused to distance themselves from the accusations evoking the excuse of freedom of the press.

And what of the 15,000 Jews today living in the country? Those who are identifiably Jewish have not had an easy time due to anti-Semitism so prevalent among the 500,000 Muslims in the country (population 9 million). Approximately half of Swedish Muslims live in Stockholm with Malmö, in the south, one-quarter Muslim. Malmö's Social Democrat mayor Ilmar Reepalu insinuated that Jews deserved to be attacked for not distancing themselves from Israel. Many Jews have decided to abandon the city. And the Simon Wiesenthal Center has recommended Jews altogether avoid travel to Sweden.
Gerstenfeld goes so far as to argue that by opening its gates to a population coming from countries with discriminatory and anti-Semitic cultures, the Swedes have made an implicit decision to "promote" anti-Semitism.

Sweden has certainly embraced multiculturalism with gusto; critics scorn its immigration policy as suicidal. Stockholm is diplomatically predisposed to the Palestinian cause; domestically it has responded to violent Muslim anti-Semitism with appalling political correctness. What, then, could Sweden have possibly done to bring forth an Islamist suicide bombing?

Al-Abdaly's recording blamed the war in Afghanistan and a 2007 cartoon depicting the Muslim prophet Muhammad as a dog. Is this credible? Sweden has a mere 500 soldiers in increasingly turbulent northern Afghanistan but they are involved mostly in reconstruction work and even training midwives. As for Lars Vilks, the Swedish artist, his caricatures in a regional newspaper were intended to protest widespread self-censorship that followed in the wake of the 2005 Muhammad cartoons published by a Danish newspaper.

More plausibly, Islamists will continue to strike at tolerant Sweden not in retribution for any particular "transgression," but simply because the "Land of the Midnight Sun" is part of the fabric of Western civilization.

Ehud Barak in Washington

According to the 8 AM news on Reshet Bet, Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned that without an agreement with the Palestinians, Israel’s position in the international community would deteriorate and that efforts to de-legitimize Israel’s existence will intensify.

This is news?

Barak is the grand chest master from Chelm.

He always manages to outmaneuver himself – tripping up even before he sets out.

His political and diplomatic ineptitude amazes given his early military career.

Obviously Barak is trying to placate the fading Labor Party about the stagnant "peace process."

Industry, Trade and Labor Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer (not a Barak enemy) has given PM Netanyahu a two-month window of opportunity to make "progress on the diplomatic front."

What is the point of putting pressure on your own side when the real obstacle continues to be Palestinian Arab intransigence? Why not give Mahmoud Abbas a two month window?

We Israelis know we need peace and acceptance. The Arabs do too.

That is why the Arabs won't give it to us.

Making it appear as if we are the ones holding things up -- something the world already believes either because of lack of understanding or something more sinister does not help.

History Book Modern Israel

Short English-language histories of Israel are few and far between, and good ones even fewer and farther. For that reason the publication of Martin Van Creveld's The Land of Blood and Honey: The Rise of Modern Israel (St. Martin'; 320 pages) raised hopes that here at last, is the book to recommend to the person seeking a definitive, concise, sensibly compassionate and elegantly-written account of modern Israel.

Van Creveld is a Dutch-born professor emeritus of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem whose specialty is military strategy. In this book, one of 17 he has authored, he sets out to provide a "brief but comprehensive outline" of Israel with "a feel for what life is like" in "perhaps the greatest success story of the entire twentieth century." Blood and Honey is intended as a synthesis of what is already known.

Unfortunately, it also turns out to be a petulant, puzzling meditation, at times bragging of Israeli accomplishments, though just as often hammering away mercilessly at the country's imperfections. It employs odd nomenclature: Van Creveld is loath to use "Torah" or "Hebrew Bible" when "Old Testament" can serve his purposes; "the so-called First Migration" supplants the First Aliya; it's "Wailing Wall" not Western Wall. And, ad nauseam, it's the "occupied" West Bank -- never Judea and Samaria.

The narrative starts with "Forged in Fury," covering the period from the first Zionist Congress convened by Theodor Herzl in 1897 until the end of the War of Independence in 1949. Van Creveld accurately portrays pre-Zionist Palestine as a backwater lacking in infrastructure – no ports, roads or rail system. The British would remedy that. Under Ottoman rule the Arabs – there were no "Palestinians" at the time – were mostly illiterate while the indigent Jews, not permitted to purchase land, lived off charity supplied by their co-religionists abroad.

Political Zionism was spurred by the failure of Europe's Enlightenment to solve the Jewish question in the liberal West and by continued violent persecution in the reactionary East. The Zionists were divided between practical settlers eager to create facts on the ground and those, like Herzl, who wanted to first set the diplomatic stage for the Jews' return. Britain's Balfour Declaration offered the Jews a homeland though not a state. Soon Winston Churchill lopped off most of the Promised Land to create Transjordan. The Jewish Agency, meanwhile, provided the framework of a Zionist governing authority that would evolve into a state. In 1947, the Arabs rejected the creation of an Arab Palestine alongside a Jewish Israel and attacked. Though vastly outnumbered, the (now) Israelis were better organized and overcame the Arab onslaught. Still, a staggering one percent of Israel's population perished in the war. So far, so good.

In "Full Steam Ahead" Van Creveld covers the 1949-1967 period summarizing Israel's political system, taking the trouble to note that Israel's hyperactive high-court does not require a litigant to show they have any stake in a matter before filing suit. He maps out the ideological divide between the political parties, emphasizes the hegemony of David Ben-Gurion's Histadrut labor federation which both much of the means of production and represented the workers.

Van Creveld also sagaciously takes cognizance of an early dilemma still unresolved: Whether Israel was to be a Jewish state or simply a state of the Jews? Overcoming formidable obstacles, he tells us, Israel absorbed enormous numbers of Holocaust survivors and other immigrants. Youth movements were created in which, quite distinctively, young people not adults were mostly in charge. Van Creveld makes a strong case in support of Ben-Gurion wrenching decision to accept Holocaust reparations from West Germany. It proved essential to Israel's economic development. The chapter finishes with Van Creveld praising the sound of Israeli artillery retaliating against unprovoked Jordanian shelling of Jerusalem in June 1967 as "the sweetest" "he ever heard."

In "The Nightmare Years" Van Creveld speedily covers the 1967-1980 era which included the 1970 War of Attrition and the 1973 Yom Kippur War, noting Dayan's haunting warning that "the Third Temple [was] in danger." The war, writes Van Creveld, left Israel's economy devastated. Finally, he deplores the settlement of the West Bank though he documents the Arabs' rejection of peace, recognition and negotiations.
Throughout his, at times, awkward prose, Van Creveld uses flashes of color to great effect. Herzl, he records, received a 15-minute standing ovation at the First Congress. Chaim Weizmann was prescient in urging Zionists to be ready with their demands when the Great War ended.

"New Challenges" the chapter covering 1981-1995 bemoans the change in Israel's "ethnic make-up." Under growing Sephardi influence, the mores of the secular, socialist and Ashkenazi elite were being supplanted. Israel had become too nationalist, too Jewish, as exemplified by Likud premier Menachem Begin who -- gasp -- ate only kosher food "even in private."

Shimon Peres is rightly credited with saving the economy from hyperinflation. Van Creveld is enthusiastic about Israel's high-tech industry whose rise he properly credits to skills gained by its founders in the IDF. He absurdly reports the mind-boggling claim that Israelis prefer theater to soccer.

We learn that the first intifada broke out in December 1987 after a traffic accident in Gaza ignited rioting. At a time there were few IDF troops in the West Bank and Gaza. The "occupation," it seems, was rather unobtrusive. Van Creveld does not tell us that during the ensuing blood-letting more Palestinians were killed by their compatriots than by Israel. Later, he neglects to mention that five separate deadly terror attacks took place in the weeks preceding Baruch Goldstein's notorious massacre of Arabs in Hebron's Cave of the Patriarchs.

Indeed, some readers will find Van Creveld tendency toward moral relativism, sophistry and even dubious history-telling off-putting. The 1929 Arab uprising was, we're told, preceded by mutual "bickering." At Deir Yassin, the Irgun "massacred about a hundred Arab civilians." Menachem Begin offers a very different and more convincing account in The Revolt. The only time Israel's survival was ever actually in jeopardy was during the 1948 War, Van Creveld claims. Adolph Eichmann "himself had never killed anybody." While Arab villages fit naturally into the terrain, Israeli towns look outlandishly European and out of place. The Chief Rabbinate's headquarters could have been designed by Albert Speer. Arab refugees sought to infiltrate the country's boundaries in the 1950s "in the absence of peace." The concept of "defensible" borders was "invented" by Yigal Allon. As president, Jimmy Carter was a real supporter of Israel. Jewish religious claims to the land are "pretty close" to racist. The image of Israelis in sealed rooms waiting out Iraqi missile attacks in the First Gulf War is "vastly exaggerated." And, today's Israeli children are "barred from the public sphere" a problem "imported from the United States."
In "Tragedy, Triumph, and Struggle," the final chapter, Van Creveld asserts that the 1993 Oslo Accords were "well worth making" and "certainly" did "nothing to harm Israel's security." Anyway, "if it did fail" the blame belongs equally to Israel and the Palestinians. Premier Ehud Barak's midnight withdrawal from south Lebanon in 2000 (which may have set the stage for the second intifada and paved the way for Hezbollah's takeover of the south) is adjudged "a minor masterpiece." Ariel Sharon not Yasser Arafat was largely to blame for the outbreak of the second intifada. Arafat's rejection of Barak's Camp David offer was understandable "since Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem were to remain in Israeli hands." As prime minister during the second intifada, Sharon did not know how to cope. The number of Israeli casualties "was never very large" just over 1,100 dead, actually. Van Creveld allows that the security barrier was not a bad idea, but that constructing it beyond the Green Line was. Of course, Sharon's purpose was not to reward enemy violence and to take topography into account. Not one suicide bomber, writes Van Creveld, entered Israel from Gaza since disengagement. Not exactly. The Eilat bakery bombing occurred on January 29, 2007. The trauma suffered by the people of Sderot? Van Creveld claims that the IDF pullout from Gaza was unconnected to the increased bombardment of Israel's south.

There are a few Zionist heroes in Van Creveld's telling. Socialist David Ben-Gurion is described as a "tin-pot dictator. Remarkably, Ben-Gurion's nemesis, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, a liberal democrat and advocate of free enterprise, gets fair treatment. Ben-Gurion, we learn, referred to Jabotinsky's followers as "Jewish Nazis" and a "bubonic plague." Yet Van Creveld is perpetually disparaging of Menachem Begin. He was a "demagogue first and foremost" though Van Creveld undermines his own assertion by lauding Begin's decision not to retaliate against the Haganah's unprovoked attack (ordered by Ben-Gurion) on the Irgun arms-ship Altalena thereby avoiding a civil war; Begin's decision not to purge Laborites from positions of influence after his 1977 electoral victory showed him to be a true democrat, and his covert outreach to Anwar Sadat before the Egyptian president's historic journey to Jerusalem enabled peace with Egypt. Van Creveld does seem to have a soft spot for the "Russian-accented" Moshe Dayan. But only playwright Hanoh Levin emerges as a true Van Creveld idol. Levin's sour, nihilistic work, exposing Israelis' "unfathomable narrow-mindedness" is, we are told, popular all over the world.

In Van Creveld telling (though not Michael Oren's) then-U.S. defense secretary Robert McNamara belatedly gave Israel a green light to launch its preemptive attack in the 1967 War; Yitzhak Rabin got along famously with Gerald Ford. (Oren said they were an "infelicitous" pair.) Youth movements such as the Scouts are no longer popular (hardly true) except for B'nei Akiva, whose main task is (supposedly) to boost the "occupation." Begin is excoriated for calling Palestinian terrorists "two-legged beasts" however Van Creveld does not tell us the context: the killing of 18 Israelis by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command in Kiryat Shmona.

Van Creveld's characterization of the Kulturkampf between ultra-Orthodox and secular Israelis is not so much wrong as completely lacking in nuance. He pitilessly denigrates the observant as if all Sabbath observers are rock-throwing fanatics; he misses the heterogeneity among Israel's Orthodox. Other streams get no mention. A description of the overflowing Friday night services at the Reform movement's flagship synagogue in Jerusalem would have done wonders to round out the picture. Of course, he is right about the ultra-Orthodox stranglehold on a structurally dysfunctional political system. True ultra-Orthodox religious coercion has alienated many Israelis from Judaism. However, his passing remark that "but for Judaism" Israel's "raison d'être would disappear" does not salvage a chronically injudicious treatment of a very complex topic.

Considering this is a book published toward the end of 2010, it is odd that there is barely an allusion to Iran's nuclear threat; nary a reference to the Second Lebanon War; and scant mention of Operation Cast Lead against Hamas in Gaza. Debilitating political corruption is treated as a minor nuisance. Instead, of illuminating these topics, Van Creveld goes off on a meandering discussion of Israeli feminism that will leave some readers confused whether the author is a misogynist or a radical pro-feminist. Lurching to a conclusion, Van Creveld sums up that while Israel is not perfect, no country is. If so, why did the author allow so much bile to overshadow his narrative?

While bookshelves sag under the weight of pro-Arab and post-Zionist tomes, the wait for a succinct, definitive and stylishly-composed history of Israel will have to continue.

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What then?

Here are several classic histories worth turning to...

The Siege by Conor Cruise O'Brien (1986)

Israel: A History by Martin Gilbert (updated in 2008)

A History of Modern Israel by Colin Shindler (2008)

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Beyond WikiLeaks

The damaging drip-by-drip disclosures of sensitive American diplomatic communications by WikiLeaks have been receiving saturation media coverage. Too few are asking why Julian Assange's website is preoccupied with confidential American cables while displaying no interest in, say, Iranian secrets. Still, there is no denying that reading other peoples clandestine communications offers heretofore unavailable insights.

Jerusalem has long argued that Iran’s march toward nuclear weapons is not Israel's problem alone. That there was an enormous disconnect between what Arab leaders said publicly and what they said privately about Iran is no revelation. Yet the intensity and uniformity with which Arab leaders have been pleading with the Obama administration to “take out” Iran's nascent capacity is illuminating.

Firstly, it debunks malicious insinuations by the Walt, Mearsheimer, Brzezinski crowd that the "Israel lobby" has been perfidiously goading the U.S. into a war with Iran against Washington's own interests, one that would cripple America's standing with Arab "moderates." We now know that virtually every Arab leader from Lebanon to Bahrain had been exhorting the U.S. to strike at Iran.

Secondly, it exposes the duplicity of the Obama administration toward Jerusalem. The president's insistence that Israeli concessions to the Palestinian faction led by Mahmoud Abbas were a prerequisite for garnering Arab support against Iran has been shown to be plain dishonest. Barack Obama knew full well that America's Arab allies wanted Iran dealt with regardless of "progress" on the Palestinian-Israeli front, as Herb Keinon of the Jerusalem Post has pointed out. And yet Obama "continued to propagate what he must have known to be a falsehood" that lack of progress on Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking was an obstacle to wide Arab backing on Iran. Obama chose to play the Iran card as a Machiavellian tactic against Israel.

In any event, the torrent of WikiLeaks revelations ought not to obscure what is really important beyond the obvious point that basically everyone in the Middle East agrees it would be catastrophic if Iran obtained the atom bomb. Is it not intriguing that Arab autocrats, presumably adept at manipulating public opinion to stay in power, have been so shy about trying to shape the views of the Arab street on Iran?

Why not let their people know that an imperial Iran threatens Sunni Arab interests?
On the Palestinian front, is it not equally interesting that Abbas often sounds conciliatory in closed door meetings with Israeli and American leaders but intransigent when publicly addressing his followers? Why would Abbas not want to prepare his Fatah faction, indeed all Palestinians for the absolute need to make concessions on refugees, land swaps and recognition of Israel as a Jewish state as the only way the conflict can be brought to an end?

Daoud Kuttab, an Amman-based Palestinian journalist maintains that Arab leaders do not actually depend on public opinion at all to retain power. They will seek regional and international alliances and do whatever it takes domestically to stay in power, but trying to change popular attitudes toward Israel or Iran would, if anything, be counterproductive. Indeed, scapegoating Israel for the failures of their regimes helps them stay in power, explains Professor Prof. Efraim Inbar of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.

If anything says Danny Rubinstein, a veteran Israeli analyst of Arab affairs, Arab rulers are afraid of public opinion because they know what the masses really think of them. The Arab street admires leaders like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for standing up against the West and Israel. The masses perceive their rulers are being propped up by the West. That is why any attempt by the autocrats to constructively realign perceptions on such core issues as Iran and Israel is simply too dangerous. For this reason, too, no amount of WikiLeaks exposure will impel Arab "moderates" to bring their public utterances and private stances into harmony.

The dysfunctional way in which ideologically indoctrinated Arab masses acquire their ideological orientations and their basic assumptions about political life has gravely warped Arab political culture. No wonder, then, that Israelis are dubious about the prospects of genuine peace with the Palestinians and apprehensive about the durability of existing peace treaties reached with unpopular autocrats.
The more profound lessons of the WikiLeaks revelations are sobering in ways, perhaps, unintended.

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