Table of Contents

Save Roi Klein's Home by Herbert Zweibon

From the Editor by Rael Jean Isaac

The True Imperialism by Daniel Greenfield

Stop This"Solution" Nonsense by Hugh Fitzgerald

BBC Jerusalem Documentary by Robin Shepherd

A Blasphemy Trial In Holland by Rael Jean Isaac

Outsourcing Security by Ruth King

Outpost
Editor: Rael Jean Isaac
Editorial Board: Herbert Zweibon, Ruth King

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Herbert Zweibon

Israel’s courts, military and civilian, along with a supine government, have for many years been acting as if they were in the service of some new White Paper, outlawing Jewish settlement. The most scandalous single example involves the order to demolish the home of the family of fallen war hero Major Roi Klein. Klein was killed in the summer of 2006 in the Second Lebanon War. With the words Shema Yisrael Klein, to save his men, threw himself on a live grenade hurled by Hezbollah forces. He was posthumously awarded the IDF’s highest honor, the Medal of Valor, the first time the medal was awarded in over 30 years.

The effort to destroy the Klein home began a year before he died. It is what is darkly called an “outpost,” located in the Hayovel neighborhood of Eli in Samaria. While the government had issued demolition orders on the grounds the neighborhood was not officially authorized, it showed no inclination to act on them. Indeed for years the neighborhood received government services. In 2005 Peace Now (a more fitting sobriquet would be Destroy Israel Now) brought a petition to Israel’s Supreme Court for the prompt demolition of 18 “illegal” homes both in Hayovel and in Hersha, also in Samaria.

The case dragged on until 2009 when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Peace Now. Klein’s widow Sarah and her two young children faced the prospect of immediate loss of their home. Neighbors described it as a “harsh blow” coming almost exactly three years after her husband’s death and, ironically, shortly before an IDF memorial ceremony in his honor.

Appealing to Defense Minister Ehud Barak (then part of the Olmert-led Kadima government, now in the same role in the Netanyahu-led Likud government) Nachi Eyal, chairman of the Land of Israel Legal Forum, wrote that if the home of Klein, a national symbol of bravery and sacrifice, was destroyed “the message sent will be disastrous, for both civilians and soldiers. If there remains any significance to ‘our duty to the fallen’ now is the time to prove it.”

Belatedly this seems to have occurred to the government for it now says it is “examining alternatives” to demolition. It intends “to conduct an examination and determine what are the boundaries of the state land in the area before making a final decision.” After ten years, first examine the boundaries now? As Israeli writer Arlene Kushner observes, “it may be determined that they were legal after all. How about that! It shows how politicized is the entire concept of ‘illegal’ building.”

Ironically the Klein family, along with the other families of Hersha and Hayovel, face expulsion at a time when the Israeli courts are finally stepping back from their previous automatic endorsement of any and all Peace Now interventions to expel Jews. Eighteen months ago Peace Now petitioned the Supreme Court to expel Jewish civilians living on an IDF base in Hebron. Kushner provides some history. The land is owned by Chabad which bought it 100 years ago and retained legal title. About twenty-five years ago the IDF built a base there and five years later a small Jewish neighborhood was established on the base with the permission of Chabad. The Court responded that the civilian neighborhood had been there for 20 years and it was a bit late to complain now. Peace Now’s petition was rejected.

It reveals the weakness of Netanyahu—supposedly leading a nationalist government—that he did not immediately throw the government’s weight on behalf of the endangered homes. The military administration of Judea and Samaria could easily issue an order protecting these homes. It is a scandal that the family of Israel’s most celebrated soldier should have been forced to live for years with the looming threat that they might at any moment be made homeless by their own government. Netanyahu should act immediately.

Rael Jean Isaac

Bibi MacDonald?

In view of Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to freeze settlements, it’s worth noting the grim irony that in doing so the Israeli prime minister has linked his administration with the policies of the British White Paper of 1939, also referred to as the MacDonald White Paper after British Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald, who presided over it.

The 1939 White Paper is best known for severely curtailing the number of Jews who could enter Palestine, bottling them up in Europe at a time when they desperately needed to escape. Less well-known were the White Paper’s “land laws,” whose purpose was to freeze Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel.

The laws went into effect with the publication of the “Palestine Land Transfer Regulations” in January, 1940. The regulations divided Palestine into three areas: 1) The first, comprising 5% of the western portion of the Land of Israel, which was permitted to Jews 2) An area totaling 31% of the land, which could only be bought by special permission of the High Commissioner, and 3) 64% of all the territory, forbidden to Jews and reserved exclusively for “Palestinian Arabs”.

When Netanyahu left Ariel Sharon’s Government in the lead-up to the expulsion of the Jews of Gush Katif, he said he was motivated by his fear of "the trial of history.” It looks as if history has already shown us which side he will end up on.

Commentary Awakes

Under new editors John Podhoretz and Jonathan Tobin, Commentary has finally emerged from its multi-year trance induced by long time editor Norman Podhoretz’s infatuation with President George W. Bush. The senior Podhoretz, by his own account, endorsed the uprooting of the Jewish communities in Gaza (a political, military and moral disaster) because Bush approved it and he trusted Bush. As a result, for the last five years, Commentary, which post-Oslo had been the voice of sanity on Israel, has been irrelevant, indeed silly. Its chief policy analyst on Israel was Hillel Halkin, who perfectly epitomized the magazine’s own confusion: Halkin, after endless agonizing back and forth, rarely—if ever—encountered an Israeli retreat he did not approve.

So it is to be celebrated that Commentary’s January issue cuts to the chase with an article by Evelyn Gordon, whose clear-thinking columns appeared for years in The Jerusalem Post. Israel’s standing, Gordon writes, has declined drastically as a direct result of the Oslo accords. She cites three major reasons: 1) With Oslo Israel sidelined its own claims to Judea, Samaria and Gaza, endorsing the Palestinian claim 2) Israel’s territorial retreats led to more Palestinian Arab deaths which mobilized public opinion against her. (Israel’s Hobson choice was to sit with folded hands while its citizens were attacked or to take actions for which she’d be condemned. 3) Israel’s withdrawals energized anti-Israel radicals worldwide.

While the Palestinian negotiating position remained unchanged (including the demand Israel commit suicide by accepting an Arab “right of return”), Gordon observes that Israel ditched red line after red line. Against all evidence, each Israeli Prime Minister kept insisting peace was within reach, senseless behavior if peace was unobtainable and territorial concessions only produced more terror. In sum, the desperate pursuit of peace is not the solution but the problem, as Israeli leaders respond to every inevitable failure of the “peace process” with a better offer.

One important caveat to this otherwise excellent essay. Gordon concludes by pinning her hopes on Netanyahu, saying he has the communication skills to convey the unpalatable truth that the peace process is a chimera to a worldwide audience. True enough, but what she does not say—despite her emphasis on “telling it like it is”—is that Netanyahu has been every bit as dishonest as his predecessors in promoting the peace-that-never-will-be.

Gordon applauds Netanyahu’s June 14 speech at Bar Ilan University and his October address to the UN General Assembly for straight shooting, but at the conclusion of both these speeches he endorsed the Great Lie: that by “universal consensus” a Palestinian state was the solution. Netanyahu’s actions have been no better than his words. Bowing to Obama’s demand for a settlement “freeze,” upon taking office in March Netanyahu froze all construction, even in East Jerusalem. While 700 new housing units have recently been announced, it transpires that these units are only being built as a result of threats by coalition partner Shas—even then Netanyahu insisted on “coordinating” with the Americans, from whom he wangled a “mild” condemnation.

This is not the stuff of a Prime Minister who will defy the “universal consensus” to announce the emperor is naked. As this writer has repeatedly said of Netanyahu, character is fate, and the man, for all his talents, lacks the spine to be Prime Minister.

Barak’s “Thought Process”

No one better typifies what Gordon calls Israel’s projecting a sense of panic in the pursuit of “peace” than Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Speaking to the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee in December, Barak declared that Israel was now in a “position of strength and that allows us to make an agreement and bring about a reality of two states living side-by-side.”

What position of strength can Barak possibly be talking about? Israel confronts two Palestinian political entities locked in combat for legitimacy on the basis of which is the greater enemy of the Jewish state. This deprives Israel of any leverage in reducing the most extreme demands of either. Barak went on to say that unless this Palestinian state comes into being Israel will wind up as “an apartheid state.”

It is insanity for an Israeli cabinet minister to endorse the calumnies of Israel’s enemies, from Jimmy Carter on down. It also gives all the cards to the enemy. If Fatah and Hamas don’t agree to a Palestinian state (one state? two states?), Israel loses her legitimacy, becomes a deservedly pariah state in the eyes of her own leadership.

Barak claims to be describing “the government’s thought process.” If this is thought, what is mindlessness?

Kudos to Kissin

World class pianist Evgeny Kissin, a Russian child prodigy who became a British citizen in 2002, has taken up cudgels against the BBC, accusing it of “slander and bias”, broadcasting material “painfully reminiscent of the old Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda.”

IsraelNews of January 4 reports that in a letter to BBC director-general Mark Thompson, Kissin accuses the BBC’s Persian service of a “blood libel concerning Israel’s alleged harvesting of Palestinian organs and blood for future transplant.” Kissin continues: “It beggars belief that the British taxpayer should be funding an organization which is aligning itself with Iran’s despotic leader in its anti-Semitic propaganda.” Kissin concludes by asking: “Is it not time for the BBC to return to the values for which it was so much respected, before it finds itself in the garbage of history, together with Pravda, Tass, Volkischer Beobachter and Der Angriff?“

Kissin promises to continue to speak out on behalf of Israel. This is the more welcome given the moral failure of some other musicians of stature like Daniel Barenboim, an Israeli citizen known for his attacks on Israel.

Kissin’s action has already encouraged others to speak up. Classical music promoter Lillian Hochhauser said: “I encourage all in the arts world to act against the growing stigmatization of Israel, as well as increasing our cultural cooperation with the country.”

Yemen Kidnappers: A Foretaste?

Yemenis claiming to hold five members of a German family kidnapped last June are demanding $2 million in ransom from the German government and the release of several al-Qaeda terrorists being held by the Yemeni government.

It is difficult to imagine that al Qaeda will not avail itself of similar opportunities when high profile trials of their members go on interminably in New York courts. Why not seize a meeting of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations. How about the AIPAC office in Washington? A bunch of politicians at a favored watering hole? Actors at an Academy Awards party? The possibilities are endless. Kill them one by one on video camera if Terrorist A, B, C is not released and sent on his way, unimpeded, to Somalia.

Brandeis Grad: No Jews on My Jury

Finally brought to trial, Brandeis Ph.D Aafia Siddiqui (captured in Afghanistan) has demanded that everyone on her jury undergo genetic testing to be sure they are not Jews. “Israel was behind 9/11. That’s not anti-Semitic” she called out from the defense table as a jury pool was being questioned.

Readers of Outpost may remember Peter Metzger’s article “Brandeis: School for Terrorists? (October 2008) describing its nefarious record in providing, in his words, “a sanctuary for more extreme radicals than any other university in America.”

Metzger began his article with Siddiqui. Here is what he wrote: “Snatching a loaded M4 carbine, the diminutive mother of three fired on her FBI questioners, and was swiftly injured by return fire. She is now in federal court awaiting charges of attempted murder. The FBI had placed her near the top of its most wanted list of fugitive terror suspects...she is charged with being an important Al-Qaeda “fixer,” a person who coordinates terror plots between various other terrorists within this very secret organization...When arrested in August [2008] just before the shootout, she was carrying plans to bomb various U.S. landmarks…” (She also had two pounds of poisonous sodium cyanide and documents on how to build chemical and biological weapons.)

It’s quite a family. Siddiqui is married to a nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, mastermind of 9/11, and who is himself a top al Qaeda operative.

Presiding over the trial, federal Judge Richard Berman has already conceded that Siddiqui be fully veiled in court, has set aside time during the trial for Islamic prayer, thrown out key evidence and disallowed prosecutors from mentioning her ties to al Qaeda.

Welcome to the world of trials in civilian courts for al Qaeda terrorists in New York City.

War on Green

AFSI declares war on green. It’s the color of jealousy, one of the mainsprings of anti-Semitism. It’s the color of Hamas. It’s the color of environmentalists who would send our (emission-free) economy back to the Dark Ages. It’s the color of the nefarious “Green Line” to which Israel’s enemies would reduce her (preparatory to eliminating her altogether). We suggest the “good greens” of the Women in Green change their color to Blue.

Foxman, Again

Abe Foxman of the ADL is proving his appallingly bad judgment yet again in what Norman Podhoretz calls "a vile attack" on Rush Limbaugh. Podhoretz points out that in discussing his book Why are Jews Liberal? on the air, Rush noted that for a lot of people—prejudiced people he called them twice—the words "banker" and "Wall Street" are code words for "Jewish." He wondered if Obama's attacks on bankers and Wall Street were triggering a certain amount of buyers' remorse within the American Jewish community and if some of the self-described "independents" who voted for Scott Brown might have been Jewish liberals.

We can't improve on Michael Ledeen's comment:

"Norman Podhoretz quite properly takes Anti-Defamation League czar Abe Foxman to task for insinuating that Rush is somehow a Jew-hater for wondering if Jewish voters are having buyer's remorse regarding Obama. They certainly should, both because of Obama's striking nastiness to Israel and of his attacks on "greedy bankers" (which Rush mentioned), free broadcasting, and of course the crusade against American medicine, all enterprises in which Jews have long flourished.

“Rush should be a hero to Foxman and American Jews, but they are so blindly partisan that they can no longer distinguish between their friends and their enemies. Foxman has relentlessly attacked American Evangelicals — arguably the most pro-Jewish and pro-Israel people in America....Foxman wants Rush to apologize.

“Nuts. I want Foxman retired and replaced by somebody who fights for Jews and our friends.”

Israel's Disproportionate Response

From Israel, David Yehezkel observes that many countries and world leaders have accused Israel of responding disproportionately to aggression from Hizbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. It is time, he suggests, that the world press and media speak of another disproportionate response from Israel.

The terrible earthquake in Haiti has generated responses from many nations. The Arab and Moslem world has contributed … nothing. Israel, a nation of 7.5 million people has sent a team of 220 including medical personnel (who established the largest field hospital in Haiti, treating up to 5000 people a day), an experienced search and rescue team and medical supplies. As in previous earthquake disasters, Israel has been one of the most generous givers of aid and assistance.

Given that the favorite occupation in the UN is Israel bashing, it is amusing that the U.N. has asked Israel to send police to help with security in Haiti.

Dan Greenfield

A theme constantly repeated both by the internationalist left and the isolationist right is that Islamic terrorism is a backlash or blowback against our foreign policy. Exponents of this point of view, whether it is Bill Ayers or Pat Buchanan, echo the same list of Muslim grievances against America and imply that if we simply left the Muslims alone, they in turn would leave us alone.

But their premise is as foolish as arguing that the Visigoths would have left Rome alone, if only Rome had left the Visigoths alone. One can buy some time by leaving the people who are expanding into your territory alone, but that just means postponing the inevitable. Europe is full of governments anxiously trying to leave the Muslims who are overrunning their countries alone. And all they're doing is buying themselves a little time, until the inevitable sacking begins. In countries such as France and Belgium, the sacking has begun already.

The internationalists and isolationists who are expert at offering the most cynical and conspiratorial readings of American foreign policy, also inevitably offer the most optimistic and naive readings of Muslim expansionism. That double standard is a mandatory requirement for blaming America first and blaming Islam never. Instead Muslims are treated as pinballs who only act violently in response to our aggression.

This pinball theory of Islamic victimization is used to sell absurdities such as the Cycle of Violence theory, which argues that if people stopped fighting Islamic terrorism it would go away, or the They Hate Us Because of Our Foreign Policy theory which pretends that Islamic terrorism is a justified response to our liberation of Kuwait, protection of Saudi Arabia and foreign aid to Israel. Both theories dehumanize Muslims by assume that the Ummah has no larger agenda than just wanting to be left alone.

Far left and far right critics of America, such as Ayers and Buchanan, routinely charge America with that dreaded "I" word, Imperialism. But it is the rising Caliphate that practices actual imperialism, spreading the faith by the sword, expanding its dominions by exploiting Muslim fifth columns around the world, and murdering anyone in its way. Muslim corporations from the oil rich gulf states leverage their wealth to promote their influence in the United States and Europe. Muslim nations band together in the UN to outlaw any speech they consider blasphemous, even when that speech takes place in non-Muslim countries.

When Obama bows to the Saudi King, when tax dollars are used to repay US oil companies whose property was nationalized by the Saudis, when Saudi lobbyists hold high positions in the government, when terrorists out of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia murder thousands of Americans while their countries profit from U.S. foreign aid and rising oil prices from the aforementioned nationalized U.S. oil companies, when Islamic leaders promote death and terror against the infidels, while demanding unflinching respect for their beliefs—there you can see true imperialism.

There was a time when Islamic terrorism was about foreign policy, but that time has long passed for Europe, where Islamic terrorism is now a matter of domestic policy. It is quickly becoming a matter of domestic policy in America as well. Because while Westerners may divide Islamic grievances into domestic and foreign spheres, Muslims themselves make no such distinction except within their own nations.

The rise of an Islamic minority in a non-Muslim country to the Muslim mind demands the imposition of Islamic law, since all other forms of jurisprudence are illegitimate and inferior in comparison to it. If that request is not granted, then Muslims naturally have the "right" to rise up against their oppressors. If the request is granted, the first seeds of an Islamic takeover have been planted. Soon disputes between Muslims and non-Muslims will have to be tried in accordance with Islamic law. Blasphemy must be outlawed. And Islamic law must step by step become the basis of the nation's legal system. Eventually the nation's indigenous legal system is so weak and inferior that it is wholly swallowed up by a little problem named Sharia.

When Muslims speak of fighting an American or Western empire, they don't mean it in quite the sense that Ron Paul or Cindy Sheehan do. They mean it in the sense of obliterating the Pax Americana, the hegemony of the Western powers in the military, economic and cultural spheres—and replacing it with their own. The Ummah is not searching for some Benetton/UNICEF fantasy of global co-existence. It is playing a zero sum game from which there is no exit. The Islamic birth rate combined with the domestic impoverishment and oppression of Muslims, stimulate immigration. The growing treasure houses of the oil rich states are used to buy power and influence and to do what all royal houses do, extend their power and dream of global ambitions.

American and European internationalists are still wedded to Soviet propaganda, which with the flexibility of Communist dogma, was willing to embrace anyone at war with the West as an enemy of capitalism. This flexibility allowed the Communists to embrace Hitler and Nazi Germany as victims of Western Imperialism (at least until German tanks swept across the border). Embracing Islamism seems almost like a trivial contortion of principles at this point.

American isolationists like Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul still think that bashing American foreign policy and Israel is a cure for all of Islam's ills, a foolish cowardice that they share with many tottering European governments who imagine the same thing. While Islamists such as Bin Laden do indeed resent America's ties to the governments of Egypt, Yemen, Israel or the House of Saud, that is only because we stand in the way of their ambition to take over those countries, a move that would quadruple the world's terrorist quota. One might as well argue that the solution to race riots is to appoint Al Sharpton president, an absurd premise that neither Buchanan nor Paul would sign on to at home, but that they somehow seem to think would solve our problems abroad.

While European right wing isolationists have generally learned that playing the foreign policy card or taking out and polishing one's antique anti-Semitism for display, as the likes of Buchanan are wont to do, are no answer, their solutions, which depend on isolationism combined with a limited domestic crackdown are no answer either. That might have been enough in 1968, but probably not even then. It certainly would not be enough now. Not in a world where the Caliphate is organized enough to sow domestic terrorism around the world, while keeping a death grip on the UN and the international energy trade. Not in a world in which NATO warplanes bombed a country because it dared stand up to Islamic separatists. Not in a world in which international boycotts are organized by the left against Israel for simply building a wall to keep the terrorists on their side of the border. Not in a world in which the ministers of every civilized nation tremble when the Caliphate squeaks.

One cannot simply build a wall and then wait out the worst of it. Because the worst of it is yet to come. If darkness spreads across Europe and the world, then Fortress Britannia will not wait it out alone. Not without cutting off international trade, ending free elections in which any more liberal party could win, developing a nuclear shield and enough weaponry to stand off all the combined forces that the UN or the remains of NATO could field. In short it isn't feasible. If a patient falls ill, he cannot simply wall off the disease in his foot or his right arm. And like it or not, the modern world has become far too interconnected for isolationism to be a survival strategy anymore.

No single nation alone could have stood off Nazism. No single nation alone can stand off Islamism. What was once foreign policy is now domestic policy. What was once a distant thunder is now a dull roar in our own streets. If you build a wall, they can shoot rockets over it. If you pass laws, they will become causes of terror. And if you fail to pass them, you will be forced to live under theirs, sooner or later. We can either stand together, or following the cowardly policies of the last few decades, sell each other out in the hopes that the best diplomat and the most esteemed backstabber will be the last to be eaten by the black crocodile of the caliphate that circles the globe from ocean to ocean.

There is no help for it, but to form an alliance of nations, an alliance of religions, an alliance of philosophies and civilizations, from the east to the west. That alliance is not yet here, but it must come, if we are to survive what waits ahead for us. .

Daniel Greenfield blogs at sultanknish.blogspot.com. This appeared on the blog on January 17.

Hugh Fitzgerald

Many continue to believe that if we argue that Islam itself is the problem, this will leave the West with no solutions.

Americans, unlike Europeans, are used to identifying situations that are troublesome or difficult or unpleasant as "problems," and, as problems, they are assumed to be susceptible of solution and therefore can be "solved." In some ways it is an attractive attitude. It testifies to a certain strain in the national character, a belief that may come from the encounter in this country with Nature, that the settlers in order to survive had to learn to subdue. And when there was a need for something to be invented, born of necessity, that invention would emerge. Yankee know-how and stick-to-itiveness, the attitude that there is "no problem in the world that cannot be solved" if we just put our minds to solve it, may seem to some comically naïve, but for many it reflects an attitude that will not disappear, and of which many of us apparently cannot be disabused.

How many times have you heard someone call in to one of those NPR talk shows (where the host invites one and all to "join the conversation" and then has his call-vetters carefully keep out any well-informed callers whose questions would throw a spanner into the whole party-line works)? The callers who are allowed on the air say that "in the Middle East those folks have been making war on each other for thousands of years" and "we Americans have got to get on in and bash some heads together to solve their problems if they can't do it for themselves."

It never occurs to those who make these suggestions, or those who run the shows and hear them, to ask if it is merely a question of a "problem" to be solved, where the Americans come in because the parties in question are unaccountably stubborn, and "solve" the problem by a little common-sensical solution—that "Two-State Solution." We already know it is a solution because otherwise why would everyone in both parties who has been working on such an outcome call it a "Two-State Solution"? Q. E. D.

And what, even for Roger Fisher, he of Harvard Law, who once galumphed all around the world peddling his made-for-television series on "Arabs and Israelis," has been one of the biggest rackets and profit centers in para-academic life? It's "Negotiation." You can learn the craft and art of "Negotiation." You can buy books, you can take courses, you can hire consultants who will help you, help anyone and everyone if the price is right, to Get To Yes. Many of those who first worked with Fisher now have their careers, and their consulting centers, and their fat, fat fees.

It never occurs to anyone that you can always "Get To Yes" if one side can be pressured into giving up what it needs for its survival (see under "Israel"). And it never occurs to anyone that sometimes life is a zero-sum game—-very often in fact—and that one side may not wish to listen to Sweet Reason and Get To Yes, because recovery at once of any lands once possessed by Muslims is more important than any Getting To Yes could ever be (unless of course "Getting To Yes" is merely a way to weaken the Infidel enemy, a variant on the Treaty of Al-Hudaibiyya).

There is no "solution" to the war being waged on Israel. Nor is there a "solution" within Israel to the presence of those Muslim Arabs who do not and cannot feel loyal to the state of Israel and wish the Jews and the State of Israel ill.

But the same thing is true in the case of Muslims all over Western Europe and, to a much lesser extent, in North America. In a few decades of criminal negligence, elites in these places allowed in many Muslims who regard the countries they have settled in as places of comfort, stability, economic opportunity— and also as places where they must work to establish Islam. They work to increase its power and the numbers of its adherents, to expand Muslim political power and, in addition, the power of Muslims to intimidate outside the political system. And they work against the legal and political institutions, such as the American Constitution, that flatly contradict the spirit and letter of the Sharia. There is a way to handle this, but there is no solution.

Many begin with the idea that there is a "problem" and that, therefore, there is a "solution" or must be, and if we analyze Islam and conclude that there is no "solution" to that perceived "problem," then we shall have to let loose the dogs of war, and nothing good can come of it.

Those who think this way are using the wrong terms. They are using the language of political Mr. Fixits, a language that misinterprets reality.

Is world poverty a problem? Is there a "solution" to this problem? What about human greed? Radix malorum cupiditas est, saith the Schoolmen. The desire for money is the root of all evil. Is that a "problem" to be "solved"? Or is it a condition to be recognized, and warned about, as are all the other Seven Deadlies? What about the innate inequality of intelligence among individuals? Is such inequality a "problem" to be "solved," or simply a condition to be recognized, and one not necessarily to be deplored? Is war (the permanence of) a "problem" to be "solved," or a condition to be dealt with, a threat to be made less rather than more dangerous?

The ideology of Islam cannot be transformed. None of those who tried, in the early part of the 20th century, to "reform" Islam managed to succeed. And indeed, the only reason they wanted to "reform" Islam was in order to make Muslims stronger, because in the early 20th century it was clear that Muslims all over the world were weak, and the Infidel West was strong. And so some changes were entertained by a few "reformers" because they correctly perceived that Muslim weakness and wished to address its causes, not because they wanted to modify the claims of Islam, or the hold of Islam, on its adherents.

Kemal Pasha, Ataturk, was someone who sensed the connection between the disorder and decadence of the Turkish state, the political, economic, social, intellectual, and moral failures of Turkish Muslim society, and what Islam inculcated. He was not a "reformer." He knew that there was no way to change the Qur'an, the Hadith, the Sira. What he wanted to do, and systematically did, was to curtail the power of Islam, as a political and social force, over Turkish Muslims themselves, and thereby to allow room for the development of a secular class. The tragedy of modern Turkey is that many of those who were the beneficiaries of Kemalism did not continue to work to extend its reach and its effects and those who had remained faithful to Islam bided their time, and then helped bring Islam back, and it is they— Erdogan and his associates—who are in the ascendant in Turkey. Those who thought that Kemalism was forever turned out to be wrong. It is Islam that is forever.

Apparently, some find recognition of a permanent threat too upsetting an idea. But why? Fascism, including its Nazi variant, and Communism remain political ideas that will always attract some adherents. Anti-Semitism, a pathological mental condition, has not been, and never will be eradicated even with the most potent of vaccination programs. But the numbers of Nazis and Communists and anti-Semites, relative and absolute, and their positions close to or far from power, and their consequent ability to do harm, or to influence others—all this is in the realm of what can be affected.

We can divide and demoralize the Camp of Islam. We can make some Muslims aware, even keenly aware, of all the ways that Islam itself explains the failures, political and economic and social and intellectual and moral, of their societies. We can prevent Muslim states and groups from acquiring major weaponry. We can halt Muslim immigration to the West and make conditions such that the conduct of Muslim life becomes more and more subject to review, critical scrutiny, open discussion. Instead of extending a dangerously naïve welcome, we can make clear that we now understand the texts and tenets of Islam, and as a consequence, we feel justified in viewing those who still call themselves Muslims with suspicion and alarm.

That isn't a "solution" to a "problem." That is something much more complicated and, for those who think we can achieve an identifiable "victory" over the ideology of Islam, or over the bearers of that ideology, no doubt this view is unsatisfying. Unsatisfying it may be. But as a way to deal with the never-to-end threat of Islam, it is the one that, being based on the truth, will prove to be the most effective.

And that is the only thing that counts.

Hugh Fitzgerald is editor of Jihadwatch. This appeared on Jihadwatch.org on January 16

An Anatomy Of Bias And Distortion
Robin Shepherd

On Monday night, the BBC’s flagship documentary program Panorama was devoted to Jerusalem. Rarely will you get a clearer insight into the flagrant institutional bias inside the world’s most powerful media outlet than this. The slipperiness of the tactics employed, the unabashed censorship of vital historical context, and the blatant pursuit of a political agenda constituted a lesson in the techniques of modern day propaganda. It was something to behold.

Entitled “A Walk in the Park”—a reference to the parkways which link settlements across East Jerusalem—the program was introduced by veteran BBC reporter Jeremy Vine: “Palestinians are being thrown out of their homes; Israelis are moving in, even underground,” he tells us. The drama then shifts to Jerusalem itself where Jane Corbin, narrator and reporter on the ground, is ready to begin a demolition job all of her own.

Right away, the documentary cuts to the destruction of a Palestinian home: “…roads were sealed. The Israelis don’t make it easy to see what’s going on,” we are ominously told as she skips daringly down a dirt track to avoid the watchful eye of the dastardly Israelis.

So why, one wonders, would the Israelis be so keen to hide their dirty little secret? “Under international law,” she tells us earnestly, “East Jerusalem is occupied territory; its status shouldn’t be changed.”

Well, good to know that we haven’t wasted much time before she introduces her very own, and quite definitive, interpretation of international law. But objective versions of the law are soon complemented by a historical narrative which forms the backdrop to the entire program:

“When the State of Israel was born in 1948, Jerusalem was divided,” says Corbin. “The West of the city became part of Israel and the East was controlled by Jordan. In 1967, Israel annexed East Jerusalem after seizing the West Bank following war with its Arab neighbours.”

And that’s it. That is the broad historical context offered to a prime time British audience on the BBC’s most prestigious weekly documentary program. Is her version accurate? Well, yes, modern day Israel was formed in 1948 and Jerusalem was indeed divided—Jordan on the one side and Israel on the other. It is also true that “following war” with its Arab neighbours in 1967 East Jerusalem was annexed by Israel.

But as an instance of propagandist methodology in airbrushing out vital context, especially in a documentary about the status of Jews in Jerusalem and the underlying causes of the wider conflict, this really rather takes the biscuit.

Consider another way of phrasing that paragraph which, once again, is vital to the documentary since it serves as the key context for a largely uninitiated British audience. Try this, with the salient points in italics:

“When the State of Israel was born in 1948— following Arab and Palestinian rejection of a peace agreement accepted by Israel which would have seen the internationalisation of the city—Jerusalem was divided. The West of the city became part of Israel and the East was controlled by Jordan—which expelled Jewish residents and forbade Jews from praying at all of the city’s holy sites. In 1967, Israel annexed East Jerusalem after seizing the West Bank following war with its Arab neighbours. That war was caused by Arab governments and the Palestinians who had the aim of eliminating the state of Israel in its entirety and expelling its Jewish residents.”

Well, that would really cast a different light on things wouldn’t it?

Next we come to Corbin’s “walk in the park” which starts in Sheikh Jarrah and winds its way through the Mount of Olives and Ras al Amoud to Silwan. Stopping off in Ras al Amoud the documentary now introduces “an Israeli lawyer” who serves throughout the program as the objective analyst providing a neutral point of reference to enhance the credibility of the narration. That Israeli lawyer is none other than, Danny Seidemann, a well known (but not to British viewers) left-wing lawyer-activist. No countervailing Israeli opinion from a legal source is offered.

But the slippery and blatantly biased tactics of the program are immediately revealed as the “objective” reference point offered by Seidemann is then counterbalanced by the opinion of an Israeli, Arieh King of the Israel Land Fund. A purportedly neutral anti-settlement view is thus juxtaposed with the views of an interested party whose work we are told (to a background of darkly melancholic music), “is paid for by wealthy backers [i.e. Jews] in America and Europe.”

Then we are offered another piece of “context”: “Peace deals proposed so far reckon on giving Arab areas in these eastern parts of the city to the Palestinians. Western areas, which are Jewish, would go to Israel.” Hmm. I wonder what’s missing from that one then? Again, here’s another way of putting that point with my suggested additions in italics:

“Peace deals proposed so far—all of which were rejected by the Palestinians—reckon on giving Arab areas in these eastern parts of the city to the Palestinians. Western areas, which are Jewish, would go to Israel.”

The omission is so blatant it is almost laughable. In this desperate attempt to support the long-standing BBC narrative that Israeli “occupation” forms the root cause of the conflict, it has become necessary to mention peace deals without pointing out that such peace deals were offered by Israel but flatly rejected (in favor of violence, one might add) by the Palestinians. To raise that issue would clearly undermine the ideological edifice. It would suggest that the root cause of the conflict is Palestinian rejectionism and anti-Semitism—two concepts that the BBC is apparently unable to deal with.

The distortion is reinforced as we then move to a catalogue of instances of how settlement policy is making a two state solution difficult if not impossible.

Harrowing stories are told of Palestinians kicked out of their homes. The briefest of references is made to the claim of the settlers that they are taking back land and property which was seized from them by Jordan in 1948. But it is done in such a way that no lay audience could possibly see any real justification for the settlers’ position.

We are told of, and shown, instances of Palestinians being thrown out of homes they have “lived in for generations.” This is stated as fact by the narrator. The counter argument, that the land they have lived on was stolen from Jews in the first place, is ventured as the mere opinion of Nir Barkat, the Mayor of Jerusalem.

Arriving in Silwan, the narrator just happens to drop in at the very moment a Palestinian house is being demolished. A Palestinian activist, Jawad Siyam, is given prominence as the articulate and reasoned voice of the oppressed. He cries out: “It’s the most racist state in the world, you see…” Pointing to Israeli policemen he adds: “You are the most racist people in the world.”

No voice from the Israeli side is offered to protest about terrorism or Palestinian anti-Semitism. Nothing. With the historical context largely obliterated earlier in the program, few uninitiated viewers could disagree with Siyam’s diatribe.

Fading in the melancholic music again, we are then told ominously that many of the settlers come from abroad as we are introduced to the Adlers, a family of American religious Jews who have settled in Silwan. (American, religious, Jewish and settlers? That’s the sort of combination that gives BBC reporters sleepless nights).

As a warning of how Israeli policy is leading to tensions, we are later introduced to a Palestinian man, Ahmed, (complete with close-up of crying son) who was shot in the right thigh by an Israeli following a scuffle. No instance of Palestinian violence is offered for balance. Ahmed then tells of how the Israeli stepped over him and “shot a child”.

As the documentary draws to a close, the narrator once again interjects with her own tendentious opinions: “Those who know Jerusalem warn that this is a powder keg,” she says. “More than the city could be ignited if the Israelis persist in what they are doing.”

“Those who know Jerusalem?” Who might that be then? We cut back to Danny Siedemann, the BBC’s “objective” analyst of events. Widening the discussion and placing responsibility for the overall conflict squarely with Israel, he says: “This is the volcanic core of the conflict…what begins in Jerusalem doesn’t stay in Jerusalem.” He adds darkly that regimes could be destabilised from Pakistan to Morocco in the ensuing cataclysm.

Finally we move to the wider settlements outside Jerusalem and “The Wall”. Corbin concludes the documentary with the words: “The face of the city is changing and that makes the chances of peace even more remote.”

Well, you get the picture. Obviously the issue of Jerusalem excites passions inside Israel and outside it. Reasonable people can disagree on it. There are many shades of opinion to be assessed. And there is no reason why a BBC documentary should not reflect that. The problem is that the documentary does not reflect that reality at all.

Every Jewish step in East Jerusalem is presented as wrong and dangerous. All the important context has been removed. A clear ideological agenda has been pushed at the expense of basic standards of fair reporting.

Welcome to the world of the BBC. And welcome to yet another illustration of the slippery path to the delegitimisation of the world’s only Jewish state.

Robin Shepherd is Director of International Affairs at the Henry Jackson Society in London, England. This appeared on www.robinshepherdonline.com on January 19th.

A Blasphemy Trial in Holland
Rael Jean Isaac

It has been dubbed “the trial of the century.” Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Policy Forum has called Dutch politician Geert Wilders, the man on trial, “the most important European alive today” with “the potential to emerge as a world-historical figure” for taking on the Islamic challenge facing Europe.

Wilders faces a 70 page charge sheet covering five counts of breaking Dutch law on incitement and discrimination against Muslims in more than 100 public statements, perhaps the most controversial being his comparison of the Koran to Mein Kampf. The charge includes Wilders’ film Fitna, which shows images of 9/11 and beheadings interspersed with (supportive, calls to jihad) verses from the Koran.

The trial opened January 20 in an Amsterdam court. Ironically, one of the two prosecuting attorneys, Paul Velleman, had earlier decided not to prosecute Wilders, finding his statements well within the boundaries of the law. He was overruled when others, determined to see Wilders on trial, took the prosecutor to court and a judge ruled the office of the prosecutor had to try the case.

What makes this case so important is the combination of Wilders’ political position and the premise of the charges—that protecting the feelings of Muslims supersedes free speech. As Pipes notes, the Party for Freedom (PVV) which Wilders founded and heads, differs from most of Europe’s other nationalist, anti-immigrant parties in being politically mainstream, with its roots not in neo-fascism but in libertarianism and mainstream conservatism. Indeed Wilders is the European leader who most staunchly supports Israel. And the Party for Freedom has been rising dramatically in popularity so that polls now show it winning a plurality of votes and becoming the country’s largest party. There is thus a real prospect that Wilders could become Prime Minister and assume a leadership role in Europe in halting the creeping Islamization of the continent.
Wilders spoke eloquently on the meaning of the trial in his opening statement:
“Freedom is the most precious of all our attainments and the most vulnerable…I believe with all my heart and soul that the freedom in the Netherlands is threatened. That what our heritage is, what generations could only dream about, that this freedom is no longer a given, no longer self-evident. I devote my life to the defence of our freedom. I know what the risks are and I pay a price for it every day. I do not complain about it; it is my own decision. I see that as my duty and it is why I am standing here.

“ I know that the words I use are sometimes harsh, but they are never rash. It is not my intention to spare the ideology of conquest and destruction, but I am not out to offend people. I have nothing against Muslims. I have a problem with Islam and Islamization of our country because Islam is an odds with freedom.

“Future generations will wonder to themselves how we in 2010, in this place, in this room, earned our most precious attainment. Whether there is freedom in this debate for both parties and thus also for the critics of Islam, or that only one side of the discussion may be heard in the Netherlands? Whether freedom of speech in the Netherlands applies to everyone or only to a few? The answer to this is at once the answer to the question whether freedom still has a home in this country.”

When Wilders says he pays a price for defending freedom every day, he does not speak idly. He lives under armed guard, his life constantly in peril from Islamic radicals. Bat Yeor, author of Eurabia, who warned about the Islamic danger decades before others took it seriously, says that the threats to Wilders’ life “are the real crimes the Netherlands should address.” The obvious risk to Wilders’ life makes the refusal of the Dutch government to take special security precautions more questionable (ironically it took such precautions in the trial of the Dutch-born Muslim who stabbed filmmaker Theo van Gogh to death in an Amsterdam street.). Columnist Mark Steyn has noted caustically: “You’d almost get the impression it would suit them if he failed to survive till the verdict.”

What are the chances Wilders will be acquitted? According to U.S. attorney David Yerushalmi, the probability is high that he will be fined or imprisoned and stripped of his political office. That is because given the law as written, he is guilty. Article 137c of the Dutch Penal Code says: “He who publicly, verbally or in writing or image, deliberately expresses himself in any way insulting of a group of people because of their race, their religion or belief, or the hetero- or homosexual nature or their physical, mental or intellectual disabilities will be punished with a prison sentence of at the most one year or a fine of third category. If the offense is committed by a person who makes it his profession or habit, or by two or more people in association, a prison sentence of at the most two years or a fine of fourth category will be imposed.”

Yerushalmi asks: “What do you say to the Netherlanders who would tolerate such fascist legislation? Is it really possible that a Western European country would criminalize speech that insults a group of people for their anti-Dutch beliefs?” The only rational defense, he says “is that the Dutch statutes which Wilders is accused of violating are themselves a violation of what it means to be a Dutchman.” Truth is no defense. Muslims profess themselves insulted. That alone is enough to condemn Wilders under the statute.

The broad language of the statute accounts for the seemingly bizarre argument of the second prosecutor in the case, Birgit van Roessel, that expressing his opinion to the citizenry is not part of the job of a member of the Dutch parliament. When Wilders’ lawyer argued that Wilders made his statements as a lawmaker, with parliamentary immunity, she replied that “expressing his opinion in the media or through other channels is not part of an MP’s duties.”

Wilders has been compared to Churchill and the comparison is apt in many ways. Like Churchill in the 1930s, Wilders is a political voice in the wilderness, describing the need to act against dangers that others refuse to see or hope to deflect through appeasement. As Wilders said in an interview on the eve of the trial: “Europe is weak. European leaders are weak….If we stay weak, we lose our identity; our culture based on Christianity, Judaism and humanism will lose ground and Islam will grow even stronger in Europe today. There will be no freedom, no room for anything but Islam, no tolerance and more sharia.”

But there is another way in which the two are similar and that is in their assessment of Islam. If Churchill were a Dutch citizen today he too might be on trial. For this is what he wrote about Islam:

“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.

“No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.

“Far from being moribund, Islam is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread through Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science—the science against which it had vainly struggled—the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.”

The outcome of Wilder’s trial will be momentous. Bat Yeor argues that a conviction will “reinforce his aura and weaken his political enemies” because “for most Europeans, Geert Wilders appears to be the hero and defender of their lost freedoms and dignity.” The public, says Bat Yeor, sees his opponents “as the stooges of the Organization of the Islamic Conference who continuously and by every means pressure European governments to punish severely what it considers blasphemy.”

In a ringing defense of Wilders, Iran expert Clare Lopez declares: “He stands in the dock for all of us. Netherlands, the world is watching. Do not lead Europe into a long black night where the light of freedom flickers but fitfully as it does in every place where sharia is law. Stand with your forebears who, like William of Orange, fought to keep Dutchmen free and do not fear the violence of assassins and mobs. Your liberty is our liberty and Wilders’ free speech is our free speech.”

Ruth King

Our southern border is nearly 2,000 miles long with a variety of protective barriers. This has created a simmering border conflict with Mexico.

Mexico is awash with unemployed and restive workers who have been flooding the United States border regions with thousands upon thousands of illegal immigrants every year. Adding to immigration enforcement woes are the number of Mexican drug cartel criminals clamoring to join them. These cartels murder thousands of people every year and there is danger they will do the same here. Indeed, in February of 2009 the Justice Department announced the results of “Operation Xcellerator” which resulted in 750 arrests and the seizure of many millions of dollars worth of drugs and weapons smuggled into the United States from Mexico. The Justice Department report warned that violent gangs masterminded by Mexican drug lords were expanding their spheres of operation into large cities throughout this country.

These Mexican cartels are not composed of ordinary criminals. They are heartless killers who employ the kind of grisly techniques--beheadings, flaying, torture and kidnapping--common to Arab terrorists. While unlike Arab terrorists, the cartels do not deliberately target civilians, thousands have died in the crossfire and an equal number live trapped in fear in their homes. In Mexico, more than seven thousand people have been killed since 2008.

The situation has become so grave that in March 2009 Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, went to Mexico to negotiate a plan with Mexican leaders to deal with the problem. The Mexicans demanded and received $1.4 billion for law enforcement equipment and training. Unfortunately not much has been achieved and some researchers have estimated that in over 230 cities in the United States the drug trade is controlled by Mexico’s cartel.

Very little on this subject gets into the daily media. For example on the day I write this (January 20, 2010) UPI, AP and Reuters between them have nineteen articles about Israel and none about the border problem with Mexico, which former director of the CIA Michael Hayden called a strong threat to national security.

Now, you may wonder what all this has to do with Israel. Patience dear reader.

What would you say if Russia nominated a “special envoy” to arbitrate the border conflict between the U.S. and Mexico and a quartet of nations far removed from our soil held a meeting in some European capital to discuss a solution? What if the quartet grew into an international symphony with chorus demanding American “concessions”?

Furthermore, what if the leaders of the drug cartels were invited by presidents of countries throughout the world to press their complaints against American law enforcement? What if academics took up the cause of the cartels as “oppressed people” citing the disparity between annual income in Mexico and America as the “root cause” of the problem?

What if world leaders and opinion makers then took up the cause of Aztlan a Hispanic/American movement that calls for the creation of an independent state in the “lost” (to Mexico) territories of our southwestern states? And what if this escalated into a demand that the United States cease its “occupation” of Texas, with every dictator in the world (joined by blackbelt strutters Sarkozy and Tony Blair) joining the chorus, along with most American academics and sundry former legislators on the cartel’s payroll?

Outrageous! How dare they expect the United States to outsource its security to Europe and South America? “Mind your own business. This is our problem and the solution is with us” we would tell the robed thugs from the oil Kingdoms, and the Frau Merkels and Vladimirs and Hugo and the Zapateros and the minions of blowhard thinktankers and pundits.

But, and here is the big but. What would we say if our President, intimidated by the “process,” travelled to every corner of the world promising to fulfill the demands of the cartels and the Aztlaners if only they would promise to like us and give up crime?

Impossible, you say? Yet this is precisely the course that Israel and its leaders follow as they acquiesce repeatedly to the demands of the West. And it has become customary for Israeli leaders to travel the world outsourcing the state’s sovereignty, with negotiations on Israel’s borders and future conducted everywhere but in Jerusalem.

A dangerous side product is that Israeli concessions weaken the resolve of American supporters of Israel. They too parrot the “two state solution.” After all it is trumpeted as “the universal consensus” by the man who is reputed to be leader of Israel’s “hard-line.” Mush line, is what it is.

The excuse of Netanyahu and the supposed “nationalist” members of his cabinet is that the two state solution is entrenched—it is too late, they shrug, to alter the course of Palarab independence. It is not.

The two state dissolution of Israel is anti-Zionist, anti-Jewish, illegal, immoral, untenable and suicidal and it is time to start a “tea party” movement here and in Israel to stop its course.

Americans showed in Massachusetts that a bad policy which seemed inevitable could be thwarted by public outrage. The American public would never give in to the demands of criminals for sovereignty in our heartland.

Israel should follow suit and stop outsourcing its sovereign responsibilities.

Table of Contents

LURCHING LEFT
Herbert Zweibon

FROM THE EDITOR
Real Jean Isaac

ISRAEL UNDERMINES ITS LEGAL STANDING
William Mehlman

NETANYAHU'S SURRENDER
Jerold Auerbach

AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH
Andrew Roberts

THREE TO READ
Ruth King

OUTPOST
Editor: Rael Jean Isaac
Editorial Board: Herbert Zweibon, Ruth King

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Herbert Zweibon

Recently Shimon Peres told Newsweek’s Lally Weymouth that Netanyahu was mistakenly viewed as a right-winger. Since assuming power, his behavior, on small matters as on larger issues, suggest that for once Peres’s words correspond to reality.

Take Beit Shalom (the Peace House) in Hebron. The Jewish community legally purchased the building (at a highly inflated price). Nonetheless the Olmert government embarked on a long process of harassment, finally evicting the residents. The case is still in the courts and it is a travesty of justice to put people out of their homes while adjudication is going on. If only to symbolize that the new government differed from its predecessor in upholding Jewish rights, Netanyahu could have made the small gesture of restoring the residents of Beit Shalom to their home.

Then, under the aegis of his own government, there are the three young men from the community of Yitzhar in Samaria, banished from their homes and families without explanation, having violated no law, charged with no offense. It may seem a small matter in that only a few families are affected, but a big principle is involved. Netanyahu could have shown solidarity with the settler community (which had invested their hopes and votes in him) and with the rule of law by insisting they be charged or allowed to return home.

Netanyahu’s actions reveal the same pattern of collapse in the face of American pressures that he manifested when he was elected Prime Minister in 1996. First there was the speech at Bar Ilan University on June 14 where Netanyahu abruptly reversed course to endorse a Palestinian state. (With breathtaking political cynicism he insisted the new state be demilitarized, although he had argued a few years earlier that demilitarization was an absurdity, that the Palestinian state would assume all the powers of a state “and the world will stand by and do nothing but it will stop us from trying to stop them”.)

Now, acceding to Obama’s pressure, there is the settlement freeze. This Outpost includes two articles, by William Mehlman (from Israel) and Jerold Auerbach, on the deadly implications of this latest exercise in appeasement. Suffice it to point out here the needlessly provocative way in which the Netanyahu government is treating the “frozen” communities. Netanyahu met with leaders of the affected communities telling them, “We need to cooperate and get through this period together” and “I would like you to sit at the steering wheel together with us.” In direct contradiction to his words, he has sent contingents of “building inspectors” to each community with “stop work papers,” backed by police and worst of all, Yassamnikim. (Yassam is an abbreviation for Special Reconnaissance Unit. Set up during the second Intifada, these black-garbed experts in strong arm techniques have been retained for “special” circumstances.) If the government wants to monitor building activities it could do so by flyovers or through sending in left-wing “spies.” In Kedumim the mayor Hananel Durani, sitting with a handful of protesting high school kids, was beaten and dragged away and Yassamnikim were caught on video manhandling young girls.

Required to enforce the freeze on Jewish construction, Israel Defense Forces have scaled back anti-terror operations in Judea and Samaria. Military affairs correspondent Haggai Huberman quotes an IDF officer: “We are barely doing patrols or initiating action against terrorists, except for the bare necessity minimum.” One result of the government’s crazily skewed priorities is already in: a young Jewish woman was stabbed in the back at a bus stop south of Efrat—the checkpoint had been removed.

While they are not likely to voice their appreciation, the fact is that judging from his behavior thus far, the secular (delusional) left could scarcely have obtained a more satisfactory leader than Benjamin Netanyahu.

Rael Jean Isaac

Freebies at Copenhagen

An unusual freebie was on offer to delegates at the Copenhagen climate-fest. Copenhagen Mayor Ritt Bjernegaard, in cooperation with Copenhagen’s Community Council, sent postcards to 160 hotels urging delegates “Be sustainable—don’t buy sex.” Copenhagen’s prostitutes were up in arms. They offered free sex to anyone who could produce one of the offending postcards and an identity card for the conference. In the wake of the exposure of distortion and destruction of key data at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, one AFSI reader wrote in: “Which are the prostitutes? The girls or the climate scientists?”

Representing Israel at this jamboree, Shimon Peres, in what is billed as a “special speech” emphasizing Israel’s obligation in solving the climate crisis, is likely to produce enough hot air to single-handedly raise global temperatures.

Talibanizing Gaza

Shin Bet (Israel’s security service) has issued a report on the ways in which Hamas has Islamized Gaza.

Here are a few: Judges have been instructed not to hold sessions if female lawyers do not appear in Islamic garb. On official Hamas TV, women announcers wear a veil and Islamic content is increasingly featured in its programs. Mixed gender public ceremonies may not be held, and men may not teach in girls’ schools. Hamas is trying to separate boys and girls in UN-run schools. Unmarried couples may not appear in public; married couples must be ready to produce a marriage certificate on demand. The pace of building mosques, madrassahs and Islamic sharia courts is being stepped up. The Bureau for Legal Counsel and Legislation is preparing a new criminal code based on Islamic law.

To be sure, Hamas faces some opposition: organizations have cropped up claiming Hamas is too compromising and moderate.

The Left and Islam

Journalist and retired federal agent Chuck Hustmyre has an original take on the union between the American left and fundamentalist Islam which, he points out, given their huge differences on issues like feminism and homosexuality, “seems like a marriage made in hell.”

Writes Hustmyre: “The Amercan Left’s affair with fundamentalist Islam is essentially a love-fear relationship. The Left loves Islam’s hatred of America and its desire to radically change this country, but the Left also fears what militant Muslims are capable of, especially if they turn their murderous rage on their so-called friends. So the Left, like Neville Chamberlain with the Nazis, walks a tightrope, appeasing Muslims at every turn, offering excuses for Islamic violence, and hoping Muslim fundamentalists won’t bite the hand that feeds them their excuses.”

The Policy of Olmerta

William Buckley famously wrote that he would rather entrust the government to the first 400 names in the Boston telephone book than to the faculty of Harvard. Reading former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s interview with The Australian (November 28), it appears Israel’s government was in the hands of a man even more foolish and reckless than anything Harvard’s faculty could offer.
Here’s Olmert on Obama: “I’m entirely free of any suspicions or complaints about the Obama administration. I think the Obama administration is very friendly to Israel.”

He goes on to provide hitherto unknown detail on the offer he made to Abbas on September 16, 2008. Israel would keep 6.4% of territory beyond the Green Line and provide an equivalent amount of territory inside the Green Line in recompense. A re-divided Jerusalem would become the capital of a Palestinian state. The holy sites would be jointly administered by Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the Palestinian state, Israel and the U.S. There would be territorial continuity for the Palestinian state via a tunnel controlled by the Palestinians between the West Bank and Gaza. Israel would accept a certain (low) number of Arab refugees for five years and create an international fund to compensate Palestinians for their suffering.

Olmert says he gave Abbas a map embodying the plan and Abbas promised that the next day his adviser would come. The adviser never came.

And so Israel was (temporarily) saved from its leadership. It is hard to imagine a more irresponsible offer—to uproot untold thousands of Israelis from their homes in Judea and Samaria, to re-divide Jerusalem, physically to join Hamastan to Fatahstan, hastening the day Hamas took over both. And then there was the absurdity of expecting “peace” to follow massive withdrawals, after the experience of Oslo and what followed retreat from Gaza. And Hamas, the “other” Palestinian state, was not even party to the talks!

William Mehlman

Even were one to accept Prime Minister Netanyahu’s “bottom-line” assurance that his shutdown of Jewish housing construction in Judea and Samaria is a “one-time step for a limited time period,” or that now “hooked,” the Israeli fish is ever going to be let off the hook by Obama & Global Associates, the bedrock damage done to the Jewish State’s most fundamental legal cover by this act could well be irreparable.

The first and most immediate casualty of the “freeze” is the July 1950 “Law of Return,” characterized by then-Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion as “the unchanging law of Jewish history, reflecting the principle whereby the State of Israel was established.” At the heart of Israel’s raison d’etre, it cast in concrete the universal Jewish right of citizenship and settlement in Israel. The language of the law, moreover, is quite specific. In prescient anticipation of changes in the contours of Israel, it deliberately does not confine the right of Jewish settlement to “Medinat Yisrael,” the “State of Israel” as it existed in the summer of 1950, but. rather extends it to “Erez Yisrael,” the “Land of Israel,” wherever and however future events might define the parameters of the “National Jewish Home.”

Given that the exercise of the right of settlement in “Eretz Yisrael” is contingent on the availability of places to live, the government’s ban on housing construction (however “limited”) in Judea and Samaria, the heartland of “Eretz Yisrael,” renders that right and the law underlying it essentially meaningless. Beyond that, the government’s action widens the shadow over the status of 120 Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, all of which draw their legitimacy from the same legal wellspring.

Even more ominous than its marginalization of the Law of Return is the can of worms the government may have opened in its outright snub of the 1948 “Area of Jurisdiction and Powers Ordinance.” It would be a grave error to let its cumbersome title obscure the impact of this ruling on Israeli history, avers Howard Grief, attorney, constitutional scholar and legal adviser to the late Professor Yuval Ne’eman, Minister of Energy in the Shamir government. Embodied in the September, 1948, “Land of Israel Proclamation,” the Jurisdiction and Powers Ordinance officially recognized all laws applicable to the State of Israel as applicable with equal force to “any area of Palestine” that came under the authority of the Israel Defense Forces. It was under that umbrella that Israel settled and populated major portions of the Negev and the Galilee—not allocated to the Jewish State in the 1947 UN Partition—that came into its possession in the 1948-49 War of Independence. The Israeli Left needs occasional reminding that those lands are part and parcel of what it sanctimoniously refers to as “Israel proper.”

It was also in part as a result of the Jurisdiction and Powers Ordinance that Israel saw itself within legal bounds in creating 142 Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza and additional communities on the Golan Heights, territories that fell to the IDF in the Six-Day War. None of them, needless to say, were allocated to Israel under the Partition. Israel may consider itself fortunate if new challenges to its territorial status do not ensue from the fresh openings it has provided its worldwide legion of enemies and ill-wishers.

If amidst concerns over Ahmadinejad’s centrifuges, Hezbollah’s rockets and the mass murderers being set free in exchange for Gilad Schalit, Israel needs to worry about the deference it pays to 60 year-old laws, it’s because it is in the courts, the agencies of the UN and other international bodies and among a phalanx of well funded, intensely hostile NGOs that the battle for the survival of the Jewish State is being played out. The suicide bombers have been replaced by lawyers and lobbyists. Their weapons are the lawsuit (900 and counting against the IDF alone): the “fact-finding” mission (UN and ad hoc); the international arrest warrant and “universal jurisdiction statute” (arrests and trials of Israeli military and public figures anywhere, any time); the petition, the initiative, the academic boycott, the apartheid charge—all directed toward the single aim of delegitimizing the Jewish State. The targets are no longer buses and coffee shops, but the legality of Israel’s presence on its land and its sovereign right to defend that land and its people.

On this battlefield, no mistake can prove more costly than ignoring the law of unintended consequences, as Netanyahu appears to be doing with this “freeze.” Nothing more painfully illustrates that fact than Israel’s 2000 middle of the night abandonment of its anti-terrorist stronghold in south Lebanon (along with its South Lebanese Army ally of 18 years) and its unilateral evacuation and destruction of 22 Jewish communities in Gaza. The first gave sinew to the then fledgling Iranian terrorist proxy Hezbollah, for which the Jewish State was repaid six years later with 4,000 Katyusha rockets over Haifa and the Galilee. Today, as a well equipped army with 15 times that number of rockets, it threatens a major retaliatory response to any Israeli strike at Iran’s nuclear installations.

The unintended consequences of Ariel Sharon’s handover of Gaza to Hamas continue to wind themselves like a steel daisy-chain around Israel’s throat. From this single most irrational act by any government in the state’s 61-year history ensued a four-year rocket bombardment of the western Negev, the termination of which required a full-scale IDF air and ground offensive into Gaza, causing minimal but inevitable casualties (lovingly documented by a hostile media) among the civilians behind whom the Hamas terrorists shielded their dirty work. This resulted in near universal condemnation of Israel as a heartless human rights violator, a charge underwritten and codified in the damning Goldstone Report, soon to be featured at the UN Security Council. The campaign to strip Israel of its right of self-defense against a terrorist organization pledged to its destruction has exceeded the wildest imaginings of its planners.

What have the legal potholes Netanyahu has dug for himself with the freeze availed him? Precious little at this counting. They have no more taken Barack Obama “off his back” than has his embrace of the “two-state solution.” “The Americans drove me nuts,” he was quoted by Ynet to have confessed to a meeting of Likud branch members. “They wanted more, also in Jerusalem.” In addition to concessions on Jerusalem, moreover, the White House, according to Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick, is demanding that Israel allow the Palestinian “Security Forces,” equipped and trained by U.S. General Keith Dayton, to set up shop in Judean and Samarian areas currently under full IDF control and that Israel “surrender land to Fatah in the strategically crucial Jordan Valley.”

The Hebrew daily Yediot Aharonot further reports that as a precondition to talks with the Palestinians, President Obama will be asking Israel to formally declare its acceptance of a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria, Gaza and eastern Jerusalem and agree to cleanse those areas of all Jews. “So far from winning American support, or at least causing the White House to ease its bullying,” Glick concludes, Obama regards Netanyahu’s “decision to implement a militarily irrational, bigoted policy of prohibiting Jews from building in Israel’s heartland as a drop in the bucket.”

From Mahmoud Abbas, the prime minister has gotten a complete brushoff. Yet, his flat rejection of “peace talks” unless the construction freeze is extended to include Jerusalem, is raising few eyebrows. The “President” of the Palestinian Authority can hardly be seen as less demanding than Israel’s self-appointed masters in Washington. Former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy, for one, is not surprised. Like all of America’s past promises of “reciprocity” from Abbas in return for Israeli concessions and “gestures,” he asserts this one also runs aground on the thorny fact that Abbas is “incapable of being a partner to peace negotiations.” The guy Obama really needs to accomplish that purpose, Halevy submits, is someone Mahmoud Abbas is not and will never be – “a Palestinian leader acceptable to all the Palestinians.”

International applause for the moratorium has also been notably absent. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s hopes for a joint declaration of support from America’s “Quartet” partners, Russia, the European Union and the UN, were dashed by Moscow’s reservations to two items in the text proposed by Washington: an acknowledgement of the “Jewish identity” of the State of Israel and that the dividing line between Israel and a future Palestine would be determined by developments on the ground, including the anticipated Israeli annexation of major settlement blocs.

What the prime minister’s accession to the freeze certainly did achieve was almost uniform settler denunciation and a deep but at present not unbridgeable rift within the Likud sector of the cabinet. Ministers Silvan Shalom, Gilad Erdan, Moshe Kahalon. Yuli Edelstein and Limor Livnat were unanimous in their condemnation of the decision, with Livnat declaring that “we have fallen into the hands of a horrible U.S. administration” and Erdan refusing to provide inspectors from his Environmental Protection Ministry to help enforce the freeze. Shalom, a late convert to the “Land of Israel” movement, declared that if the Likud was now abandoning its championing of the settlement enterprise, such a turnabout would have to be deliberated by the party’s institutions.

At least three of the “Security Cabinet” members who voted 11 to 1 to back Netanyahu on the freeze (Minister Uzi Landau of “Yisrael Beteinu” cast the lone dissenting vote) were experiencing varying degrees of buyer’s remorse. Stung by an avalanche of “Stop Work” orders on the settlements, propelled by Defense Minister Ehud Barak within hours after the announcement of the moratorium, Minister of Strategic Affairs Moshe Yaalon told the Hebrew weekly Makor Rishon that he was particularly disturbed by the blanket manner in which the decision was being implemented. “It was not intended to be an overall freeze of all construction,” he said. “This is not what we meant. Whatever was already being built and approved should have continued to be built.” He vowed to quit the government if the moratorium was not lifted after 10 months.

Joining Yaalon in a request to Netanyahu that he rein in an overly zealous Barak, Minister Without Portfolio Benny Begin promised that the end of the moratorium would see a resumption of housing construction in Judea and Samaria “at a faster pace than before the freeze.” Likud Central Committee Chairman and Communications Minister Moshe Kahalon caustically noted that “the U.S. did not send us flowers,” while the Europeans were “unilaterally declaring east Jerusalem to be the Palestinian capital.”

As for the settlers, a column in the Hebrew daily Ha’aretz by the paper’s chief political correspondent Yossi Verder entitled “Worst of All Worlds,” seemed to say it all: “If Tsipi Livni were in power today,” Verder opined, “she would not have had the courage to freeze construction. And if she had, she would have been left without a government because Shas and Yisrael Beitenu (her prospective coalition partners) would have walked. Netanyahu, however, can do what he wants.”

Verder touches on a key point in that last sentence, because for all the grousing among the Likud cabinet members and the Likud Knesset caucus as a whole, not one of the senior members has risen to lead a revolt, nor have any of them attacked the prime minister directly. They are not ready to bring this government down—at least not yet.. Virtually all of their anger has been vented at Barak, the leader of a fractured, diminishing, unpopular Labor party. However emotionally satisfying, that expedient may have limited shelf-life. All of which raises an intriguing question: When push comes to shove, as it inevitably will when Obama demands that he acquiesce to the division of Jerusalem (“One Capital for Two Nations”), in order to lure or keep Mahmoud Abbas at the bargaining table, will Netanyahu, faced with a revolt that must bring his premiership crashing to earth, finally stand his ground, or might he do something else?

The “something else” scenario initially posed by Verder and now gaining increasing traction, is that the Prime Minister, flushed with the momentum of a perceived diplomatic “breakthrough” on the Palestinian or Syrian “track,” might—a la Ariel Sharon in 2005— split the Likud, taking a required one-third (but probably more) of the faction with him, and join forces with Barak and his nine “loyalists” (none of whom would presumably cavil at deserting a drowning Labor party $40 million in debt) and, with a bunch of Tsipi Livni-hating Kadima defectors in tow, cobble together a new “centrist” Likud. Verder believes Barak has been banking on just such a turn of events “from the moment he entered the government. A government of ‘B’s’—Bibi and Barak—may be his last opportunity to succeed Netanyahu as prime minister,” Verder argues. As for Netanyahu, Verder says nothing about the man would surprise him: “Since taking office less than a year ago, Netanyahu’s principles and declarations of the past have been put to the test repeatedly and each time a new reality emerges victorious.”

Is such a scenario within the realm of possibility? If we are to credit MK Ophir Pines-Paz, one of the four Labor “rebels” who have fought the party’s entry into the Likud coalition from the outset, a variation of it could be in the making. Pines-Paz related to Verder the details of a meeting he recently had with an unidentified Likud cabinet minister. In the course of the conversation, Pines-Paz says, he was “suddenly asked” what he thought about Likud and Labor running on a joint list in the next election, but with each party retaining an autonomous existence. Queried as to the genesis of the idea, the Likud minister said it was put to him by Netanyahu. He said he told Netanyahu he could live with it. Knowing Netanyahu, he added, he didn’t think the prime minister would have broached the subject “if something wasn’t cooking.” Pines-Paz tossed the idea around with several of his colleagues and “not one of them fell off his chair.”

Be that as it may, it could be a signal for the rest of the country to fasten its seat belt.

William Mehlman is AFSI’s representative in Israel..

Jerold S. Auerbach

Just before Prime Minister Netanyahu imposed the ten-month housing freeze in Jewish settlements that has roiled Israel since late November, President Obama committed his Gilo gaffe. The woefully misinformed president labeled a neighborhood of 40,000 Israelis in southwest Jerusalem, purchased by Jews before World War II, a “settlement” in (Arab) “East” Jerusalem where Jews must not build new homes. Rejecting Obama’s demand for a Jerusalem freeze, Netanyahu responded with a far more draconian constraint of his own. The two episodes are not unrelated.

To be sure, Netanyahu’s penchant for yielding to American pressure is hardly new. In 1998, during his first term as prime minister, he was strong-armed by President Clinton into relinquishing Israeli control over nearly all of Hebron, the ancient biblical city where the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Jewish people are entombed, where King David reigned, where sixty-seven Jews were brutally massacred in 1929 – and where Jews once again now live.
Even by Netanyahu’s surrender standards, however, the announcement of a ten-month housing freeze stunned the settler communities. Instantly polarizing Israelis, it raised the danger of massive civil (and even military) disobedience and draconian government retaliation. Worse yet, the freeze may represent only the beginning of massive capitulation to American demands: for the release from prison of a thousand Fatah terrorists, the surrender of strategic land in the Jordan Valley to the Palestinian Authority, and ultimate acceptance of a Palestinian state in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and Gaza.
It was hardly coincidental that just days after Netanyahu’s announcement of the housing freeze Defense Minister Ehud Barak visited an army induction base to warn soldiers of the consequences of refusing orders. “We intend to use an iron fist to limit this phenomenon,” Barak announced bluntly, while directing a special warning to “kippa-wearers” to obey the Talmudic injunction against a civil war between Jews, a warning that Barak himself seemed prepared to disregard.

Netanyahu has been deservedly criticized for his abject surrender. “In the hopes of appeasing the unappeasable Obama administration,” Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick wrote sharply, “the government has adopted Obama’s anti-Semitic policies against Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.” Yoram Ettinger, who carefully monitors Middle Eastern demographic trends, dismissed Netanyahu’s implicit claim that Jewish settlements are obstacles to peace. It was, after all, the evacuation of 9,000 Jews from twenty-five communities in Gaza in 2005, ordered by Prime Minister Sharon, that enabled Hamas militants to ascend to power there. Ettinger wondered whether President Obama, who evidently considers 300,000 Jews (17%) living among 1.5 million Palestinian Arabs in Judea and Samaria to be an obstacle to peace in the Middle East, would also support the uprooting of 1.4 million Arabs (20%) who reside among six million Jews within the State of Israel. If not, why are only Jews to be ethnically cleansed?

By the beginning of December, just a week after Netanyahu’s announcement of the housing freeze, several dozen army officers and soldiers on reserve duty had signed and circulated a statement indicating their refusal to report to active service for the duration of the housing freeze: “We see this as a racist decision that infringes on our human rights and our rights as citizens, contradicts the rights of the Jewish nation to its land, and goes against morality and justice.” Ehud Barak’s nightmare scenario was already unfolding, and he was eager to enforce the edict that provoked it.

Confronting the outrage that was building in Israel, even Cabinet ministers who had supported the Netanyahu freeze began to backtrack. Directing much of their criticism at Barak for his ham-handed zeal— the Defense Ministry had even issued stop-work orders to houses already approved or under construction —Moshe Yaalon and Benny Begin asked Netanyahu to urge Barak to “calm down.” The Knesset Subcommittee for Judea and Samaria Affairs demanded that the housing freeze order be revoked for its violations of settlers’ rights.

Prime Minister Netanyahu could hardly ignore the outrage that his capitulation to Obama had generated. As settlers sought an injunction against the freeze, he met with their leaders to persuade them that “We took this difficult decision in order to move Israel’s widest interests forward.” In an atmosphere described by one participant as “hard and tense,” Netanyahu tried to reassure them that “we are not your enemy, we are your brethren.” But, for entirely understandable reasons, it was a hard sell, not least because it implicitly undermined the 2004 agreement reached by President Bush and Prime Minister Sharon that large settlement blocs (Ma’ale Adumim, Gush Etzion, Ariel) would, in any peace agreement, remain part of Israel.

Insisting that the freeze would make it evident that it is Palestinians who provide the real resistance to peace, Netanyahu was sharply rebuked: “Didn’t Israel already make that point when it withdrew from Gaza in the summer of 2005?” Offering reassurance that the suspension was “one-time and temporary,” the Prime Minister also issued a firm warning: “You can protest, demonstrate and express your opinion, but it can’t be that you don’t abide by a decision that was lawfully taken.” Predictably, the Palestinians rejected the housing freeze as insufficient, demanding that it also include a freeze in Jerusalem. Given Netanyahu’s inclination to capitulate, why not?

Settler leaders remained openly defiant. Danny Dayan, chairman of the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea and Samaria, bluntly declared: “We will disobey the freeze order and we are willing to pay the price in order to break Netanyahu’s ‘White Paper’ policy”—a reference to British limitations on Jewish immigration to Palestine during and after the Holocaust years. Residents of Kedumim, a settlement founded during Hanukkah in 1975, responded by blocking Civil Administration officials from distributing stop-work orders in its new building projects.

Israeli opinion, at first, was sharply divided over Netanyahu’s decree. Haaretz, predictably, focused more on the “organized lawlessness” of Jewish settlers whose communities were threatened by the freeze than on the draconian restriction itself. “Only a few kilometers from Tel Aviv,” proclaimed a lead editorial (December 3), “the laws of democracy give way to the law of the jungle.” But once Tel Aviv is within Palestinian missile range, as it will be if Israel returns to its pre-1967 borders, Israeli leftists may regret the absence of the “jungle” Jews whose presence in Judea and Samaria now protects them.
Journalist Amos Harel noted that Netanyahu, under heavy American pressure, had “crossed an ideological Rubicon” with his announcement of the housing freeze. Indeed, in tandem with his embrace of a two-state solution in his Bar-Ilan speech several months earlier, the Likud prime minister was sounding increasingly like Shimon Peres, whose shimmering vision of “a new Middle East” plunged Israel into the Oslo “peace process” fiasco. To his Haaretz colleague Akiva Eldar, the problem was that the prime minister had not yet done enough. If only Netanyahu had been more conciliatory toward Palestinian Authority and President Abbas. If only he had formed a new government based upon a genuine commitment to “the road map and a regional peace plan.” If only he had reached out to his Kadima opponent Tzipi Livni instead of to the settlers. By now, of course, Israel would have returned to the “safety” of its pre-1967 “Auschwitz borders.”

Once public opinion consolidated, however, the depth of opposition to the Netanyahu freeze was evident. One week into December, 72% of Israelis believed that the housing freeze stemmed from Netanyahu’s inability to withstand American pressure; 68% believed that Netanyahu’s primary objective was to placate President Obama; 65% believed that the freeze should be brought to the Knesset for approval; 56% believed that the freeze would increase, not decrease, pressure on Israel to make further concessions.

As Netanyahu scrambled to minimize the damage caused by the housing freeze, he insisted that it was not intended to apply to construction already underway. But Defense Ministry inspectors, surely at Barak’s orders, had already ordered stoppage of work under construction.

Settlers quickly let Netanyahu know that they would resist his draconian plan. In Beit Arieh, their mayor was arrested when residents blocked security forces from entering to enforce the freeze. In Elon Moreh and Kiryat Arba, there were confrontations with inspectors. "The anger we feel over the freeze is only getting stronger," said a resident of Psagot. "And we're making our voices heard." Indeed they were: the evening of December 9, more than 10,000 Israelis gathered in Jerusalem, near the Prime Minister’s residence, to make their opposition known. "Jews are not ice pops,” Knesset member Aryeh Eldad proclaimed at the rally. “You don't freeze us so fast."

Netanyahu’s housing freeze in Judea and Samaria was instantly volatile because it needlessly—and heedlessly—reopened the issue of Israel’s final borders. For sixty years now, from Ben-Gurion to Netanyahu, Israeli prime ministers have ignored the settlement rights of Jews under international guarantees that were set in place in 1920. In that year, the San Remo Conference converted the Balfour Declaration (1917) into what Howard Grief has correctly called in The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel Under International Law “a binding legal document.” The right of the Jewish people to establish their national home in Palestine —the land that now encompasses Jordan, the West Bank, Israel, and Gaza—was affirmed. The League of Nations mandate for Palestine, ratified unanimously two years later, recognized “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine” and “the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.” In this land, Jews were guaranteed the right of “close settlement.”

But Great Britain, the Mandatory Trustee for Palestine, retained the discretion to “withhold” the right of Jews to settle east—not west—of the Jordan River. Consistent with that solitary exception, and to satisfy the ambitions of the Hashemite Sheikh Abdullah, Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill removed the land east of the Jordan River, which became Trans-Jordan, from Palestine. West of the river, however, the right of Jewish settlement remained undiminished. No international legal agreement has ever abrogated it. The United States, having signed the 1924 Anglo-American Convention stipulating acceptance of the mandate, remains bound by it. Article 80 of the United Nations Charter, drafted in 1945, explicitly protected “the terms of existing international instruments to which members of the United Nations may respectively be parties.”

After the Six-Day War, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 242, calling for “secure and recognized boundaries.” It provided that when “a just and lasting peace in the Middle East” was achieved—not before—Israel would be required to withdraw “from territories”—but not from “the territories” or “all the territories”—that it gained in that defensive war. No limitation on Jewish settlement was adopted. “The Jewish right of settlement in the area,” wrote Eugene V. Rostow, Undersecretary of State for political affairs between 1966-69, “is equivalent in every way to the right of the existing [Palestinian] population to live there.” International law expert Julius Stone concluded that any allegation of settlement illegality was a “subversion . . . of basic international law principles.” In sum, the right of Jews to “close settlement” throughout Mandatory Palestine west of the Jordan River has never been abrogated.

It is nothing less than astonishing, and potentially catastrophic for Israel, that its political leaders from Ben-Gurion to Netanyahu have been prepared to relinquish Israel’s legitimate land claims in Judea and Samaria. Only in Chelm, the mythical land of Jewish folly, can such a surrender otherwise be imagined. Why has a long parade of prime ministers, defense ministers, judges, media sages, and “peace” advocates been so eager to divest the State of Israel of its internationally guaranteed rights in the biblical homeland of the Jewish people?

The question answers itself. For the Israeli secular majority, and its representatives in government, anything that promises to squelch the potential political power, and undermine the land base, of religious Zionism is both worthy and urgently necessary. The Gaza withdrawal, as Caroline Glick wrote perceptively, “wasn’t about peace with the Arabs. It was about cultural supremacy within Israel.” Even Haaretz editors conceded that “the real disengagement” was not from Gaza but from Jewish religious sources. That helps to explain why no Israeli government during sixty-one years of statehood has acted as though it believed that Judea and Samaria actually belong to the Jewish people.

The enduring lesson from ancient Jewish history is that sinat hinam, groundless hatred between Jews, undermined national independence and led to the destruction of the Jewish Commonwealth. That very hatred, however, propels the unfolding Jewish tragedy of our time: the willingness, if not eagerness, to abdicate the biblical homeland of the Jewish people.

Jerold S. Auerbach, professor of history at Wellesley College, is the author of Hebron Jews: Memory and Conflict in the Land of Israel (Roman & Littlefield, 2009).

Andrew Roberts

Editor’s Note: Melanie Phillips posted this speech, given by historian Andrew Roberts (raised in the Anglican church) on Dec. 9, on her (U.K.) Spectator blog.

My Lords, Ladies & Gentlemen,

It’s a great honour to be invited to address you, especially on this the 60th anniversary of the Anglo-Israel Association, and I’d like to take the opportunity of this anniversary to look at the overall story of the relationship between Britain and Israel, and to try to strip away some of the myths.

Because it seems to me that for all the undoubted statesmanship implicit in Arthur Balfour’s Declaration of November 1917, promising “a National Home for the Jewish People,” it doesn’t mean that Britain has ever been much more than a fair-weather friend to Jewish national aspirations. The Declaration itself was at least in part conceived to keep Eastern European and Russian Jews supporting the Great War after the Bolshevik Revolution, and Chaim Weizmann’s preferred wording of ‘a Jewish State’ was turned down by the British Foreign Office. As David Ben-Gurion wrote at the time: “Britain has made a magnificent gesture … But only the Hebrew people can transform this right into tangible fact: only they, with body and soul, with their strength and capital, must build their National Home and bring about their national redemption.”

Sure enough, at the Versailles Conference and its ancillary meetings up to 1922, although Britain was given the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, the Jewish National Home was not established. During the Mandate period there was an observable tension between the Colonial Office, which was responsible for administering Palestine and wanted to do so within the terms of the (admittedly self-contradictory) Balfour Declaration, and the Foreign Office, which feared that allowing the de facto creation of a Jewish State would alienate Arabs. In 1937 the Peel Commission recommended ending the Mandate and partitioning Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, with population transfers of 225,000 Arabs from Galilee, an outcome Ben-Gurion said “could give us something which we have never had, even when we stood on our own during the days of the First and Second Temples.” Nonetheless, both the Arabs and the 20th Zionist Congress rejected Peel’s recommendations, to the palpable relief of the Foreign Office, which concentrated its own opposition to it on the basis of its supposed impracticality.

Instead there was the notorious 1939 White Paper, which severely limited Jewish immigration into Palestine at precisely the period of their greatest need, during the Final Solution. A total upper limit of 75,000 Jewish immigrants was set for the fateful years 1940-44, a figure that was also intended to cover refugee emergencies. The White Paper was published on 9 November 1938—the very same day as the Kristallnacht atrocities in Germany—and was approved by Parliament in May 1939, a full two months after Hitler’s occupation of the rump of Czechoslovakia. The Manchester Guardian described it as “a death sentence on tens of thousands of Central European Jews,” which in sheer numerical terms was probably an underestimation. Although the Labour Party Conference voted to repeal the White Paper in 1945, the Labour Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin—a bitter enemy of Israel—persisted in it, and it was not to be repealed until the day after the State of Israel was proclaimed.

In late April 1948, Bevin ordered that Arab positions in Jaffa needed to be protected from the Jews “at all costs,” and when Israeli independence came the next month, the departing British sometimes handed over vital military and strategic strong points to the five invading Arab armies, the most efficient of which, Transjordan’s Arab Legion, was actually commanded by a Briton, Sir John Glubb. And then on New Year’s Eve 1948 the British Government actually issued an ultimatum to Israel threatening war if Israel did not halt its counter-attacks on Egyptian forces in the Gaza Strip and Sinai. Britain was the only country in the UN that came to Egypt’s aid in this regard.

One can easily see, therefore, why when Brigadier-General Sir Wyndham Deedes set up the Anglo-Israeli Association only weeks after Israel was finally recognized by Britain in 1949—months after America, Russia and several other states had already done so—it was much-needed. There was still massive resentment over the War of Independence; Israel was considered at best a headache by the Foreign Office; and worst of all, unlike her neighbours, she had no oil. Nor did the Suez Crisis much help matters seven years later: the way in which Israel fitted in neatly with British plans to crush Nasser ought to have endeared her to the Foreign Office, but of course it didn’t.

When in May 1967 Nasser announced the blockading of the Straits of Tiran, closing Israel’s commercial lifeline to the east, the guarantors of this international waterway—including Britain—failed to act quickly or decisively, and although Harold Wilson was proud of his pro-Israeli sentiments, his foreign secretary George Brown and the Foreign Office certainly did not reciprocate them. Britain compounded its generally lukewarm attitude during the Six Day War by sponsoring Resolution 242 at the end of it, which called on Israel to withdraw “from territories occupied,” in a resolution that was so badly worded by the Foreign Office that Arabs and Israelis have been able to argue over its proper meaning ever since.

The Yom Kippur War of October 1973 saw even worse bias by the Foreign Office in favour of the Arabs and against the Jews. Announcing an arms embargo “equally” between the belligerents, the Heath Government effectively stopped Israel buying spare parts for the IDF’s Centurion tanks, whilst allowing them to be bought by Jordan, the only other country affected, because it was not (officially at least) a belligerent. Egyptian helicopter pilots continued to be trained in Britain, with the foreign secretary Sir Alec Douglas-Home lamely telling the Israeli Ambassador that it was better for the pilots to be training in Britain than fighting at the front. Heath even refused to allow American cargo planes taking supplies to Israel to land and refuel at our bases on Cyprus.

In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher seemed to offer a new warmth to Anglo-Israeli relations. She sat for Finchley, her Methodism chimed well with Jewish values, and she was the most philo-Semitic PM since Churchill, yet even she was stymied by the Foreign Office, especially over Intelligence cooperation with Mossad. It’s true that John Major sent a special SAS unit to seek and destroy Iraqi Scud missile batteries targeting Israel during the First Gulf War, but that was largely to remove the danger of Israel retaliating, and thereby perhaps destroying the Arab coalition against Saddam.

After 9/11 Tony Blair seemed to appreciate how Israel was in the very front line in the War against Terror, and he thus bravely refused to condemn Israel’s acts of self-defence in Lebanon, but since then Britain’s contribution to the EU’s strand of negotiating over Iran’s nuclear ambitions has been, frankly, pathetic.

One area of policy over which the Foreign Office has traditionally held great sway is in the question of Royal Visits. It is therefore no coincidence that although HMQ has made over 250 official overseas visits to 129 different countries during her reign, neither she nor one single member of the British royal family has ever been to Israel on an official visit. Even though Prince Philip’s mother, Princess Alice of Greece, who was recognized as "Righteous Among the Nations" for sheltering a Jewish family in her Athens home during the Holocaust, was buried on the Mount of Olives, the Duke of Edinburgh was not allowed by the Foreign Office to visit her grave until 1994, and then only on a private visit.

"Official visits are organized and taken on the advice of the Foreign and Commonwealth office," a press officer for the royal family explained when Prince Edward visited Israel recently privately—and a spokesman for the Foreign Office replied that “Israel is not unique" in not having received an official royal visit, because “Many countries have not had an official visit.” That might be true for Burkino Faso and Chad, but the Foreign Office has somehow managed to find the time over the years to send the Queen on State visits to Libya, Iran, Sudan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Jordan & Turkey. So it can’t have been that she wasn’t in the area.

Perhaps Her Majesty hasn’t been on the throne long enough, at 57 years, for the Foreign Office to get round to allowing her to visit one of the only democracies in the Middle East. At least she could be certain of a warm welcome in Israel, unlike in Morocco where she was kept waiting by the King for three hours in 90 degree heat.

The true reason of course, is that the Foreign Office has a ban on official Royal visits to Israel, which is even more powerful for its being unwritten and unacknowledged. As an act of delegitimization of Israel, this effective boycott is quite as serious as other similar acts, such as the academic boycott, and is the direct fault of the Foreign Office Arabists. Which brings us on to Mr Oliver Miles.

One of the reasons I’m proud to be an historian is that there are scholars of the integrity and erudition of Prof. Sir Martin Gilbert and Prof. Sir Lawrence Freedman who also write history. If people as intelligent, wise and incorruptible as they choose to be historians, then it must be an honourable profession. Let me quote to you, therefore, word-for-word, what a former British Ambassador to Libya and Greece, Mr. Oliver Miles, wrote in The Independent newspaper, commenting on the composition of the present Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War: “Both Gilbert and Freedman are Jewish, and Gilbert at least has a record of active support for Zionism. Such facts are not usually mentioned in the mainstream British and American media….All five members have outstanding reputations and records, but it is a pity that, if and when the inquiry is accused of a whitewash, such handy ammunition will be available. Membership should not only be balanced; it should be seen to be balanced.”

Ladies and gentlemen, if that’s the way that Foreign Office Arabists are prepared to express themselves in public, can you imagine the way that they refer to such people as Professors Gilbert and Freedman in private? For the balance that Mr. Miles is talking about here is clearly a racial balance, that only a certain quota of Jews should have been allowed on to the Inquiry. Of course there’s a reason why “such facts are not usually mentioned in the mainstream media,” and that is because it is a disgraceful and disgusting concept even to notice the racial background of such distinguished public servants, and one that wouldn’t have even occurred to most people had not Mr. Miles made such a point of it.

It seems to me that there is an implicit racism going on here. Jews are expected to behave better, goes the Foreign Office thinking, because they are like us. Arabs must not be chastised because they are not. So in warfare, we constantly expect Israel to behave far better than her neighbours, and chastise her quite hypocritically when occasionally under the exigencies of national struggle, she cannot. The problem crosses political parties today, just as it always has. William Hague called for Israel to adopt a proportionate response in its struggle with Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2007, as though proportionate responses ever won any victories against fascists. In the Second World War, the Luftwaffe killed 50,000 Britons in the Blitz, and the Allied response was to kill 600,000 Germans—twelve times the number and hardly a proportionate response, but one that contributed mightily to victory. Who are we therefore to lecture the Israelis on how proportionate their responses should be?

Very often in Britain, especially when faced with the overwhelmingly anti-Israeli bias that is endemic in our liberal media and the BBC, we fail to ask ourselves what we would not do placed in the same position? The population of the United Kingdom of 63 millions is nine times that of Israel. In July 2006, to take one example entirely at random, Hezbollah crossed the border of Lebanon into Israel and killed 8 patrolmen and kidnapped 2 others, and that summer fired 4,000 Katyusha rockets into Israel which killed a further 43 civilians. Now, if we multiply those numbers by nine to get the British equivalent, just imagine what we would not do if a terrorist organization based as close as Calais were to fire 36,000 rockets into Sussex and Kent, killing 387 British civilians, after killing 72 British servicemen in an ambush and capturing a further eighteen? I put it to you that there is absolutely no lengths to which our Government would not go to protect British subjects under those circumstances, and quite right too. So why should Israel be expected to behave any differently?

There has hardly been a single year since Brigadier-General Deedes established the Anglo-Israel Association in 1949 when a speaker has not been able to say that Israel faced a crisis, and on some occasions—in 1956, 1967, 1973 and especially in the face of the present Iranian nuclear programme today— these were existential. At a time when Barack Obama appears to be the least pro-Israeli president since Eisenhower, the dangers are even more obvious. For there is simply no way that Obama will prevent Ahmadinejad, perhaps Jewry’s most viciously outspoken and dangerous foe since the death of Adolf Hitler, to acquire a nuclear bomb.

None of us can pretend to know what lies ahead for Israel, but if she decides preemptively to strike against such a threat—in the same way that Nelson preemptively sank the Danish Fleet at Copenhagen and Churchill preemptively sank the Vichy Fleet at Oran—then she can expect nothing but condemnation from the British Foreign Office. She should ignore such criticism.

Although History does not repeat itself, its cadences do occasionally rhyme, and if the witness of History is testament to anything it is testament to this: That in her hopes of averting the threat of a Second Holocaust, only Israel can be relied upon to act decisively in the best interests of the Jews.

Ruth King

Pretend there is no European Union, no United Nations, no Arab League, no Iran, no mainstream media and no George Mitchell. Fly this magic carpet to a warm and comfortable chair and read two books that are original and exhilarating and optimistic about Israel.

First, George Gilder’s The Israel Test is a thrilling paean to the Jewish people and Israel. Gilder, an apostle of free market capitalism and author of highly acclaimed books and articles on economics and technology, calls tiny Israel the “central issue in international politics, dividing the world into two fractious armies”…one of creative excellence and the rule of law and its opposite an army of envy, hatred and resentment—for Gilder sees anti-Semitism as the product of irrational envy.

Gilder, who calls Israel “the Hong Kong of the desert,” sees a thriving, creative and entrepreneurial Israel as the paradigm of achievement and endless possibility in an economically free society. He credits Jews with genius in science, technology, business and medicine which continues to propel them to the cutting edge in the advance of Western civilization.

Gilders spares no obloquy for the easy fix policies of peace processors. He mocks those who treat the impasse as though it was caused by Israel’s occupying “too much land” and “think it is within Israel’s power to choose peace” by making territorial concessions. He calls the recidivist recyclers of Oslo “extortionists.”

For Gilder Israel is America’s most valuable partner and ally, but it is more than that. In the last lines of the book, Gilder melds his political, secular and entrepreneurial respect for Israel with his spiritual love of the land: “Ultimately our loyalty to Israel arises not from the cold calculus of survival but from a sense of the holy…..What Americans must fathom with both heart and mind is that this instinct is true—and vital to our survival—that if we would live, we must defend this Holy Land.”

One finishes this book with gratitude and a fervent Amen.

The second highly recommended book is Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle by Dan Senor, a senior Fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and Saul Singer, a former adviser to the U.S. Congress and journalist who lives in Israel.

Again, one succumbs to the pleasure of reading an original, lively and optimistic recounting of the nation’s booming start-up companies that outpace those of China, India, Korea, Canada and the United Kingdom. Incredibly, there are more Israeli companies on the Nasdaq than from all of Europe, Korea, Japan, Singapore and India combined!

The authors believe that Israeli “chutzpah”, immigration, research and development, and the military have been key components of this incredible economic leap.

Jews have always been entrepreneurial. In the U.S., in the pre-computer and technology era, they were key to the development of the garment trade, large retail chains and the movie industry which between them employed more Americans from entry level to executive suites than all other industries.

However, in Israel, the early oppressive bureaucracies inhibited growth and innovation, and created a brain drain of top scientists, researchers and entrepreneurs. The Israeli “hero” in those days was a farmer who grew crops in sand and not a “yuppie” business upstart.

The authors also remind us that in an earlier and (I might add, saner) incarnation, Shimon Peres encouraged and persuaded Israel’s government to develop its first technological “start-up,” namely its nuclear deterrent, long before India, China and Pakistan developed theirs.

Ironically, the unrelenting wars and the need for an effective and efficient military presented Israel with a great opportunity to train its citizens. As the authors point out, America has a limited all-volunteer army but in Israel all families have soldiers, and the “Ivy League” of the citizens are the elite army units that challenge, inform and teach problem solving and strategy as well as ordnance and combat. Friendships are formed that lead to collaborative efforts in industry. Their army education transforms these people into what the authors call “mission oriented leaders and problem solvers”--read that as business school students in military uniforms.

In a bizarre turn of events, Senor and Singer point out that the Arab boycott spurred Israel to develop products that could be shipped in boxes which would not arouse boycotters’ suspicions—unlike produce which requires more space and open carting.

One ends the book with renewed appreciation of Israel’s Defense Forces which not only guard the nation but contribute mightily to its dazzling economic successes.

But, and here is the seemingly everlasting “but” of the Jewish people, the delight and optimism these books produce are quickly dissipated when we turn to our third volume, Robin Shepherd’s A State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel which chronicles the tsumani of anti-Semitism sweeping Europe. This hatred gives aid and support to the Jihad that threatens the survival of the state that elicits Gilder’s, Senor’s and Singer’s admiration.

Shepherd wrote this book while running the Europe program at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. Presently, he is Director of International Affairs at the Henry Jackson Society. As he states in his introduction, Shepherd is neither Jewish nor a Christian Zionist and as a mainstream Anglican youth he was largely unaware of Jews or their myriad problems. In 1989 he read Conor Cruise O’Brien’s epic The Siege, given to him by a Zionist friend, and for the first time he challenged what he calls the prevalent anti-Israel bias that mushroomed in British academia in the eighties.

The forty-four pages of footnotes and index display the meticulous research that sustains the author’s conclusion that the language, tone, content and mainstream commentary on Israel in Europe is hard to distinguish from the libels of the Arab world.

Shepherd calls this a civilizational sickness fueled by appeasement and moral relativism rather than an atavistic return to old style European anti-Semitism. One may debate the roots, but not the actual facts. Shepherd also cautions that the virus of Jew-hatred may easily spread to American shores.

Although he gives a cursory overview of Israel’s history, Shepherd concentrates on the past nine years and the question of how and why Israel has become the focus of such intense disdain in Europe, with attitude polls reflecting a significant decline in Jewish prestige along with an irrational view of the Israel/Arab dispute wherein Israel is painted as oppressor, racist and neo-Nazi, and terrorism seen as the “natural” response of her victims.

Shepherd blames the Jewish defamers of Israel, the old left which leads the charges against Israel, the large Muslim population which is becoming electorally and culturally significant throughout the continent and elements of the right which have made common cause with Muslims and the left in their anti-Israel bandwagon. Whenever Israel engages in self defense, throughout Western Europe there are charges of war-crimes, violations of international law, and disproportionate response. Israel’s denials are lost in the howls of self-righteous venom.

Then, there are the charges of Israel as untrustworthy and a liability rather than a worthy ally. These spill over to the general Jewish population which by and large continues to support Israel and lead to overt anti-Semitism including harassment, defamation and threats.

Shepherd reminds us that in Europe the only nations that defend Israel are Eastern European countries freed of the Soviet yoke. He attributes this to their recent first hand experience with totalitarianism which they see throughout the Arab world.

There is no hint in Shepherd’s fine book that things will change for the better, and although he avoids reference to similarities between the present and pre-Holocaust Europe, one cannot avoid thinking of Europe, 1938.

On reflection, perhaps one should reverse the order I have taken here—read Shepherd first and then rush to the other books for solace. •