I AM A JEW (PART XXI - Voices in Defense of Israel)

As the title shows this is the 21st part (actually the 22^nd, if you count the Special Bulletin) of the series. If you haven’t read the other parts, I urge you to do so. They are, after all a continuum. Easy access to the others can be obtained by clicking on Part I and then scrolling upwards or by accessing the label I Am A Jew.

I have not been publishing any comments received from readers because as I said at the end of each my blogs: “I welcome comments, but will not publish any, unless they have a unique relevance to the segment under discussion, until this series is complete. “

The series is not complete, but I think it is time to publish some of the comments I have received, and to analyze them.

Leonard Levenson, a criminal defense attorney, living and having his office in Manhattan, NY wrote:

I have been following your series very closely. I am very impressed by the thoroughness of your research and the apparent logic of your arguments. However, though I find your facts are correct, the conclusions you draw from them are not. I have been waiting for you to complete your series before responding in depth. At the outset however, I believe that all of the atrocities committed by Israel stem from the overhanging threat to their existence. The massacre at Deir Yassin for example occurred during a fight for Israel's very survival. The source of danger was, of course Arab hostility. The assassination of Count Bernadotte was the perception that he posed a threat to the survival of Israel. The reaction was extreme and unwise but it stemmed from Arab hostility.

 Israel, on the other hand was willing to cooperate with regard to the development of the Middle East economically and developmentally. Beneficial proposals for the irrigation of dry land in Palestine by diverting the Litani River would have greatly increased the productivity of the land but was rejected by Palestinian and Arab leaders. Other economic and developmental projects such as joint desalination proposals were put forth and likewise rejected.

 The terrorist acts by Israel were essentially misguided defensive acts designed to protect the Israeli state and population. The terrorist acts of the Arabs were misguided offensive acts designed to destroy Israel. I have not yet completed my research into the specifics of my comments. I doubt that it will be as thorough as yours. However, when completed I will communicate further.

This is a perfect example of what I see as a kind of “kneejerk” reaction in defense of actions by Israel that purport to be based on researched facts, but that upon examination are anything but that.

Levenson writes: “The massacre at Deir Yassin for example occurred during a fight for Israel's very survival.”

Even if that were true, would it justify the slaughter of innocent men, women and children? But it isn’t even true!

If Levenson had bothered to read my post "I AM A JEW (Part II)" carefully he would not have made this blanket statement for I wrote, and I quote in part:

“What has come to be known as the Deir Yassin massacre is instructive. I quote from Wikipedia:

“The Deir Yassin massacre took place on April 9, 1948, when around 120 fighters from the Irgun Zevai Leumi and Lohamei Herut Israel Zionist paramilitary groups attacked Deir Yassin near Jerusalem, a Palestinian Arab village of roughly 600 people. The assault occurred as Jewish militia sought to relieve the blockade of Jerusalem by Palestinian forces during the civil war that preceded the end of British rule in Palestine…. sparked terror within the Palestinian community, encouraging them to flee from their towns and villages in the face of Jewish troop advances, and it strengthened the resolve of Arab governments to intervene, which they did five weeks later. (Emphasis added)”

I call Levenson’s attention to the fact that at this point Israel was not “fighting for its life.” Arab armies entered the fray five weeks later and to a large extent because of this event. If Levenson, or for that matter other readers, want to know more of the details of Deir Yassin, I urge them to read the post here.

But Deir Yassin - or for that matter the bombing of the King David hotel - would not be a blot on Israel but for events that followed, about which the Jerusalem Post recently wrote:

On July 22, 1946, three phone calls were placed to the King David Hotel, an adjacent building and to The Jerusalem Post (then The Palestine Post), warning of an imminent bombing. Minutes later, a blast ripped through the historic hotel and then-headquarters of the British Mandate for Palestine’s civilian and military authorities, killing 91 people and injuring nearly 50.

These acts were not done by the Israeli Defense Forces, “The Haganah” but by the terrorist organizations known as the Stern Gang, later the Irgun and violated the ethics of The Haganah, which believed in “Purity of Arms.” In fact the differences between these groups was so fierce that it led to an actual clash of arms between them in the not to be forgotten “sinking of the ‘Altalena.’” 

So as long as the forces of decency reigned in Israel, it would have been wrong to even mention these horrendous deeds. But the Israel of its founders, the Israel of Ben-Gurion, is no more. The enemies of the Haganah, the enemies of Ben-Gurion, the very people who called Yitzhak Rabin a Nazi, and whose denunciations of him were directly responsible for his assassination, are now running the Israeli government.

They know no “Purity of Arms”! They are the philosophic descendants of terrorists, and they bear the blot of Deir Yassin and the King David Hotel and the Atelena.

As for Levenson’s comment:

Israel, on the other hand was willing to cooperate with regard to the development of the Middle East economically and developmentally. Beneficial proposals for the irrigation of dry land in Palestine by diverting the Litani River would have greatly increased the productivity of the land but was rejected by Palestinian and Arab leaders.

It is totally inaccurate, even though I wish it were true.

According to Wikipedia under the heading: “Jordan Valley Unified Water Plan” it states:

1955 US ambassador Eric Johnston negotiated the Jordan Valley Unified Water Plan… Jordan undertook to abide by their allocations under the plan. The plan was initially un-ratified by Israel, but after the US linked the Johnston plan to aid, also agreed to accept the allocation provisions.

In that same post, under the heading: “Subsequent developments” it relates:

1988 The Syrian/Jordanian agreement on development of the Yarmouk is blocked when Israel as a riparian right holder refuses to ratify the plan and the World Bank withholds funding. Israel's augments its Johnson plan allocation of 25,000,000 m³/yr by a further 45,000,000–75,000,000 m³/yr.

That doesn’t quite sound like the Levenson rendition.

There are many American Jews who are deeply concerned that the Israel that true Zionists like my father and I, and untold survivors of the Holocaust, and their children, is no more. We want an Israel that returns to the ideals of its founders, to the people, like Levenson, who went to Israel to work on a kibbutz, but that Israel is no more.

It is proud Jews, not self-hating ones, who decry what has happened and is happening in Israel. Who paid for advertisements in the New York Times like the one that appeared in the Times on September 16^th 2014 entitled “An Open letter to President Obama.” 

True Zionists seek the ideals on which Israel was founded!! Not the one of Netanyahu and Lieberman. Not the one that is described here:

I rode a bus in Jerusalem on January 22, that in and of itself is not unusual. What made this 90 minute journey unique was that it had been arranged by Anat Hoffman, director of the Israel Religious Action Centre (IRAC) for myself and Judith Sudilovsky, a free-lance journalist on assignment for Na’amat magazine. Our task was to observe and record gender segregation on bus line 56. On this bus line and others both in Jerusalem and between Jerusalem and other cities Haredim insist that women sit in the back of the bus, and when possible only enter through the back door.

Or the one described in an e-mail from “The Pluralist” an Israeli women’s organization:

The controversial nation state bill that passed its initial vote…(asserts) that only the Hebrew calendar will be the official state calendar… (or) that Arabic, the native tongue of 21% of Israel's population, will no longer be an official language on par with Hebrew.

But neither Levenson, nor most Americans, instinctive Israeli defenders of Israel, know what is going on. They believe what they want to believe, not what the reality is.

People in Israel are beginning to see the crisis that Israel has brought on itself. Thus a former director general of the Mossad, Shabtai Shavit writing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz - see here or here - tells us:

I am truly concerned about the future of the Zionist project… the government’s blindness and political and strategic paralysis on the other. Although the State of Israel is dependent upon the United States, the relationship between the two countries has reached an unprecedented low point. Europe, our biggest market, has grown tired of us and is heading toward imposing sanctions on us. For China, Israel is an attractive high-tech project, and we are selling them our national assets for the sake of profit. Russia is gradually turning against us and supporting and assisting our enemies.

 I am concerned that large segments of the nation of Israel have forgotten, or put aside, the original vision of Zionism: to establish a Jewish and democratic state for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel. No borders were defined in that vision, and the current defiant policy is working against it.

What can and ought to be done? We need to create an Archimedean lever that will stop the current deterioration and reverse today’s reality at once. I propose creating that lever by using the Arab League’s proposal from 2002, which was partly created by Saudi Arabia. The government must make a decision that the proposal will be the basis of talks with the moderate Arab states, led by Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

True American supporters of Israel, of whatever faith, must stop blindly labeling resistance to oppression terrorism, and not excuse the inexcusable, defend the indefensible, rationalize the irrational, or justify the unjustifiable.

I welcome comments, but will not publish any, unless they have a unique relevance to the segment under discussion, until this series is complete.

I AM A JEW (PART VII - A Defense of Israel’s Policies and a Rebuttal)

As the title shows this is the seventh part (actually the 8^th, if you count the Special Bulletin) of the series. If you haven’t read the other parts I urge you to do so. They are, after all a continuum. Easy access to the others can be obtained by clicking on the titles: "I AM A JEW (Part I)," "I AM A JEW (Part II)," "I AM A JEW (Part III)," I AM A JEW (Special Bulletin)," "I AM A JEW (Part IV - The Torah & The Talmud)," "I AM A JEW (Part V - Gaza Is A Huge Prison)" and "I AM A JEW (PART VI - The Palestinians)."

As the reader is well aware by now, I am very critical of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians. However, I do want to give some space toward the opposite viewpoint, though, obviously, not equal space. My problem with the arguments defending Israeli policy is that the bulk of those come from the Right Wing media, and I call attention to those who consider themselves liberals, or progressives, which is the more popular term these days, that they frequently circulate articles from sources that they would never rely on for any other purpose.

However, there is one voice that is unquestionably progressive and yet a staunch defender of Israeli policies and that is Alan Dershowitz. Wikipedia describes him as “A political liberal."

In his article, which appeared in the Jerusalem Post dated July 7, 2014 entitled The current conflict between Israel and Hamas shatters myths (Those who want to read the article in full can find it here.), he makes a number of arguments or what he calls myths.

Myth 1: The primary cause of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is the occupation of the West Bank and Israel’s settlement policy.

He then goes on to rebut this hypothesis. This, it seems to me is setting up a straw man for I am not aware that this has been put forth as the casus belli for the recent conflict in Gaza. Instead, as I have pointed out, the cause for the rocket attacks form Gaza were triggered by Israel’s rounding up and imprisoning without trial 500 members of Hamas in response to the murder of three teenage Israelis by members of Hamas, without the approval, or even knowledge, of the Hamas leadership. (Emphasis added.)

He argues that the attacks from Gaza on Israel:

...are incited by the Muslim Brotherhood, Iran, Syria and others opposed to the very concept of the nationstate for the Jewish people. The best proof of this reality is that these attacks began as soon as Israel ended its occupation of Gaza and uprooted all the civilian settlements from that area. Israel left behind agricultural hothouses and other equipment that the residents of Gaza could have used to build a decent society.

This is a damming charge. For it puts forth that Gaza had been given its full freedom to govern itself and to build a prosperous economy and it rewards Israel with attacks upon it. What are the facts?

According to the Washington Post:  

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said the withdrawal was to increase security of residents of Israel, relieve pressure on the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and reduce friction between Israelis and Palestinians. Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, claims that the withdrawal is the result of violent Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation. (Emphasis added)

But what about Dershowitz’s charge?:

… that these attacks began as soon as Israel ended its occupation of Gaza…(and) left behind agricultural hothouses and other equipment that the residents of Gaza could have used to build a decent society.

Here we must look to Peter Beinart, another Jewish liberal. In his article Gaza myths and Facts (I urge you to read the article in full) he writes:

If you’ve been anywhere near the American Jewish community over the past few weeks, you’ve heard the following morality tale: Israel left the Gaza Strip in 2005, hoping the newly independent country would become the Singapore of the Middle East. Instead, Hamas seized power, ransacked greenhouses, threw its opponents off rooftops and began launching thousands of rockets at Israel.

… But at no point did Gaza become its own country. Had Gaza become its own country, it would have gained control over its borders. It never did. As the Israeli human rights group Gisha has detailed, even before the election of Hamas, Israel controlled whether Gazans could enter or exit the Strip (In conjunction with Egypt, which controlled the Rafah checkpoint in Gaza's south). Israel controlled the population registry through which Gazans were issued identification cards. Upon evacuating its settlers and soldiers from Gaza, Israel even created a security perimeter inside the Strip from which Gazans were barred from entry. (Unfortunately for Gazans, this perimeter included some of the Strip’s best farmland). (Emphasis added.)

He adds: 

Pro-Israel” commentators claim Israel had legitimate security reasons for all this. But that concedes the point. A necessary occupation is still an occupation. That’s why it’s silly to analogize Hamas’ rockets—repugnant as they are—to Mexico or Canada attacking the United States. The United States is not occupying Mexico or Canada. Israel — according to the United States government has been occupying Gaza without interruption since 1967.

He goes on to point out: 

To grasp the perversity of using Gaza as an explanation for why Israel can’t risk a Palestinian state, it helps to realize that Sharon withdrew Gaza’s settlers in large measure because he didn’t want a Palestinian state.

Now when we look to Dershowitz’s allegations such as: 

…these attacks began as soon as Israel ended its occupation of Gaza…

Beinart corrects the record by pointing out:

…militants in Gaza didn’t start launching rockets at Israel after the settlers left. They began a half-decade earlier, at the start of the second intifada. The Gaza disengagement did not stop this rocket fire. But it did not cause it either.

Returning to Dershowitz’s allegations: 

Moreover, there was no siege of Gaza at that time. Gaza was free to become a Singapore on the Mediterranean. Instead, Hamas engaged in a coup d’état, murdering many members of the PA, seizing control of all of Gaza, and turning it into a militant theocracy. It used the material left behind by the Israelis not to feed its citizens but to build rockets with which to attack Israeli civilians. It was only after these rocket attacks that Israel began a siege of Gaza designed to prevent the importation of rockets and material used to build terrorist kidnap tunnels. 

I have already addressed the claim that there was no siege of Gaza at the time above. There was! As to the claim that “Hamas engaged in a coup d’état” Beinart points out: 

But Hamas didn’t seize power. It won an election. In January 2006, four months after the last settlers left, Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem chose representatives to the Palestinian Authority’s parliament. (The previous year, they had separately elected Abbas to be the Palestinian Authority’s President). Hamas won a plurality of the vote - forty-five percent - but because of the PA’s voting system, and Fatah’s idiotic decision to run more than one candidate in several districts, Hamas garnered 58 percent of the seats in parliament.

Beinart goes on to say:

So yes, members of Hamas did throw their Fatah opponents off rooftops. Some of that may have been payback because Dahlan was widely believed to have overseen the torture of Hamas members in the 1990s. Regardless, in winning the battle for Gaza, Hamas—which had already shed much Israeli blood - shed Palestinian blood too. But to suggest that Hamas “seized power” - as American Jewish leaders often do - ignores the fact that Hamas’ brutal takeover occurred in response to an attempted Fatah coup backed by the United States and Israel. In the words of David Wurmser, who resigned as Dick Cheney’s Middle East advisor a month after Hamas’ takeover, “what happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen.”

As for the greenhouses Beinart writes:

Israel responded to Hamas’ election victory by further restricting access in and out of Gaza. As it happens, these restrictions played a key role in explaining why Gaza’s greenhouses did not help it become Singapore. American Jewish leaders usually tell the story this way: When the settlers left, Israel handed over their greenhouses to the Palestinians, hoping they would use them to create jobs. Instead, Palestinians tore them down in an anti-Jewish rage.

But one person who does not endorse that narrative is the prime mover behind the greenhouse deal, Australian-Jewish businessman James Wolfensohn, who served as the Quartet’s Special Envoy for Gaza Disengagement. In his memoir, Wolfensohn notes that “some damage was done to the greenhouses [as the result of post-disengagement looting] but they came through essentially intact” and were subsequently guarded by Palestinian Authority police. What really doomed the greenhouse initiative, Wolfensohn argues, were Israeli restrictions on Gazan exports. “In early December [2005], he writes, “the much-awaited first harvest of quality cash crops—strawberries, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, sweet peppers and flowers—began. These crops were intended for export via Israel for Europe. But their success relied upon the Karni crossing [between Gaza and Israel], which, beginning in mid-January 2006, was closed more than not. The Palestine Economic Development Corporation, which was managing the greenhouses taken over from the settlers, said that it was experiencing losses in excess of $120,000 per day…It was excruciating.

Facts, facts, facts;. They do get in the way of our pre-conceptions. But if we are to objectively analyze a problem, a conflict, or find a solution, we must start with the facts, and Beinart sets them forth without distortion and without bias.

I am only excerpting Beinart’s analysis here, but those who really want to see what the facts are should read both Dershowitz’s article and Beinart’s in full.

I welcome comments, but will not publish any until this series is complete.