The Art of Seaborne Humiliation.doc

 

 

by Victor Davis Hanson

 

There’s just a chance that, if Israel doesn’t lose its nerve, it could restore a climate of deterrence against seaborne provocations.

 

A tiny flotilla of “peace ships” sets out to run an Israeli blockade of the Gaza coast. The Israeli strategy in response is intended to ensure that neither weapons nor terrorists enter the Hamas-held territory, at a time when Hamas is in a virtual war with Israel.

 

Once the ships neared the coast, the choices were not good. Either the Israelis could allow the ships through, rendering the blockade irrelevant and permitting dozens of unknown persons to enter Gaza, along with unspecified cargos — or the Israelis had to intervene, ensuring that at some point they might have to use force, perhaps against some passengers who were not entirely unarmed.

 

And once things reached that point, the militarily dominant Israelis had lost the public-relations war — at least as conventional wisdom defines it. The Gaza flotilla, then, joins a long list of incidents — intifadas, kidnappings, rocket attacks — in which the provocation proves minor in comparison with the hoped-for response.

 

The aim of such provocations is to create over time a narrative in which the Israelis appear to be bullying aggressors not worthy of global, and perhaps not even of Western, support. As these incidents continue, Israel’s enemies hope that at some point Israel will go too far, wear too thin the patience of the West, and finally lose the financial, military, and diplomatic support necessary for its very survival. That point has already been reached in Europe, and the Gaza-flotilla incident was aimed at doing the same within the United States — given the reset-button Middle East policy of President Obama.

 

As a general rule, nothing much good comes to a Western power when a rogue nation or anti-Western organization seeks confrontation on the seas. In such incidents, Iranians, Palestinians, North Koreans, and generic pirates are judged on an entirely different set of moral rules that tend to offer exemption for the weaker power (i.e., the victims of “disproportionate” force) or the crazier party (i.e., we expect provocation from them, but not retaliation from you).

 

In an unprovoked attack this past March, North Korea torpedoed a South Korean ship, killing 46 sailors. The general facts were clear enough, given torpedo fragments and the conclusions of an international body of experts who examined them.

 

But was South Korea going to risk a war — or even a small and temporary economic downturn — in any such period of heightened tensions? Would it restore deterrence if the South Korean navy sank the next North Korean ship that came its way?

 

Probably not. After all, there were neither worldwide demonstrations lamenting the killing of the South Korean sailors nor popular demands for retaliation against such naked aggression. But then, South Koreans are listening to iPods while not long ago North Koreans were eating grass. - -

 

China, nuclear North Korea’s nuclear patron, was, of course, slightly miffed by the incident, given its commercial interest in keeping regional calm, but it was also slightly amused that states like South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan from time to time have to be reminded that power is not solely to be defined by GDP. As it is now, South Korea plays by the rules, convenes its expert panel to confirm what one already knew — and in the process humiliates itself by being presented with facts that, for a variety of reasons, it believes it cannot act upon.

 

When the Iranians hijacked a British patrol boat in March 2007 and took 15 sailors hostage for two weeks, the United Kingdom did little in response. Who wishes to go to war over a tiny spat like that? Meanwhile, Ahmadinejad paraded the sailors on television, fitted them out with Iranian dress, and thereby reminded the world that the navy of Nelson either cannot or will not protect its own personnel on the high seas. The message was clear to the nearby rich, but weak, Gulf oil exporters: Would you prefer to be allied with a brazen upstart that takes hostages from a supposedly stronger power, or with a hesitant power that begs to have them returned?

 

Over 1,000 pirates operate off the Somali coast. In 2009 they attempted 214 attacks on private shipping, well over twice the number tried in 2008. They remind ocean-goers that the world’s great navies cannot ensure safe passage through the Gulf of Aden. And they count on Western publics’ contextualizing their criminality — by adducing poverty, past exploitation, or lack of Western humanitarian aid — rather than demanding punishment for it.

 

Of course, the classical way of ending piracy — as Pompey demonstrated with the Cilician outlaws — is to combine naval interception with assaults against the criminals’ home ports. But again, given the asymmetry involved in piracy — wealthy Western ship- or boat-owners versus desperate “others” — who wants to risk killing poor Third World civilians just to hit the pirates who live among them? The final scenes of Black Hawk Down give us a taste of what the shooting might look like on CNN.

 

Many other such incidents could be cited — think of the 1968 capture of the Pueblo by North Korea or the 1975 taking of the Mayaguez by the Khmer Rouge. While the details differ, the general playbook remains the same: Some sort of incident is staged at sea, where witnesses and boundaries are often nonexistent, in order to provoke a response that will work to the provoker’s benefit.

 

In each of these cases, the instigator dares a powerful Western nation to retaliate and thereby stupidly endanger its collective good life over a small matter of 19th-century-style national pride. And if violence follows, the props almost always ensure that the Western nation is transmogrified in the blink of an eye into a bully, pushing around the Other where it has no business being in the first place. No wonder that the Western nation usually instead sends diplomats to work out some sort of restrained apology, which gives the provocateur stature and pours more humiliation upon the provoked — another milestone on a long road of weakening Western stature and influence.

 

What might change the rules of seaborne humiliation?

 

Perhaps the only remedy would be a new sort of public opinion that requires leaders to resist concessions. Such a tougher policy at first might mean some greater risk of violence, but standing up to Iranians, or North Koreans, or Somali pirates — or pro-Hamas activists — would, in the long run, reestablish deterrence and convince the aggressors that the last thing they wish to do is take on a Western ship.

 

In this regard, if Israel can make the case that it has a perfect right to inspect ships intending to bring supplies and persons into Gaza, then it should increase, not cease, such vigilance. What it would lose in public opinion in the short term would be more than outweighed in the long term by the establishment of a new scenario in which no ship, under any circumstances, wishes to confront an Israeli vessel at sea. But unless and until that happens, expect not only that the provocations of Hamas and its fellow travelers will increase, but also that regional powers from Iran to Turkey will take note of how staging confrontations with Israel results in strategic advantage — and favorable global press.

 

 

Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

Singling Out Israel For "International Investigation"

 

by Alan M. Dershowitz

 

In a world in which North Korea sinks a South Korean naval vessel killing dozens, Iran arms Islamic terrorists, who kill hundreds, Russia bombs Chechnya, killing thousands, and the United States and Great Britain, while targeting Al Qaeda and Taliban, kill an indeterminate number of civilians, only Israel is subjected to international "investigations" such as that conducted by Richard Goldstone and that being called for by the Security Council in the wake of the recent flotilla fiasco.

 

Why only Israel? Why is the United Nations silent about other situations that cry out for international investigations? Surely it's not because what Israel did was worse than what other member nations have done. Certainly it's not because Israel lacks self-criticism or mechanisms for internal investigation. Plainly it's not because the other "offenders" were provoked, while Israel was unprovoked.

 

There is only one answer--because Israel has long been singled out for public scrutiny and opprobrium by the United Nations in particular and the international community in general.

 

This is not to say that Israel has always been blameless. It foolishly took the bait and allowed itself to be provoked into overreacting to a well planned provocation by so-called "humanitarians," who love only those who hate the Jewish state. The best proof that the flotilla had little to do with providing humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza and everything to do with breaking Israel's entirely lawful military blockade of a terrorist enclave, is Hamas' refusal to accept the food and medicine that Israel removed from the captured boats. The leaders of the flotilla admitted that their object was the same as Hamas'--not to provide humanitarian assistance to Gaza but rather to break the military blockade that is designed to keep rockets and other anti-personnel weapons from the hands of Hamas terrorists.

 

Israel should have been smarter in its efforts to enforce its blockade, but it did nothing illegal--and what it did do certainly doesn't warrant being singled out for the stigma of an international investigation.

 

If the United Nations is to get into the business of ordering and conducting international investigations, it must establish neutral and objective criteria for when such an investigation is warranted. These criteria must be equally applicable to all nations, and not merely to the Jewish nation.

 

Primary among the criteria must be "the worst first." Under that rule, investigations must be conducted in the order of the seriousness of the offense, not the unpopularity of the offender. Israel's actions in enforcing its blockade ranks fairly low on the pecking order of offenses, compared to those that have never been subjected to a mandated international investigation. Until and unless North Korea, Iran, Russia and other nations are required to undergo international scrutiny, the demand that Israel do so is illegitimate.

 

The second neutral criteria should be the capacity of the accused nation to investigate itself and to be subjected to domestic scrutiny and criticism. Here too Israel fares must better than most. It has an activist Supreme Court, a free and aggressive press and a responsive political system. It doesn't need dictatorial tyrannies telling it how to defend its citizens.

 

For international law to have any credibility, it must be applied neutrally, objectively and fairly to all nations. Singling out Israel for special scrutiny and investigation, while far more serious offenders and offenses are ignored, is incompatible with the rule of law.

 

 

Alan M. Dershowitz

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

A Fine Recipe for War

 

by Mario Loyola

 

Turkey's attempt to breach the Israeli siege of Gaza is a destabilizing and unacceptable challenge to vital U.S. interests.

The government of Turkey seems increasingly bent on a collision course with vital U.S. interests, and the time has come to stop ignoring that fact. Our wayward NATO ally's recent involvement in the incident of the Gaza flotilla is particularly hurtful to the United States, and demands a particularly sharp response. The U.S. has a vital interest in maintaining the regional stability that is indispensable for the preservation of peace and for any prospect of a two-state solution. Sanctioning an attempt to forcibly breach the Israeli siege of Gaza is among the most destabilizing and dangerous things that Turkey could have done.

The Turkish government knew in advance that a Turkish organization with ties to Hamas was launching a flotilla of activists bearing humanitarian aid for Gaza, and chose not to stop it. Turkey knew that the flotilla would put Israel in an impossible dilemma, and that it would be a direct challenge to the Israeli siege of Gaza. Israel reacted precisely as the Turkish government knew it would, with a military response that resulted in bloodshed and in a public-relations disaster for Israel. Because Israel generally defends its internationally understood legal rights, the Turkish government was able to predict what it would do. 

 

 The Turkish flotilla may well have had a humanitarian purpose. But that does not alter its military significance. The attempt to breach the Israeli siege by a flotilla of eight ships carrying some 800 activists — and totally unknown cargo — had obvious military implications for Israel. Israel is on solid legal ground in claiming the right to search cargo approaching Gaza, and that right has been widely confirmed through customary practice. When the flotilla proceeded in disregard of Israel's offer of docking rights in an Israeli port, and help in transporting all nonmilitary aid overland to Gaza, it turned into a hostile action. And because of the Turkish government's complicity in the flotilla's mission, the action can and should be attributed directly to the Turkish government.

As an attempt to forcibly breach a military siege, the Turkish flotilla constituted a "use of force" under the United Nations Charter — of that there is no doubt. The only question is whether that use of force was legitimate. That in turn depends on whether the Israeli siege of Gaza is itself a legitimate use of force. If the siege is illegitimate, then the flotilla was a laudable attempt to bring humanitarian assistance to a beleaguered people. But if the siege is legitimate, then the flotilla was arguably an act of war by Turkey against Israel.

The carefully worded presidential statement from the U.N. Security Council took no position on this issue. It condemned "the acts" that resulted in loss of life, which obviously include actions of both Turkey and Israel, and studiously avoided apportioning blame. It called the siege of Gaza "unsustainable," but stopped short of styling it illegal or illegitimate. The document represents a commendable parry by the State Department, and sustains a longstanding principle of U.S. foreign policy, namely the inviolability of a legitimate naval quarantine.

When NATO launched its air campaign against Serbia during the Kosovo crisis of 1999, the U.S. threatened to sink Russian vessels if they entered the Adriatic Sea, the naval theater of NATO operations. Nobody doubted the threat's legitimacy. When Kennedy threatened to sink Soviet vessels headed for Cuba while still on the high seas, he never had to worry about legitimacy. Military actions that are necessary for enforcing a legitimate military blockade, and are kept clearly within that need, have always stood on firm grounds of international law.
 
The siege of Gaza is a terrible human tragedy. It is sapping Israel's international standing to a dangerous degree. As an act of self-defense, it may well prove suicidal, just as holding on to the occupied territories for decades after the 1967 war has proven of dubious benefit to Israel's long-term security.

 

But none of that has any bearing on the legal issue. There is simply no respectable basis for arguing that the siege of Gaza is illegal under international law. The siege is founded on multilateral agreements involving Egypt, the U.S., and even the Palestinian Authority, in the wake of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 and the subsequent Hamas takeover. It is a legitimate military incident to a legitimate state of war, one that will continue to exist so long as no general peace agreement is reached — and for the moment, neither Hamas nor Hezbollah has any interest in peace. Now Israel's enemies smell the blood of a real kill, and as a result, they have never been more disinclined to compromise.

 

 Meanwhile, Turkey appears bent on challenging key elements of the international legal order on which our Middle East diplomacy is based. Even if there is a colorable argument that the Israeli siege of Gaza violates international law (which it doesn't), it is crucial to the Israeli–Palestinian peace process that lifting the siege remain a matter for negotiation.

Turkey's assault on the legal foundations of regional stability has already had serious strategic consequences. Within hours of the flotilla incident, Egypt opened its border with Gaza pending further notice, in violation of legal agreements it reached with the U.S. and Israel in support of the peace process over several years. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have already crossed into Sinai — but the far worse problem is that the parties to the Israeli–Palestinian process no longer have any real control over the influx of weapons to Gaza from the smuggler's paradise that is the Egyptian Sinai peninsula.

With the unraveling of the regional legal edifice, the situation can only grow more volatile. The siege of Gaza is starting to collapse under international pressure — and those who think this is good news for the Palestinians are not thinking clearly. In the absence of a negotiated settlement of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the collapse of the Gaza siege will bring about an extremely dangerous situation: Missiles will pour into the Hamas arsenal; further devastating Israeli military action against Gaza will become inevitable; all prospects for a two-state solution will disappear; and the collateral effects could make a wider Middle Eastern war more likely than it has been in decades.

Alas, our ally Turkey has now joined Iran as one of the two major external influences undermining the prospects for a negotiated peace. It is crucial to appreciate just how destructive Turkey's flotilla adventure is likely to be for the effort to achieve a two-state solution.

The Israeli government has long held that, in light of what happened to Gaza after the unilateral Israeli withdrawal in 2005 (namely, that it became a platform for missile terrorism against Israel), and in light of the continuing existential threats facing Israel, a two-state solution based in the West Bank would require continued Israeli control of the West Bank's borders, particularly its border with Jordan. In other words, any Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank would be conditioned on what for all practical purposes would be a consensual Israeli siege of the West Bank. Netanyahu was quite clear about this in his AIPAC speech earlier this year, and it seems incredible that commentators have taken almost no notice.

 

No Israeli government of any party would ever allow the uncontrolled influx of weapons into the West Bank from the direction of Jordan. Look at a map. The ensuing problem for Israeli security would vastly dwarf the problem that would result even from a total collapse of the Gaza siege.

Israel will withdraw from the West Bank only if it feels safe — and Turkey has just made that a lot more difficult to achieve. How can Israel feel safe with the Gaza siege collapsing amidst a general increase in hostility towards it? How can anybody think that with Gaza under Hamas control, and arming freely for war, Israel would ever risk withdrawing from the West Bank?

 

Only the U.S. can reassure Israel sufficiently to deliver Israeli concessions to the Palestinians. Hence neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians can get what they ultimately want except from the mediating efforts of the United States.

We are not there to arbitrate. We are not there to be even-handed in settling playground fights. Our indispensable role is to underwrite an international transaction of historical significance, by minimizing the risks and costs of a peace settlement for both sides in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. This has indeed been the overriding aim of U.S. policy in the region for decades — since 1967 to be exact — and it is a cause to which we have devoted hundreds of billions dollars and a huge amount of time and effort by our most senior leaders.

Forget about Israel. Turkey's complicity in the aid flotilla is a flagrant offense against the United States.

The existing Middle East balance of power must be preserved. And that balance is now tilting dangerously against Israel.

In terms of offensive military capability, Israel has never been stronger. But the asymmetrical threat of missile terrorism emanating chiefly from Hezbollah and Hamas — which Israel has no way to defend against — has created perhaps the most existentially threatening situation in the history of Israel. Given this reality, and given that Israel is faced increasingly with the impossible choice between security at home and legitimacy abroad, the looming collapse of the Gaza siege has terrifying implications for Israel.

If Israel cannot get both peace and security out of negotiations, then it faces an existential choice between them — and alas neither, by itself, will bring legitimacy or survival for the Jewish state in the long run. Israel can simply surrender the occupied territories to its enemies, without any security guarantees, and pray for mercy — which is what Iran, Turkey, the Arabs, and Western liberals increasingly want. Or it can get security through further and endless projections of military power, while its international legitimacy continues to dwindle. Faced with that choice, Israel is highly likely to continue trying the latter before resigning itself to the former.

 

Dim though the prospects for a two-state solution may be right now, keeping those prospects alive, and protecting the balance of power and legal edifice on which those prospects rest, is the only way to slow the increasingly inescapable spiral toward war.

Hence the enormous destructiveness of what Turkey did this week. For many years now, the U.S. has been trying to ignore a disturbing trend in Turkey's behavior. Turkey has been turning away from traditional allies — and toward a new role as a dominant regional power, perhaps even hoping for a reprise of the Ottoman Empire's leadership of the Muslim world. The end of the Cold War, and the near-simultaneous end of Turkey's prospects for membership in the European Union, have set the stage for Turkey's drift towards Islamist militancy.  But even worse, the Turkish government has both followed and fomented an increasingly anti-American and anti-Israeli trend in Turkish public opinion.

 

This disturbing trend has just taken a significant turn for the worse. In the space of two weeks — between its attempt to undercut U.S. diplomacy toward Iran and its complicity in the forcible attempt to lift the siege of Gaza — Turkey has now openly undertaken actions totally incompatible with an alliance relationship. Turkey's official statements on both the Iranian nuclear crisis and the Gaza incident have been a direct affront to U.S. diplomacy, and — in the latter case — have reached a tenor of hostility that is simply unacceptable from an ally.

At the very least, the U.S. should quietly remind the Turkish government that losing America's support can be quite costly. When Britain and France seized military control of the Suez Canal in 1956, President Eisenhower threatened to dump U.S. holdings of British pounds-sterling and French francs, plunging them both into a currency crisis, if they did not withdraw their forces. They promptly withdrew.

Turkey has survived more than one imminent currency crisis because of U.S. help. Such assistance may not be so readily available in the future.

The United States should make it clear to the Turkish government that its status as an ally depends upon its observance of a certain minimal regard for U.S. interests. Turkey has many concerns that depend upon U.S. support — in its economy, in the Armenian Genocide resolution before Congress, in Cyprus, in Kurdistan, and elsewhere. We can cause a lot of problems for them, and they should perhaps be reminded of the fact as they stroll about the Middle East causing serious problems for us.

 

Mario Loyola is a former counsel for national security affairs to the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee.

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

Why Iran is quiet on the flotilla

 

by Meir Javedanfar

 

Iran is usually the first to condemn Israel. Could its silence over the flotilla attack signal a sea change in Islamic politics?

 

The takeover of the Turkish-flagged Mavi Marmaris by Israeli commandos led to demonstrations in numerous places around the world. People in Baku, Istanbul, and as far away as Edmonton, Canada, marched on the streets to voice their opposition to Israel's actions. However, in Tehran and in other big cities in Iran, the streets have been eerily quiet.

This is unusual for the Iranian government. Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, sees himself and the Islamic Republic as the defender of Muslim rights around the world. During every major confrontation in West Bank or Gaza, he has been the first to arrange demonstrations. This was seen during the Gaza war of 2009. Demonstrations were also arranged as soon as the Muhammad cartoon affair caused rage in the Muslim world. Even the killing of a pregnant Egyptian woman in Germany by a racist individual led to government-arranged demonstrations against Germany in Iran.

So far, four days since the crisis started, we have not seen any major demonstration in Iran. Although some statements may be made during the anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini's death on Friday, the focus on that day will be on his legacy.

So what has happened?

Khamenei is fearful. Not of Israel, but from his own population. His regime is isolated within Iran and has lost so much credibility that he is worried that such demonstrations could turn into anti-government gatherings. And he would be right.

Last year's Qods Day turned into an opposition event. The same could happen this year if he arranges demonstrations against the flotilla incident, especially since we are close to the anniversary of the 2009 Iranian presidential elections. The very fact that opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi issued his own statement against Israel calling it a "violator of human dignity" makes Khamenei's concerns more valid.

This is a clear sign that one year on from the elections, we are no longer looking at the same Iran. The cracks in the foundations of the regime have still not been repaired.

There is another factor that should concern Khamenei. Israel's taking over of the Turkish ship was useful for Khamenei's government; it gave a boost to Iran and its hardline position in the region. However, the points that Iran has gained pale into insignificance when they are compared to the effect on Turkey. The flotilla incident and Turkey's role have catapulted its status in the Muslim world as the defender of Muslim rights. This most probably includes members of Hamas, whom Iran has been spending millions on in an effort to buy their support and loyalty.

Which other Muslim country has enough credibility, power and self-confidence to do what Turkey did? It promised to dispatch the flotilla and it went through with its promise.

The icing on the cake came when prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan issued a very clear ultimatum to the Israeli government: free every single Turkish citizen, including those who assaulted your soldiers, otherwise our relations will suffer. Within three hours, Binyamin Netanyahu had accepted. Had this been an Arab country, including those that Israel has relations with, such as Jordan and Egypt, the Israelis would probably have stuck to their guns. The same for Iran.

But not Turkey. There is a new player in town and Israel takes it very seriously. Unlike Iran, Turkey has a powerful economy. Its GDP is the 18th largest in the world – one place above Iran. This is a major achievement for a country which is not a gas and oil exporter. It sits on the border of Europe and its relations with the EU and the US are astronomically better than those of its Iranian neighbour. Its power is expanding in the Caucasus, and relations are improving with its old foe and rival, Greece.

It's the same in the Middle East, where Turkey, unlike Iran, enjoys good relations with Sunni-ruled countries such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt, as well as among Iran's friends Iraq and Syria. If current trends continue, Turkey could do what the Islamic Republic of Iran has been trying to do for the last 32 years: become the most powerful and credible political and military force in the Islamic world.

 

 

Meir Javedanfar

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

The Symbol Fetish

 

by  Abe Greenwald

 

At the New Republic, Leon Wieseltier writes that Israel has lost “the all-important war for symbols and meanings, to Hamas.” Somehow, among all the wars and skirmishes and ambushes that define Israeli existence and threaten to erase the Jewish state, I find it hard to swallow Wieseltier’s post-modern competition “for symbols and meanings” as “the all important war.”

Ethan Bronner writes, in the New York Times, “the world powers have grown increasingly disillusioned with the blockade, saying that it has created far too much suffering in Gaza and serves as a symbol not only of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians but of how the West is seen in relation to the Palestinians.”

You know what else the blockade serves as? A blockade. It separates Israel’s sworn enemies from those who would help them arm and kill Israelis. Oh, and by the way, as a blockade – and not a symbol – the blockade works. So, too, do the fences, check points, and walls that separate Israel from would-be terrorists in the Palestinian territories.

Oops, did I say walls? This comes from a Reuters story that ran last year: “Pope Benedict stood by the wall Israel is building round the West Bank on Wednesday and called it a symbol of “stalemate” between Israel and the Palestinians, urging both sides to break a ‘spiral of violence.’”

What kind of Freudian limbo do Israelis now supposedly inhabit where everything they do and create is just another telling symbol of chauvinism, paranoia, and frustration. Friends of Israel often decry the absurd standards to which “world powers” try to hold the Jewish state. But this isn’t even about selective standards; it’s a category distinction. Here are the rules: Russia, which has been illegally occupying Georgia for almost two years, and facilitating Iran’s nuclear and anti-aircraft programs for even longer, is a state. North Korea, which recently sank a South Korean navy boat full of 46 sailors (not in oh-so-precious international waters, but in South Korean waters), starves its own population, and threatens to destroy Seoul, is a state. Pakistan — the creation of which led to a million deaths and millions more displaced, in order to give a single religious group its own area– is a terrorist Disneyland; it is also a state, achieving independence in 1947. Israel, on the other hand, is the world’s Hitchcock dream sequence. And it better not forget it.

That’s what all this criticism of the flotilla operation amounts to. How dare Israel act in service of its existence as a country when it’s so valuable as a symbol. In this way, those who wag their fingers at Israel for insufficiently weighing optics and PR and world opinion have put an insidious twist on the denial of Israel’s right to exist. For if it is forbidden to act on its own behalf as a state then there is an implicit denial of its right to be one. After all, when a state prevents a fleet of armed enemies from breaking its blockade with no casualties on their side it’s called a smashing success. When it’s done by Israel it’s just another sinister emblem of increasingly violent suicidal tendencies.

 

 

Abe Greenwald

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

The truth

 

 

Facts, facts, facts, facts, facts….

 

 

Just open :

  
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=ZprVPKi-W6s 

In Praise of Blockades - Israel upholds an honorable tradition.

 

by William Kristol

 

The Royal Navy's blockade of Napoleon, most famously led by Lord Nelson, protected England from invasion and laid the groundwork for the liberation of Europe. Lincoln's blockade of the South helped win the Civil War, preserve the Union, and end slavery. John Kennedy's blockade of Cuba forced Khrushchev to withdraw nuclear weapons from that island and contributed to the eventual successful outcome of the Cold War.

 

The history of blockades by free nations is an honorable one. Israel's blockade of Hamas-run Gaza—a blockade that, unlike some of the above, permits the delivery of humanitarian and civilian aid—stands in that tradition. It preserves a tenuous peace in the short run. And it may result in the liberation of Palestinians from Hamas's dictatorship, and prevent their exploitation by a terror-supporting Iranian regime, in the longer run.

 

Israel withdrew from Gaza almost five years ago. Three years ago, Hamas took over in a military coup. Since then, Israel and Egypt have blockaded Gaza to prevent weapons from reaching Hamas, which has launched missiles into Israel and which is committed to the killing of Israelis and the destruction of the state of Israel. Last week, Hamas sympathizers sought to break the blockade. Israel acted to stop them. It has nothing to apologize for. The blockade prevents Hamas, and its backer, Iran, from triggering a larger war from Gaza. It isolates Hamas and allows for continued progress on the West Bank. Israelis live in (relative) safety. The people of Gaza continue to have access to the necessities of life.

 

The Palestinian Authority owes Israel thanks for keeping Hamas at bay. The Palestinian people owe Israel thanks for weakening Hamas. The Arab states owe Israel thanks for controlling Hamas and curbing Iranian influence. The Europeans owe Israel thanks for denying Iran a port on the Mediterranean.

 

Israel will not receive public thanks from any of these entities. Nor, it appears, can Israel expect a full measure of understanding and support from the government of the United States, which one would have hoped would be less timid than the Palestinian Authority, less intimidated than the Palestinian people, less hypocritical than the Arab states, and less sanctimonious than the Europeans.

 

But the United States these days is under unusually timid, intimidated, hypocritical, and sanctimonious leadership. Such a failure of leadership is not just disappointing. It is dangerous. According to one reliable reporter of the administration's views, writing in the Washington Post, "The Obama team recognizes that Israel will act in its interests, but it wants Jerusalem to consider U.S. interests, as well. The administration has communicated at a senior level its fear that the Israelis sometimes 'care about their equities, but not about ours."

 

This shows the Obama administration does not understand U.S. interests and equities. And it shows the administration does not understand that its pathetic desire to split the difference between the forces of civilization and the forces of terror simply emboldens our enemies—our enemies, not just Israel's enemies. Our weakness makes the world more dangerous. The forces of civilization retreat.

 

What can be done? Congress can speak for America. Congress can stand with Israel, expressing support for Israel's right to defend itself. And Congress can act. Congress can demand that we pull out of the farcical U.N. Human Rights Council, and can deny the use of any U.S. funds for the biased, Alice-in-Wonderland-type "investigation" authorized by that council in a resolution that already includes a condemnation "in the strongest terms" of "the outrageous attack by the Israeli forces." And for that matter Congress could authorize the shipment of weapons and materiel to Israel to help enforce the blockade.

But it is not just a matter of congressional resolutions and pressure on the Obama administration. American political leaders can speak up. We survived the Carter presidency partly because men like Ronald Reagan and Scoop Jackson gave our friends hope a better day was ahead.

 

The dispute over this terror-friendly flotilla is about more than policy toward Gaza. It is about more than Israel. It is about whether the West has the will to defend itself against its enemies. It is about showing (to paraphrase William Gladstone) that the resources of civilization against terror are by no means exhausted.

 

 

William Kristol

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

 

The Otto Weininger syndrome

 

by Sarah Honig

 

Suicide can be individual or collective. In either manifestation it can share similar attributes and arise from parallel psychological anomalies. It can be perversely popular.

In early 20th-century Vienna, for example, a spate of high-profile suicides triggered a pseudo-romantic fad. There seemed to be something dashing in taking one's own life in a grand gesture that apparently made a statement. Pivotal in sensationalizing the fashion was 23-year-old philosopher Otto Weininger who shot himself in 1903 in the same hotel room where Beethoven died (presumably to enhance the dramatic effect).

Weininger's intense auto-anti-Semitism loomed large among his motivations. Born Jewish, he converted to Christianity in his last year but obviously found no salvation. His book Geschlecht und Charakter (Gender and Character) testifies to boundless self-loathing. Weininger lambastes modernity as "Jewish" and asserts that "women and Jews are pimps; their goal is to make man guilty. Our era is not only the most Jewish, but also the most feminine of eras" which "no longer has a single great artist, a single great philosopher. It has the least originality and the biggest hunt for originality."

Moreover, Weininger makes hair-raising "anthropological observations," even embracing notions that "Jewish hair… points to the Negro, and the completely Chinese or Malaysian skull shapes, which one so often finds among the Jews – who frequently have a yellow complexion – point to partly Mongolian blood." Harrowing stuff.

Unsurprisingly Weininger's most ardent posthumous fans were the Nazis, foremost Hitler himself who reportedly said he "had only encountered one decent Jew, Otto Weininger, who killed himself when he realized that the Jew thrives on contaminating the authentic folk bloodlines of others."

Weininger's suicide was regarded by Third Reich ideologues as the only "honorable" way for a Jew to cleanse the world of his existence.

Repulsive as this undeniably is, it's hardly irrelevant. The noxious Weininger syndrome still afflicts certain Jews. The mental aberration Weininger took to extremes is still being taken to extremes by his torchbearers. But there's one very significant difference. Latter-day Weiningers look out quite nicely for their own well-being. Their self-abhorrence is channeled onto the Jewish collective. They promote national Jewish suicide, not their own personal demise.

A CASE in point is Noam Chomsky who, despite his pristine Hebrew forename, misses no opportunity to castigate the Jewish state and idolize its most fanatic and implacable foes (most recently Hizbullah chieftain Hassan Nasrallah).

Trailing behind Chomsky is a whole ragtag retinue of homegrown Israeli ultra-leftist professors, authors, filmmakers and self-congratulating artistes, who profit quite handsomely by undermining and demonizing the rest of us – pro forma their compatriots, but in reality the objects of their expediently projected self-detestation.

Some "new historians" and serial provocateurs have achieved renown. These international celebrities, who gain fame and fortune by trashing their own country and people, have avid audiences overseas, where delegitimization of Israel is eagerly lapped up and where tradition has conditioned minds to anti-Jewish bias (to put it mildly).

Toeing the line of self-hating Jews/Israelis who had reaped success from aversion to their own kind are wannabes who persistently pursue comparable glory. Dror Feiler is one. His latest antic was organizing the supposedly humanitarian flotilla to break the supposedly inhumane Israeli blockade of Gaza.

Feiler never mentioned the facts that Israel regularly (and quite dementedly) supplies Gaza with goods, electricity, fuel and water, whereas Gaza uses its resources to subjugate its masses and stockpile weapons of mass destruction.

Feiler either justifies or omits from discourse Gaza's many and flagrant sins. He grotesquely exaggerates Israeli responses and willfully wrests them out of all context. Feiler delights in painting Israel as intrinsically and irredeemably evil. He's chummy with Swedish reporter Donald Bostrom who accused Israel of deliberately killing Palestinians to facilitate illicit organ-harvesting. Don't look for Jewish empathy or a soft spot for the old homeland in Dror. That would contradict his upbringing. That's not where he comes from.

He's a loyal unquestioning chip off the old block – his mother, Pnina Feiler, who spent a lifetime championing Palestinian causes and defaming Israel with relish. She hails from Yad Hanna, Israel's sole communist kibbutz. It was named in 1950 after heroic World War II parachutist Hanna Szenes, whose memory and legacy have of late been targeted by artsy left-wing iconoclasts. Self-sacrifice for a Jewish cause and Zionist dedication had become unbearable in their enlightened milieu.

Among other groups, Pnina Feiler was active in the pro-Arab Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (in her professional capacity as a nurse). In May 2001, after Arabs sadistically bashed the skulls of two hooky-playing schoolboys near Tekoa, PHR-Israel's founder, psychiatrist Ruchama Marton, reacted angrily toward the underage victims. "The settlers," she seethed, "raise little monsters."

That's the moral wellspring from which Dror drank. That's the intellectual and ideological pool in which he waded and where he learned that pools of Jewish blood form an aesthetic background against which to highlight the glorified features of Hanadi Jaradat, who blew herself up next to a baby in her buggy at Haifa's Maxim Restaurant in 2003 (murdering 21, among them three generations of two separate families).

A few months post-atrocity, Dror, a naturalized Swedish citizen, and his Scandinavian wife created the Stockholm-exhibited "work of art" that presented Jaradat as "Snow White" sailing in a red-liquid lake. The image goaded Israel's enraged then-ambassador Zvi Mazel to sabotage it.

Dror exuded the same artistic orientation which had earlier inspired a gloating art show in Nablus featuring bloodied pizza slices and a baby stroller inside a model of Jerusalem's Sbarro eatery after the 2001 terrorist blast (which killed 15 innocents, including nine children and five members of a single family). Nevertheless, Dror enjoyed unstinting succor and friendly publicity. His sanctified suicide bomber starred boldly in giant advertising posters all around greater Stockholm.

The text which accompanied Dror's masterpiece argued that Jaradat's homicidal ardor was kindled by grief over a brother and cousin the Israelis slew. Swedes, like other supercilious Europeans, love Jews who – like Dror – love their enemies. Jews are required to show compassion toward those who, with genocidal malice aforethought, still keep trying to annihilate them. Jews are sentenced to solitary confinement on the moral high ground, where no other nation is remotely expected to go. Jews are obliged to turn the other cheek. Jews have no right to avenge.

So when Dror Feiler now postures as a humanitarian, we need to remember that he also rationalizes the zeal for blowing us up to smithereens. That makes him even less ethically tolerable than Weininger, who merely fired a bullet into his own private chest.

Both Weininger and Feiler boosted pernicious Judeophobic propaganda. Both gave comfort and ostensible vindication to their people's enemies, yet Weininger only took his self-hate to its logical conclusions personally. Thus, warped as he doubtlessly was, he emerges more moral than Dror Feiler, in so far as the word moral is at all applicable here.

 

Sarah Honig

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

Should Jews Apologize to Turkey or Go Back to Poland and Germany?

 

by  Richard Davis Hanson

Memo to Ambassador Tan

The Turkish ambassador to the United States has a long op-ed in the Washington Post asking for Israel to apologize to Turkey for the Gaza flotilla incident, and urging the U.S. to pressure Israel to act accordingly. It is an important document since Amb. Tan couches his argument in moral terms — Israel  illegally detained a ship on the high seas of civilian peace activists and human rights workers, killed Turkish citizens, and violated international law.

There is, of course, no mention by Tan of the origins and nature of the Turkish “peace” group that organized the gambit. Only in passing does the ambassador mention the rallying cries of the protestors (e.g., “Whatever the aid carriers may have chanted in opposition to Israel, this was a humanitarian initiative.”), after failing to note the chants, in fact, included both calls for a new holocaust (“Shut up, go back to Auschwitz” ) and glee about Americans killed on 9/11  (“Don’t forget 9/11″).

If anyone might be offering apologies, it should be Ambassador Tan, or at least an explanation for why a ship left a Turkish port headed for a planned confrontation. A ship, it should be added, staffed in large part by the Insani Yardim Vakfi organization, which according to American and European intelligence chiefs is a terrorist organization with ties to al-Qaeda — an apparent conclusion that formerly a Turkish government used to share when it periodically raided the IHH’s compounds.

But on a larger point, the sanctimonious tone of Tan’s piece is depressing. Turkey currently quite illegally and against world opinion sponsors the occupation of Cyprus. Nicosia is a far more divided city than Jerusalem. The Turkish government has killed far more Turkish Kurds than the Israeli government has Palestinians; it has zero tolerance for foreign human rights organizations that have wished to investigate the treatment of Kurds in Turkish prisons. Turkish fighter aircraft are not always so careful to stay on their side of the Aegean.

As far as the request that Americans pressure Israel, that is an odd wish from a society that continually broadcasts gruesome anti-American serials on its television channels, and now has chosen to reach out (far more even than the Obama administration) to the terrorist-sponsoring regimes in Teheran and Damascus that are responsible for a number of American deaths in Iraq. When Turkey has felt its own security threatened, it has had no problem with warning of an invasion of Syria or crossing Iraqi borders. Demands don’t work well in the Turkish-American relationship, as we remember from the U.S. House of Representatives’ request that the Turkish government offer some sort of regret for the genocide of the Armenians — a declaration that outraged the present Turkish government. Ambassador Tan evokes history, particularly the Ottomans and World War II, to cement his argument of past Turkish tolerance. Some of us who study Mediterranean history are not quite impressed by either the human rights record of the Ottoman sultanate or the Turkish role in the second World War, especially the German-Turkish friendship pact of June 1941, days before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. My problem is that when I travel abroad, whether in Vienna, Cyprus, or old Smyrna, I am reminded of a different sort of past.

Many of us who have had positive feelings about Turkey in general and the Turkish-American relationship in particular have seen this past week’s events as a reminder of how different the present Turkish government wishes our relationship to evolve. Turkey’s present reset diplomacy had long ago convinced the EU to have second thoughts about extending membership to Ankara. And despite the protestations of our own foreign policy establishments, most Americans sense that the end of Turkey’s participation in NATO is only a matter of when, not if. Turkey wishes to reestablish, mutatis mutandis, its old Ottoman role as the more legitimate voice of the Sunni Muslim world. And that means it must sound radical to Muslims and sober and judicious to Westerners — and sometimes it tries both at the same time, as we now witness.

(If I were Greece, I would be somewhat anxious: its bankruptcy will mean a cut in military forces quite soon; it has gratuitously offended the Northern Europeans who will not be eager to lend it any more foreign aid, military especially; for 30 years anti-Americanism has been the mother’s milk of Greek politics, so Americans have come over to the Greek way of thinking that our shared NATO heritage is, well, at best a Cold War anachronism and at worst an embarrassment. And all this transpires at a time when an ascendant Turkey wants to carve out a new radical identity and seems to increasingly brag about its Ottoman past [note to Greeks: violently protesting against Israel will not impress Turkey, should it plan on revisiting Cyprus or re-adjudicating the nebulous Aegean border.])

Postmodern anti-Semitism

Yes, yes, I know — faulting Israel is hardly anti-Semitism. But note the obsessive focus on Israel, especially from the left. So take any issue: occupied land? Why do we not evoke Ossetia, Tibet, or Cyprus? Or for that matter Prussia?

Take a divided city? How about Nicosia?

Take disproportionate force? Try the leveling of Grozny?

Targeted killing? Our own Predators have killed more than Israeli air attacks.

The killing of Muslims? India and China trump Israel.

Wait — the issue is U.S. aid? OK, are we “shocked” that Egypt gets billions and harasses human rights activists, stifles democracy, and tortures its own?

No, the issue is blockading Gaza? So Turkish and European flotillas are off the Egyptian coast?

No, no, the problem is the detention of third parties in international waters? So President Obama has ended, as promised, rendition (remember the movie?)? Hardly.

Yes, the Arabs have hundreds of millions, Israel seven. Yes, they have oil, the Israelis none. Yes, libel a Jew and it’s cute, libel the prophet and go into hiding. And yes, Israel is a surrogate often for anti-Americanism. But all that said, it is still strange that so many Westerners focus such antipathy and attention on Israel over precisely the topics that they otherwise ignore in other countries.

It is not anti-Semitic to discuss divided cities, occupations, the use of force, blockades, refugees, etc. It is, when all these topics mysteriously appear only in reference to Israel so as to suggest it is somehow singular in its transgressions.  I somehow know who Rachel Corrie is, but not any of the names of tens of thousands of Kurds in Turkey, or Chechens in Grozny, or Tibetans in China, or Egyptians in Cairo. Why? I know the rough square mileage of “occupied” Palestine, but not the acreage of Turkish-controlled Cyprus.

The doyen of the White House press corps, Helen Thomas, put it best when she wondered why the Jews didn’t just go back to Poland and Germany. Think of that for a second — a million thoughts spark: well, Helen, that’s where 6 million were gassed. Or, Helen, some Jews have been in “Palestine” from pre-antiquity. Or, Helen, some 3^rd-generation Israelis have been in Israel as long as your family has been in the United States. Or, Helen, exactly how do you envision the process of removing them? Trains to Haifa, where boats head to “processing centers” in Bremen and Gdansk? Perhaps the Iranian quick way?

I realize Ms. Thomas is in her dotage, but had anyone else voiced anything similar about any other particular group, they would be banned from the White House press corps, rather than feted. Case closed.

 

Richard Davis Hanson

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.