I attach a number of recent articles. Because of a heavy workload I don’t have time to summarize them but would recommend reading them all. (The authors of each of these pieces are subscribers to this email list.)

-- Tom Gross

 

CONSIDER THE MONTH THAT ISRAEL HAS JUST HAD

Israel’s Predicament
By Bret Stephens
The Wall Street Journal
September 13, 2011

What is Israel’s predicament? It is this: It is surrounded on nearly all sides by enemies who are aggressively committed to its destruction. And too many people who call themselves its friends are only ambivalently committed to its security.

Consider the month that Israel has just had:

• On Aug. 18, eight Israelis were killed in a sophisticated cross-border ambush near the frontier with Egypt.

• From Aug. 18-24, some 200 large-caliber, factory-made rockets and mortars were fired at Israel from Gaza.

• On Sept. 1, the head of Iran’s atomic energy agency announced that it was moving the bulk of its enrichment facilities to a heavily fortified site near the city of Qom.

• On Sept. 2, the United Nations released a report on the May 2010 Turkish flotilla incident, which defended Israel’s right to enforce a naval blockade on Gaza and noted that Israeli commandos faced “organized and violent resistance.” The Turkish government responded by yanking its ambassador from Tel Aviv and expelling Israel’s from Ankara.

• On Sept. 4, the U.S. made a final appeal to the Palestinian Authority to drop its bid to seek statehood recognition at the U.N., a bid that sends to the rubbish bin decades of international agreements that a Palestinian state can be established only on the basis of negotiations. The PA rebuffed the American entreaties.

• On Sept. 8, Turkey’s prime minister announced that Turkish warships would escort future Gaza-bound flotillas.

• On Sept. 9, thousands of hooligans stormed and nearly sacked the Israeli embassy in Cairo. Israel evacuated nearly its entire diplomatic mission from Egypt the following morning.

Egyptian hooligans storm Israel’s embassy in Cairo, Sept. 9.

One other item: On Sept. 5, an organization called NGO Monitor reported that an associate director of the New Israel Fund, cited in a February 2011 State Department cable released by Wikileaks, said that “the disappearance of a Jewish state would not be the tragedy that Israelis fear since it would become more democratic.” The NIF describes itself as a group “dedicated to a vision of Israel as both the Jewish homeland and a shared society at peace with itself and its neighbors.”

Maybe the case of the (now former) NIF official is a relatively rare one. Or maybe it’s just rare to have such off-the-record candor find its way into the public domain.

Not rare, however, is the idea that Israel’s legitimacy is a function of its moral performance, and that judgment of its performance lies in the hands of its foreign critics and their designated Israeli scolds. Should the legitimacy of Pakistan or Zimbabwe be called into doubt on account of the wretched mess they have made of their existence as self-governing states? Nobody says this. Nor do many people say that the Palestinian Authority – half of which is ruled by a terrorist group and the other half by a president whose elected term in office expired more than two years ago – hasn’t quite earned the moral right to statehood.

Only Israel is on perpetual trial. Only Israel, by way of this or that policy, is routinely held to moral account for the terrorist outrages committed against it. Only the Jews, as Eric Hoffer put it in 1968, are expected to be “the only real Christians in the world.”

But then the argument is made that Israel is occupying somebody else’s country. And risking its own future as a Jewish democracy, on account of well-known demographic trends. And all of this is corrosive, so it is often said, to Israel’s soul.

Yet the purported concern for Israel’s soul would be more convincing if it were joined by some decent respect for Israel’s mind. Israel today labors under the invidious stereotype that it is too clever to blunder militarily or politically – and therefore that any such blunders are, in fact, acts of malice aforethought. But Israel also labors under the stereotype that it is too stupid or shortsighted to recognize its own strategic interest in coming to terms with a Palestinian state.

Will it some day dawn on Israel’s so-called friends that 18 years of abortive efforts to come to terms with the Palestinians – the spurned statehood offers in 2000 and 2008, the withdrawal of the settlers from Gaza in 2005, the experience of what a “liberated” Gaza soon became – has soured Israelis on the idea of a Palestinian state? Or that the long-term demographic threat is worth risking in the face of the immediate threats of a near-nuclear Iran, a newly hostile Egypt, and a still-irredentist Palestinian leadership? Or that a professed commitment to Israeli democracy means, among other things, some regard to the conclusions Israelis have drawn about the prospects of peace by way of their electoral choices?

No democracy in the world today lies under a darker shadow of existential dread than Israel. And the events of the past month ought to demonstrate that Israel’s dread is not of shadows only. Israel’s efforts to allay the enmity of its enemies or mollify the scorn of its critics have failed. But is it too much to ask its friends for support – this time, for once, without cavil or reservation?

 

THE CORE DEMANDS OF THE ARAB SPRING HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH ISRAEL

Once again, Israel is scapegoated
Editorial
The Washington Post
September 13, 2011

www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/once-again-israel-is-scapegoated/2011/09/12/gIQAEJPvNK_story.html

ISRAELIS WORRY that the Arab Spring is turning from a popular movement against dictatorship into another assault on the Jewish state, and their worry is not unfounded. Last week in Cairo a mob attacked the Israeli Embassy, forcing the evacuation of the ambassador and most of his staff; the previous week the Israeli ambassador to Turkey was expelled. Later this month Palestinians are expected to introduce a resolution on statehood at the United Nations, and Israel could be further isolated if, as expected, a large majority of the General Assembly votes in favor of it.

There’s little doubt that plenty of Arabs and Turks are angry at Israel. But it’s worth noting that, as often is the case in the Middle East, those passions are being steered by governments.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who aspires to regional leadership, has directed a campaign against the government of Benjamin Netanyahu and stoked it with incendiary statements. Mr. Erdogan is furious that a U.N. investigation concluded that Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip, and thus its intervention to stop a Turkish-led flotilla last year, was legal. He also finds it convenient to lambaste Israel rather than talk about neighboring Syria, where daily massacres are being carried out by a regime Mr. Erdogan cultivated.

The assault on the embassy in Cairo has been condemned by the leaders of Egypt’s popular revolution and by some leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. Both they and Western diplomats blame the ruling military for failing to secure the embassy, and they suspect the omission may have been part of an effort to divert rising public unrest toward a familiar target.

In the West Bank, polls have shown that President Mahmoud Abbas’s U.N. statehood initiative is regarded as a low priority by the majority of Palestinians, 60 percent of whom said the better option was resuming direct negotiations with Israel. But Mr. Abbas fears he may be the next target of popular uprising; the U.N. gambit appears aimed in part at preempting that.

This is not to say the trend is benign. Israel is looking more isolated than at any time in decades. It is more than a hapless bystander: Mr. Netanyahu’s government could have avoided a crisis with Turkey had it been willing to apologize for the deaths of nine Turks during the interception of the flotilla, which the U.N. panel rightly judged to be an excessive use of force. An incident in which five Egyptian guards were killed when Israeli forces pursued terrorists crossing the border helped to trigger the upsurge in tensions with Cairo. And Mr. Netanyahu’s slowness to embrace reasonable parameters for Palestinian statehood provided Mr. Abbas with a pretext for his U.N. initiative.

It nevertheless is in the interest of Western governments, as well as of Israel, to resist the counterproductive and irresponsible initiatives of Mr. Abbas and Mr. Erdogan. In Egypt, the military has cited the attack on the Israeli Embassy as a pretext to apply emergency laws and censor the media; those, too, are steps in the wrong direction. The core demands of the Arab Spring have nothing to do with Israel: They are about ending authoritarian rule and modernizing stagnating societies. Scapegoating Israel will not satisfy the imperative for change.

 

PART OF A 60 YEAR HATE CAMPAIGN WHICH HAS PERMEATED ALL LEVELS OF EGYPTIAN SOCIETY

Cairo: Israeli embassy attack planned
By Tim Marshall, Foreign Affairs editor, Sky News
Sky News website
September 12, 2011

http://blogs.news.sky.com/foreignmatters/Post:a6e60be6-a9b1-4be4-8035-3703b370905c

The storming of the Israeli Embassy in Cairo on Friday night was not just planned, it was part of a 60 year campaign of hate which has permeated all levels of Egyptian society and which the current chaos in Egypt is allowing full rein.

On the surface the attack was in revenge for the killing of several Egyptian security forces mistakenly shot by the Israelis. The IDF was pursuing a terrorist gang which had killed Israelis in the Eilat region last month.

A large anti Government demonstration was taking place on Friday in Cairo’s Tahrir Sq when a group of men broke away and headed for the embassy. They were armed with sledge hammers, hammers, and ropes.

They set about the security wall built, say the Egyptian authorities, to protect the residents of the apartment block which houses the embassy. As they battered at the concrete some attached ropes to cars in an attempt to finish the job they started last month.

The army stood by and watched as the wall was breached and the mob entered the building. By this point Israeli cabinet ministers had been pulled into a government emergency situation room in Jerusalem. Defence Minister Barak and Prime Minister Netanyahu were among those watching a live feed coming from the embassy security cameras. The embassy staff had been told to stay home but 6 Israeli guards were still inside.

Netanyahu assured them he would do everything to save them from the mob which was making its way up towards the 16th floor housing the consulate. Sources say he ordered them not to open fire. At ground level police cars had been set ablaze and it appeared no help was coming.

Israeli officials were phoning their Egyptian counterparts. A source tells me ‘every single possible channel was used to speak to the Egyptians but some senior officials refused to take the calls’.

Barak then phoned his opposite number in Washington, Leon Panetta, and President Obama’s Middle East advisor - Dennis Ross. Hillary Clinton then called the Egyptian Foreign Minister Mohammed Amr. By this time the mob had reached the 16th floor and was smashing up the consulate and throwing paper work from the windows.

The security guards had retreated upstairs to the embassy proper. As some protesters tried to scale the outside of the building the guards used fire extinguishers to spray white powder into the faces of the attackers.

With just one door separating the guards from the mob an Egyptian commando unit finally arrived, cleared the consulate, and led the guards to safety.

It had been a close call, a source told me ‘I have no doubt the staff would have been killed’. If that had happened the troubled relationship between Egypt and Israel might have unraveled.

The attack did not come out of the blue and was widely supported in Egypt. During the previous assault protestor, Ahmad Shahat managed to scale the embassy building, seize the Israeli flag and throw it the crowd below who burnt it. The chant that evening was ‘Give us weapons and we’ll kill all the Jews’.

Shahat was feted across Egypt for his actions. Presidential candidate Hamdeen Sabahi hailed him as ‘the people’s hero’ and a local governor, Azazy Ali Azazy rewarded him with a job and a flat.

The teaching of hatred for the ‘other’ is widespread in Egypt. School books are full of historical inaccuracies and holocaust denial. Portions of the Koran which deal with the Jews in a hostile way are promoted. Few politicians can resist the temptation to play to popular appeal and routinely engage in virulently hostile comments not just about Israel but about Jews. These politicians are not just from the Islamic parties, some of the brightest and best of Egyptian liberals also use deeply anti-Semitic language.

Every Friday many Imams pour forth abuse against Jews without any official sanction. The mass media also routinely engages in anti-Semitism. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, used to justify slaughter for decades, is a best seller, Hitler’s Mein Kampf is popular. The ‘Protocols’ were serialised as a 24 episode TV series a few years ago and portrayed as fact. In 2002 the number 1 hit in the Egyptian charts was a song about the Jews masterminding 9/11. Newspapers print deeply offensive cartoons which are used across the Arab world. These bigots have their mirror image in some of the wilder fringes of Israeli society, the difference is the views do not appear to be sanctioned at the highest levels, have not permeated the body politic, and are roundly condemned in the Israeli main stream media.

This is the background to Friday nights attack. Unless the authorities work to protect what is left of the relationship between Israel and Egypt it may not just be the Israeli flag which is ripped up, it could be the treaty which has kept the peace for three decades.

 

THERE ARE ALMOST NO JEWS LEFT IN EGYPT – BUT THERE ARE PLENTY OF JEWS JUST OVER THE BORDER IN ISRAEL

The Middle East is slipping backward
By Richard Cohen
Washington Post
September 13, 2011

Back in 1953, an Egyptian army officer was asked by the magazine Al-Musawwar what he would write to Hitler if he were still alive. “My Dear Hitler,” he began gushingly, “I admire you from the bottom of my heart.” He proceeded to extol the German dictator for, among other things, creating dissension between “the old man Churchill and his allies, the sons of Satan.” If the mass murder of Jews bothered the officer in the least, he did not mention it. Years later, as the president of Egypt, he was himself murdered for making peace with the Jewish state. His name, of course, was Anwar Sadat.

The peace that Sadat manufactured is now shredding, a thread here, a thread there. The Israelis and the Egyptians have traded insults of all sorts, and now the embassy of Israel, always an edifice constructed out of wishful thinking, has been sacked by a mob of Cairenes. The Israeli ambassador is gone, and when he will return, if ever, is not at all clear.

The Israeli-Egyptian peace is in jeopardy and so is the cordial rapport Israel once had with Turkey. Along with Iran and Ethiopia, Turkey comprised what was called “the strategy of the periphery,” the relationship that Israel’s founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, established with non-Arab nations. But Iran now is Israel’s mortal enemy, Ethiopia hardly matters and Turkey is bristling with hostility. Ankara wants Israel to apologize – not merely express regret – for its perfectly legal attempt to turn back a so-called humanitarian flotilla heading for Gaza. Nine died. Israeli forces overreacted and now Turkey is doing the same.

Israel’s dilemma is that the Middle East, for all the talk of revolution, is slipping backward. Turkey is possibly evolving into an Islamic republic and even if this is not the case, it is reasserting its historical role as a regional power. Iran toppled its modernizing, Westernizing shah with his pro-Israel proclivities and in 1979 became a theocracy. And Egypt, long the leader of the Arab world, may find it cannot lead its own people. The peace with Israel has little support among the populace. It’s not just that Israel is not loved, it’s that Jews are hated.

Think back to Sadat writing his pretend letter to Hitler. This was eight years after the ovens of Auschwitz were demolished and much of the world was coming to grips with the enormity of the Holocaust. Yet not only could an Egyptian magazine solicit such letters, but an army officer with the intellectual wherewithal to someday run the country was an entrant. This suggests a society in which the Holocaust was thought to be a Jewish concoction, a Jewish exaggeration or some sort of just deserts.

Since those days, the situation has evolved but not necessarily improved. Egyptian society, indeed the entire Arab world, has been drenched by a steady drizzle of government approved or tolerated anti-Semitism. It would take willful historical ignorance to dismiss the possible consequences. There are almost no Jews left in Egypt – the substantial community was expelled, first by Gamal Abdel Nasser and then by incessant oppression and fear – but there are plenty of Jews just over the border in Israel.

The clock must move backward for the United States as well. It took Harry Truman just 11 minutes to recognize the new State of Israel in 1948 – and he did so over the vociferous objection of some key aides, particularly the immensely important Gen. George C. Marshall, the secretary of state. As the historian and Israeli ambassador Michael B. Oren writes in his book “Power, Faith and Fantasy,” Marshall felt so strongly that he told Truman to his face that if he recognized Israel, “I would vote against the president.” Truman didn’t blink.

Marshall’s arguments are not entirely invalid. The Arab world has the oil and the geography and the numbers. But the U.S. has the moral obligation to stick by the sometimes obstreperous democracy it felt morally obligated to embrace. The Obama administration has to show no daylight between it and Israel – never mind that Binyamin Netanyahu is no Ben-Gurion. Leaders come and leaders go, but what remains are values and cultural forces that transform glacially. Sadat proved this. He was a confounding character who showed what is possible and what is not. He was hope and he was despair and finally he was tragedy. It’s clear he changed greatly over the years. It’s not so clear his country has.

 

TURKISH PAPER PUBLISHES PHOTOS OF BEATEN ISRAELIS

* Last week, the UN ruled in Israel’s favor and declared that Israel’s policy of preventing uninspected boats from reaching Gaza is a legal act of self-defense in order to prevent the smuggling of rockets and other weapons to terrorist groups in Gaza. Instead of gracefully accepting this verdict, the Turkish government has thrown a tantrum and launched a series of vicious verbal attacks on Israel.

In their misreporting of this story, prominent international media have continued to mislead audiences by saying that the “Turkish peace activists on the Mavi Marmari were unarmed.” I attach this piece from 2010, as a reminder that many were armed and injured Israelis, as the photos linked to below from the Turkish daily paper Hurriyet show.

-- Tom Gross

Turkish paper publishes photos of beaten Israelis
By Tom Gross
The National Post (Canada)
June 6, 2010

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/06/06/tom-gross-turkish-paper-publishes-photos-of-beaten-israelis/

Photos taken by the Turkish “peace” activists on the Mavi Marmari boat, published in the leading Turkish paper Hurriyet, show Israeli soldiers bruised, beaten and bleeding having been attacked by “peace” activists on the boat.

They also back up Israeli accounts that there were attempts to kidnap Israeli soldiers (possibly creating more Gilad Shalits), and put paid to the lies being told by British, French and Irish “peace” activists day after day last week in European and Middle Eastern media that no Israelis were attacked on the boat and that “the IDF is lying” when they said they were.

See the photos here.

The Israeli army has consistently said that it only gave permission for troops to fire 40 minutes after they had boarded the boat, once the lives of Israeli troops – who had tried to peaceably reach an agreement with the activists – were put at severe risk.

The Turkish media don’t run the fabricated accounts of the Western press saying the Israelis “shot from the helicopter and murdered civilians within seconds of landing on deck.” Instead they mock the IDF for being so reluctant to use lethal force for so long even when attacked.

Respectable Western journalists apparently continue to believe the American and British run “Free Gaza” movement is telling the truth when it says in its press release that the Israelis “began to shoot the moment their feet hit the deck. They fired directly into the crowd of civilians asleep.”

For more coverage of the Gaza Flotilla incident, please see:

“Rachel Corrie is on Her Way” – Due to attempt to land shortly in Gaza

Videos, articles and notes about the tragic incident off the coast of Israel

 

A PROMS PROTEST WITH A WHIFF OF WEIMAR ABOUT IT

A Proms protest with a whiff of Weimar about it: The demonstration at the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra BBC Proms concert was against Jews, not the Israeli state.
By Stephen Pollard
The Daily Telegraph (London)
September 2, 2011

www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/proms/8737692/A-Proms-protest-with-a-whiff-of-Weimar-about-it.html

Until Thursday night, nothing in the history of Proms broadcasts had forced a concert off air. Certainly not the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. On the very night the tanks moved into Prague, the great Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich was at the Proms with the USSR Symphony Orchestra. And he was performing, with intense poignancy, the Czech composer

Dvorak’s cello concerto. I have a cherished recording of the concert. The audience was rapt and not a word was uttered.

When Chinese performers grace the Proms with their presence, there is not a word of protest about their government’s abuses of human rights. Nor should there be. They are musicians, not politicians.

But when the Israel Philharmonic played on Thursday evening, a band of around 30 thugs – none was wearing jackboots, but they should have been – launched into chanting and mock singing, disrupting the concert to such an extent that BBC Radio 3 decided it could not go on with the broadcast.

The corporation has come under attack for pulling the plug. Louise Mensch, the Conservative MP, called it a “disgraceful” decision. But I sympathise with the BBC. Why should a bunch of hooligans be given free rein on the airwaves to have their hooliganism validated with a broadcast? The real story isn’t the broadcast, but the behaviour of the anti-Zionists, which has opened many people’s eyes to their real agenda, and what really drives them.

As the IPO began Webern’s Passacaglia, a dozen people unfurled a banner reading “Free Palestine” and started to sing about “Israeli apartheid” and “violations of international law and human rights”. As the orchestra played over the disruption, the hooligans were removed by security guards. Then, as Gil Shaham, an Israeli violinist, prepared to play an encore after the Bruch violin concerto, another group began shouting and started to scuffle with audience members.

You can see videos of it on YouTube. They will remind you of something. It is inescapable. There is a chilling air to the so-called protests: an air of Weimar Germany, and the way Nazi party members broke up meetings.

It shouldn’t need saying that protesting against the actions of the Israeli government is not the same as being anti-Semitic. Clearly not: this month, 250,000 Israelis joined rallies against their government’s economic policies. They could hardly be driven by anti-Semitism.

But Thursday night’s events can only be understood in the context of anti-Semitism. When have there been similar protests against “violations of international law and human rights”, as was chanted on Thursday, by any other country? And this in the middle of the Arab Spring, when genuine protesters for human rights are daily risking their lives in Syria against a murderous dictatorship.

If, indeed, this was a protest against the actions of the Israeli government, rather than against Jews, where have been the similar disruptions of performances by Russian, Chinese, Turkish, Iranian or any number of other nations’ musicians? What about disruptions of British national companies, in protest at British human rights abuses? To pose the question is to answer it. There’s little doubt in my mind that this was an action motivated specifically by the fact that the performers were playing in the national orchestra of the Jewish state.

This should no longer surprise anyone. It seems to me that the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) long ago moved from legitimate protest for a legitimate cause – the rights of Palestinians to self-determination – to attacks on Jews for being Jews.

Last month, a St Andrews student was convicted of racially abusing a Jewish postgraduate. Paul Donnachie forced his way into the man’s room, rubbed his own genitals and wiped his hands on an Israeli flag in the room. With another student, Donnachie then jumped on the Jewish postgraduate and urinated into his sink.

Legitimate protest against the Israeli government? That appears to be the view of the PSC, whose director, Sarah Colborne, has attacked the conviction. The Scottish branch of the organisation demonstrated last week in support of Donnachie. No wonder the Board of Deputies, often pilloried within the Jewish community for its spinelessness, says that the PSC’s anti-Israel rhetoric is “infused with anti-Semitism” and its members engage in “racist conspiracy theories”.

In July, Ellie Merton, the chair of Waltham Forest PSC, wrote that Anders Breivik’s massacre in Norway was “an Israeli government-sponsored operation”. The PSC is happy for her to continue in her role.

But it is far from all doom and gloom. The sheriff who tried Donnachie refused to allow the Scottish PSC to turn the trial into another vehicle for its venom and found that the student’s identification with Israel is part of his Jewish identity, so that to attack him on those grounds constituted a racially aggravated offence.

As for the Proms hooligans, there is one big difference from the Weimar audiences. Far from being afraid of the thugs, the Proms audience turned almost as one on them. They chanted “Out, out, out”. As one of the men fought with security guards, a woman can be heard shouting “Shut your mouth”. In fact, their violent, thoroughly illegitimate tactics did nothing but harm to their cause. Ed Vaizey, the Culture Minister, was in the Royal Albert Hall for the concert. As he tweeted on the night: “Demonstrators seem to have turned [the] entire audience pro-Israel.”