ARTICLES

ECONOMIST MAGAZINE REMOVES CARTOON DEEMED AS ANTI-SEMITIC

‘Economist’ magazine cartoon sparks anti-Semitism row
By Jonny Paul, Benjamin Weinthal
Jerusalem Post
January 22, 2014

http://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-Features/Economist-magazine-cartoon-sparks-anti-Semitism-row-338962

BERLIN/LONDON – Following widespread condemnation on Monday, The Economist has removed a cartoon deemed as anti-Semitic.

However the offending illustration, of US President Barack Obama reaching out to Iran shackled to a congress emblem embossed with Stars of David, is still on a different area of the site.

The cartoon first appeared in the magazine’s January 18 print edition under the headlines Negotiating with Iran, A big gap to close.

Critics blasted the cartoon for suggesting that the US is controlled by Jews and Israel.

The Economist replaced the cartoon, showing Obama and Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani, with juxtaposed photographs of the two leaders.

The anti-Israel and anti-Jewish aspects of the illustration electrified the blogosphere and twittersphere.

The magazine published an editorial note at the bottom of the article on Monday, “The print edition of this story had a cartoon which inadvertently caused offense to some readers, so we have replaced it with a photograph.”

Middle East media expert Tom Gross told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday, “The Economist is perhaps the most influential news weekly in the world – Bill Clinton, for example, said it was the first magazine he looked at each week when he was president – and people take it seriously. So for it to toy with ugly anti-Semitic stereotypes is very dangerous indeed. In some countries, such stereotypes lead directly to physical attacks on Jews, as we saw in Ukraine and elsewhere last week.”

Gross added: “It is not the first time the Economist has employed anti-Semitism as part of what it pretends to be straightforward political commentary. For example, some years ago, it likened Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to Charles Dickens’s infamous anti-Semitic stereotype, Fagin.”

***

Tom Gross adds:: Many journalists have tweeted the above article, including John Reed, the Financial Times correspondent in Israel. The Economist is half-owned by the Financial Times.

 

PALESTINIAN DEMOCRACY

Mabrouk to Abbas on tenth year of his four year term
By Khaled Abu Toameh
Gatestone Institute
January 24, 2014

www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4141/abbas-term-of-office

Kerry does not seem to care whether Abbas is a “rightful” president or not. He is so desperate for a diplomatic achievement that he is prepared to ignore fundamental facts. How exactly does Abbas plan to enforce a peace agreement in the Gaza Strip when he cannot even visit his private residence there?

The only way to find out what Palestinians really want is by letting them head to the ballot boxes. Palestinians representing all groups, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad, should be allowed to run.

Palestinian Authority [PA] President Mahmoud Abbas deserves congratulations (mabrouk in Arabic). He has just entered his tenth year of his four-year term in office.

The next time US Secretary of State John Kerry visits Ramallah, he should not forget to congratulate Abbas on this happy occasion.

The fact that Abbas has is now in his tenth year of his four-year term in office should also serve as a reminder to Kerry that the PA president does not really have a mandate from his people to sign any agreement with Israel.

Abbas, who turns 79 in March, became President of the PA on January 2005. He was elected to serve until January 9, 2009.

But he has since used the conflict between his Fatah faction and Hamas as an excuse to remain in power.

Abbas’s critics maintain that his decision unilaterally to extend his term in office violates Palestinian Basic Law. They have also warned that Abbas’s move paves the way for “constitutional and legislative anarchy” in the Palestinian territories.

By remaining in power beyond his term, Abbas has given Hamas and other Palestinians a good excuse to argue that he is in no way authorized to sign a peace agreement with Israel.

“Mahmoud Abbas’s term in office expired a long time ago,” said Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri. “He has lost his legitimacy. He does not have a mandate to negotiate or sign an agreement.”

What this basically means is that Hamas and other Palestinian groups are not going to accept any deal between the Palestinian Authority and Israel, even if it includes far-reaching concessions on the part of Israel.

Abbas was recently quoted as saying once again that any deal he signs with Israel would apply not only to the West Bank, which is under his control, but to the Gaza Strip as well.

One can understand why Abbas is speaking on behalf of his constituents in the West Bank. But how exactly does Abbas intend to enforce a peace agreement in the Gaza Strip when he cannot even visit his private residence there?

While some may argue that Abbas has some legitimacy among Palestinians in the West Bank, especially in light of Fatah’s control over the area, it is hard to say that he has much following in the Gaza Strip, which remains under the tight grip of Hamas and its allies.

It would have been better had Abbas called new presidential elections before the resumption of the peace talks with Israel. Such a move would have embarrassed Hamas and probably forced it to comply.

But as of now it seems that neither Abbas nor Hamas is interested in holding new elections for the presidency or the legislative council. The status quo, where each side has full control over a mini-state (Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip) appears to be convenient for both parties.

However, the need for such elections has become imperative in wake of Kerry’s relentless efforts to achieve an “historic” agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.

The only way to find out what Palestinians really want is by allowing them to head to the ballot boxes. Palestinians representing all groups, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad, should be allowed to run in such an election.

A victory for the radicals would mean that a majority of Palestinians do not want peace and continue to dream about the destruction of Israel. If Abbas and his political allies win, that would be great news for the peace process and Kerry’s efforts to achieve a two-state solution.

Yet Kerry does not seem to care whether Abbas is a “rightful” president or not. He is so desperate for a diplomatic achievement that he is prepared to ignore fundamental facts.

How can Kerry expect Abbas to sign any document declaring the end of the conflict with Israel when many Palestinians are already pointing out that their president does not even have a mandate to act or speak on their behalf?

 

“ONE OF THE GREATEST SPEECHES EVER DELIVERED BY A CANADIAN LEADER”

Harper in Israel: A great moment for Canada
By Conrad Black
National Post (Toronto)
January 25, 2014

Prime Minister Harper’s address to the Israeli Knesset this week was one of the greatest speeches ever delivered by a Canadian leader, ranking (in content if not delivery, though that was quite adequate) with Sir John Macdonald’s defense of his conduct in the Pacific scandal in 1873, Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s parliamentary response to conscription in 1917, and Pierre E. Trudeau’s speech at the end of the Quebec sovereignty referendum campaign in 1980.

The content of the Knesset speech was generally accurately reported in Canada, but not widely recognized as a brilliant address, as a great milestone in the rise of Canada as a power in the world, a clarification of the moral basis of this country’s foreign policy, and as an episode that brings distinction on the whole country.

The prime minister emphasized the historic connection between our country and the Jews, who have been in Canada for 250 years. He said that the pride in Israel exhibited by Canada’s 350,000 Jews is perfectly compatible with their Canadian patriotism. This was a worthwhile rebuttal of the hackneyed claim that Jews are compromised by “divided loyalties.” In its most extreme form, this libel became the basis of Hitler’s charge of treasonous betrayal in World War I, and of Stalin’s infamous persecution of Jews as “rootless cosmopolitans.”

Mr. Harper declared: “After generations of persecution, the Jewish people deserve their own homeland and the right to live peacefully in that homeland.” It was on this basis exactly that the United Nations created Israel, as opposed to merely admitting it as a member state, as the UN’s five founding members did with Canada and the world’s other nations. In the aftermath of the genocidal murder of half the world’s Jews in the death camps of the Third Reich (along with 6 million non-Jews), it was agreed that the Jews should have a homeland in the land of Israel.

All the efforts to float a pluralistic Palestine or an unlimited right of return to Israel for the Arabs and their descendants who fled Palestine when Israel was founded, would inundate Israel with hostile Arabs and convert the Jewish homeland into another opportunity to persecute a Jewish minority. They are, intentionally or otherwise, just attempts to reduce the Jews, one more time, to the status of a stateless and vulnerable minority. Two generations after the Holocaust, the Jewish homeland, a desert country the Jews have made fabulously successful, would be repealed and the Jews would be left once more at the mercy of their most zealous enemies.

Stephen Harper made the point that “Canada supports Israel because it is right,” and he explained that in its history, Canada often has taken principled positions and made sacrifices, not because it was itself under threat, but because it was correct to do so. This was in fact what Canada did in both World Wars, where, in an act unprecedented in world history, Canada, Australia and New Zealand sent large numbers of volunteers to overseas wars to fight for the cause of freedom, although none of those countries was under any threat (except, more than two years after the outbreak of World War II, when Japan threatened Australia and New Zealand).

Mr. Harper acknowledged that Canada had entered World War II against Nazi Germany despite our nation’s failure to assist the Jews being persecuted in the Third Reich in the 1930s. In this, he accepted the moral failure of Prime Minister W.L. Mackenzie King, who, like the British leaders in the thirties, did not lift a finger to assist the Jewish victims of the Nazis (in contrast to the United States, where Roosevelt admitted nearly 20% of Germany’s Jews to the United States, and almost 20,000 Austrian Jews in one stroke, after the German takeover of Austria, and without the congressional authorization that the law technically required; and withdrew his ambassador from Berlin after the unspeakable pogroms of Kristallnacht in November 1938).

Though Canada supports Israel because it is the right thing to do morally, Harper made the point that it is also the right thing to do strategically, because Israel is the only true democracy in the Middle East, and democracy, as he told the Knesset, is the only method of “assuring human rights, political stability, and economic prosperity.” Moreover, “When democracy is threatened anywhere, it is threatened everywhere … by those who scorn modernity, loathe the liberty of others, and hold the cultures of others in contempt. [We must] stand up for a free and democratic Israel or our retreat in the world will begin.” This was essentially the point that brought Canada into the World Wars, and this position is consistent with our history and character.

“The Canadian commitment to what is right applies no less to the Palestinians [and to Canada’s desire for] “a just and secure future for the Palestinian people,” Harper added. He also declared that when the borders of a Palestinian state are agreed to, Israel would be the first country to recognize it, but Canada will be the second.

The prime minister thus recorded that the principal obstacle to a Palestinian state is not Israel, but the Arab powers. Arab leaders have used the tragic fate of the Palestinians, which they have prolonged and exacerbated by keeping them teeming in wretched refugee camps, to distract the Arab masses from the despotism the Arab leaders have inflicted on their peoples while inflaming the pan-Arab world with the red herring of Israel.

Mr. Harper deplored that “the legitimacy of the existence of the State of Israel” has been compromised by world leaders’ and diplomats’ desire “to go along to get along” with Israel’s enemies, and that this practice is regularly represented as “balanced” or diplomatically “sophisticated.”

“Intellectualized arguments thinly mask underlying realities,” he said. “Some openly call Israel an Apartheid state. Think about the logic and outright malice behind that: a state based on freedom, democracy, and the rule of law that was founded so Jews can flourish as Jews and seek shelter from the worst racist experiment in history” is assimilated to the racist oppressions of South African Apartheid. It is, he fairly stated, “sickening … For too many nations, it is still easier to scapegoat Israel than to emulate your success. It is easier to foster resentment and hatred of Israel’s democracy than it is to provide the same rights and freedoms to their own people.”

As if to illustrate Stephen Harper’s point, two Arab members of the Knesset heckled and shouted at him as the rest of the members of Israel’s parliament applauded the visitor. Exercising democratic freedoms they would not have in ethnically more kindred states, the two legislators stormed out of the chamber, which rose en bloc to give the Canadian prime minister a prolonged standing ovation.

Harper did not discuss the specific issues that are now invoked to prevent progress in peace discussions, particularly the West Bank settlements. Israel demonstrated in Sinai and Gaza that it will concede settlements for real peace, but in the face of Arab claims of predestined demographic victory over Israel, gradually expanding the settlements is the best bargaining pressure Israel can apply, since, as a democracy, it cannot expel, coerce, or ghettoize the Arabs.

Nor can it engage in any more spurious land-for-peace arrangements such as Oslo, where land Israel gained in wars the Arabs started and lost is conceded for cease-fires of brief duration (if any). Yet the settlements issue is frequently invoked by those, including most of the Canadian foreign-policy establishment and the opposition Liberals and New Democrats, in pursuit of the spurious “moral relativism” and “sophistication” that Harper rightly debunked.

The prime minister’s speech concluded: “In the democratic family of nations, Israel represents values which our government takes as articles of faith and principles to drive our national life.” Expressed in this way, Stephen Harper and John Baird’s Israel policy is the first serious occasion in Canadian history when this country has taken a position sharply at variance with the United States and most of Western Europe, without truckling to powers antagonistic to the West, as Pierre Trudeau did with his sophomoric posturing as a neutral arms-control-promoter. Stephen Harper has turned Canada into Israel’s greatest ally; aligned Canada with democracy against despotism, with international law and the better traditions of the United Nations against racism, bigotry, genocidal polemics and Holocaust denial; has called the United States and the European Union back to their former and rightful views; and erased the shame of the appeasement of the Nazis in the 1930s by the King government.

We have finally got beyond the self-righteous fairy tales about peace-keeping and “soft power.” (You don’t need peace-keepers in either peace, or war, and soft power works only when there is a hard-power alternative.) All Canadians are ennobled by this espousal of, as the Prime Minister described it, what is morally imperative and strategically wise in the world’s premier crisis area,

“Through fire and water, Canada will stand with you,” he told the Israelis. All Canadians, including those who sympathize with the Palestinians, should support him.

***

(Tom Gross adds: Some people have wrongly stated Conrad Black is Jewish. He is a Roman Catholic.)

ISRAELI PRESS REACTION

For a selection of Israeli press reaction to Sharon’s death, here are summaries of the editorials from January 14, 2014:

Ma’ariv asserts that the fact that the IDF stationed an Iron Dome battery in the area near where former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was buried yesterday, “is, perhaps, the clearest repudiation of Sharon’s legacy.” The paper notes that Sharon was laid to rest “in a place he loved – in an area under threat from the same region he destroyed and whose flourishing communities he uprooted.” The paper cites reports that Hamas now has missiles that can hit as far as Hadera and questions why it is that Jews can be uprooted from their homes, but not Arabs. The author concludes with his concern that Ariel Sharon, as prime minister, “pushed us further away from peace.”

Yediot Ahronot says: “The disengagement from the Gaza Strip was distinguished mainly by errors. Sharon erred when he thought it would bring quiet. The settlers erred when they did not understand the need to offer their own diplomatic plan.” The paper adds: “Sharon did not manage to learn the lessons. He sank into a coma without seeing how Gaza turned into a strategic problem, how the funeral at Shikmim Farm became a target for the terrorist organizations he had spent all his life fighting.” The paper continues: “On the other hand, the settlers in Judea and Samaria have also not learned lessons: Some have sunk into black moods. Some are involved in the attempt to ‘settle in the hearts’. Despite the passage of time, they are still talking about ‘what was shall not be.’ Despite the processes all around, there is still no attempt to craft a diplomatic alternative.”

The Jerusalem Post states: “Regardless of whether one supported or opposed the 2005 Gaza disengagement carried out by former prime minister Ariel Sharon, a unilateral withdrawal from ‘disputed’ territories remains a relevant option to this day,” and adds: “Learning from the mistakes made in the Gaza disengagement are an essential element of any future unilateral measure.”

 

ARTICLES

“WHAT IF?” THEY ASKED THEMSELVES

What if Sharon Still Lived?
By David Landau
New York Times
January 13, 2014

JERUSALEM – Ever since Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli prime minister who died Saturday, fell into a coma after suffering a stroke eight years ago, Israelis and Palestinians had been living in the subjunctive mood. “What if?” they asked themselves.

What if Mr. Sharon had remained at the head of his new and promising centrist party, Kadima? What if he had been able to follow through on his dramatic withdrawal of soldiers and settlers from the Gaza Strip the year before?

This “disengagement” from Gaza in 2005 was Israel’s first practical act of decolonization since Prime Minister Menachem Begin – like Mr. Sharon, from the Likud party – withdrew Israeli troops and settlers from the Sinai Peninsula following a treaty with Egypt. Mr. Sharon’s withdrawal was much more significant because it was intended to lead to a peaceable partition of the Holy Land itself.

To Mr. Begin, such ideas remained taboo until the end of his life. Mr. Sharon, too, had devoted much of his career to fighting the Palestinians and building settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. As many of those asking “what if” believed, only Mr. Sharon, aptly nicknamed “the bulldozer,” could have taken them down with such ease. No wonder many Israelis continue to pine for an alternate reality in which Mr. Sharon remains a vital presence.

Still, as we continue to ask “what if,” we must also recognize the ways that Mr. Sharon’s decisions a decade ago continue to shape Israeli politics.

For one thing, they have defined the terms of Israeli-Palestinian talks today. “We know what the issues are and the parameters,” the American secretary of state, John Kerry, recently declared. There’s no deal in sight yet, but there is a sense, among both Israelis and Palestinians, that America means business.

Any such speculation around Mr. Kerry’s efforts would have been unimaginable without Mr. Sharon’s efforts a decade earlier. Mr. Kerry’s “issues and the parameters” are the very same that Mr. Sharon promoted during his premiership, in particular his acceptance of a deal enabling Israel to annex the large blocs of settlements close to the West Bank border in exchange for land now inside Israel.

“In light of new realities on the ground,” President George W. Bush wrote in a historic 2004 letter to Mr. Sharon, “including already existing major Israeli population centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.”

The formula in the letter, long haggled over with Israeli diplomats before publication, was now American policy. Following Israel’s lead, it envisioned land swaps, with the Israelis keeping the large settlement blocs near the old border. Swapping land meant ceding land, and this was no less than heresy in pristine Likud doctrine.

But Mr. Sharon had made his choice, and not reluctantly. He wanted the blocs-plus-swaps scenario to be the preferred, pragmatic policy not only of the Israeli left and center, which were steadily sliding in his direction, but also of the rightist-religious coalition, which he had been vigorously involved in setting up.

Today, apart from the hardest core of settlers, their rabbis and their politician-supporters within the Likud, that consensus has indeed emerged – and makes the negotiations possible under another Likud prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

This was not a sudden whim on Mr. Sharon’s part. The first significant indicator that he was finally maturing came soon after his election as prime minister, in 2001, with his relatively restrained use of the army and air force during the second intifada. His critics feared that the hawkish Mr. Sharon would send the army in full force against Palestinian terrorist groups, causing a blood bath in the West Bank.

It did not happen. “Restraint is strength,” he proclaimed, with a decisiveness that harked back to his role during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, when he led his division in a hard drive across the Suez Canal. Many officers and men who had no prior loyalty to him concluded that without his calm, steadfast command there would likely have been no Israeli crossing that October, nor ever.

But where did the “restraint” come from? Was it an upshot of his generalship during the 1982-1983 Lebanon War, including standing by while Christian militias slaughtered Palestinian and Lebanese Shiites, which brought obloquy on Israel, and especially on him? Perhaps: Despite his hard-boiled image, after weeks of war, it was hard for him to look into the eyes of bereaved Israeli parents of soldiers who were killed in Lebanon and persuade them their sacrifice was justified.

As prime minister, Mr. Sharon began using buzzwords like “occupation” – once the sole province of the peace movement – in his speeches explaining Israel’s strategic interest in Palestinian independence. Likud members feared that his secession from the party was imminent. They were right.

Above all, Mr. Sharon’s resounding legacy is his confrontation with the settlers in Gaza who refused to leave in 2005, including many from the West Bank who infiltrated the Gaza settlements to “defend” them. The disengagement was sad for the individual settler family, but on the national plane it was an anticlimax, thanks to Mr. Sharon’s determination to neutralize the settlers – until recently his most loyal political allies.

Mr. Sharon had them forcibly removed, demonstrating that the government of a sovereign, democratic state had a monopoly on armed power over its citizenry.

I had the opportunity to ask him, before the disengagement, if he would go to Gaza himself and take command if the operation got bogged down. “You worry too much,” was his self-assured answer, which turned out to be fully vindicated.

 

“HE WAS NOT THE RIGHTIST ZEALOT HE WAS MADE TO APPEAR BY THE LEGIONS OF HIS OPPONENTS”

Ariel Sharon (1928–2014)
By Michael Zantovsky
World Affairs Journal
January 11, 2014

www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/michael-zantovsky/ariel-sharon-1928%E2%80%932014

It speaks volumes that Ariel Sharon, whose name rarely if ever appeared in any context without the word “controversy” or “controversial” nearby, was in his own country most often referred to by his few close friends and numerous foes alike by the familial “Arik,” reducing him from the grand lion of “Ariel” to human proportions. Without any doubt this was meant to signify that what he represented, good and bad, both in generous proportions, was inseparable from the existence and history of Israel, a country, which he indefatigably served.

There will be many obituaries that will dwell on who he was and what he did, and so perhaps it might be worth mentioning a few things that he was not and what he did not do. He was not the rightist zealot he was made to appear by the legions of his opponents. His parents came from Belarus and settled in a socialist moshav, where by questioning the official orthodoxy they soon exhibited a contrarian streak, which they passed on in ample quantities to their son. Although his major contribution to Israeli political scene was the cofounding of the Likud party in July 1973, closely before the Yom Kippur War, he was never permanently affiliated with any political party and, as a matter of fact, in the course of his career he pretty much flirted with every political party of note on Israel’s nationalist center-right, liberal center, and socialist center-left, including the Labor Party. He must have been a terrible party member but an inspiring party leader. When his vision seriously conflicted with the program or the policies of the party, he simply left and started a new party, whether it was the Shlomtzion in 1977, the only party on the Israeli political scene at the time with anything resembling “peace” in its name, or Kadimain 2005, a couple of months before his fatal stroke. Altogether, and rather counterintuitively, his political instincts seem to have been individualistic and liberal, almost libertarian rather than collectivist-socialist or collectivist-nationalist, resonating quite well with the modern mentality of an average Israeli.

Second, he was not the military adventurer he was sometimes described as, although he made his share of ill-considered decisions, the Mitla Pass operation of 1956 having been perhaps the most serious. For most part, though, he was a cautious and farseeing military strategist, with a considerable degree of respect for his opponents, most often the Egyptian army (which many of his colleagues had underestimated), and the resulting ability to take into account the most likely rather than the most favorable scenario of any ensuing battle. On his departure as the commander of the Southern Command in the summer of 1973, he left behind a battle plan envisaging a withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Suez Canal at least 10 miles back in the eventuality of a forced Egyptian crossing, followed by a swift counterattack, a strategy which could have brought an earlier end to the fighting and saved lives if adhered to. Likewise, the Israeli counter-crossing of the canal with Sharon in the lead, which turned the tide of the Yom Kippur War in Israel’s favor, was not the work of desperate military bravado, but an operation pre-planned by Sharon months before, with forward-deployed equipment for that very purpose.

Third, and most controversially, Sharon was a hard, and on occasion brutal, soldier in the five wars against Arabs in which he played a part. But he was not an Arab hater. As a farmer who worked the land in southern Israel he came into close contact with many Israeli Palestinians and Bedouins and was apparently able to communicate with them in the way that the Tel Aviv and Jerusalem elites could not. He bore personal responsibility for, and lost his ministerial job over, the massacre of the Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila camps by the Lebanese Phalangist forces during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. It was nevertheless a sin of omission in not preventing an atrocity he could have perhaps foreseen, rather a sin of commission. He was not a humanitarian interventionist by any stretch of imagination but neither was he the “butcher of Beirut.” As prime minister he used brutal tactics to suppress the second Palestinian intifada, which led to more than 1,000 Israeli and close to 5,000 Palestinian casualties between 2000 and 2006. But in 2002 he was not responsible for the “massacre of Jenin,” for the simple reason that the massacre – a tendentious label for an 11-day pitched battle in the Palestinian Jenin camp in early April 2002, in which 23 Israeli soldiers and more than 50 Palestinians, mostly combatants, died – never occurred.

Last, and most important, Sharon was not simply a legendary warrior of lore, but also a peacemaker of considerable achievements. His disengagement plan, in which all of Gaza and four settlements in the West Bank were evacuated and transferred to the Palestinians, is to date the only post-Oslo change on the ground in the direction of a two-state solution. Perhaps nobody but the “Bulldozer,” as he was also called, could have done this in the face of the furious resistance of the settlers and the homicidal curses of some of their rabbis.

Maybe Sharon’s greatest achievement, in keeping with his liberal instincts, was not just the implementation of the plan, but the underlying and explicit realization that a people aspiring to freedom cannot permanently deny that freedom to others. Admittedly, the realization, which would have certainly led him to further steps, were it not for the stroke, came late, but he was in the right place and at the right time when it did. His message to the posterity, “What you see from here you don’t see from there,” was an appropriately humble recognition of his own limitations and of the limitations of humanity in general.

 

FROM THE BEGINNING THE MEDIA WAS DETERMINED TO BLAME SHARON, NOT ARAFAT

Sharon and the second intifada
By Tom Gross
The Jewish Chronicle (London)
January 17, 2014

www.thejc.com/news/world-news/114827/the-big-myth-he-caused-second-intifada

One of several episodes for which Ariel Sharon continues to be blamed, despite much evidence to the contrary, was that he caused the second Palestinian Intifada in September 2000 by visiting Jerusalem’s Temple Mount.

Foremost among the propagators of this narrative is the BBC which, unlike CNN, fails to point out that Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount was co-ordinated in advance with the Palestinian Authority (PA), took place within regular opening hours, lasted just 34 minutes, and, perhaps most importantly, it is Judaism’s holiest site. Nor did Sharon ever enter a mosque there, as some BBC and other journalists claim.

In their reports in recent days, BBC Middle East correspondents such as Jeremy Bowen and Kevin Connolly tell us none of this. Nor did they tell us that key Palestinians deny Sharon triggered the intifada.

Marwan Barghouti, for example, the de facto leader of the second intifada, said: “The intifada did not start because of Sharon’s visit to Al-Aqsa”.

PA Communications Minister Imad Al-Faluji said: “Whoever thinks that the intifada broke out because of the despised Sharon’s visit to Al-Aqsa is wrong. This intifada was planned in advance, ever since President Arafat’s return from the Camp David negotiations, where he turned the table upside down on President Clinton.”

And Yasser Arafat’s widow Suha told Dubai TV: “Immediately after the failure of the Camp David [negotiations and before Sharon visited the Temple Mount], I met him [Arafat] in Paris upon his return and he said to me, ‘You should remain in Paris.’ I asked him why, and he said, ‘Because I am going to start an intifada. They [Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak] want me to betray the Palestinian cause. I will not do so.”

Yet almost from the beginning the British press – much more than media in some other countries – was determined to blame Sharon, not Arafat. I was Jerusalem correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph at the time. I wrote a sentence along the lines “Some have accused Likud opposition leader Ariel Sharon of triggering the violence by visiting the Temple Mount, a site holy to Jews and Muslims, although many say the violence was pre-planned.”

The Telegraph foreign editor changed my sentence to read: “The violence was caused by General Sharon’s provocative visit to a Muslim holy site.”

I asked him afterwards why he inserted the word “General” into my text, when Sharon had been out of the military for over two decades, and Ehud Barak and Yitzhak Rabin – also mentioned in the piece – were not described as generals. “That’s different,” he replied. “How?” I inquired, adding that Barak was Israel’s most decorated general and was more recently in the military than Sharon.

And when I further wanted to know why he had removed my reference to the Temple Mount being holy for Jews as well as Muslims, the editor replied “The Guardian and other papers say it is only a Muslim site, so why should I believe you – you are only saying that because I hear you are Jewish.” (These were the days when search engines such as Google were in their infancy and Wikipedia had not yet been launched.)

So even among media with proprietors sympathetic to Israel (at the time the Telegraph was owned by Conrad Black), it seemed easier to blame Israel, and Ariel Sharon in particular, rather than allow more balanced accounts.

 

DEFENDING THE INDEFENSIBLE?

Ariel Sharon’s military career: Defending the indefensible?
By Jonathan Hunter
Trending Central (UK)
January 15, 2014

www.trendingcentral.com/ariel-sharons-military-career-defending-indefensible/

With the death of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon last week, the media has been ablaze with some very unfair coverage of the man’s life. On the one hand, certain Israeli media outlets have described Sharon as a hero without blemishes. Alternatively, radical leftists such as Yossi Gurvitz continuously accuse him of being a murderous war criminal.

An obituary is meant to provoke reflection. It is should not glorify, apologise, defame or vilify the memory of any individual. It should objectively chronicle their life – allowing the observer to pass judgement on the relative merits of the deceased individual’s actions.

The media fails to recognise this basic methodological approach to history. Sensationalist journalists of all colours fail to recognise the central tenet of their profession – that notion of ‘objectivity.’

Rather than write another obituary of Arik Sharon, I feel it necessary to intervene – and provide context to episodes of his life which otherwise have none.

SABRA AND SHATILA

Of course, the elephant in the room is the Sabra and Shatila massacre – a forever contentious issue. On the one hand, defenders of Sharon claim he bears no responsibility – even if it is indirect. According to them, Christian Arabs killed Muslim Arabs – and as usual, the world blamed the Jews. It’s a nice slogan, there is some truth to it, but one cannot deny its simplicity.

In contrast to these positions, Sharon’s greatest critics accuse him of being the architect of ‘genocide.’ Take for instance, +972 Magazine’s Yossi Gurvitz. As he writes:

“…the IDF armed those who carried out the massacre; the IDF surrounded west Beirut; the perpetrators made their way into west Beirut at the invitation and with the assistance of the IDF; IDF artillery fired flares which facilitated the massacre and later on the helped the Phalangists conceal the bodies.”

This description deprives the event of any context – and even makes up a few facts.

The Phalangists were the allies of the IDF. They were thus armed and ordered to enter West Beirut as part of an internationally sanctioned handover of authority to the Lebanese. Does this mean the IDF ‘facilitated the massacre?’ Of course not. Why were the Phalangists ordered to enter the camps? According to Ehud Ya’ari – Israel’s foremost authority on the Middle East – the IDF believed the camp to have housed almost 200 armed men, hiding in dozens of bunkers constructed by the PLO. They surely posed a threat to the objective of expelling all terroristic elements from Beirut – and securing Lebanese control of the city.

Of course, the Kahan Commission found Ariel Sharon negligent in not supposing the Phalangists would commit war crimes – famously leading him to step down as Defense Minister. But as an American Court ruled in a famous libel case against Time Magazine, to declare that Sharon ‘consciously intended’ or ‘actively encouraged’ the killing of civilians, is a slanderous accusation. Sharon himself forever regretted his carelessness – he was not a man to kill the innocent. As for Gurwitz’s accusation that the IDF concealed the bodies of the dead, he gives no source for it– and I am yet to find one.

LEBANON

On the subject of Lebanon, it is widely declared that Sharon provoked its invasion in 1982 – and that he broke a ceasefire with the PLO. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Between the 1981 ceasefire and the 1982 invasion, the PLO staged 270 terroristic actions in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Twenty-nine Israelis were murdered, and more than 300 seriously wounded. The frequency of attacks around Qiryat Shmona forced thousands of residents to flee their homes – something which was repeated in 2006.

As Henry Kissinger put it when defending Israel’s response, ‘no sovereign state can tolerate indefinitely the buildup along its borders of a military force dedicated to its destruction and implementing its objectives by periodic shellings and raids.’

These words have as much relevance to Israeli society today as they did in the 1980s – but leaving that interesting observation aside, to say that Sharon’s military actions in Lebanon were anything but defensive is to completely twist history. I do not deny the invasion did not succeed in achieving all its objectives – but hindsight is a privilege never afforded to men taking difficult, life or death decisions. The reasoning behind Israel’s 1982 invasion is identical to the justifications of its most recent wars – self-defence, a right which much of the international community have stood by.

QIBYA

There is then the issue of Qibya – which has provoked the most debate. As one of my friends put it, ‘if you have an answer for why Qibya was not a war crime, I’d be fascinated to hear it.’

The massacres at Qibya must be placed in a tradition of defensive warfare whereby outnumbered Jewish settlers took reprisal attacks against Arab population centres which facilitated a terrorist act. This strategy dates back to the earliest organised Zionist settlement of the late 19th century. In the 1930s, 300 Jews were killed by Palestinian militia men. The para-military Irgun responded in kind by launching operations against the towns from which the attackers originated. The objective of such activities was to create a deterrent – to avoid further lives from being lost. I am not apologising or excusing Sharon’s actions at Qibya – I do not pass judgement on it in this public forum. What I am asking for is that we attempt to understand their context.

The attack on Qibya was provoked by the horrific murder of Suzanne Kinyas and her two children. Nearly 100 other Israelis were similarly murdered by Palestinian infiltrators between 1949 and 1952. Accounts given by Gurvitz and his friends ignore this. They focus on the act and not its historical context. They forget the existential threats faced by the State of Israel in its nascent years – and the regrettable measures it was provoked into taking.

This is not even taking into account Sharon’s testimony of the event. As he put it:

“I couldn’t believe my ears. As I went back over each step of the operation, I began to understand what must have happened. For years Israeli reprisal raids had never succeeded in doing more than blowing up a few outlying buildings, if that. Expecting the same, some Arab families must have stayed in their houses rather than running away. In those big stone houses [...] some could easily have hidden in the cellars and back rooms, keeping quiet when the paratroopers went in to check and yell out a warning. The result was this tragedy that had happened.”

BALANCE?

One should never seek to defame a dead man who doesn’t have the opportunity to respond to his critics – especially . In chronicling the lives of the recently deceased, one should attempt to be as objective as possible.

I asked Yossi Gurvitz why he ignored the bold steps Sharon took for peace. He responded childishly: ‘bold steps for peace? LOL.’

I then asked if he thought balance was important as a journalist. He revealingly replied, ‘I don’t do balance.’

That was a very saddening remark – it reveals reams about Israel’s most vicious critics. I nevertheless take some consolation that Gurvitz was honest about his intentions. I cannot say the same thing about the rest of the media…

 

BEGIN SAID, “EVERYONE’S HERE, WAITING FOR YOU.” SADAT ASKED, “IS SHARON HERE TOO?”

A Man Who Knew When Peace Will Come
By Benjamin Weinthal
National Review
January 11, 2014

www.nationalreview.com/corner/368198/man-who-knew-when-peace-will-come-benjamin-weinthal

Situated on a wall in the reporter’s room of the Jerusalem Post is a framed front-page of the daily’s 1977 story of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s historic peace visit to Israel. According to the account of Sadat’s arrival at Ben Gurion Airport, the then–prime minister Menachem Begin said, “Everyone’s here, waiting for you.” Sadat asked, “Is Sharon here too?”

Sadat shook Sharon’s hand and told him, “I tried to catch you when you were on the side of the canal.” Sharon’s reply: “Well, Mr. President, now you have a chance to catch me as a friend.”

Sadat understood Sharon’s greatness as a military leader. After Egypt and Syria attacked Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Sharon defeated the Egyptian offensive with a brilliant tank strategy that led to Israel’s army crossing the Suez Canal and getting within striking range of Cairo.

Sadat and Sharon were, without question, larger than life figures in Middle East history. Sharon, prime minister from 2001 to 2006, passed away today at the age of 85.

Sharon – in the vein of the British intelligence officer T. E. Lawrence – excelled as a Middle East military strategist. However, Sharon’s accomplishments dwarfed Lawrence’s WWI victories against the Turks. Where Lawrence sought to unify a fragmented Arab world, Sharon played a key role in solidifying the Jewish state and provided robust security to Israelis in a terribly rough neighborhood.

He was not infallible – he made mistakes in the 1982 Lebanon war, and erred in his unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005. As the Middle East expert Jeffrey Goldberg noted, Prime Minister Sharon could have used the withdrawal opportunity to “have extracted important concessions from Palestinians,” but did not.

Sharon earned the names “the Bulldozer” and “Arik, the King of the Jews” for his efforts to stop Arab terrorism and jingoism. His business was to implement plans. He famously said,”Planning is something a lot of people know how to do, but executing, as you know, far fewer, far fewer.”

In short, he was a pragmatic politician and general who matched his rhetoric with action. He developed a strong alliance with American Christians worried about the security of the Jewish state.

While many European countries and politicians shamelessly and hypocritically slammed Sharon’s construction of a security barrier and other counterterrorism measures to stop Palestinian attacks, the efforts speak for themselves: According to Israel’s foreign ministry, suicide terror attacks numbered 55 in 2002, causing 220 deaths. In 2005, the last year of Sharon’s premiership, the data showed seven attacks, causing 22 killings. Two years later, in 2007, there were three deaths reported.

The Israeli historian Benny Morris offers more in a neat history of Sharon’s legacy.

Many European news organizations demonized Sharon during his tenure, in viciously hardcore anti-Semitic cartoons and articles. While large swaths of the European media and public fail to understand Israel’s security needs, Sharon plowed ahead and refuted their false assessments.

In the wake of spectacular levels of horrific violence among Arab countries, former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir’s piercing comment still carries tremendous weight: “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”

Sadat took the lead and “caught” Sharon as a friend of peace. Will responsible Arab leaders renounce violence and do the same with Israel’s new prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu?

 

“HE DOESN’T STOP AT RED LIGHTS”

The Man on the Wall
Jan. 15, 2014
By Thomas Friedman
New York Times

I’ve always thought that the reason Ariel Sharon was such an enduring presence in Israeli political life is that he personally reflected three of the most important states of mind that the state of Israel has gone through since its founding. At key times, for better and for worse, Sharon expressed and embodied the feelings of the Israeli Everyman as much, if not more, than any Israeli leader.

The first was the enduring struggle for survival of the Jewish people in Israel. The founding of a Jewish state in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world would never be a natural act, welcomed by the region. There is a Jewish state today because of hard men, like Ariel Sharon, who were ready to play by the local rules, and successive Israeli prime ministers used him to do just that. Sharon – whom I first met at age 16 when I interviewed him for my high school newspaper after a lecture he gave at the University of Minnesota in 1969 – always had contempt for those in Israel or abroad who he believed did not understand the kill-or-be-killed nature of their neighborhood. He was a warrior without regrets and, at times, without restraints. Not for nothing was a Hebrew biography of him entitled, “He Doesn’t Stop at Red Lights.”

Sharon could have perfectly delivered a Hebrew version of the speech Marine Col. Nathan Jessep, played by Jack Nicholson, delivered in the climactic courtroom scene in “A Few Good Men,” justifying the death of a weak soldier, Santiago, under his command. In Sharon’s case, it would be justifying his no-holds-barred dealing with Arabs who resisted Israel’s existence back in the 1950s and ’60s.

As Jessep told the lawyer trying him: “Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? ... I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. ... You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That Santiago’s death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall.”

Many Israelis wanted Sharon on that wall, which is why he survived so many crises. At the end of the day, they always wanted to know their chief warrior, who played by the local rules, was available.

But, in the 1980s, Sharon also embodied a fantasy that gripped Israel – that with enough power the Israelis could rid themselves of the Palestinian threat, that they could have it all: resettling Jews in their biblical heartland in the West Bank, plus settlements in Gaza, docile Palestinians, peace with the neighbors, and good relations with the world. That fantasy drove Sharon to team up in 1982 with the Christian Phalangist leader Bashir Gemayel on a strategic overreach to both oust Yasir Arafat and the P.L.O. from Lebanon and install Gemayel as a pro-Israeli president in Beirut. Ronald Reagan was in power in America; Sadat had just made peace with Israel and taken Egypt off the battlefield. The little Jewish state, Sharon thought, could rearrange the neighborhood.

That Israeli overreach, which I covered from Beirut, ended badly for everyone. Sharon was deemed by a 1983 Israeli commission of inquiry as “indirectly responsible” for the horrible massacre of Palestinian civilians by Phalangists in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. The fiasco in Lebanon (which also gave birth to Hezbollah), followed by two Palestinian intifadas, seemed to impress on Sharon the limits of Israeli power.

Indeed, I don’t know what, if any, epitaph the Sharon family will etch on his gravestone one day, but an adaptation of the most memorable line from Clint Eastwood’s classic “Magnum Force” would certainly be appropriate: “A country’s got to know its limitations.”

That was the conclusion that Sharon, the settlements builder, came to late in life – and so, too, did many Israelis. He acted on it by getting elected prime minister and then parting ways with his old Likud/settler allies, moving to the center and orchestrating a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. He surely would have tried something similar in the West Bank if he had not had a stroke. Sharon remained skeptical that the Palestinians would ever make a true peace with Israel, but he concluded that occupying them forever was harmful to Israel’s future and, therefore, a third way had to be found.

Once again, Sharon was expressing the sentiments of the Israeli Everyman – which is probably why President Obama got such a warm reception from Israeli youths when, on his visit to Israel last March, he justified his own peace diplomacy by quoting a wiser and older Ariel Sharon, as telling Israelis that the dream of a Greater Israel had to be abandoned: “If we insist on fulfilling the dream in its entirety, we are liable to lose it all,” Sharon said.

Few Israelis are neutral about Sharon. I think that’s because some part of him – the hardheaded survivor, the dreamer that hoped Israel could return to its biblical roots and that the Palestinians would eventually acquiesce or disappear or the sober realist trying to figure out how to share the land he loved with a people he’d never trust – touched something in all of them.

 

“THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN NO LAWSUIT HAD TIME MAGAZINE PUBLISHED A RETRACTION AND APOLOGY FOR ITS BLOOD LIBEL”

‘Sharon, Get Lost,’ They Say. I Won’t
By Ariel Sharon
New York Times
December 16, 1984

www.nytimes.com/1984/12/16/opinion/sharon-get-lost-they-say-i-won-t.html

While the jury sits in judgment on my libel suit in Foley Square, any number of critics sit in judgment on my case. This judgment has thus far been singularly harsh. I was naive enough to believe that when a case is sub judice, particularly when a jury is sitting, responsible commentators would refrain from editorial comment until the verdict is in. But I do not complain; indeed, I welcome the opportunity to set the record straight.

First of all, let me say, there would have been no lawsuit had Time magazine published a retraction and apology for its blood libel – this vicious, absolutely untrue charge that I instigated the massacres in Sabra and Shatila. That Time refused to retract and still refuses in the face of overwhelming evidence that the charge was utterly false and unsubstantiated only proves that its arrogance is unremitting. It is the same arrogance and recklessness that led Time to publish the libel in the first place; that they continue to repeat it each day by asserting in court that the libel was ‘‘substantially true’’ makes it imperative that I continue to prosecute this case here and everywhere else the libel appeared. It is my duty to see to it that this incredible smear, this blood libel, be erased from the earth. So long as Time goes on with its lies, I go on with my case.

The alternative is to let them get away with it. But if I let them get away with calling me a murderer, I let them get away with murder. Forgive me, please, for choosing another way, for calling upon the American system of justice to clear my name and the name of the Jewish and Israeli people. And make no mistake about it: Time was not simply calling Ariel Sharon a murderer; the objects of its malice were the Jews and the Israeli people.

They sought and still seek to blacken the name of the Jew and the Israeli state and it is not a new thing for Time; it is an old desire, an old attempt. So it is a blood libel, and there is nothing worse. Were I to walk away from this, I would be allowing this blood libel to spread like a cancer. This is intolerable, it is no option at all. So I chose to come to an honorable court to legally restore my honor and the honor of my people. And for this, too, I am pilloried.

I am instructed by critics to cease and desist. They are telling me - if I may use plain talk - to get out of town. They do not put it this way, exactly.

One says I should understand the ‘‘good faith’’ of Time Inc. One accuses me of wrapping myself in the ‘‘flag of Israel and Judaism.’’

And still another critic condemns me for destroying the First Amendment.

But what they are all saying is: ‘‘Mr. Sharon, get lost.’’

I am going to disappoint them.

I am going to stay the course. Until this venomous blood libel is exposed. Until Time Inc. is condemned, by press and public, for its reckless, malicious journalism that reports as ‘‘fact’’ what its own correspondent admits was personal ‘‘evaluation.’’ I ask my critics a few questions. Do you think Time magazine would have so casually condemned as a murderer a Secretary of Defense of the United States?

Do you think Time would have done to Yasir Arafat what it did to me? To the P.L.O. what it did to the Jews and the Israeli state? I am sorry to say that perhaps the reason some people want me to get lost is that they don’t want to answer these questions. For to answer these questions, to answer them as you know the truth to be, would put the blood where it belongs: on the cover of Time magazine.

I say to you that Time Inc. knows that the story was false, top to bottom. They know there is nothing to back them up, not in Appendix B, that secret Appendix to the Kahan Commission report where the condemnation was reported to be, and not anywhere else. They know that, yet they persist in their ultimate arrogance and refuse to recant this lie. I wonder why, and in wondering I again ask my foes a question or two. Could it be they think they will somehow confuse the jury? That perhaps these pieces will be read by the jury, despite the judge’s admonitions against reading newspapers and watching television? Or that maybe the jury will not prefer my manner, my Israeli accent? These are good trial tactics, but are they good journalism?

Finally, about the First Amendment. I cherish the First Amendment. As Defense Minister, I gave full play to the media, I dare say no country during war has ever allowed the press more freedom than we did during the war in Lebanon. No country, including the United States.

Now I am accused of placing a ‘‘chill’’ on the First Amendment. I am suddenly a destroyer of that great cornerstone of freedom. Well, I chose to try this case here first though I knew well that the burdens put on libel plaintiffs, particularly public officials, were far more onerous in this country than in my own. I yield to no one in my respect for my nation’s independent judiciary. But the judicial test in Israel in libel cases is not nearly so severe for public people.

I came here because this was the proper primary forum, no matter how much more difficult the burden of proof. This is the home of Time Inc., this is where the blood libel was actually published. So I am an old soldier. I go to the front. I go where the action is. The action is New York. I like it here. I won’t get lost.

Since The New York Times prints corrections every day, I don’t believe I am putting a ‘‘chill’’ on the First Amendment. When did a demand for a retraction of a lie from Time magazine constitute a ‘‘chilling effect’’ on the First Amendment?

 

“IF WE ARE IN LEBANON, NO LONGER WILL SOVIET KATYUSHA ROCKETS RAIN DOWN ON ISRAELI VILLAGES”

Gains From The War In Lebanon
By Ariel Sharon
New York Times
August 29, 1982

www.nytimes.com/1982/08/29/opinion/gains-from-the-war-in-lebanon.html

What did Israel gain from the military campaign it undertook in Lebanon? How are the United States and the rest of the free world affected? What do the results of Operation Peace for Galilee portend?

Israel’s most immediate achievement is the crushing defeat of the P.L.O. No longer will Soviet Katyusha rockets rain down on Israeli villages from terrorist sanctuaries in Lebanon. Israeli children who spent night after night, month after month, in bomb shelters are free at last from attack. Normal life has returned to the Galilee.

A byproduct of that achievement is the opportunity that has been created for Lebanon to regain its sovereignty and independence, a goal we share with the Lebanese people and with the United States. The kingdom of terror that the P.L.O. had established on Lebanese soil is no more; the expulsion of the remaining terrorists, the evacuation of Syrian occupation forces and the withdrawal of our own troops will return to the Lebanese people control of their own destiny. We wish Bashir Gemayel, Lebanon’s newly elected President, well. We look forward to the day when his country and Israel will sign a treaty of peace.

Israel’s troops entering Lebanon were greeted as liberators for driving out the terrorists who had raped and pillaged and plundered. Our soldiers were welcomed despite the casualties that were the inevitable result of fighting against P.L.O. terrorists who used civilians as human shields and who deliberately placed their weapons and ammunition in the midst of apartment houses, schools, refugee camps and hospitals.

No army in the history of modern warfare ever took such pains to prevent civilian casualties as did the Israel Defense Forces. Indeed, most of the losses we suffered - some 350 dead and 2,000 wounded - resulted from the rule we imposed on ourselves to avoid harming noncombatants. In Hebrew, we call this tohar haneshek, ‘‘the moral conduct of war.’’ We are proud our soldiers followed this Jewish doctrine scrupulously, despite the heavy costs we incurred in warning civilians we were coming, in attacking only predetermined P.L.O. positions and in bombing and shelling buildings only when they served as P.L.O. strongholds.

This policy stands in vivid contrast to the P.L.O.’s practice of attacking only civilian targets. Since 1965, 1,392 civilians have died and 6,400 have been wounded as a result of P.L.O. terrorist raids against our people.

Trapped in west Beirut, the P.L.O. still hoped to turn military defeat into political victory. Because we respect the views of our American friends, Israel exercised great restraint. We did not close in but waited at Beirut’s gates. The P.L.O. took that as weakness. Only when we made clear that we would not give up the military option, only when we began to tighten the noose, did the P.L.O. agree at last to quit Beirut.

America and the rest of the free world have gained much from Israel’s action in removing the P.L.O. threat. The expulsion of the P.L.O. means that international terrorism has been dealt a mortal blow. The arms, training, supplies, intelligence - the whole infrastructure of violence and revolution has been broken. The end of the P.L.O. in Lebanon is a victory for peace and freedom everywhere.

But what of the future? I am optimistic that a new era is at hand in the Middle East. There will be peace between Lebanon and Israel. The problem of the Palestinian Arabs remains, but here too there is reason for hope. We did not go to war against the Palestinian Arabs, with whom we wish to live in peaceful co-existence, but against the P.L.O. The terrorists never received a mandate to represent the Palestinians. Indeed, since Judea and Samaria were liberated from Jordanian occupation in 1967, hundreds of Palestinians who dared to differ with the P.L.O. have been assassinated by P.L.O. gunmen. Who knows how many other Palestinian voices were silenced by P.L.O. intimidation?

Today, with the P.L.O. terrorists gone, I believe Palestinians will come forward prepared to negotiate with Israel on the autonomy plan proposed by Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Just before flying to the United States, I visited with a group of Palestinian Arabs in Judea and renewed a dialogue with them. I sensed a new atmosphere, a new confidence that they could speak their minds and offer their ideas freely, without fear of P.L.O. reprisal.

These are some of the reasons why I believe the results of our action in Lebanon offer bright promise for the entire Middle East. Determined as we are to defend ourselves, it is the path of peace that is the most pleasant to us. Egypt lives in peace with Israel. Soon there will be a triangle of peace - Jerusalem, Cairo, Beirut. One day, I believe, all of our Arab neighbors will find the courage and the good sense to live in peace with Israel. Operation Peace for Galilee has brought that day closer.

ARTICLES

HOW THE SOLDIER BECAME A STATESMAN

How the soldier became a statesman
A new biography of Ariel Sharon

By Tom Gross
The Wall Street Journal
October 3, 2006

(Book Review)

EVEN now, as he lies in a stroke-induced coma from which he is not expected to recover, the vilification of Ariel Sharon continues. Last month, for example, one of Britain’s leading magazines, The New Statesman, in the course of attacking Tony Blair for supporting the “racist regime in Tel Aviv,” attributed to Mr. Sharon a series of racist remarks about Arabs. But Mr. Sharon had never said them. They were the words of extremists that he had specifically repudiated. It was the equivalent of taking the words of the Ku Klux Klan and putting them in the mouth of George W. Bush. The New Statesmen eventually printed a letter noting its error, but without offering an apology or official correction.

Mr. Sharon’s long and controversial career – as Israeli general, politician and peacemaker – has inspired so much vituperation and calumny that it has often been difficult, especially for observers outside Israel, to separate fact from fiction. Thus “Ariel Sharon: A Life” is especially welcome. While the authors, Israeli journalists Nir Hefez and Gadi Bloom, clearly hold their subject in high esteem, their tone is far from merely adulatory. They do not shy away from the misdeeds and excesses of which Sharon has often been accused. But they seem intent, most of all, on faithfully describing the full arc of his crowded life.

Mr. Sharon’s supporters have long hailed his tough approach to terrorism and viewed him as a leader who strived to establish peace without sacrificing Israel’s security. His detractors claim that he overstepped the mark and caused unnecessary civilian suffering. All agree that he has played a pivotal role in almost every major event in modern Israeli history, and even his worst enemies acknowledge that he has shown extraordinary courage, both in battle and in politics.

A MASTER TACTICIAN

Inevitably, “Ariel Sharon: A Life” is dense with facts and incident, but it is a lucid read, well translated from the Hebrew by Mitch Ginsburg. The book appeared in Israel last year; the English edition has been updated to provide a full account of Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza. Mr. Sharon spearheaded for the Gaza move in 2004 and 2005, which spurred the formation of a new political party under his leadership. Kadima, as it is called, won the Israeli election in March of this year, even after Mr. Sharon’s stroke, largely on the basis of his popularity.

For all his political mastery, Sharon may ultimately be best remembered as a military man. He fought in all of Israel’s wars or played a major role in leading them. Time and again soldiers who served with him testified to his resilience and resourcefulness.

He was also a master tactician. His assault on Abu Agelia fortress during the 1967 Six Day War is still studied in military academies around the world. His crossing of the Suez Canal, against the orders of his superiors, changed the course of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Afterwards, at home, crowds took to the streets chanting “Arik, King of Israel.” And in 1981, in defiance of the whole world, including the Reagan administration, he persuaded his fellow Israeli cabinet ministers to destroy Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor.

WHAT “NO ONE HAD DONE BEFORE”

Upon retiring from the army, he put equal vigor into pursuing political goals. He forged Israel’s disparate center-right parties into the Likud, the party that dominated Israeli political life for the better part of three decades, until Sharon himself broke it in two late last year. Serving in various political posts, he was reviled by Arab extremists but respected by leading Arab moderates, such as Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Jordan’s King Hussein.

After Israel’s 1982 Lebanon war, however, he found the most senior government posts closed to him. Sharon took the rap, as defense minister, for the reprisal massacres that Christian Arabs carried out against Muslim Arabs in Beirut in September of that year. Although a post-massacre inquiry cleared him of any direct wrongdoing, it was acknowledged that the killings had taken place while Israel had troops in Beirut and that Israel’s army could possibly have prevented them.

But he came back, as foreign minister in the 1990s and as prime minister from 2001 to 2006. In 2004, a bribery scandal plagued his administration, implicating his son. But the greatest controversy of his tenure had to do with his policy of “disengagement.”

For much of his career, Mr. Sharon had been a leading proponent of settlement in the West Bank and Gaza. But as prime minister he reversed his views. Against the wishes of virtually his entire electoral base, he closed down all the settlements in Gaza and four of those in the West Bank, with the promise of further evacuations to come. He said he wished to do what “no one – not the Turks, British, Egyptians, or Jordanians – had done before, and give the Palestinians the chance to form a state of their own.”

WITH STRIPS OF LEATHER AROUND HER FEET

Such a reversal wasn’t as strange as it might seem. Mr. Sharon had always been driven less by ideology than by a concern for Israel’s security, and security may well mean taking different measures at different times. Indeed, it had been Mr. Sharon who had forced through the traumatic withdrawal of Israeli citizens from Sinai more than two decades earlier.

While Messrs. Hefez and Bloom naturally concentrate on Mr. Sharon’s public life, they explore his hardly less tumultuous personal life too: his complex relations with his parents; the death of his first wife in 1962 in a car accident; the death of his first son in 1967, at age 11, in an accident while playing with other children; his very close bond with his second wife (who was his first wife’s sister).

We learn about the impoverished conditions in which he was raised in pre-state Israel – his mother tied strips of leather around her feet as she farmed swampland because she didn’t want to ruin her only pair of shoes – and about his later success in building up Israel’s biggest cattle farm in the spartan Negev desert. Mr. Sharon was very proud of his animals, insisting on being called from the ranch if a new calf, kid or lamb was born, even if, when he was prime minister, it meant interrupting him in a tense cabinet meeting.

In the end, to the utter astonishment of Mr. Sharon’s many enemies, opinion polls voted him the most popular prime minister in Israel’s history. Messrs. Hefez and Bloom help to show why. There will no doubt be other accounts of Mr. Sharon’s life – his close friend, the journalist Uri Dan, is bringing one out later this month, and may well offer more personal insights into what made Sharon tick. But “Ariel Sharon: A Life” is as good a place as any to start for those wanting to know more about this colossus of our time.

 

ARIEL SHARON AS A TARGET OF ANTI-SEMITISM

Ariel Sharon as a target of anti-Semitism
By Tom Gross
The Jerusalem Post (and reprinted in Ma’ariv in Hebrew)
January 11, 2005

www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1136361054170

www.nrg.co.il/online/1/ART1/033/002.html

Compared to past international media coverage of Ariel Sharon, which on a number of occasions in recent years has gone beyond personal demonization to outright anti-Semitism, the reporting on Sharon since he suffered a massive stroke last week has been relatively benign. Sharon, the butcher, the bulldozer, the war criminal, the “successor of Hitler,” has suddenly been humanized in several usually hostile quarters, such as the BBC.

But only up to a point. Even amid this improved coverage, as Sharon lies fighting for his life, many articles in the Western media have retailed untruths, almost in passing, as though they were incontrovertible historical facts: Sharon initiated the second intifada, Sharon ordered the Sabra and Shatila massacres, and so on.

According to a Google search, there were over 24,000 articles published on Sharon in the 24 hours following his stroke last Wednesday night. But it was only four days later, in Monday’s Washington Post, that there was the first mention of Sharon’s protracted and successful libel battle in the 1980s against Time magazine for its inaccurate suggestion that he had encouraged the Sabra and Shatila massacres.

Equally, there has been almost no reference to the fact that the Sabra and Shatila massacres were carried out by (Christian) Arabs against (Muslim) Arabs, in response to massacres by Muslims, and virtually no indication that the Palestinians themselves had carefully planned the 2000 intifada.

This is by their own admission. For example, the PA Communications Minister, Imad Al-Faluji told Al-Safir (March 3, 2001): “Whoever thinks that the intifada broke out because of the despised Sharon’s visit to the Al-Aqsa Mosque is wrong. This intifada was planned in advance, ever since President Arafat’s return from the Camp David negotiations, where he turned the table upside down on President Clinton.”

And the jailed Palestinian terror leader Marwan Barghouti told the Palestinian paper, the Jerusalem Times (June 8, 2001): “The intifada did not start because of Sharon’s visit to Al-Aqsa. The intifada began because the Palestinians did not approve of the peace process in its previous form.” But now as then Western media are uninterested in passing such comments on to their readers.

Most of the reporting has failed to supply any context – for example as to why Israeli troops had entered Lebanon in 1982. I have seen hardly any references to past moves Sharon made for peace, such as the 1982 dismantling of Yamit and 13 other settlements in the Sinai.

“MIDDLE BEAST”

There have also been some nasty headlines and cartoons. “He is the King Kong of massacres” ran the headline of a news report on Sharon on January 8 in The Observer, the Sunday affiliate of Britain’s Guardian newspaper, referring to the recently released remake of the 1933 movie classic. “Ariel Sharon, agent of perpetual war,” was the headline of an article in the relatively moderate Lebanese paper, the Daily Star, on January 7, 2006, by its editor-at-large and frequent guest on America’s NPR, Rami Khouri.

“Sharon’s legacy does not include peace,” is how a January 5 feature on the BBC News website by Paul Reynolds, the BBC’s World Affairs correspondent, was introduced, while Richard Stott’s January 8 column on Sharon for the mass circulation (British) Sunday Mirror was titled “Middle Beast.”

On Friday, the entire front page of the (London) Independent carried a photo of Sharon with the words “Inside: Robert Fisk on Ariel Sharon.” The article, over 7000 words extracted from Fisk’s new book, was hardly about Sharon at all, and consisted almost entirely of Fisk’s claims about what happened at Sabra and Shatila. Unsurprisingly, Fisk made no mention of Sharon’s successful American court ruling against Time.

Yet overall, the international coverage of Sharon since his stroke has been relatively kind. Who could have imagined, for example, that the New York Times – which for decades has blackened Sharon’s reputation – would run a comparatively complimentary editorial on him by Benny Morris? Who could have imagined that the home page of aljazeera.net would this week show Sharon sitting in a grandfatherly pose looking on as Hanukah candles were lit?

I use the term “relatively kind” because it is important to recall what the coverage of Sharon was like until just a few weeks ago. He was not only reviled in the international media, but frequently portrayed in viciously anti-Semitic terms.

“AT LEAST HITLER TAUGHT ME . . .”

In Spain, for example, on June 4, 2001 (three days after a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 21 young Israelis at a disco, in the midst of a unilateral Israeli ceasefire), the liberal magazine Cambio 16 published a cartoon of Sharon (with a hook nose he does not have), wearing a skull cap (which he does not usually wear), sporting a swastika inside a star of David on his chest, and proclaiming: “At least Hitler taught me how to invade a country and destroy every living insect.”

A week earlier, El Pais, Spain’s equivalent of The New York Times, published a cartoon of an allegorical figure carrying a small rectangular-shaped black moustache, flying through the air towards Sharon’s upper lip. The caption read: “Clio, the muse of history, puts Hitler’s moustache on Ariel Sharon”.

Cartoons in the Greek press in 2004 showed Sharon as a Nazi officer. One of Italy’s leading papers, Corriere Della Sera, ran a cartoon on March 31, 2002, showing Sharon killing Jesus. (The cartoon, which was timed to coincide with Easter that year, was published as Israelis lay dying from the Netanya Passover massacre three days earlier.)

Hundreds of similar anti-Semitic motifs have been applied to Sharon in recent years. The Economist magazine compared him to Charles Dickens’s infamous anti-Semitic stereotype, Fagin. (An earlier edition of The Economist ran a blackened front cover with the words “Sharon’s Israel, the world’s worry.”) And grotesque cartoons of Sharon have continued to appear until as recently as six weeks ago in, for example, the Guardian.

Now, by contrast, attitudes to Sharon are by and large restrained, even respectful. But we still have to wait and see whether journalists in the supposedly respectable world media have decided to rid themselves once and for all of the anti-Semitic overspill in their Israel coverage. It is much too early to tell.

ARTICLES

“THEY ARE POISONING PALESTINIAN CHILDREN WITH DEEP HATRED”

Israeli Official Points to ‘Incitement’ by Palestinians
By Jodi Rudoren
New York Times
January 7, 2014

www.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/world/middleeast/israeli-official-points-to-incitements-by-palestinians.html

JERUSALEM — Adolf Hitler is quoted on the websites of Palestinian Authority schools. A young girl appears on Palestinian television, describing Jews as “barbaric monkeys, wretched pigs” and the “murderers of Muhammad,” the Islamic prophet. Maps on the Facebook page of the Palestinian presidential guards do not show Israel. President Mahmoud Abbas himself embraced as “heroes” released Palestinian prisoners who killed Israelis.

These are among dozens of examples highlighted by Israeli officials in a new presentation documenting negative statements about Israel and Jews in official Palestinian Authority media and textbooks. As Secretary of State John Kerry departed here on Monday after an intense four-day push for a framework agreement outlining prospects for a peace deal, Israeli leaders said that such statements had not abated since negotiations began this summer and did not bode well.

“The general phenomenon is very clear: They are poisoning Palestinian children with deep hatred of Israel and the Jewish people,” Yuval Steinitz, Israel’s minister of strategic affairs, said on Monday as he showed the presentation to international reporters. “At the end of the day, let’s assume we’ll be able to resolve all the technical issues, which are extremely complicated. Are we going to get genuine peace, or just a piece of paper?”

The presentation, which Mr. Steinitz delivered at an Israeli cabinet meeting on Sunday, is part of an intensifying campaign in which he, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others have emphasized what they call “incitement” as a prime obstacle to peace. It underpins their increasing demand for Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, which they argue is the only way they will be assured that an agreement will end the long-running conflict.

Palestinian leaders dismiss the renewed focus on incitement as a ruse to distract from disagreements over issues including borders, the future of Jerusalem and the rights of refugees. They say that Israel has refused to reconvene a committee, which included Americans, that was established in 1998 to deal with incitement but disbanded after two years and about 20 meetings.

“If there is any incitement against Israel, this is a forum where they can provide it officially, and we can do the same,” said Majdi Khaldi, a diplomatic adviser to Mr. Abbas. “Why do we have to continue just complaints from one to the other? It’s better for all to go to the trilateral committee, and that will solve the whole issue.”

Asked about reviving the committee, Mr. Steinitz said Monday that it had been “completely useless” and would not help because the problems were coming from Palestinian government sources, not rogue individuals.

Mr. Khaldi says the problems go both ways. He pointed out that Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, has repeatedly accused Mr. Abbas of “diplomatic terrorism,” and said he also saw Israel’s continued construction in West Bank settlements and military raids on Palestinian cities as forms of incitement.

Xavier Abu Eid, a spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization, noted that weather maps in Israeli newspapers do not demarcate Palestinian territory, just as maps cited in Mr. Steinitz’s report do not show the land divided.

Incitement is an issue as old as the conflict itself. An unusually comprehensive recent study of Israeli and Palestinian Authority textbooks found that each presented the other side as the enemy, but that the Palestinian books contained more negative characterizations. David Pollock, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who in September published a 172-page study of the issue, said that while incitement had decreased markedly since the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising, a decade ago, it persists.

“There are ups and downs, there are exceptions,” Mr. Pollock said in an interview, “but unfortunately I think it is true that the official Palestinian media continue to incite against Israel and to claim that all of Palestine belongs to the Palestinians. There’s almost no positive discussion of peace, two peoples, any of that sort of favorable or even just moderate messages about Israel.”

On the Israeli side, Mr. Pollock said, “what you have are unofficial, extremist fringe individuals” whose statements are “disowned and discouraged, for the most part,” by government leaders.

Mr. Steinitz’s ministry has four people working full time tracking incitement, and since 2009 it has issued quarterly reports trying to quantify it. Mr. Steinitz said that numbers for the fall of 2013 were not yet available, but that “amazingly, surprisingly, since the resumption of the negotiations we see even more incidents.”

On the Nov. 2 anniversary of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which Britain endorsed the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine, the website of Mr. Abbas’s presidential guards posted bloodied pictures of Arthur Balfour, the British foreign secretary for whom the declaration is named, and Israeli prime ministers under the banner, “A promise from one who did not own it to one who did not deserve it,” according to the presentation.

The same site, on the Nov. 29 anniversary of the 1947 United Nations vote to partition Palestine, had a headline, “Palestine Is Not to Be Divided,” with a map that did not show Israel. The presentation also included a picture of a Nazi flag hung in the West Bank village of Beit Ummar in October.

And there was a November video on a website of Mr. Abbas’s Fatah faction in which masked members of its military wing threatened to kidnap Israeli soldiers and showed off weapons, singing, “With these rockets we will liberate Jerusalem, with these rockets we will crush the Zionist enemy.”

Mr. Steinitz said that Mr. Netanyahu had shown Mr. Kerry some of these examples during a recent meeting in Rome. The prime minister also complained about incitement in an August letter to Mr. Kerry, and has frequently raised the issue in his public statements since the negotiations began.

“This Palestinian government incitement is rampant,” Mr. Netanyahu said at a joint appearance with Mr. Kerry when he arrived here on Thursday. “Instead of preparing Palestinians for peace, Palestinian leaders are teaching them to hate Israel.”

 

“A FOG OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESS USUALLY KEEPS EVENTS LIKE THE AL-QUDS RALLY FROM GETTING MUCH ATTENTION IN THE WESTERN MEDIA”

A pro-terror rally on a Palestinian campus
By Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
November 24, 2013

www.jeffjacoby.com/14077/a-pro-terror-rally-on-a-palestinian-campus

www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2013/11/24/rally-shows-pervasive-palestinian-anti-semitism/tfrQGd8HuJ2by7m2jp0HiI/story.html

PHOTO
Supporters of the Palestinian terrorist organization Islamic Jihad stage a rally on the main campus of Al-Quds University, Nov. 5, 2013. (Photo credit: Tom Gross Media)

THEY WEREN’T wearing swastika armbands or chanting “Sieg Heil!” during the Islamic Jihad rally this month on the campus of Al-Quds University. They didn’t need to. Everything about the event reeked of fascism and anti-Semitic bloodlust. Demonstrators at the Palestinian school paraded in paramilitary gear, with massed black flags, mock assault weapons, and arms extended in Nazi-style salutes. There were banners lionizing suicide bombers, and hand-drawn Israeli flags on which students trod. Islamic Jihad — long identified as a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union — posted photos of the rally on its website. In one, students representing dead Israelis sprawl on the ground as black-clad jihadists brandishing weapons stride past.

Such celebrations of terrorism and incitement to violence are pervasive in Palestinian society. Children raised under the Palestinian Authority are indoctrinated from an early age to regard Israelis and Jews as enemies to be destroyed and infidels to be loathed. Nothing about the nearly three-hour rally at Al-Quds would likely have surprised the estimated 1,000 students who saw it. Most of them have been fed a steady diet of such poison all their lives, and not just in schools and mosques. From TV shows and popular music to the naming of sports clubs and public squares, the next generation of Palestinians has grown up amid the most violent culture of Jew-hatred since the Third Reich.

A fog of political correctness usually keeps events like the Al-Quds rally from getting much attention in the Western media. But this one, first reported by veteran British journalist Tom Gross, made news last week when it led Brandeis University into suspending a longstanding academic partnership with the Palestinian school. It wasn’t the grotesque rally itself that provoked Brandeis to pull the plug, though that should have been sufficient: One of Islamic Jihad’s many innocent victims was a 20-year-old Brandeis undergraduate, Alisa Flatow, who was one of eight people murdered in 1995 when an Islamic Jihad bomber blew up the bus in which they were riding.

What finally forced the issue was the refusal of Sari Nusseibeh, the president of Al-Quds and a well-known Palestinian intellectual, to condemn the hate-drenched rally even after being asked to do so by Brandeis president Frederick Lawrence. Nusseibeh replied instead with an outrageous letter that denounced “vilification campaigns by Jewish extremists,” and suggested their only purpose in raising the issue was to “prevent Palestinians from achieving our freedom.”

Nusseibeh is often described as a Palestinian “moderate.” But in a culture as poisoned with vitriolic anti-Semitism as the Palestinian Authority, moderation doesn’t go very far. It doesn’t even go as far as repudiating the Nazi-like salutes and tableaux of dead Israelis during a public rally on an East Jerusalem college campus. Not even to retain the goodwill of an institution as dovish and liberal as Brandeis, a Jewish-sponsored university that was proud of its relationship with Al-Quds.

The genocidal values of Islamic Jihad are no anomaly. They are the values of Hamas and the PLO. Haj Amin al-Husseini, leader of the Palestinian Arabs, meets with Adolf Hitler in November 1941. The Arabs were Nazi Germany’s “natural friends,” Husseini assured the führer, “because they had the same enemies” – namely, the Jews.

They are the values that led the Arab League to spurn the UN’s proposed two-state solution in 1947, and to announce that it would crush the newborn Jewish state in “a war of extermination and a momentous massacre.” They are the values that induced Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the leader of the Palestinians in the 1930s, to form an alliance with Adolf Hitler, eagerly collaborating with the führer in the hope of importing the Final Solution to the Jews of the Middle East.

“Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany,” Husseini wrote in his journal, “was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world.” He asked Hitler “for an explicit undertaking to allow us to solve the Jewish problem … according to the scientific methods innovated by Germany in the handling of its Jews.”

There may have been no actual swastikas at the Islamic Jihad rally, but the lethal values represented by the swastika have been a part of the Palestinian national movement for the better part of a century. They still are, however much people of goodwill might wish otherwise. So long as even famous Palestinian “moderates” cannot bring themselves to bravely defy those values, Palestinian sovereignty will remain a reckless gamble — and peace as far off as ever.

THE FLOODGATES OPEN

Analysis: Has the Geneva agreement undercut sanctions to stop Iran’s nuclear program?
By Benjamin Weinthal, Europe correspondent
The Jerusalem Post
January 5, 2014

www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Has-the-Geneva-agreement-undercut-sanctions-to-stop-Irans-nuclear-program-337098

BERLIN – The interim nuclear deal reached between the major powers and the Islamic Republic on November 24 opened the investment floodgates for Western companies seeking to capitalize on a new business environment in Iran. Just in the first week of 2014 – before the slated late January implementation of the interim agreement – a series of articles capture the mad dash to jump-start business with Iran.

Finding Geneva a hard sell, in no small measure because Israel and US’s Arab allies in the Gulf see gaping holes in the sanctions relief provided to Tehran, a range of Middle East experts voiced new warnings on Sunday in the course of interviews with The Jerusalem Post. Avarice-driven conduct by Western businesses will help Tehran develop a nuclear weapon and repress its population’s human rights, according to experts.

Prof. Gerald M. Steinberg, a political scientist at Bar-Ilan University, said, “After Geneva, and without any significant change in Iranian behavior, the gold rush is on to resume business as usual.”

“The claims made by President Obama and European leaders to the effect that they can simply restore sanctions whenever the Iranian leaders resume production of nuclear weapons looks increasingly hollow.”

He added, “If the sanctions continue to unravel, the last resort for stopping Iran is a military operation that Israel, the US and Europe have long sought to avoid.”

Der Spiegel magazine addressed the breakdown in the anti-Iran business atmosphere, headlining its article: “Chance of a Century: International Investors Flock to Tehran.”

Daniel Bernbeck, head of the German-Iranian Chamber of Industry and Commerce in Tehran, told Der Spiegel that airplanes to Iran are “full of Italians,” which includes managers from Italian energy company Eni S.p.A.

Der Spiegel noted, “France is also on the move. In a deal worth billions, the French are about to renew their licensing contract for supplying Peugeot components to Iranian car-maker Iran Khodro.

“And the Americans are already here with ExxonMobil, Chevron Corporation and other US companies,” Bernbeck said. “They are responsible for renovating the old oil production facilities and refinery industry, as well as exploring new oil fields. That’s a huge multibillion-euro business.”

Bernbeck triggered controversy in 2009 with his energetic efforts to attract business to Iran at the expense of human rights. After Iran’s regime allegedly doctored the results of the 2009 presidential election, Bernbeck said he saw “no moral question here at all” in engaging in business deals during the wave of anti-democratic repression.

Canadian MP and former justice minister Irwin Cotler slammed Bernbeck at the time, saying an “important role for civil society is to hold the Daniel Bernbecks to account.”

Tom Gross, a Middle East expert, told the Post, “The rush by Western companies and diplomats back into Iran is extremely disconcerting, and highly dangerous,” adding, “The despotic Iranian regime – which already executes more people than any other government in the world apart from China – will feel even more emboldened to continue its clampdown on liberals, reformers and human rights activists and its persecution of minorities such as the Baha’i, Baluchis and homosexuals.”

The flaws in the Iran agreement have come under great scrutiny in the US.

Michael Doran, a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, told the Post, “The idea that the United States could turn on and off the flow of investment to Iran like a spigot was always fanciful. It has sent a clear message that doing business with Iran is now legitimate, and that Tehran and Washington are on a path to improved relations. In doing so it has created an influential economic lobby in the West dedicated to ensuring that the Americans and Iranians remain on that path. The sanctions regime is not dead, but it is damaged.”

In Israel, experts expressed growing frustration and disappointment with the international community’s failure to confront Iran.

Tommy Steiner, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Policy and Strategy at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, told the Post, “The flocking of European and American executives to try and position themselves for making business with Iran in anticipation of additional sanctions relief undercuts the negotiating posture of the US and the EU in the next round of negotiations.

Iranian negotiators might misinterpret the executives’ ‘charm offensive’ and wrongly assume that the soon relief of sanctions is a done deal and that they are not compelled to rollback and dismantle their nuclear program.”

Steiner, a leading expert on Israel-EU relations, added, “While one cannot forbid the travel of Western executives to Iran, US and European governments ought to reach out to these companies and explain to them that their eagerness to do business with Iran might cause misperceptions and undermine the diplomatic efforts. In that case, the Western executives will contribute to an escalating crisis with Iran rather than developing new business opportunities.”

Emmanuel Navon, director of the communications and political science department at Jerusalem Orthodox College, told the Post he is “not surprised” that Western companies are rushing into Iran. The Geneva deal sent a message to loosen sanctions.

“Many of the companies are technically breaking the embargo [against Iran], but because of the atmosphere no one in the West is willing to enforce the sanctions 100 percent,” he said. Navon sees Western business “taking advantage of the interim deal” and the West giving Tehran a free pass.

Steinberg said, “This is exactly what Prime Minister Netanyahu warned about after last month’s breakthrough in the Geneva talks with Iran. It took more than a decade to build up serious economic sanctions after the IAEA documented Iran’s illicit nuclear weapons program, but they were finally exerting pressure on the regime in Tehran.”

With Iran securing as much as $20 billion in sanctions relief, the interim agreement may have erred on the side of providing Iran with a heavy dose of carrots.

This method is likely to undercut the world power’s original aim, namely, the use of both carrots and sticks to stop Iran’s nuclear program.

 

WESTERN COMPANIES ARE GEARING UP DO BIG BUSINESS

‘Chance of a century’: International investors flock to Tehran
By Susanne Koelbl
(Translated from the German)
Der Spiegel
January 2, 2014

www.spiegel.de/international/world/geneva-deal-sparks-new-international-investor-interest-in-iran-a-940629.html

Since the West reached a landmark deal with Iran on its controversial nuclear program late last year, many Iranians are hoping for an end to sanctions. Western companies are also gearing up do big business.

Daniel Bernbeck has learned that in Tehran there’s no point getting worked up about things like the gridlock between Gholhak, his neighborhood in the northern part of the city, and downtown, where his office is located. Here he is again, stuck in traffic, with everyone honking their horns. Tehran is a murderous city, says Bernbeck, even without international sanctions and threats of attack from Israel.

Bernbeck is sitting in a gray SUV. He’s a wiry, tall blond man who wears lawyer-like glasses. The only departure from the standard business look is a narrow soul patch on his chin, which suggests a certain degree of individualism. His cell phone rings. Bernbeck’s Iranian secretary is on the line. She’s expecting him, and the deputy German ambassador has also arrived, along with two investment bankers from London and Hong Kong. They are asking about stock tips for Iran.

“Iranian stocks for Hong Kong?” Bernbeck exclaims with a grin, and then says in his best Farsi: “The same bankers would have said a year ago: You’re crazy.” Then he asks the driver to hurry up, although it doesn’t do any good.

Bernbeck is the head of the German-Iranian Chamber of Industry and Commerce in Tehran. He paves the way for business ties in a country where Western politicians have been trying for decades to make such relationships impossible, especially since 2006.

At the time, the Islamic Republic started to rapidly expand its nuclear program.

Intelligence agencies predicted that it would be only a matter of a few years before the Iranians had a nuclear bomb. Arab Gulf states in the region felt threatened, and Israel was determined to go to war with Tehran if a political solution could not be found quickly.

For over five years now, Bernbeck, 50, has been living between these two adversarial worlds, more specifically “on the dark side of Mars, where the cannibals and Holocaust deniers live.” Bernbeck says that’s how Iran is portrayed in the West.

LANDMARK DEAL IN GENEVA

But his world has become much brighter since Nov. 24. That was the day when the five permanent members of the UN Security Council -- plus Germany and Iran -- signed a landmark deal in Geneva aimed at turning around the situation within the next six months. According to this agreement, Iran would roll back certain elements of its nuclear program and, in exchange, the West would ease economic sanctions.

Bernbeck believes in this possibility for a peace accord. Suddenly it appears to be there, the “chance of a century” that he has been waiting for, although this opportunity could still be dashed, like in 2005.

Back then, Iran only had a few centrifuges for enriching uranium, and negotiators were close to reaching an agreement that would have frozen its nuclear program at that level. But then the negotiations faltered and US President George W. Bush refused the deal.

Today, eight years later, Iran has over 19,000 centrifuges. So why should things work out now? Perhaps because this time both sides have made concessions on the issue. The Americans have dropped their absolute demand that the Iranians abandon their entire nuclear program. At the same time, Israel’s threats of war and, above all, painful international sanctions have forced the Iranians back to the negotiating table.

For the past three years, there have been virtually no bank transfers between Iran and the outside world, and revenues from oil and gas sales have plummeted. Only the Chinese are still making purchases, but instead of paying in hard currency they are delivering only bulldozers and construction machinery.

OLD REVOLUTIONARIES ARE SKEPTICAL

The sanctions have paralyzed Iran’s economy. But Mohammed Hossein Rafi is one of the many Iranians who simply don’t believe that. In fact, he says, the sanctions have only served to make his proud country even stronger.

Rafi ranks among the country’s conservatives, the hardliners, the old faithful followers of Ayatollah Khomeini. He is sitting in the Iranian Artists’ Cafe, and like most former revolutionaries, he wears his beard neatly trimmed around the chin. He keeps his cashmere coat on during the interview.

During the 1970s, he campaigned against the Shah, then fought in the Iraq-Iran war, and later had a long career with an Iranian intelligence agency. Now he is supposedly working at an institute for Islamic standards, which wants to create something akin to Germany’s DIN industrial standards.

Rafi says that with the international pressure Iran has risen to become a leading country in the area of science and research. It has even discovered an effective AIDS drug, which will soon be presented to the world, he contends.

These are just some of the stories that war veterans recount in Tehran. The old revolutionaries take a highly skeptical view of the negotiations with their arch-enemy, the United States. They would prefer to see the negotiators fail. And the Revolutionary Guards’ network, which was founded by Ayatollah Khomeini -- and includes Rafi -- still remains one of the most powerful organizations in Iran.

Rafi says that he doesn’t believe in peace or the current nuclear negotiations: “Obama wants war,” he says. Rafi maintains that 50,000 volunteers have already registered as suicide bombers, to be deployed if it should come to an armed conflict. But he refuses to divulge the identity of the organization that has recruited them.

Iran’s new president, Hassan Rohani -- who the West is hoping has the strength to institute reforms -- will have to incorporate people like Rafi into his new Persia. Indeed, Rohani says that there should be no more “revolutions,” but rather an “evolutionary process.” It might be possible to win over the war veterans if they can benefit from future business deals, Bernbeck says.

INVESTORS FLOCK TO TEHRAN

Rohani needs economic success stories. He has to sweep aside the sanctions but, more importantly, move faster than inflation, which is eating away at the already meager income earned by millions of Iranians. The monthly minimum wage is only €140 ($190).

Iranians are suffering under the embargo, and they are not just holding the Americans responsible for this. The price of gasoline has multiplied; milk and cheese now cost three times as much as they did two years ago.

But it looks like the nuclear negotiations could spark an economic upswing in Iran. Although none of the sanctions have been lifted, droves of Western business people are already flocking to Tehran. Iran has the world’s fourth-largest known oil reserves, and the second-largest gas reserves. Business deals worth billions of euros can be made here.

Bernbeck has finally arrived at the underground parking garage. He takes the elevator to the seventh floor, which is the home of the German-Iranian Chamber of Industry and Commerce. He lists the names of all the countries whose business people have already been here -- “except for the Germans again.”

Bernbeck tells a story that he thinks perfectly illustrates the current situation in Tehran: Not a single top European official came to President Rohani’s inauguration, as agreed by the EU member states’ representatives in Brussels. But the very next day the government in Rome sent a high-ranking emissary to personally congratulate the new Iranian head of state.

Now the planes from Europe are “full of Italians,” Bernbeck quips, including managers from Italian energy giant Eni. France is also on the move. In a deal worth billions, the French are about to renew their licensing contract for supplying Peugeot conponents to Iranian carmaker Iran Khodro. “And the Americans are already here with ExxonMobil, Chevron Corporation and other US companies,” he says, adding: “They are responsible for renovating the old oil production facilities and refinery industry, as well as exploring new oil fields. That’s a huge multibillion-euro business.”

CULTURE SHOCK

Bernbeck falls silent for a moment, but on his face one can read the disbelief of a man who is not only exhausted from the traffic of this megacity, but also from the political games of the other Western nations in Tehran. In front of his office door, he swings around again and says: “This here is not a matter of good and evil, or perhaps even the nuclear deal. It’s really about a great deal of money.”

“Salam, khub hastid, khoshhalam,” Bernbeck greets a number of board members from the chamber of commerce who have been waiting for him. He bows slightly and places his right hand over his heart. Bernbeck knows Iran. As the oldest son of a Protestant priest, he grew up in Tehran in the 1970s. He experienced the oil boom under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. A few years later, he asked the Shah of Iran’s daughter Farahnas for a dance after a day of skiing at a fancy resort in the mountains north of Tehran.

Then came the revolution in 1979, and the fledgling Islamic Republic made many of his childhood friends into Revolutionary Guards, who wore uniforms and sped through the streets in all-terrain vehicles. During the Iraq-Iran war in 1981, when blackouts were ordered throughout the city and the power was turned off, Bernbeck sat in the basement of the parsonage in the district of Gholhak, and played rummy together with his parents and siblings.

Today he speaks Farsi almost as well as he speaks German, and he hears the difference between t’aarof and the truth. T’aarof is a term that covers a broad range of polite etiquette that doesn’t necessarily have to reflect reality. Westerners are often driven to despair by t’aarof, because they think they understand the content of the message.

When Bernbeck returned to Iran 26 years after spending his formative years there, he also had to deal with culture shock. The chamber of commerce was mired in the corrupt undertow of an Iranian mafia-like network before he took charge. Now Bernbeck is endeavoring to establish his notions of “transparency and truthfulness.” Of course, it’s not always easy.

Only recently one of his employees slipped him another one of those ubiquitous envelopes. It contained a heavy gold coin -- a bribery attempt. Bernbeck was asked to go to special lengths for a certain individual. But he personally returned the gold coin to the sender. “Send me flowers, cake, but nothing worth more than 100,000 toman,” he said (100,000 toman is the equivalent of roughly €30).

RESPECT MORE IMPORTANT THAN PEACE

As someone who understands both worlds, Bernbeck has no problems imagining how the West came close to war with Iran. He says it has to do with a chain of observations, each of which is coherent in its own right, yet not necessarily understood by the other side.

An angry radical like former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could only be elected because he represented the will for independence -- even if he spent billions on the nuclear program, ruined the economy and perhaps even endangered world peace. The Iranians thought that he would win back respect for their country, says Bernbeck. For many Iranians, respect is more important than peace.

Bernbeck packs his briefcase and puts on his winter coat. He wants to make an official visit to the new president of the Iranian Chamber of Industry and Commerce, where representatives of business organizations from around the world are standing in line.

On Vali-e Asr, the most prestigious avenue in the capital city, he gazes at a young couple. The two are walking hand in hand, and the girl’s headscarf is only barely covering her hair in a halfhearted attempt to comply with the law. She is wearing black eyeliner and bright red lipstick. Behind the couple is a group of young, pious women dressed in black full-body hijabs that don’t reveal a single lock of hair.

Looking at the couple, Bernbeck says that Iran has become a divided nation. Many Iranians long for freedom and individuality -- and their dreamland is the United States, he contends. The others still shout the same old hostile slogans -- like “death to America” -- after Friday prayers.

GERMAN INTEREST COMES LATE

President Rohani would like to move his country forward economically, but he is hardly capable of easing the strict rules that govern Iranian society. The young woman wearing makeup can expect to be disciplined by the guardians of public morals. Bernbeck spreads out his hands like a horn of plenty. He says that the economy could perhaps change the country. But can money and prosperity also bring liberalization?

Since the beginning of Rohani’s presidency, the pressure on young people has been even greater than at the end of Ahmadinejad’s term in office. Private parties are raided by the guardians of public morals, websites are shut down, and the sites’ operators are thrown in jail. An increasing number of prisoners sentenced to death row are hanged from construction cranes in the city streets.

The young people are going underground, literally. Many parties, concerts and art show openings are held in cellars, because it is cheaper and organizers are afraid of being persecuted.

“They play with us, get our hopes up and waste our time,” says Gelareh Sheibani, “and I don’t have that much time.” She is 28, making her old enough to recall the enormous expectations that she pinned on earlier so-called attempts at reform, which ultimately failed. And now the hardliners in the country intend to show Rohani once again that they still call the shots.

Sheibani’s dark hair falls down to her hips. She is sitting on a large velour armchair in a small recording studio in downtown Tehran basement. She is not wearing any jewelry, but she does wear eggplant-colored nail polish.

Sheibani is a singer. But solo singing by women is forbidden in Iran because it has an “erotic” effect on men, according to clerics. Nevertheless, she has launched her professional career and now regularly performs abroad.

Bernbeck rolls with his SUV into the garage of his home in Gholhak. With all the foreign delegations in Tehran he has to work late these days, and his three children are already in bed. Bernbeck checks his emails and discovers another three requests for information from Germany: What are the labeling requirements for energy drinks in Iran? How can I organize a pasta sales network? And, last but not least, please compile an analysis of merchant marine jobs on the Iranian coast.

The Germans are arriving late, but they are coming after all.