With their waxed moustaches, precision-clipped beards and dapper clothes, members of the Mr. Erbil gentleman's club look like the smarter residents of Brooklyn or Shoreditch. But this is Iraqi Kurdistan, just 60 miles from ISIS.
[Note by Tom Gross]
I attach a number of articles below, which may be on interest to those of you who follow military matters.
Before that, something lighter from Iraqi Kurdistan:
Video: Iraq's hipsters declare war on poor dress sense. Also here.
And something more serious, also concerning an Iraqi Kurd:
I have linked to Shifa Gardi's reports before. She was a fearless journalist. She died yesterday in Mosul.
* You can also find other items that are not in these dispatches if you “like” this page on Facebook www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia
CONTENTS
1. “350% increase in women warfighters in the IDF ground arm” (By Or Heller, Israel Defense Magazine, Feb. 23, 2017)
2. “A German clash over Trump’s NATO demands: The German military is in a terrible state” (By Konstantin von Hammerstein, Der Spiegel, Feb. 25, 2017)
3. “Hezbollah forces to remain in Syria until political deal reached” (Tasnim News, Teheran, Feb. 25, 2017)
4. [Iranian-controlled] “Iraqi Nujaba movement ready to join Syrian Army operation to liberate Occupied Golan” (Fars news agency, Teheran, Feb. 25, 2017)
5. “India clears $2.6 billion air defense system purchase from Israel” (By Alexei Danichev, Sputnik, Feb. 24, 2017)
ARTICLES
“350% INCREASE IN WOMEN WARFIGHTERS IN THE IDF GROUND ARM”
“350% Increase in Women Warfighters in the IDF Ground Arm”
Following a staff work effort that lasted about eighteen months, the IDF publishes new data, trends, and conclusions regarding the integration of female warfighters in the IDF Ground Arm
By Or Heller
Israel Defense Magazine
February 23, 2017
[Tom Gross adds: some in Israel have criticized this decision to reduce fire-power and use lighter weapons for both male and female troops in some battalions in an effort to accommodate female recruits, saying that Hizbullah and other forces who may attack Israel won’t be doing the same. ]
http://www.israeldefense.co.il/en/node/28641
IDF sources reported a 350% increase in the number of female warfighters serving in the IDF Ground Arm between 2015 and 2016, an improvement in motivation to opt for combat positions among female recruits from the religious sector, and an increase in the recruitment of religious female warfighters into the Combat Intelligence Collection Corps – at present the “Eilat” company is a “gender specific” company and soon the entire “Eitam” battalion will become a “gender specific” battalion enabling religious female warfighters to join its ranks.
As part of the establishment of the new border protection layout, which integrates the border protection mission and commands the various setups, the border protection training school will be established in November, where the personnel of this layout will be trained (surveillance operators, combat intelligence collection operators, trackers, operations center NCOs and light infantry border battalions). The establishment of the new border protection layout provides a glimpse into the data and service characteristics of IDF female warfighters. Last week, the IDF Ground Arm presented, in a briefing to the press held at the Quirya compound, the border protection layout currently being established. The new layout includes the four mixed light infantry battalions (Caracal, Arayot HaYarden, Bardelas and the new 47th battalion), the combat intelligence collection forces, the civilian settlement protection forces, the command centers of the regional brigades and divisions and other elements.
This new layout is being established pursuant to a staff work effort that lasted about eighteen months, during which the IDF attempted to make the necessary adaptations and improvements required in order to enable female warfighters to serve in the ground forces (today, some 1,300 female warfighters serve in ground units), with the emphasis on the female warfighters in the mixed battalions and the combat intelligence collection battalions, which are intended to constitute the core of the new layout. This staff work effort produced various data, trends and conclusions regarding the typical female warfighter of the IDF ground forces.
For example, a comparison between a company of new female recruits in basic infantry training course and a mixed warfighter company indicated that in the mixed company, the number of ‘sick bay’ calls and visits to the medical staff was four times higher. It was further indicated that female warfighters are 5 cm shorter, on average, than male warfighters, in addition to other physiological changes that would require adaptations of the nutrition of female warfighters as early as during the training stage at the new training base for mixed light infantry battalions. The new base is a part of the Sayarim Combat Intelligence Collection School in the Arava region, and is to be opened between August and November (today, the training companies of these battalions are scattered among the brigade training centers of the Golani, Givati and Nahal infantry brigades).
Another adaptation currently under development for the benefit of the female warfighters is a lighter and more comfortable helmet and a combat vest designed specifically to fit the female body. Additionally, a decision was made to discontinue the use of heavy machine guns and MAG machine guns in the configurations carried by the male and female warfighters. These machine guns will only be mounted on the routine security vehicles. The male and female warfighters will continue to carry the Negev machine guns regarded as lighter and more comfortable. The light infantry battalions will adopt the shortened version of the M-16 assault rifle, which is, admittedly longer but lighter than the Micro-Tavor rifle used thus far by the warfighters of the Caracal battalion.
IDF sources admitted that a substantial dropout was recorded about two years ago and about a year ago in two major elements of the new border protection layout: the new light infantry battalions and the female surveillance operator force.
9% of female surveillance operators in active service plus 12.5% of the operators undergoing training dropped out of this demanding job in 2015, but last year the dropout figure decreased to 8% during active service and 5.7% during training. The female surveillance operator layout has grown by 1500% in the last decade. Pursuant to the reconstruction of the operations center infrastructures and the revised leave arrangements, dropout figures decreased by 15% between 2015 and 2016. According to IDF sources, dropout has stopped and decreased in the light infantry battalions as well. “The staff was not suitable for these companies. They had squad leaders and platoon commanders that had hailed from such other brigades as the Golani Brigade and did not know how to deal with the special characteristics of a mixed company,” a senior Ground Arm officer explained. “Today, almost all of the commanders in these companies had previously served in the mixed battalions. Contrary to the American concept according to which the same selection processes are applied to both male and female warfighters, we decided to make adaptations so as to have many more female warfighters relative to the US Army.”
Another officer described the extent to which negative media reports regarding the service conditions affect motivation as early as during the recruitment stage: “A few weeks ago, 35 female recruits at the BAKUM (IDF central recruitment & selection depot) refused to be transported to the surveillance operator course pursuant to negative media reports, despite the increase we had experienced following Operation Protective Edge.” Another element with which the IDF is trying to cope with the fluctuations in motivation is the new unique beret designed for the entire personnel of the new layout by one of the female warfighters – a yellow and brown camouflage pattern.
All of the above notwithstanding, in the coming years, the new layout is not expected to be involved in the primary activities of the world of routine security that keep the IDF busy in the various border sectors. These activities are assigned to the battalions of the regular brigades – the same battalions expected to execute the ground maneuvers in enemy territory during wartime. These battalions, the very core of the combat force of the regular military, will continue to be trained for routine security operations by the IDF regional commands. “Our vision is to establish a training base through which all of the IDF battalions assigned to operational routine security activities will go,” explained the Ground Arm officer. “For the time being, the new layout includes the drivers, the operations center officers and female NCOs for the various sectors, the routine security coordinators and the trackers. The objective is to assign all four light infantry battalions to operational security activities in the Judea and Samaria district by 2018 – just like the mixed battalions of the IDF Home Front Command. Today, these four battalions also have operational plans for fighting in enemy territory near the border. We look at the border threat while planning a few steps ahead. Accordingly, for example, the issue of multicopters is already on our doorstep, as a surveillance asset or as a strike asset, operated by Hamas as well as by Hezbollah, and we are preparing to face this threat, among others.”
THE GERMAN MILITARY IS IN A TERRIBLE STATE
A German Clash over Trump’s NATO Demands: The German military is in a terrible state
U.S. President Donald Trump’s demand that NATO member states pay their fair share has turned into a political hot potato ahead of German elections later this year. But the debate ignores a salient fact: The German military is in a terrible state.
By Konstantin von Hammerstein
Der Spiegel
February 25, 2017
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/trump-nato-demands-becomes-political-debate-in-germany-a-1136140.html
It was really nothing more than a test. Sigmar Gabriel was standing at the lectern inside the Bayerischer Hof hotel in Munich for his first appearance at the Munich Security Conference in his new role as German foreign minister. And he looked terrible. He was sick and had cancelled many of his appointments, but nevertheless decided not to forego his speech and the Security Conference. He wanted to toss a fly into the NATO soup.
That morning, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence had spoken from the same stage and had used the spotlight to urge NATO member states to fulfil their alliance obligations as agreed and spend the equivalent of at least 2 percent of their GDPs on defense. Germany was one of his primary targets. The country is the clear economic leader in Europe, but Berlin only spends 1.2 percent of its GDP on the military, less even in absolute terms than the United Kingdom, France and a host of other European countries.
Gabriel was well aware of all that, but he said: “We have to be a bit careful here that we don’t over-interpret the 2 percent target.” He then became much clearer: “Maintain perspective, stay focused on the target, but avoid being consumed by the bliss of a new rearmament spiral!” That was the decisive phrase: Rearmament spiral.
Following the careful test balloon launched in Munich, Gabriel dripped a bit more oil into the fire a few days later, warning of “blind obedience” to the U.S. He also took a dig at his cabinet colleague Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen, saying that she apparently had a rather “naïve” notion regarding what was possible in Germany.
Just a few weeks after the inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump, the debate over military spending has reached the depths of the accelerating German election campaign. Trump himself triggered the debate, having declared several times that NATO is “obsolete” and hinting that the U.S. would make its loyalties dependent on member states paying their fair share.
Ever since the real-estate tycoon’s adversarial speeches in New York, the trans-Atlantic alliance has found itself in a crisis of trust. But for Gabriel, the issue opens up a world of possibilities.
MORALS AND VALUES
Gabriel, after all, is not just foreign minister. He is also the erstwhile head of the center-left Social Democrats (SPD). Since the party chose former European Parliament president Martin Schulz as its chancellor candidate a few weeks ago, the party has been revitalized and, after more than a decade of doldrums, finally believes it has a realistic chance of unseating Chancellor Angela Merkel in the September general election.
Gabriel is now using the battle over increased defense spending as a symbol of resistance against the unpopular President Trump, a man who most German voters view with a significant distrust. For the SPD, the debate has great potential: the enemy is clear and, at its core, the debate is about morals and values. It also has the advantage that it pushes Merkel’s conservatives into the Trump camp and puts them in the uncomfortable position of having to insist on spending more money on arms, which has never been politically palatable for a broad swath of the electorate.
The debate has now become so potent that it has slowly begun losing all connection to reality. The actual needs of the German military, the Bundeswehr, hardly play any role at all. Which means the question as to what it would actually mean were 2 percent of GDP invested in the military has gone unanswered. Would it really be a “rearmament spiral” as Gabriel would have it?
The best overview of the state of the German military is provided once a year in a report submitted by Armed Forces Commissioner Hans-Peter Bartels. As an SPD member of parliament for many years, Bartels is a credible voice from the perspective of the Social Democrats. And the image that he paints of the Bundeswehr is dark indeed.
One year ago, he described how the Saxony-based 371st tank battalion, prior to taking on its role as “spearhead” of the NATO Response Force, had to borrow 15,000 pieces of equipment from 56 other German military units. In another example, the 345th artillery training battalion, based just west of Frankfurt, was officially supposed to have 24 armored artillery vehicles at its disposal. In reality, though, it had just seven, of which six were on standby for NATO and could not be used. And the seventh was in reserve for the six on standby. Troops reported to Bartels that they hadn’t been able to carry out training exercises at the site for the last three years.
‘SELF-REINFORCING’
There is an endless list of such examples: A mountain infantry unit had only 96 pairs of night-vision goggles available instead of the 522 it had been allotted -- of which 76 had to be loaned out to other units. Which meant they only had 20, of which 17 were damaged.
The lack of equipment, Bartels wrote in his most recent report, has led to a system of sharing by necessity. “It is often the case, with Navy units that are returning from a mission, for example, that as soon as they dock in their homeport, pieces of equipment are immediately dismounted from ships and then remounted on those vessels heading out to replace them, such as (radar devices). The components wear out much more quickly due to the frequent mounting and dismounting, such that the process becomes self-reinforcing.”
One can imagine the Bundeswehr as a fire department which, due to a lack of money, has no hoses, too few helmets, hardly any ladder trucks and no oxygen masks. But the department isn’t eliminated entirely just in case a fire breaks out.
Following cabinet consultations back in 2010, then-Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg of the CSU, the Bavarian sister party of Merkel’s CDU, rejoiced at the government’s decision to cut 8.3 billion euros from the defense budget by 2014, referring to it as a “unique opportunity” for “realignment.” The German military still hasn’t recovered.
The military had already shrunk in the two decades since the end of the Cold War, from more than half a million soldiers to just 205,000 in 2011. The number of Leopard 2 battle tanks at the Bundeswehr’s disposal likewise plunged during that same time period, from 2,000 to 225. The additional cuts announced by Guttenberg, largely a consequence of the financial crisis, were a step too far. “The national goal of budget consolidation,” Guttenberg said at the time, “is the most important strategic parameter” for the reorganization of the German military.
A STREAM OF NEW EUPHEMISMS
In the future, the structures weren’t going to determined spending needs, but spending needs were going to determine the structures. Classic areas of concern, such as alliance and national defense needs, were no longer seen as central. Operations overseas became the priority, determining personnel, materiel and munitions needs. NATO’s eastern flank was still at peace and, according to the logic of the time, since the boys were in Afghanistan anyway, not as many tanks were needed at home.
The Defense Ministry invented a constant stream of new euphemisms to describe the measures taken to deal with the deficiencies. “Dynamic Availability Management,” for example, shortened to the acronym DynVM, was used to describe a situation when one unit had to borrow tanks from another for exercises. And when just three surveillance drones were acquired instead of the 20 necessary, it was termed “minimum contribution.”
Erhard Bühler still shudders when he is forced to use such terms. As commander of the 10th tank division, he was an immediate victim of the budget cuts. He was told by Berlin one morning that his base was slated for closure and had to give a press conference at noon, still largely in the dark about what was happening.
The lieutenant general is now head of the planning division in the Defense Ministry and thus responsible for the future constellation of the German military. In addition to the German flag, a large oil painting of Prussian King Frederick the Great hangs on the wall behind his desk. He continually pulls graphics out of a file folder showing the decline of the Bundeswehr.
The consequences of Guttenberg’s “realignment,” the graphics make clear, are hollow structures and a military that is slowly wearing out. There is a huge need for new, modern equipment. According to protocol, the army is supposed to have at least 70 percent of large pieces of equipment, such as tanks and armored vehicles, available during operations. In reality, though, it is often much less than that. Other systems, such as night-vision goggles, are often missing completely.
Bühler’s colorful graphics make it clear how the 2010 budget cuts made it impossible for several years to pursue badly needed modernization efforts. Now, it will take several more years before that technology can be delivered to the troops.
NECESSARY MODERNIZATION
With much to-do, Defense Minister von der Leyen has since announced several “trend reversals,” according to which the Bundeswehr is turning its back on Guttenberg’s focus on overseas operations. In the future, national and alliance defense will once again determine structures within the German military. Russian aggression has led to a reinterpretation of the threat levels on NATO’s eastern flank.
Since the seminal Harmel Report in 1967, compiled for NATO by the Belgian Foreign Minister Pierre Harmel, the alliance has viewed effective deterrence as an important partner alongside dialogue and negotiation. Security and the reduction of tensions are not contradictory, the philosophy holds, rather the one is dependent on the other. As such, rapprochement with Russia will only be possible if Moscow takes European military strength seriously. That becomes even more important if the U.S. under Trump withdraws from Europe.
After years of falling, the German defense budget is now climbing again. This year it is slated to rise by 8 percent to 37 billion euros. But even if Germany were to increase its budget to between 65 million and 75 million euros by 2024, thus fulfilling its 2 percent commitment, it would be far from being a “rearmament spiral.” Rather, it would serve to complete the necessary modernization of the German military. It would fill up the hollow structures of today.
Bühler is following the political debate carefully. In his graphics, the lines for the next budget year and thereafter are dotted and drawn in red. And they come to an end in 2021 -- at 1.5 percent.
HEZBOLLAH FORCES TO REMAIN IN SYRIA UNTIL POLITICAL DEAL REACHED
Hezbollah Forces to Remain in Syria until Political Deal Reached: Official
Tasnim News (Tehran)
February 25, 2017
https://www.tasnimnews.com/en/news/2017/02/25/1338983/hezbollah-forces-to-remain-in-syria-until-political-deal-reached-official
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Lebanese Hezbollah Resistance Movement’s second-in-command, Sheikh Naim Qassem, made assurances that the movement’s military forces will remain in war-hit Syria until a political agreement is reached there.
“The Hezbollah forces have been deployed to Syria to support resistance front,” Sheikh Qassem said in an exclusive interview with the Tasnim News Agency.
The forces will remain stationed in Syria as long as they are needed and they will not return to Lebanon until a political solution is reached in the Arab country, the cleric added.
The Hezbollah official also emphasized that the current situation in Syria is better than ever and there is a good commitment to the nationwide ceasefire there.
He added that the Syrian forces have made major advances against foreign-backed terrorist and now the grounds are provided for reaching a political solution to the Syrian crisis.
Sheikh Qassem had traveled to Iran to attend an international conference on Palestinian Intifada held in Tehran earlier this week with around 700 foreign officials and intellectuals, including 18 parliament speakers, in attendance.
Diplomatic efforts to end fighting in Syria have gained momentum in recent weeks with the announcement of a ceasefire in the Arab country in early January.
The truce, which was negotiated between Russia, Iran, Turkey, the Damascus government and the Syrian opposition, excludes terrorist groups such as Daesh and Jabhat Fateh al-Sham.
Syria has been gripped by civil war since March 2011 with various terrorist groups, including Daesh (also known as ISIS or ISIL), currently controlling parts of it.
According to a report by the Syrian Center for Policy Research, the conflict has claimed the lives of over 470,000 people, injured 1.9 million others, and displaced nearly half of the country’s pre-war population of about 23 million within or beyond its borders.
(IRANIAN-REGIME CONTROLLED) IRAQI NUJABA MOVEMENT READY TO JOIN SYRIAN ARMY OPERATION TO LIBERATE OCCUPIED GOLAN
Iraqi Nujaba Movement Ready to Join Syrian Army Operation to Liberate Occupied Golan
Fars news agency (Iran)
February 25, 2017
http://en.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13951207000842
TEHRAN (FNA)- Sheikh Akram al-Ka’abi, the leader of Hezbollah al-Nujaba, a major Iraqi Shiite resistance movement fighting the ISIL, underlined his forces’ preparedness to cooperate with the Syrian Army troops to liberate the Golan region occupied by Israeli forces.
Al-Ka’abi said that the ISIL terrorist group is implementing an Israeli-initiated road map under the supervision of the US with the cooperation of Turkey and Arab states of the Persian Gulf in the region.
“And our presence in Syria is aimed at resisting against this plot,” Ka’abi underscored.
He further underlined Iraqi al-Nujaba movement’s full readiness to take part in a war to liberate Israeli-occupied Golan Heights shoulder to shoulder with the Syrian Army soldiers.
A spokesman of Iraq’s Hezbollah al-Nujaba Movement declared in a statement in January that his fighters would fight against the terrorist groups in Syria until driving all of them out of the neighboring country.
“We were the first group (of popular forces) to have arrived in Syria to fight terrorists and we will stay there until the last terrorist leaves the country,” Seyed Hashem al-Moussavi said in his statement.
He reiterated that the Iraqi popular forces fight against the terrorist groups for humanitarian reasons, and said, “The reason for our presence in Syria is only to fight terrorism.”
His words came as Syrian soldiers, the Lebanese Hezbollah fighters and the Iraqi al-Nujaba Movement were about to carry out a joint operation on the Southern outskirts of Aleppo city to liberate the districts of Rashedeen 4 and 5 and then rush to Khan Touman to free the town from Jeish Al-Fatah coalition of terrorist groups.
INDIA CLEARS $2.6 BILLION AIR DEFENSE SYSTEM PURCHASE FROM ISRAEL
India Clears $2.6 Billion Air Defense System Purchase From Israel
By Alexei Danichev
Sputnik
February 24, 2017
India is also negotiating with Russia for long range air defense system S-400 which is expected to be finalized next month.
https://sputniknews.com/asia/201702241051002481-india-air-defense-russia/
NEW DELHI (Sputnik) — In a bid to expedite the overhauling of obsolete air defense system, Indian government has approved a budget of $2.6 billion for the acquisition of Medium Range Surface to Air Defense Missile Systems from Israel. Sources told Sputnik that this acquisition for the Indian Army will be in line with ongoing India-Israel LRSAM and MRSAM projects for Indian Navy and Indian Air Force respectively. The system is jointly developed by India and Israel and will intercept aerial threats at range up to 70 Kilometer. According to approved proposal, Indian Army will start receiving the missile system by 2023. A total of 40 firing units and over 200 missiles are proposed for induction in the Indian armed forces.
The project will be completed in India under the guidance of Defense Research Development Organization. Bharat Dynamics is expected to produce the system whereas private sector companies like Tata Power SED and Larson & Turbo are likely to participate for supplying components for the missile system.
“For long range missile systems, we are in talks with Russia for S-400, but in medium range there is a clear gap and threat is actually that, medium range threat is more. All the combat formations that are moving around, they require cover then staging area of the army, consultation areas of the army, tactical assembly areas of the army; they require coverage. Airfields also require coverage. Vulnerable areas and points require air defense coverage. MRSAM is important kind of an acquisition. Equally important is the fact that it will be Make in India product,” says Brigadier Rumel Dahiya (retired), a renowned defense analyst.
India’s air defense has received a major setback in the recent past as there has not been any major acquisition except for some for short range Akash missile system. “This is not sufficient. A long time back, we had taken some air defense missile systems from Russia, that was three decades back,” Dahiya added.
MRSAM will be an important component of India’s Cold Start doctrine. Cold Start doctrine is considered as retaliatory offensive arrangement along western border through which Indian armed forces can hit specific targets of rivals in limited duration. Indian Army had been continuously requisitioning for MRSAM since a long time back to defend mechanized formations operating in the plains and desert regions of the country.
* “In a White House laden with competing power centers, a trio of military men has emerged as a force to be reckoned with. All three are notable for their independence from Trump... None had a prior relationship with him but all have long histories with each other.”
* “The U.S. national security team – traditionalist lieutenants, disruptive boss – might be trying to reproduce the old Nixonian ‘madman theory.’ That’s when adversaries tread carefully because they suspect the U.S. president of being unpredictable, occasionally reckless and potentially crazy dangerous [and it may already be having benefits as China and others start to fall into line].”
* “The U.S. military is contemplating a long-term presence in Iraq to stabilize the country after the anticipated defeat of ISIS…The longer-term approach to stabilizing Iraq stands in stark contrast to policies pursued by President Obama, who ran on a platform of getting U.S. troops out of Iraq and campaigned for reelection based on having withdrawn all U.S. troops in 2011 [leading to ISIS stepping into fill the gap the following year, as the defense and intelligence establishment had warned Obama would happen by prematurely withdrawing].”
* Sidelining the State Department old guard: those who have been obsessed on being hard on Israel, soft on Islamic radicalism, are being pushed out of the way. Trump and Tillerson bring in outsiders such as Nikki Haley, to take a different line.
***
I attach six articles concerning Donald Trump’s foreign policy. If you have limited time, I suggest only reading the first two pieces.
-- Tom Gross
* You can also find other items that are not in these dispatches if you “like” this page on Facebook www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia
CONTENTS
1. “Trump and the ‘madman theory’” (By Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, Feb. 24, 2017)
2. “Trio of military men gain growing influence with Trump” (By Vivian Salam and Julie Pace, Associated Press / Military Times, Feb. 23, 2017)
3. “Top general: US mulling ‘long-term commitment’ in Iraq” (By Ryan Browne, CNN, Feb. 23, 2017)
4. “More U.S. troops may be needed against ISIS in Syria, a top general says” (By Michael Gordon, NY Times, Feb. 23, 2017)
5. “In first month of Trump presidency, State Department has been sidelined” (By Carol Morello and Anne Gearan, Washington Post, Feb. 22, 2017)
6. “It’s a bloodbath at the State Department” (By Daniel Halper, NY Post, Feb. 17, 2017)
ADOPTING THE “MADMAN THEORY” TO PRESSURE ADVERSARIES?
Trump and the ‘madman theory’
By Charles Krauthammer
The Washington Post
February 24, 2017
At the heart of President Trump’s foreign policy team lies a glaring contradiction. On the one hand, it is composed of men of experience, judgment and traditionalism. Meaning, they are all very much within the parameters of mainstream American internationalism as practiced since 1945. Practically every member of the team – the heads of State, Homeland Security, the CIA, and most especially Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and national security adviser H.R. McMaster – could fit in a Cabinet put together by, say, Hillary Clinton.
The commander in chief, on the other hand, is quite the opposite – inexperienced, untraditional, unbounded. His pronouncements on everything from the one-China policy to the two-state (Arab-Israeli) solution, from NATO obsolescence to the ravages of free trade, continue to confound and, as we say today, disrupt.
The obvious question is: Can this arrangement possibly work? The answer thus far, surprisingly, is: perhaps.
The sample size is tiny but take, for example, the German excursion. Trump dispatched his grown-ups – Vice President Pence, Defense Secretary Mattis, Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson – to various international confabs in Germany to reassure allies with the usual pieties about America’s commitment to European security. They did drop a few hints to Trump’s loud complaints about allied parasitism, in particular shirking their share of the defense burden.
Within days, Germany announced a 20,000-troop expansion of its military. Smaller European countries are likely to take note of the new setup. It’s classic good-cop, bad-cop: The secretaries represent foreign policy continuity but their boss preaches America First. Message: Shape up.
John Hannah of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies suggests that the push-pull effect might work on foes as well as friends. On Saturday, China announced a cutoff of all coal imports from North Korea for the rest of 2017. Constituting more than one-third of all North Korean exports, this is a major blow to its economy.
True, part of the reason could be Chinese ire at the brazen assassination of Kim Jong Un’s half brother, who had been under Chinese protection. Nonetheless, the boycott was declared just days after a provocative North Korean missile launch – and shortly into the term of a new American president who has shown that he can be erratic and quite disdainful of Chinese sensibilities.
His wavering on the one-China policy took Beijing by surprise. Trump also strongly denounced Chinese expansion in the South China Sea and conducted an ostentatious love-in with Japan’s prime minister, something guaranteed to rankle the Chinese. Beijing’s boycott of Pyongyang is many things, among them a nod to Washington.
This suggests that the peculiar and discordant makeup of the U.S. national security team – traditionalist lieutenants, disruptive boss – might reproduce the old Nixonian “madman theory.” That’s when adversaries tread carefully because they suspect the U.S. president of being unpredictable, occasionally reckless and potentially crazy dangerous. Henry Kissinger, with Nixon’s collaboration, tried more than once to exploit this perception to pressure adversaries.
Trump’s people have already shown a delicate touch in dealing with his bouts of loopiness. Trump has gone on for years about how we should have taken Iraq’s oil for ourselves. Sunday in Baghdad, Mattis wryly backed off, telling his hosts that “All of us in America have generally paid for our gas and oil all along, and I am sure we will continue to do so in the future.”
Yet sometimes an off-center comment can have its uses. Take Trump’s casual dismissal of a U.S. commitment to a two-state solution in the Middle East. The next day, U.S. policy was brought back in line by his own U.N. ambassador. But this diversion might prove salutary. It’s a message to the Palestinians that their decades of rejectionism may not continue to pay off with an inexorable march toward statehood – that there may actually be a price to pay for making no concessions and simply waiting for the U.S. to deliver them a Palestinian state.
To be sure, a two-track, two-policy, two-reality foreign policy is risky, unsettling and has the potential to go totally off the rails. This is not how you would draw it up in advance. It’s unstable and confusing. But the experience of the first month suggests that, with prudence and luck, it can yield the occasional benefit – that the combination of radical rhetoric and conventional policy may induce better behavior both in friend and foe.
Alas, there is also a worst-case scenario. It needs no elaboration.
TRIO OF MILITARY MEN GAIN GROWING INFLUENCE WITH TRUMP
Trio of military men gain growing influence with Trump
By Vivian Salam and Julie Pace
The Associated Press
February 23, 2017
http://www.militarytimes.com/articles/trio-of-military-men-gain-growing-influence-with-trump
WASHINGTON – In a White House laden with competing power centers, a trio of military men has emerged as a force to be reckoned with.
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly and Joint Chiefs Chairman Joseph Dunford have quickly formed a stabilizing alliance in an administration whose earliest days have been marked by turmoil. At working dinners and meetings with President Donald Trump, the men – all retired or current generals – have sought to guide the new leader and foreign policy novice.
And they have increasingly represented Trump around the world, seeking to allay concerns about the new president and his nascent foreign policy.
Their fingerprints can increasingly be seen on the president’s early national security moves, from the reworking of his controversial refugee and immigration order to the walking back of his talk of a “military operation” for deportations to his search for a national security adviser after the first was ousted.
All three are notable for their independence from Trump. None had a prior relationship with him but all have long histories with each other.
When Kelly’s son was killed in Afghanistan in 2010, it was Dunford who arrived at his house in uniform to inform him. Mattis and Kelly recommended each other for defense secretary. All three served in Iraq around the same time.
In Washington and in foreign capitals, their long resumes have been a welcome addition to an administration led by a president and several advisers with no experience in government.
“It should be reassuring that they are visible with Trump and cementing their influence,” said Christine Wormuth, a former undersecretary of defense for policy and a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank.
The rising power of Mattis, Kelly and Dunford also could assuage some fears among Republicans that national security decision-making is becoming too concentrated in the White House West Wing. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, has been deeply involved in discussions with foreign officials. And chief strategist Steve Bannon, a media executive with no foreign policy experience, now has a seat on Trump’s Principals Committee, which weighs pressing national security issues.
Of the three military men, Mattis has emerged as a dominant figure in Trump’s orbit.
A 66-year-old retired Marine, Mattis is credited by some National Security Council staff with blocking an executive order that would have reopened CIA “black sites.” Trump has said the Pentagon chief convinced him it wasn’t necessary to bring back banned torture techniques like waterboarding.
On his way to Baghdad this week, Mattis bluntly rebuffed Trump’s assertion that America may have a second chance to take Iraqi oil as compensation for U.S. efforts in the war-torn country.
“We’re not in Iraq to seize anybody’s oil,” Mattis told reporters.
Kelly, too, has tried to moderate some of the president’s hard-line positions. Hours after Trump said deportations of people in the U.S. illegally were being carried out as a “military operation,” Kelly said Thursday in Mexico that the U.S. would not enlist the military to enforce immigration laws.
White House spokesman Sean Spicer later said Trump was describing the “precision” of the operations and not referring to the military actually being involved.
Mattis and Kelly are said to have been deeply frustrated with the rollout of Trump’s refugee and immigration ban and made clear to associates that they were not involved in crafting the directive. Both moved swiftly to address gaps in the measure, with Mattis asking that Iraqis who helped U.S. troops be exempt and Kelly clarifying that green card holders would not be affected.
For the first few weeks after the inauguration, Mattis and Kelly agreed that one of them should remain in the United States to keep tabs on the orders rapidly firing out of the White House, according to a person familiar with the discussions.
Despite their concerns about Trump’s travel order, neither has spoken out against it. In fact, Kelly launched a particularly robust defense of it, which was welcomed by the White House, an administration official said.
The official and others with knowledge of the emerging dynamic insisted on anonymity in order to discuss the administration’s internal dynamics.
While Trump tapped Mattis and Kelly for his Cabinet, he inherited Dunford, whose term as Joint Chiefs chairman runs through the end of the year. But the president, who has stocked his national security team with military leaders, is said to see Dunford as a “general’s general,” according to another person with knowledge of Trump’s team.
Earlier this week, Trump tapped another military man, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, as his national security adviser after firing Michael Flynn for misleading the White House about his dealings with Russia. Mattis, Kelly and Dunford all praised the pick, the administration official said.
Loren Schulman, a national security and defense expert at the Center for a New American Security, said the generals “speak similar language, in terms of how to assess risk or what military options are possible or relationships overseas – those are the good things they bring to the table.”
What’s bad, Schulman said, is that “military tools are not the only tools in the foreign policy tool kit.”
Thus far, the military leaders have overshadowed Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the former head of Exxon Mobil. Tillerson has taken a low-key approach during his first several weeks on the job, leading to concern among some diplomats that he is not a major player in Trump’s national security team.
Some officials worry that diplomacy has been relegated to a back seat or been taken over by the White House. In response to such concerns, acting department spokesman Mark Toner, a career foreign service officer who served as deputy spokesman under John Kerry, said late Wednesday that press briefings would resume soon.
U.S. MULLING “LONG-TERM COMMITMENT” IN IRAQ
Top general: US mulling ‘long-term commitment’ in Iraq
By Ryan Browne
CNN
February 23, 2017
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/02/23/politics/dunford-us-iraq-commitment/index.html
The US military is contemplating a long-term presence in Iraq to stabilize the country after the anticipated defeat ISIS, America’s top military officer said Thursday.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Joseph Dunford said that both the US and NATO have begun discussions with Iraq about the possibility.
“We have, as has NATO, begun a dialogue about a long term commitment to grow the capacity, maintain the capacity of Iraqi Security Forces, but no decisions have been made yet,” Dunford told an audience at the Brookings Institution in Washington, his first time fielding questions since the inauguration of President Donald Trump.
“Iraq has begun to speak, and you’ve heard Prime Minister (Haider) Abadi speak, about the international community continuing to support defense capacity building,” he added.
A NATO official told CNN Friday that, at Abadi’s request, the alliance had already begun training Iraqi troops this month and that NATO’s presence there “has no fixed end date.”
Dunford’s comments come days after Secretary of Defense James Mattis and the commander of the US-led counter-ISIS coalition, Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend, suggested in Baghdad that there would be continued US-Iraqi military collaboration even after the terror group is ejected from Mosul. Forces are currently advancing on the terror group there, the last major city it controls.
“The Iraqi people, the Iraqi military and the Iraqi political leadership recognizes what they’re up against and the value of the coalition and the partnership in particular with the United States, Mattis told reporters Monday on a trip to Baghdad. “I imagine we’ll be in this fight for a while and we’ll stand by each other.”
The longer-term approach to stabilizing Iraq stands in stark contrast to policies pursued by President Barack Obama, who ran on a platform of getting US troops out of Iraq and campaigned for reelection based on having withdrawn all US troops in 2011.
Obama later had to recommit American forces upon the rise of ISIS, but kept their involvement limited. A longer assignment could trigger political pushback.
Dunford seemed to take a subtle swipe at Obama as well as offer a warning to his current commander in chief when he stressed Thursday that “we can’t be paralyzed” with the difficult decision in the fight against ISIS. Many in the military had pushed the Obama White House to take more forceful action to confront the terror group, something Trump has pledged to do.
Before deciding on a specific course, however, Trump directed the Pentagon, with input from the State Department and Treasury, to draw up a plan to be delivered Monday or Tuesday to the White House for consideration.
“It’s fair to say we’ll provide him a full range of options,” Dunford said, refusing to rule anything out.
A US defense official told CNN this week that the document would include strategies, goals and resources needed to accelerate the fight, potentially proposing an increase in resources for Syria. The plan is also expected to address ISIS franchises outside of Syria and Iraq, including in Yemen, Libya and Afghanistan.
At Brookings, Dunford mentioned the need to weigh the views of regional players, such as key American ally Turkey, which opposes US-backed Kurdish groups currently carrying out some of the most effective fighting against ISIS in Syria.
“We are wrestling with all those issues, but at the end of the day we can’t be paralyzed by tough choices,” Dunford said.
MORE U.S. TROOPS MAY BE NEEDED AGAINST ISIS IN SYRIA
More U.S. Troops May Be Needed Against ISIS in Syria, a Top General Says
By Michael Gordon
New York Times
Feb. 23, 2017
AMMAN, Jordan – More American troops may be needed in Syria to speed the campaign against the Islamic State, the top United States commander for the Middle East said on Wednesday.
“I am very concerned about maintaining momentum,” Gen. Joseph L. Votel, the head of the United States Central Command, told reporters accompanying him on a trip to the region.
“It could be that we take on a larger burden ourselves,” he added. “That’s an option.”
The current American strategy is to press the Islamic State from multiple directions by moving ahead with the offensive to retake the Syrian city of Raqqa even as Iraqi forces carry on their operation to take western Mosul.
Syrian Kurdish and Arab fighters backed by the United States are to play the principal role in seizing Raqqa, the de facto capital of the Islamic State’s professed caliphate.
But one option being considered is for American troops to step up their support of the fighters by firing artillery, shooting mortars, helping with logistics and significantly expanding efforts to advise them, much as the United States is doing for Iraqi forces in the battle for Mosul.
In late January, President Trump gave the defense secretary, Jim Mattis, 30 days to develop a “preliminary plan” to defeat the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. That deadline is fast approaching.
Mr. Trump has not said what steps he is prepared to take to make good on his campaign vow to hasten the defeat of the Islamic State. But he has a high regard for American generals and for Mr. Mattis, and he is likely to be receptive to their recommendations.
General Votel’s trip to the region and a visit Mr. Mattis recently made to Iraq are intended to help the Pentagon refine the plan that is presented to the White House.
The United States has about 500 Special Operations troops in Syria. If the American military presence were to be expanded, additional personnel could come from conventional combat units, though General Votel stressed that he would not recommend deploying large combat formations.
“We want to bring the right capabilities forward,” he said. “Not all of those are necessarily resident in the Special Operations community. If we need additional artillery or things like that, I want to be able to bring those forward to augment our operations.”
Raqqa has long been an objective for the American-led campaign. In addition to serving as the Islamic State’s capital, it has been a sanctuary for militants who have plotted to carry out terrorist attacks in Europe.
But the mission to seize Raqqa has been seriously complicated by Turkey’s vociferous objections to any effort by the United States to arm the People’s Protection Units, a Kurdish militia in northern Syria known by its Kurdish initials, Y.P.G.
American military officers have said that the Y.P.G. is the most capable Syrian fighting force and the best hope for mounting an attack to capture Raqqa in the coming weeks. To conduct urban warfare, however, the group needs to be equipped with armored vehicles, heavy machine guns and other arms.
Turkey, however, has denounced the Y.P.G. as a terrorist group. The United States ambassador in Ankara, American officials say, has cautioned that proceeding with the plan to arm the Kurdish group could prompt a major Turkish backlash, which could ultimately undermine American military efforts in Syria.
After months of sharp debate within his administration, President Barack Obama concluded during his final week in office that the United States should arm the Y.P.G., former administration officials said. But Mr. Obama left the ultimate decision to the Trump administration, which had informed his national security adviser that it wanted to conduct its own review of military strategy.
Many observers say that if arming the Y.P.G. is ruled out, it could take a long time to cobble together an alternative force that could draw on Turkish-backed Syrian militias and other fighters. How effective that force might be is unclear. The Turkish military and the Syrian fighters it backs have had a difficult time trying to seize the northern town of Al Bab from the Islamic State even though American teams have been inserted with Turkish units to call in American airstrikes.
General Votel did not detail how the United States might proceed if the White House ruled out equipping the Y.P.G. in deference to Turkish concerns. But he asserted there were several ways to keep up the pressure against Raqqa, including making greater use of American troops.
“We might bring potentially more of our assets to bear if we need to, as opposed to relying on our partners,” he said. “That’s an option.”
“There could be other forces that we potentially bring in to do this,” General Votel added. “It could be a different approach to how we go after the city in terms of changing our tactics.”
Toward the end of his administration, Mr. Obama approved the use of three Apache attack helicopters to support the Raqqa offensive. Expanding the use of Apaches, which have yet to be deployed in Syria, could be an option as well, observers say.
What has been successful “for us in the campaign thus far, I think, has been simultaneous pressure on the Islamic State and continuing to present them with lots of dilemmas,” General Votel said.
SIDELINING THE STATE DEPARTMENT OLD GUARD
In first month of Trump presidency, State Department has been sidelined
By Carol Morello and Anne Gearan,
Washington Post
February 22
The Trump administration in its first month has largely benched the State Department from its long-standing role as the preeminent voice of U.S. foreign policy, curtailing public engagement and official travel and relegating Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to a mostly offstage role.
Decisions on hiring, policy and scheduling are being driven by a White House often wary of the foreign policy establishment and struggling to set priorities and write policy on the fly.
The most visible change at the State Department is the month-long lack of daily press briefings, a fixture since John Foster Dulles was secretary of state in the 1950s. The televised question-and-answer session is watched closely around the world, and past administrations have pointed proudly to the accountability of having a government spokesman available to domestic and foreign press almost every day without fail.
Tillerson has also been notably absent from White House meetings with foreign leaders. The State Department was represented by the acting deputy, Tom Shannon, at the president’s discussions with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Because he was en route to Bonn for a Group of 20 meeting, Tillerson did not join Trump’s meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, although the two had a working dinner the night before.
It is still early in Tillerson’s tenure, and former State Department officials, from Republican and Democratic administrations alike, say his performance reflects the disarray in the White House. The administration had sent mixed signals on key issues such as U.S. policy toward China and commitment to the NATO alliance even before Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was forced to resign last week.
Some of the State Department’s lack of public diplomacy is probably due to the learning curve of the former oil executive turned diplomat. Other factors appear to be at play, including an aversion to freewheeling questions from reporters and the many department vacancies.
But the biggest factor is the confusing lines of communication and authority to the White House, and Trump’s inclination to farm out elements of foreign policy to a kitchen Cabinet of close advisers.
Chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon attends national security meetings and recently spoke with the German ambassador, and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has been given a major role in getting Israeli-Palestinian talks on track, a job usually the preserve of the State Department. When asked about foreign policy developments, State Department officials often have referred reporters to the White House.
“Tillerson isn’t being purposefully sidelined; he’s just caught up in an administration with too many competing power centers and a president who’s unwilling or unable to decide who he wants to play the lead role in implementing his foreign policy,” said Aaron David Miller, a former diplomat who advised Republican and Democratic presidents about the Middle East. “The problem is letting a thousand flowers and tweets bloom isn’t the best way to run the foreign policy of the world’s most consequential power.”
So far, most of Tillerson’s diplomacy has been conducted out of sight. He has met with several visiting foreign ministers, spoken on the phone with dozens of other diplomats and met more at the G-20 meeting last week in Bonn.
Unlike in previous administrations, the State Department has not always made brief accounts of those conversations public. After Tillerson met with European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini this month, the State Department said nothing, while Mogherini held a detailed on-the-record briefing for reporters.
“I think it’s hard to go out and talk to the press if you don’t know what to say,” said Richard Boucher, a retired career diplomat and former spokesman for Republican and Democratic administrations.
“I think they’re struggling to get back to square one and reassure people they aren’t undercutting the foundations of what America stood for,” he added. “So they don’t have a lot to say and don’t know how to use the press to influence getting there.”
In some cases, governments of countries that are not democracies have been more transparent than the State Department. Phone conversations Tillerson had with the foreign ministers of Russia and Egypt as well as a phone conversation with Saudi Arabia’s King Salman came to light only when the officials told their local press about them.
“It behooves the administration to give our side of any conversation,” said Richard Stengel, the undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs from 2014 through 2016 in the Obama administration. “Having someone put points on the scoreboard and not taking the shot yourself seems peculiar to me.”
Tillerson speaks frequently with Trump and met with him before leaving Washington on Wednesday for meetings in Mexico that will include Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly. A senior State Department official said Tillerson has also had several working meals with the president and provided Trump a debriefing on the meetings in Bonn.
Still, the new secretary of state has maintained an extremely low profile since taking office Feb. 1. His influence appears muted, at least for now, and he suffered a public embarrassment just a week into the job when Trump rejected his choice of a deputy, Republican foreign policy veteran Elliott Abrams, as insufficiently loyal to Trump.
“Tillerson is pretty clearly a decent character and would be a perfectly normal Republican secretary of state, but he’s clearly hampered in all kinds of ways, including in making his own appointments,” said Eliot Cohen, who was a top aide to former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. “The Elliott Abrams example is pretty horrifying.”
Tillerson has a small group of aides clustered around him, including chief of staff Margaret Peterlin, a former deputy director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office; R.C. Hammond, who was press secretary in Newt Gingrich’s 2012 presidential campaign; Matt Mowers, a former aide to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie who worked on the Trump campaign; and Jennifer Hazelton, who worked at CNN and Fox News before joining the Trump campaign.
Asked whether the absence of top officials at State – Tillerson and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley are the only Trump-selected officials on the job – is hampering the work of diplomacy, the department referred to earlier comments from White House press secretary Sean Spicer.
“The secretary is having an ongoing and productive exchange with the president and his team that is identifying very talented individuals to serve and help the department execute its mission,” Spicer said.
Though the president always sets foreign policy, often it is considered better for tactical reasons to have policies explained by the State Department and the secretary of state instead of the president.
Former secretaries of state were viewed as the primary public face of U.S. foreign policy, a role Tillerson has yet to fill.
“I support Secretary Tillerson and believe everyone should be patient while he defines his operating style,” said Jim Wilkinson, who was a senior adviser to Rice.
Tillerson has not taken the usual complement of beat reporters with him on either of his foreign trips so far, opting instead for small “pools” that send reports to others. Other recent secretaries of state have made a point of orchestrating a long, symbolic first trip, showcasing their own agendas with news conferences and interviews.
State Department officials have said the daily press briefings are only temporarily shelved while the new administration gets its footing, but there has been no announcement about when they will resume or whether they will still be held every day.
“The Department of State continues to provide members of the media a full suite of services,” acting department spokesman Mark Toner said Wednesday. “In addition to regular press briefings conducted by a department spokesperson, reporters will soon have access to additional opportunities each week to interact with State Department officials.”
Other incoming administrations have called a hiatus of a few days at most before the briefings resumed. In 2001, the last time a Republican took over after a Democratic administration, there was no break at all. Boucher briefed on Monday, Jan. 22, answering questions about the Philippines, Iraq and Colin L. Powell’s first day on the job as secretary of state.
The silence from the State Department is all the more notable for the combative and sometimes adversarial stance Spicer has adopted and Trump’s own denunciations of major news organizations as biased. Last week, Trump used his favorite bypass, Twitter, to call the news media “the enemy of the American People.”
The former ExxonMobil chief executive has made no speeches beyond a well-received address to State Department employees on his arrival and has held no news conferences. He made only one brief, substantive remark on policy within reporters’ earshot during an intensive round of meetings in Bonn last week and ignored shouted questions that other foreign ministers attending the G-20 session gladly answered.
CLEANING HOUSE (OF THE LEFT-WING ESTABLISHMENT) AT THE STATE DEPARTMENT
It’s a bloodbath at the State Department
By Daniel Halper
New York Post
February 17, 2017
http://nypost.com/2017/02/17/rex-tillerson-fires-top-officials-at-state-department/
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is cleaning house at the State Department, according to a report.
Staffers in the offices of deputy secretary of state for management and resources as well as counselor were shown the door Thursday, according to CBS News.
Many of those let go were on the building’s seventh floor – top-floor bigs – a symbolically important sign to the rest of the diplomatic corps that their new boss has different priorities than the last one.
The staffing changes came as Tillerson was on his first foreign trip – attending a G-20 meeting in Bonn, Germany.
“As part of the transition from one administration to the next, we continue to build out our team. The State Department is supported by a very talented group of individuals, both Republicans and Democrats,” State Department spokesman RC Hammond told CBS.
“We are appreciative to any American who dedicates their talents to public,” he added.
This week’s round of firings marks the second time State Department personnel have been cleared out since President Trump took office last month.
Four top officials were cleared out of the building at the end of January.
“As is standard with every transition, the outgoing administration, in coordination with the incoming one, requested all politically appointed officers submit letters of resignation,” a State Department spokesman said at the time.
U.S. Vice President Mike Pence visited Dachau death camp after attending the nearby Munich security summit last weekend. Above, Pence stands behind the gate with the infamous lie “Work sets you free”.
Pence was joined by his wife Karen and daughter Charlotte. At Pence’s request Dachau survivor Abba Naor, above right, who lives in Israel, showed them the ovens and crematorium, where the bodes of tens of thousands of German and Austrian Jews and others were disposed of having been worked to death.
TRUMP FINALLY FIRMLY CONDEMNS ANTI-SEMITISM AND RACISM
[Note by Tom Gross]
As I have pointed out previously, before he entered politics Donald Trump’s record on Jewish issues was very positive. Among other things, he condemned anti-Semitism and donated money to groups that fought prejudice.
However, during the presidential campaign, there was a strain of anti-Semitism among some of Trump’s more extremist supporters and Trump insufficiently condemned this.
Today, for the first time since becoming president, Trump firmly condemned anti-Semitism and racism.
In remarks made after visiting the new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington this morning, Trump called bomb threats against Jewish community centers “horrible”.
He said: “The anti-Semitic threats targeting our Jewish community and community centers are horrible and are painful and a very sad reminder of the work that still must be done to root out hate and prejudice and evil.”
He said that the National Museum of African American History and Culture was “a meaningful reminder of why we have to fight bigotry, intolerance and hatred in all of its very ugly forms.”
“Part of the beauty of what you’re doing here with the museum and the success of the museum – the success is very important because it’s doing tremendous numbers. Tremendous numbers of people coming in,” he said. “I think that really helps to get that divide and bring it much closer together.”
Earlier today, Trump told MSNBC’s Craig Melvin that “anti-Semitism is horrible and it’s gonna stop and it has to stop.”
RYAN, PENCE AND McMASTER ALSO DENOUNCE ANTI-SEMITISM
The Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan also condemned anti-Semitism this morning, tweeting: “Anti-Semitism in any form is abhorrent, and I encourage authorities nationwide to take these threats seriously.”
Vice-President Mike Pence denounced anti-Semitism during his visit to Dachau concentration camp two days ago, which he went to after attending the Munich Security summit.
President Trump’s incoming National Security Adviser, H.R. McMaster, spoke of the importance of Holocaust commemoration when he dedicated a new Holocaust exhibit at the National Infantry Museum at Fort Benning in Georgia in 2012.
WHIPPED AND LEFT TO DROWN
I mention Trump’s remarks today because last week international media were very harsh on Trump for his failure to properly condemn anti-Semitism. But now that he has done so, it wasn’t mentioned at all on the BBC Radio World Service News that I just listened to -- broadcast to hundreds of millions of people across the globe. Instead the BBC is once again obsessing over Israel and portraying the Jewish state in a negative light, which was the BBC’s main story.
Likewise, so is The Guardian. As I write The Guardian has a large headline and story about the sentencing to prison of an Israeli soldier who shot dead a wounded Palestinian terrorist who (the soldier claims) he thought was reaching for a suicide bomb vest in order to detonate it.
At the same time The Guardian has a much smaller headline “Libya: Bodies of 74 migrants wash ashore”.
(In fact, 87 bodies have been recovered according to the International Organization for Migration, and there are dozens of other bodies at sea. The boat didn’t capsize. The boat was deliberately set adrift, according to the IOM.)
Hardly any major Western media are reporting the significant number of civilian casualties currently being caused by American airstrikes in Mosul, or those being killed by American and British warplanes in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.
Nor are they reporting much on the killing of civilians with American and British weapons in Yemen.
Nor about the torture and summary execution of Sunnis by U.S.-allied and Iranian directed militia in Mosul.
Nor about the brutal whipping of African migrants by European-Union trained coastguards.
By contrast, in one recent print edition of the New York Times (U.S. edition) that I happened to see last week, of the 27 pages with articles in the paper’s main section, six were devoted to focusing negatively on just one tiny country: Israel.
* You can also find other items that are not in these dispatches if you “like” this page on Facebook www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia
As I have pointed out before, this iconic photo was staged, but it is still being widely used as if it were not staged, giving a somewhat skewed impression of attitudes on the ground.
MORE PEACEFUL RELATIONS: PREFERABLE THAN TWO STATES THAT GO TO WAR
[Note by Tom Gross]
I attach five articles published in advance of the meeting today between U.S. President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. (Three of the pieces are by liberal-left writers, and two by more conservative ones.)
White House sources revealed that Trump will not use the term “two states” during his meeting today, and instead Trump will focus on a regional peace initiative that would bring peace between Israel and all its Arab neighbors and not automatically assume two states is the way to achieve the most peaceful outcome.
A White House official added that a two-state solution that doesn’t achieve peace is “unwanted”. The goal is to achieve peace, whether through the two-state solution or otherwise, the official said.
Regarding the fourth piece below, from The New York Times (titled “Trump’s Shift to ‘Outside-In’ Strategy for Mideast Peace Is a Long Shot”) the Associated Press’s astute Diplomatic Correspondent Matt Lee tweeted out its headline saying:
“Hmm. Maybe not, but the record of the ‘peace process professionals’ over the last 17 years ain’t so hot either... https://t.co/1pXwbN5nlY”
https://twitter.com/APDiploWriter/status/830874952001847296
***
(Once again, I don’t necessarily agree with all of the points in these pieces.)
CONTENTS
1. “A Step Toward Mideast Peace: Tell the Truth” (By Max Singer, Wall Street Journal, Feb. 14, 2017)
2. “U.S. Official: Trump Wants Israeli-Palestinian Peace, but Not Necessarily Through Two-state Solution” (By Barak Ravid, Haaretz, Feb. 14, 2017)
3. “A Settler’s View of Israel’s Future” (By Yishai Fleisher, NY Times, Feb. 14, 2017)
4. “Trump’s Shift to ‘Outside-In’ Strategy for Mideast Peace Is a Long Shot” (By Ian Fisher and Ben Hubbard, NY Times, Feb. 14, 2017)
5. “Boycotting Ivanka and Israel Is Equally Indefensible” (By David Rosenberg, Haaretz, February 15, 2017)
ARTICLES
ENOUGH PC: TIME TO TELL THE TRUTH
A Step Toward Mideast Peace: Tell the Truth
Netanyahu’s Washington visit is an opportunity to debunk pernicious falsehoods about Israel.
By Max Singer
Wall Street Journal
Feb. 14, 2017
Donald Trump ran for president pledging to throw off political correctness and tell bold truths. That’s something to keep in mind this week. On Wednesday Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will visit the White House. Thursday will bring Senate confirmation hearings for David Friedman, Mr. Trump’s nominee for ambassador to the Jewish state. Both events offer an opportunity for the fearless truth-telling that Mr. Trump promised.
The U.S. has long favored Israel, even during the relative chill of the Obama administration. Washington has nevertheless parroted or passively accepted the conventional falsehoods about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If Mr. Trump wants to advance the possibility of peace, he should begin by challenging the five big untruths that sustain the anti-Israel consensus:
• Israel occupies “Palestinian territory.” This is nonsensical: There never has been a Palestinian government that could hold any territory, meaning Israel could not have taken “Palestinian land.” Quite possibly large parts of the West Bank should become Palestinian territory, but that is a different claim.
The Trump administration should always describe the West Bank as “disputed” land and speak against the phrase “Palestinian territory” – except when used in the future tense. It should also recognize that Israel came to the territory it holds not only during a defensive war but also through historical and legal claims, including the 1922 League of Nations mandate to establish a Jewish homeland.
• Millions of Palestinian “refugees” have a “right of return” to Israel. The standard international view is that Israel has prevented five million Palestinians, many living in “refugee camps,” from returning to their homes. But practically none of these people are refugees as normally defined; rather they are the descendants of refugees. The Arab world has kept them in misery for three generations to preserve their plight as a weapon against Israel.
The U.S. has failed to challenge this false narrative. It is the principal financial supporter of Unrwa – the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East – whose sole purpose is to provide for the basic needs of these perpetual “refugees.”
Privately, American diplomats understand that the normal description of Palestinian “refugees” is a fraud and that these descendants have no legal “right of return.” A first step to peace, then, would be to end the charade and begin to dismantle Unrwa. The Trump administration might also mention the estimated 800,000 Jewish refugees who, in the late 1940s and early ‘50s, were thrown out of the Arab countries where they had been living for millennia. Most of them settled in an impoverished, newborn Israel without international assistance.
• Israelis and Palestinians have comparable claims to Jerusalem. This is the best example of the false “evenhandedness” that has long characterized American policy – saying, for instance, that “Jerusalem is sacred to both religions.” Although the city’s Al Aqsa mosque is significant in Islam, Jerusalem itself has essentially no religious importance. It is not mentioned in the Quran or in Muslim prayers. It was never the capital of any Islamic empire.
Peace requires recognizing three things: that Jerusalem must remain the capital of Israel; that the city’s religious sites must be protected and free, as they have been only under the Jewish state; and that any provision for a Palestinian capital must not threaten the city’s peaceful unity. A bold truth-teller would also move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, despite the threats of a violent response, and would allow the passports of American citizens born in the capital to record that they were born in Israel.
• There was no ancient Jewish presence in Israel. Palestinian leaders insist that this is true, and that the historical Jewish temples were not actually located on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. This feeds their claim that the Jews came to Israel as foreign colonialists imposed by the Europeans after the Holocaust.
This falsehood can be sustained only because it is politely tolerated by the U.S. and Europe – and sometimes supported by U.N. agencies like Unesco. It works against the possibility of peace by denying the Palestinians a moral basis for negotiating with Israel. The Trump administration should contradict these absurd denials of history so often that Palestinian leaders begin to look foolish to their own people.
• The Palestinians are ready to accept a “two-state solution” to end the conflict. The U.S. has a tendency to assume that Palestinian leaders are ready to accept Israel if suitable concessions are offered. The Trump administration ought to ask: What is the evidence for this? When did the Palestinians give up their long-term commitment to destroy Israel, and which leaders backed such a dramatic change? Undoubtedly, many Palestinians are willing and even eager for peace. Yet it is still taboo in Palestinian debate to publicly suggest accepting Israel’s legitimacy or renouncing the claims of the “refugees.”
Washington is practiced at superficial evenhandedness, always issuing parallel-seeming statements about both sides. What the Trump administration can bring is genuine evenhandedness: respecting each side’s truths and rejecting each side’s falsehoods, even when this leads to a position that seems “unbalanced.”
Israel, too, should move toward a strategy of truth-telling and stop appeasing the false international consensus. It ought to make its case defiantly to the world. Israel can be ready and willing to make concessions for peace without pretending that today there are any terms on which the Palestinians are willing to agree. The Israelis should continue to help the Palestinian economy but not refrain from publicizing the ways that Palestinians sabotage the effort and undermine their own welfare.
Even in a conflict as fraught as this one, there remain underlying truths – and American policy in the Middle East will benefit from telling more of them.
U.S. OFFICIAL: TRUMP WANTS ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN PEACE, BUT NOT NECESSARILY THROUGH TWO-STATE SOLUTION
U.S. Official: Trump Wants Israeli-Palestinian Peace, but Not Necessarily Through Two-state Solution
Term ‘two-state solution’ isn’t well defined, official says, U.S. won’t force it on sides: ‘We’re not going to dictate what the terms of peace will be.’
By Barak Ravid
Haaretz
Feb. 14, 2017
WASHINGTON - Peace between Israel and the Palestinians is high on the agenda of U.S. President Donald Trump, but whether or not that will entail the two-state solution depends on the two sides, a senior U.S. administration official told reporters in Washington on Tuesday, a day before a meeting between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the U.S. president.
“It’s not for us to impose that vision,” the official said, adding that the term “two-state solution” has not been particularly well defined.
“If I ask five people what a two-state solution is, I get eight different answers,” the officials said. “We’re looking at the two sides to come together to make peace together and we’ll be there to help them.”
The official added that a two-state solution that doesn’t achieve peace is unwanted. The goal is to achieve peace, whether through the two-state solution – if that’s what both sides wish – or through another solution, the official said. “If that’s what the parties want, we’re going to help them,” he said, adding: “We’re not going to dictate what the terms of peace will be.”
The official added that Trump is interested in organizing a bilateral meeting between Israel and the Palestinians, and that advancing the peace process is high on his agenda.
Two days before he landed in Washington, Netanyahu told his ministers that Trump is serious about the peace process. An official with knowledge of the cabinet meeting said that Netanyahu told the ministers that Trump asked him in a phone conversation two days after his inauguration if and how he intends to advance the peace process with the Palestinians. Netanyahu said that he told Trump that he supports the two-state solution and a final status agreement, but stressed that he told the president that the Palestinians are unwilling and detailed the reasons why a peace deal cannot be reached at this time.
“They (the Palestinians) will want, they will make concessions,” was Trump’s response, Netanyahu told the ministers, the official said.
Netanyahu revealed the details of his phone call with Trump after Education Minister Naftali Bennett and Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked pressed him to urge the U.S. president to take the two-state solution off the table.
The senior official said that Netanyahu replied that he doesn’t believe that was possible, noting the American president’s stances and temperament. “Trump believes in a deal and in running peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians,” Netanyahu stressed. “We should be careful and not do things that will cause everything to break down. We mustn’t get into a confrontation with him.”
Netanyahu landed in Washington Tuesday morning, straight into an unprecedented internal crisis in the White House following the resignation of Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Flynn. Flynn was a central figure in preparing for the meeting between Trump and Netanyahu and a crucial figure in forming American policy toward Iran.
It is still unclear how Flynn’s resignation will affect the meeting, but in light of the pivotal role he had in preparing for the summit and the White House’s need to find a solution to the crisis it produced, the resignation is certainly liable to cast a shadow over the meeting.
On Tuesday Netanyahu and his advisers concentrated on preparing for the summit. Some of the preparatory discussions were held Tuesday night at the Israeli embassy in Washington, and not at Blair House, mainly due to fear of wiretapping.
Netanyahu will try to reach the closest possible coordination with the Americans regarding settlement construction and how to proceed in negotiations with the Palestinians. Already on Sunday he dispatched his special envoy, Yitzhak Molho, for discussions with Trump’s adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, who is expected to be involved in the Israeli-Palestinian issue, and Tillerson, who is also expected to play a major part on this front.
According to Israeli officials, Netanyahu hopes Trump will support a regional peace initiative in which the Palestinians will be only one part of a wider arrangement. Obama did not support such a move because he did not trust Netanyahu.
“‘WE INVENTED THE CELLPHONE’ DOESN’T EXPLAIN JEWISH RIGHTS”
A Settler’s View of Israel’s Future
By Yishai Fleisher
New York Times (opinion)
Feb. 14, 2017
HEBRON, West Bank – Last week, Israel’s Parliament passed a controversial bill that allows the government to retroactively authorize contested West Bank Jewish communities by compensating previous Palestinian land claimants. Opposition parties warn that this law could open Israel to prosecution at The Hague, and the chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, said, “Israel’s Parliament has just approved a law to legalize theft of Palestinian land.” This theme has been echoed recently at the Paris peace conference, in a United Nations Security Council resolution and by a major policy speech by then Secretary of State John Kerry, which all condemned settlements.
Israel never seems to have a good answer to accusations against the settlement enterprise. Whenever the claim that Israel stole Palestinian lands is heard, Israel’s answers inevitably are: “We invented the cellphone,” “We have gay rights,” “We fly to help Haiti after an earthquake.” Obvious obfuscation. And when pushed to explain why the much-promised two-state solution is perennially stuck, the response is always to blame Arab obstructionism.
This inability to give a straight answer is a result of 30 years of bad policy that has pressed Israel to create a Palestinian state in the historic Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria, which the world calls the West Bank. This policy has worked to legitimize the idea that the territory of Judea and Samaria is Arab land and that Israel is an intractable occupier. Today, as Israel is beginning to walk back the two-state solution, it is not easy to admit we were wrong; and many people’s careers are on the line. This is why Israel mouths the old party line, yet takes no steps toward making a Palestinian state a reality.
But for us settlers, the truth is clear: The two-state solution was misconceived, and will never come to pass, because Judea and Samaria belong to the Jewish people. Our right to this land is derived from our history, religion, international decisions and defensive wars. Jews have lived here for 3,700 years, despite repeated massacres, expulsions and occupations – by the Romans, Arabs, Crusaders and Ottomans. And the world recognized the Jewish people’s indigenous existence in this land in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the San Remo Accords of 1920.
When Israel declared independence in 1948, Jordan, along with five other Arab states, attacked Israel, occupied Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem, and drove out Jewish residents. Again, in 1967, Jordan attempted to wipe out the Jewish State, but this time, Israel forced the Jordanian army back across the Jordan River. While the government of Israel was ambivalent about whether to retain the newly emancipated areas, the settler movement was not. We set about holding and developing the land, just like the pioneers of the Kibbutz movement.
Today, the estimated number of Arabs living in Judea and Samaria is 2.7 million, though some researchers dispute the data and argue that the figure is far lower. Yet the presence of these Arab residents alone does not warrant a new country. Arabs can live in Israel, as other minorities do, with personal rights, not national rights. But many Arabs reject that option because they do not recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish State, with or without settlements.
This pervasive intolerance was laid bare in the aftermath of Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, when Hamas seized control in 2007 and turned the territory into a forward base for jihad, starting three wars in seven years. As a result, most Israelis, however pragmatic, no longer believe in a policy of forfeiting land in hopes of getting peace in return. While a Hamas-controlled Gaza is now a reality, no Israeli wants an Islamic State of Palestine looking down at them from the strategic heights of Judea and Samaria.
Therefore, most settlers say without ambivalence that the two-state solution is dead, and the time has come for a discussion of new options by which Israel would hold onto the West Bank and eventually assert Israel sovereignty there, just as we did with the Golan Heights and eastern Jerusalem. Yes, Israel will have to grapple with questions of the Arab population’s rights, and the issues of the country’s security and Jewish character, but we believe those questions can be worked out through the democratic process. At least five credible plans are on the table already.
The first option, proposed by former members of Israel’s Parliament Aryeh Eldad and Benny Alon, is known as “Jordan is Palestine,” a fair name given that Jordan’s population is generally reckoned to be majority Palestinian. Under their plan, Israel would assert Israeli law in Judea and Samaria while Arabs living there would have Israeli residency and Jordanian citizenship. Those Arabs would exercise their democratic rights in Jordan, but live as expats with civil rights in Israel.
A second alternative, suggested by Israel’s education minister, Naftali Bennett, proposes annexation of only Area C – the territory in the West Bank as defined by the Oslo Accords (about 60 percent by area), where a majority of the 400,000 settlers live – while offering Israeli citizenship to the relatively few Arabs there. But Arabs living in Areas A and B – the main Palestinian population centers – would have self-rule.
A third option, which dovetails with Mr. Bennett’s, is promoted by Prof. Mordechai Kedar of Bar-Ilan University, near Tel Aviv. His premise is that the most stable Arab entity in the Middle East is the Gulf Emirates, which are based on a consolidated traditional group or tribe. The Palestinian Arabs are not a cohesive nation, he argues, but are comprised of separate city-based clans. So he proposes Palestinian autonomy for seven non-contiguous emirates in major Arab cities, as well as Gaza, which he considers already an emirate. Israel would annex the rest of the West Bank and offer Israeli citizenship to Arab villagers outside those cities.
The fourth proposal is the most straightforward. Caroline Glick, a Jerusalem Post journalist, wrote in her 2014 book, “The Israeli Solution: A One State Plan for Peace in the Middle East,” that, contrary to prevailing opinion, Jews are not in danger of losing a demographic majority in an Israel that includes Judea and Samaria. New demographic research shows that thanks to falling Palestinian birth rates and emigration, combined with opposite trends among Jews, a stable Jewish majority of above 60 percent exists between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean (excluding Gaza); and this is projected to grow to about 70 percent by 2059.
Ms. Glick thus concludes that the Jewish State is secure: Israel should assert Israeli law in the West Bank and offer Israeli citizenship to its entire Arab population without fear of being outvoted. This very week, Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin, announced his backing for the idea in principle. “If we extend sovereignty,” he said, “the law must apply equally to all.”
Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Tzipi Hotovely, similarly advocates for annexation and giving the Palestinians residency rights – with a pathway to citizenship for those who pledge allegiance to the Jewish State. Others prefer an arrangement more like that of Puerto Rico, a United States territory whose residents cannot vote in federal elections. Some Palestinians, like the Jabari clan in Hebron, want Israeli residency and oppose the Palestinian Authority, which they view as illegitimate and corrupt.
Finally, there is a fifth alternative, which comes from the head of the new Zehut party, Moshe Feiglin, and Martin Sherman of the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies. They do not see a resolution of conflicting national aspirations in one land and instead propose an exchange of populations with Arab countries, which effectively expelled about 800,000 Jews around the time of Israeli independence. In contrast, however, Palestinians in Judea and Samaria would be offered generous compensation to emigrate voluntarily.
None of these options is a panacea. Every formula has some potentially repugnant element or tricky trade-off. But Israeli policy is at last on the move, as the passing of the bill on settlements indicates.
Mr. Kerry’s mantra that “there really is no viable alternative” to the two-state solution is contradicted by its manifest failure. With a new American administration in power, there is a historic opportunity to have an open discussion of real alternatives, unhampered by the shibboleths of the past.
(Yishai Fleisher is the international spokesman of the Jewish community of Hebron.)
TRUMP’S SHIFT TO ‘OUTSIDE-IN’ STRATEGY FOR MIDEAST PEACE IS A LONG SHOT
Trump’s Shift to ‘Outside-In’ Strategy for Mideast Peace Is a Long Shot
By Ian Fisher and Ben Hubbard
New York Times
Feb. 14, 2017
HAMAD CITY, Gaza Strip – Wail al-Gatshan, 44, a mechanical engineer, is grateful for his new apartment here in a growing neighborhood in southern Gaza. For just $140 a month, there are separate bedrooms for his three girls and two boys, as well as a guest bathroom.
The complex is being built by Qatar, the oil-rich Persian Gulf state that has stepped in repeatedly in recent years to help isolated, war-racked Gazans. But there are limits to Mr. Gatshan’s thankfulness.
“As a Palestinian, I would not support Qatar if they said they wanted a two-state solution,” he said. “I want my human rights. My rights are to live without any limits or restrictions and without occupiers.”
When President Trump meets Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in Washington on Wednesday, they are likely to discuss the role Arab states like Qatar could play in securing a two-state solution, under which Israel and an independent Palestinian state would live side-by-side in peace.
The Trump administration plans to move away from a so-called inside-out strategy, in which a deal between Israel and the Palestinians would pave the way for normalization of relations between Israel and Arab countries.
Instead, the new approach would be “outside-in,” meaning that Israel would first pursue agreements with Arab countries to help solve the conflict with the Palestinians.
Such an approach has been tried before, without success, because of deep and nearly universal Arab opposition to Israel. And the realities on the ground make the likelihood of success seem more remote than ever.
The Palestinians remain sharply divided: the Palestinian Authority, backed by the United States and European powers, governs parts of the West Bank, while Hamas, a militant Islamist movement committed to Israel’s destruction, rules the coastal Gaza Strip.
Israel’s government has moved steadily to the right, expanding settlements on land that the Palestinians and much of the rest of the world say should be part of a future Palestinian state.
Given those realities, there is little that Arab countries can do to break the deadlock, especially at a time when uprisings and wars have left them focused on domestic affairs, said Oraib al-Rantawi, the director of the Quds Center for Political Studies in Jordan.
“What can Jordan or Egypt or Saudi Arabia do?” he said. “In the end, the occupation has to end or you will have no end to the conflict.”
Historically, sympathy for the Palestinians and their quest for statehood was one of few unifying causes across the Arab world. Arab armies came together to wage wars against the Jewish state, and many governments later provided financial and military aid to armed Palestinian factions.
Even after the Oslo peace accords of 1993 led to the creation of the Palestinian Authority, most Arab countries rejected formal relations with Israel on principle, considering it a usurper of Arab land. Jordan and Egypt have peace treaties with Israel, but Israel remains unpopular with their citizens.
But the prominence of the Palestinian issue in the Arab consciousness has waned in recent years, as the Arab state system has weakened because of popular uprisings and civil conflicts.
Saudi Arabia and its allies in the Persian Gulf are bogged down in a war against Houthi rebels in Yemen and are increasingly worried about Iran’s influence – a strategic concern they share with Israel.
Syria and Iraq, longtime enemies of Israel, have been locked in lengthy wars that have drained their governments’ resources and given them little time to focus on issues beyond their borders.
Egypt, too, has turned inward, as its economy has worsened and a jihadist insurgency has taken root on the Sinai Peninsula.
“Care is there, but attention is not,” Mahmoud Yehia, an Egyptian lawmaker, said of the Palestinian cause. “People are dealing with all these new internal issues now, and they have been struggling economically for years and years before that.”
Supporters of the outside-in approach say that the merging of interests between Israel and Arab states like Saudi Arabia and Egypt could provide an opening.
But on-the-ground opposition in Arab countries would make it hard for even committed leadership to push toward a deal with Israel.
Last year, a survey of attitudes across the Middle East by Zogby Research Services found that 41 percent of respondents in Egypt and 39 percent in Saudi Arabia considered the Israeli occupation “the greatest obstacle to regional peace,” surpassing any other issue.
So while Saudi and Egyptian leaders may collaborate with Israel privately on issues of shared interest, doing so publicly could incite a blowback from their populations.
For many Arabs, the sheer number of crises in the region leaves little energy left for the Palestinians.
“There is also a growing realization among people that the region is now very chaotic,” said H. A. Hellyer, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a research organization based in Washington. That causes “a sense of helplessness” toward the Palestinian issue.
The divisions among Palestinians also undermine support for their cause.
“Even if they wanted to do something, they don’t know who they should support now,” Mr. Hellyer said.
Many Palestinians have given up altogether on the idea of a two-state solution.
A decade has passed since Palestinian infighting left the West Bank and Gaza under the control of competing administrations with opposing views of how the Palestinians should pursue statehood.
Multiple rounds of talks have gained only limited benefit for the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which supports a two-state solution, while Hamas’s dedication to its slogan of “resistance” seems as strong as ever. On Monday, it announced that Yehya Sinwar, a hard-line member of its military wing, had been chosen as its new Gaza leader.
Others felt that too much time had passed to expect that the West Bank and Gaza could again be brought under a single authority.
“It’s impossible to have a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza,” said Ibrahim Madhoun, a columnist for the Hamas-affiliated newspaper Al Resala. “Now, Gaza is one thing and the West Bank is something else.”
Hamad City, where Mr. Gatshan lives with his family, is home to tidy shops, playgrounds and a mosque that will soon hold 3,000 people. A second wing of roughly 1,400 spacious units has just opened. But the Qatari initiative has risen on a potent symbol of deadlock.
Much of the land once belonged to an Israeli settlement, which was evacuated in 2005. Israel called it a move toward peace. Gazans said there should never have been settlers there in the first place. But Israelis complain bitterly that this showed that pulling back from settlements does not work: Militant groups, including Hamas, fired rockets into Israel. Three wars followed, from which the scars have hardly healed.
Though Hamas has ended the fire in a truce, and largely controlled other groups who try to do so, some Israelis say a new war in Gaza is the only choice.
Israel “cannot be the only country in the world where children cannot walk down the street without worrying that a missile will fall,” Naftali Bennett, a far-right lawmaker and education minister, said on a visit to the fence dividing Gaza and Israel last week. “Our enemies are investing all their resources in developing ways to kill us.”
“Only with a complete victory can we put an end to this cycle,” he said.
OPINION BOYCOTTING IVANKA AND ISRAEL IS EQUALLY INDEFENSIBLE
Opinion Boycotting Ivanka and Israel Is Equally Indefensible
The boycotters demonstrate an inflated and highly selective moral sensibility: Nordstrom and other retailers sell far more objectionable items, like fur coats.
By David Rosenberg
Haaretz
February 15, 2017
You may have been blissfully unaware of it, but if you had been flipping through the dress racks at your local Nordstrom department store over the last few months, you were engaged in a highly political and morally offensive act. The same applies if you shop at Macy’s, Lord & Taylor, and Bloomingdale’s or Amazon.
That’s because all of these outlets have, or had been, carrying the Ivanka Trump apparel line.
A boycott campaign under the Twitter banner #GrabYour Wallet has been urging people to not only scorn the first daughter’s line of clothing, but the retailers who carry it. Their argument is that wearing Ivanka is tantamount to supporting Donald and his racist, misogynist, Islamophobic, neoliberal and authoritarian policies.
As quixotic as a campaign like that would appear – after all, adhering to GrabYourWallet’s call would narrow an American’s shopping options to almost zero – it seems to be having an effect. Nordstrom, among other leading U.S. chains, has announced they are dropping all or part of the Ivanka line, or is lowering its profile in their stores.
GUILTY AS CHARGED, OF BEING HIS DAUGHTER
To the many people who are justifiably shocked and horrified that Donald Trump is now ensconced in the White House, a boycott seems like an effective response.
Trump’s election is about more than politics – it’s about what kind of country America is or will be; it’s about competing moral visions – and that’s as good a reason as any to boycott your opponent.
But how far does the moral taint of Donald Trump extend?
Ivanka is certainly guilty of being Trump’s daughter. She plays the role of informal adviser and (as the Trump family is wont to do) has exploited the celebrity that comes with being part of the first family to further her business.
But she has taken no formal role in the administration. She has not spoken in public about her views and is not known to have initiated any policies.
FUR COATS AND ISRAELI PRODUCTS
Then, there’s Nordstrom’s complicity, which is infinitesimal. The Ivanka line reportedly generated $14.3 million in sales for the department store in the most recent full fiscal year, equal to about one-tenth of one percent of the company’s total sales.
If you’re looking for real complicity in wrongdoing, you can be quite confident that Nordstrom carries many products made in China. Beijing is certainly a far bigger offender of human rights than Ivanka Trump can even aspire to be. I’m willing to bet that the store sells products made with child or other exploited labor because in the global supply chain, that is inevitable. Nordstrom sells fur coats. And, hey, BDSers, Nordstrom also carries Israeli products.
The boycott of Ivanka Trump and the stores that sell her clothes is an ugly mixture of inflated (but inevitably highly selective) moral sensibilities, combined with an even more inflated sense of self-importance, that says the world should bend to whatever outrage-of-the-day moves you.
Israel has also been the victim of this style of boycott insanity.
We have done worse things than Ivanka Trump has, although to cut us a little slack, we have been around twice as long than she has, we control an army, which poses more human rights problems than owning a fashion line, and we live in the Middle East, a part of the world that presents more than the average number of moral dilemmas (what’s the right thing to do by Syria?).
But by world standards, Israel is not particularly immoral. For true believers of Israeli wickedness, the thing is to elevate everything Israel does wrong into a heinous crime, and everything it does right into no less of an offense. Thus, we plant forests not to roll back the desert but to cover up the former Palestinian presence; we send rescue crews to disaster areas for PR purposes, unlike the rest of the world, which only sends their teams for purely humanitarian reasons.
Most people can see through this and aren’t going to stop patronizing their favorite store or product. Boycotts rely on lots of noise and fictitious victories to keep it in the public eye and give the appearance of success.
But it’s appearance. More than a decade of BDS activity has seen foreign investment into Israel grow by leaps and bounds, and for every business that may have left Israel (and it’s often unclear that BDS is the reason), dozens more are coming.
The Ivanka boycott is also less of an issue than touted to be. Nordstrom said it dropped the line due to sharply falling sales -- and objective, third-party data back that claim.
The intense media coverage the Ivanka boycott has received in America has scared retailers, who fear the slightest offense to their customers. But the sales drop is probably due to women who don’t want to be associated with the name as a matter of personal choice and self-image, just like a Cubs fan won’t sport a White Sox cap. She’s not boycotting Ivanka or the stores that carry her clothing as a matter of principle or politics.
Like BDS, GrabYourWallet will try to say otherwise, but don’t believe it.
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“IN JAPAN, SOUTH KOREA, GERMANY, KUWAIT, QATAR, THE BALTIC STATES, POLAND, AND ELSEWHERE...”
[Note by Tom Gross]
I attach below a new paper by Hillel Frisch, professor of politics and Middle East studies at Bar-Ilan University, and an associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.
Frisch says that “Countless articles discrediting Israel (as well as many other better-intentioned articles) … begin by stating that Israel receives the lion’s share of U.S. military aid” whereas “in reality, Israel receives only a small fraction of American military aid, and most of that [aid to Israel] was spent in the U.S. to the benefit of the American economy.”
American University Professor David Vine deduces that once the real costs are calculated, the largest aid recipient is Japan, where by conservative estimates $27 billion of American government money is spent each year. Germany receives around $21 billion, South Korea $15 billion, and Italy $6 billion.
The per capita numbers are even greater for the small Gulf states of Kuwait and Bahrain, whose American bases are home to over 5,000 US military personnel each.
And, adds Frisch, “In striking contrast to other countries, no U.S. plane has ever flown to protect Israel’s airspace. No U.S. Navy ship patrols to protect Israel’s coast. And most importantly, no U.S. military personnel are put at risk to ensure Israel’s safety.”
“In Japan, South Korea, Germany, Kuwait, Qatar, the Baltic states, Poland, and elsewhere, U.S. troops are vulnerable.”
TWO REFUGEES PER MONTH
Incidentally, speaking of Japan, I noted this heading in The Financial Times yesterday: “Japan accepted 28 refugees in 2016.”
NETANYAHU ONCE AGAIN POPULAR AMONG WASHINGTON DEMOCRATS
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrives in Washington later today to meet President Donald Trump and others.
Netanyahu also has many scheduled meetings with leading Democrats as well as Republicans.
After years of being undermined by former president Barack Obama, Netanyahu is once again much sought after by Democratic Senators and congressmen. Leading Democrats have requested so many meetings with the Israeli prime minister that he hasn’t got time to fit them all into his schedule.
Netanyahu will begin his trip this evening by dining with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson at the State Department.
Tomorrow Netanyahu is scheduled to meet Trump and then a host of leading Democrats and Republicans.
Meanwhile, at home, Netanyahu’s political opponents on both the left and right are once again gearing up to try and oust him from power, as his Israeli and foreign opponents also launch a PR campaign against him in the American media.
-- Tom Gross
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DISPELLING THE MYTH THAT ISRAEL IS THE LARGEST BENEFICIARY OF U.S. MILITARY AID
Dispelling the Myth that Israel Is the Largest Beneficiary of US Military Aid
By Prof. Hillel Frisch
February 10, 2017
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 410
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Many American detractors of Israel begin by citing that Israel receives the lion’s share of US military aid. The very suggestion conjures the demon of an all-powerful Israel lobby that has turned the US Congress into its pawn. But these figures, while reflecting official direct US military aid, are almost meaningless in comparison to the real costs and benefits of US military aid – above all, American boots on the ground. In reality, Israel receives only a small fraction of American military aid, and most of that was spent in the US to the benefit of the American economy.
***
Countless articles discrediting Israel (as well as many other better-intentioned articles) ask how it is that a country as small as Israel receives the bulk of US military aid. Israel receives 55%, or $US3.1 billion per year, followed by Egypt, which receives 23%. This largesse comes at the expense, so it is claimed, of other equal or more important allies, such as Germany, Japan, and South Korea. The complaint conjures the specter of an all-powerful Israel lobby that has turned the US Congress into its pawn.
The response to the charge is simple: Israel is not even a major beneficiary of American military aid. The numerical figure reflects official direct US military aid, but is almost meaningless compared to the real costs and benefits of US military aid – which include, above all, American boots on the ground in the host states.
There are 150,500 American troops stationed in seventy countries around the globe. This costs the American taxpayer an annual $US85-100 billion, according to David Vine, a professor at American University and author of a book on the subject. In other words, 800-1,000 American soldiers stationed abroad represent US$565-665 million of aid to the country in which they are located.
Once the real costs are calculated, the largest aid recipient is revealed to be Japan, where 48,828 US military personnel are stationed. This translates into a US military aid package of over US$27 billion (calculated according to Vine’s lower estimation). Germany, with 37,704 US troops on its soil, receives aid equivalent to around US$21 billion; South Korea, with 27,553 US troops, receives over US$15 billion; and Italy receives at least US$6 billion.
If Vine’s estimate is correct, Japan’s US military aid package is nine times larger than that of Israel, Germany’s is seven times larger, and Italy’s is twice as large. The multipliers are even greater for Egypt. Even the Lilliputian Gulf states, Kuwait and Bahrain, whose American bases are home to over 5,000 US military personnel apiece, receive military aid almost equal to what Israel receives.
Yet even these figures grossly underestimate the total costs of US aid to its allies. The cost of maintaining troops abroad does not reflect the considerable expense, deeply buried in classified US military expenditure figures, of numerous US air and sea patrols. Nor does it reflect the high cost of joint ground, air, and maritime exercises with host countries (events only grudgingly acknowledged on NATO’s official site).
US air and naval forces constantly patrol the Northern, Baltic, and China Seas to protect American allies in Europe and in the Pacific – at American expense. Glimpses of the scale of these operations are afforded by incidents like the shadowing of a Russian ship in the Baltics, near run-ins between Chinese Coast Guard ships and US Navy ships dispatched to challenge Chinese claims in the South China Sea, and near collisions between US Air Force planes and their Chinese counterparts in the same area.
In striking contrast, no US plane has ever flown to protect Israel’s airspace. No US Navy ship patrols to protect Israel’s coast. And most importantly, no US military personnel are put at risk to ensure Israel’s safety.
In Japan, South Korea, Germany, Kuwait, Qatar, the Baltic states, Poland, and elsewhere, US troops are a vulnerable trip-wire. It is hoped that their presence will deter attack, but there is never any assurance that an attack will not take place. Should such an attack occur, it will no doubt cost American lives.
This cannot happen in Israel, which defends its own turf with its own troops. There is no danger that in Israel, the US might find itself embroiled in wars like those it waged in Iraq and Afghanistan at a cost of US$4 trillion, according to Linda J. Bilmes, a public policy professor and Harvard University researcher.
Japan’s presence at the top of the list of US military aid recipients is both understandable and debatable. It is understandable because Japan is critical to US national security in terms of maintaining freedom of the seas and containing a rising China. It is debatable because Japan is a rich country that ought to pay for the US troops stationed within it – or in lieu of that, to significantly strengthen its own army. At present, the Japanese army numbers close to 250,000, but it is facing the rapidly expanding military power of its main adversary, China. A similar case can be made with regard to Germany, both in terms of its wealth and its contribution towards meeting the Russian threat.
What is incomprehensible is not why Israel receives so much US military aid, but why Japan has received nine times more aid than Israel does. This is a curious proportion given the relative power Israel possesses in the Middle East and its potential to advance vital US security interests in times of crisis, compared to the force maintained by Japan relative to China.
Ever since the Turkish parliament’s decision in March 2003 not to join the US-led coalition, and the Turkish government’s refusal to allow movement of American troops across its borders, Israel has been America’s sole ally between Cyprus and India with a strategic air force and (albeit small) rapid force deployment capabilities to counter major threats to vital US interests.
It takes little imagination to envision these potential threats. Iran might decide to occupy Bahrain, which has a Shiite majority seriously at odds with the ruling Sunni monarchy. It might take over the United Arab Emirates, which plays a major role in the air offensive against the Houthis, Iran’s proxies in the war in Yemen. There might be a combined Syrian and Iraqi bid to destabilize Sunni Jordan, in the event that both states subdue their Sunni rebels. Any of these moves would threaten vital energy supplies to the US and its allies. Only Israel can be depended upon completely to provide bases and utilities for a US response and to participate in the effort if needed.
The politicians, pundits, and IR scholars who attack Israel and the Israeli lobby for extracting the lion’s share of US military aid from a gullible Congress know full well that this is not true. Israel receives a small fraction of the real outlays of military aid the US indirectly gives its allies and other countries. These experts also know that 74% of military aid to Israel was spent on American arms, equipment, and services. Under the recently signed Memorandum of Understanding, that figure will be changed to 100%. The experts simply cite the wrong figures.
The US is now led by a businessman president who knows his dollars and cents. He has been adamant about the need to curb free-riding by the large recipients of real US aid. He will, one hopes, appreciate the security bargain the US has with Israel – a country that not only shares many common values with the US, but can make a meaningful contribution to American vital interests with no trip-wires attached.
* Hunter Stuart, on his time reporting from the Middle East: “I know a lot of Jewish-Israelis who are willing to share the land [and live in peace] with Muslim Palestinians, but for some reason finding a Palestinian who feels the same way was near impossible.”
Above: Israeli schoolteacher and peace activist Richard Lakin, with his youngest granddaughter, shortly before he was shot and knifed to death as he boarded a Jerusalem bus in 2015.
Journalist Hunter Stuart says he began to change his mind about the Palestinian conflict after he wrote what he calls “a very sympathetic story” about one of Richard Lakin’s murderers for a Jordanian news site.
The families of Lakin’s murderers are now being rewarded by Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority with substantial monthly sums of money from European and American government aid to the PA.
CHANGING ONE’S MIND
[Note by Tom Gross]
I attach a piece due to be published in the Feb. 20, 2017 edition of The Jerusalem Report magazine, by Hunter Stuart.
Stuart was a staff reporter and editor at The Huffington Post in New York for six years before working as a freelance reporter in the Middle East, where he wrote for Al Jazeera English, the International Business Times and others. His reporting has also appeared on CNN, Yahoo News, Slate, and The Atlantic Wire. His reports were previously so hostile to Israel that, he claims, “The State of Israel considered me a threat to ‘public security’.”
(Incidentally, The Huffington Post is often even more scathing about Israel than Al Jazeera.)
I don’t know Hunter Stuart, but I imagine he has had to publish this article in The Jerusalem Report because no mainstream non-Jewish publication would publish it. This was the case with pieces by myself , Matti Friedman and others who had previously worked full-time for mainstream media but the moment we wanted to publish something that went against the prevailing anti-Israel liberal orthodoxies, it was extremely difficult to find a home for it.
RICHARD LAKIN: “TEACHING AS AN ACT OF LOVE.”
In his new piece (attached in full below) Stuart writes: “Before I moved to Jerusalem, I was very pro-Palestinian. Almost everyone I knew was. I grew up Protestant in a quaint, politically-correct New England town; almost everyone around me was liberal. The belief that Israel is unjustly bullying the Palestinians is an inextricable part of this pantheon.”
But after Stuart wrote what he called “a very sympathetic story about the killer [of Richard Lakin]” for the Jordanian news site Al Bawaba News, and he later began to understand who Lakin was, he began to change his attitude. “I [now] felt horrible for having publicly glorified one of the murderers,” says Stuart.
(I wrote about Richard Lakin -- a long-time peace activist who “never missed a peace rally” here and here.)
(Lakin, a close friend of subscribers to this email list, was shot and his heart was slashed in two as he boarded a Jerusalem bus in an ISIS-like attack. He taught at the Hand in Hand Center for Jewish-Arab Education. One of the books he wrote was called “Teaching as an Act of Love.”)
WHY DID BAN KI MOON SEEMINGLY JUSTIFY THE KILLING?
Stuart writes in his new piece that whereas Lakin “taught English to Israeli and Palestinian children at a school in Jerusalem… by contrast, his killers – who came from a middle-class neighborhood in East Jerusalem and were actually quite well-off relative to most Palestinians – had been paid $20,000 to storm the bus that morning. Over a year later, you can still see their faces plastered around East Jerusalem on posters hailing them as martyrs.”
Stuart adds that seeing the continuing official Palestinian Authority hero-worship of Lakin’s killers “caused me to question how forgiving I’d been of Palestinian violence previously, [in the way that] liberals, human-rights groups and most of the media [are].”
“Ban Ki Moon, for example, who at the time was head of the United Nations, said in January 2016 – as the streets of my neighborhood were stained with the blood of innocent Israeli civilians – that it was ‘human nature to react to occupation.’ In fact, there is no justification for killing someone, no matter what the political situation may or may not be, and Moon’s statement rankled me.”
ONE STANDARD FOR THE JEWISH STATE, ANOTHER FOR EVERYONE ELSE
“Similarly, the way that international NGOs, European leaders and others criticized Israel for its ‘shoot to kill’ policy during this wave of terror attacks began to annoy me more and more.
“In almost any nation, when the police confront a terrorist in the act of killing people, they shoot him dead and human rights groups don’t make a peep. This happens in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Bangladesh, it happens in Germany and England and France and Spain, and it sure as hell happens in the U.S. (see San Bernardino and the Orlando nightclub massacre and the Boston marathon shootings and others). Did Amnesty International condemn Obama or Sisi or Merkel or Hollande when their police forces killed a terrorist? Nope. But they made a point of condemning Israel.”
“EDUCATED PALESTINIANS ALMOST NEVER SPEAK OF COEXISTENCE”
Stuart, who spent much of his time socializing with Palestinians, adds that he discovered during his time in the Middle East, that “even the kindest, most educated, upper-class Palestinians reject 100 percent of Israel – not just the occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank. They simply will not be content with a two-state solution .”
“They almost never speak of coexistence; they speak of expulsion, of taking back ‘their’ land. To me, however morally complicated the creation of Israel may have been, however many innocent Palestinians were killed and displaced from their homes in 1948 and again in 1967, Israel is now a fact, accepted by almost every government in the world (including many Middle Eastern ones). But Palestinians’ ongoing desire wipe Israel off the map is unproductive and backward-looking and the West must be very careful not to encourage it.”
CONSPIRACY THEORIES
“The other thing is that a large percentage of Palestinians, even among the educated upper class, believe that most Islamic terrorism is actually engineered by Western governments in order to make Muslims look bad. I know this sounds absurd. It’s a conspiracy theory that’s comical until you hear it repeated again and again as I did. I can hardly count how many Palestinians told me the stabbing attacks in Israel in 2015 and 2016 were fake or that the CIA had created ISIS. After the Nov. 2015 ISIS shootings in Paris, for example, which killed 150 people, a colleague of mine – an educated 27-year-old Lebanese-Palestinian journalist – casually remarked that those massacres were “probably” perpetrated by the Mossad…
“I know a lot of Jewish-Israelis who are willing to share the land with Muslim Palestinians, but for some reason finding a Palestinian who feels the same way was near impossible.”
BACK IN THE U.S. NOW
“I’m back in the U.S. now, living on the north side of Chicago, in a liberal enclave where most people – including Jews – tend to support the Palestinians’ bid for statehood, which is meanwhile gaining steam every year in international forums like the UN. Personally I’m no longer convinced it’s such a good idea. Because if the Palestinians are given their own state in the West Bank, who’s to say they wouldn’t elect Hamas, an Islamist group committed to Israel’s destruction? ... And no country can be expected to consent to its own destruction.”
***
(Tom Gross adds:: Personally I am in principle still in favor of a Palestinian state – I send various articles with a variety of views.)
HAMAS PICKS CONVICTED MURDERER AS ITS NEW HEAD IN GAZA
Tom Gross adds:
Yesterday, Hamas chose Yehya Sinwar as its new leader in Gaza. Sinwar was released from an Israeli jail in 2011 as part of a swap for kidnapped Israeli Gilad Shalit. Sinwar was serving four consecutive life terms for murder at the time of his release.
The release by Israel of so many convicted killers to secure Gilad Shalit’s freedom was in my opinion (as I wrote at the time) strategically foolish.
Hamas’s former head in Gaza Ismail Haniyeh takes over from Khaled Meshaal as Hamas’s supreme leader.
ASSASSINATED BY POISON NEEDLE AT KULA LUMPUR AIRPORT
The elder half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has been assassinated at Kuala Lumpur airport. Kim Jong Nam, 45, was killed with a poison needle by two women who fled the scene by taxi. He was once considered to be the heir to late North Korean leader Kim Jong I. His murder was very possibly carried out on the orders of his brother.
(Among pieces I have written mentioning human rights in North Korea, please see here.)
* You can also find other items that are not in these dispatches if you “like” this page on Facebook www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia
ARTICLE
A VIEW FROM THE FRONTLINES
A View From The Frontlines
A year working as a journalist in Israel and the Palestinian Territories made Hunter Stuart rethink his positions on the conflict
By Hunter Stuart
The Jerusalem Report magazine
Feb. 20, 2017
www.hunterstuartjournalist.com/2017/02/a-view-from-frontlines.html
In the summer of 2015, just three days after I moved to Israel for a one-and-a-half year stint freelance reporting in the region, I wrote down my feelings about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A friend of mine in New York had mentioned that it would be interesting to see if living in Israel would change the way I felt about it. My friend probably suspected that things would look differently from the front-row seat, so to speak.
Boy was he right.
Before I moved to Jerusalem, I was very pro-Palestinian. Almost everyone I knew was. I grew up Protestant in a quaint, politically-correct New England town; almost everyone around me was liberal. And being liberal in America comes with a pantheon of beliefs: You support pluralism, tolerance and diversity. You support gay rights, access to abortion and gun control.
The belief that Israel is unjustly bullying the Palestinians is an inextricable part of this pantheon. Most progressives in the US view Israel as an aggressor, oppressing the poor noble Arabs who are being so brutally denied their freedom. “I believe Israel should relinquish control of all of the Gaza Strip and most of the West Bank,” I wrote on July 11, 2015 from a park near my new apartment in Baka. “The occupation is an act of colonialism that only creates suffering, frustration and despair for millions of Palestinians.”
Perhaps predictably, this view didn’t play well among the people I met during my first few weeks in Jerusalem, which even by Israeli standards is a conservative city. My wife and I had moved to the Jewish side of town, more or less by chance – the first Airbnb host who accepted our request to rent a room happened to be in the Nachlaot neighborhood, where even the hipsters are religious. As a result, almost everyone we interacted with was Jewish Israeli and very supportive of Israel. I didn’t announce my pro-Palestinian views to them – I was too afraid. But they must have sensed my antipathy. (I later learned this is a sixth sense Israelis have.)
Because my first few weeks in Jerusalem I found myself constantly getting into arguments about the conflict with my roommates and in social settings. Unlike waspy New England, Israel does not afford the privilege of politely avoiding unpleasant political conversations. Outside of the Tel Aviv bubble, the conflict is omnipresent; it affects almost every aspect of life. Avoiding it simply isn’t an option.
During one such argument, one of my roommates – an easy-going American-Jewish guy in his mid-30s – seemed to be suggesting that all Palestinians were terrorists. I became annoyed and said to him that it was wrong to call all Palestinians terrorists, that only a small minority supported terror attacks. My roommate promptly pulled out his laptop, called up a 2013 Pew Research poll and showed me the screen. I saw that Pew’s researchers had done a survey of thousands of people across the Muslim world, asking them if they supported suicide bombings against civilians in order to “defend Islam from its enemies.” The survey found that 62 percent of Palestinians believed such terror acts against civilians were justified in these circumstances. And not only that, the Palestinian Territories were the only place in the Muslim World where a majority of citizens supported terrorism; everywhere else it was a minority, from Lebanon and Egypt to Pakistan and Malaysia.
I didn’t let my roommate win the argument that night – the bickering continued into the early morning hours. But the statistic stuck with me.
Less than a month later, in October of 2015 , a wave of Palestinian terror attacks against Jewish-Israelis began. Nearly every day an angry, young Muslim Palestinian was stabbing or trying to run over someone with his car. A lot of the violence was happening in Jerusalem, some of it just steps from where my wife and I lived and worked and went grocery shopping.
At first, I’ll admit – I didn’t feel a lot of sympathy for Israelis. Actually I felt hostility. I felt that they were the cause of the violence. I wanted to shake them and say, “Stop occupying the West Bank, stop blockading Gaza, and Palestinians will stop killing you!” It seemed so obvious to me, how could they not realize that all this violence was a natural, if unpleasant, reaction to their government’s actions?
It wasn’t until the violence became personal that I began to see the Israeli side with greater clarity. As the “Stabbing Intifada” (as it later became known) kicked into full gear, I traveled to the impoverished East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan for a story I was writing.
As soon as I arrived, a Palestinian kid who was perhaps 13 years old pointed at me and shouted “Yehud!” which means “Jew” in Arabic. Immediately a large group of his friends – who’d been hanging out nearby – were running towards me with a terrifying sparkle in their eyes. “Yehud! Yehud!” they shouted. I felt my heart start to pound. I shouted at them in Arabic “Ana mish yehud! Ana mish yehud!” (“I’m not Jewish, I’m not Jewish!”) over and over. I told them, also in Arabic, that I was an American journalist who “loved Palestine.” They calmed down after that, but the look in their eyes when they first saw me is something I’ll never forget. Later, at a house party in Amman, I met a Palestinian guy who’d grown up in Silwan. “If you were Jewish, they probably would have killed you,” he said.
I made it back from Silwan that day in one piece; others weren’t so lucky. In Jerusalem and across Israel the attacks against Jewish Israelis continued. My attitude began to shift, probably because the violence was for the first time affecting me directly. I found myself worrying that my wife might be stabbed while she was on her way home from work. Every time my phone lit up with news of another attack, if I wasn’t in the same room with her, I immediately sent her a text to see if she was okay.
Then a friend of mine – an older Jewish Israeli guy who’d hosted my wife and I for dinner at his apartment in Talpiot – told us that his friend had been murdered by two Palestinians the month before on a city bus not far from his apartment. I knew the story well – not just from the news but because I’d interviewed the family of one of the Palestinian guys who’d carried out the attack. In the interview, his family told me how he was a promising young entrepreneur who was pushed over the edge by the daily humiliations wrought by the occupation. I ended up writing a very sympathetic story about the killer for a Jordanian news site called Al Bawaba News.
Writing about the attack with the detached analytical eye of a journalist, I was able to take the perspective that (I was fast learning) most news outlets wanted: that Israel was to blame for Palestinian violence. But when I learned that my friend’s friend was one of the victims, it changed my way of thinking. I felt horrible for having publicly glorified one of the murderers. The man who’d been murdered, Richard Lakin, was originally from New England, like me, and had taught English to Israeli and Palestinian children at a school in Jerusalem. He believed in making peace with the Palestinians and “never missed a peace rally,” according to his son.
By contrast, his killers – who came from a middle-class neighborhood in East Jerusalem and were actually quite well-off relative to most Palestinians – had been paid $20,000 to storm the bus that morning with their cowardly guns. Over a year later, you can still see their faces plastered around East Jerusalem on posters hailing them as martyrs. (One of the attackers, Baha Aliyan, 22, was killed at the scene; the second, Bilal Ranem, 23, was captured alive.)
Being personally affected by the conflict caused me to question how forgiving I’d been of Palestinian violence previously. Liberals, human-rights groups and most of the media, though, continued to blame Israel for being attacked. Ban Ki Moon, for example, who at the time was head of the United Nations, said in January 2016 – as the streets of my neighborhood were stained with the blood of innocent Israeli civilians – that it was “human nature to react to occupation.” In fact, there is no justification for killing someone, no matter what the political situation may or may not be, and Moon’s statement rankled me.
Similarly, the way that international NGOs, European leaders and others criticized Israel for its “shoot to kill” policy during this wave of terror attacks began to annoy me more and more.
In almost any nation, when the police confront a terrorist in the act of killing people, they shoot him dead and human rights groups don’t make a peep. This happens in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Bangladesh, it happens in Germany and England and France and Spain, and it sure as hell happens in the US (see San Bernardino and the Orlando nightclub massacre and the Boston marathon shootings and others). Did Amnesty International condemn Obama or Sisi or Merkel or Hollande when their police forces killed a terrorist? Nope. But they made a point of condemning Israel.
What’s more, I started to notice that the media was unusually fixated on highlighting the moral shortcomings of Israel, even as other countries acted in infinitely more abominable ways. If Israel threatened to relocate a collection of Palestinian agricultural tents, as they did in the West Bank village of Susiya in the summer of 2015, for example, the story made international headlines for weeks. The liberal outrage was endless. Yet when Egypt’s president used bulldozers and dynamite to demolish an entire neighborhood in the Sinai Peninsula in the name of national security, people scarcely noticed.
Where do these double-standards come from?
I’ve come to believe it’s because the Israeli-Palestinian conflict appeals to the appetites of progressive people in Europe and the US and elsewhere. They see it as a white, First-World people beating on a poor, Third-World one. It’s easier for them be to get outraged watching two radically different civilizations collide than it is watching Alawite Muslims kill Sunni Muslims in Syria, for example, because to a Western observer the difference between Alawite and Sunni Muslims is too subtle to fit into a compelling narrative that can be easily summarized on Facebook. Unfortunately for Israel, videos on social media that show US-funded Jewish soldiers shooting tear gas at rioting Arab Muslims is Hollywood-level entertainment and fits perfectly with the liberal narrative that Muslims are oppressed and Jewish Israel is a bully.
I admire the liberal desire to support the underdog. They want to be on the right side of history, and their intentions are good. The problem is that their beliefs often don’t square with reality.
In reality things are much, much more complex than a 5-minute spot on the evening news or a two-paragraph long Facebook status will ever be able to portray. As a friend told me recently, “The reason the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is so intractable is that both sides have a really, really good point.” Unfortunately not enough people see it that way. I recently bumped into an old friend from college who told me that a guy we’d both known when we were freshman had been active in Palestinian protests for a time after graduating. The fact that a smart, well-educated kid from Vermont who went to one of the best liberal arts schools in the US traveled thousands of miles to throw bricks at Israeli soldiers is very, very telling.
***
There’s an old saying that goes, “If you want to change someone’s mind, first make them your friend.” The friends I made in Israel forever changed my mind about the country and about the Jewish need for a homeland. But I also spent a lot of time traveling in the Palestinian Territories getting to know Palestinians. I spent close to six weeks visiting Nablus and Ramallah and Hebron and even the Gaza Strip. I spent another six weeks in Amman, which is 60% Palestinian. I met some incredible people in these places; I saw generosity and hospitality unlike anywhere I’ve else I’ve ever traveled to. I’ll be friends with some of them for the rest of my life. But almost without fail, their views of the conflict and of Israel and of Jewish people in general were extremely disappointing to me.
First of all, even the kindest, most educated, upper-class Palestinians reject 100 percent of Israel – not just the occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank. They simply will not be content with a two-state solution – what they want is to return to their ancestral homes in Ramle and Jaffa and Haifa and other places in 1948 Israel, within the Green Line. And they want the Israelis who live there now to leave. They almost never speak of coexistence; they speak of expulsion, of taking back “their” land. To me, however morally complicated the creation of Israel may have been, however many innocent Palestinians were killed and displaced from their homes in 1948 and again in 1967, Israel is now a fact, accepted by almost every government in the world (including many Middle Eastern ones). But Palestinians’ ongoing desire wipe Israel off the map is unproductive and backward-looking and the West must be very careful not to encourage it.
The other thing is that a large percentage of Palestinians, even among the educated upper class, believe that most Islamic terrorism is actually engineered by Western governments in order to make Muslims look bad. I know this sounds absurd. It’s a conspiracy theory that’s comical until you hear it repeated again and again as I did. I can hardly count how many Palestinians told me the stabbing attacks in Israel in 2015 and 2016 were fake or that the CIA had created ISIS. After the Nov. 2015 ISIS shootings in Paris, for example, which killed 150 people, a colleague of mine – an educated 27-year-old Lebanese-Palestinian journalist – casually remarked that those massacres were “probably” perpetrated by the Mossad. Though she was a journalist like me and ought to have been committed to searching out the truth, no matter how unpleasant, this woman was unwilling to admit that Muslims would commit such a horrific attack, and all too willing – in defiance of all the facts – to blame it on Israeli spies.
Usually when I travel I try to listen to people without imposing my own opinion. To me that’s what traveling is all about: keeping your mouth shut and learning other peoples’ perspectives. But after 3-4 weeks of traveling in Palestine I grew tired of these conspiracy theories. “Arabs need to take responsibility for certain things,” I finally shouted at a friend I’d made in Nablus the third or fourth time he tried to deflect blame from Muslims for Islamic terror. “Not everything is America’s fault.” My friend seemed surprised by my vehemence and let the subject drop – obviously I’d reached my saturation point with this nonsense.
I know a lot of Jewish-Israelis who are willing to share the land with Muslim Palestinians, but for some reason finding a Palestinian who feels the same way was near impossible. Countless Palestinians told me they didn’t have a problem with Jewish people, only with Zionists. They seemed to forget that Jews have been living in Israel for thousands of years, along with Muslims, Christians, Druze, atheists, agnostics and others, more often than not in harmony. Instead, the vast majority of them believe that Jews only arrived to Israel in the 20th century and therefore don’t belong here.
Of course I don’t blame Palestinians for wanting autonomy or for wanting to return to their ancestral homes. It’s a completely natural desire; I know I would feel the same way if something similar happened to my own family. But as long as Western powers and NGOs and progressive people in the US and Europe fail to condemn Palestinian attacks against Israel, the deeper the conflict will grow and the more blood will be shed on both sides.
I’m back in the US now, living on the north side of Chicago, in a liberal enclave where most people – including Jews – tend to support the Palestinians’ bid for statehood, which is meanwhile gaining steam every year in international forums like the UN. Personally I’m no longer convinced it’s such a good idea. Because if the Palestinians are given their own state in the West Bank, who’s to say they wouldn’t elect Hamas, an Islamist group committed to Israel’s destruction? That’s exactly what happened in Gaza in democratic elections in 2006. Fortunately Gaza is somewhat isolated, and it’s geographic isolation – plus the Israeli- and Egyptian-imposed blockade – limit the damage that the group can do. But having them in control of the West Bank and half of Jerusalem is something that Israel obviously doesn’t want. It would be suicide. And no country can be expected to consent to its own destruction.
This dispatch concerns changing attitudes by some in the Saudi media towards Israel and Jews.
(At the very end of the dispatch, for those interested, there is also a short TV interview with me from yesterday morning concerning Donald Trump and the UK.)
***
(See also: How Israel’s tech firms are quietly doing business in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, Feb. 2, 2017)
CONTENTS
1. Saudi columnist Siham Al-Qahtani: Jews should no longer collectively be blamed for all disasters throughout history
2. “No Jewish plot against Arabs, without Arab knowledge”
3. Muhammad Al-Sheikh: Only political ignoramuses advocate armed resistance; the two-state solution is the only feasible option
4. Al-Sheikh criticized by Al-Jazeera presenter
5. Prominent Saudi Journalist: West Jerusalem is part of Israel; moving the U.S. embassy there as part of a peace agreement could herald the end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
6. Kuwaiti journalist: I support relocating the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem
7. Saudi Cleric Awadh Al-Qarni: 9/11 was “fabricated”
8. Assad welcome in London, Trump not?
[Notes by Tom Gross]
SAUDI COLUMNIST: JEWS SHOULD NO LONGER COLLECTIVELY BE BLAMED FOR ALL DISASTERS THROUGHOUT HISTORY
Last year, after a semi-official delegation of Saudis visited Israel (that Saudi delegation included two people who I know personally) some (but certainly not all) Saudi media columnists wrote that Saudi Arabia should improve its attitude toward Jews and towards Israel.
For example, Siham Al-Qahtani argued that Koranic descriptions of Jews as killers of prophets, infidels, warmongers and usurers, applied to only a particular historic period, and that Jews should no longer collectively be blamed for all disasters throughout history (as some other Arab journalists and religious preachers continue to argue).
“NO JEWISH PLOT AGAINST ARABS, WITHOUT ARAB KNOWLEDGE”
In a courageous piece (especially for a woman in Saudi Arabia) she wrote:
“The [collective] memory of Arab culture continues to preserve the stereotypical image of Jews to this day. Some see this stereotype as the product of Koranic texts, [which depict the Jews] as killers of prophets, infidels, warmongers, and usurers.
“[However,] it is improper to blame the Koran for the creation of Jewish stereotypes. When the Koran depicts a certain people, it does so in accordance with [this people’s] behavior and thought during a specific time period.
“This description is valid in the context of [those particular] circumstances and [that particular] behavior, and does not refer to a unique and permanent trait. Proof of this is [the fact] that, among the Jews [mentioned in the Koran], just as there are murderers and warmongers there are also prophets and righteous men.
“[Further proof is] the fact that Islam at the time permitted marriage between a Muslim man and a Jewish woman. If the ‘Jewish race’ possessed some unique and permanent flaw, then Islam would have banned such marriages in order to preserve the integrity and propriety of the Muslim man.”
She added: “I do not reject [out of hand] the notion of “a Jewish plot against the Arabs,” because I believe that such a plot does exist, but such plots could not have been realized without the ignorance of Arabs, their improper attitude, and the division in their ranks. The chief enemy of Arabs is Arabs [themselves].”
(Translations above and below courtesy of the excellent Middle East Media Research Institute.)
“ONLY POLITICAL IGNORAMUSES ADVOCATE ARMED RESISTANCE; THE TWO-STATE SOLUTION IS THE ONLY FEASIBLE OPTION”
Now some Saudi writers are turning their attention to the Palestinian-Israeli dispute.
In a column on January 24, 2017 in the official Saudi daily Al-Jazirah, titled “The Palestinians Have No [Choice] But Peace,” Saudi journalist Muhammad Aal Al-Sheikh criticized Palestinian groups that advocate “armed resistance,” saying it was political suicide.
He called on these groups to realize that a two-state solution is the only option that is feasible. He added that the Arab world is no longer very concerned with the Palestinian cause, and an insistence on armed resistance will only end up hurting the Palestinians themselves.
He wrote:
“Seven out of the ten biggest [donors] supporting the [candidates] in the recent U.S. congressional elections are Jews; moreover, the Jewish organization AIPAC is the most influential and important lobby in the U.S. These two facts together transform the U.S. Congress into a parliament that protects Israel and helps it [even] more than the Israeli Knesset itself does.
“I think that many Arabs, especially the Palestinians in Gaza who purport to be devout Muslims [i.e., Hamas], do not understand this reality and its implications: it means that Israel derives its power and its global status from the U.S., which is practically the most powerful country on earth. Russia – which some Arabs have begun betting on as the [potential solution] to their problems – likewise sees Israel as a red line due to the power and influence of the Jews there. The same goes for the E.U. countries, as well as Britain, Canada and Australia.
“In light of this, it can be said that relying on armed resistance to confront all of these global powers, while making the option of peace, especially the two-state solution, a more remote possibility – as implied by the statements of radical Palestinians nationalists and of those purporting to be devout – constitutes a kind of political suicide that only political ignoramuses [can] condone.
“I know the Israelis oppose the proposal of the two-state solution and attempt to evade it. [Moreover,] this position of theirs was recently endorsed by the U.S. Congress, when it denounced the forceful resolution [recently passed] by the Security Council against the construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank... without so much as mentioning the two-state solution. But I believe that the two-state solution is the only available solution that can be demanded and which enjoys the support of most of the international community.
“The insistence of the [Arab or Iranian] left-wing nationalists and the politically-biased people who purport to be devout, whether Sunni or Shi’ite, on calling for resistance ultimately serves the interests of the Israeli right. [This insistence] provides [the Israeli right] with excuses that strengthen its position, which [seeks to] prove that the Palestinians do not want peace or a solution [to the conflict], but rather war.
“Another thing the Palestinians need to understand is that the Arabs of today are not the Arabs of yesterday, and that the Palestinian cause has lost ground among Arabs. This cause is no longer a top priority for them, because civil wars are literally pulverizing four Arab countries, and because fighting the ‘Islamic’ terrorism is the foremost concern that causes all Arabs, without exception, to lose sleep. It is folly to ask someone to sacrifice [tending to] his own problems and national interests in order to help [you solve] your own problems...
“All I can say to my Palestinian brethren is that stubbornness, contrariness, and betting on the [support of] the Arab masses are a hopeless effort, and that ultimately you are the only ones who will pay the price of this stubbornness and contrariness.”
AL-SHEIKH CRITICIZED BY AL-JAZEERA PRESENTER
Al-Sheikh’s column, which he also shared on his Twitter account, was widely criticized.
For example, Al-Jazeera TV presenter Jamal Rayyan shared Al-Sheikh’s column on his Twitter page with the comment: “Given the Arab-Israeli reality he describes, this journalist should have called on the Palestinians not to sign any capitulation agreement until this reality changes.”
PROMINENT SAUDI JOURNALIST: WEST JERUSALEM IS PART OF ISRAEL; MOVING THE U.S. EMBASSY THERE AS PART OF OVERALL PEACE AGREEMENT COULD HERALD THE END OF THE ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN CONFLICT
In an article in the leading London-based Saudi-controlled daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat on January 25, 2017, the prominent Saudi journalist Abd Al-Rahman Al-Rashed, (a former editor of the paper and a former director of Al-Arabiya TV), wrote that Israeli sovereignty over West Jerusalem is a settled matter and that moving the U.S. embassy there, or any other nation’s embassy, would not lend legitimacy to the occupation. Rather, if U.S. President Donald Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem as part of an overall peace agreement, this measure could actually mark the end of the occupation and the conflict.
Al-Rashed also noted that in the 2000 Camp David talks, Yasser Arafat missed a golden opportunity to restore East Jerusalem to the Palestinians as part of then-U.S. president Bill Clinton’s peace plan.
He added that today, due to the crises plaguing the Middle East, “the Palestinian cause is no longer central,” although extremists exploit the Palestinian tragedy to further their own interests.
***
For those who have time to read it, here are longer excerpts from Abd Al-Rahman Al-Rashed’s article in Al-Sharq Al-Awsat (again translation courtesy of Memri):
“The decision of the U.S. government to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to occupied Jerusalem is not a new measure. Congress issued a binding order to that effect over a decade ago, but successive [American] presidents worked to thwart the move by delaying the process. This, because they cannot undo the decision without going back to Congress for a decision that overturns it – and such an attempt might fail. What is new is the insistence of the new American president, Donald Trump, to implement [this decision] as he promised.
“I will discuss three aspects connected to the talk about moving the embassy: the meaning of [the term] ‘occupied Jerusalem,’ the historical aspect, and the current situation.
“Already in 1948, the year the state of Israel was established, the U.S. opened a diplomatic representation in Tel Aviv, the first capital of the Jewish state, and so did the other powers. A year before the outbreak of the 1967 war, the U.S. opened the embassy in a large building in Tel Aviv, which serves as its official residence to this day. Later a consulate [general] and [consular services] were opened in Jerusalem, and their location has changed [over the years]. The current location [of the consular services] is near the Green Line separating [East and West] Jerusalem...
“Arabic political terms are [sometimes] used vaguely in [Arab] statements, and this is the case with the term ‘occupied Jerusalem.’ Usually this [term] refers to ‘occupied Eastern Jerusalem,’ rather than the city as a whole, namely the part Israel conquered in 1967 from the Hashemite kingdom [of Jordan]. As for West Jerusalem, it was already under Israeli control before that, and it has never been included in any discussion or negotiations. Its [status] as part of Israel is a settled matter. Arab politicians use the vague term ‘occupied Jerusalem’ to avoid getting entangled in the issue of recognizing Israel.
“Historically, the Palestinians had only one opportunity to regain control of occupied East Jerusalem, but the negotiating team, headed by the late [Palestinian] president Yasser Arafat, missed this opportunity. This was at the Camp David [talks] in 2000... U.S. president Bill Clinton decided to resolve the [Palestinian-Israeli] issue [once and for all] and put all his weight behind the negotiations. He reached a ‘reasonable’ solution with Arafat and with then Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, which no president had proposed before or has proposed since. The Clinton proposal involved returning to the Palestinians over 90 percent of the West Bank and 100 percent of the Gaza Strip, with a safe passage between them, [to form] a de-militarized independent Palestinian state. [The proposal also specified that] East Jerusalem, including the [Al-Aqsa] mosque and the Dome of the Rock, would return to the Palestinians, excluding the Jewish Quarter and the Western Wall, which would be placed under international supervision.
“[But] for some unknown reason, Arafat did not attend the final meeting and [instead] sent a delegation to Washington on his behalf to inform Clinton that they were rejecting the proposal – and the proposal collapsed. During that period, extremist Palestinian groups close to Iran and the Assad regime [in Syria], such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, carried out armed operations against Israel. The extremist camp in Israel used this to undermine a subsequent attempt to negotiate [an agreement] in Taba, and then Barak resigned. Arafat tried to revive the [negotiation] attempts, but it was too late – and to this very day East Jerusalem and the [rest of] the occupied territories are subject to [acts of] usurping land and altering the character of sites in the area and Judaizing them...
“Due to the destruction and displacement that [now] plague the Middle East, [especially] Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, the Palestinian cause is no longer central. We will not forget how extremists exploited the Palestinian tragedy to serve opportunistic regimes. Iran reached a nuclear agreement [with the superpowers] on the condition that it stop harming the U.S., and Hizbullah effectively took control of Lebanon in the name of the purported resistance [against Israel]. As for Assad and Qaddafi, they were defeated because of their inciting positions.
“Finally, will moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem kill the hope of establishing a Palestinian state? I think that [even] if the U.S. moves its embassy – and [even] if all the governments of the world do the same – this will not grant legitimacy to the occupation. [But we] hope that Trump takes this controversial move of transferring the embassy as part of a peaceful solution [to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict] that he has promised [to achieve]. Trump said he would assign this task to his son-in-law, which reflects his commitment [to this issue]. Who knows? Perhaps the embassy will be the last of the political campaigns.”
***
[Note 1] The Clinton proposal was to establish an independent Palestinian state that would include the Gaza Strip and the vast majority of the West Bank, while settlement blocks would be incorporated into Israel with the goal of maximizing the number of settlers in Israel while minimizing the land annex; in Jerusalem Arab areas would be under Palestinian sovereignty and Jewish ones under Israeli sovereignty; Palestinian refugees would be allowed to return to the Palestinian State (unispal.un.org, January 7, 2001).
KUWAITI JOURNALIST: I SUPPORT RELOCATING THE U.S. EMBASSY TO JERUSALEM
Kuwaiti journalist Abdallah Al-Hadlaq also expressed support for relocating the American embassy to Jerusalem.
In an article on January 28, 2017 in the Al-Watan daily titled “Be Brave [Trump] – Move [The Embassy] to Jerusalem and Trust in God,” he quoted from an article by Robert Satloff (also a subscriber to this list), the director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which presents arguments in favor of moving the embassy.
Al-Hadlaq argued the move could involve extensive benefits and not only dangers and drawbacks. He wrote: “Wise and intelligent diplomats, politicians and pundits are telling Trump, who is reluctant to move the embassy to Jerusalem: ‘Be brave, move it to Jerusalem and trust in God.’”
SAUDI CLERIC AWADH AL-QARNI: 9/11 WAS “FABRICATED”
Lest one thinks Saudi Arabia is now full only of rational commentators, it is not.
For example, in a TV sermon last month on the Saudi Al-Majd TV channel, Saudi Cleric Awadh Al-Qarni said that the 9/11 attacks had been “premeditated, fabricated, and calculated,” and that the towers had been toppled in an organized explosion by the U.S. government.
ASSAD WELCOME IN LONDON, TRUMP NOT?
For those interested, here is a short TV interview with me from yesterday morning concerning the calls by the speaker of the British House of Commons to disinvite U.S. President Donald Trump from addressing the British parliament later this year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShN-CI-IEys
Among other things, I point out that Queen Elizabeth and the British foreign office welcomed Syrian President Assad to London at a time when he was already torturing to death thousands of political prisoners in Syria, but now many in the UK want to disinvite Trump.
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* The Saudis and other oil-rich Arab states are only too happy to pay for Israeli help. “The Arab boycott? It doesn’t exist.”
* “From 2007 through 2015, an Israeli company called AGT International, based in Zurich, installed thousands of cameras, sensors, and license-plate readers along the U.A.E.’s 620-mile international border and throughout Abu Dhabi. AGT’s artificial intelligence platform, code-named Wisdom, analyzed images and data from the devices.
“Twice a week at the height of the project, a chartered Boeing 737, painted all white, took off from Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport, touched down briefly in Cyprus or Jordan for political cover, and landed about three hours later in Abu Dhabi with dozens of Israeli engineers onboard, many of them out of the intelligence services. They lived and ate together – never in restaurants – carried location transmitters and panic buttons at all times, and disguised their nationality and Hebrew names as best they could. They called Israel ‘C country’.”
(This is one of many such examples of how Israeli companies are helping Arab states.)
Because it is long, in this dispatch I attach a single article, published today by Bloomberg Business Week.
It expands on points made before in these dispatches about the increasingly high level security cooperation between Israel and various countries that Israel doesn’t officially have relations with, as these countries come to rely on the importance of Israeli-developed technology.
(One of the persons cited in this article has verified to me that almost everything in the article is accurate.)
-- Tom Gross
***
(See also: Saudi Journalist: The Palestinians are no longer our primary concern (& Assad welcome, Trump not?), Feb. 8, 2017)
HOW ISRAEL’S TECH FIRMS ARE QUIETLY DOING BUSINESS IN SAUDI ARABIA AND THE GULF STATES
How Do Israel’s Tech Firms Do Business in Saudi Arabia? Very Quietly
Good deals (and plausible deniability) make good neighbors.
By Jonathan Ferziger and Peter Waldman
Bloomberg Business Week
February 2, 2017
Over the course of 30 years working in Israeli intelligence, Shmuel Bar immersed himself in the hermeneutics of terrorism. Using techniques of literary analysis more familiar to Koranic scholars and Bible critics, he came to recognize the distinctive language and religious phrases that suicide bombers used in their farewell videos. “Victory is with the patient” appeared frequently in the martyrdom declarations of Hamas recruits. Al-Qaeda adherents favored the call “God, count them, kill them, and don’t leave any of them.”
Bar, a tousle-haired 62-year-old with a wry sensibility, emerged from government service in 2003 amid the proliferation of global terrorism, and in the rising sense of doom he saw a business opportunity. He founded a company called IntuView, a miner of data in the deep, dark web – a sort of Israeli version of Palantir, the Silicon Valley security contractor. Tapping engineering talent in Israel’s startup hub of Herzliya, he adapted his analyst’s ear for language to custom algorithms capable of sifting through unending streams of social media messages for terrorist threats. He sold his services to police, border, and intelligence agencies across Europe and the U.S.
Then, two years ago, an e-mail arrived out of the blue. Someone from the upper echelons of power in Saudi Arabia, Bar says, invited him to discuss a potential project via Skype. The Saudis had heard about his technology and wanted his help identifying potential terrorists. There was one catch: Bar would have to set up a pass-through company overseas to hide IntuView’s Israeli identity. Not a problem, he said, and he went to work ferreting out Saudi jihadis with a software program called IntuScan, which can process 4 million Facebook and Twitter posts a day. Later, the job expanded to include public-opinion research on the Saudi royal family.
“It’s not as if I went looking for this,” Bar says, still bemused by the unexpected turn in a life spent confronting Israel’s enemies. “They came to me.”
“IF IT’S A COUNTRY WHICH IS NOT HOSTILE TO ISRAEL THAT WE CAN HELP, WE’LL DO IT”
Bar says he meets freely these days with Saudis and other Gulf Arabs at overseas conferences and private events. Trade and collaboration in technology and intelligence are flourishing between Israel and a host of Arab states, even if the people and companies involved rarely talk about it publicly. When a London think tank recently disinvited Bar from speaking on a panel, explaining that a senior Saudi official was also coming and it wasn’t possible to have them appear together, Bar told the organizers that he and the Saudi gentleman had in fact been planning to have lunch together at a Moroccan restaurant nearby before walking over to the event together. “They were out-Saudi-ing the Saudis,” he says.
Peace hasn’t come to the Middle East. This isn’t beating swords into plowshares but a logical coalescence of interests based on shared fears: of an Iranian bomb, jihadi terror, popular insurgency, and an American retreat from the region. IntuView has Israeli export licenses and the full support of its government to help any country facing threats from Iran and militant Islamic groups. “If it’s a country which is not hostile to Israel that we can help, we’ll do it,” Bar says. Only Syria, Lebanon, Iran, and Iraq are off-limits.
The Saudis and other oil-rich Arab states are only too happy to pay for the help. “The Arab boycott?” Bar says. “It doesn’t exist.”
Cybersecurity is particularly ripe for collaboration. In 2012, when hackers breached the computer system of Saudi Aramco, the national oil company, Israeli businesses were called to help unlock the jam, and “some are involved in an ongoing basis” through offshore companies, says Erel Margalit, a venture capitalist and member of the Israeli parliament. Expect more of this, said Rudy Giuliani, in a late January interview in Israel, where he met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on behalf of President Donald Trump. “I see it as well beyond [cyber] in terms of areas of cooperation,” added the former New York City mayor, who’s advising Trump on cyber matters.
Saudi officials declined to speak on the record about possible ties to Israel. Questions e-mailed to the kingdom’s interior ministry and its embassy in Washington for this article were unanswered. A source in Riyadh, insisting on anonymity, e-mailed a statement denying any trade links between Israel and Saudi Arabia:
“In regard to defense systems technology, Saudi Arabia has never dealt with Israel in this field or any other field. Moreover, common sense tells us that in order for Saudi Arabia to get any weapon systems, they have to be bought under trade agreements made with friendly countries that manufacture those systems with official and approved export trade certificates from their governments. It is also certain that Israel is not among the countries that have commercial relations with the Kingdom.”
The Arab embargo of Israel, nominally in force since the Jewish state’s founding in 1948, necessitates that all business between Israel and most Arab states remain strictly off the books, cloaked by intermediaries in other countries. But the volume and range of Israeli activity in at least six Gulf countries is getting hard to hide. One Israeli entrepreneur set up companies in Europe and the U.S. that installed more than $6 billion in security infrastructure for the United Arab Emirates, using Israeli engineers. The same companies then pitched Saudi Arabia to manage overcrowding in Mecca. Other Israeli businesses are working in the Gulf, through front companies, on desalination, infrastructure protection, cybersecurity, and intelligence gathering.
“All the big ones are active and some of the small ones,” says Shabtai Shavit, who ran the Mossad from 1989 to 1996 and is chairman of the Israeli security firm Athena GS3. Shavit won’t offer details on who’s doing what. “You don’t saw off the branch you’re sitting on,” he says.
Discretion is particularly prized when it comes to weapons sales. At the New Hampshire plant of Elbit Systems of America, a subsidiary of Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest private defense contractor, there was a procedure when customers visited from Kuwait, Qatar, or Saudi Arabia, workers say. Managers purged the building of Elbit signs, Israeli maps, and Hebrew writing. Employee nameplates were removed temporarily, “if you had an obvious Jewish name,” says Richard Wolfe, who worked at the facility for 15 years, through 2013, designing lenses for the various optical systems the plant produces. Some components were also scrubbed of Israeli markings, another former worker says. Elbit Systems of America said in a statement that it isn’t company policy to conceal the Elbit name or other associations with Israel.
Elbit’s sales to Saudi Arabia attracted some attention two years ago when one of its New Hampshire technicians, an American named Chris Cramer, mysteriously died while servicing missile systems in the kingdom. According to a travelogue Cramer posted on Facebook, he was sent to help the Saudi army with a series of live-fire demonstrations of Elbit’s newly upgraded targeting system for TOW missiles. Cramer had worked for Elbit for 12 years and helped build the system. He was found dead beneath his third-story hotel room in the military city of Tabuk one day before he was due to come home. Saudi police called the death a suicide, which Cramer’s family rejected.
In a statement issued in Israel, Elbit did not specify what Cramer had been doing in Saudi Arabia. It said only that he was working on an “American product” with no Israeli technology. The statement e-mailed by the Saudi source said:
“In regard to the death of the American citizen, that matter has criminal and judicial dimensions. The Saudi government does not interfere in these cases and assigns them to the criminal and judicial bodies to look into and decide in accordance with the laws governing these types of cases.”
In speeches, Netanyahu likes to quip that the three reasons Arabs are interested in Israel these days are “technology, technology, and technology.” That interest doesn’t translate into open business relationships for one reason above all others: the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Cooperation in the Gulf cannot become truly lucrative until “the lightbulb goes off in Netanyahu’s head” and he signs a peace treaty, says Riad al Khouri, a director at political risk adviser GeoEconomica, based in Amman, Jordan. “The Palestinians are still the gatekeepers.” And the conflict could quickly get worse. Trump said during his campaign, and reiterated after his inauguration, that he intends to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. His nominee for ambassador to Israel, his bankruptcy lawyer, David Friedman, has said he intends to work from Jerusalem, calling it “Israel’s eternal capital.” The Palestinian Fatah party has stated such a move would “open the gates of hell.” On Feb. 1, Netanyahu pledged to build the first new West Bank settlement in 25 years. Since Trump took office, Israel has announced plans to build an additional 5,500 housing units in the occupied territory. Trump has invited Netanyahu to visit the White House on Feb. 15.
The Saudis say they’ll make peace with Israel after Israel makes peace with the Palestinians. The offer was reiterated in 2016 by two retired senior Saudi officials in rare public appearances alongside Israeli counterparts in Washington and Jerusalem. Salman al-Ansari, a former banker and media executive who runs a new Saudi advocacy group in Washington, sent an even stronger signal in October. In an article for the Hill, he wrote that Saudi Arabia and Israel should form a “collaborative alliance,” rooted in open business ties, to assert their rightful place as the “twin pillars of regional stability.” Arab critics skewered al-Ansari for not mentioning the Palestinians in the article. He says the omission was intentional, reflecting his wish to change the old narrative of conditioning everything on Palestinian statehood. Even without formal diplomatic ties, he says, the Saudi-Israeli relationship can blossom under the “pragmatic and forward-thinking” Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
That openness could change quickly if Trump and Netanyahu provoke another Palestinian intifada. Still, these feelers “show how Saudi Arabia is changing,” says Dennis Ross, who conducted Arab-Israeli diplomacy for three U.S. presidents. “You’d never have seen something like that before. These are clearly straws in the wind.”
On the ground, Netanyahu’s frontman for regional cooperation is Ayoob Kara, a 61-year-old Arab-Israeli parliamentarian who recently became a full cabinet minister. A member of the Druze sect and a hard-liner on Palestinian peacemaking, Kara shares the Likud Party dream – or some might say fantasy – of normalizing relations with Arab states while retaining large swaths of the West Bank.
On a day last November, Kara stood on the veranda of a Jordanian mineral spa overlooking the Dead Sea and swept his left arm southward toward the Gulf of Aqaba, where Israel, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia converge. Israel and Jordan are developing plans for the desolate area where Moses led the Israelites while wandering the desert for 40 years, and Kara insists Saudi Arabia will eventually be involved. “They want our technology, they want our expertise, and they really want to get the Palestinian headache out of the way,” he says.
Plans start with the biggest public works collaboration ever proposed among Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinians. Dubbed the Red Sea-Dead Sea Conveyance Project, it’s a $10 billion pipeline and desalination venture, backed in part by the World Bank, that will siphon water from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea, 1,400 feet below sea level. The project, whose construction is scheduled to start in 2018, will produce drinking water and electricity for Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinians. Waste brine will then flow into the Dead Sea, a vast mineral sink that’s been shrinking for years. The project could ease water conflicts in the hydrological crossroads where Israel, Jordan, the West Bank, and parts of Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Syria all rely on the same handful of rivers and aquifers.
Kara has more immediate concerns, too, as he gazes across the water at the West Bank and Israel. Invited here to address the Swedish-funded EcoPeace Middle East conference on regional water sharing, Kara also arranged to meet a Jordanian counterpart to discuss a possible trade route from Europe and Turkey through the Israeli port city of Haifa, to Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf. Since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, Haifa has become a transshipment hub for Turkish goods that used to travel by road to the Gulf through eastern Turkey and Syria. Today about 20 Turkish trucks a week arrive by rusty freighter on the Haifa docks, where Israeli officials X-ray and process them in a drive-through warehouse and send them on their way across the Galilee to Jordan. For a time, customs agents at the Jordanian-Saudi border waved them through. But passage to Saudi Arabia ended abruptly two years ago, when a competitor in Riyadh ratted out several truckloads of Turkish tomatoes that had arrived, via Haifa, in Saudi markets, according to a Haifa freight broker.
Kara is working with Gulf diplomats, through partners high up in Jordan’s government, to attempt to reopen the Israeli-Saudi route to the wider Arabian Peninsula, a move that would quintuple Turkish truck traffic overnight, the freight broker says. “Very soon things will be out in the open, and you’ll see Netanyahu landing in one of these countries,” Kara says. His Jordanian go-between agrees: “Times have changed,” he says. “They’re all looking at ways to connect with Israel.”
Netanyahu also uses other aides for high-level Arab contacts, including his personal attorney, Yitzhak Molcho, and former Ambassador to the United Nations Dore Gold. Off and on since the Oslo Accords in the early 1990s, Israel has operated trade offices in Qatar and Oman, and about a year ago it received approval to station a diplomat in the U.A.E.’s capital emirate, Abu Dhabi, as its representative to the International Renewable Energy Agency. The office has the capacity to function as an embassy for Israel’s expanding ties in the Gulf.
“I CONNECT WITH PEOPLE IN ARABIC, BUT I DON’T GIVE UP ON ISRAEL’S NEEDS”
Kara’s role is unique. The only Arab in Netanyahu’s cabinet, he meets regularly with Arab diplomats and businessmen in Cairo, Casablanca, Geneva, and New York. The Druze sect, which numbers about 140,000 in Israel and an additional 850,000 in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, formed a millennium ago. Druze have survived in tightknit farming clans in mountain villages by paying allegiance to whatever political authority is in control.
Two of Kara’s uncles were killed by Arabs for cooperating with Jews before Israeli statehood. He was injured in an Israeli army tank while fighting in the 1982 Lebanon War and discharged as an officer after two of his brothers were killed. He practiced law in northern Israel for 15 years, won a Knesset seat in 1999, and broke into the Likud Party leadership in 2006. To celebrate Israel’s 58th Independence Day that year, he threw a party for Netanyahu and hired kosher butchers to slaughter 58 sheep for the occasion. Netanyahu feasted with 7,000 Druze townspeople in front of the Kara home, in Daliyat al-Karmel.
“I feel like a Jew, but I’m not a Jew,” Kara says, sitting with his college-age daughter, Ameera, on the stone portico by his front door. “I connect with people in Arabic, but I don’t give up on Israel’s needs.” He whips out a cell phone to show a photo of a guy lighting a fat Cuban cigar for him in a New York hotel suite. The older bald man, who’s wearing suspenders and holding the lighter, is a member of the royal family of Qatar, Kara says, and one of his go-to go-betweens.
He also says there’s Gulf interest in a second Red Sea pipeline, an existing one built 50 years ago in partnership with the shah of Iran when the two countries maintained secret alliances. The state-owned Eilat-Ashkelon Pipeline Co. operates the 160-mile conduit to pump oil from tankers in the Red Sea port of Eilat to the Mediterranean city of Ashkelon. It bypasses the Suez Canal and can cut shipping costs to Europe and North America. When the shah was overthrown in 1979, Israel took sole ownership of the project. A Swiss appeals court last year awarded Iran $1.1 billion in lost revenue, a sum Israel refuses to pay its sworn enemy. Kara says the prospect of using the pipeline keeps coming up in his discussions with Saudis.
For now, “everything has to be under the radar,” says Shavit, the former Mossad chief. That’s how Mati Kochavi blazed Israel’s trail into the Gulf with a $6 billion security business in the United Arab Emirates. An Israeli serial entrepreneur who lives part time in the U.S., Kochavi, 54, founded several high-tech security companies after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. One, called 4D Security Solutions of South Plainfield, N.J., built the perimeter monitoring systems at New York’s airports.
Kochavi shopped his companies’ services to the leaders of the U.A.E. and Abu Dhabi. He didn’t hide that he and most of his companies’ technology and many of their employees came from Israel. Not a concern, he was assured, as long as the contractors weren’t domiciled in Israel. In fact, Israel’s security prowess was seen as an advantage in a country facing similar threats but lacking sophisticated defenses, former Kochavi employees say. “There weren’t even fences when we started,” says one former Israeli intelligence officer, describing the Emirates’ 3 million-barrel-a-day oil infrastructure. “A camel could have walked up to the production facilities and drank the oil.” Kochavi, through his spokesman, Moshe Debby, declined to comment.
Kochavi sold the U.A.E. on what became the most comprehensive integrated security system in the world at the time. From 2007 through 2015, a Kochavi company called AGT International, based in Zurich, installed thousands of cameras, sensors, and license-plate readers along the U.A.E.’s 620-mile international border and throughout Abu Dhabi. AGT’s artificial intelligence platform, code-named Wisdom, analyzed images and data from the devices. Nominally, Kochavi managed the operation out of the U.S. and Switzerland. The real brainpower, however, resided in Israel, at a separate Kochavi company called Logic Industries.
Twice a week at the height of the project, a chartered Boeing 737, painted all white, took off from Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport, touched down briefly in Cyprus or Jordan for political cover, and landed about three hours later in Abu Dhabi with dozens of Israeli engineers onboard, many of them out of the intelligence services. They lived and ate together – never in restaurants – carried location transmitters and panic buttons at all times, and disguised their nationality and Hebrew names as best they could. They called Israel “C country”; Kochavi was known as “MK.”
Most Arabs who worked with AGT saw through the Swiss veneer, which caused occasional tension but didn’t stop the formation of some close friendships. The charade got a bit absurd at times, such as when U.A.E. intelligence officials would wryly address the Israelis by pseudonyms from the TV series Lost, such as “Boone” and “Sawyer.”
The Israeli technology demonstrated its value in December 2014, when a woman stabbed an American schoolteacher to death in the restroom of an Abu Dhabi mall. She then drove to the home of an Egyptian-American doctor and planted a bomb, which was later defused. AGT’s network, processing video and still images captured at the scenes, identified the suspect within a day. She was convicted and executed seven months later. Government spokesmen in Abu Dhabi didn’t respond to e-mailed questions about AGT’s work in the U.A.E. An embassy spokesman in Washington declined to comment.
“WHAT ALWAYS SURPRISES ME IS HOW MUCH MONEY AND TECHNOLOGY AND EQUIPMENT FLOWS BETWEEN MORTAL ENEMIES ON THE POLITICAL STAGE”
In 2014, as the U.A.E. project was winding down, AGT and 4D teamed up on a crowd-management system with Mobily, a Saudi-based cellular provider, for a place so sacred that non-Muslims can’t even set foot there: Mecca. With more than 3 million people flooding the city for the annual five-day hajj pilgrimage, Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Hajj solicited bids for controlling access to the area. Although the Saudis ration hajj permits, they don’t turn away pilgrims who make it into the holy city. So the flow of pilgrims has to be controlled long before their buses reach Western Saudi Arabia from throughout the Middle East and North Africa. But how?
4D engineers in New Jersey designed a system requiring every credentialed pilgrim to wear an electronic bracelet that would register his or her presence on hajj buses. The buses would use Mobily’s cellular system to notify a central computer how many travelers were on each bus – both with bracelets and without. A red light could flash on the outside of buses carrying unpermitted passengers, alerting police to pull them over long before they reached Mecca. Or automated gates might turn them back at electronic checkpoints. Saudi officials could also deploy 4D’s design like an air traffic control system, sequencing bus arrivals to minimize congestion.
The Kochavi companies and Mobily demonstrated a prototype of their system at the Hajj Ministry in Jeddah. The minister at the time, Bandar al-Hajjar, participated in the test with several aides, each donning 4D bracelets on a bus in the parking lot. At one point a computer screen showed there were more bracelets than passengers on the bus, a potentially embarrassing error. But al-Hajjar smiled and pulled a second wristband out of his pocket. “He was testing us,” says a former Kochavi employee.
The AGT-4D system earned the ministry’s top score of three prototypes presented. Yet they didn’t get the job. Several months later, some engineers at Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals published an almost identical idea in an academic journal. At last year’s hajj, the Saudis required pilgrims to wear bracelets for the first time. The police announced they turned back almost 200,000 people without permits. A Hajj Ministry spokesman didn’t respond to e-mailed questions.
“Mobily has submitted a bid for the mentioned contract with an American company, but we did not win,” wrote Mobily spokesman Mohammed Al Belwe, in response to e-mailed questions. “Claiming that this is a cooperation between Mobily and an Israeli company is totally misleading and incorrect. … Our policy will not allow such teaming-up.”
A former senior engineer in Kochavi’s operation says he and his team believed their idea was stolen. Still, he marvels that the test happened at all. “What always surprises me is how much money and technology and equipment flows between mortal enemies on the political stage,” he says. But Islam’s holiest site appears to be, at least for now, a leap too far.
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* After consistently defending the Obama administration’s opposition to moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Obama’s former ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro, who stepped down last month, now says he is sympathetic to the idea, even before a final Palestinian-Israeli peace deal is reached. (Donald Trump has pledged to move the American embassy to Israel’s capital.)
But Shapiro adds, in an article for Foreign Policy Magazine: “Done carefully, it could advance American national goals and interests. Done carelessly, it could cause them grave harm and lead to preventable tragedy.”
* Haaretz: “A controversial [visa and refugee] entry ban was signed minutes before the Jewish Sabbath, sparking speculation the problem could have been avoided had Trump’s son-in-law still been at the office… Jared Kushner observes the sabbath, and is unable to work, ride in a car, or use electronic devices from sundown on Friday through the fall of darkness on Saturday” … Kushner apparently opposed the nature of the executive order that temporarily stopped immigration from Libya, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Sudan, and halted U.S.-bound refugees in their tracks.
* Vanity Fair magazine: “A little more than a week into the Trump presidency, the timing of the Friday sunset seems to be growing increasingly important” due to the fact that Kushner who is “positioned as something of a mollifying presence upon his mercurial boss” is absent.
* Vanity Fair quotes “an insider source saying that the fact that all of this troublesome behavior played out when Kushner wasn’t around ‘was not a coincidence.’”
* The political news website Politico: Trump’s Jewish aide Boris Epshteyn accidentally wrote International Holocaust Remembrance Day statement that omitted Jews.
* On Monday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters at the daily briefing, “The statement was written with the help of an individual who is both Jewish and the descendant of Holocaust survivors.” Asked if it was Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and a leading adviser, Spicer refused to say. Politico names the person as Epshteyn, who formerly served as a communications aide for Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2008.
* Jewish community in Texas town give Muslims key to their synagogue after town’s mosque burns down (in a possibly accidental blaze).
You can also find other items that are not in these dispatches if you “like” this page on Facebook www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia
CONTENTS
1. Trump’s Syrian ban is old news in Kuwait
2. “Kuwait bans entry to five nationalities” (Gulf News)
3. “Ex-US envoy voices support for ‘carefully’ moving embassy to Jerusalem” (Times of Israel / Foreign Policy magazine)
4. “Jewish people give Muslims key to their synagogue after town’s mosque burns down” (The Independent, London)
5. “At least 17 bomb threats called in to JCCs nationwide in third wave of harassment” (JTA news service)
6. “Report: Trump Jewish aide Boris Epshteyn wrote Holocaust statement that omitted Jews” (JTA / Politico)
7. “Is the U.S. in for Trouble Whenever Jared Kushner Observes the Jewish Shabbat?” (Haaretz / Vanity Fair)
TRUMP’S SYRIAN BAN IS OLD NEWS IN KUWAIT
[Note by Tom Gross]
All six articles below are from today or yesterday, apart from the first, which was published in Gulf News in 2011. It reports that Kuwait had decided to ban citizens of five Arab states “for security reasons”.
That ban remains in place today. Syrians, Iraqis, Iranians, Pakistanis and Afghans have not been able to enter Kuwait since 2011 and Kuwaiti authorities say that the ban would be lifted “only once the security situation improves” in those countries.
Of course, this should not be used as an excuse to justify Donald Trump’s sweeping executive order (as I explained in this article yesterday).
Meanwhile, Dubai security chief Dhahi Khalfan surprised some people by announcing that he backed Trump’s executive order. And UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan said the ban was “not Islamophobic”.
Kuwait is also one of 16 countries that bans Israeli Jews from visiting.
***
I attach six articles below.
ARTICLES
KUWAIT BANS ENTRY TO FIVE NATIONALITIES
Kuwait bans visa issuance to five nationalities
Nationals from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan banned from entering Kuwait
By Habib Toumi, Bureau Chief
Gulf News
May 21, 2011
http://m.gulfnews.com/news/gulf/kuwait/kuwait-bans-visa-issuance-to-five-nationalities-1.810834
Manama: Kuwait has banned nationals from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan from entering the country, local media have reported.
The ban includes suspending all tourism, visit and trade visas as well as visas sponsored by spouses, immigration sources said, quoted by Kuwaiti media on Saturday.
They attributed the blanket visa ban to the “difficult security conditions in the five countries” and to “the remarkably increasing tendency of nationals from the five countries to apply for visas to bring in relatives who faced or could face arrest by the local authorities to Kuwait.”
The sources said the authorities insisted that no exception in the visa application would be tolerated, but added that the ban was temporarily and would be lifted after the security situation stabilised.
Last month, a social affairs and labour official denied reports that Kuwait was planning to impose a ban on issuing visas to nationals from the five countries.
OBAMA’S AMBASSADOR NOW VOICES SUPPORT FOR MOVING EMBASSY TO JERUSALEM
Ex-US envoy voices support for ‘carefully’ moving embassy to Jerusalem
Offering advice to new administration, Dan Shapiro professes his ‘love of Jerusalem’ and ‘sense of justice for Jewish claims to the city’
By Raphael Ahren
Times of Israel
February 1, 2017
http://www.timesofisrael.com/ex-us-envoy-seems-sympathetic-to-embassys-move-to-jerusalem/
After consistently defending the Obama administration’s opposition to moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem, former US ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro now appears sympathetic to the idea.
In an article offering advice to the new US administration, he argues that the embassy’s relocation could take place even before a final Palestinian-Israeli peace deal is reached.
The move might also have positive practical implications for American diplomats stationed in Israel, who would no longer need to travel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to meet government officials, he wrote.
“I supported all three presidents’ use of their national security waiver authority to delay the move in the interest of pursuing Middle East peace. But I have never believed that arguments for moving the embassy were groundless, or that it must await a final Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement,” Shapiro wrote in Foreign Policy Magazine (registration required).
“I’m influenced by my love of Jerusalem – an emotional attachment born of decades studying its history – and sense of justice for Jewish claims to the city that are far too often called into question. The presence of a US Embassy in parts of Jerusalem no one disputes are Israeli territory is one way of acknowledging the centuries of history that link the Jewish people to the city, the questioning of which is closely linked to the denial of Israel’s very legitimacy.”
The former ambassador, who continues to live in Israel so his children can finish school here, offers several pieces of advice on how US President Donald Trump could fulfill his campaign promise to move the embassy in a constructive manner that would not provoke too much protest from the Arab world.
“Done carefully, it could advance American national goals and interests. Done carelessly, it could cause them grave harm and lead to preventable tragedy,” he said.
So far, statements coming from the White House suggest it is not rushing to move the embassy but weighing the question carefully, the ex-diplomat pointed out, calling it “a welcome contrast to numerous off-the-cuff policy pronouncements, from China to Mexico to refugee and immigration policy.”
Earlier this week, Trump said in an interview that there is “a chance” that he’ll move the embassy, but acknowledged that there are “two sides” to this issue and that it is “not easy” to make a decision.
To safeguard a future peace deal based on the two-state solution, of which a Palestinian capital in Jerusalem is a central component, the US Embassy should be located in the western part of the city, Shapiro suggested in the Foreign Policy article. The administration should make it very clear that the move does not constitute an official recognition of Israel’s claim of sovereignty over the entire city, he argued.
Furthermore, the US needs to recommit itself to preserving the status quo of the holy sites to “assuage both Muslim sensitivities about the Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount) and Jewish sensitivities about the Western Wall,” Shapiro wrote.
Neither Israelis nor Palestinians will be happy about such pronouncements, he added, but they could “actually advance the prospects for a two-state solution by shattering self-defeating myths on both sides.”
Before publicly announcing the embassy’s move, the Trump administration should consult with other important stakeholders: the Palestinians, the Jordanians, the Saudis and the Egyptians, the former ambassador recommended.
Arab leaders are likely to protest the relocation and might even threaten some kind of “diplomatic retaliation,” Shapiro predicted, but they also wish to “get off on the right foot with the Trump administration, and several have common strategic interests with Israel.”
Informing the Arab world about the administration’s plan “shows respect” and could actually “dampen the blowback,” he argued.
Washington should avoid linking a possible embassy relocation to this June’s 50th anniversary of the Six Day War, during which Israel captured the eastern part of Jerusalem, Shapiro suggested. Such a connection would appear to endorse Israel’s subsequent annexation of this part of the city and thus “drag the United States into a historical argument that is not ours.”
Rejecting suggestions that the US could simply put up a sign at its Jerusalem Consulate that says “Embassy,” Shapiro said a new large and secure facility would have to be built in the capital to accommodate the mission’s 800 employees. New residences would have to be found for staffers asked to move to Jerusalem, and solutions found for those who don’t want to relocate.
Such a project – which would cost “hundreds of millions of dollars” – needs to be well planned and could take up to 10 years, Shapiro estimated.
In contemplating the embassy’s move to Jerusalem, the US should not be deterred by the prospect of violent protests, but at the same time “we also should not pretend that the risk of violence does not exist,” the former envoy urged.
“Terror and violence can never be justified, but any significant policy change should be accompanied by a professional assessment about the risks of violence and the ability to contain it. Lives may well be at stake if an embassy move is handled cavalierly, and it is simply denial to say otherwise.”
Since leaving the ambassador’s residence on January 20, Shapiro has not been shy about weighing in on matters regarding US-Israel relations. For instance, he questioned the motives of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s support for Trump’s plan to build a border wall with Mexico, which led to a diplomatic crisis with the Latin American country.
In 1995, when the US Congress passed legislation requiring the embassy’s move to Jerusalem, Shapiro worked as foreign policy aide to Democratic California Senator Dianne Feinstein, who was instrumental in getting the law’s sponsors to insert a provision allowing the president to waive the move. It is this particular stipulation that has prevented the embassy’s relocation for the last 22 years.
The waiver, last signed on December 1, 2016, by president Barack Obama, expires on June 1.
JEWISH PEOPLE GIVE MUSLIMS KEY TO THEIR SYNAGOGUE AFTER TOWN’S MOSQUE BURNS DOWN
Jewish people give Muslims key to their synagogue after town’s mosque burns down
Donations to rebuild the Islamic centre are adding up
By Jon Sharman
The Independent
February 1, 2017
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/victoria-islamic-centre-mosque-fire-texas-jews-give-key-synagogue-muslims-worship-gofundme-a7556331.html
Jewish people in a small Texas city handed Muslim worshippers the keys to their synagogue after the town’s only mosque was destroyed in a fire.
The Victoria Islamic Centre burned down on Saturday and had previously been burgled – the cause is being investigated by federal officials.
But the town’s Muslim population will not be without a place to worship while their building is reconstructed, thanks to their Jewish neighbours.
Robert Loeb, the president of Temple Bnai Israel, told Forward: “Everyone knows everybody, I know several members of the mosque, and we felt for them. When a calamity like this happens, we have to stand together.
“We have probably 25 to 30 Jewish people in Victoria, and they probably have 100 Muslims. We got a lot of building for a small amount of Jews.”
One of the mosque’s founders, Shahid Hashmi, said: “Jewish community members walked into my home and gave me a key to the synagogue.”
The centre was built in 2000.
Donations and an online fundraising campaign have raised more than $900,000 (£717,000) for reconstruction.
The blaze was discovered at at about 2am on Saturday by a clerk at a convenience store, who called the fire department. It took around four hours to bring it under control and no injuries were reported.
The fire took place just hours after President Donald Trump announced he would ban citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the US, and halted the country’s refugee program for 120 days.
Omar Rachid, who created the GoFundMe campaign, said: “Our hearts are filled with gratitude for the tremendous support we’ve received. The outpouring of love, kind words, hugs, helping hands and the financial contributions are examples of the true American spirit.”
AT LEAST 17 BOMB THREATS CALLED IN TO JCCS NATIONWIDE IN THIRD WAVE OF HARASSMENT
At least 17 bomb threats called in to JCCs nationwide in third wave of harassment
JTA news service
January 31, 2017
http://www.jta.org/2017/01/31/news-opinion/united-states/at-least-11-bomb-threats-called-in-to-jccs-nationwide-in-third-wave-of-threats
At least 17 Jewish community centers across the United States were targeted with bomb threats in the third wave of such mass disruption this month.
Paul Goldenberg, the director of Secure Community Network – an affiliate of the Jewish Federations of North America that advises Jewish groups and institutions on security – said the threats were called in late Tuesday morning. Some of the messages were live, he confirmed.
“[I]n the past we know that the numbers can grow exponentially,” he said, adding that perpetrators have been “leveraging technologies to make mass calls.”
Goldenberg confirmed that threats had been called into JCCs in Albany, New York; Syracuse, New York; West Orange, New Jersey; Milwaukee, San Diego and Salt Lake City.
The JCC in New Haven, Connecticut received a live call at 11:45 a.m. Tuesday threatening violence. The JCC is housed in several locations following a Dec. 5 fire, and evacuated about 100 people from those places following the call. After law enforcement determined that the threat was not credible, the evacuees returned. The New Haven JCC was also targeted in a wave of bomb threats about two weeks ago.
“We recognize that we live under a new set of circumstances that we have to be responsive to, and take every possible precaution to keep our people safe,” said New Haven JCC CEO Judy Diamondstein. “While we are disrupted, we refuse to be daunted by this.”
Diamondstein said the JCC has drilled safety protocols extensively in order to be prepared for a situation like this. Diamondstein had a previously scheduled meeting Wednesday afternoon with an FBI officer to sharpen procedures for dealing with an active shooter.
“We have been diligent in looking at our security for a while now,” she said.
Goldenberg said his organization was instructing the JCCs to be in touch with local police to determine if they should evacuate. The JCC MetroWest in West Orange, New Jersey announced an evacuation at 11:42 a.m.
“In light of the newest bomb threats, we must remain a resilient community, and we need to ensure that we are back at our JCCs as soon as local police advise the all-clear,” Goldenberg said.
He added: “Our Jewish community centers are focusing on security today more than ever before, and in spite of these continuous bomb threats I’m confident that our institutions are taking security seriously – and in many cases Jewish institutions are more secure than institutions frequented by the general public.”
On Jan. 18, some 30 Jewish institutions in at least 17 states received bomb threats. On Jan. 9, such threats were called into 16 JCCs across the Northwest and South, forcing the evacuation of hundreds.
TRUMP’S JEWISH AIDE BORIS EPSHTEYN WROTE HOLOCAUST STATEMENT THAT OMITTED JEWS
Report: Trump Jewish aide Boris Epshteyn wrote Holocaust statement that omitted Jews
JTA
January 31, 2017
http://www.jta.org/2017/01/31/news-opinion/politics/report-jewish-aide-to-president-donald-trump-wrote-holocaust-statement-that-omitted-jews
The White House statement for International Holocaust Remembrance Day that has generated controversy for omitting Jews reportedly was written by a Jewish aide to President Donald Trump.
Boris Epshteyn, a special assistant to the president, crafted the statement, the political news website Politico reported Monday evening, citing an unnamed source “with knowledge of the situation.”
Epshteyn, a former Republican political strategist, immigrated to the United States from his native Moscow in 1993 at 11.
On Monday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters at the daily briefing, “The statement was written with the help of an individual who is both Jewish and the descendant of Holocaust survivors.” Asked if it was Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and a leading adviser, Spicer refused to say.
Spicer also said that complaints, including from major U.S. Jewish groups, about the omission of Jews from the statement issued Friday were “pathetic” and “disappointing.”
“The president went out of his way to recognize the Holocaust and the suffering that went through it, and to make sure America never forgets the people that were affected by it and the loss of life,” Spicer said.
“To suggest that remembering the Holocaust and acknowledging all of the people – Jewish, gypsies, priests, disabled, gays and lesbians – I mean it is pathetic that people are picking on a statement,” he said.
Since the United Nations launched the remembrance day in 2005, marking the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama have noted in their statements that the principal aim of the Holocaust was the genocide of the Jews.
Jewish critics have said that omitting Jews from Holocaust commemoration statements, wittingly or not, plays into the agenda of groups that seek to diminish the Nazi genocide of the Jews.
Since the controversy erupted, Trump administration spokesmen, including his chief of staff, Reince Priebus, have doubled down on the argument that it is better not to single out Jews in order to be “inclusive.”
A New York-based investment banker and finance attorney, Epshteyn was a communications aide for Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2008, focusing his efforts on the Arizona senator’s running mate, then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.
IS THE U.S. IN FOR TROUBLE WHENEVER JARED KUSHNER OBSERVES THE JEWISH SHABBAT?
Is the U.S. in for Trouble Whenever Jared Kushner Observes the Jewish Shabbat?
A controversial entry ban was signed minutes before the Jewish Sabbath, sparking speculation the problem could have been avoided had Trump’s son-in-law still been at the office.
By Allison Kaplan Sommer
Haaretz
February 1, 2017
The good news is that more Americans are learning about Orthodox Jews and their laws of Sabbath observance than ever before.
The bad news is the reason. It appears to be a growing problem that the White House adviser most capable of moderating the behavior of U.S. President Donald Trump, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is off-duty for a day every week, restricted by the limitations of Shabbat - unable to work, ride in a car, or use electronic devices from sundown on Friday through the fall of darkness on Saturday.
Certainly no one can prove that if Kushner had not already left Trump’s side on Friday afternoon, the president wouldn’t have made the controversial chaos-inducing move of signing the executive order that temporarily stopped immigration from Libya, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Sudan, and halted U.S.-bound refugees in their tracks.
But it couldn’t help but be noticed: the signing took place at 4:42 pm - Shabbat began shortly afterwards, at 5:08. Kushner was already home when the deed was done, helping his wife Ivanka prepare for their Friday night Shabbat dinner where the guests of honor were members of the Trump cabinet. Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly told reporters on Tuesday he knew of plans to sign the immigration order on Thursday. But who knows how many other members of Trump’s entourage were aware.
It’s not the first time there has been a national conversation about Orthodox Jews at the highest levels of government. When Senator Joseph Lieberman was nominated as a candidate for Vice President, there was debate over whether his religious observance would prove a hindrance in emergency situations, both as vice president and in the eventuality that something happened to the president and he would have to become commander in chief.
While Lieberman, of course, was never tested, and Kushner is an adviser, not an office-holder, the conversation has been revived.
The timing of the executive order signing and the Sabbath was bantered about on a CNN roundtable after it was reported in Vanity Fair, which observed that “a little more than a week into the Trump presidency, the timing of the Friday sunset seems to be growing increasingly important” due to the fact that Kushner who is “positioned as something of a mollifying presence upon his mercurial boss” is absent.
In winter months, this means Kushner’s checkout time on Fridays is extremely early - in summer, Shabbat often begins hours later.
The previous week, immediately following his inauguration, Trump spent Friday and Saturday settling scores over reports that the size of his swearing-in crowd was smaller than Barack Obama, delivering a rambling off-message speech at the CIA, and ordered an uncomfortable-looking press secretary, Sean Spicer, in the White House briefing room to deliver “alternative facts” about inauguration attendance and lambaste the press for its coverage.
The Vanity Fair article quoted an insider source saying that the fact that all of this troublesome behavior played out when Kushner wasn’t around “was not a coincidence.”
So do we live in terror of Rosh Hashana, starting Wednesday night this year...meaning a 72 hour Jared-less cone?
It isn’t the first time that Trump has been observed going rogue while Ivanka and Jared were worshipping and spending time with their three children. During his presidential campaign, some of Trump’s most ill-advised Twitter forays were observed to have taken place on Shabbat and Jewish holidays.
Included on the list of toxic Shabbat social media gaffes was the infamous meme featuring Hillary Clinton on a pile of cash next to a six-pointed star, and Trump’s insensitive reaction to the Orlando nightclub killing, in which he tweeted: “Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism.”
In a September profile of Ivanka in the Huffington Post, the future First Daughter was described as acting “like the parent with her inexhaustible patience for cleaning up messes, while Donald acts like a rebellious child constantly testing the limits of how far he can go.” The article quoted an unnamed friend of the couple as saying “some of Donald’s worst tweets of the campaign” took place on Jewish holidays when Ivanka and Jared were “off the grid.”
The friend proved prophetic when they said “It could be a big problem if the people who make our president not crazy aren’t available one day a week.”
At least on one occasion, Kushner seemed willing to bend religious rules to put out a political fire. In October, after the release of the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape where the future president was caught bragging about groping and propositioning women, the press took note that Kushner, then a campaign adviser, “broke his usual Shabbat routine” and joined the huddle at Trump Tower to help the candidate’s team strategize their way through the crisis.
It’s not easy to be a high-profile Orthodox Jew in the media fishbowl. Tongues wagged when Jared and Ivanka broke Shabbat strictures when they travelled by car to participate in an Inaugural Ball and Saturday morning church service. The violation took place after they reportedly found an unnamed rabbi who deemed their secured travel excusable under the Jewish principle of “pikuach nefesh” - permission to violate Shabbat rules in order to save lives.
Hopefully, the anonymous rabbi will be close at hand the next time Trump is on the brink of doing something ill-advised with serious consequences late on Friday - and Jared or Ivanka need to be on hand to stop him.
Pikuach nefesh would surely apply - not only lives could be at stake, but the future of a country.