Do Unilateralists Own Israel’s Future? By Tom Wilson.

Do Unilateralists Own Israel’s Future? By Tom Wilson. Commentary, April 10, 2014.

ScarJo Tells the Truth About Anti-Semitism. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

ScarJo Tells the Truth About Anti-Semitism. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, April 10, 2014.

Demonizing Israel; Demonizing ScarJo. By Jonathan S. Tobin. NJBR, January 28, 2014. With related articles and video.

Pity the Palestinians? Count Me Out. By Norman Podhoretz.

Pity the Palestinians? Count Me Out. By Norman Podhoretz. The Wall Street Journal, April 9, 2014. Also here.

Podhoretz:

Thousands of Arabs are dying in Syria and South Sudan. Where’s the outrage on behalf of those truly suffering?

Provoked by the predictable collapse of the farcical negotiations forced by Secretary of State John Kerry on the Palestinians and the Israelis, I wish to make a confession: I have no sympathy—none—for the Palestinians. Furthermore, I do not believe they deserve any.

This, of course, puts me at daggers drawn with the enlightened opinion that goes forth from the familiar triumvirate of the universities, the mainstream media and the entertainment industry. For everyone in that world is so busy weeping over the allegedly incomparable sufferings of the Palestinians that hardly a tear is left for the tribulations of other peoples. And so all-consuming is the universal rage over the supposedly monumental injustice that has been done to the Palestinians that virtually no indignation is available for any other claimant to unwarranted mistreatment.

In my unenlightened opinion, this picture of the Palestinian plight is nothing short of grotesquely disproportionate. Let me leave aside the Palestinians who live in Israel as Israeli citizens and who enjoy the same political rights as Israeli Jews (which is far more than can be said of Palestinians who live in any Arab country), and let me concentrate on those living under Israeli occupation on the West Bank.

Well, to judge by the most significant measure and applying it only to two instances of what is going on at this very moment: In Syria, untold thousands of fellow Arabs are starving, while according to the United Nations official on the scene in South Sudan, 3.7 million people, amounting to one-third of the population, are now facing imminent death by starvation.

And the Palestinians? True, when they wish to go from the West Bank into Israel proper, they are forced to stop at checkpoints and subjected to searches for suicide vests or other weapons in the terrorist arsenal. Once, when she was secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice bemoaned the great inconvenience and humiliation inflicted by such things on the poor Palestinians. Yet she had nothing to say about Palestinians dying of starvation on the West Bank, for the simple reason that there were none to be found.

Nor did anyone starve to death in Gaza when it too was under Israeli occupation. And despite propaganda to the contrary, neither is anyone facing the same fate in Gaza today because of the blockade the Israelis have set up to prevent clandestine shipments of arms intended for use against them.

Speaking of Gaza, it can serve as a case study of the extent to which the plight of the Palestinians has been self-inflicted. Thus when every last Israeli was pulled out of Gaza in 2005, some well-wishers expected that the Palestinians, now in complete control, would dedicate themselves to turning it into a free and prosperous country. Instead, they turned it into a haven for terrorism and a base for firing rockets into Israel.

Meanwhile little or nothing of the billions in aid being poured into Gaza—some of it from wealthy American Jewish donors—went to improving the living conditions of the general populace. Which did not prevent a majority of those ordinary Palestinians from supporting Hamas, under whose leadership this order of priorities was more faithfully followed than it was under Fatah, its slightly less militant rival.

As for the monumental injustice supposedly done to the Palestinians, it consists largely of losing territory in the war they themselves provoked in 1967, and the refusal of their demand that every inch of it be returned to them by the Israeli victors in that war. Such demands have always been known and universally denounced as revanchism or irredentism, most recently over the Russian seizure of Crimea. But where Israel is concerned, everything goes topsy-turvy, so that Palestinian irredentism is universally supported.

The accompanying and equally great injustice allegedly suffered by the Palestinians is that they have been denied a state of their own. But this hardly qualifies as unique, given that dozens of other ethnic groups—the Kurds being the most prominent—are in the same boat.

In any event, this “injustice” is also self-inflicted, since three times in the past 15 years the Palestinians have refused offers of a state on most of the territory taken by Israel in 1967 and with Jerusalem as its capital. They have justified these refusals by one pretext or another, but as anyone willing to look can see, what they truly want is not a state of their own living side by side with Israel but a state that replaces Israel altogether.

With this we come to the main reason I believe that the Palestinians do not deserve any sympathy, let alone the astonishing degree of it they do receive (and not least from many of my fellow Jews). It is that ever since the day of Israel’s birth in 1948, they have never ceased declaring that their goal is to wipe it off the map. In all other contexts, this would be called by its rightful name of genocide and condemned by all decent people. Yet—here we go topsy-turvy again—for any and every step Israel takes to defend itself against so shamelessly evil an intent, it is the Israelis who are obsessively condemned at the U.N. and by the increasingly strident propagators of what calls itself “anti-Zionism” but is also increasingly indistinguishable from anti-Semitism.

Nor, alas, is it only the leaders of the Palestinians who harbor this evil intent. As revealed by poll after poll, as well as by the elections that led the way for Hamas to take power in Gaza, a decisive majority of the Palestinian people does so as well. No doubt this is the fruit of relentless indoctrination from above, but the damage has been done, and the end result is what it is.

Indeed, the best that can be said of both Palestinian leaders and led is that many of them no longer imagine—as did Gamal Abdel Nasser, the former president of Egypt—that they have the power to drive the Jews of Israel into the sea. Therefore they are now willing to give up pursuing the goal of genocide and to settle for the more modest objective of politicide—that is, to get rid of the Jewish state by transforming it, through various “peaceful” means like the “right of return,” into a state with a Palestinian majority.

I for one pray that a day will come when the Palestinians finally let go of the evil intent toward Israel that keeps me from having any sympathy for them, and that they will make their own inner peace with the existence of a Jewish state in their immediate neighborhood. But until that day arrives, the “peace process” will go on being as futile as it has been so many times before and as it has just proved once again to be. Another thing that never changes: When John Kerry testified on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, it was the Israelis he blamed for this latest diplomatic fiasco.

Life for Russia’s Liberals Just Got a Whole Lot Worse. By Anna Nemtsova.

Life for Russia’s Liberals Just Got a Whole Lot Worse. By Anna Nemtsova. Foreign Policy, April 9, 2014. Also here.

Moscow’s annexation of Crimea is fueling a surge of “patriotism” – and a new sense of claustrophobia.

Is a French Intifada Brewing? By Marc Hecker.

Is a French Intifada Brewing? By Marc Hecker. The American Interest, April 9, 2014.

Why the “Open” Internet Is So Closed to Women. By Astra Taylor.

Why the “Open” Internet Is So Closed to Women. By Astra Taylor. The Nation, April 10, 2014.

Putin Causing More Trouble in Ukraine. By Bill O’ Reilly and Ralph Peters.

Putin Causing More Trouble in Ukraine. By Bill O’ Reilly and Ralph Peters. Video. The O’Reilly Factor. Fox News, April 8, 2014. YouTube. Also here.

The Grand Mufti’s Nazi Connection. By Edy Cohen.

The Grand Mufti’s Nazi connection. By Edy Cohen. Translated by Hannah Hochner. Jerusalem Post, April 7, 2014.

Cohen:

It’s no coincidence that just a few months after Nazi Germany surrendered, on November 2, 1945, the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, many synagogues were burned down in Egypt and dozens of Jews were killed on the streets of Cairo.

 

On November 5, 1941, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, arrived in Berlin. He was fleeing Iraq following the failure of the coup he was involved in there, and three weeks later he met with Adolf Hitler. The meeting took place despite Nazi Germany’s entanglement in Operation Barbarossa and the war against Russia.

 

The Nazis appointed the mufti “Das Arabische Buro Der Grossmufti” of Berlin and gave him a monthly allowance of tens of thousands of dollars a month. He was instructed to hire dozens of assistants, each of whom also received a salary directly from the Third Reich. Among the individuals with whom he worked closely during his time in Berlin was Hassan Salameh – the father of the Palestinian terrorist Ali Salameh (aka “the Red Prince”), one of the perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of Israeli athletes.

 

In his new position, the mufti was placed in charge of the Nazi’s Arabic-language radio station, that broadcast anti-Semitic propaganda in Arabic from 1939 until the Nazi party collapsed in 1945. This radio station was highly popular and could be heard throughout the Middle East. The mufti was also responsible for disseminating written Nazi propaganda in Arabic designed to encourage protests against British and French occupation.

 

The mufti lived in Germany until May 1945, when the Second World War came to an end. Throughout this entire period, the mufti was involved in espionage, sabotage, terrorist activity against the British and the Jews, as well as anti-Semitic propaganda.

 

As part of his alleged struggle for independence for the Palestinian people, the mufti attempted to prevent the arrival of European Jews to Palestine, as well as the establishment of a national Jewish homeland in the Land of Israel. At least that’s what he claimed in his memoirs.

 

But this is far from the truth. In actuality, the mufti was constantly engaged in the deportation and extermination of Jews from Arab countries and from Palestine.

 

I recently discovered documents that attest to the depth of the Arab world’s animosity toward the Jews and how the Arabs incited against the Jews and spread propaganda. Many people have asked just how closely the mufti identified conceptually and practically to the Nazi approach regarding the extermination of the Jewish people.

 

There are recordings of the mufti broadcasting from Berlin to the Arab world in Arabic, in which he says, “Kill the Jews wherever you find them – this is God’s will.”

 

On November 2, 1943 – the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration – the mufti organized a protest in Berlin in which thousands of Muslim immigrants to Germany participated. The following is an excerpt from the speech the mufti gave at the protest: “26 years ago the Jews received the Balfour Declaration so they could build a national Jewish homeland. The British betrayed the Arabs and Islam by supporting the Jews. Jews are selfish.”

 

“They think they are the chosen people and that all the other people of the world are meant to serve them. The Jews are the enemy of Islam – they are the ones killed the prophet Mohammad!” The Mufti continues, “The Jewish British minister [Benjamin] Disraeli bought the Suez Canal, thus paving the way for the British to conquer Egypt. And Algerian Jews helped France occupy Algeria. . . . The Arabs – and especially the Muslims – must expel the Jews from Arab countries.

 

“This is the ultimate solution.

 

“The prophet Mohammad used this solution 1,300 years ago.

 

“The Treaty of Versailles was a disaster for Germany and for the Arabs, but the Germans know how to get rid of the Jews, and this is why the Arab world has such close relations with Germany.

 

“Germany never harmed the Muslims and is fighting against our common enemy – the Jews.

 

“The most important thing is that they have found the final solution to the Jewish problem. Time is working against the Jews even though the Allies are helping them.”

 

According to the mufti’s memoirs, he was aware of the Final Solution already in the summer of 1943.

 

On March 19, 1943, the mufti made a speech from the Islamic Mosque in Berlin in honor of the prophet Mohammad’s birthday, during which he said, “The Jews have managed to use their influence to control the British and the Americans. This is proven by the recent passing of a bill in Congress allowing the Jews to build a national homeland in Palestine.

 

“The Jews took advantage of the previous war to settle in the Holy Land. The Jews are a threat not just in Palestine, but in every Arab country, since this is where the Allies plan to resettle the millions of Jews who were expelled from Europe. The Arabs must fight with all their strength to put an end to this plot.”

 

From the above, we can clearly conclude that the mufti was aware of the Final Solution and the plan to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe from the beginning of the war. There is also documentation showing that the mufti toured concentration camps in Poland with Heinrich Himmler. Killing European Jews was not good enough for the mufti, though, and so he planned to kill all the Jews in the Arab world and in Palestine. While the mufti publicly called for Arab countries to expel Jews living in them, he secretly planned to build extermination camps for Jews from Arab countries and Palestine, so that he could implement the Final Solution in the Middle East.

 

Haviv Kanaan, who was a researcher, journalist and police commander during the British Mandate, wrote many books about Nazi propaganda. After he retired from the Police, Kanaan began working as a journalist for Haaretz and researching the construction of the concentration camps in Palestine and uncovered the mufti’s plan to build incinerators in the Dotan Valley. Kanaan based his conclusion on the testimony of Faiz Bay Idrisi, who was a senior Arab officer in the Mandate Police and a Jerusalem area district commander.

 

Idrisi is quoted as saying, “Chills go through my body even today as I recall what I heard back then from police officials and mufti supporters [when General Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was about to enter Egypt as part of the 1942 El Alamein campaign].

 

“Haj Amin Husseini was preparing to enter Jerusalem at the head of the Muslim Arab Legion squadron he’d created for the army of the Third Reich. The mufti’s grand plan was to build huge Auschwitz-like crematoria near Nablus, to which Jews from Palestine, Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and North Africa would be sent and then be gassed, just like the Jews were by the SS in Europe.”

 

Kanaan also tells how once, when he was carrying out his research, he met a retired German diplomat who had refused to join the Nazi Party. He told Kanaan, “I cannot say with certainty what lay in store for the Jews living in the Land of Israel, but I do know that their entire existence would have been at stake had Rommel succeeded in conquering the Middle East.”

 

Kanaan’s full-length study was published in Haaretz on March 2, 1970. Kanaan wrote a book about the El Alamein campaign called 200 days of fear – the Land of Israel against Rommel’s Army, in which he describes how the Jews in Palestine prepared for a possible Nazi attack from Egypt.

 

To collect information about the mufti’s plans, Kanaan traveled to Germany where he met with officials who were knowledgeable about them. In fact, after the defeat in the summer of 1942 at El Alamein as well as on other fronts, the mufti realized that the Third Reich’s days were numbered, and so he prepared another plan: conquest of the Middle East by the Nazi army, whose first order of business would be the annihilation of the 250,000 Jews in Tel Aviv. The mufti believed that the extermination of the Jews would stimulate the Arabs in Palestine and Egypt to revolt against the British and carry out a jihad (holy war).

 

These holy warriors would release the Arabs from tyranny of British and French colonialism.

 

Kanaan uncovered proof that the Germans invested heavily in this program and even established spy networks throughout the Arab world. Kanaan describes how senior German officials such as Heinrich Himmler and Hermann Goering took part in these discussions, although Hitler himself was never involved. The fact that most Arab countries were pro-British made it quite difficult to implement this program, and then the Third Reich began to collapse on all fronts, making it practically impossible.

 

It’s no coincidence that just a few months after Nazi Germany surrendered, on November 2, 1945, the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, many synagogues were burned down in Egypt and dozens of Jews were killed on the streets of Cairo.

 

And it was also no coincidence that on that same day, hundreds of Jews in Libya were killed, nine synagogues were desecrated, and hundreds of Jewish homes and shops were looted and burned down. There is no doubt that these attacks on Egyptian and Libyan Jews, which took place exactly on the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, were the result of the mufti’s machinations and his influence on leaders of the Arab world. These events were the direct consequence of propaganda the mufti had been circulating for years. Generations of Muslims, including the Salameh family, were being raised on such beliefs. The mufti’s actions had prepared the ground for attacks on Jews in Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

 

A plan to compensate Jews who escaped from Arab countries due to harassment and persecution is currently being discussed in the Knesset and in coordination with the US government. It’s important that Israeli politicians not only understand the historical background that led up to the displacement of Jews from Arab counties, but also the direct connection between their fate and what the Palestinians call the Nakba.

Daenerys Targaryen: Neoconservative. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Daenerys Targaryen: Neoconservative. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, April 8, 2014.

Daenerys Targaryen, everyone’s favorite Game of Thrones character, is secretly George W. Bush. By Zack Beauchamp. Vox, April 7, 2014.

Why No One Should Still Be a Neocon (II). By Daniel Larison. The American Conservative, April 9, 2014.

Americans Still Blind to Israel’s Domination of Palestinians. By Ira Chernus.

Americans Still Blind to Israel’s Domination of Palestinians. By Ira Chernus. History News Network, April 8, 2014.

Chernus:

The only realistic path to peace is to speak honestly – to name Israel as the stronger party, the occupier, and thus the side obliged (legally, morally, and practically) to make more concessions.


Typical left-wing anti-Israel blather. Palestinians have the moral high ground because they are victims of those evil, nasty Jews and are thus justified in lashing out in terrorism.

The Game Is Up for Climate Change Believers. By Charles Moore.

The game is up for climate change believers. By Charles Moore. The Telegraph, April 6, 2014.

Moore:

The origins of warmism lie in a cocktail of ideas which includes anti-industrial nature worship, post-colonial guilt, a post-Enlightenment belief in scientists as a new priesthood of the truth, a hatred of population growth, a revulsion against the widespread increase in wealth and a belief in world government. It involves a fondness for predicting that energy supplies won’t last much longer (as early as 1909, the US National Conservation Commission reported to Congress that America’s natural gas would be gone in 25 years and its oil by the middle of the century), protest movements which involve dressing up and disappearing into woods (the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, the Mosleyite Blackshirts who believed in reafforestation) and a dislike of the human race (The Club of Rome’s work Mankind at the Turning-Point said: “The world has cancer and the cancer is man.”).

Why Palestine Must Recognize Israel as a Jewish State. By Chuck Freilich.

Why Palestine Must Recognize Israel as a Jewish State. By Chuck Freilich. The National Interest, April 3, 2014.

Freilich:

Prime Minister Netanyahu has recently chosen to place the long-standing Israeli demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, at the center of the negotiations. Heretofore a secondary issue, he even agreed to a temporary extension of the settlement freeze in exchange. Though the timing was clearly designed as a tactical ploy, the demand itself is substantive and highly important.

 

Why, the Palestinians ask, should they be required to address the question of Israel’s character; it is enough that they recognize its right to exist. No, it is not enough. After sixty-six years of Israeli independence and nearly a century of conflict, the Palestinians must recognize Israel for what it is. They are not being asked to define Israel’s character, merely to accept its self-definition.

 

But, rejoin critics of Israel, there is no symmetry here. Whereas Israel is being asked to recognize the right of the Palestinian nation to a state, the Palestinians are being asked to recognize a religious group’s claim.

 

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of Jewish history, prevalent even among diaspora Jews. The Jews are unique, in that they are both a religious group and a people, a nation, with a right of self-determination. That is why we speak of the “Jewish people”, a Jewish nationhood, but not a Christian people, or a Muslim people. The Jews’ right to a nation-state was recognized by the League of Nations and United Nations. Israel is and always will be the nation-state of the Jewish people. That is its raison d’être, and it is high time that the Palestinians reconcile themselves to this.

 

The Palestinians argue that the Israeli demand is merely obstructionist; Israel already defines itself as it wishes and Palestinian recognition will have no bearing on its standing. Formally, this is true. Israel does not need Palestinian recognition to define itself.

 

What it does need is for the Palestinians to truly and irrevocably recognize Israel as it is, not just the Israeli state, which has guaranteed its existence by achieving military superiority, but the legitimacy of its character. Only when the Palestinians can bring themselves to do so, will Israel be confident that they are truly ready for peace, an end to the conflict and the painful concessions that will be required by all.

 

In recognizing the Israeli demand, the Palestinians charge, they are in effect being asked to forgo the refugees' “right of return” and adversely affect the standing of Israeli Arabs. Absolutely not. Recognition of the Israeli demand does not preclude the Palestinians’ demand for a “right of return.”

 

Conversely, it is abundantly clear to anyone truly committed to resolving the conflict, that this is a demand which the Palestinians will have to largely forgo. They can retain it for the meantime, as a negotiating card, but just as Israel will be required to make the major concessions on borders, settlements and Jerusalem, the Palestinians will have to do so on the refugees.

 

Furthermore, the Palestinians do not speak for Israeli Arabs. They already live in an Israel which defines itself as the nation-state of the Jewish people. Palestinian recognition thereof will not affect their standing—unless, of course, they still harbor hopes of changing Israel’s character.

 

Israel, the Palestinians note, did not ask Egypt and Jordan to recognize its Jewish character as part of the peace agreements with them, just its right to exist. This is true, the difference being that, unlike the Palestinians, they did not claim all of Israel as their own, nor did they maintain that in recognizing Israel in its 1967 borders, they were being forced to cede 78 percent of their homeland, nor did they harbor hopes of return of their populations to Israel itself. With Egypt and Jordan, the conflict was ultimately over the occupied territories of 1967. With the Palestinians it is still over 1948.

 

At bottom, that is what the current debate is truly about. Most Israelis believe that the negotiations with the Palestinians are not really over the West Bank and Gaza, which most are willing to accept as the Palestinian state, but over the Palestinians’ ongoing refusal to accept the legitimacy of Israel’s right to exist, as the nation-state of the Jewish people, even within the 1948 borders.

 

Paradoxically, a case can be made that it was unnecessary to present the demand for recognition to begin with. Once, however, the Palestinians expressed reservations and then rejected it out of hand, it has become essential.

As Mideast Hopes Dim, Some Urge Scaling Back of Lofty Goals. By Nicholas Casey.

As Mideast Hopes Dim, Some Urge Scaling Back of Lofty Goals. By Nicholas Casey. The Wall Street Journal, April 7, 2014.

John Kerry ruined what John Kerry built. By Ben-Dror Yemini. i24News, April 7, 2014.

Israel Has Few Options With Palestinians. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, April 9, 2014.

Why Netanyahu Won’t “Go Big.” By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, April 10, 2014.

Naftali Bennett calls on Netanyahu to annex 60% of West Bank. By Gil Hoffman. Jerusalem Post, April 10, 2014.


Casey:

But with Secretary of State John Kerry’s declaration last week that the peace process needed a “reality check,” hopes of a grand bargain put forward when he kicked off his diplomacy nine months ago are being scaled back.

 

The difficulties in agreeing on a prisoner swap bode ill for tackling more complex issues that need to be resolved to reach a lasting peace. That has opened a discussion about constraining aspirations and urging U.S. mediators to accept the status quo while the two sides focus on ways to avoid any escalation in violence.

 

Former politicians and analysts propose that the most contentious issues that need to be resolved for a comprehensive peace, such as borders and security, would be left for after future elections. The two sides would continue official peace talks, allowing their U.S. ally to avoid failure on a long-standing foreign-policy goal.

 

“The gap between the most moderate position in Israel and the most moderate position in the Palestinian leadership is too far right now,” said Shlomo Avineri, a former director general of Israel’s foreign ministry. “It’s time for the U.S. to think of a contingency plan—treating this as a conflict-management situation.” His suggestion: treat the two governments like Kosovo or Cyprus, where adversaries never fully recognized each other, but modest agreements stopped the threat of another war.

 

A Final Status Agreement between Israelis and Palestinians—the wide-ranging deal that would settle everything from the location of borders and capitals to the right of return for Palestinians who lost their homes during Israel's creation in 1948—has remained elusive since the 1993 Oslo accords.

 

Achieving a deal now would require both Israeli and Palestinian leaders to be able to sell the agreement to hard-liners who threaten to bring down their respective governments if they go too far. Yet both sides must continue to negotiate with one another—Israel to avoid international isolation for its occupation of the West Bank, Palestinians so they can continue to receive international aid. The result is that both sides keep talking, but neither has incentive to reach a deal.

 

Yehuda Ben Meir, a former Israeli deputy foreign minister, said the U.S. has two options at this point.

 

“Either manage the conflict until the next elections, or walk away, and that would mean conflict, and wouldn’t be a viable option for them,” he said.

 

The most the two sides could agree upon in the near term might be what he called unilateral coordinated actions such as allowing Palestinians to control more land in parts of the West Bank now under Israeli control.

Watters’ World: Miley Cyrus Concert Edition.

Watters’ World: Miley Cyrus concert edition. Video. The O’Reilly Factor. Fox News, April 7, 2014. YouTube. Also at Mediaite, Yahoo! News, The Blaze.

The Grievance Industry Takes on Momentum. By Bill O’Reilly.

The grievance industry takes on momentum. By Bill O’Reilly. Video. Talking Points Memo. The O’Reilly Factor. Fox News, April 7, 2014. YouTube. Mediaite. Transcript.

Dartmouth grievance list designed to ensure MLK Jr.’s dream never comes true. By William A. Jacobson. Legal Insurrection, April 8, 2014.

Lifting the Liberal Veil on US Support for Israel. By Paul Croce.

Lifting the Liberal Veil on US Support for Israel. By Paul Croce. History News Network, April 7, 2014.

Croce:

Support for Israeli political and military actions have been doing the work of American conservative ideologies, but in liberal disguise.

 

The American Studies Association is an academic David dwarfed by the political Goliaths currently managing Israeli-Palestinian relations.  But the association’s academic boycott of Israel, for “policies that violate [the] human rights” of Palestinians, has produced a tremendous reaction because it reveals the long-hidden role of American political divisions in US policies in the region.

 

And yet, among all the debating points against and for the boycott, there has been minimal attention to the role of American political ideologies.  Instead, the arguments against the ASA’s action have been based on the proper role of an academic organization in relation to political events, while supporters of the boycott focus on Israeli restrictions on Palestinian civil rights often with use of military force.

 

This dynamic is a reminder of the situation in American universities in the mid-1960s.  While Civil Rights and the Vietnam War agitated the country, many students with some faculty support asked for a broadening of education to include discussion of race relations and war and peace; most administrators rejected these calls arguing that they fell outside the proper bounds of academic inquiry, labeling them outside issues, or even subversive.

 

The ASA has long served the academic community and US civil society by telling truth to power.  I first learned American Studies from William McLoughlin, a productive and inspiring scholar in religious and Native American history at Brown University, and a constant agitator for social justice; he had a poster in his office with a quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Action to the scholar is secondary, but essential.”

 

With its resolution for boycott, the ASA joins a growing minority of scholars and advocates seeking to shift the rhetorical agenda by encouraging debate about Israeli policies and “the unparalleled military and financial ties between the U.S. and Israel.”

 

The ASA president Curtis Marez has been ridiculed for sounding frivolous when he defended the boycott by saying, “We have to start somewhere,” as if it were an action of feckless meandering.  However, given the prevalent American attitudes about Israel and its environs, this may actually be the organization’s trump card for its willingness to challenge the longstanding inertia about a seemingly impossible situation.

 

The current mainstream US narrative is that the situation is a mess, and the Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular are untrustworthy.  Add to this, for a significant minority of Americans, Islam is an illegitimate religion, and many even believe that it will fall sway in an epochal battle that will bring the victory, not ultimately of Jews, but of Christians.  In fact, a higher percentage of American white evangelicals than of American Jews support Israeli claims to Palestinian land.

 

To most Americans, Israel represents our team in the region, with its harsh measures fulfilling American interests.  This narrative is often presented as both a moral defense of Jews, and as a practical necessity for sustaining American power in this sector of the globe.  With its lack of attention to the Palestinians, this path also suggests a bleak future for Israeli Jews in tense relations with the other Semites in their midst, and with many Palestinians even contained behind walls.  Graffiti on one wall reads “Ich bin ein Berliner,” recalling John Kennedy’s defiance of the Berlin Wall in 1963.

 

Fear and anger have haunted each side for decades, with tragic cycles of terror and military reprisals.  The boycott is a welcome turn to nonviolence that should be applauded by all sides—except, of course, for those who find Arab terror useful for maintaining fear and justifying robust military policies.

 

It would be a tragedy if criticism of the ASA about the proper role for an academic organization would distract from the way that Israeli policies toward Palestinians have become a chapter in the contemporary American culture war between neo-conservative support of aggressive military strength by contrast with progressive hopes to scale back military action and spending in favor of diplomatic solutions.

 

Within this American polarization, ironically, the boycott has prompted some academic progressives to affiliate with Israel’s military measures for dealing with a population within its dominion.  The ASA action reminds us that Israeli political and military actions have been doing the work of conservative ideologies, but in liberal disguise.

Can Putin’s Ukrainian Strategy Be Countered? By Walter Russell Mead.

Can Putin’s Ukrainian Strategy Be Countered? By Walter Russell Mead. The American Interest, April 6, 2014.

Rare Paleolithic Site Filled with Animal Bones Uncovered at Israeli Quarry. By Eli Ashkenazi

The prehistoric pit near Ramle

Rare Paleolithic site filled with animal bones uncovered at Israeli quarry. By Eli Ashkenazi. Haaretz, March 31, 2014.

Prehistoric site in Israel offers menu for a Paleolithic Diet. By Robin Ngo. Bible History Daily, April 1, 2014.

A series of Mousterian occupations in a new type of site: The Nesher Ramla karst depression, Israel. By Yossi Zaidner et al. Journal of Human Evolution, Vol. 66 (January 2014).


Ashkenazi:

Archaeologists have found a rare and large prehistoric site dating back around 170,000 years, a funnel-shaped pit, 30 meters deep and about 100 meters in diameter, containing an unusually large number of well-preserved animal bones, discovered accidentally in the course of quarrying in the center of the country.

 

It marks the second time in a decade that the Nesher quarry outside Ramle has yielded an exceptional archaeological discovery. The last time, in 2006, it was a cave with small prehistoric creatures unique to the site.

 

The newest finding is an enormous quantities of auroch bones – an extinct species of large wild cattle that is the ancestor of domestic cattle – which were found, together with the bones of other large mammals such as horse, rhinoceros and fallow deer, and of smaller animals including gazelles and land turtles. They were uncovered in 2010 and 2011 in rescue digs carried out by Yossi Zaidner of the University of Haifa’s Zinman Institute of Archaeology. Researchers believe the funnel-shaped pit was formed when the cave’s ceiling collapsed.

 

Zaidner presented his findings yesterday at his institute’s annual research conference, and published them in the January 2014 issue of the Journal of Human Evolution.

 

The findings at the site are associated with the Mousterian period, a hunter-gatherer culture from the Middle Paleolithic Period (from 250,000 to around 40,000 years ago). No human remains were found at the site.

 

The researchers concluded that the site was settled around 170,000 years ago and was an important gathering place for around 40,000 years after that.

 

“From our acquaintance with the Mousterian culture in the Mediterranean region, it appears to be the first time that remains from this culture have been found in such an unusual manner,” Zaidner said, adding that members of this culture generally lived in caves, into which they brought their stone tools, parts of animals they hunted and other resources.

 

The Nesher site is unique, Zaidner said, because it combines cave living with open-air settlement.

 

“The discovery was a complete surprise to us and we’re still not certain what the site was used for, perhaps for hunting, perhaps as a meeting place; another avenue of investigation is that the pit might have been used as a giant trap.”

 

According to Zaidner, a small number of sites that can be associated to the Mousterian period have been found, but they tend to contain small numbers of remains in a layer only a few centimeters deep. Such sites are assumed to be hunting sites or way stations rather than sites of long-term habitation, he said, noting that such a site was discovered in recent years on the banks of the Jordan River.

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CAIR’s Jihad against Honor Diaries. By Andrew C. McCarthy. National Review Online, April 5, 2014.

The silence of Western feminists is deafening. By William A. Jacobson. Legal Insurrection, April 5, 2014.

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Film on violence against Muslim women attacked by critics. Video. The Kelly File. Fox News, March 31, 2014. YouTube. YouTube. YouTube.

Backlash Grows As US Universities Cancel or Postpone “Honor Diaries” Film. Video. The Kelly File. Fox Nation, April 2, 2014. YouTube. YouTube. Also at Heritage.org.

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Why we believe conspiracy theories. By Fareed Zakaria. Fareed Zakaria GPS. CNN, April 5, 2014.

Bridget Firtle: Millennial Generation Rum Distiller and Entrepreneur.

Bridget Firtle at her distillery in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where she produces Owney’s NYC Rum, named after a New York bootlegger. Danny Ghitis for The New York Times.

Rum Distiller Bridget Firtle: Guided by Ghosts of the Speakeasy. By Robert Simonson. New York Times, February 27, 2013.

Bridget Firtle was interviewed on Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo, Fox News, April 6, 2014.

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Turn’s Silent Revolution. By Tim Cavanaugh.

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