Nader Raids Reality

It's interesting how Ralph Nader, who began public life by presenting well-documented information about the auto industry, has taken to writing fiction.

A recent venomous, anti-Israel diatribe written by Nader may be found on his website and in several newspapers.  Here are a handful of the more outrageous fabrications, misrepresentations and distortions and comments on them.


Nader: "Out comes the well-worn playbook by Israel's militaristic government that has worked to silence Israeli politicians and citizens who want a two-state solution."

Reality check:  The leader of the Israeli government has come out publicly and firmly in favor of a two-state solution. Nader is arguing the Israel's government is trying to silence its own leader!


Nader: "This is an opportunity to use and test advanced weaponry from the U.S., compliments of U.S. taxpayers, and squelch ongoing peace efforts, small and large, by Palestinians, Israelis and international peace advocates."

Reality check: There are no effective "ongoing peace efforts," for the simple reason that the Palestinian Authority refuses to allow them. Since not even bothering to respond to an Israeli offer way back in 2008 to establish a Palestinian Arab state in the equivalent of the entirety of the disputed territories, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has refused to negotiate.


Nader: "The playbook's first chapter is provocation to upset a tense but workable truce with Hamas, the elected government of Gaza."

Reality check: Mr. Nader might try asking the residents of Sderot whether they believe a "workable truce with Hamas" existed. This year alone, nearly 900 rockets were fired from Gaza at Israeli civilians before the start of Operation Pillar of Defense! Thousands of rockets and mortars were fired from Gaza during the "truce."


Nader: "Hamas was encouraged at its creation years ago by both Israeli and U.S. backers to counter the secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Bit of a blowback there."

Reality check: When Hamas was forming, there was a brief period during which it pledged itself to non-violence and there was some hope in Israel that it would become a reasonable entity. Period.


Nader: "Israeli government leaders are expert provocateurs when they wish to seize land, water or prisoners and upset any movement toward a peace that would create a viable Palestinian state back to the 1967 borders, which includes East Jerusalem."

Reality check: Israel long ago gave away the vast bulk of the territory which it found itself administering after the 1967 war. It has repeatedly given more territory to the Palestinian Authority and offered to give the Palestinian Arabs the equivalent of 100% of the disputed territory - despite the fact that Israel has at least as much of an historical, legal and moral right to that territory. Unfortunately, the leaders of the Palestinian Arabs have been unwilling to pay the necessary price: giving up on their dream of destroying Israel and living together in peace.

There were no "1967 borders," only temporary armistice lines. Indeed, at the insistence of the Arab countries, the armistice agreements contained the provision that the armistice lines had no political significance. One may reasonably consider negotiations based on those armistice lines to be a violation of the armistice agreements!


Nader: "When Israel came into being in 1948, it soon broke a UN truce and doubled its territory by taking the large area known as the Negev desert ,whose refugees ended up in the Gaza Strip."

Reality check: Israel was invaded by Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Saudi Arabia the day after it was reestablished in 1948. It greatly preferred peace, but was forced to defend itself in the Arabs' genocidal war. It ended up with more territory than called for in the UN Partition Plan, but the amount was far from double (a mathematical impossibility) and was a consequence of the Arab aggression.


Nader: "Now 1.6 million encircled and impoverished humans, blockaded and under siege by Israel, try to survive in an open-air prison little more than twice the size of the District of Columbia."

Reality check: Israel controls only its own boundary with Gaza and, as allowed under the Oslo Accords, sea access. Gaza also has a border with Egypt, which is now ruled by the Egyptian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is also a branch. Not only is it physically impossible for Israel to "encircle" Gaza, but Israel transfers immense amounts of humanitarian assistance to the people in Gaza. Astoundingly, this assistance continued even during the recent flare-up. One would be hard-pressed to find another example of a country providing assistance to the very people murdering its citizens!


Nader: "Israel's strategy of breaking cease-fires and truces over the years has been documented by Princeton University history professor emeritus, Arno J. Mayer, in his scholarly book Plowshares into Swords: From Zionism to Israel (Verso, 2008)."

Reality check: Nader isn't the only one who writes fiction. Note again the thousands of rockets launched by Hamas and other terror groups from Gaza during the so-called "cease-fire" before Israel finally defended itself recently.


Nader: "In late 2008, Israel broke a months-long truce with Hamas with an attack that took half a dozen lives. Modern Israeli missiles and crude Hamas rockets started flying to and fro."

Reality check: A concise summary of Operation Cast Lead may be found at , where it is pointed out "Israel's Operation Cast Lead comes after three years of suffering thousands of daily Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel's southern cities."

More specifically, from : "On June 17, 2008, after several months of indirect contacts between Israel and Hamas through Egyptian mediators, Hamas agreed to a cease-fire (tahadiya). Almost immediately afterward, terrorists fired rockets into southern Israel. Despite what it called a “gross violation” of the truce, Israel refrained from military action.1 In fact, during the six months the arrangement was supposed to be observed, 329 rockets and mortar shells were fired at Israel."

Clearly, by Nader's standards, a cease-fire is an arrangement during which Israel ceases to defend its civilians as Hamas continues to fire at them.


Nader: "When the Gaza invasion-massacre ended, there were more than 1400 Palestinian fatalities, including around 300 children, and many thousands of injuries, a population surrounded by destruction and deprived by this illegal blockade-siege of medicines, food, water, electricity and the other necessities of life."

Fact check: Anti-Israel fanatics love to scream "massacre;" the reality is that even Hamas later tacitly acknowledged the vast majority of casualties were terrorists, despite the fact that Hamas deliberately operated out of civilian areas and used civilians as shields. The proportion of civilian casualties was amazingly low, far less than is typical in urban warfare, even when civilians are not being used as shields.


Nader: "The current hostilities started in two stages. The first was a back-and-forth that saw an emerging truce broken decisively on November 14 when Israel pridefully blew up a car containing Hamas military chief, Ahmad al-Jabari who actually was leading the negotiations via Egypt with Israel for a longer-range truce."

Reality check: For Nader, a truce is emerging as long as Israel refrains from defending itself even as its citizens are bombarded by rocket fire.


Nader: "Back to Israel's playbook, chapter two can be called the instant, mandatory resolutions by the puppet show in Congress and the automatic one-sided mantra by the White House. "Israel has a right to defend itself," said President Obama, from the occupied, besieged, defenseless Palestinians, whose lands, water, homes, businesses and freedom of movement are being taken relentlessly by the raiding Israeli government that is not content with possessing 78 percent of traditional Palestine."

Reality check: Another mathematical impossibility, since Jordan is in control of roughly 78 percent of the territory of the Palestine Mandate. And rather than taking from the Palestinian Arabs, Israel keeps trying to negotiate a peace that would leave the Palestinian Arabs with most of the disputed territory, even after the Palestinian Arabs refused to agree to an offer to give them the equivalent of all the disputed territory.


Nader: "Finally, chapter three of the playbook is to make sure that the Israeli government advocates dominate the U.S. media - the talk shows, the news slants, and the opinion columnists. This is becoming less easy in an internet age. Which might explain that, along with homes, water wells, rescue teams, an ambulance, and other civilian installations, the Israeli air force already has bombed the office building housing Palestinian television studios and hosting media from the western world, including Fox TV. That is one indelicate way to tell these western journalists to get out of Gaza so that the truth about the immense civilian suffering and war crimes can no longer be told by them."

Reality check: Those on the PRIMER list know how humorous this assertion is. For at least 22 journalists, the decision of whether to stay in Gaza or leave was not their own decision; Hamas would not let them leave. (See .)


Nader: "The Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be resolved peacefully, without violence. During quieter times, more than half the Israelis supported a two-state solution. A few years ago, 61 percent of Israelis, polled by a prominent university there, favored negotiations with Hamas. A majority of Jewish-Americans, though unorganized, favor a two-state solution."

Reality check: Unfortunately, the Palestinian Arab leadership has repeatedly refused to accept a two-state solution.


Nader: "So what is the alternative? A one-state solution with both Palestinians and Israelis having equal rights? Noura Erakat, who teaches at Georgetown University, framed the dilemma back in August when she quoted former prime minister and current Defense Minister Ehud Barak, saying, after leaving his former post, "If, and as long as between the Jordan [River] and the [Mediterranean] Sea there is only one political entity, named Israel, it will end up being either non-Jewish or nondemocratic.... If the Palestinians vote in elections it is a binational state, and if they don't vote it is an apartheid state." (http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1962232,00.html) His rival, former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said the same thing."

Reality check: De facto, there are already three political entities in the area: Israel, the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip and the Palestinian Authority-ruled territories. Roughly 95 percent of the Arabs in the disputed territories are governed by either Hamas or the PA. It's not an ideal situation from Israel's perspective, but its existence until the Palestinian Arabs are willing to negotiate an alternative is a totally separate issue from the ethnic and democratic nature of Israel.


Nader: "Awareness of this pathway is leading some extremist Israeli politicians who call Palestinians 'vermin' and 'rats' to think about the day when they can, with suitable provocations, drive the Palestinians into the desert."

Reality check: Unfortunately, what Nader recognizes as extreme among Israeli politicians is mainstream in Palestinian Arab politics; indeed, this points to the heart of the conflict.

Dinner With Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran

This op-ed by PRIMER Board Member Jay Bergman was published in the Litchfield County Times on Tuesday, November 13, 2012.

On Oct. 24 The Central Recorder, the student newspaper at CCSU, reported that when the U.N. General Assembly convened in New York in late September, Professor Ghassan El-Eid of the CCSU Political Science Department brought 12 CCSU students to attend a dinner with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran. In the article Mr. Ahmadinejad was described by students as "very smart," "not as radical as the western media portray him," "inclusive," "kind to everyone who asked a question," and someone who "really wants everyone to get along, be respected, and learn."

Professor El Eid is quoted as characterizing Mr. Ahmadinejad as "a pretty rational leader," whose views may be "controversial" but who is "very careful to support his arguments with facts."

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is an anti-Semitic bigot who has denied the Holocaust while repeatedly making clear his intention to carry out a second one:

* "Today, they [Europeans] have created a myth in the name of Holocaust (Dec. 14, 2005)."

*"Israel must be wiped off the map (Oct. 26, 2005)."

*"The Zionists are the true manifestation of Satan (Feb. 28, 2007)."

*"I warn you to abandon the filthy Zionist entity, which has reached the end of the line. It has lost its reason to be and will sooner or later fall. The ones who still support the criminal Zionists should know that the occupiers' days are numbered. ... Accept that the life of Zionists will sooner or later come to an end (Jan. 30, 2008)."

*"They [the Western powers] launched the myth of the Holocaust. They lied, they put on a show and then they support the Jews (Sept. 18, 2009)."

*No "Zionists" were killed in the World Trade Center, because "one day earlier they were told not to go to their workplace (Aug. 7, 2010)."

*"The Zionist regime and the Zionists are a cancerous tumor (Aug. 17, 2012)."

On Feb. 4, 2012, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, claimed "jurisprudential justification to kill all the Jews and annihilate Israel. In that, the Islamic government of Iran must take the helm."

The government of Iran savagely persecutes Bahai's and Christians. It tortures and executes homosexuals. It has killed Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan. It has harassed, arrested, tried and barred from travel Iranian women's rights activists. In 1983 it approved and funded the bombing of U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Lebanon, killing 241 Marines. And in 2009 it ruthlessly suppressed the Green Revolution, in which millions of Iranians demanded the freedoms Americans enjoy.

It is appalling that CCSU students were used as props in a public relations campaign to legitimize one of the most murderous regimes in the world today. I seriously doubt that any professor at CCSU, or at any other college or university in America, would arrange a dinner for students with a kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan. And yet dining with a genocidal anti-Semite who wants to kill six million Jews is perfectly acceptable.

Jay Bergman is a professor of history at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain.

Dismissive Behavior-Perspective is Critical to Understanding Another’s Point of View

GS Don Morris, P.H.D.

Social media is used by so many around the world. Allow me a disclaimer from the top: I am not not social media savvy nor do I use it much. I do recognize it as a communication tool that seems to influence individuals’ points of view. These last couple of months I have increased my FB participation, basically in the form of reading others’ posts. From time to time I engaged in some political banter and not always with positive results. Certainly so many feel so “free” to express themselves and that brings me to the topic of this post.

Everyone is entitled to his/her opinion. Attempting to honor multiple peoples’ plea for civility I noticed how quickly after the election my Democratic “friends” moved to position themselves as the moral authority when it came to any attempted discussion regarding the results. The civil and polite term I use is dismissive. When one cared enough to write a position different from their point of view their words or regrettably, they, themselves were dismissed from either being one who practiced veracity or one who simply held a contrary point of view. This was and is to this day followed up with a stern reprimand or disingenuous statement about the said position. In other words, the post and/or the person were dismissed. Yet, these same individuals demanded both in language and tone of their language that we must now move away from our long held beliefs and values and move towards their point of view-of course, employing, “for the sake of the country”. After all, they now had a mandate.

Let us examine some numbers to see if the preceding is accurate. I can only use the numbers available to me as of the writing of this post so please focus upon the main concept. Here are the popular vote totals for both parties:

Total=120,556,792

R=48% plus         46%(2008 vote)

D=51%         53%(2008 vote)

3,258,999-vote difference

Now follows my interpretation. It appears that Mr. Obama won by slightly less than 3% of the vote; I’ll not squabble over new data. It is true that the Republicans increased their share of the popular vote compared to 2008 and the Democrat decreased their popular vote share compared to 2008. Terms like “resounding” used to mean enormous, huge, or colossal. You might imagine when I realize that over 120,500,000 votes were cast and the difference was 3.2 million votes I had difficulty accepting the adjectives describing the outcome. We can discuss this but please to suggest that the American people have endorsed, authorized or indicated ratification of his policies is to accept the concept of “majority rules.” It is more accurate to suggest that a little over half of the nation supports the President and just under half of the nation does not support his policies. Careful, if you dismiss this point of view does this mean no discussion or bi-partisan cooperation is possible?

I marvel at other data interpretations-keeping the House in the hands of the Republicans (change occurred in 2010) and this “change” didn’t work (no explanation provided individuals making said pronouncement) and in 2012 the Congress remains basically the same, some interpret this as we are all in agreement, legislators should return and get back to business. Business as defined by whom and by what criteria-are these two questions not useful to discuss?? What is the meaning beneath this arcane statement? What can we all agree to? How about addressing the coming financial cliff, might everyone involved put in the time, effort and perseverance it will take to resolve this before January 1?

Remember school elections-did you participate in any? Can you imagine how you might respond when you know 100 students were eligible to participate in the class president election and after the election you discovered that the “other kid” received over 100 votes and you received 30 of the votes.  Clearly you lost but does the math add up? Might you want an explanation?

Hopefully you can at least understand why some of us had a reaction that went something like this: “How in the world can that be? In Ms. James math class last week we learned this was not possible.” You are therefore not surprised when we hear the following, you might expect we would be a bit suspicious:

Obama Wins %141 Percent of the Vote in St. Lucie County, Florida-huh?

Obama Won %108 of Registered Voters in Ohio County

 

Energy is also a major concern for our nation especially as we attempt to increase jobs in this country.  So when we hear: Obama administration seeks to drastically limit oil shale development on western lands

You can imagine we might suggest that this is not a prudent energy move right now.

Even though you may think it is not necessary to prove your identity when you vote for the President of the USA and yet you willingly show your picture id when you go to the airport to travel to …  or to cash a check, you can imagine our interests were peaked when we read Crooked Politics: Obama Lost in Every State With Photo ID Law

Wait, you get to practice your non-dismissive civil behavior right now. When this entire voter picture id issue came up boy did it cause a stir? Any of us who dared to suggest that this is fair and consistent with public policy in so many of our daily lives, we were dismissed as racists, bigots and other unseemly names. I noted that by using this word tactic you wanted to close down my point of view and even ascribe negative characteristics to it and to me. Why the fear in having a dialogue about this sensitive issue?

Certainly human rights are important for all peoples-yes? This is true more now than ever before.  The Middle East is awash with thousands of women being either raped, murdered, attacked or denied basic rights; one of our greatest enemies, Iran, continues to move rapidly toward acquiring nuclear bombs; thousands of people are slaughtered in northern Africa; Europe’s economy is on the brink of collapse, we hope Germany will fund those going bankrupt; our economy is stagnate at all time lows; recession is predicted for 2013; 23 million Americans are out of work and you know the other horrific economic data points. Can you imagine our upset when instead of focusing on these issues; a “war on women” became a major theme of this election? Imagine our surprise when we heard As Andrew Stiles of The Washington Free Beacon reported on May 24, "of the five senators who participated in Wednesday’s press conference—Barbara Mikulski (D., Md.), Patty Murray (D., Wash.), Debbie Stabenow (D., Mich.), Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) And Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.)—Three pay their female staff members significantly less than male staffers." Perhaps any thoughtful, caring person might then ask critical questions about who has “women’s’ backs.

As a father of a highly successful daughter involved in a major business in the USA I have always been concerned about her rights, her opportunities and together with her mother we did our best to ensure she had every possibility made available to her-she however did the work and on her own efforts has made her way. Has it been easy-ask her. Is life meant to be easy, ah, a question for another post. My point is this, as important as this topic is to individuals, to use it as a wedge issue (a Democrat introduced this phrase ) intentionally to alienate a gender is … For the sake of civility I shall not complete the sentence. We had and still have major economic and security concerns. We have a dysfunctional legislative group and our international reputation has changed-I know, I live in the Middle East and hear it, read it and see it every day. By the way it is not what you may think or believe.  It seems that both sides operate from different perspectives. It does the nation no good to berate and negate one another’s positions. This human situation requires leadership that operates with an ability to listen and hear what the two parties say. This nation deserves individuals willing to put country first.  Rather than dismissing this final statement how about sitting down for a coffee and beginning a new narrative-one void of political sound bites?

Iran seeks to destroy the Jewish people

Published in the Connecticut Jewish Ledger, September 24, 2012

Persons involved in Jewish life believe that all American Jews support and identify with the State of Israel. While that belief may be generally correct, there are undoubtedly exceptions.

Clearly,  some dichotomize between the State of Israel, on the one hand, and American Jews, including themselves, on the other. They blithely live their lives despite the very real, mortal threat to the State of Israel from Iran's imminent attainment of nuclear weapons capability.

The dichotomization can only go so far. I was struck by the observation offered by a rabbi on Rosh Hashanah that Iran does not seek merely to destroy the State of Israel. Rather, its goal is the destruction of the Jewish people.

As I thought about his comment, I realized that the rabbi was correct. No Jew, no matter how seemingly secure in Connecticut, will be safe from a nuclear Iran.  Iran showed its intentions toward the Jewish people by directing the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. The bombing was an attack on the Jewish people, qua Jewish people, and not merely on the State of Israel as a political entity. The bombing had no relationship to Israel until the IDF, as protectors of the Jewish people, arrived in the wake of the tragedy.

If Iran could wreak such destruction without nuclear weapons, consider the peril for all Jews when Iran next year has nuclear capability and, virtually automatically, nuclear weapons. We delude ourselves to believe that we can escape Iran's fanatical hatred of us as Jews by psychologically divorcing ourselves from Jews abroad. We share a common fate, as we did in the Holocaust, when Jews were killed without distinction. Oceans are no longer a barrier.

What should we do? It is incumbent on all Jews, Jewishly involved and non-involved, to use their best efforts to stop Iran before Iran reaches the so-called zone of immunity. This must be our priority. We must communicate with governmental leaders, write to the media, and support organizations and candidates who demonstrate urgency in dealing with Iran. Of transcendent importance, we must understand that all Jews are joined together as targets of Iran's irrational hatred.

Mark I. Fishman
Fairfield
President of PRIMER-CT (Promoting Responsibility in Middle East Reporting)

Unpublished Letters

These letters have been submitted but have not yet been published.

New London Day

Submitted September 15, 2012

Reading David Ignatius's September 15 op-ed, "U.S. can't let Israel force it into Iran war," I couldn't help but think of how wonderful hindsight is.

The world was virtually unanimous in condemning Israel when it destroyed Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981; today, every sane person is grateful for that prophylactic action.

History will probably condemn Israel for not doing the same to Iran's nuclear program fifteen years ago.

I certainly don't want either the United States or Israel to be forced to take military action against Iran. I own a winter home in Israel and will probably wind up spending time in bomb shelters if there's a military confrontation.

On the other hand, I want a nuclear Iran even less, especially since with Iran developing ICBMs we won't be safe here in America, either. When we seem to be putting more effort into pressuring Israel not to take military action against Iran's nukes than we put into pressuring those mad mullahs, we only increase the long-term probability not only of war, but of nuclear war.

I'm currently reading "Why England Slept," the published version of John F. Kennedy's senior thesis at Harvard. The similarities to today's world are frightening. We need to wake up.

Sincerely,
Alan Stein

New York Times

Submitted September 28, 2012

Re The Times' September 27 editorial, "Talking at Cross Purposes," about the United Nations speeches by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, the headline was right on but the rest of the editorial was way off base.

Netanyahu devoted most of his speech to the most serious immediate problem facing the world today, the drive by Iran to obtain nuclear weapons. Rather than, as The Times incorrectly reports, trying to get the world to take military action, Netanyahu is trying to get the world to wake up and take serious action that has a chance of making military action unnecessary.

Netanyahu paid little attention to the Palestinian Arabs for a very good reason: there is no chance for any progress as long as Mahmoud Abbas continues to refuse to negotiate while putting his effort into demonstrating that Mitt Romney's comment about the Palestinians "not wanting to see peace anyway" was correct.

Sincerely,
Alan Stein

Boston Globe

Submitted October 1, 2012

Re the October 1 editorial, "Palestinian Authority's woes are a problem for US, Israel," the PA could make a significant dent in its financial problems if it stopped spending 6 percent of its budget paying jailed terrorists and the families of suicide bombers. As just one example, it pays Abbas al-Sayyeed $3,000 per month. Al-Sayyeed is in jail because he planned the 2002 Passover seder massacre at the Park Hotel in Netanya, blowing up 30 civilians.

The PA also puts 48 percent of its expenditures into Hamas-ruled Gaza and pays 60,000 former employees to sit home.

For the Palestinian Authority, wasting donated money is a strategic ploy. Since its inception its leaders have successfully made alleged and self-induced weakness into a weapon against Israel, whose leaders have shown far more interest in the welfare of the Palestinian Arabs than either Yassir Arafat or Mahmoud Abbas, the so-called "moderate" who in 2008 refused to even respond to an Israeli offer of a Palestinian Arab state in the equivalent of all the disputed territories and since then has generally refused to even sit down and negotiate.

Sincerely,
Alan Stein

Notes:

The statistics about payments to jailed terrorists and families of suicide bombers is available from many sources, including the Times of Israel article "PA spends 6% of its budget paying Palestinians in Israeli jails, families of suicide bombers," available at <http://www.timesofisrael.com/cash-strapped-pa-spends-4-5-million-per-month-compensating-security-detainees/>.

The statistics about Palestinian Authority spending in Gaza is also available from many sources, including the Commentary Magazine article "PA’s Fiscal Crisis Is Due to Gaza, Not Israel," <http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/09/20/pas-fiscal-crisis-is-due-to-gaza-not-israel/>.

Comment and Analysis: New York TImes, New London Day, Danbury News-Times

Short quotes from three recent items in Connecticut newspapers along with analyses of those quotes.

Item 1:

A letter, entitled "U.S. policies further isolate Israel," written by Ernie Cohen of Norwich and published in The Day letters@theday.com on Saturday, September 29, 2012.

"Avraham Berg, former speaker of the Israeli parliament, laments that Israel is falling into theocracy where citizenship depends on belonging to the right synagogue and excluding everyone else."

While the conflicts between the ultra-orthodox and secular Jewish communities in Israel is one of their most serious problems, in quoting Berg the writer grossly exaggerates. In no way is Israel "falling into theocracy" and one's synagogue has absolutely no relationship to citizenship, either for current citizens or for Jews in the diaspora making aliyah.

Note that Avraham Berg has become a French citizen, "is in favor of abrogating the Law of Return and calls on everyone who can to obtain a foreign passport." (See the Ha'aretz article "Burg: Defining Israel as a Jewish state is the key to its end" http://www.haaretz.com/news/burg-defining-israel-as-a-jewish-state-is-the-key-to-its-end-1.222491.) An Algemeiner article http://www.algemeiner.com/2012/08/06/self-hating-israeli-avraham-burg/ refers to him as a self-hating Israel and an anti-Zionist. He seems to be suffering from a variant of the Stockhold Syndrome.

"Israel's rapidly increasing Jewish population contrasts with an Arab population living behind barbed wire on the West Bank while new Jewish immigrants settle on more Arab lands."

This is absolutely false.

The Arab population is no more "living behind barbed wire" than the Jewish population. A separation barrier, in some places ordinary chain link fence, concrete barriers in some places where fencing is impractical, was built to protect Israeli civilians from the brutal terrorist campaign launched by the Palestinian Arabs after Yassir Arafat rejected peace and the establishment of a Palestinian state in 2000.

Re population increases, the Arab population in Israel is growing at a much faster rate than the Jewish population.

In the last year, the Jewish population grew by 1.8% and the Arab population grew by 2.4%. In the disputed territories, there are no Jews at all in Gaza. In the West Bank, Jews are restricted from building anywhere but within the boundaries of some existing communities, while Arab building, legal and illegal, is rampant. (See http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Society_&_Culture/newpop.html.)

Since Jerusalem was reunited in 1967, the capital city's Jewish population has increased by 157 percent while the Arab population has increased an astounding 327 percent! (See http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/155939#.UGzFM7RrDGI.)

The Jewish communities in the disputed territories are generally built on land that was either owned by Jews or was state land; very little can be honestly characterized as "Arab land."

"The prolonged occupation and opposition by Israel to Palestinian efforts to become a state is having moral consequences within Israeli society."

The Israeli government is publicly in favor of the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state and has twice proposed the establishment of such a state in virtually all (in 2000) or the equivalent of all (in 2008) the disputed territories. It is the Palestinian Arab leadership, not Israel, which has prevented the establishment of another Palestinian state.

For most practical purposes, the so-called "occupation" ended near the start of the failed Oslo process nearly two decades ago and any remnants remain only because of Arab terrorism and rejectionism.

"Israel today hasn't a single supporter in the middle East."

    Israel has never had a supporter in the Middle East, with the exception of Iran during the rule of the Shah and Turkey until the Islamist government under Erdogan. In each case, it was Islamist hatred rather than any action by Israel which changed friend into enemy.

"Americans have contributed to Israel's isolation by abandoning the peace process and exploiting biblical sentiments for political and military gains."

    It was Mahmoud Abbas, not either America or Israel, who destroyed and abandoned the so-called peace process.

"Christians and Jews alike need to ask themselves: 'If God walked across the Holy Land today, what would he see? Who would he help.'"

    The answer is obvious, but it's not the one which the letter-writer wishes the reader to incorrectly infer.

Item 2:

A New York Times letters@nytimes.com editorial, published in The Times September 28 and republished as a guest editorial in The Day letters@theday.com on Saturday, September 29, 2012.

"In dueling speeches, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel focused on drawing a red line for an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities while the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, cataloged his community's many grievances against Israel and tried to revive the fading dream of a two-state solution."

    The editorial writer(s) infer too much; crossing a red line might lead to an attack, but one might conceive of other possibilities. They also falsely imply Netanyahu wants to attack; he's made it quite clear he would like to see Iran's nuclear program ended without military action, but believes that is far more likely to be achieved if there is a credible threat of military action.

    Most of the so-called grievances charged by Abbas were figments of his imagination and consequences of his refusal to make peace, or even negotiate, with Israel. He did nothing to revive the "fading dream of a two-state solution;" indeed, since the death of Yassir Arafat, he's been the chief roadblock.

"Both issues - Iran's dangerous nuclear ambitions and the Palestinian right to a secure state - need to be dealt with seriously, but neither man acknowledged the other side's priority nor articulated a common path forward. Mostly, the speeches showed how far peace efforts have gone off track."

    Netanyahu gave Abbas' anti-Israel rhetoric precisely the amount of consideration it deserved, 67 words. He pointed out: "We won’t solve our conflict with libelous speeches at the UN. That’s not the way to solve it. We won’t solve our conflict with unilateral declarations of statehood. We have to sit together, negotiate together, and reach a mutual compromise, in which a demilitarized Palestinian state recognizes the one and only Jewish State."

    Abbas's rejectionism and refusal to negotiate has made the so-called "peace process" irrelevant, at least until he or a successor exhibits a willingness to negotiate.

    The Iranian nuclear program is arguably the most serious problem facing the world today and it was quite appropriate that the Israeli prime minister devote most of his speech to that problem. (That is not to say, if the world succeeds in keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of the mad mullahs in charge of Iran, that the consequences of the mislabeled "Arab spring" will not in the future present a more serious problem.)

"Netanyahu told the U.N. that he believes Iran's ability to make a nuclear weapon will be irreversible by next spring or summer, and he argued that a 'clear red line' must be drawn to warn Iran to halt its nuclear fuel enrichment or face military action. While that was a far more specific time frame than he had previously noted, his reference to next year seems to back away from earlier statements that seemed to suggest an Israeli strike much sooner."

    Indeed, Netanyahu made no mention of any attacks on Iran; his emphasis was on preventing military action. In his own words, "Red lines don’t lead to war; red lines prevent war." He gave illustrations of red lines drawn in the past which helped keep the peace: "Look at NATO’s charter: it made clear that an attack on one member country would be considered an attack on all.  NATO’s red line helped keep the peace in Europe for nearly half a century. President Kennedy set a red line during the Cuban Missile Crisis. That red line also prevented war and helped preserve the peace for decades."

    And he pointed out "In fact, it’s the failure to place red lines that has often invited aggression."

"Still, Netanyahu's speech continued to push a campaign that promotes military action when there is time for sanctions and diplomatic negotiations to produce a peaceful outcome. An Israeli Foreign Ministry report, disclosed by Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, on Thursday, acknowledged as much, saying that sanctions imposed by the U.S. and Europe are having a huge impact on Iran's economy and may be affecting the government's stability. The report urged that the sanctions be tightened further."

    The writers completely misread Netanyahu's intent, which is to prevent the need for military action. While the sanctions have had a significant impact on Iran's economy, they have yet to impact Iran's nuclear weapons program, which has actually been sped up. The point is that the sanctions and diplomatic efforts are unlikely to work unless they are backed up by a credible military threat.

"Abbas' complaints are no less important for both Israel, the Palestinians and the region. Using exceptionally sharp rhetoric, he accused Israeli settlers of undertaking 535 attacks against Palestinians in recent months, and he charged Israel with using settlement expansion and efforts to weaken the Palestinian Authority to destroy the prospect of a two-state solution. Netanyahu made a brief reference to wanting peace with the Palestinians, but there is no hope of meaningful negotiations anytime soon."

    The reason there is no hope for meaningful negotiations anytime soon is that there is no hope that Abbas will end his boycott of negotiations anytime soon.

    Just because Abbas makes outlandish accusations doesn't make those accusations true. Contrast, for example, his absurd accusations of Israel "judaizing Jerusalem" with the enormous Arab population increases in Jerusalem cited above.

    While there have been a relative handful of "price tag" attacks by radical Israelis against both Israeli government facilities and Palestinian Arabs, their quantity and seriousness are dwarfed by the continued Arab terrorism against innocent Israeli civilians. So far this year, well over 400 rockets and mortars have been fired from Gaza at Israeli cities and towns.

    Whereas the Palestinian Authority continues to incite against Israel, glorify terrorists and terrorism,  financially supports murderers of Israeli civilians and insists that Israel release all imprisoned Arab terrorists, the Israeli government acts vigorously against the fringe elements that attack Palestinian Arabs.

"After failing to get a process for talks going early in his term, Obama seems to have given up. Mitt Romney has suggested that he would do even less if he's elected. On the notorious videotaped when he was speaking at a private fundraising event in May, he disparaged Palestinians as "not wanting to see peace anyway" and said his approach was to "recognize this is going to remain an unsolved problem." He seems poised to encourage Netanyahu's intemperate posture toward Iran, no matter the consequences."

    Netanyahu is trying to get the world to prevent letting the mad mullahs in charge of Iran get there hands on nuclear weapons. In other words, he is trying to prevent a nuclear catastrophe and is trying to do that without military action. That's hardly intemperate.

    Regardless of his reasons, Romney's remarks regarding the Palestinian Arabs' disinterest in peace were accurate and, obviously, the Arab-Israeli conflict will remain an "unsolved problem" until both the Palestinian Arabs and the rest of the Arabs start having an interest in making peace.

Item 3:

An op-ed, entitled "Where I Stand; Bibi, bluster and Bain," written by Stephan Lesher of Southbury and published in the Danbury News-Times letters@newstimes.com on Sunday, September 30, 2012.

"It may have gone unnoticed by many, but when Mitt Romney, the bagman from Bain, dismissed nearly half the American people as people who refuse to take personal responsibility for their lives, he also threw the Palestinian people and any hope for a Palestinian-Israeli two-state solution under the bus."

    PRIMER, of course, takes no position regarding any candidate's words or actions relating to anything other than the Middle East. Re Romney's words re the Palestinian Arab unwillingness to make peace, as noted above, they were accurate. In no way did they throw "any hope for a Palestinian-Israeli two-state solution under the bus;" indeed, since he isn't even a government official, he couldn't; on the other hand, at least in the near term, Mahmoud Abbas has already done it.

"Of course, when Romney told 150 donors at a Boca Raton, Fla. fundraising dinner last May (at $50,000 a plate) that 'I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel,' he was simply mouthing the party line from the blustering, bombastic, and eminently dangerous Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Romney's all-but-open political supporter in the 2012 American presidential race."

    Again, the comments re the Palestinian Arabs were accurate. His comments re Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would have been accurate if made regarding Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, from whose "blustering, bombastic, and eminently dangerous" policies Netanyahu is trying to save the world.

"Indeed, the opposition leader in Israel, Shaul Mofaz, asked of Netanyahu in the Knesset recently, 'Who are you trying to replace? The administration in Washington or that in Tehran.'"

    Israeli politics are sometimes rather impolitic.

"As Netanyahu presses closer and closer to launching a unilateral attack on Iran, and continues relentlessly painting President Barack Obama as naïve in the extreme, it is, as journalist David Remnick wrote recently In the New Yorker, 'hard to overestimate the risks (he) poses to the future of his own country.'"

    It's interesting to note the conflict between Lesher's assertion and The Times' grudging acknowledgment that Netanyahu seemed "to back away from earlier statements that seemed to suggest an Israeli strike much sooner." Of course, consistency in unfair criticism of Israel has rarely been a consideration.

    It's hard to overestimate the risks not preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons would pose not just to Israel and not just to the United States, but to the entire world.

"It might be added that the risk extends to the United States as well because of the overwhelming pressure that would be brought on the administration to take military actions to support Israel in any counterattack."

    The risk extends to the United States because Iran considers us the "Great Satan" while Israel is merely considered the "Little Satan." Israel is the first target right now only because Iran has not yet developed missiles that could strike us. It's reasonable to expect that it will not be long before Iran's efforts to develop longer range missiles bring us into range, at which point they very well might ignore Israel in order to strike directly at us.

"As New York Times columnist Gail Collins suggested recently, the U.S. Congress will take almost any action 'designed to demonstrate total support for whatever Israel thinks a good idea.'"

    Whatever one thinks of Congress, it boggles the mind to take seriously an accusation that all of Congress is unpatriotic.

"What makes Netanyahu's determination to strike out at Iran so monumentally wrongheaded is that he has been ignoring the advice of almost every current and recently retired leader of the Israeli military and the country's major intelligence organizations as well as a clear majority of the Israeli population."

    Once again, Netanyahu is not determined "to strike out at Iran;" he clearly very much wants to avoid having to do so.

"Many of these current and former officials have said in public interviews that they are afraid that such an attack might spark a regional war as well as unify the Iranian people behind the country's none-too-popular regime.
"It is becoming clear that Netanyahu is not only playing to his right-wing supporters in Israel, but to the neo-cons in the US as well."

    Is it not possible that Netanyahu is simply trying to save both his country and the world from the gravest threat both face at the present time?

"The problem is that Romney is picking up on Netanyahu's rejection of Palestinians and of the two-state solution."

    Netanyahu has rejected neither. He has put the Israeli government firmly on record as supporting the so-called two-state solution.

"In its place, the Netanyahu policy of making life as difficult as possible for Palestinians will continue and presumably be adopted by a Romney administration should he somehow succeed in unseating President Obama."

    Au contraire, Netanyahu has worked assiduously to improve the lives of the Palestinian Arabs in the disputed territories, often over objections of Israelis who, justifiably, fear that he has put their lives in danger by removing most of the roadblocks and greatly increasing the numbers of Palestinian Arabs given permission to work in Israel. He has also lobbied foreign governments to increase their assistance to the Palestinian Authority and has even advanced tax money, effectively loaning the Palestinian Authority money, to help with its self-inflicted financial problems.

"The result would be continued and perhaps unending turmoil in the Middle East."

    There will be continued turmoil in the small Arab-Israeli portion of the Middle East until the Arabs, including the Palestinian Arabs, give up on their dream of destroying Israel. And, even in the event of an Arab-Israeli peace - not just a peace between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs - there will obviously be great turmoil in the Middle East for many years to come.

The time to have Israel's back is right now

By Joseph Marx

Over the last year or so, Ron Estes has written articles titled “Israel supporters attack critics not the criticism,” “Romney is still weak on foreign affairs,” “Israel attack on Iran could spark Middle East conflict,” “US cannot afford to lose its Arab allies,” “US vote on Palestine could effect 2012 elections,” “Rejects pro-Israel comments as propaganda” and his latest “Israel attack in Iran would hurt US interests.”

Call me crazy, but I seem to detect a common thread in all of these letters and articles. Israel is the pariah state in this conflict and the US interests would be better served siding with the Arabs, contrary to Obama’s disingenuous declaration to Israel “we have your back.”

I would like to remind the readers of The Record that Israel is the one democracy and the one true and steadfast friend of the U.S. in this conflict. Their values regarding life, liberty, justice and freedom are our values.

I would also like to remind everyone that Israel is a 1 bomb country the size of New Jersey surrounded by half a billion hostiles. In his most recent letter, Mr. Estes makes the statement that “… the U.S. and the western world lived over four decades facing a hostile, belligerent nuclear armed Soviet Union … and the west avoided a nuclear confrontation …

That is all well and good when you are negotiating with an adversary of enormous land mass populated with people who hold life precious. The Soviet Union knew they could never launch enough nukes to remove our retaliation capabilities on a first strike. This scenario does not hold true in the case of Iran vs Israel where just a few warheads could destroy the entire country of Israel on a first strike. It wouldn’t do Israel much good at that point knowing the U.S. had its back because there would be nothing left to defend.

In addition, Israel has become a center of technology innovation for the entire world. Drive thru the cities of Herziliya and Netanya and the large office buildings have names like Motorola, Google, Apple and Microsoft. The product R & D coming out of this area is a vital U.S. interest not to be underestimated and certainly worth safeguarding.

The US has been negotiating with the Middle East in general and Iran in particular since the 1970s with very little effect. We have frittered away over 30 years dealing with this problem ineffectually. If we give Iran any more time, they will possess enough enriched uranium to build multiple bombs and even if they don’t launch a strike against Israel, I have zero confidence that Iran wouldn’t sell some of this material to radical groups to attack “The Great Satan.”

The sand in this hourglass has run out. It is time for the US to draw some well defined lines in the sand and be willing to back them up militarily. Europe and the U.S. tried appeasement and playing for time in the 1930s and when we were forced to fight, it was much bloodier than if we put our collective foot down in the beginning. If we have learned anything from history, we should have learned that you can’t negotiate with leaders who stall and won’t negotiate in good faith.

The time to have Israel’s back is right now. It is in the long term interest of the U.S. to do so.

This column, written by one of my friends from college, was published in the St. Augustine Record, where it may also be read at http://staugustine.com/opinions/2012-09-30/guest-column-time-have-israels-back-right-now#.UGroArRrDGJ. It's posted here with the permission of the author.

Hebron, Not Jerusalem, Will Be the Key Issue if the Palestinian Arabs Ever Change Their Stripes

This was published as a letter to the editor in the Waterbury Republican-American on Friday, August 31, 2012, under the title "Future of Hebron in Israel Is Sticking Point in Talks."

The Aug. 27 article "Market stalls at heart of fight for Hebron" brings up a generally ignored reality: If the Palestinian Arabs ever give up their goal of destroying Israel and decide to try to live in peace, the thorniest issue will be Hebron, not Jerusalem.

Except as a tool for fomenting anti-Israel fanaticism, Jerusalem has never been all that important to the Palestinian Arabs; indeed, it was generally ignored when the Old City, including the Temple Mount and Western Wall, was under Jordanian occupation and Jews barred from their holiest sites. A key signal from the Palestinian Arabs that they are finally interested in peace would be for them to drop their outrageous demand that Jerusalem be redivided.

Hebron is a different matter. Geographically, it is within those areas that naturally would go to the Palestinian Arabs. On the other hand, it is historically and religiously the second most important city to the Jewish people, far more important to Jews than Jerusalem is to Muslims.

Hebron, also known in the Bible as Kiryat Arba, contains Me'arat ha-Machpela, the Cave of the Patriarchs, the burial site of the Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as well as Sarah, Rebecca and Leah. Indeed, the sale of that burial site by the Hittites to Abraham, the father of the Jewish people, is probably the earliest recorded real estate transaction in history.

Even with goodwill, something the Palestinian Arabs have yet to demonstrate, resolving the conflict between the physical location of Hebron and its importance to the Jewish people will be extremely difficult.

Alan Stein
Waterbury

The writer is president emeritus of PRIMER-Connecticut (Promoting Responsibility in Middle East Reporting; www.primerct.org).

Anti-Semitism Denial

A Reminder:

Edward Alexander
FrontPage Magazine
April 9, 2004

http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/1111

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12882

 

On September 20, 2002 Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard University, delivered to the Harvard community a speech deploring the upsurge of antisemitism in many parts of the globe: he specified synagogue bombings, physical assaults on Jews, desecration of Jewish holy places, and (this with special emphasis) denial of the right of "the Jewish state to exist." But his most immediate concern was that "at Harvard and ...universities across the country" faculty-initiated petitions were calling "for the University to single out Israel among all nations as the lone country where it is inappropriate for any part of the university's endowment to be invested."1

 

One of the Harvard faculty, Ruth Wisse, had described the divestment petition as "corrupt and cowardly" in offering its reasons for calling on the U. S. government to stop military aid and arms sales to Israel and upon universities to divest both from Israel and from American companies selling arms to Israel. "The petition," wrote Wisse,"requires that Israel comply with certain resolutions of the UN--the terms of which it distorts to say what those resolutions do not mean"; she also pointed out that the petition says nothing of the fact that all the Arab states remain in perpetual non-compliance with the entire UN Charter, which is based on the principle of mutual respect for the sovereignty of member states, which are to settle disputes by peaceful means.2

But of course the advocates of disinvestment in Israeli companies took a less benign view of Summers' position. Amidst the numerous wails of outrage Summers provoked, one, because of its great length and still greater indignation, stands out as a classic utterance of what has come to be called "antisemitism denial": Judith Butler's essay in the LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS (21 August 2003) entitled "No, it's not anti-semitic."

 

Prior to the autumn of 2003, this University of California professor of rhetoric and comparative literature was, like many members of Berkeley's "progressive" Jewish community with which she habitually identifies herself, somebody who defined her "Jewishness" (not exactly Judaism) in opposition to the State of Israel. She was mainly a signer of petitions harshly critical of the Jewish state, full of mean spite towards its alleged "apartheid" and "bantustan" practices, oily sycophancy towards such Palestinian figures as Sari Nusseibeh, and a habit of covering over the brutality of Arab terror with the soft snow of Latinized euphemisms. She was one of the 3700 American Jews opposed to "occupation" (Israeli, not Syrian or Chinese or any other) who signed an "Open Letter" urging the American government to cut financial aid to Israel; later she expressed misgiving about signing that particular petition--it "was not nearly strong enough...it did not call for the end of Zionism."3 In autumn of 2002 she requested, with ponderous irony, honorary membership in the Campus Watch organization's listing of Middle East specialists polemicizing in their classrooms on behalf of Radical Islam and against Israel and America. In June 2003 her name could be found on the ubiquitous "Stop the Wall Immediately" petition.

 

The wall, Butler and her fellow adepts in the rhetoric of inverted commas alleged, was "supposed to block 'terrorist attacks' but certainly won't prevent missiles and helicopters from hitting their human target." Suicide bombings, lynchings, pogroms, and roadside shootings were not terrorist attacks but only "terrorist attacks," whereas Israeli response to those so- called "terrorist attacks" injured real human targets.

 

But deeper currents were also stirring in Butler. She had undertaken some abstruse research into the history of Zionism and discovered that there had been "debates among Jews throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries as to whether Zionism ought to become the basis of a state."4 From this discovery the Hannah Arendt professor of philosophy (as she is called at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland) promptly concluded that demanding an end to Zionism in 2003, that is, calling for politicide (and the genocide that would surely accompany it) was no different from taking a debater's position against Zionism 75 or 100 years ago. She was helped in following this arrow-straight course from Buber and Magnes to "post-Zionism" by her conviction that the crucial ethical activity for Jews "is relating to the other,"5 i.e., that Jews must dance at everybody's wedding except their own.

 

Butler had herself signed the divestment petition at its place of origin, Berkeley, where it had circulated in February 2001. She therefore found Summers' remarks not only wrong but personally "hurtful" since they implicated Judith Butler herself in the newly resurgent campus antisemitism. Butler could hardly have failed to notice that the Berkeley divestment petition had supplied the impetus and inspiration for anti-Israel mob violence on her own campus on 24 April 2001, a few weeks after it had been circulated, and for more explicitly anti-Jewish mobs at San Francisco State University in May of the following year. Slander of Israel has provoked physical violence on many campuses, especially those (like Wayne State in Detroit or Concordia in Montreal) with a large Arab presence.

 

Summers, aware of how ubiquitous in anti-Israel discourse is the straw man called "the defender of Israel who decries any criticism of Israeli policy as antisemitism," went out of his way in his address to separate himself from this (conjectural) figure: "I have always throughout my life been put off by those who ... conjured up images of Hitler's Kristallnacht at any disagreement with Israel." Nobody has ever discovered just who these conjurors (a term Butler picked up in her rebuttal) might be, but if Summers thought that he would distance himself from them by this disclaimer, he was greatly mistaken.

In fact, the corruption of discourse about the ongoing Arab war against Israel--as Butler would soon demonstrate--consists precisely of the now deeply ingrained rhetorical habit of calling virtually all assaults on Israel, on Zionism, on Israelis, from verbal to physical, "criticism of Israeli policy." In a recent issue of JUDAISM, for example, one Andrew Bush (whose name pops up near Butler's in some anti-Israel petitions) writes that "The Intifada"--i.e., the murderous assaults by Arabs against Jews that were unleashed by the Oslo Accords--"is also a critique of Zionism...[and] it is precisely Postzionism that allows one to read the violent language [!] of the Intifada as critique."6 It is indeed the compulsive repetition, with the regularity of a steam-engine, of the euphemism "criticism of Israel" that characterizes Butler's "No, it's not anti-semitic."

 

Despite the large role played in promoting the divestment campaign by people like Noam Chomsky, Summers had chivalrously gone out of his way to say that "Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent." To annihilate Summers' distinction between intentional and effective antisemitism is the primary aim of Butler's counter-attack. Her strategy is what logicians call the tu quoque (i.e., you too, or you're another) argument: Summers' accusations, says Butler, are "a blow against academic freedom, in effect, if not intent." His words have had "a chilling effect on political discourse." No evidence, of course, is (or could be) adduced for the allegation. Of one thing we can be sure: the chill did not extend to Harvard itself, whose English department would soon (in November, to be precise) play host to the racist hoodlum from Oxford, Tom Paulin, who had urged (in yet another "criticism of Israeli policy") that Jews living in Judea/Samaria "should be shot dead," or to Columbia, where Paulin continued merrily through autumn semester as a visiting professor, or to the New York Review of Books, which in October 2003 would establish a new front in its 36-year old assault on Israel by publishing Professor Tony Judt's "Israel: The Alternative," a call for an end to the State of Israel that had already appeared in shorter form in the Los Angeles Times. Neither did Summers dampen the fires of Israel-hatred at the London Review of Books itself, which in January 2003 published another 133 lines of Paulin doggerel called "On Being Dealt the Anti-Semitic Card," a versified rehearsal for Butler's "No, it's not anti-semitic.". If Summers' speech had a chilling effect on antisemitic clarion calls, including incitement to raw murder, one would not want to know what the fully heated versions would sound like.

 

Butler perfunctorily assented to Summers' recommendation that--as she deviously restates it--"every progressive person ought to challenge anti-semitism vigorously wherever it occurs," but she seemed incapable either of recognizing it in such (to her) innocent "public criticisms" as economic warfare against the Jewish state or calls for its dismantling or assaults on Zionism itself or opposing any effort (however feeble) Israel might make to defend herself against suicide bombers; indeed, she made it clear that she saw no difference between Jews intentionally murdered by suicide bombers (also their sponsors and despatchers) and Arabs accidentally killed by Israeli efforts to repel would-be murderers. Although nobody can recall Judith Butler saying anything more critical of Arab butchery of Jews than that it is "unacceptable," she here presented herself, with characteristic brazenness, as offering Jews a salutary warning against crying wolf: "if the charge of anti-semitism is used to defend Israel at all costs, then its power when used against those who do discriminate against Jews--who do violence to synagogues in Europe [synagogues, bar mitzvahs, and Passover seders in Israel are not mentioned], wave Nazi flags or support anti-semitic organizations--is radically diluted." And so on and on--ad nauseam.

 

In trying to confute Summers' distinction between intentional and effective antisemitism, Butler calls it wildly improbable that somebody examining the disinvestment petitions signed by herself and her co-conspirators might take them (as hundreds on her own campus already had done, and as gleeful readers of the London Review of Books were about to do) as condoning antisemitism.7 She therefore poses this (as she assumes) unanswerable conundrum: "We are asked to conjure a listener who attributes an intention to the speaker: so-and-so has made a public statement against the Israeli occupation, and this must mean that so-and-so hates Jews or is willing to fuel those who do." But Summers was perfectly correct in stating that one need not "hate Jews" in order to perform actions or utter words that are "antisemitic in their effect if not their intent."

 

Let us take a well-known case: when Dickens wrote OLIVER TWIST he harbored no hatred of Jews and had no programmatic or conscious intention to harm them. Indeed, he said of his Jewish monster Fagin that "he's such an out and outer I don't know what to make of him." The reason for Dickens' puzzlement was that, in an important sense, he did not indeed "make" Fagin, and therefore didn't know what to make of him. Fagin was ready-made for Dickens by the traditional folklore of Christendom, which had for centuries fixed the Jew in the role of Christ-killer, surrogate of Satan, inheritor of Judas, thief, fence, corrupter of the young; to which list of attributes Butler and her friends would now add "Zionist imperialist and occupier," or--I quote from the statement that was the germ of the whole divestment campaign--"criminal apartheid regime." Has OLIVER TWIST often been antisemitic in its effect? Of course--or does Butler think that it is because of their interest in the plight of the homeless in early Victorian England that Arab publishers have long kept cheap paperback translations of the book in print?

 

Butler also uses the tu quoque "argument" in rebutting or rather evading (for she never really acknowledges it) the charge of discriminatory selectivity that Summers (like countless others) had made. Why, among all the nations on earth, has Israel alone been singled out for punishment and pariah status by the advocates of disinvestment? Where is their advocacy of disinvestment in China until China withdraws from Tibet, or from Morocco until that country ceases to occupy Western Sahara, or from Zimbabwe until it ceases persecuting its white citizens, or from Egypt until it stops building tunnels for the smuggling of arms to Palestinian killers? Could the singling out of Israel possibly have anything to do with the fact that it is a Jewish country? Despite the inordinate length of her essay, Butler cannot find space to answer this question. Instead, she accuses Summers himself of biased selectivity. "If we say that the case of Israel is different, that any criticism of it is considered as an attack on Israelis, or Jews in general, then we have singled out this political allegiance from all other allegiances that are open to public debate. We have engaged in the most outrageous form of 'effective' censorship...."

 

Her ultimate use of the tu quoque strategy is to make Summers, the critic of antisemitism, himself guilty of what he attacks. Why? Because he assumes that Jews can only be victims, conflates "Jews" with Israel, and writes as if all Jews were a single, undifferentiated group.

 

Apparently the 1135 Israelis murdered and the nearly 10,000 mutilated (in a Jewish population of under five million) by Arab pogromists, lynch mobs, and suicide bombers between 27 September 2000 and the time Butler published her essay were not sufficient to meet her stringent requirements for (Jewish) victim status.8 But if Israelis are not the victims of Palestinian aggression in the latest round of the Arab nations' 56-year old war to eradicate the Jewish state, why is it that Jewish schools in Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem must be protected by armed guards while Arab schools in Nazareth or Jenin require no such safeguards? Why is it that getting on a bus in Jerusalem or going to a cafe or discotheque in Haifa is a form of Russian roulette, a far more dangerous activity than prancing about as a "human shield" for Arafat in Ramallah? One might forgive Butler for overlooking a seminal essay in the June 2000 issue of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN9 which demonstrated massively that ours is a time of a new kind of war, "characterized by routine massacre of civilians," in which relatively little of the destruction is inflicted by tanks and artillery. It is harder to forgive her for overlooking 9/11 of 2001, in which a small number of technically competent Islamicist barbarians, heavily armed with fanatical indifference to human life, including their own, succeeded in attacking two major cities of the greatest power on earth, killing 3000 people, shattering whole industries, and causing billions of dollars in economic damage.

 

As for the argument that nothing is antisemitic which does not explicitly target every single Jew in the world, it is Butler at her most jejune. After all, she says (as if she had to remind us!) not all Jews are heavily "invested" in Israel: "Some Jews have a heartfelt investment in corned beef sandwiches."10 But does she really think that when Josef (later Johannes) Pfefferkorn, whose distinction between "good" and "bad" Jews became the paradigm for Jewish self-haters, urged his countrymen (in the1520s) to "drive the old Jews out [of Germany]" he had himself in mind? When Karl Marx excoriated Jews as "the filthiest of all races," did he really mean to include himself? Do the operators of Nazi websites have trouble making "exceptions" for the writings of Chomsky or his disciple Norman Finkelstein? Indeed, Butler's requirement of total inclusiveness would have allowed Hitler himself to say (had he so wished) of his racial policy: "No, it's not antisemitic." And since Butler writes as if antisemitism were a genetic affliction from which Jews, most especially her "post-Zionist" Israeli friends, are protected by virtue of being born, this line of argument would leave poor Summers as virtually the only Jewish antisemite in the whole world.

 

Although Butler's essay is such a loose, baggy monster that only a journal fanatically committed to erasing the Jewish state would have published it, what it leaves out is even more outrageous than what it includes. It omits history altogether, torturing a text and omitting context. Did it never occur to Butler that the divestment effort is merely the latest installment of the 50-year old Arab economic boycott of Israel, one prong in the endless Arab campaign to destroy the Jewish state, or that the Arab boycott is itself an imitation of the Nazi boycotts of the 1930s? Does she see no connection between the Nazi denial of the Jews' right to live and her own effort to make Israel's "right to exist" contingent upon its conformity to her political prejudices? And then, of course, there is the omission of context that is de rigueur among all those who have made the "Palestinian cause" and the erasure of Israel the touchstone of contemporary liberalism. The "occupation" which they constantly bemoan did not precede and cause Arab hatred and violence; it was Arab hatred and violence that led--in 1967 as in 2002--to occupation.

 

But the crucial omission from this essay by somebody who has relentlessly insisted on the political implications of language is--the political implications of the language of the advocates of divestment, of boycott, of "an end to Israeli occupation," of an end to Zionism, of stopping the "wall," etc. Josef Joffe, editor of the German weekly DER ZEIT, has succinctly defined the linguistic difference between "criticism of Israeli policy" and antisemitism:

 

Take this statement: 'Demolishing the houses of the families of
terrorists is morally wrong because it imputes guilt by
association, and politically wrong because it pushes more people
into the arms of Hamas.' Such a statement is neither anti-Israel
nor anti-Semitic; it might even be correct. By contrast, 'the
Israelis are latter-day Nazis who want to drive the Palestinians
from their land in order to realize an imperialist biblical
dream' inhabits a very different order of discourse, ascribing
evil to an entire collective and, in its equation of Israelis and
Nazis, revealing an obsessive need for moral denigration.11

The Harvard/MIT divestment petition that Butler champions against Summers was promoted at MIT by Noam Chomsky, a person who would be rendered almost speechless on the subject of Israel if deprived of the epithet "Nazi"; it was promoted at Harvard by Professor Paul Hanson, who referred to Israel as the "pariah" state. Butler was herself among the "first signatories" of a July 28, 2003 petition that uses the Israeli-Nazi equation beloved of nearly all denigrators of the Zionist enterprise (going back to British official circles in Cairo in 1941) by stating that "concrete, barbed wire and electronic fortifications whose precedents...belong to the totalitarian tradition" were transforming the Israel "'defense forces'" (again the rhetorical quotation marks) and indeed "Israeli citizens themselves into a people of camp wardens."12

 

And so it would seem that, for Butler, "Language plays an important role in shaping and attuning our...understanding of social and political realities"13 except when it happens to be the antisemitic language that demonizes Israel as the devil's own experiment station, black as Gehenna and the pit of hell.

Edward Alexander is professor of English at University of Washington and the author of IRVING HOWE--SOCIALIST, CRITIC, JEW (Indiana University Press).

 

Notes:

1. The full text of Summers' speech may be found in CONGRESS MONTHLY
(September/October 2003)

2. Ruth Wisse, "How Harvard and MIT Professors are Planting a Seed of Malevolence," NEW YORK SUN, 20 May 2002.

3. LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS, 21 August 2003.

4. Ibid.

5. HA'ARETZ interview of 6 January 2004.

6. JUDAISM, 52 (Winter/Spring2003), 111.

7. A delicious letter from a reader published in LONDON REVIEW on 11 September 2003 thanked Butler for saving him from thinking of himself as an antisemite: "As someone rather too ready to allow strong disapproval of Israel's policies to slide into anti-semitic prejudice, may I say how illuminating and helpful I found Judith Butler's article." Very helpful indeed. The only letter printed by the journal critical of Butler's essay was by Mona Baker, originator of the academic boycott of Israel: she found Butler too soft on Zionists and was angered at Butler's linking her to the arch-villain Summers himself.

8. Butler's feminist followers may wish to contemplate the following statistic: of the Palestinian fatalities at that stage of "Intifada II" 116 were women; of the Israel fatalities 271 were women.

9. Jeffrey Boutwell and Michael T. Klare, "Special Report: Waging a New Kind of War," SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, 282 June 2000).

10. LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS, 21 August 2003.

11. "The Demons of Europe," COMMENTARY, 117 (January 2004), 30.

12. "Israel and Palestine: Stop the Wall Immediately" petition.

13. "A 'Bad' Writer Bites Back," NEW YORK TIMES, 20 March 1999.

 

Is there a better word to use than "culture?"

Sent to the Boston Globe in the aftermath of the Palestinian Arab pique over hearing an obvious truth about the reasons their economy isn't so great.

As of today, more than three weeks after the article was published, the Boston Globe has published five letters relating to the article. Of those five, four have been biased against Israel and only one was not biased against Israel.

This letter, not being biased against Israel, has not been published.

To the editor:

The article "Romney provokes Palestinian outrage," published July 31, showed a lack of understanding both of history and current reality; the letters published August 2 about that article did nothing to enlighten anyone.

Roughly 95 percent of the Arabs living in the disputed territories have been living under the Palestinian Authority, not the so-called "Israeli occupation," for nearly two decades. Ironically, the conditions under which they live improved dramatically only during the period Israel administered those areas.

Particularly ironic are the complaints about "border-crossing restrictions," especially given the alleged desire of the Palestinian Arabs for their own state. After all, one of the obvious consequences of being a citizen is needing permission to enter other states.

Based on actions, it would appear Israel is far more interested in establishing a Palestinian Arab state than the Palestinians themselves, whose present leader, the so-called "moderate" Mahmoud Abbas, has refused to even negotiate with Israel since ignoring an offer in 2008 for independence in the equivalent of all the disputed territory.

Maybe there's a better word to use than culture, but the key to improving their economic conditions lies mostly with the Palestinian Arabs.

Sincerely,

Alan H. Stein