IMPRESSIONISM BY HERBERT ZWEIBON

FROM THE EDITOR BY RAEL JEAN ISAAC

A FOOL'S PARADISE BY ELYAKIM HA'ETZNI

ON JEWS AND POWER BY RAEL JEAN ISAAC

ARIEL: CAPITAL OF SAMARIA BY DINA SHALIT

THE BBC: HOW DID IT GET SO BAD BY ADRIAN MORGAN

THAT SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP BY RUTH KING

Outpost
Editor: Rael Jean Isaac
Editorial Board: Herbert Zweibon, Ruth King

Outpost is distributed free to
Members of Americans For a Safe Israel
Annual membership: $50.

Americans For a Safe Israel
1751 Second Ave. (at 91st St.)
New York, NY 10128
tel (212) 828-2424 / fax (212) 828-1717
E-mail: afsi @rcn.com web site: http://www.afsi.org

HERBERT ZWEIBON

On September 6 Israel launched a raid on Syria which is widely believed to have been directed against nuclear materials from North Korea if not an early-stage reactor. In Lebanon, a rearmed Hezbollah controls the south of the country even as the central government threatens to implode. Iran’s threats to annihilate Israel come with clockwork regularity. Hamas, in control of Gaza, rains rockets on southern Israel with impunity and has formally offered al Qaeda (already in residence) a home.

In short, Israel’s enemies are more threatening, more motivated, better armed and more confident than ever. The response of the United States? To further impair Israel’s ability to defend herself by inserting a Palestinian state into this cauldron. Secretary of State Rice is determined to force Israel to come up with enough concessions in advance to induce a variety of Israel’s Arab enemies (including Syria) to join a Mideast “peace” conference in Washington. Exuding domineering hubris, Rice seems unaware of the many administrations that have fallen on their face “solving” the Arab-Israel conflict.

What ever happened to that ringing declaration by the President: “Either you are with us or with the terrorists”? Whose side are we on? The “moderate” Fatah the administration seeks to reward continues its annual tradition of celebrating the anniversary of 9/11, this year with a cartoon in Al Hayat Al Jadida (controlled by Abbas’ office) showing Bin Laden smiling while making the V for victory sign with two fingers in the shape of the burning twin towers.

And what of the Israeli government? Like a drunken sailor, it flings away its most vital assets. Haaretz reports that Olmert’s lead negotiator with Fatah, Vice Premier Haim Ramon, has offered to redivide Jerusalem, to withdraw from Judea and Samaria (with any territorial changes compensated by the same amount of land within Israel) and to establish a land corridor so the new state of Palestine will not be divided (never mind that Israel will be cut in two.) Olmert defends his abandoning the long-standing Israeli position that Palestinian security compliance was a prerequisite to final status talks by arguing there is no time to waste waiting for compliance. Both Olmert and Peres have announced they are ready for peace talks with Syria (do they think the recent bombing of Syria cleared the air?). Peres announces “The nervousness in relations between ourselves and Syria is over.”

How can one account for such depths of folly? The Wall Street Journal (September 18) reports from Jerusalem that the sharp drop in suicide attacks and the rise in tourism is “providing political space and momentum for the negotiations.” The great Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky understood the pathological trait that led Jews to be swept up in hope and optimism by the most superficial improvement: he called it “impressionism.” Jabotinsky likened the Jewish penchant for ignoring underlying reality to the person who experiences in a cold January in Warsaw or New York a sudden warm day and concludes it is now spring, and you can put away the stove and pack away the fur coat. Jabotinsky recognized the inability to think beyond the events of yesterday and today as a lethal disease; indeed, he wrote, “it is worse than a disease, it is death.” By which he meant it could spell the death of the Zionist enterprise.

And so the folie a deux between the U.S. and Israel continues. Off in never never land Rice describes a Palestinian state that will “live side by side [with Israel] in peace and freedom.” At her side, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni declares that “the creation of a future Palestinian state is in our own interest.” Meanwhile, in the real world, between them, Israel and the United States bring ever closer the Middle Eastern chaos President Bush keeps proclaiming he is bending all his efforts to avoid.

RAEL JEAN ISAAC

PRESIDENT OF THE GLOBE

Shimon Peres, in a Yom Kippur eve statement, called upon mankind to meet “two of the most significant challenges which the world currently presents us with: the Terror against the Environment – or in other words, Global Warming – and the Terror against Humanity, that is, the prevention of the safety of mankind, as well as poverty.”

Here you have it, the reason Peres can’t be bothered with such petty issues as Israel’s survival. In his self-assigned role as Global President he must weigh Israel in the scale of his whole-earth responsibilities and in that framework Israel is a tiny, trivial geographic speck, scarcely worth of notice.

Perhaps next year Israel’s Prince of Grandiosity will decide he is President of the Universe and take upon himself the challenge of the black hole.

ARABS HONOR HERSH

Seymour Hersh is scheduled as the keynote speaker at the Arab American Chamber of Commerce’s conference on November 15 in Detroit. The conference is entitled “View Our World with Crystal Clarity” and there’s no doubt the Arabs demonstrate “crystal clarity” in assessing who their friends are. In the meantime Jews are clueless to distinguish friend from foe – witness their adulation for the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman with “investigative reporter” Seymour Hersh a close second. (For an in depth look at Hersh’s shoddy performance as a reporter see this writer’s “Investigating Seymour Hersh” in The Jewish Divide Over Israel, Edward Alexander and Paul Bogdanor eds., Transaction Publishers, 2006).

DEATH OF THE GROWNUP

Our favorite columnist Diana West has a new book "Death of the Grownup, "linking the emergence of the youth culture in the 1950s and 60s with the triumph of multiculturalism. But the book does much more.

In an interview with Frontpage, West explains the book’s contribution: “The book makes a connection between what seem to be superficial trappings of fashion and custom and what are the most significant challenges a civilization must contend with—war and survival.” West observes: “One of the things we all enjoy about childhood is getting lost in the world of pretend. But such flights of fancy are not supposed to govern us as adults formulating geo-political strategy. I write at length in the book about how our understanding of the struggle underway between the West and Islam begins and ends in the world of pretend: the PC, multicultural, ‘non-judgmental’ outlook on life that insists all cultures, religions, and peoples are equally benign and equally valuable, with the great exception being that of Western cultures, religions and peoples, which, according to multiculti cant, cause all evil in the world….We stick to a PC script that consigns all dangerous aspects of jihad violence and the Islamization of the West to a nasty, sort of mythical ‘band of extremists’ who have no connection to Islam’s teachings, history and goals. This explanation, while comforting as a bedtime story, is demonstrably absurd, as I show in the book. But such is the prevailing wisdom in our 21st century Age of Faith—multicultural faith.”

DOUBLE STANDARDS

Much has been made of the double standard practiced by Columbia, which invited Ahmadinejad but refuses to permit ROTC on campus. But the most important double standard is overlooked and goes far beyond Columbia. The real double standard is the one that condemns Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (a Daily News headline told him to “Go to Hell”) while celebrating Mahmoud Abbas. Ahmadinejad is condemned for denying the Holocaust, yet Abbas wrote his doctoral thesis “proving” it did not happen. Ahmadinejad and Abbas have precisely the same genocidal goal—eliminating Israel. So why is Ahmadinejad condemned while many of those most vociferous in attacking him applaud his clone, Abbas, and an Israeli government falls over itself in efforts to give him a state, with (unbelievably) Jerusalem as its capital?

INDIFFERENT TO ISRAEL

A recent study (by the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies) has found that young non-Orthodox Jews (Orthodox Jews are estimated to be only 8% of affiliated Jews) are increasingly alienated from Israel with implications for the future of support for Israel in this country. The study found that “feelings of attachment may well be changing as warmth gives way to indifference and indifference gives way even to downright alienation.” According to the study only 48% of non-Orthodox U.S. Jews under 35 believe Israel’s destruction would be a personal tragedy for them (compared with 77% 65 and older) and only 54% are even “comfortable with the idea of a Jewish state” (compared with 81% 65 and over). (continued on page 12)

The study’s findings are apt to produce much beating of breasts among Jewish organizations, but one can be sure little recognition by the breast-beaters of their own responsibility. In the March 2001 Outpost, in an article entitled “Into the Twilight: The Decline of American Jewish Influence,” Ruth King and I described the developments now coming into full flower. We wrote of the loss of focus of Jewish organizations as they “augmented their issues to include many that had nothing to do with Jews or Israel.”

We wrote how a segment of Jews with backgrounds in radical movements moved into professional Jewish communal work, encountering “a welcoming liberal Jewish community receptive to anything identified as a ‘progressive’ cause.” A growing array of trendy issues, from affirmative action to gay rights to environmentalism to multiculturalism were sanctified as “commanded” by Jewish religious tradition. “The end result,” we wrote, “was both to dissipate the energy of the organized Jewish community on a host of issues unrelated and often actually opposed to Jewish interests and to turn many Jewish organizations into vociferous critics of this or that aspect of Israeli policy (everything from insufficient ‘peace efforts’ to religious ‘coercion’ to inadequate ‘sensitivity’ to Israeli Arabs).”

How can it then be cause for surprise that the next generation of Jews feels indifferent (at best) to Israel? Or are blind to how important Israel is to their own welfare? What we wrote in 2001, before the huge upsurge in anti-Semitism in the West, remains as true as ever: “At their peril, American Jews have lost sight of the fact that Israel’s fate is inextricably bound to the fate of Jews worldwide…that a strong and secure Israel is the guarantor of the safety and well being of Jews in America.”

ELYAKIM HA'ETZNI

Some day we’ll recall these tranquil months of Israeli newspaper headlines devoted to road accidents and minor scandals—the headlines of a society free from existential cares—as a fool’s paradise whose fools turned a blind eye to the erupting volcano threatening to bury us all. There was another summer like this one preceding Yom Kippur in 1973, but this time the surprise attack is being readied from within, and the calamity will be diplomatic.

I’m referring to the ritual sacrifice being prepared for us this November that goes by the name of a “peace conference.” The role of the sacrificial lamb will be filled by Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, hundreds of Jewish communities, and hundreds of thousands of Jews who will become refugees in their own land – all this on the backdrop of national, societal, and diplomatic collapse.

The kindling and the fire for the sacrifice will be brought by Shimon Peres and his perpetual partner Terje Larsen [UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process]. Serving them are Haim Ramon, Ehud Olmert, and Abu Mazen. Spurring them on are two ambitious women who, like the most destructive tornadoes, are called by cute nicknames: Tzipi and Condi. On the tombstone the gravediggers will engrave the words “The Diplomatic Horizon” and/or “Principles for the Final Status Agreement” and/or “Framework Agreement for the Establishment of a Palestinian State.” The conference will deal with “core issues,” that is to say it will uproot the core and the heart of our hold on our land: Jerusalem, borders, refugees, destruction of the settlements.

Discussions on these matters are being held continually in order to bring the sacrificial lamb to Washington on time, already bound and readied for slaughter. There are those who are working to ensure that the sacrificial feast will be well attended—from Morocco in the West to the Gulf States in the East. Israel’s enemies have waited 40 years for this moment when Israel will be forced to regurgitate all that she swallowed during the Six Day War. Their eyes will finally merit seeing the ceremony of subjugation whereby the Jews will return to the Arabs their lost honor and resume their proper places. To our enemies’ good fortune, manning the helm of Israel’s ship of state is a man supremely appropriate to the task of self-administering this coup de grace to the Jews -- a man dogged by failures and accusations of corruption, whose personal attributes embody all that is weak, rotten and foundering among the Jews in their land at this hour.

At this “peace” conference, the enemies of Israel from the East and from the West will dictate the decree that Olmert and his friends are writing now in secret together with the Americans and the Arabs while the Israeli public, including the national camp and the settlers, twiddle their thumbs. It’s comforting to tell ourselves soothing tales such as how Olmert is weak and Abu Mazen is even weaker, and that both of them lack the standing and support among their people to undertake such far-reaching diplomatic initiatives. There are no lack of such rationalizing yarns. Whoever calms himself in this way doesn’t understand the nature and quality of the liquidation ceremony that’s being prepared for us.

This ceremony doesn’t require any strength; in fact it doesn’t require anything at all except for a declaratory statement, ink on paper, an exhalation of breath, an effort that even a dying man could make without difficulty. However, a declaration like this is enough to bring about, in the words of Shimon Peres, “the concluding chapter of the conflict with the Palestinians,” and, in truth, the concluding chapter of Israel’s independence. After this, Israel will be a state in name only. In reality Israel will become a protectorate of the United Nations, whose foreign policy and security are given into the hands of the Quartet, and whose security, that is to say our lives, are entrusted to international forces in the north, center, and south of the country.

At the sacrificial peace conference in Washington, Israel will likely obligate itself to establish a Palestinian state on its ancestral inheritance. The capital of the new state will be Jerusalem, and not even one Jew will be allowed to live within its boundaries.

It doesn’t matter that the conference will not determine on which street in Jerusalem and over which hill or through which valley the border will pass. It is of no significance that the conference won’t decide how many Arab “refugees” we’ll be forced to swallow. What will be determined, irrevocably and eternally, this coming year or next year at the latest, is Palestinian sovereignty as a diplomatic, international, fact—with finality. The rest truly isn’t important. So too when they signed the Oslo Accords with only the “Declaration of Principles.” In its wake, as thunder follows lightning, we were hit by the “interim agreement” with all its details that demanded actualization: areas A, B, and C, the Palestinian “police”, inserting a terror state infrastructure from Tunis into our borders, and all the rest of the insane arrangements that buried 1,500 Jews in their land and prepared the state for its final act of self-immolation in the guise of a Palestinian state that will turn life in this land into a living hell—an irrevocable living hell.

It’s not important that the governmental apparatuses of the Palestinian state will be weak or even non-existent. It doesn’t matter whether a prime minister or the head of some terrorist faction will rule. It’s not important if this state has no economy and will live on the handouts that Israel, the Europeans, and the Americans pay to the gangsters as protection money for a modicum of quiet. The world contains a number of such non-functional states. Somalia, for example, is ruled by gangs of tribal thieves and thugs, but that doesn’t in the least detract from Somalian sovereignty and from the land remaining the land of Somalia according to international law.

Herzl had a vision of a Jewish state arising with international legal recognition. Now this vision has been turned on its head, and a foreign entity is achieving international recognition as sovereign over the Land of Israel. And who is promoting this travesty? The Jews themselves.

What is the irredeemable, eternal meaning of Palestinian sovereignty? When Israel liberated Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and Gaza in the Six Day War, she didn’t conquer land that belonged to any sovereign power. Neither Jordan in Judea and Samaria nor Egypt in Gaza had any sovereign rights in those territories. Both had invaded those territories in 1948 in order to frustrate the League of Nations decision of November 29, 1947 recognizing Israel. Egypt never claimed sovereignty over Gaza and established military rule there from the beginning. Jordan, in contravention of international law, attempted to establish sovereignty over Judea and Samaria, but renounced this aspiration on its own initiative in 1988.

Only because of this vacuum in sovereignty was Israel authorized to utilize state lands to settle Jews in Judea and Samaria or to settle the lands in any way. Had there been a legal sovereign before Israel’s takeover of those territories, the Hague Convention would have forbidden Israel from making fundamental changes to the status quo, including the utilization of state lands. International law views the conquering military administration as custodian over the occupied territories until they are returned to the original sovereign in a future peace agreement. Until then, the conquered lands are held in trust by the occupying power. In the same way, the conqueror is forbidden from excavating antiquities located in occupied territories. They too are held in trust for the conquered power that will eventually regain sovereignty. Therefore, coins from the Great Revolt or the Bar Kochba Revolt, bearing images of the Holy Temple and other Jewish symbols, will belong to the Palestinians the moment they became sovereign over Judea and Samaria; Israel will be obligated to give up all the Jewish antiquities that she’s excavated since 1967. All this we will bring upon ourselves the moment a Jewish hand signs an agreement granting Palestinian sovereignty over the Land of Israel.

For the Palestinians to win sovereignty over our homeland, it doesn’t matter that Abu Mazen today happens to be weak, or if the day after signing an agreement he resumes his alliance with Hamas, or that he resigns, or is assassinated. From the moment that Palestine is declared a state, what is done can never be undone. The Palestinians, of course, will instigate terror and wars. The IDF might conquer Shechem over and over again, but will always be forced to leave and return the land to the Palestinian sovereign. This is because the land has become Palestinian land according to international law from the moment that Palestinian sovereignty is officially recognized. Just so was Berlin conquered and destroyed and divided, but in the end returned to Germany as its capital. Just so the Nazis came and went, but Germany remained.

I’ve already described how this scenario is viewed under international law. The giants in the field, professors Stone, Rostow, and Schwabel, have proven how the provisions of the Mandate for Palestine, granted by the League of Nations to Britain over the Land of Israel, are in force in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza until this day. According to the Mandate, the area of the Land of Israel is allocated under international law as the national homeland of the Jewish nation “in recognition of the historic right of the Jewish people to reestablish their national home in Palestine” (including, of course, Judea, Samaria, and Gaza).

Why are the provisions of the Mandate in force to this day despite the fact that the League of Nations has passed from the world and been replaced by the United Nations, and despite the fact that England is no longer here? The professors have explained that although a part of the lands of the Mandate have become the internationally recognized State of Israel and although another part of the lands of the Mandate east of the Jordan River have become the internationally recognized State of Jordan, a third part of the Mandate lands, that include Judea, Samaria, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, were left without a recognized sovereign. As long as international law doesn’t officially recognize any other sovereignty, they’ll continue to be governed by the provisions of the Mandate, which states, inter alia, that state lands are to be used for intensive Jewish settlement, to encourage aliyah, and names the Jewish Agency as a tool to serve those ends.

When will these Mandate provisions cease to apply? When another sovereign will be declared over Judea, Samaria, Gaza, and Jerusalem. In the first stage, Israel abdicated her right to declare her sovereignty over Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, and left those lands undefined and ownerless. Now she is moving to the next stage, the stage of the historic terminus of Jewish rights over the Land of Israel, the stage of voluntary relinquishment of sovereignty and of transferring her rights to an alien power. In all the years of our exile and persecution, there was not found among the Jewish people any authority willing to sever the people from its beloved land. We had to return and persevere here for 120 years, undergoing difficult and bitter trials, in order to establish a state authorized under international law to give the Land of Israel a decree of divorce in the name of the Jewish People, now and forever.

Intensifying the heartbreak is the fact that Judea, Samaria, and Gaza are the only remaining territories on the entire earth (excepting the South Pole) which remain ownerless—as if an invisible hand guarded the ancient Jewish home for the Jewish people. And now that people’s representative is pushing away this hand in an act of historic betrayal that will resound throughout the generations. Now the more we ground and strengthen our claim that we’re the real and legal owners of Judea, Samaria, Gaza, and Jerusalem, the more we’ll ground and strengthen the newly acquired right of the Palestinians to those lands. After all, who is most authorized to gift and grant ownership over land if not the rightful owner? He and only he can legally effectuate the transfer!

When this despicable act will be final, all else will flow from it. Whether the Israeli army drags the Jews out by their hair from their homes on land that has become “Palestine,” or whether it will be left to the Palestinian murderers in uniform to do the job by themselves, from the moment land comes under Palestinian sovereignty, that will be the end of all Jewish life there.

One can almost hear the destroyers talking, from Ramon to Livni and from Olmert to Peres: Soon the Palestinians will come and sweep away everything with a giant broom, the legal and established cities together with the “illegal” outposts and hilltops. Nothing will remain of the hated settlement enterprise, and together with its disappearance will come the collapse of those that bore it, the religious and national camps that endanger leftist rule. Our rulers are an elite that sprouted from what used to be called “the rule of the proletariat,” in whose name they meant to appropriate the state in perpetuity. While the Socialist rationalizations have passed from the world and the elites represent no one but themselves, the socialist heirs still intend to rule in perpetuity.

I don’t bother to ask, “Where is Netanyahu?” or “Where is the Likud and its Knesset members?” at this fateful hour. Neither am I asking where Avigdor Lieberman [leader of the nationalist party Israel Beiteinu, now in the government] is or what Rav Ovadia and his Shas party [also in the government] are doing. I’m asking the settlers whose lands will be the first the Palestinian bulldozer overturns: “Where are you?” “Going up to Homesh”? [Homesh was a Jewish community in northern Samaria evacuated in the 2005 “disengagement”. In Sept 2007 7-10,000 marchers converged on Homesh to urge Jewish resettlement of the community.] The return to Homesh isn’t taking place in a void. Homesh is not suspended in thin air. This enterprise only makes sense and has purpose as part of a struggle for our continued existence in Judea, Samaria, Gaza, and Jerusalem that is now in immediate danger of destruction.

We need to gather all the Jews—all those who remain Jews—while there’s still time and embark on a struggle to the bitter end in order to prevent at any price taking the one step from which there’s no return, the one additional step that will pull the ground from under us and fling us into the abyss of Palestinian sovereignty.

Elyakim Ha’etzni is a former Knesset member. An attorney, he lives in Kiryat Arba in Judea. This was a talk given on Arutz 7.

RAEL JEAN ISAAC

In Jews and Power (Schocken, NY 2007) Ruth Wisse zeroes in on an issue of crucial importance to Israel’s prospects for continued existence—the development over centuries in the diaspora of what she calls Jewish “moral solipsism,” a concentration on moral improvement to the detriment of political survival.

Wisse takes exception to the common notion that Jewish political history experienced a hiatus between the destruction of the Second Temple and the emergence of modern Zionism. Not so, says Wisse, there was an active Jewish politics in the Diaspora as worthy of study as Jewish religion, philosophy and culture. It is concerning the nature of that political tradition that Wisse demonstrates ambivalence. Wisse explains that part of the problem stemmed from Jewish religious beliefs. The prophets taught that the political fate of Jews depended upon their ability to convince God of their uprightness. While this situated politics in a transcendent scheme of judgment so that Jews did not have to accept the verdict of the battlefield, it also laid the responsibility for defeat on Jewish behavior. Thus, for example, the rabbis no less than Josephus (a traitor to the Judean state) attached the blame for their defeat on the Jews, not Roman imperialism.

The penchant for self-blame coupled with pride in sheer survival, Wisse argues, over time sometimes led the toleration for political weakness (a fact of life for diaspora communities) to cross the moral line into veneration for political weakness, making of this a Jewish ideal. This notion was particularly prominent in European liberal Judaism whose proponents saw Judaism as becoming more ethically and spiritually advanced as it became freed of a national and state apparatus.

On the other hand Wisse finds much that was positive in Jews’ political adaptation to the diaspora – even in the syndrome for self-blame. By accepting responsibility for their political failure, Jews could maintain a political narrative in which they retained control of their national destiny despite their dependency in other peoples lands. Jewish self-governance in the diaspora (especially well-developed in Poland) was modeled on self-rule in the land of Israel except that the power of protection was handed over to local rulers. Moreover, Wisse maintains, Jewish diaspora communities were skilful in adaptation—elastic, flexible, pliable, subtle and worked to master skills that would make them indispensable.

With the failure of the Jewish political experiment in Europe—already apparent by the end of the nineteenth century as anti-Semitism burgeoned—Jews applied their adaptive skills to building a home in the Land of Israel. Wisse notes that Jews fell into the traditional pattern of appealing to the good faith of stronger nations. Notably absent from Jewish planning (Jabotinsky, and his Jewish Legion, was the exception) was the military force every other nation assumes it needs to gain its land.

Wisse writes that as a state, despite the constant threats to its survival Israel has continued to be grudging in its use of military force, repeatedly falling back on the preferred diaspora strategy of accommodation. Like the rest of the world it has refused to acknowledge that Arab-Islamic hostility is directed against the very idea of a Jewish state, rendering useless the endless attempts to deal with the conflict as if it were a matter of borders, susceptible to political accommodation. With the Oslo accords, says Wisse, Israel wound up doing what no people in human history had ever done, arm its enemy in the (ludicrous) expectation that this would bring the state security.

Another Jewish political tradition, that of self-blame, has persisted to haunt the state: rather than blame the pan-Arab war against the Jews, a sizable portion of Israelis (and an even larger section of its media and other elites) have turned inward and focus on supposed Israeli wrongdoing, blaming “settlers” and religious Jews for the conflict, assuming, contrary to all evidence, that there would be peace were it not for the post 1967 “occupation.” Wisse concludes: “Their capacity for accommodation dooms them if they fail to repel their assailants when necessary.”

This is a brief book, seeking to focus on the broadest issues in the historical relationship of Jews and power. Even so, there are curious omissions. Although the book is published in 2007, Wisse essentially ends the narrative with Oslo. She quotes at length Norman Podhoretz as the “strongest” of several American critics of Oslo who rightly predicted that it was merely destined to provoke great Palestinian Arab violence. But she makes no mention of the more important, and more forceful, attacks on Oslo by many on the Israeli right, including future Prime Ministers Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon, who warned repeatedly that the Palestinian state envisaged by Oslo would spell the end of the Jewish state. If Wisse had mentioned this she would have been forced to address the about-face of both of these leaders once they headed the government. Why did Netanyahu continue the Oslo process with the Wye agreement? Why did Sharon back a Palestinian state and uproot the Jewish communities of Gaza, with results even more predictable than Oslo?

No doubt there were a variety of reasons (external pressures, in the case of Sharon personal political considerations) but their actions would not have been possible were it not for aspects of the Jewish national character that cannot be fully subsumed under the rubric of “accommodation” or “self-blame.” After all, polls showed their policies had the support of a majority of the public, the very public that had presumably voted against precisely those policies in selecting these leaders. (This was especially striking in the case of the Gaza communities, whose importance to Israel Sharon had stoutly defended up until the moment he decided to eliminate them.)

Jabotinsky referred to a flaw in Jewish national character that he called “political diabetes.” Jews were afflicted with a spiritual pathology in which the body did not adjust to bitter things but changed everything to sugar. This meant that those who knew how to purvey pleasant news, no matter how transitory and immaterial in the broader framework, were able to produce in the public an unjustified optimism that paralyzed rational political thought. In other words political diabetes made the public vulnerable to manipulation by leaders who dangled a hoped-for change for the better in Israel-Arab relations, confident that the wish-to-believe would overcome the lessons of experience and simple rationality.

There is something else Wisse ignores: the inability Jews seem to have in comprehending the basics of what having a state entails. Long before Oslo this failure was pinpointed by Moshe Ben Yosef (Hagar) in his 1968 Hebrew book (never translated) Ha’Ayarah (The Shtetl). Hagar argued that Jews in Israel continued to live politically and spiritually as if they were in the confines of the European shtetl. Indeed one could go further and argue that in many respects Israel behaves more like a family than a state. Take the absurdly disproportionate prisoner “exchanges,” with hundreds of terrorists freed to ransom a single soldier. A family may appropriately make a huge sacrifice for the return of a family member, but a state cannot operate in this way; it cannot ignore the effects of its actions upon the larger community, including (only one of the many terrible results of these crazy mass releases) the inevitability that many more will in future die at the hands of those thus set free. Or take the major policy changes undertaken because of the agitation of a small group of family members, e.g. the flight from Lebanon (and betrayal of Lebanese allies in southern Lebanon) as the result of agitation by, literally, a handful of mothers of slain soldiers.

Wisse writes of the moral solipsism that puts moral purity over survival, and ennobles powerlessness. But this is to give more credit than is due to Israel’s critics from within. Theirs is moral posturing, not morality; treasonous identification with the enemy, not a spirit of compromise; self-hatred, not devotion to high ethical standards. What possible moral justification can one find, for example, for the assortment of Israeli academics who instigate boycotts of Israel abroad and work closely with the European anti-Semites who implement them? The pretense of moral concerns only underlines the moral corruption of these Jews.

In her broad brush strokes, Wisse occasionally makes errors. She writes that two opposite movements arose in Israel in response to the political impasse following the Six Day War—Gush Emunim, which wanted to annex the conquered territories up to the Jordan and Peace Now which wanted to return most of the territories. But Gush Emunim arose in response to the Yom Kippur War of 1973, not the Six Day War, and Peace Now was formed in 1978 to put pressure on Prime Minister Begin to accede to all Sadat’s demands. (Begin initially held out to keep the Jewish communities in northern Sinai, including the town of Yamit, within Israel.)

There were indeed opposing movements that arose following the Six Day War. Arguing that all the conquered territories should be incorporated into Israel was the Land of Israel Movement, which dramatically brought together intellectuals from left and right, some of whom earlier would not have remained in a room with one another. On the opposite side were a series of small peace movements with competing proposals. They differed on how much of the territories to give up, to whom they should be surrendered (whether to the former rulers or to a new separate Palestinian state) and what, if anything, Israel should demand in return, by way of recognition or peace.

Moreover Wisse is mistaken (understandably since she has the movements wrong) when she says that neither of the opposing movements “articulated the unique political dilemma facing their country or developed a strategic plan of national defense.” The Land of Israel Movement articulated both dilemma and strategic plan. It emphasized that the return of territories would merely restore the state to the old vulnerability and increase Arab hopes of success in a renewed conflict with Israel. If Israel did not assert her will upon the region, the region would assert its will upon Israel by destroying her. Israel would be a regional power or it would not exist. The problem was not that Israelis were unable to articulate alternative strategies but that the alternatives had such little resonance. In spirit, successive governments were far closer to the peace movement, seeing no alternative to accommodation, to using the territories as bargaining counters (“territories for peace”). It was the supposedly “far right” Menachem Begin, pressured by massive public demonstrations by a public calling for “peace now,” who engaged in the first wholesale retreat, as soon as the first peace partner announced himself. (Wisse correctly points out how empty the peace with Egypt would turn out to be and how obvious this should have been at the time.)

Wisse concludes that the West at its peril believes Israel—and Jews -- can conveniently be sacrificed: “far from choking on the Jewish bone, aggressors against a democratic system are more often invigorated by their anti-Semitism….Why stop at the Jews? Thugs who get away with harassing Jewish citizens go on to torch the rest of the citizenry.”

Fair enough. But Wisse never makes the point that the Jews of the world, so ready to criticize Israel, so eager to approve Israel’s self destructive spirit of accommodation (when the Arab/Islamic world has no intention of accommodating Israel), depend on Israel’s power for their own well-being. Nor does she talk of the counterproductive way Jews have used their own power in the United States when it comes to domestic issues as well as foreign policy—but that should be the subject of another book.

In sum, Jews and Power is not the last word, but a must-read introduction to a crucially important topic.

DINA SHALIT

Often, I have the privilege of showing this city, the largest Jewish community in Samaria, that I have watched grow out of barren hills, to Israeli and foreign visitors. With my husband and our three children, I made Aliyah from Canada directly to Ariel in early 1983. When Israelis talk of pioneering, they often use the phrase livnot u’l’hibanot, to build and to be built. For us, no description could be more apt.

Ariel’s roots go back to 1973, when Defense Minister Moshe Dayan called on the young people of Israel to become more involved in the defense and settlement of Eretz Yisrael. (As former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu often says, the two are intertwined, for the borders of Israel will only include the land where Jews live.) A group of young men, employees of the Israel Military Industries decided to answer Dayan’s challenge. They formed a “garin”, a core group of people who would become the first settlers in Ariel. The Yom Kippur War that broke out later that year caused the “garin” to disband temporarily. When it reformed, its members made a decision that turned out to be critical: they decided they would wait for government permission so that no one could ever say that Ariel was an illegal settlement.

In 1978, two tents were dropped by helicopter onto the rocky barren hilltop. Later 40 families, led by our present mayor, Ron Nachman, took up residence on this incredibly difficult terrain. When our family first came to Ariel five years later, there were still only 61 permanent homes, the first permanent Jewish homes to be built in Samaria in thousands of years: the rest was temporary housing. An elementary school had just been built and there was a grocery store. That’s it. I remember telling my children that living in the 400 square feet of our temporary quarters, together with all our furniture, would be a wonderful adventure.

It wasn’t really so wonderful. It was very hard that first year, but we were sustained by knowing we were establishing a Jewish presence in a vital strategic area and contributing to the security of the Jewish homeland. That’s a pretty big bonus.

Today, Ariel is home to over 18,000 residents, 25 pre-schools, 4 elementary schools, 3 junior high school and a comprehensive regional high school. We also house Israel’s newest university, until recently known as the College of Judea & Samaria, now upgraded to a university center that will carry our city’s name: Ariel University Center of Samaria. Ariel has several shopping areas, three supermarkets and an indoor mall. There are two industrial areas that abut our city limits, a large regional industrial park and a growing municipal industrial area, together employing some 7,000 people. We have a beautiful resort hotel, the only one in Samaria, a miniature golf course, a center for child development, a community center and municipal library, two centers for senior citizens and a day care senior center for those who need extra help. We have a sheltered workshop, a senior village and 14 synagogues.

In celebration of our 30th year, Ariel will soon open a new central park, a brand new Sports & Recreation complex, a one-of-a-kind-for-Israel Challenge Park for youth and hopefully, our currently under construction Center for the Performing Arts.

For me personally, our most important achievement was in doubling our population during the nineties. We welcomed and absorbed and found jobs for over 9,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union. We have just been included in the Ministry of Absorption’s Community Aliyah Project and are working with the Jewish Agency, Nefesh B’Nefesh and Tehilla to make Ariel an option for American immigrants.

Not surprisingly, Ariel has not wholly escaped Arab terror. There were three suicide bombings in 2002 at the outskirts of Ariel, in which three soldiers and two young civilians were killed. Perhaps even more traumatic were our losses in terrorist attacks that took place elsewhere. In March 2002, two new immigrants to Ariel, Vadim Balagula and Sergei Butrov were murdered in a terrorist sniper attack when they drove through an army checkpoint near Jerusalem. And in late November 2002, an Ariel family was in a hotel in Mombasa, preparing to take their three children on safari. For the boys, Noy and Dvir Anter, aged 12 and 13, this was to be a Bar-Mitzvah celebration. When a truck packed with explosives plowed into the thatched expanse that served as the hotel lobby Noy and Dvir were killed instantly. There is an annual memorial in the junior high school the Anter boys attended.

Although our mayor Ron Nachman initially opposed the entire concept of the security fence, once it was clear that Prime Minister Sharon was determined to proceed, Nachman fought to have Ariel on the inside (west of) the fence. Today the fence around Ariel is almost complete. Driving alongside it is heartbreaking, for though being inside the fence provides us with a greater sense of optimism that the government does not intend to abandon us, it is hard to look over the fence and see the rooftops of Tapuach, Har Bracha, Eli and Shilo – just to name a few communities – and know that their right to their homes, no less legitimate than ours, is being challenged by our own government.

We in Ariel have absorbed a portion of the residents who were expelled from Netzarim two years ago. We have watched their pain and their dignity in the face of the hateful “disengagement.” They are still traumatized by the treacherous act committed by Israel’s leadership. No Israeli community should have to face a threat of this kind again.

Dina Shalit is assistant to the mayor of Ariel.

ADRIAN MORGAN

High up on a hill in Wood Green, north London, is a Victorian brick building called Alexandra Palace. Surrounded by 196 acres of parkland, the edifice was constructed in 1873. In 1936, it was from Alexandra Palace that the BBC made its first television broadcasts. When I was growing up in 1960s Britain, the BBC was highly regarded. There was a time when people would validate a statement by claiming that they had heard it "on the BBC." Those days have long passed, and a once-revered institution is now being used to disseminate disinformation and political correctness.

Damien Thompson, a correspondent for The Daily Telegraph has noted that the BBC's "reporting of the Middle East has been so relentlessly pro-Palestinian for so long, and that coverage is so influential, that it finds itself an actual player in the conflict, as opposed to an impartial observer."

The Balen Report was an internal BBC document which was commissioned in 2004 to investigate complaints of anti-Israeli bias in the BBC's coverage of the Middle East conflicts. Even though the BBC is funded by the taxpayer, the organization allegedly spent $400,000 of tax-payers' money to prevent the report from being made available to the public. The Telegraph quoted lawyer Steven Sugar, who was using the Freedom of Information Act to have the Balen Report released. The report was widely believed to have found the BBC guilty of anti-Israeli bias.

Sugar said: "This is a serious report about a serious issue and has been compiled with public money. I lodged the request because I was concerned that the BBC's reporting of the second intifada was seriously unbalanced against Israel, but I think there are other issues at stake now in the light of the BBC's reaction." On April 27, 2007 the BBC won its battle to suppress the report's publication. The decision to suppress the Balen Report was condemned by Tory MP Philip Davies, who said: "This seems to be outrageous. If the BBC are embarrassed about what they are doing they should not be doing it. If they are not embarrassed they should release the information."

The BBC runs a "rolling news" channel, called News 24. One of its frequent guests and commentators on Middle East events is Palestinian-born Abdel Bari-Atwan, editor of the London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper. In June 2007, Bari-Atwan told a Lebanese TV station: "If the Iranian missiles strike Israel, by Allah, I will go to Trafalgar Square and dance with delight... Allah willing, [Iran] will attack Israel." Defending its decision to keep Bari-Atwan as a pundit, the BBC said that it was obliged to present "a range of views so that no significant strand of thought is knowingly unreflected or under-represented."

In 2002 the then-head of BBC News, RIchard Sambrook, warned his journalists that they needed to be more concerned about "impartiality" on contentious issues such as the Middle East, the European Union and the gap between those living in the countryside and those in towns. Sambrook would later commission the Balen Report. His warnings were not heeded. In January 2005 an independent review commissioned by BBC governors found that reporting on the European Union was riddled with ignorance. Presenters were described as "ill-briefed" and there was lack of knowledge about the EU "at every stage" of the news gathering and presenting process. The report claimed that BBC reporting of this subject needed to be "more demonstrably impartial," but stopped short of stating that the BBC was "pro-EU."

In 2005, the BBC advised journalists to be cautious in the use of the word "terrorist," as the term was deemed to be "judgmental." In October 2006, a senior executive at the BBC, Richard Klein, admitted at a conference that the corporation was "ignoring" mainstream opinion and was out of touch with the British public. A month earlier the BBC held an "impartiality" summit. Alan Yentob, head of BBC Drama, admitted that he would not air a Koran being thrown in a garbage can, lest the act offended Muslims, but he would allow a Bible to be shown being thrown in a bin. The impartiality summit found that there was an anti-Christian bias within the corporation, as well as an anti-American bias. At the same conference Jeff Randall, a former business editor at the BBC, gave damning testimony. He said that he had complained about the "multicultural stance" of the BBC to a top news executive and was told: "The BBC is not neutral in multiculturalism: it believes in it and it promotes it." When Randall wore cufflinks into work, which bore the Union Jack (the national flag) he was told: "You can't do that, that's like the National Front!" The National Front is a racist political group. To Americans, the notion of being accused of racism for wearing an item carrying the Stars and Stripes would be unthinkable, but not so in the Britain of the BBC.

The issue of the BBC's left-wing bias was brought to a head earlier this year. In June a BBC-commissioned report authored by John Bridcut From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel was published, which stated that the corporation was existing in a "left-leaning comfort zone." and that it had an "innate liberal bias."

In July 2005, after the 7/7 Muslim bombings in London, which killed 52 innocent people, the BBC had a discussion show entitled "Questions of Security: A BBC News Special." The corporation admitted that it had deliberately stacked the audience with Muslims. As a proportion of the audience, there were five times as many Muslims as the proportion of Muslims in the national demographic.

The PC and leftist bias has extended to the BBC Drama Department. The popular drama "Spooks" is known in the U.S. as "MI-5" and is entertaining hokum. In November 2006, the BBC was facing complaints of anti-Christian bias, after an episode of this show featured religious terrorists murdering people from another faith. The terrorists were evangelical Christians, and the victims were Muslims. Another episode involved Al Qaeda terrorists taking control of the Saudi Embassy and murdering people inside. Except the Al Qaeda terrorists were not Muslim terrorists—they were dastardly Israeli agents, posing as Muslims.

"Casualty" is a long-running hospital drama, where patients get injured, brought into an Emergency Room, and then all their emotional problems are solved by the improbably intrusive staff. Recently, the show was to have featured the aftermath of a suicide-bomber blowing himself up in a bus station, with all the consequent mayhem and social hand-wringing amongst the caring, sensitive hospital staff. The suicide bomber was originally written as an Islamist. By the time BBC executives had got their hands on the script, the bomber had changed his allegiance to become an animal rights activist.

Lord Tebbitt, who served in Thatcher's government and whose wife was paralyzed in an IRA bomb attack in 1984, condemned the decision to change the Casualty storyline to avoid offending Muslims. He said: "People were perfectly free during the violence in Northern Ireland to produce dramas about terrorism for which presumably they might have been accused of stereotyping IRA terrorists or even suggesting that all Catholics were terrorists. What is the difference here? The BBC exists in a world of New Labour political correctness."

The BBC produces international radio shows on its "World Service," in the manner of "Voice of America." These are produced at Bush House near Piccadilly. The reports from the BBC World Service used to be influential—so much so that in 1978 Bulgarian dissident and World Service broadcaster Georgi Markov was assassinated by a Bulgarian communist in the street outside Bush House. Now, the BBC World Service has succumbed to the leftist climate. Professor Frank Stewart has claimed that the BBC's Arabic language service, which began in 1938, was "anti-Western and anti-democratic." Stewart claimed that the Arabic BBC service spoke of Saddam's 2002 election victory as if it was "straight" news, and said that Assad of Syria also received favorable coverage. When a member of the U.S. State Department referred to Assad's Ba'athist regime as a dictatorship, the interviewer "immediately interrupted and reprimanded him." Stewart wrote that "authoritarian regimes and armed militants of the Arab world" had received "sympathetic treatment."

The bias which exists on the BBC has been so frequent that blog sites have been created to document its transgressions, such as Busting BBC Bias and Biased BBC.

What was once a great British institution is now a club for the commissars of political correctness. Alexandra Palace, where BBC TV began, is no longer used by the BBC. In a symptom of the times we live in, Alexandra Palace still has a purpose. In 2006, while London marked the first anniversary of 7/7, Islamists from the Muslim Brotherhood held an "Islam Expo" at the site. Last month, the terror supporting Hizb ut-Tahrir held its annual conference at Alexandra Palace.

Adrian Morgan is a British based writer and artist. This is an abbreviated version of an article that appeared on Sept 25 in familysecuritymatters.org

RUTH KING

When Golda Meir was told that Israel could afford to take risks because its survival was guaranteed by America, she is reputed to have retorted: “By the time you get here we won’t be here.”

Meir’s pragmatism has eluded a succession of Israeli leaders who have acceded to imposed cease-fires, territorial withdrawals, release of terrorists, restraint in the face of naked aggression, all under the spell of nebulous and illusory promises of support and the chimera of “a special relationship” with the United States.

Only yesterday (as of this writing) Israel’s Tzipi Livni burbled that Israel has the “firm backing” of the United States, apparently clueless how often the United States has firmly turned its back on Israel.

Meir was particularly scalded by so called “guarantees.” As Foreign Minister in 1956, she negotiated the terms for Israel’s total withdrawal after the combined forces of Israel, France and England invaded the Sinai, responding to Nasser’s blockading the Suez Canal and closing the Straits of Tiran. The guarantees she secured were joint pledges by the United Nations and the United States to support Israel’s unrestricted access to the Straits of Tiran and to install a UN peacekeeping force (UNEF) in the Sinai. In 1967, in violation of these signed guarantees, Egypt again blockaded the Straits, dismissed the United Nations forces and transferred close to 100,000 troops of her own troops to the Sinai. The United States agreed that this constituted an act of war but asked for Israeli “restraint.”

Then Foreign Minister Abba Eban urgently reminded President Johnson of the U.S. guarantees. He was categorically rebuffed by Robert McNamara, by Secretary of State Dean Rusk and by President Johnson himself. Fortunately, Israel acted in her own defense. However, few remember that following Israel’s breathtaking victory in the Six Day War, the United States enforced an arms embargo for 130 days.

In 1973 Golda Meir trusted the pledges of support by Richard Nixon (the first President to visit Israel) and was stung by America’s failure to share intelligence “chatter” which indicated a forthcoming surprise attack by the combined forces of Egypt and Syria. When the Israeli government, very late, woke up to the imminent attack, the U.S. warned Israel not to mobilize or preempt. This clearly contributed to Israel’s serious initial setbacks. Furthermore, in spite of Israel’s desperate and repeated pleas, there was a six day delay in the airlift of critical supplies from the United States. Henry Kissinger and Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger subsequently pointed fingers at one another for the delay. It was Nixon who finally ordered the airlift to begin immediately but by that time almost 2000 Israelis had died.

Egypt’s prestige was greatly enhanced by its attack and oiled by a concomitant OPEC embargo. In spite of a brilliant come-from-behind victory, in 1974, Israel was pummeled by then Secretary of State Kissinger’s hard fisted demands that Israel accept a final cease fire on Egypt’s terms or face a “reassessment” of the “special relationship.”

Under Carter, the euphoria of the peace treaty with Egypt clouded the fact that Carter used “the special relationship” to clobber Menachem Begin into conceding to every single one of Sadat’s demands at Camp David.

The “special relationship” was again put to the test in 1981 when a UN resolution harshly rebuked Israel for the destruction of Iraq’s nuclear reactor. The Reagan administration, in the person of U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick voted in favor of the resolution. Kirkpatrick said that Israel had “shocked” the US administration by bombing while the possibility for peaceful approaches remained.

A decade later, during the first Persian Gulf War, Israel pledged that if attacked she would retaliate. Iraq bombed Israel, a non-combatant, with 39 scud missiles which caused extensive damage in Haifa and Tel Aviv; 74 people died, most from heart attacks, some from suffocation in gas masks, several in direct hits. But the Bush administration sternly warned Israel to remain out of the conflict in order not to disrupt America’s other “special relationships”, those with the Arab states.

Perhaps influenced by his anti-Israel Secretary of State James Baker, Bush rewarded Israeli restraint by demanding participation in a Madrid conference. In the October 1981 letter to the Palestinian Arabs calling for participation, the US stated:

“We [the US government] do not recognize Israel’s annexation of east Jerusalem or the extension of its municipal boundaries and we encourage all sides to avoid unilateral acts that would exacerbate local tensions or make negotiations more difficult or preempt their final outcome. … In this regard, the US has opposed and will continue to oppose activity in the territories occupied in 1967, which remains an obstacle for peace.

To add injury to insult, the letter to Israel was almost identical (apart from a soothing mention of “warm friendship, shared destiny and values”). It is to be noted that the words “strategic partnership” gradually faded from American canned speeches.

The rest is bitter history. Bill Clinton, who as a candidate upbraided Bush for endangering Israel, shepherded along Oslo, the greatest catastrophe of all, on behalf of his “super special relationship” with Yasser Arafat.

After 9/11 there should have been a renewed mandate for strategic cooperation between Israel and the United States, but President Bush, whose stirring post 9/11 speeches vowed to hunt down terrorists and the nations who harbor them, flogs his so called “road map” which rewards terrorists and promises them sovereignty over Israel’s heartland.

Don’t get me wrong. The United States has been generous with both military and foreign aid. Israel, for its part has been (by far) America’s most dependable ally in the region. Israel and America have the same enemies, but America, for reasons of a misguided “realpolitik” or energy needs or foolish utopianism or ignorance of jihad, gratifies the enemy at Israel’s expense. Compounding this failed policy, these gratuitous gifts to the Arabs (who have never honored an agreement with Israel and rarely with each other) are given with the perfunctory invocation of a “special relationship” -- with Israel.

And Israel’s governing auctioneers, selling the illusions of American “guarantees,” continue to offer up their future and security to the lowest bidders.