David's Israel Blog

2003-07-23T02:28:00.000-07:00

Outrageous Equivalence

In Little Green Footballs, Charles Johnson notes:

Those wacky Palestinian Arabs are trying to turn the tables on Israel; since many sources have pointed out the bloodthirsty incitement to murder that pours out of official Palestinian media 24 hours a day, the PA has issued their own report on Israeli “incitement” ...

It's bad enough that the PA is making this effort, but in the LA Times its reporter treats the "incitement" on both sides equally:

The U.S.-backed peace plan requires both Israelis and Palestinians to immediately stop inciting violence, and Israel has been particularly adamant that Palestinians must get rid of the fiery rhetoric that has characterized the 33-month-old intifada, or uprising.

"Something has to be done," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Jonathan Peled. "This is not a way to raise a generation to peace."

The government of Israel blames TV, radio, newspapers and textbooks for teaching Palestinian youths to hate the Jewish state.

For their part, Palestinians believe Israeli children are raised to stereotype Arabs, that Israelis learn young to write off all Palestinians as "terrorists" and deny their historical land claims.

To equate the two sides is reprehensible. I've been aware the nature of the PA's propaganda from some time. But when I saw a presentation by Itamar Marcus of Palestinian Media Watch last year, I understood that nature of the PA's program was really something unique.

I don't think that there's been such a sustained effort to demonize Jews in sixty years. The pervasiveness of the images of evil Israelis, of public calls to kill Jews and denying Israel's "historical land claims" is beyond belief. It's on radio, television, in the newspapers and the textbooks. If one Israel cabinet minister says something over the top, it in no way compares to the wall to wall incitement generated by the PA's propaganda machine.
The article gets worse:

But incitement is tricky to define, and the project of bleaching it out is somewhat ambiguous. Israel accuses the Palestinian media of worsening a seething political climate; Palestinians reply that their media reflect the world around them.

"If you call these facts, these pictures, incitement, then how should we show fact?" asked Samir Sharif, interim director of the state-run Palestinian Satellite Television. "Official television in any country is a mirror of general politics. If things are on fire, I cannot be calm."

"[T]ricky to define" what weasel words!!! If you show a fictional account of Israeli soldiers massacring a family and raping its daughter at a checkpoint or Mohammed Al-Dura inviting children to join him in paradise, that's not fact!

Charles Johnson has it right:

I don’t know; these examples don’t really seem comparable to “A million martyrs, marching to Jerusalem!” or “Death to the sons of monkeys and pigs!”

But maybe it’s just me.

Indeed.

2003-06-12T23:23:00.000-07:00

Fighting Hamas Damages the Peace Process

Ha'aretz seems to be doing its darndest to blame Sharon for the failure, so far, of the Road Map. Here's Amir Oren from "Analysis / Hamas crimes, Sharon sins, Bush mistakes"

Rantisi was incriminated in the attack on the Erez Junction army base, and would direct future attacks. But killing him would not have obstructed a single terrorist action, only punish him and send a signal to his colleagues.
Punishments and signals can be reasonable goals under certain circumstances, but they should not be confused with foiling an attack. The appropriate time for an all-out offensive or assassination of the entire Hamas leadership is after a major terrorist outrage, one of the dozens that are being planned - not before one.

The logic here is astounding. Rantisi was implicated in one terrorist attack and many others were being planned but it made no sense to try and kill him because no terrible outrage had happened yet! The reasoning is absurd if not outright immoral. Still at least Oren makes clear: Rantisi was targeted for a reason, something that isn't clear from Ze'ev Schiff's article "Focus / Americans fear Abu Mazen is further weakened." Schiff allows that the Israeli claimed that Rantisi was a "regular inciter of suicide bombings." But then he advances an American counterclaim that, if true, Rantisi should have been targeted before now. Oren, as noted above, claims that Rantisi was tied to the attack in Gaza on Sunday; was Schiff unaware of the connection? Or was he simply looking to criticize the PM? There is evidence, in the column, that Schiff was gunning for the Prime Minister when he asks in his own voice:

Does Tuesday's assassination attempt indicate his political weakness, or his attempt to prevent a cease-fire (hudna) between Abu Mazen and Hamas, and create a situation in which Abu Mazen is finally forced to use force against the Islamic organizations?

The logical conclusion is that Sharon decided to target Rantisi because he was an immediate threat and because PM Abbas said that he wouldn't take action against Hamas or other rejectionists but would only seek a ceasefire. Despite Oren's illogic and Schiff's imputed cynicism to Sharon, this is the simplest explanation for Sharon's actions. He is willing to make peace, but as much as possible he won't allow innocents to be sacrificed for the noble goal of peace.

And what about the American claim that Schiff mentions:

American sources believe Israel does not understand that after the Aqaba summit, new circumstances have been created. Sharon's Palestinian partner Abu Mazen is weak, and has now been weakened further.

Schiff seems to be saying that strengthening Abu Mazen/Abbas is more important than saving lives. This is wrong on its face but. worse than that, Abbas may not be as weak s he's led us to believe:

Israel Radio reported this afternoon that ISS ("Shabak") head Avi Dichter told the Cabinet today that the PA has 15,000 armed men posted in the Gaza Strip who are trained and ready for action, thus the claims that the PA needs time to build up a force before it acts are groundless. Dichter said that some of these armed PA forces are under Arafat's command while others are under Dahlan's command.

Despite the best efforts of Oren and Schiff, Sharon has done the right thing by targetting Hamas. Alas, their cynicism has a real effect. Here's an observation from the Washington Post:

Sharon professes no contradiction between the two prongs of his policy, even as this week's violence threatens to destroy the road map at its inception. He argues that by eradicating radical groups such as Hamas he is helping Abbas, a political moderate who otherwise would face constant opposition and undermining by extremists. But Abbas's fate is a secondary consideration. Sharon's supreme priority, throughout his 55-year career in the army and politics, has been to protect Israel from its enemies.

It's amazing that the idea that striking at an enemy of peace may actually enhance the prospects of peace is treated as if only Sharon could believe such a thing. (The alternative belief, that allowing your enemies to continue striking at you will bring peace, is absurd.) The cynicism, so apparent in the Israeli media is repeated in America.

2003-06-12T22:20:00.000-07:00

Three for the Road

There have been 3 recent articles that have illuminated the current direction the US is heading along its road map. The first of these is Jim Hoagland's "The Price for A Palestinian State." While Hoagland is a good deal more enthusiastic about a Palestinian state than I am he still writes:

Bush also attaches strong conditions to his championing of Palestinian national aspirations through a two-state solution. These include halting terrorism and demilitarization.

"I destroyed a terrorist state in Afghanistan, I destroyed a terrorist state in Iraq and I am not about to help create a terrorist state" on Israel's borders, the president is said to have told aides in discussions about security guarantees that Israel needs for peace.

So maybe the President is allowing the PA (and the Arab world in general) to get away with acting against the "road map") but there's also a cap on what he will allow in the end. This doesn't seem to bother Hoagland. He's not one of those people who believes that "any solution must pick up where Barak and Arafat left off in Camp David."

Hoagland is also cognizant of the fact that even if Israel has undergone a tremendous ideological transformation in the past 35 years, its neighbors have not:

But a paradox develops: At this highest crest of acceptance of a two-state solution since 1947 -- when Israel adopted the original U.N. partition but Arabs did not -- Arab leaders are increasingly edging away from openly recognizing Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state.

That retreat is largely disguised and conducted in diplomatic code. It nonetheless feeds separate tides of anti-Israeli resentment and anti-Semitic hatred of Jews that are rising and fusing in Europe, potentially in the United States and elsewhere. Such behavior does not summon peace to the Middle East.

Arab leaders who met with Bush in Egypt on Tuesday did so on the condition that Israel was excluded. Earlier, Palestinian negotiators told journalists they had turned down a proposed joint communique with the Israelis because of proposed language that could be interpreted as endorsing Israel's existence as a Jewish state.

Saul Singer has expressed similar ideas in his column "Sharon's not-so-secret plan." Singer writes:

IT IS FASHIONABLE on the Right to claim that the road map is worse than Oslo. What is meant by this is that, under the road map, the Palestinians get a state first, before they have to make peace with Israel. In this view, the road map is the latest, most serious step in Israel's serial capitulation to terrorism. "The only consistent element in the Israeli position has been the constant retreat from its stated positions on issues that are critical to the country's future. Evidently, terrorism works," writes reclusive Likud scion Binyamin Begin.

Begin is largely right. Terrorism is what brought Yasser Arafat to power and is bringing the Palestinians a state. But here's the secret. For Sharon, the road map's "independent Palestinian state with provisional borders" is not at the bottom of the slippery slope, but a brake that prevents precisely the slide that Begin fears.
The deal Sharon is offering the Palestinians is a partial state in exchange for a partial peace. You don't want to renounce the "right of return" and accept Israel as a Jewish state? Fine, says Sharon, but for that all you get is a truncated state whose borders are controlled by Israel.
Why would the Palestinians accept such a deal? Because they know that the only alternatives are the status quo, in which both sides bleed indefinitely, or making a full peace, neither of which they want.

He takes things a step further than Hoagland and considers that this provisional state may not be the brake that Sharon envisions. Still it's interesting that Singer implies that Bush doesn't want to see a terrorist state next to Israel. This is exactly what Hoagland quoted the President saying just that.

It's interesting that Singer portrays Sharon's views as being derived from Ben Gurion. Ari Shavit, in Ha'aretz portrays Sharon as "Kissinger's attentive protege." And guess what, Shavit has Sharon believing - as Singer does - that there can't be a final peace with the Palestinians, so Israel needs to make an interim agreement that holds."

According to Bin Nun's theory, Ehud Barak, Yossi Beilin, and Benjamin Netanayhu belonged to the school of political optimism in seeking an end to the conflict. Yitzhak Rabin, Ariel Sharon and perhaps even Shimon Peres belong to the school of practical pessimism that would be satisfied with stabilization and management of the conflict.
The father of the practical-pessimistic school in Israeli political thinking is actually an American named Henry Kissinger. Prof. Itamar
Rabinowitz, who was close to Rabin, says behind Rabin's peace strategy lay Kissinger's deterministic worldview.

I've heard this sort of breakdown before. I don't necessarily agree with the breakdown (Shimon Peres is no "practical pessimist;" he wrote a book called "The New Middle East!") but again, I think that Shavit is correct - following Singer and Hoagland - that this President and this PM are looking for only an interim agreement.

2003-06-04T00:40:00.000-07:00

Goodwill Gesture

Israel made another painful concession in return for some vague promises of peace. This concession was the release of a convicted mass murderer, one Ahmad Jubarah. Glenn Frankel of the Washington Post profiles him in an article, "Israel Frees Longest-Held Palestinian" You'd think that maybe the releases were only of political prisoners from the headline. Perhaps "Israel releases mass murderer as gesture for peace" would have been more appropriate, but that would have pointed to the absurdity of Israel's situation.

Anyway our protaganist, Mr. Jubara declares:

In an interview this evening, Jubarah said he hoped "to be the first ambassador for peace. We need a state beside Israel -- two states in Palestine."

Still, he said, he was unhappy that thousands of Palestinians remain in Israeli
prisons. As for his own act 28 years ago, he offered only a justification: "We
were in war and still we are in war." Referring to the Israelis, he said, "They
have killed many of us, in the intifada," the 32-month-old uprising in which
2,000 Palestinians and 780 Israelis have died.

I'm not sure I get that. He says he wants to be for peace but that the Arabs are at war. His son tries to straighten out the contradiction:

"My father, he's the road map, because he believes in peace," said Reda Jubarah. When his father emerged and spoke passionately about the need for more Israeli concessions, the son tugged gently on his father's sleeve, as if willing him to sound more moderate.

"The people at that time believed what he believed -- that it was war," said
Reda Jubarah. "Now we are new people; we're now in a different era. He did what
he did. We have to leave what happened a long time ago and begin a new life for
everybody."

So if the son is right, then his father was a fighter in the 70's but now there's no war. That doesn't work either, because his father says - even after Yasser Arafat purportedly disavowed the armed struggle ten years ago - at his people are at war.

If it weren't so perverse, it might be funny.

Crossposted on IsraPundit2 and David's Israel Blog.

2003-06-04T00:36:00.000-07:00

Powell's Foul

(Thanks to Malka Young for pointing this out)

In a transcript of a press conference carried on VOA makes a really offensive editorial comment:

"Contiguous means that if you're going to have a state, the people will recognize the state," he said. "And the Palestinians will say: this truly is a homeland for us. Then it has to have contiguity. It has to be connected. It has to have means of moving about within that state. So it can't be chopped up in so many ways, in some form of Bantustan, that it would not really be seen as an honest effort to provide a state for the Palestinian people."

By describing a divided Palestinian state as a "Bantustan" Secretary Powell skews the debate. It's not enough for Israel to trade land for peace. It must give the PA contiguity. But Israel gave up land at great risk and great cost for seven years. It was the PA that stopped the process by refusing Barak's offer and starting an intifada. If it happens again is Israel to be judged because the PA refused its generosity? Essentially, Powell is saying that Israel's legitimacy is dependent on fulfilling this condition; else it is morally equivalent to South Africa.

But if Secretary Powell wishes to throw around loaded terms when will he say something about the Nazi-like propaganda of the PA and the rest of the Arab world? Consider the effect of pervasis martyr training:

Palestinian polls show that 72% - 80% of Palestinian children desire death as Shahids. In games and in conversation, the yearning to die for Allah is an integral component of the Palestinian child’s worldview. Children are already acting on the indoctrination – a 17-year old girl has blown herself up in a terrorist attack in a Jerusalem supermarket. 14-year-old children have written “farewell letters” to their parents, incorporating expressions from PA propaganda film-clips. In the letters they took pride in their eagerness to die as Shahids and then set out on attacks in which they did, in fact, die. Following are some examples, listed by age groups.

In other words children are being taught at young ages that it is good to die killing Jews. Powell (and President Bush) should forcefully say that the United States will not stand for the creation of a state based on Nazi principles. He should not be prejudging Israel for something that may be (and has been) out of Israel's hands when he has an existing problem already.

Crossposted on IsraPundit2 and David's Israel Blog.

2003-06-03T11:02:00.000-07:00

Something for Nothing

David Ignatius's "A Roadmap for Syria Too" demonstrates much of what is wrong with analysis of the Middle East. He starts with:

When Secretary of State Colin Powell visited Damascus last month, sources here say, Syrian President Bashar Assad asked him a blunt question: "Where is our road map?"

That's a welcome sign, if Assad is indeed signaling that he wants to negotiate a settlement of the interlocking issues of Syria, Israel and Lebanon.

It means nothing. It is a sign that Assad wants America to pressure Israel over the Golan just like its pressuring Israel over Palestinian statehood. All Israeli "peace" negotiations with its neighbors amount to Israel making substantive sacrifices in exchange for some nice words.

The following is worse:

For the cautious Assad, just talking about a road map is a step in the right direction. Until now, his public comments have mostly been a reprise of the hard-line rhetoric of his father, the late President Hafez Assad. But he needs to embrace the full legacy of his father, who for all his tough talk came within inches of closing a peace deal with Israel in 2000, a few months before his death. Assad realizes that Syria needs change -- and that it needs the stability of a peace agreement to implement reforms.

On our recent trip to Israel I visited the Golan for the first time. Our tour guide said that the Golan amounts to 1/2 of 1% of Syrian territory. To claim that Syria would gain stability from acquiring the Golan is absurd. If it wants peace it can stop siccing Hizbullah on Israel.

And worse:

• Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights. This is the cornerstone of any deal with Syria, and successive Israeli prime ministers have privately signaled their willingness to cut such a deal. Hafez Assad expected to make precisely this agreement with President Clinton in Geneva in March 2000. But when Clinton offered less than the full restoration of the June 1967 prewar border, the prickly Syrian leader felt he had been misled and backed out.

U.S. and Syrian officials agree that the modifications the Israelis wanted in 2000 were trivial and not worth busting the accord. Haggling again would be a waste of time. If Israel wants a deal this time, it should withdraw to the 1967 border.

Here Ignatius is justifying Daddy Assad's obstructionism. If the few hundred yards were trivial then why didn't Assad agree? Israel should do nothing. How about this: require Syria to end its occupation of Lebanon and stop arming Hizbullah to show that it is serious about peace. Then it can work out a compromise with Israel on how much of the Golan it can get back. Let's not reward obstructionism.

Ignatius used to work for the WSJ; I don't know what's happened to him since he came to the Washington Post. He's become Thomas Friedman lite.

Crossposted at IsraPundit and David's Israel Blog

2003-06-02T10:56:00.000-07:00

What a difference 12 months make.

Last year President Bush put forward a principled (if imperfect) view of peace in the Middle East. Let's recall part of his famous June 24, 2002 speech:

I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror. I call upon them to build a practicing democracy, based on tolerance and liberty. If the Palestinian people actively pursue these goals, America and the world will actively support their efforts. If the Palestinian people meet these goals, they will be able to reach agreement with Israel and Egypt and Jordan on security and other arrangements for independence.

And when the Palestinian people have new leaders, new institutions and new security arrangements with their neighbors, the United States of America will support the creation of a Palestinian state whose borders and certain aspects of its sovereignty will be provisional until resolved as part of a final settlement in the Middle East.

In the work ahead, we all have responsibilities. The Palestinian people are gifted and capable, and I am confident they can achieve a new birth for their nation. A Palestinian state will never be created by terror -- it will be built through reform. And reform must be more than cosmetic change, or veiled attempt to preserve the status quo. True reform will require entirely new political and economic institutions, based on democracy, market economics and action against terrorism.

Two days later, a reporter asked a question if the president would take up arms against Yasser Arafat. The President diplomatically sidestepped the question. Still the impression at that time was that Arafat was hopelessly compromised by terror and was no longer a credible negotiating partner for Israel. In case these instances were not enough there's David Frum's account:

Bush began to speak more frequently with Ariel Sharon — but he absolutely refused to see or even speak on the telephone with Arafat. Bush's disdain so maddened the Palestinian leader that Arafat actually tried to shove himself into the president's presence at the United Nations meeting in November and had to be physically blocked by the Secret Service. August's "state first, peace later" policy was definitively repudiated. By November, when Powell at last delivered his big Middle East speech, all the deadlines and time lines and talk of international protection for Arafat had been deleted.

Then Arafat made what may someday be reckoned as the most fateful miscalculation of his career. On January 5, 2002, Israeli naval forces intercepted a Gaza-bound merchant ship loaded with fifty tonnes of arms from Iran. Arafat hastily sent Bush a letter denying any involvement in the shipment. Probably Arafat did not even intend his denial to be interpreted literally; he may have written it as a social form, like the phrase I regret in a letter declining an invitation to a wedding or a dinner party. If so, Arafat sorely misunderstood his man. Bush does not lie to you. You had better not lie to him.

So why now do we read in the New York Times "Spotlight Leaves Arafat, but He's Still in the Show":

The international spotlight that Mr. Arafat so relishes has been dimmed by an Israeli boycott and a not-so-veiled warning that he might not be allowed back from any trip abroad. But Palestinian officials and analysts insist that he will still be the most influential Palestinian figure in renewed peace negotiations, even if he is working behind the scenes.

"No Palestinian would dare sit with the Israelis or the Americans without his approval," Mr. Aburdeineh said of Mr. Arafat. "Nobody here can even go see his wife without the green light from him."

While Mr. Arafat retains considerable influence, the dynamics of the Middle East conflict have been changing in the month since Mr. Abbas assumed office.

I thought with the victory of George W. Bush we had reached the end of the recurring rewards for the PA despite their blatant disregards for any American standards. The only positive spin I can put on the President's ignoring Arafat's continued influence - and there was a new terror boat that Israel just intercepted - is that he feels he must prop up Abbas. But that's a weak justification. If President Bush doesn't hold true to his principles he risks completely undermining his war on terror.

Crossposted on IsraPundit and David's Israel Blog.

2003-05-30T11:06:00.000-07:00

Is Bush betraying Israel?

Read Caroline Glick's essay, "Washington's Betrayal" and you will have little doubt that the answer to that question is in the affirmative. Not nearly as bleak, but still disappointing (in its assessment of the President) is Charles Krauthammer's "No Phony 'Cease-Fires' With Terrorism." Krauthammer allows that the president can still extricate himself. I don't believe President Bush to be as frivolous as his predecessor. Still, it's disturbing that he's had nothing to say as the PA flouts his basic premises.

The problem of course is that President Bush has made a Palestinian state the centerpiece of his Middle East policy. Thus all actions must be evaluated by how they work toward that end. Peace should have been the centerpiece, with statehood for the Palestinians the reward for peace. (Not that I think that Palestinian statehood is in any way a good thing. But I'm arguing from Bush's perspective.

Oh and in case anyone tells you that Peace Now is pro-Israel. Tell them that they are lying.

Cross posted on Israpundit and David's Israel Blog.

2003-05-26T08:36:00.000-07:00

Wishful thinking Times?

According to the New York Times:

Mr. Sharon has told the Bush administration that he cannot take several of the steps the Americans want, particularly on endorsing the plan, without provoking a cabinet crisis. Many cabinet members are conservative opponents of anything that would create a Palestinian state.

A diplomat knowledgeable about the negotiations said some in the Bush administration think that it would be better for Mr. Sharon's cabinet to break apart so that he could then form a unity government with the Labor Party.

Of course the Times doesn't report if those hoping for a national unity government are senior officials or simply State Department professionals who consider the road map to be progress. However the Washington Post gave a slightly different view of things...

In an effort to avoid a deadlock in the Middle East peace process, the Bush administration has acceded to Israel's demands that a U.S.-backed peace plan be subjected to significant revisions as it is implemented, a move that quickly brought a public acceptance of the plan's broad outlines by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

In winning Sharon's support, the administration relented on its insistence of no changes in the peace plan, known as the "road map." The White House issued a statement today by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice saying the United States recognizes Israel's concerns and will seek to address them.

"The roadmap was presented to the Government of Israel with a request from the President that it respond with contributions to this document to advance true peace," Powell and Rice said. "The United States Government received a response from the Government of Israel, explaining its significant concerns about the roadmap.

Whereas the NY Times has it that the administration - or unnamed officials - wish to see a more pliant Israeli government; the Washington Post reports that the admistration is willing to consider the Sharon government's objections in order to keep the road map. I realize that these two views are not necessarily incompatible. But the emphasis of the Times article is telling.

Maybe I'm not being generous to the Times, accounts of the cabinet decision have Sharon saying that it was necessary to accept the road map in order to avoid friction with Washington.
Cross posted on the IsraPundit and David's Israel Blog

2003-05-20T03:06:00.000-07:00

3 Times bias = bias

The recently discovery of Jayson Blair's deception has been cause of much discussion in the media. Part of the problem with the media (specifically the New York Times) is not the outright deception, but the articles which contain no overt falsehoods but are dishonest when taken as a whole.

To be sure there are many details in each story. Part of reporting is understanding what's important and what isn't. Making that choice does tell something about the reporter (and his/her editor.)

I know that news organizations defend themselves against charges of bias by saying that pro-Israel advocates don't want to face the truth. It's more accurate to say that we don't agree with the truths that the media selectively presents.

Take for example Sunday's article about a new Hezbollah created video game.

In an article that seems more a video game review than an investigation of Islamic extremism, Daniel J.Wakin reported "Video Game Mounts Simulated Attacks Against Israeli Targets."
It seems that the most popular video game in parts of Lebanon is one that allows the player to simulate destroying Israeli soldiers or simply popping PM Ariel Sharon in the head for the heck of it.

While not the first politically oriented video game to enter Middle Eastern cyberspace, "Special Force" is a sign of Hezbollah's elaborate propaganda efforts. Its popularity is also an indication of Hezbollah'ssuccess in permeating popular consciousness in Lebanon and in gaining political legitimacy here.

Washington has implicated Hezbollah in terrorist attacks in the 1980's and says it remains a terrorist force with worldwide operations. With the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, the United States hasrenewed pressure on Lebanon and one of Hezbollah's sponsors, Syria, to disarm the group and halt its activities.

Hezbollah says it is focusing on resisting the Israeli occupation of a disputed patch of land on Israel's northern border and on providing moral support to the Palestinian struggle in the West Bank and Gaza.

Its relentless attacks helped drive out Israeli forces from southern Lebanon in 2000, ending a 22-year occupation. That has given Hezbollah a certain stature here and elsewhere in the Arab world.

Hezbollah has capitalized on that stature, entrenching itself in Lebanese society with the patronage of Syria, the power broker here, and with Iranian financing and arms, United States and Israeli officials say.

Take, for example, the above five paragraphs.

A few things are presented as unqualified facts. Hezbollahs' "relentless attacks" forced Israel from southern Lebanon. That success translated into "stature."

What's presented as opinion? That Hezbollah has been "implicated" in terrorism by the United States. Adding a degree of remoteness to Hezbollah's terror Wakin only mentions Hezbollah terrorism from the "1980's." What about the three soldiers who were kidnapped and apparently murdered in October 2000? What about Elchanan Tenenboim who was kidnapped by Hezbollah later? Hezbollah isn't simply "implicated" in terror, its involved in it up to its members' eyeballs.

Another thing: Why is Israel's presence in Lebanon described as an occupation but Syria - which has occupied Lebanon longer and more brutally than Israel - is simply described as a "power broker" not an occupier in Lebanon?

Finally Wakin cites Hezbollah claim that "... it is focusing on resisting the Israeli occupation of a disputed patch of land on Israel's northern border ..." without comment. Until three years ago, no one claimed that Shebaa Farms was part of Lebanon, it was always considered part of Syria. Once Israel withdrew from Lebanon and the Security Council certified that Israel has totally withdrawn from Lebanon, Syria "ceded" Shebaa Farms to Lebanon in order to allow Hezbollah's grievance to persist. The reporter had a responsibility to point out that the "patch of land" was not considered part of Lebanon. Instead he chose to promote Hezbollah's view without challenge.

Mr. Zain said the video game also served as a counterweight to other games on the international market that depicted Arabs as terrorists instead of as freedom fighters with legitimate grievances. He said "Special Force" was less bloody than many other games.

"We want others to know our land is occupied, our people are imprisoned in Israeli jails, our houses are being demolished," he said.

The border area controlled by Hezbollah is quiet for now, he said. "But we do not want the resistance concept to vanish," he said. "We want this idea to live among the Arab people, the Islamic people."

Now we get the scoop on this game from one of its developers. Apparently Mr. Zain is most concerned about PR. He wants Hezbollah to be viewed as "freedom fighters with legitimate grievances." Where's the NY Times telling us uncomfortable truths that Hezbollah is still a terrorist organization?

I remember an episode of "Get Smart" where the bad guys, KAOS, issue an ultimatum via a commercial, complete with a jingle and a disclaimer that KAOS is a Delaware corporation. It was very funny having a criminal organization passing itself of as a commercial enterprise. At least it's funny in fiction. It's not funny in real life, but that's exactly what the NY Times is doing here: portraying a terrorist organization as a video game manufacturer with a message.

By coverning for Hezbollah the New York Times squanders its role as an uncoverer of the world's ills and instead becomes an advertiser for a terrorist group.

The hottest video game for the teenagers of Beirut's southern Shiite neighborhoods is "Special Force," a creation of Hezbollah, the strongly anti-Israel militant organization that is on the United States' terror list.

Of course I have no reason to be offended by the Times's reporting. Hezbollah isn't a terrorist organization; it's a "militant" organization.

What I'm complaining about is not uncommon at the NY Times. Last week, when reporting on the British suicide bombers, the Times used a tone in describing the terrroists that suggested that they were little more than mischievous boys stealing hubcaps off of cars. Little Green Footballs critiqued the Times very well last week.

I realize that this doesn't have much to do with video games, but again it speaks volumes about the bias at the Times when dealing with the Middle East. Overall, James Bennet gave a reasonably good survey of Rabbi Elon's plan in "The Exit That Isn't on Bush's 'Road Map'" Still the following 4 paragraphs really bother me:

Mr. Elon has formed ties to other Christian leaders, including Pat Robertson. In October, he addressed the annual convention of the Christian Coalition. According to The Forward, a weekly focused on American Jewish life, he was cheered by thousands of evangelical Christians waving Israeli flags when he called for the "relocation" of Palestinians to Jordan. Mr. Elon says he envisions a voluntary transfer.

For Palestinians, Mr. Elon's message amounts to incitement. "Imagine a country that said, `These Jews aren't really happy here, and we're going to give them rights in another country,' " said Michael Tarazi, a legal adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organization. "The entire world would rightfully see that as anti-Semitic. And there would be, correctly, public outcry."

In 1989, in his autobiography, "Warrior," Mr. Sharon argued that Jordan was the Palestinian state. He said then that Palestinians in the West Bank should be granted political rights in Jordan, while living under Israeli security control among Israeli Jews.

Mr. Elon adds that Israel should deport "terrorists and their direct supporters" and dismantle refugee camps, settling refugees abroad in Arab nations. Palestinians call this forced transfer, or ethnic cleansing. Mr. Elon calls it "the completion of the exchange of
populations that began in 1948."

Bennet is perfectly willing to use the loaded term "ethnic cleansing" that Tarazi, Arafat's American born mouthpiece, to define Elon's plan. All he offers in Elon's defense is a single fragment talking of the "exchange of populations." There's a strong historical precedent for population exchanges after wars. But more importantly, Elon is referring to the expulsion of nearly the same number of Jews from Arab countries as Arabs who fled "Palestine" in 1948. The main difference being that the Jews who left were not leaving in fear from a theater of war, but were forced from their homes. These Jews of course were absorbed by Israel. Their Arab counterparts were allowed to languish in order to preserve a culture of grievance and hate against Israel. It's a significant point that Elon was making here, and it deserved further exposition. Bennet might also have noted that the situation Tarazi described is what happened to the Jews 55 years ago. How ironic.

One last exapmple the Times's bias (for now.) Bennet's choice of words in "Israel Pulls Back From Peace Plan After 4 Attacks" leaves something to be desired:

After convening his cabinet tonight, Mr. Sharon issued an implicit repudiation of a new international peace plan, which calls for simultaneous concessions by both sides and rapid political progress to achieve peace and a Palestinian state in just three years.

Which side is repudiating the road map? The side that refuses to fight terror or the side that responds. Worse he refers to the Palestinian Arab obligation to fight the terror against Israel as a "concession." It is and has been an obligation of the PA to do so since 1993. Even if you argue that Oslo Accords are now a dead letter, launching attacks - or allowing them - against your opponents makes one the aggressor. Israel is the aggrieved party here and to suggest that its response is somehow hurting the chances for peace is unoforgiveably obtuse.

Cross posted on David's Israel Blog and Israpundit

2003-05-13T10:47:00.000-07:00

Terrorists from Arafat's compound murdered Israeli

Was it earlier this week or last week that it was reported that the terrorists who were expelled from Bethlehem last year after taking the Church of the Nativity hostage, were asking to return to their homes? Regardless, no doubt international pressure will increase that Israel should allow those thugs to return. But we're not talking about worthy boy scouts here. We're talking about the sort of person who's holed up with Arafat in his compound. As the Jerusalem Post reports:

A terror cell left Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's Mukata compound in Ramallah on Remembrance Day Eve, murdered Gideon Lichterman, 27, of Ahiya, near Shvut Rahel, then returned to the compound, security officials said on Monday.

Officials believe the terrorists, who may be members of the Palestinian Authority's security forces, received their orders from inside the Mukata.

"The terrorists responsible for Lichterman's murder left the Mukata to perpetrate the attack and then returned to the compound. The same cell also shot at a vehicle on the Aboud bypass road last Thursday night, but no one was wounded. We cannot rule out, but have yet to ascertain, that the same cell also murdered Zion David [north of Ofra] on Sunday morning," an IDF officer said.

Gee, do you think the NY Times or Washington Post will report this? Or will they keep claiming that Israel's holding up the Road Map because its stalling for time? I can answer that. Nope. Neither the NY Times nor the Washington Post published this damning charge.

Each of those papers had other items of note. From the Washington Post ("Sharon's Refusal To Accept Plan Vexes Powell Trip "):

Further complicating the picture during Powell's visit for talks with Israeli and Palestinian leaders, the Israeli military imposed the tightest crackdown on travel between Israel and the Gaza Strip since the current Palestinian uprising began in September 2000, closing Gaza's borders to everyone except diplomats and aid workers. Maher indicated the tightened closure undercut earlier gestures announced by Israel to ease Palestinian suffering that Powell had hailed as "very promising."

At the same time -- and adding to the impression that Powell's tour has not eased tensions -- three Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip, including a farm worker who Palestinian news reports said was tilling a field near an army observation post in Khan Yunis in southern Gaza.

Israel's position on the peace plan, known as the "road map," has stirred anger in the Arab world and has become a major point of contention during Powell's tour of the region. Palestinian officials have accepted the road map, and they complained that Israel's crackdown in Gaza, which also barred journalists, belied the symbolism of any of the gestures announced earlier.

In three of the first 4 paragraphs, the Washington Post puts the full onus of the lack of progress on Israel. It even mentions the killing of a "farm worker" according "Palestinian news reports". If the reporters had read Ha'aretz, they'd know that Minister of Defense Mofaz made that charge. It would also support Israel's hestitation over making any further concessions. Alas the only way reporters know how to present the Middle East is whether or not there's been talks. Actions - particularly Arab actions against Israel - get ignored.

The New York Times, surprsingly, does a little better.

In the Gaza violence, the Israeli Army said troops had found two tunnels used by weapons smugglers in the town of Rafah, on the border with Egypt. Soldiers in the area spotted two Palestinians trying to plant a an explosive device and shot them, the army said. Palestinians said both were killed.

Israeli troops also shot a Palestinian farmer dead in his fields outside the nearby town of Khan Yunis, according to the Palestinians. The army said it was checking the report.

noting that Israel found weapon smuggling tunnels. Still the Times mentions the dead farmer quoting unidentified "Palestinians," but no mentions of Mofaz's charge.
Cross-posted on IsraPundit and David's Israel Blog.

2003-05-09T01:28:00.000-07:00

Denying history

I call your attention Ethan Bronner's review of a book 'Shattered Dreams' from Sunday's New York Times Book Section. Bronner starts off with an excellent observation:

I once asked King Hussein of Jordan whether he considered Zionism legitimate. Did he accept that there was any historical basis to the Jews' claim to a portion of Palestine as their homeland? He looked at me as if I were from Mars and ducked the question. Later he told a Jordanian colleague that only a Jew could have posed such a strange question. Perhaps by the time of his death in 1999 he had softened his view. But his reaction still exemplifies that of the vast majority of Arabs today.

Unfortunately, it's all downhill from there. Next he writes:

Ask most Israelis about Palestinian nationalism or the centrality of Jerusalem to Palestinian history and you will get a dismissive wave of the hand and a lecture asserting that there was no Palestinian identity until the Arabs invented it as a weapon to wield against Israel.

That's right, the denial of Jewish history is equated with denying the "centrality of Jerusalem to Palestinian history." Bonner acknowledges later that "Palestinians refuse to accept that the spot ever contained the temples, despite near unanimity on the point among archaeologists and historians." But as Daniel Pipes has shown (on more than one occasion) there is no Muslim claim to Jerusalem.
There's another line where Bronner seems to acknowledge the lack of symmetry between the two sides:

Until the two sides teach their children what it means to have stood in the shoes of their adversaries -- something the Israelis began doing but stopped, and something the Palestinians have never done -- the chance of real peace remains slim.

Unfortunately Bronner handles this on the sly. Why did Israelis stop trying to understand their enemy? Is it because they were rewarded for making efforts at coming to terms with the Palestinian with the brutal violence of the "Aqsa" intifada? Of course Bronner wants to explain that away too.

The accepted story in the United States is that after several years of halting negotiations, at Camp David the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Yasir Arafat some 90 percent of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and a reasonable deal on Jerusalem. Arafat balked, made no counteroffer and two months later gave his real response, the violent uprising, complete with suicide bombings.

Again, so far so good, but then ...

Enderlin's story makes clear that there is truth to this version but, by itself, it will not do. Unless you understand the way Barak ignored the Palestinians in 1999 in a failed effort to cut a deal with the Syrians first; unless you see the accelerated level of Jewish settlement building; unless you grasp the dynamic by which the Israeli right interrupted the peace process, forcing Barak to pull back, you will not have a complete picture. In this book, we learn what was offered at Camp David -- 76 percent of the West Bank -- and how it grew to 92 percent the following January before talks broke down. Errors, misjudgments, false moves and internal tensions -- Israeli, Palestinian and American -- are all part of the sad story.

One example concerns the visit of Ariel Sharon, then the leader of the opposition, to the holiest Muslim site in Jerusalem, followed by the uprising. Israelis have long argued that the visit was an excuse for an already planned uprising. The Palestinians have said the violence was spontaneous. Enderlin shows that it was the poor judgment of an Israeli deputy police commander -- based on faulty intelligence -- that set off the worst of the violence, which was then taken over by Palestinian leaders seeking to make their mark.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. As Joseph pointed out earlier this week, there's a movement afoot to absolve Arafat from blame for the intifada. Read for example Amb. Yehuda Lancry's letter from October 2, 2000. He noted that the violence started on September 13. Take a contemporaneous account from Ha'aretz on September 18, 2000 that Arafat had released every single Hamas and PIJ leader from jail and you realize that the violence occurred because the ringleaders were released from prison and allowed to operate freely by the PA.
Clearly Bronner has to toe the company line at the NY Times and can't admit that Arafat never wanted peace. Like Friedman and many others in the media (and the diplomatic corps) there's no crime committed by the PA that is so large that it can't be explained away.

Bronner ends by writing:

But in the end, this book suggests, until there is a mutual acceptance of competing historic and religious claims, a lasting solution will not emerge.

That indeed is the problem. What Bronner won't allow himself to say is that Palestinian nationalism is built upon the denial of Zionism and that until that changes there will be no peace. It's not a balanced issue here. There is a good side and a bad side. Trying to blame both sides is not the sign of even handedness but the sign moral blindness.

Cross posted to IsraPundit and David's Israel Blog.

2003-05-09T01:14:00.000-07:00

Fisking Dennis Ross

Dennis Ross has retired from peacemaking and landed with Robert Satloff's Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Given the sloppiness of Ross's work, I wonder how he got such a prestigious position. No mind. Let's critique his work.

In the last week the prospects for peace between Israelis and Palestinians appeared to be improving. The Palestinians approved Mahmoud Abbas as their first-ever prime minister, and he declared that terrorism threatened to destroy the Palestinian cause — language one never heard from Yasir Arafat. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel reiterated his understanding that it would take painful concessions by Israel to achieve peace, including a willingness to part with areas central to Jewish history like Bethlehem, Shilo and Beit El. And Secretary of State Colin Powell is on his way to Jerusalem to promote President Bush's "road map" toward a peacefully coexisting Israel and Palestine.

True, as Ross notes, that one never heard Yasir Arafat saying that violence was counterproductive. So then why did Ross put so much stock in Arafat for eight years if Arafat never acknowledged that violence was not the way to achieve the PA's goals. It's nice for Ross to make this observation now, but why didn't he make it - and force Clinton to act upon it - during the 90's?

Still I suppose even a little progress is preferable to none at all. So what if Abbas, just a few weeks ago, said that he considered Jews living in Judea, Samaria and Gaza legitimate targets? Well we'll just ignore the inconvenient stuff.

But these hopeful signs were accompanied by a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv and an Israeli incursion in Gaza, which yet again left noncombatants dead on both sides. Then Mr. Abbas was stymied by Mr. Arafat and other Palestinian leaders over his plans to reorganize the Palestinian security services. And aides to Mr. Sharon said Israel was unlikely to commit to the road map until after he meets with President Bush in a few weeks.

Here's one of those annoying equivalences. "...noncombatants dead on both sides." Yes but which side targeted the noncombatants? And which side hides its combatants among noncombatants?

Are we watching yet another brief moment of opportunity undone by Palestinian terrorism and Israeli reprisal? Perhaps not — we are at a promising stage because the interests of the Israelis and Palestinians have greatly converged. But everyone involved must recognize what is possible and what is not. These shared concerns of the leaders on both sides only involve stopping the current Intifadah. We must focus on changes in the near-term reality, not a lasting peace that would require concessions neither side can make now.

Despite what Ross implies here it's not up to both leaders to stop the intifadah. That is the responsibility of Abbas alone. And no, I don't buy excuses such as "our police can't do their jobs until the Israelis retreat." Israel's retreated before only to watch terrorism increase. There is plenty of work the PA can do even with Israel around. (The PA, it should be noted, has little difficulty rooting out those they thinking are helping Israel.)

Mr. Sharon knows that Israel's economic woes cannot be overcome so long as the daily struggle with the Palestinians goes on. Nor can the Israeli Defense Force stay in the Palestinian cities of the West Bank indefinitely. It is not only that Israel's army, largely made up of reserves, is being sapped in terms of manpower and morale, but also that the Palestinians' hostility toward Israel will continue as long as they feel the cities are under siege.

I get the impression that morale is not a problem among Israeli reservists. Why suggest it? And is the hostility the result of the "siege" or is it the result of an orchestrated hate campaign? Did the level of hate go down when Netanyahu was Prime Minister and there were few if any closures?

Thus neither prime minister is focused on the endgame of peacemaking right now. Mr. Abbas has no authority to make concessions on issues like the control of Jerusalem, borders and refugees. To gain credibility on tackling these core questions, he has to show that he can reform the Palestinian Authority and reduce Israeli control of Palestinian lives. Ariel Sharon, for his part, won't consider addressing the major issues until he knows that he has a partner who will truly dismantle all the terrorism networks in the Palestinian areas. None of this will happen overnight.

As IMRA notes, Abbas claims he has no authorization to compromise on the right of return ever. Given that admission, it's hard to see where building trust will help.

Moreover, the absence of clear measuring sticks for judging performance will leave each side in a position to claim it has done what was required, no matter the reality. For example, the Palestinians are supposed to make arrests and dismantle terrorist groups. But how many people should be arrested, and who are the key targets? What does the essential terrorist network consist of, and does it include the Dawa — the social support structure of the terrorist group Hamas?

On the Israeli side, what is the real number of illegal settler outposts? Israel is supposed to withdraw to its defense force positions of September 2000, but where exactly were they?

Terrorist infrastructure clearly includes the "social services" branch of Hamas. No distinction necessary. And this lack of specificity is one of the failures of Oslo. Of course the PA even ignored its obvious obligations. So it's not clear that adding specificity to the Road Map will bring any improvement in PA compliance.

The two sides need to be clear on what each is going to do, where it is going to do it, how it is going to do it, and when it is going to do it. Can they come to an agreement on their own? I doubt it. From my long experience dealing with the two sides, I know that the potential for using the same language to mean different things existed even in the best of times of dialogue and cooperation. Now, in a very hostile environment, the potential to talk past each other and inadvertently create profound misunderstandings is even greater. It is already visible in the debate over "confronting" Hamas — with Palestinians feeling this means persuasion, the Israelis that it means physical destruction.

Israeli expectations must be reconciled with Palestinian capacities — and that will happen only with American help. Mr. Powell has the best chance of success this weekend if he puts his emphasis on near-term specifics. His success at getting the two sides to agree on what to do now will determine whether the road map is a genuine path toward peace or yet another Middle Eastern cul-de-sac.

And if this is to work, Powell must bring pressure to bear on the PA that controlling Hamas means destroying it. Persuasion is long past. In the past whenever Arafat tried to co-opt Hamas, his apologists - in the media and in the diplomatic - would excuse it as Arafat trying to moderate Hamas. But these agreements always included permission for Hamas to strike at Jews in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. So the PA was violating its commitment to end violence by entering into those agreements. It was up to the world to condemn him for it. The world didn't then. Now there's no choice. Hamas must be destroyed. And the United States must bring pressure to bear to make that happen.
Cross posted on IsraPundit and David's Israel Blog.

2003-04-30T21:12:00.000-07:00

Deodorizing Dahlan

When I was in 7th or 8th grade, I remember my teacher referring to Kurt Waldheim as a "deodorized Nazi." Back then, about 30 years ago, Waldheim's wartime record was not yet known, so we were befuddled as to why the teacher was criticizing Kofi Annan's predecessor. About 10 years later, the stories came out and Waldheim was disgraced. My teacher was right.

In order for the peace process to work there's a need to do the same with the members of the PA.

Ted Belman noted earlier that Mohammed Dahlan is getting a free ride despite his involvement in terror in the past 6 years. Here's the New York Times:

A chain smoker, Mr. Dahlan is a dapper figure who is always impeccably groomed. With his expensive suits and luxury home, he can come across as a wealthy businessman rather than a security chief. He is seen as extremely ambitious, and he has been willing to criticize Mr. Arafat.

In an interview last month with The New York Times, Mr. Dahlan said he quit his post in November 2001 "because I didn't feel the Palestinian Authority had a political vision." He added, "I hope the new prime minister will make a difference."

Since his resignation, Mr. Dahlan has remained visible, presenting himself as a moderate, conciliatory figure ready to resume peace negotiations with Israel.

But it's not just Dahlan who presents himself as a moderate; the Times is perfectly willing to do the work for him:

Many of those same militants were released shortly after the current Palestinian uprising began in September 2000, and Israel says its security forces moved into Palestinian cities and towns, killing and capturing suspects because Palestinian authorities refused to do so.

Actually Amos Harel reported in Ha'aretz in Mid-September 2000 (roughly ten days before the intifada "officially" started) that most of the leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad had been released. In other words, it's not as the Times suggested that the PA released terrorists as a result of the breakdown of the peace process, but the terrorist leaders were let out so that they could organize attacks against Israel.
Michael Freund will have none of the phony Dahlan PR and does a nice job of skewering the fawning coverage:

What the guardians of the public's right to know neglected to mention is that Dahlan has a nasty habit of trying to blow up schoolbuses full of Jewish children. On at least three separate occasions in the past six years Dahlan has reportedly been linked to such attacks.

Update!! Debka has more on Dahlan's CV including the plausible charge that he helped organize the Karine A.
Cross-posted on IsraPundit and David's Israel Blog

2003-04-07T11:13:00.000-07:00

Israeli Soldiers see parallels to their battles in Iraq

Many Israeli soldiers who have been closely following the war in Iraq have noticed disturbing similarities between the enemy they've been facing over the past two and a half years and the Iraqi resistance faced by American and British troops in Iraq. Avi, a young lieutenant in the army said, "The Iraqis have been using mosques and medical facilities to hid weapons and use as a base for snipers. Terrorists pressure young men and women to sacrifice themselves to strike blows against the coalition forces. Like the irregular force that we've been facing the Americans have been learning what it's like to face an enemy that refuses to play by the rules of war.

"Like us the Americans have shown remarkable restraint and compassion when facing such a merciless foe. I've seen pictures of American soldiers giving water to thirsty prisoners. Just like our troops did. I've seen American soldiers die because they choose not to use force that might cause additional civilian deaths.

"It is heartening to know that other armies behave themselves is such enlightened ways."
Nice story. Did you read it in the Washington Post? No of course not.

Cross-Posted at David's Israel Blog and IsraPundit.

2003-04-01T10:46:00.000-08:00

Get your Protocols here

This from a country whose peace proposal is still taken seriously by many. Pretty vile isn't it? But other than the nastiness is it really that much different from what Rober Kaiser wrote in the Washington Post?

Cross-posted on IsraPundit and David's Israel Blog

2003-03-30T19:39:00.000-08:00

Bronner's Myth

Ethan Bronner, the one-time Middle East correspondent for the Boston Globe, has been transferred to the editorial page of the paper that currently owns the Globe. Now he spreads disinformation about Israel for the New York Times. In today's editorial notebook Bronner wrote:

When a Palestinian terrorist shot Israel's London ambassador in the head in June 1982, the invasion was set in motion. The gunman was from a breakaway group that had nothing to do with Yasir Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization in southern Lebanon. But the shooting was the pretext Mr. Sharon needed. Israeli troops pushed through the northern border, smashing P.L.O. bases. Shiites had suffered terribly under the P.L.O.'s cruel and arbitrary rule and they were thrilled to see it broken. Israeli soldiers reported that locals welcomed them by throwing rice.

Things turned nasty for Israel when it helped engineer the election of Bashir Gemayel, a Christian ally, as president. Begin pushed him to recognize Israel as one of his first acts, something he resented terribly. Before much of anything could happen, though, Gemayel was assassinated. Within a week Israelis helped Christian militiamen enter two Palestinian refugee camps, where they carried out a massacre.

First of if the border with Lebanon was quiet it was not for a long time before June 1982. I was studying in Yeshiva in Israel in 1981, when I was told that Israel had attacked Iraq. I didn't believe it. I remember saying, "You mean Lebanon," because the border with Lebanon had been very busy. (Attacks by the PLO from the north and Israeli retaliations into Lebanon.) But I was assured that I had been informed correctly. And indeed I had.

It also doesn't really matter if cross-border attacks had ceased even for several months. By one account Israel recovered over $1 billion of weaponry that the PLO was holding. Are we to assume that the PLO was just accumulating weaponry for the heck of it? Or did they have longer term plans in mind? I assume the latter. Bronner apparently assumes the former.

It's also odd that Bronner asserts with confidence that Abu Nidal had nothing to do with Arafat. We know that they broke publicly over how honest they thought they should be about their intentions toward Israel: Abu Nidal said that the Palestinians should be honest about wanting to destroy Israel; Arafat said that the Palestinians should pretend to make nice. Still after years of assuring us that Arafat didn't support Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or even Fatah and finding out that Arafat lent and lends at least tacit support for terror even after he renounced it, shouldn't media types be hesitant before categorically denying any tie between Arafat and other terrorists?

The second paragraph is also annoying. Bronner is quite happy to tie Israel in with the massacres at Sabra and Shatilla. But how did Bashir Gemayal die? Did his car spontaneously explode? Why not report that Syria is suspected of having killed Gemayal for demonstrating too much independence from the occupying power in Lebanon?

Cross-posted on David's Israel Blog and IsraPundit.

2003-03-30T18:46:00.000-08:00

Why I read Sports Illustrated

Some of the best reporting on the Middle East recently has been done by Sports Illustrated. I kid you not. Last August, even before Abu Mazen was being talked about as a candidate for Palestinian PM, Sports Illustrated carried this article about Abu Daoud in which Abu Daoud alleged this:

Though he didn't know what the money was being spent for, longtime Fatah official Mahmoud Abbas, a.k.a. Abu Mazen, was responsible for the financing of the Munich attack. Abu Mazen could not be reached for comment regarding Abu Daoud's allegation. After Oslo in 1993, Abu Mazen went to the White House Rose Garden for a photo op with Arafat, President Bill Clinton and Israel's Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres. "Do you think that ... would have been possible if the Israelis had known that Abu Mazen was the financier of our operation?" Abu Daoud writes. "I doubt it." Today the Bush Administration seeks a Palestinian negotiating partner "uncompromised by terror," yet last year Abu Mazen met in Washington with Secretary of State Colin Powell.

It would seem that SI found out something that the NY Times missed. The NY Times insists that Abu Mazen is a "moderate."
And on the subject Iraq we learn of Uday Hussein's training methods for the Olympics.

With a wave of Uday's arm the manacled boxer was led into the room by Iraqi secret service. Sitting behind a dark wood desk beneath an oversized portrait of himself, Uday began his tirade. "In sport you can win or you can lose. I told you not to come home if you didn't win." His voice rising, he walked around the desk and gave the boxer a lesson. "This is how you box," he screamed as he threw a left and a right straight to the fighter's face. Blood dribbled from the athlete's nose as Uday launched another round of punches. Then, using the electric prod he was famous for carrying, Uday jolted the boxer in the chest.

Blood was streaming from a cut above the boxer's eye when Uday ordered his guards to fetch a straight razor. The boxer cried out as Uday held the razor to his throat, and as he moved the blade to the fighter's forehead, Uday laughed. He then shaved the man's eyebrows, an insult to Muslim males. "Take him downstairs and finish the job," Uday screamed.

Says Yahia, "They took him to the basement of the Olympic building. It has a 30-cell prison where athletes -- and anyone else who is out of favor with Uday -- are beaten and tortured. That was the last I ever heard of that boxer."

So there you have it. Guys, when you're explaining to your wives why you bought the swimsuit issue, just explain that you bought it for the in-depth coverage of the Middle East.

Cross-posted on David's Israel Blog and IsraPundit

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2003-03-27T02:44:00.000-08:00

Potholes in the Roadmap

Earlier Fred Lapides commented on Sunday's James Bennett article in the NYT's Week in Review section. There's a lot about the article that calls for comment. Here goes:

The reasoning is that President Bush cannot hope to stabilize the region, much less democratize Arab states, so long as the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians endures as a propaganda tool for the likes of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. After the war with Iraq, Arab leaders will demand that President Bush "prove what he can do for peace," Dennis Ross, the former Clinton administration negotiator, wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal.

First Bennett starts off with the reasoning why President Bush would push the Road Map right now. Then ...

But there is a flaw in all this analysis: The Bush administration has never accepted it. It has never regarded peace between Israelis and Palestinians as a goal as central to American interests as, say, getting rid of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

Now Bennett's saying that Bush doesn't accept the Road Map because he "has never regarded peace between Israelis and Palestinians as a goal as central to American interests." Now Bush has often expressed his support for a Palestinian state so this doesn't quite wash.

Worse than that, Bennett attributes Bush's (and apparently *any*) objection to the Road Map simply in terms of his being unconcerned. There's a better reason, backed up by historical precedent, for saying that American participation in the Quartet's Road Map won't help bring peace in the Middle East: because American support for peace hasn't worked until now.

Go back to 2000. What happened?

1) President Clinton, representing PM Barak went to Geneva offering over 90% of the Golan to the President Hafez Assad of Syria.

2) PM Barak unilaterally withdrew Israeli troops from southern Lebanon.

3) PM Barak offered Arafat over 90% of the land Arafat demanded at Camp David.

What were the results?

1) Assad went to his grave refusing the Israeli offer.

2) Hezbollah still maintains a hostile posture towards Israel and claims (along with the Arab League) that Israel still occupies Lebanon.

3) Arafat refused the offer and two months later launched a new intifada.

Since the United States backed two of these efforts we can hardly say that American involvement was missing. The problem is that the Arab world refuses to change. Refuses to accept 1948.

Bennett continues:

The administration clearly recognizes there is a problem here, and it may truly want to help. But with rebuilding Iraq, confronting North Korea and addressing the American economy already on its agenda, this conflict may never rise to the level of a top priority, certainly not enough of one to justify the political risks involved in dragging the antagonists along the route outlined by the road
map — particularly during the coming presidential election year.

It would be much easier, some experts say, for the White House simply to create the impression that it is trying.

"You have a whole menu of diplomatic activity that doesn't force you to take political risks," said Robert Malley, a former Clinton negotiator who is the Middle East program director of the International Crisis Group, a non-governmental conflict prevention organization. "You don't have to look too far to find the pieces that will fill the diplomatic vacuum that Blair and others
have been complaining about."

For example, he said, "an international conference would be seen by Arab countries as a major step, even if didn't change that much" on the ground. Such a move, he said, would eat up time and score the administration political points, without risking a confrontation with Israel.

Now we're getting the real story. The problem are the political risks involved with pursuing peace. What might those risks be? Ah, I have it "...a confrontation with Israel." Left unsaid, of course, is that risk comes from the all powerful Jewish lobby that is well known to oppose peace. (Actually, we elders of Zion, oppose stupid risks that are unlikely to bring peace.) And quoting Malley without identifying him as the person who rewrote the history of Camp David (ie Barak wasn't really as generous as portrayed, all parties - including the US and Israel - were at fault for botching Camp David) is negligent.

The fundamental question is whether the two sides are expected to make their concessions at the same time or in sequence.

The plan now calls for action "in parallel," including, for example, an immediate halt to incitement by both sides. As the Palestinians crack down on violence, the Israelis are supposed to stop all punitive demolition of Palestinian homes and dismantle all settlement outposts built in the last two years.

In addressing the United Nations Security Council recently, Terje Roed-Larsen, the special envoy here, called parallelism "a key guiding principle" of the new plan.

"Critically, and as we have seen so many times, no cease-fire can take hold without also simultaneously addressing political progress and the economic suffering," he said.

But Prime Minister Ariel Sharon says the Palestinians must act first.

This is the core of the problem. Arafat took upon himself the obligation to fight and prevent terror. He has never done this completely. Even when his security forces were more involved in stopping Hamas and Islamic Jihad, his schools were teaching hatred and his channels were broadcasting it. To condition the PA's obligation on any Israeli behavior at all is to make a mockery of the idea of peace. The whole peace process was predicated on Arafat's supposed change. To say Israel is now obligated to withdraw from any area in return for Arafat (or the PA) fulfilling the premise of the whole process is to condone the past ten years of PA sponsored and incited terror. It's the reporters job to provide context and Bennett, again, has come up woefully short. Worse, in order to buttress the faulty premise he quotes Roed-Larsen - who in Bennett's mind and the mind of many diplomats is an unbiased referee but in reality is a pro-Palestinian agitator who helped promote the blood libel of a Jenin massacre last year - along with Roed-Larsen's rationale. In contrast he mentions PM Sharon but provides no reason. Clearly Bennett is taking sides and not offering a balanced analysis.

For example, the Bush administration has repeatedly called for Yasir Arafat to be sidelined. It largely left it to its Quartet allies and the Palestinians to make that happen — and last week, they achieved the appointment of the Americans' candidate, Mahmoud Abbas, to the new position of prime minister. It is still not clear how much authority Mr. Abbas will have.

Then, on Thursday, Palestinian security forces killed a Hamas militant in a renewed campaign to stop Hamas rocket fire at Israel.

"You see the little magnets getting in line with the new American power grid," said Dr. Eran Lerman, director of the Israel-Middle East office of the American Jewish Committee.

While I don't know that Abbas was the American's choice, Bennett makes no mention of any reason he might be controversial - like his Holocaust denial, his support of murdering Jewish civilians in Judea, Samaria and Azza, or his role in financing the Olympic massacre 31 years ago. Still even if we accept that this is a positive change and look at it along with the PA's action against the Hamas rocket launchers, did these things happen because of concessions or because America and Israel were steadfast in demanding change? Take the pressure off the PA and the situation will deteriorate again. Stand firm and maybe the PA will realize it has to change or be relegated to oblivion. Only the thoughts of irrelevance will force the PA to act in good faith. Incidentally, Dr. Lerman has written a number of good articles for the Jerusalem Post; I wonder if this is a full quote from him.

Cross Posted at David's Israel Blog and IsraPundit.

2003-03-24T02:07:00.000-08:00

Selective Outrage

I get annoyed when journalists act as if they're some sort of special breed, deserving of deferential treatment. Yes, I know, many of them put themselves in danger, and several of them paid the ultimate price. But there's this story from the Washington Post complaining that several Arab countries haven't allowed embedded journalists in to attach to American army units.

... in recent days reporters from CNN, U.S. News & World Report, NBC and The Washington Post have been unable to gain direct access to U.S. forces stationed in Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Turkey has prevented some journalists from crossing its border into northern Iraq, according to media sources. Air bases in Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and the United Arab Emirates have also been deemed off-limits to the media by those countries.

this has led to an outraged response:

"I think it proves that in the Coalition of the Willing, willingness is a very subjective thing," said Phil Bennett, The Post's assistant managing editor for foreign news. Saudi Arabia's denial, he said, was particularly "schizophrenic" because the Saudi government has issued numerous visas to journalists in recent months, but still won't allow access to military installations. "It's a false openness," he said.

The Saudis, however, have a ready response:

A spokesman for the Saudi Embassy in Washington, Nail Al-Jubeir, characterized his government's policy as "a logistical issue. We got an enormous amount of requests from journalists. It got to the point where the government said, 'Let's put a hold on this and study it.' "

I may not have paid much mind to that article, except then I saw Caroline Glick's account of her experiences trying to get to an embedded unit in Kuwait:

I never felt any strong emotion towards Kuwait or towards the Kuwaiti people until I arrived in the country on Sunday, March 9, only to be greeted by blistering, virulent hatred accompanied by a reign of quiet, relentless discrimination.

From the moment I arrived, the Kuwaiti government sought to silence me as a writer, a journalist and an Israeli even as I was traveling as a US citizen on a valid visa.

A few hours before I was set to depart for Kuwait on a flight from Washington, DC, I began to realize that I would be in for a rough ride. I read on the Internet that the Kuwaitis issued a statement telling the international press corps in Kuwait that anyone transmitting reports to the Israeli media would face criminal prosecution.

Pretty strong stuff. If the Post didn't know about this Kuwaiti selectivity why not? Did any American newspaper (other than the Chicago Sun Times note Glick's difficulties? It's hard to feel much sympathy for the journalists who are excluded because Arab countries don't want to advertise their participation in the war, if they, in turn, don't manage to scare up a little bit of outrage about over this outright discrimination.

There's an irony here. After the Gulf War, Time magazine quoted a Kuwaiti official who said that now he understood why Israel chased war criminals, and that the Kuwaitis felt about Saddam the way he imagined the Jewish state would have felt about Hitler. (I don't remember the exact words, but you get the picture.) The reporter, I think, even noted the apparent softening of the Kuwaiti's attitude toward Israel. Apparently it was temporary. As was the appreciation for freedom the Kuwaitis gained from America's rescue of their country from the tyrant Saddam.

While your at it, read how Glick celebrated Purim. I bet the Saudis will have conniptions about some of this too!

Cross Posted on IsraPundit and David's Israel Blog.

2003-03-20T09:37:00.000-08:00

Always the Bridesmaid

An exception to Dennis Ross's generalization that Arabs don't want to be "on the wrong side of the U.S" is the PA.

"We Palestinians are against the war and we totally condemn this war in the Middle East. A solution must be found to this problem through diplomatic means, with the international community," local authorities minister Saeb Erakat said Thursday.

And it gets better. The article says that Hamas and Islamic Jihad support the PA's position. Not even a week after President Bush reiterates his dream of a Palestinian state, the PA shows whose side its on.

Why do Hamas and Islamic Jihad support Saddam?

The two opposition groups joined Erakat in slamming the US attack on Iraq's President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites), who has disbursed millions of dollars to the families of suicide bommbers and Palestinian civilians shot dead by the Israeli army.

So if the PA wants peace shouldn't they be condemning the fellow who encourages suicide bombers?
Cross posted on IsraPundit and David's Israel Blog.

2003-03-19T02:40:00.000-08:00

Biases

Tom Gross did an excellent critique of how the New York Times skews its coverage of the Middle East. There's too much in the article to give you a full taste of his essay, but here's a small flavor:

While the Times couldn't find room to include a photo of Abigail (or any injured child) last Thursday, it did choose to again run its "Mideast Death Toll" chart alongside the news report about the Haifa bomb. Strangely, the Times (to my recollection) usually runs this chart — in which it lines up total numbers of Israeli deaths next to the greater number of Palestinian deaths — only on days after Israelis have died. The implication would seem to be that Israel is responsible for more fatalities than the Palestinians.

It also seems odd that the Times doesn't (to the best of my knowledge) run these kind of football-score-type charts for any other conflict (Protestant vs. Catholic deaths in Northern Ireland, for example, or Afghan vs. American deaths since September 11).

Indeed this is one of my pet peeves about any coverage. And it bothered me during the first intifada too. With no context, the numbers serve as a judgment - and not one that is favorable to Israel - despite what the editors say.

There were two examples that Gross didn't include in his article.

One of the more incredible stories of 2000 was that Egypt and Saudi Arabia encouraged Arafat to reject the Camp David agreement offered by the PM Barak. It's a really huge story that two "moderate pro-Western" Arab states played a role in this act of extremism. Of course neither country paid a diplomatic price for its perfidy; and, of course, this little item didn't cause the New York Times to rethink its evaluation of these countries.

During the last few days, a number of Arab leaders like Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudia Arabia and President Mubarak have joined with Mr. Arafat's domestic opponents in Islamic militant movements to weigh in on the issue. They all but threatened Mr. Arafat with political excommunication if he accepted Prime Minister Ehud Barak's proposals for administrative control over parts of the city and access to -- but not sovereignty over -- the major Muslim sites.

So there you have it. How did the Times work its own reporting into future stories? Let's see.

After more than 20 years of standing alongside American presidents in building peace in the region, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt is feeling undermined by Washington, upstaged by Saudi Arabia and vulnerable before an angry Arab population, officials here say.

Apparently encouraging Arafat to reject the most generous Israeli offer (and one that was too generous) is considered "building peace." And what about our stalwart Saudi allies?

Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is expected to tell President Bush in stark terms at their meeting on Thursday that the strategic relationship between their two countries will be threatened if Mr. Bush does not moderate his support for Israel's military policies, a person familiar with the Saudi's thinking said today.

In a bleak assessment, he said there was talk within the Saudi royal family and in Arab capitals of using the "oil weapon" against the United States, and demanding that the United States leave strategic military bases in the region.

Such measures, he said, would be a "strategic debacle for the United States."

He also warned of a general drift by Arab leaders toward the radical politics that have been building in the Arab street.

The Saudi message contained undeniable brinkmanship intended to put pressure on Mr. Bush to take a much larger political gamble by imposing a peace settlement on Israelis and Palestinians.

These five paragraphs are breathtaking, especially knowing what we now know. First, of if the Saudis think that America "imposing a peace settlement" will help, why did torpedo the American effort nearly two years earlier. Why warn about the chance that America's supposed failure to take the initiative might radicalize Arab leaders when, in fact, they'd already demonstrated that radicalization at a pivotal moment? As he did in the Mubarak article, Patrick Tyler ignores the significant story his own newspaper had previously reported.

The Thomas Friedman peace proposal also brought out some dishonesty in the Times. After Thomas Friedman unveiled the supposed "Saudi peace plan" last year, the Times used all its resources to promote the plan and presumably promote their Op-Ed guy for a Nobel Peace Prize. The most egregious violation of journalistic ethics came in the context of Syrian support for the "Saudi Peace Plan." Serge Schmemann reported:

In its first statement on the plan proposed last month by Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, which pledges Arab countries to a full normalization of relations with Israel in return for full Israeli withdrawal from land occupied in the 1967 war, Syria expressed its "satisfaction with the position of Saudi Arabia."
The statement followed a meeting between Prince Abdullah and President Bashar al-Assad of Syria in Riyadh. It said a comprehensive peace "cannot be achieved except with Israeli withdrawal from all occupied Arab land, including the Syrian Golan." The statement also called for the right of return for Palestinian refugees, a matter critical to Lebanon, where many of them live.

Since it's clear that Schmemann saw the statement its inconceivable that he didn't see this part:

Viewpoints were identical regarding all discussed issues and ideas where assertion was that the just and comprehensive peace in the region as the strategic option could never be realized but through the Israeli full withdrawal from the occupied Arab territories including from the Syrian Golan Heights to the line of June4 1967, the liberation of the remaining occupied territories in South Lebanon, the establishment of an independent Palestinian State with Jerusalem as its capital clinging the the right of the refugees return in accordance with related UN resolutions.

(Emphasis mine.) Syria added language (and Saudi Arabia agreed to this addition) demanding that Israel withdraw from southern Lebanon. It did not matter that Israel withdrew from Lebanon two years earlier or that the Security Council endorsed that withdrawal. Syria, Lebanon's occupier, changed the rules and made Shebaa Farms Lebanese territory. (It was captured from Syria and was to be discussed along with any part of an agreement with Syria.) Essentially Syria gave land to Lebanon in order to maintain a Lebanese grievance against Israel.

This is significant because it shows the hazards of any Arab peacemaking efforts. They will always change the goals. Here was a significant change in the Syrian proposal and the Times just ignored it. The reporter left out the part of the Syrian "agreement" with the Saudi plan that was inconvenient even though he had to have been aware of it. (Thomas Friedman, whose peace plan this was, clearly knew about this - I'm sure he read the Syrian statement too - and also remained silent.)

The funny thing is that the Times eventually acknowledge the Syrian position- at the end of the Arab League summit.

Some provisions in the plan run counter to existing Security Council resolutions, an official here said. Among these is the call by the Saudi plan for an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanese territory. The Council does not consider Israel to be in control of any Lebanese land after the Israeli withdrawal from the border area two years ago. In Beirut this week, Lebanon revived its claim to a small part of the Israeli-held Golan Heights known as the Sheba Farms.

It's news enough that the Security Council was honest. But here was significant evidence that Saudi peace proposal had been significantly altered and sabotaged. The Times managed one article on the subject and only after the Arab League summit was over! The Times had a responsibility to report this but didn't. Promoting its columnist's peace proposal was more important than reporting the news.

These two examples show the degree to which the Times will go to say that Arabs are trying to make peace - even against the available evidence. You'd think that these countries with official media could promote these lies effectively on their own. But the New York Times apparently thinks the cause of peace is so important that it must promote it; even if it means repeating the lies of dictators.
Cross posted on David's Israel Blog and IsraPundit.

2003-03-12T21:42:00.000-08:00

Washington Post's Hypocrisy

The Washington Post ran a pretty good editorial today on Jim Moran, "Blaming the Jews"

"The leaders of the Jewish community are influential enough that they could change the direction of where this is going, and I think they should." The comment perpetuates a stereotype of Jews as a unified bloc steering the world in their interest and against everyone else's. Over the centuries anti-Semites have used this libel to distract attention from their own failings and to instigate violence and discrimination against Jews. In the United States today, though anti-Semitism is far from eradicated, such violence may seem a mercifully distant danger.

There is a mistake here; one that's honest though. According to the FBI in 2000 hate crimes against Jews were committed at a higher rate than against any other ethnic group. However, the rest of this is reasonably solid from a historical standpoint. The problem with the editorial is that the Post kicks Rep. Moran when he's down. He's an easy target. As the editorial noted at the beginning:

OUR VIEW THAT Rep. James P. Moran Jr. is unfit to serve in Congress is not new. Last July, citing Mr. Moran's ethical obtuseness, we urged Democrats in Alexandria and surrounding neighborhoods to find another candidate for the fall election. Now, by blaming American Jews for an Iraq policy he opposes, the seven-term congressman has confirmed our opinion about him.

One gets the impression that they may not have taken such a strong stand against unless his behavior "confirmed" their previous impression of Moran.

Why the cynicism? Because last month, Robert Kaiser, the managing editor of the Washington Post wrote in "Bush and Sharon Nearly Identical On Mideast Policy":

Over the past dozen years or more, supporters of Sharon's Likud Party have moved into leadership roles in most of the American Jewish organizations that provide financial and political support for Israel.

True the article doesn't use the inflammatory language of Rep. Moran. Still the undercurrent of the article is that the rising prominence of right-wing Jews who are loyal to Israel has had an effect on the administration in terms of the Middle East generally and Israel and Iraq specifically.

The interesting thing is that despite this thesis, Kaiser even undermines his premise:

The State Department pressed for continued negotiations and pressure on Sharon to limit the scope of his military response to Palestinian suicide bombers, while the Pentagon and the vice president's office favored more encouragement for the Israelis, and less concern for a peace process which, they said, was going nowhere anyhow.

and

Neumann agreed that Abrams's appointment was symbolically important, not least because Abrams's views were shared by his boss, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, by Vice President Cheney and by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. "It's a strong lineup," he said.

So the tough line against Arafat and Saddam came from Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld. Not exactly Likudniks. It's true that Rumsfeld has always had a reputation for being pro-Israel. But Cheney and Rice didn't. Read "Broken Covenant" by Moshe Arens. During the Gulf War Defense Secretary Cheney did not come across as pro-Israel. Rice is a protege of Brent Scowcroft whose hostility towards Israel is well-known. (For more on possible expectations of W's orientation toward Israel see "Reorient" by Lawrence Kaplan and Sarah Wildman, originally published in The New Republic. I thought that Kaplan and Wildman didn't give W enough credit, and I think that my instincts have been confirmed.) Instead of attributing the change of policy direction in the current Bush administration to the influence of Jewish supporters of Israel, why doesn't Kaiser try to uncover the reason that Rice and Cheney seem to have changed their views? Even if unintentional, Kaiser's approach was damaging. No matter how dispassionately he wrote his article, the message of overly influential Jews comes through quite clearly.

Certainly Pat Buchanan got the message.

In a Feb. 9 front-page article in the Washington Post, Robert Kaiser quotes a senior U.S. official as saying, “The Likudniks are really in charge now.” Kaiser names Perle, Wolfowitz, and Feith as members of a pro-Israel network inside the administration and adds David Wurmser of the Defense Department and Elliott Abrams of the National Security Council.

For the Post to criticize Moran while giving a platform to Kaiser strikes me as a case of cognitive dissonance.

There are ways to make Kaiser's point but not do it in the same manner. In a recent issue of the New Yorker, Nicholas Lehmann did just that in an article "After Iraq." (No longer available on the Web.)

Yet another argument for war, which has emerged during the last few months, is that removing Saddam could help bring about a wholesale change for the better in the political, cultural, and economic climate of the Arab Middle East. To give one of many possible examples, Fouad Ajami, an expert on the Arab world who is highly respected inside the Bush Administration, proposes in the current issue of Foreign Affairs that the United States might lead "a reformist project that seeks to modernize and transform the Arab landscape. Iraq would be the starting point, and beyond Iraq lies an Arab political and economic tradition and a culture whose agonies have been on cruel display." The Administration's main public proponent of this view is Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, who often speaks about the possibility that war in Iraq could help bring democracy to the Arab Middle East. President Bush appeared to be making the same point in the State of the Union address when he remarked that "all people have a right to choose their own government, and determine their own destiny—and the United States supports their aspirations to live in freedom."

There may be support for the approach of democratizing the Arab world, but it is not exclusively the province of the pro-Israel crowd, or Likudniks. Lehmann credits Fouad Ajami with promoting this idea. But what makes Lehmann's article superior to Kaiser's is that he gives Feith a chance to elaborate on what he's thinking. Lehmann seems impressed with the thought that goes into Feith's ideas even if he doesn't seem to accept them. (Feith declined to be interviewed for Kaiser's article; did he refuse to speak because he thought there was a chance of being misrepresented?)

As I suggested above, perhaps the Bush adminstration took a more supportive view of Israel because of new information not due to the nefarious influence of Likudniks. This is something that David Frum seems to have picked up on:

Then Arafat made what may someday be reckoned as the most fateful miscalculation of his career. On January 5, 2002, Israeli naval forces intercepted a Gaza-bound merchant ship loaded with fifty tonnes of arms from Iran. Arafat hastily sent Bush a letter denying any involvement in the shipment. Probably Arafat did not even intend his denial to be interpreted literally; he may have written it as a social form, like the phrase I regret in a letter declining an invitation to a wedding or a dinner party. If so, Arafat sorely misunderstood his man. Bush does not lie to you. You had better not lie to him.

The Karine A. incident finished off Arafat in Bush's eyes. In conversation, Bush ceased to conceal either his contempt for the thuggish Palestinian or his irritation with the thug's European protectors. "They just luuuuuve Arafat," he would say with elongated wonder.

In other words Bush found Arafat's dishonesty so offensive that he re-thought his views on the Middle East. Why is it so hard to believe that other members of his adminstration were swayed by similarly weighing the evidence in front of them? Why is Kaiser intent on painting the Likud worldview as superstition not as something an open-minded person could conclude when weighing all the evidence. Why did the Washington Post give Kaiser a pass but not Moran?
Cross-posted on "IsraPundit" and "David's Israel Blog."

2003-03-06T23:51:00.000-08:00

Buneul is Right

I was going to write this anyway, so I'm adding my voice to Bunuel's below. The New York Times ran the story, "Israelis Storm Gaza Camp; 11 Palestinians Are Killed" in yesterday's paper. After the headline and three paragraphs either asserting or implying that Israel killed all eleven James Bennet wrote:

The Israeli Army rejected that account. It said a tank had fired a shell from a spot near the crowd, but in another direction, toward a Palestinian who was firing a rocket-propelled grenade at the retreating Israelis. It said the casualties had been caused by a Palestinian explosive.

I give Bennet a little credit for at least acknowledging that the Israeli army disputed the PA view. But no more than a little. The Arab accounts he cites were more specific. But it isn't as if there wasn't a readily available Israeli account:

"The IDF forces were right next to a store. It is obvious that we would not fire at the store point blank with tanks shells. The control over the firing of the shells belongs solely to the commander and we know how to react in every situation, what to fire upon with shells and when. A tank commander will only fire if he receives an order from the battalion commander or if his life is in danger and firing is the only way to combat the danger. I was the battalion commander at that moment," noted Lt. Col. Moshe.

"We fired a shell a moment later, after the explosion, into an adjacent ally where an RPG rocket was threatening the tank. However this was only done after the incident where the bomb detonated inside the store. It was a powerful bomb that created a great blaze in the store and even, in our opinion, caused the walls to collapse and the ceiling to cave in," said Lt. Col. Moshe.

He added: "I imagine that many civilians were injured from that."
"As the ground commander I can say with certainty that the tank shell was fired at a lone terrorist armed with an RPG rocket, from a distance of 150-200 meters within the ally."

I've noted previously that Bennet strikes me as lazy. He doesn't make much of an effort. It's also interesting that in the earlier story that I commented on, Bennet noted that Israeli silence on the deaths of several ranking members of Hamas was an indication that Israel probably did it. I'm not convinced that he was correct there. But wouldn't the converse of that observation be that if Israel denies participation in violence it probably was not involved? So why not attach greater significance to Israel's version?

If over here, Bennet implicitly belittles Israel's version of events; elsewhere, he's not so subtle:

That is the approach Israel has taken in the West Bank, where soldiers have seized back territory ceded under the Oslo peace accords in what the army says is an effort to stop suicide bombers.

"...in what the army says is an effort to stop suicide bombers!" Qualifying it in this way implies that the only the army would draw such a conclusion. Hmm. How about this?

During the months of January-February 2003, 122 terror attacks against Israeli citizens were prevented.

That seems successful by any standard!!! Unfortunately, Wednesday, we saw that the Israeli tactics are not perfect.
Cross Posted to Israpundit and David's Israel Blog.

2003-03-04T19:46:00.000-08:00

Wealth of Bias

Recently, the Boston Globe's media critic, Mark Jurkowitz, critiqued CAMERA in an article "Blaming the Messenger". Aspects of the article were actually very good. He listed some of the group's successes. Still there are a number of troubling observations that he makes. The main problem is, of course, the title of the article. Though it doesn't really reflect the bulk of the article, it clearly shows where Jurkowitz stands. The problem in the perception of media coverage of Israel, is not the media but the perception of it by extreme partisans. Jurkowitz quotes one NPR official:

"Economic blackmail" is the term Klose uses to describe CAMERA's tactics. "CAMERA is essentially an advocacy group that calls itself an umpire but only calls foul balls," he adds.

The problem with repeating this sort of criticism is that Jurkowitz doesn't bring a single example of where CAMERA dealt dishonestly with a media outlet. In fact read this:

In September, a crucial effort to stanch the bleeding took place inside WBUR's Commonwealth Avenue offices. Christo and Klose sat down with a small group of WBUR funders, including some who had withdrawn their support. Klose says the meeting was "very satisfactory" and "made clear the complicated reality of doing what we do." But other reports say it was tense and adversarial and didn't exactly end with a meeting of the minds.

This gives NPR a chance to expain its "complicated reality." But even as the NPR official claims he was successful, Jurkowtiz reports that not everyone found Klose to be convincing. Interesting isn't it?
The article is worth reading. Despite the title, I think that Jurkowitz does a pretty good job of showing that CAMERA is correct in what it does.
It's also worth keeping in mind. Saturday's New York Times featured a report, "Palestinian Assets 'a Mess,' Official Says." The article leads of with:

The Palestinian Authority's top finance official said today that he had identified $600 million in Authority assets in 79 commercial ventures, including money that he said appeared to have given rise to Israeli accusations of slush funds controlled by Mr. Arafat and others.

I'm not sure what the impetus of the article was. Was it to bolster the efforts of PA "finance minister, Salam Fayyad, a former official of the International Monetary Fund who has been praised by American and Israeli officials as an energetic reformer?" Or was it to deflect criticism of Arafat likely to result from his listing as one of the world's richest world's leaders in Forbes magazine?
Reading the article, it really seems that the latter is going on. The bloodless way the Times discusses the PA's corruption is astounding. Read that first paragraph again, "... given rise to Israeli accusation ..." Please. There's plenty of corruption in the PA, it's been going on for a long time, and it's well documented. Using a quote from Fayyad to qualify the problem as an Israeli accusation or

"Of all the issues in public finance that cause us to have a bad name, this probably is the one that had the biggest neon sign on it..."

using this quote to say that corruption is a matter of appearances goes beyond being non-judgmental. It is abdicating the skepticism that every journalist is supposed to show. In fact the only negative James Bennet lists about Fayyad is that because Israel likes him it may be difficult for him to become Prime Minister of the PA.
Mark Jurkowitz may think that supporters of Israel hold the media to impossible standards. But reading this news report about the PA's finances you'd think that the NY Times is describing a person who has trouble keeping his checkbook straight not someone who, according to an editorial in the Jerusalem Post, "... has done more than his fair share of plundering his own people, treating their public resources as his personal ATM machine to be looted at will." In fact the Jerusalem Post editorial *reports* more relevant information about the misuse of aid money directed toward the PA than the news article in the New York Times. To any fair-minded person, the Times is whitewashing Arafat and the PA. (Yes that's my judgment.) Bennet's failure to provide a history of PA corruption is typical of American reporting from the Middle East.

The sins and crimes of the PA are downplayed. The statements of its officials are treated unskeptically. The opposite is true when dealing with Israel.

There's a joke, "Just because you're not paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you." In the case of reporting on the Middle East there could be a variation: "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean you're wrong." Maybe we supporters of Israel are looking too hard for signs of bias. Unfortunately, it doesn't take that much effort to turn it up.

Cross Posted on IsraPundit and David's Israel Blog.

2003-03-03T10:05:00.000-08:00

Dulling the Talons

An editorial in the Baltimore Sun last week, "Sharpening the Talons" was pretty typical of the paper's shrill anti-Israel bias. Several aspects of the article call out for rebuttal. The first paragraph begins:

ARIEL SHARON has finished putting together a governing coalition in Israel that includes an extreme right-wing party and a rabidly extreme right-wing party. This won't do the cause of peace in the Middle East any good at all.

Specifically the problem here is that neither of the "extreme right-wing" parties that joined the Likud's coalition has much power. Shinui, the one leftist party got all the major ministries outside of Defense, Foreign Affairs and Treasury. What's more, Sharon could have formed a coalition of just nationalist and religious parties and left out Shinui. Under the circumstances (i.e. the democratic choice of the Israeli people) the government Sharon formed was arguably the most left wing possible! Maybe the Sun wants to criticize the Israeli people; but it's criticism of Sharon is sheer propaganda.

More generally, the problem with the Sun's position is that in the year 2000, Israel 1) offered (through President Clinton) Syria over 90% of the land it wanted to make peace 2) pulled completely - as certified by the UN Security Council - out of Southern Lebanon (even as Syria continues to occupy that country with impunity) and 3) offered Yasser Arafat over 90% of the land he wanted to make peace. In return Israel got 1) Assad's even shriller and more belligerent son after Assad died refusing to make a deal 2) a continued threat from Hezbollah and 3) a renewed intifada overseen by Yasser Arafat. The notion that the composition of Israel's government plays any role in whether Israel makes is nonsense. The continued obstacle to peace is Arab rejectionism.

To Arab eyes, there is no daylight between the White House and Mr. Sharon. It has not gone unnoticed that one of the neoconservative arguments for an American-led regime change in Iraq is that it would be good for Israel. But if Israel is going to be so militant, Iraq's Arab neighbors might well ask, what's in it for them?

So if the Arabs had something to gain, they'd support US efforts? Something to gain, as implied by the editorial, means Israel retreating from the lands it obtained in defensive wars. So then explain, why is it that at the time of the Camp David summit in July, 2000 did Saudi Arabia and Egypt encourage Arafat to reject the American backed deal that Barak offered - as reported by the New York Times? (I sent a letter to the editor with similar substance to the Editor of the Sun.)

Again the answer is that support for Israel is not an obstacle to peace. It's Arab rejectionism of any compromise with Israel.
Cross-posted to IsraPundit and David's Israel Blog.

2003-02-26T20:31:00.000-08:00

Shlomo Argov

I was really bothered by the Associated Press's obituary of Shlomo Argov, Israel's former ambassador to Britain. Here are three paragraphs from the obit:

The attack was Israel's stated pretext for invading Lebanon four days later and laying siege to Beirut for three months until the Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, and his fighters were forced out of the country. The invasion began an 18-year Israeli military presence in southern Lebanon, which ended with Israel's withdrawal in May 2000.
Reuven Merhav, a former colleague, said Mr. Sharon, who was defense minister at the time, had actually planned the Lebanon invasion well before Mr. Argov was shot.
Mr. Merhav, referring to Mr. Sharon's invasion strategy on Israel Radio on Sunday, said: "The war plan was ready. He made no secret of it. He had presented the plan to the Americans some months earlier."

Argov was reduced to being the pretext for war. Other factors such as regular shelling by the PLO of Northern Israel are ignored. I suppose that by mentioning Sharon's "invasion strategy" the report is implicitly acknowledging the ongoing threat to Israel. Arutz-7 gave a more complete view of the time.

The next day Israeli jets bombed PLO ammunition depots and training bases. This triggered a massive PLO bombardment against Israel's northern settlements, causing extensive damage and loss of life.

Even this fails to acknowledge that the PLO was attacking Israel prior to the attack on Argov. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs gives the most complete account of Argov's life.

Shlomo Argov received a B.A. in political science from Georgetown University in Washington D.C. (1952) and an M.A. in international relations from the London School of Economics (1955). After several years in the Prime Minister's Office under David Ben-Gurion, he joined the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1959. His first postings were to the Israeli embassies in Ghana and Nigeria. He later served in New York and Washington, as well as Deputy Director-General for Information of the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem, before being appointed Ambassador to Mexico (1971-1974) and the Netherlands (1977-1979).
In September 1979 he assumed his final post as Ambassador to Britain. During his three years in Britain, Argov forcefully and articulately put forward the Israeli case to a generally hostile Foreign Office and media. He was held in high esteem by Anglo-Jewry and traveled often to visit outlying Jewish communities.
On the night of June 3, 1982, Ambassador Argov was shot and critically wounded by Palestinian terrorists from the Abu Nidal group of the PLO outside London's Dorchester Hotel, where he was one of 80 diplomats attending a private dinner. He was hospitalized in Jerusalem for 21 years and remained permanently incapacitated until his death on February 23, 2003 at the age of 73.

Cross-posted on IsraPundit and David's Israel Blog

2003-02-24T10:21:00.000-08:00

Comparing Arab and Jewish Exremists

Recently the New York Times has run two separate articles; one was called "The Unsettlers" about a small group of Israelis who take up positions in what the Times calls "outposts," the other about various armed bands of Palestinian terrorists called "Armed With Weapons and a Will, Palestinian Factions Plot Revenge." The contrast between the two articles is fascinating.
I suppose the one paragraph that most got my goat was from the "Revenge" article:

In referring to attacks "inside Israel," Abu Mujahid was touching on a long-running dispute within the intifada. Mr. Arafat says — and some of Israel's top intelligence officials affirm — that he is pursuing an independent state only in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the territories Israel occupied in 1967.

Here's a very conscious effort to whitewash Arafat. Even "Israel's top intelligence officials affirm" that Arafat's aims are limited to "the territories Israel occupied in 1967." Of course there may be some top officials who have that view. Bennett doesn't name them. But surely many others dispute it. (The current chief of staff, Gen Yaalon, among them.) But that's not what important to Bennett. Here he is clearly taking sides. Arafat is a moderate says the NY Times reporter. Arafat is a moderate say Israeli intelligence officials. Arab extremists say that Arafat is a moderate.
Does it make a difference what the PA's media says? Does it make a difference what the PA's educational systems says? Does it make a difference that the militia associated with Arafat disputes this characterization? Does it make a difference that Arafat himself disputes this?
Well, no it doesn't. Arafat is a moderate and we have the word of the NY Times reporter to vouch for him.
Compare the treatment given to Moshe Zar the focus of the "The Unsettlers." He's associated with the Israeli terrorist underground and with PM Sharon. Worse:

since 1979, Zar has been buying land in the territory from individual Palestinians. It is a controversial practice; some Palestinians who have sold land to Jews have been killed as collaborators.

Horrors. It's controversial because Arabs have been killed for doing it. But the underlying Nuremberg type rationale, is not controversial. According to the Palestinian Legislative Council, selling land to Jews is high treason.
So it goes Arafat's association with extremists is a way to exonerate him. He's different. Sharon's association with extremists is a way to convict him. He's just like them. Worse, the Arab extremists seek to kill; the Jewish ones seek to build. But to the NY Times who's worse?
Cross Posted to Israpundit and David's Israel Blog

2003-02-20T09:30:00.000-08:00

All the News That's Fit to Spin
Who caused the explosion that killed six Hamas terrorists this past Sunday? It's an interesting question that's still not entirely clear. The Washington Post, for example, noted in an article "6 Palestinians Die in Gaza Blast; 3 Killed in West Bank " that:

The Israeli army has killed numerous Palestinian militants by rigging cars, telephone booths and cellular telephones with explosives. But many other Palestinian militants have died while trying to build or transport often unstable homemade bombs.

Similarly in a New York Times article, "Hamas Says Israel Killed at Least 6 in Gaza Blast" the reporter notes:

Hamas blamed Israel for the blast today, suggesting that the men were killed by a booby-trapped toy plane. But the Israeli government did not comment on the deaths. Israel has tracked down and killed scores of militants, often without claiming responsibility. Many have also died by accidentally triggering bombs they were assembling.

James Bennet of the New York Times does all he can to suggest that the Israeli government was responsible for the explosion. For example, in the above paragraph, he uses the Israeli government's silence on the explosion as support for his belief.
Still the Washington Post reports:

It was unclear tonight which scenario was more likely the cause of today's deaths, which occurred in the al-Zeitun neighborhood of Gaza City, a Hamas stronghold.

The Jerusalem Post, on the other hand, makes it clear that it believes that the explosion was the result of a work accident: Six Hamas men killed while packing drone with explosives The JPost seems to be focusing on a Hamas statement:

Hours after the incident Hamas released a statement declaring the six were planning to pack an unmanned drone with explosives to blow up inside Israel in a mega-attack.

Still the JPost doesn't clarify that the terrrorists were actually working on rigging the plane at the time. The NY Times on the other hand even plays down the Hamas statement:

Later, in a statement, Hamas said the men had been working on a small remote-controlled plane, which they evidently planned to use in an attack. Hamas said the men had received the plane today, implying that it had been booby-trapped by Israel.

"[E]vidently?" Both the JPost and Ha'aretz reported that Hamas claimed that the terrorists were planning to use a remote-controlled plane in an attack on Israel. Evidently the confirmation by Hamas is not enough for the Times. The Washington Post also seems to have missed something here:

In the Gaza Strip, the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, identified the six dead men as its members and said in a statement that they were killed in an explosion that occurred while the group was examining an item in the trunk of a car.

What that object might be isn't explained by the Washington Post. And the WPost is the only story of the four that doesn't mention that the terrorists were working with remotely controlled plane. The only drone the WPost mentions is the Israeli one that Hamas claimed triggered the explosion.
The report with the most details was the one from Ha'aretz:

Palestinian sources said the six had purchased the drone not long ago and that it had apparently come with a bomb hidden inside. Yesterday, the six were standing in a courtyard as the drone carried out a test flight overhead when the bomb exploded. Hamas' military wing is now trying to figure out how and from whom the six purchased the drone.
Army sources said that Hamas first showed an interest in pilotless drones, both as a means of collecting intelligence and as a means of carrying out attacks, about a year ago.

There seems to be a disconnect here: the suggestion in the first paragraph the drone was rigged by Israel; the second says that Hamas has been eyeing drones for an attack for awhile. (Of course, it's possible that Israel, aware of the new threat, boobytrapped a prototype. But there's no suggestion, except from Ha'aretz that that may have been the case. The American papers mostly consider the possibility that the killing of the six terrorists was revenge for the deadly attack by Hamas.)
Eric Silver of the Indpendent takes the Hamas line, pretty much uncritically, in his account of the explosion:

Hamas accused Israel last night of detonating a car bomb that killed six of the Islamic movement's activists and wounded three in a farm south of Gaza City yesterday.
The dead included Nidal Farkhat, a leading militant, whose brother killed five Jewish students in a Gaza settlement a year ago.
Palestinian witnesses said Sunday's blast was set off by remote control from a pilotless drone flying overhead. An Israeli spokesman lent credence to the report by declining to confirm or deny it. The explosion came as Israel was burying four soldiers killed on Saturday in the Gaza Strip after a roadside bomb, planted by Hamas, blew up their tank.
Israeli tanks entered Gaza City in the early hours of this morning, surrounded the house of a leading militant.Witnesses said about 35 tanks moved into position around a five-storey building in Gaza City where Ahmed Ghandour and his family live. Palestinians said Mr Ghandour is an aide to Hamas' bombmaker, Adnan al-Roul, believed responsible for planning the attack on the tank.
The war of revenge and counter-revenge is escalating. Abdul-Aziz Rantissi, a Hamas spokesman, said last night: "We will retaliate for this new crime, for Israel's new act of terror. They will pay a very expensive price."

By associating the explosion with the blockade of Ahmed Ghandour, Silver is attempting linkage. Even if Israel was responsible for knocking off the six terrorists, it seems unlikely it had anything to do with tank attack. Finally, it's worth mentioning that on January 14, 2003, DebkaFiles reported on, "Arafat’s New Terror Weapon: Exploding Toy Planes."

The Palestinian leader’s daily routine, as revealed by our intelligence data, is particularly revealing.
He is fully occupied in arranging the funding and deployment of new weapons, tricks, ruses and devices for the coming cycle of terrorist operations, that bank heavily on the effectiveness of… a toy: Model planes packed with explosives and operated by remote control .
Last month, Palestinian toy importers in Jerusalem and Ramallah were told to order hundreds of these toys for distribution to Palestinian children in hospitals. Subsidies from European Union member-governments could legitimately be allocated to this humanitarian purpose.
The model airplanes were purchased in Europe and shipped quite openly to the Palestinian shopkeepers.
According to our sources, not a single toy reached an injured Palestinian child. The model planes were sent to Palestinian workshops for conversion into miniature air bombers with explosive payloads. Tanzim militiamen from Arafat’s Fatah, sent out to open areas near Jericho to test the new weapons, discovered they could fly to a distance of 1 kilometer and an altitude of 300 meters. The only problem was how to guide the plane to target inside an Israeli built-up area when it was no longer visible to the remote control holder. A small adjustment was made in the engine enabling him to cut it out from a distance, so that it dropped to the ground and blew up.

Ha'aretz, pretty much confirms the gist - though not the particulars - of this report. For the papers - Washington Post and Independent - that ignored the reports that the PA is attempting to use remote control planes for terror attacks, it's one more example of how the media - wittingly or unwittingly - covers for Arafat & co. While I shed no tears for the six who were killed, I am no more convinced now that Israel killed them than I was when I started. The New York Times was wrong for (echoing Eric Silver and ) slyly supporting the view that Israel arranged the explosion. I know that the Baltimore Jewish Times carries Eric Silver from Israel. I've never been a fan, but after reading this piece, I'm even more disgusted. How can any Jewish publication carry reports from a guy who openly sides with the enemy? This isn't my being upset over balance. Silver will say that I have blinders on for Israel. He clearly has blinders on for Hamas as he uncritically carries that organization's account in his report.

2003-02-13T10:35:00.000-08:00

How America influences Israel

Robert Kaiser's "Bush and Sharon Nearly Identical On Mideast Policy" has been discussed on IsraPundit. I've found another article documenting the ties between the current governments in Israel and the US. AFTER IRAQ by Nicholas Lemann is free from a lot of the sneaky terms that Kaiser uses. I get the feeling that Lemann is not comfortable with the likes of Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. But it's also clear from the article that he feels that it's more a matter of Americans in a position to influence having a similar worldview to people in the Israeli government. If anything he suggests that it may that it's a case Americans affecting Israel's direction rather than the other way around. Check it out while you can.

2003-02-13T03:16:00.000-08:00

Cycle of violence.

For a while Daniel Pipes has been predicting that if Israel held firm it would eventually win the war against the PA. Maybe this is overly optimistic but according to "Analysis / IDF reverses suicide bombers' success-failure ratio" by Amos Harel in Ha'aretz, there is evidence that that Israel's refusal to give in is starting to make a difference. In addition the PA is starting to realize that it has something to lose:

Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz made one recent comment which attracted little attention in Israel but the Palestinians noted it very carefully. He said in interview with Israel Radio that if the Kassam rocket fire from Gaza continued, Israel would consider reoccupying the Gaza Strip. Although an invasion is far from happening - and the wisdom of it is hotly disputed within the IDF - yet this was no slip of the tongue.

"The Palestinians are developing a real fear of losing the Strip," a senior General Staff officer told Haaretz. "Mofaz made them made them worry that what has already happened in the West Bank will happen in Gaza as well. So far the PA has succeeded in retaining relative control in Gaza. Its senior officials have much to lose if their reign there collapses."

The Palestinians are very aware of something that most Israelis have barely noticed - before the outbreak of the Intifada in September 2000, Gaza was a Palestinian "sea" with a few "islands" of settlements, but is now a collection of isolated Palestinian enclaves surrounded by wide "corridors" controlled by the IDF. They also understand that IDF operations to stop the rocket fire, such as those now being conducted around Beit Hanun, could easily be transformed into a permanent IDF presence in these areas.

Is this a decisive reversal? Maybe, maybe not. But it has brought about some change in the rhetoric of the leaders of the PA. According to MEMRI "Palestinian Leaders: Our Strategy Brought Sharon Victory." Granted many of the comments are self serving and they show little remorse except to the degree that the violence against Israel hurt the Palestinian cause. But a lot of the bluster is gone. (Though perhaps it persists in other comments.) Here too we have a leader of the PA saying that he rejects suicide bombings. Of course the interview is self serving and not a single tough question is asked. I particularly liked this:

Doesn’t it make you laugh when the side that loses 4,000 is [said to be] the aggressor and the one that did the killing is not responsible? The Palestinians didn’t choose armed struggle. During the first month after Sharon went to al-Aqsa [a visit to a holy Muslim site in Jerusalem that is widely blamed for restarting the intifada] Israel killed 107 and two Israelis died. Yet there were no suicide attacks....I believe the Israeli army killed [Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin because they were against a peace treaty; they want a security treaty, not a peace treaty. Mofaz wants to stay in the West Bank while the Palestinian security should work under Israeli domination. That’s why [the Israelis] escalated [the conflict.]

Of course no one (in the West) argues that NATO was the aggressor against Serbia just because Serbia suffered more losses than NATO. Also, the notes here show a bias. Why doesn't the editor acknowledge that there was evidence that the PA was planning the renewed violence for months? Finally, the conspiracy theory here is incredible and the interviewer doesn't follow it up with, "What's your evidence?" Still, at least the PA is acknowledging that they have to take action to prevent violence against Israel. Even if they're insincere about it. If they take action and fewer innocents are killed that is a start.

2003-02-09T21:47:00.000-08:00

Good News from Israel

Tired of all the cynical reporting from Israel; focusing almost excusively (not too mention obsessively) about Israel's warts? There is an antidote: Israel21c. Israel might not be thriving like it was five years ago; but neither has it hidden its head in the sand. Go here and see not only how Israel helps itself; but how it helps the world.

2003-02-09T21:38:00.000-08:00

Why I'm glad that Gore lost

Rober Kaiser's article "Bush and Sharon Nearly Identical On Mideast Policy" (already explicated by Joseph Norland) is one of those articles that again reinforces my belief that Israel is fortunate to have a sympathetic President residing on Pennsylvania Avenue. It was only five years ago that a Washington Post reporter could barely contain his glee that President Clinton was practicing "snub diplomacy" with then-PM Netanyahu. Aside from Joseph's accurate criticism of Kaiser's article that it implies that "America's foreign policy is being made by Israeli PM Ariel Sharon" and thus echoing the vile views of the ZOG believers, what's disturbing about the article is its premise. Kaiser, though he is dispassionate and clinical throughout seems amazed that anyone should assume that one side (specifically Israel) should be favored over the other. Kaiser, for example, quote retired General Anthony Zinni:

Since then, U.S. policy has been in step with Sharon's. The peace process is "quiescent," said retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, Bush's special envoy to the region. "I've kind of gone dormant," he added.

Does he mention that each of the three times Zinni was dispatched to the Middle East, his arrival was greeted by stepped up Palestinian terrorism? Would the fact that "peace moves" seem to breed terror have anything to do with the Bush administration's beliefs?
Kaiser even seems befuddled about the notion that anyone might consider anything other than that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the central issue in the Middle East. Did Iraqi aggression have anything to do with Israel?
Despite my misgivings about Kaiser's article I find it re-assuring. For now Israel and the U.S. seem to be on the same page.
That's not to say there aren't concerns.
Today's Arutz-7 gives voice to some of these concerns, quoting its correspondent Haggai Huberman:

"Both sides are interested in showing that there's talks. Sharon knows that after Iraq, there will be intensified American interest in our region. He therefore wants to be able to show that there's something going on, as if to tell the Americans that they don't have to come down on us too hard. He doesn't want them forcing the Road Map timetable on him... The Palestinians are interested in having talks because they want to do everything they can to show that they're not associated with Saddam Hussein. They're trying to extricate themselves from this image, especially as Saddam's fall will put his allies next on the target..."
Huberman concluded that he has trouble believing that Sharon "is really pushing for a process with dangers of which he is quite aware. I'm not saying we can be complacent - he needs to be watched very carefully - but I don't think he will let these talks come to fruition and lead to a withdrawal, certainly not at present."

Still if we'd gotten Al Gore to be President this might have been the prevailing wisdom:

A particular imbalance in the process is the remarkable blind spot of Israelis for the regular nonviolent protests by Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. A suicide bombing that kills only a few speaks louder than thousands of hours of Palestinian nonviolent protest

And this says nothing of the incitement that springs seemingly from every single organ of Palestinian society. The above comes from an op-ed by Hady Amr who was identified as "national director for ethnic American outreach for Al Gore's presidential campaign." Who would you rather have on your side? Condoleezza Rice's boss or Hady Amr's?

2003-02-09T04:13:00.000-08:00

Life Under Saddam

Saddam isn't simply some misunderstood bully he is a very dangerous one. What's he up to? A recent article in the Washington Post describes a conversation between Saddam's bombmaker Khidhir Hamza and Richard Perle:

Afterward, this odd, portly pair -- Perle the Washington insider, Hamza the former paladin of Saddam's palace -- get down to the details. They delight in swapping the latest intelligence about how Iraq may have modified aluminum tubes to enrich uranium.
It's something of a preview of Powell's U.N. assertions: that those tubes, which Iraq said were for ordinary missiles, were crucial to building a nuclear weapon. "This was part of the deception program," Perle says. Hamza nods in agreement. "I know, I know."

So Hamza thinks that Saddam's after a nuclear weapon. Unfortunately, the article, "The Smoking Gun," doesn't give much information about Iraq. For more on Iraq and the kind of man read Daniel Pipes's review of Hamza's book "Saddam's Bombmaker," or "Tales of the Tyrant" by Mark Bowden from the Atlantic. Here is a description of Saddam's first purge:

On July 18, 1979, he invited all the members of the Revolutionary Command Council and hundreds of other party leaders to a conference hall in Baghdad. He had a video camera running in the back of the hall to record the event for posterity. Wearing his military uniform, he walked slowly to the lectern and stood behind two microphones, gesturing with a big cigar. His body and broad face seemed weighted down with sadness. There had been a betrayal, he said. A Syrian plot. There were traitors among them. Then Saddam took a seat, and Muhyi Abd al-Hussein Mashhadi, the secretary-general of the Command Council, appeared from behind a curtain to confess his own involvement in the putsch. He had been secretly arrested and tortured days before; now he spilled out dates, times, and places where the plotters had met. Then he started naming names. As he fingered members of the audience one by one, armed guards grabbed the accused and escorted them from the hall. When one man shouted that he was innocent, Saddam shouted back, "Itla! Itla!"—"Get out! Get out!" (Weeks later, after secret trials, Saddam had the mouths of the accused taped shut so that they could utter no troublesome last words before their firing squads.) When all of the sixty "traitors" had been removed, Saddam again took the podium and wiped tears from his eyes as he repeated the names of those who had betrayed him. Some in the audience, too, were crying—perhaps out of fear. This chilling performance had the desired effect. Everyone in the hall now understood exactly how things would work in Iraq from that day forward. The audience rose and began clapping, first in small groups and finally as one. The session ended with cheers and laughter. The remaining "leaders"—about 300 in all—left the hall shaken, grateful to have avoided the fate of their colleagues, and certain that one man now controlled the destiny of their entire nation. Videotapes of the purge were circulated throughout the country.
It was what the world would come to see as classic Saddam. He tends to commit his crimes in public, cloaking them in patriotism and in effect turning his witnesses into accomplices. The purge that day reportedly resulted in the executions of a third of the Command Council. (Mashhadi's performance didn't spare him; he, too, was executed.) During the next few weeks scores of other "traitors" were shot, including government officials, military officers, and people turned in by ordinary citizens who responded to a hotline phone number broadcast on Iraqi TV. Some Council members say that Saddam ordered members of the party's inner circle to participate in this bloodbath.

I read in another account that the last detail did indeed happen. So this is the man President Bush is proposing to disarm and people have a problem with that? It seems that the antiwar movement is really more the pro-Saddam movement. These "pacifists" should make the case why he should be left alone.
Cross posted on David's Israel Blog.

2003-02-04T22:12:00.000-08:00

The Play's the Thing

Muslims in Cincinatti are trying to stop the production of play called "Paradise" that features a seventeen year old suicide bomber. It is based on the true story of the killer of Chaim Smadar and Rachel Levy. Though the playwright understands:

Mr. O'Malley continued, "There was one man who said — chillingly — that suicide bombing was `the same as "Give me liberty or give me death." ' To my mind there is nothing about adult men strapping bombs onto kids — male and female — and sending them off to kill themselves and murder others that resonates even remotely with Patrick Henry's now axiomatic saying about the American Revolution."

he still has the unhealthy tendency to equate both sides such as saying, "I've worked to show the hard-line point of view from both sides of the conflict without justifying or condoning suicide bombing." FWIW the young murderess got a rather sympathetic writeup in the NY Times. Fortunately, Bret Stephens of the Jerusalem Post did a nice job of critiquing the Times story. I'll quote him because the link is no longer valid. Stephens notes that:

"But who's kidding whom? There's a hero to this story. She's a quiet, studious, beautiful Palestinian girl, with a rich and mysterious inner life, who one day bids a nonchalant farewell to her classmates, leaves a "grim warren of alleys and tightly packed dwellings," and commits something perfectly abrupt and terrible, in the stylized manner of ritual Japanese suicide or a French art-house film. The Rachel Levy of Greenberg's telling is, by contrast, just another transplanted JAP."

He also importantly points out that the effort to compare Rachel Levy with her murderer leaves out the hero of the story: Chaim Smadar.

For whatever your view on the vexed subject of martyrdom or murder, the supermarket bombing was not a one-for-one deal. There was a second victim, security guard Haim Smadar. The Israeli press has given him his due, as does Etgar Lefkovits's story in today's Jerusalem Post magazine. But in the West, he doesn't count: his presence interrupts the happy fictive symmetries of its political imagination. So a word about Haim Smadar.
He was a father of five. Two of his children are deaf. He had been married for more than 30 years. He made a security guard's salary. He prided himself on his alertness. He received a commendation last year from Mayor Ehud Olmert for his diligence. His knowledge of Arabic - he was born in Tunisia - may have alerted him to the danger posed by Akhras. Witnesses attest that his last words, as he struggled to stop Akhras from entering the supermarket were, "You are not coming in here. You and I will blow up here." He may have saved 12 or 20 or 30 lives, or more.

2003-01-31T01:53:00.000-08:00

Letters to the Times

In the NY Times today, the letters page had a wealth sense about Israel. Three of the four letters were supportive of Israel. The fourth had a depressingly Jewish name as its author. You can find letters under the title of "The Israeli Vote: What Was the Message?" Yoni Rosenzweig argues:

"You would be hard pressed to find a country that would make a different decision — elect a leader who promises concession to a perceived aggressor — when the enemy shows no inclination for a peaceable solution. To Israelis, the choice lies with the Palestinians: give up your brutal leadership and tactics or watch the sovereignty — once within your grasp — evaporate."

Exactly. That sentiment flies directly in the face of yesterday's NY Times editorial, "Ariel Sharon's Paradoxical Victory." The Times wonders:

"The strong Likud showing was something of a paradox, considering that opinion polls show that a consistent majority of Israelis favor exactly what Mr. Sharon has not done so far — remove most Jewish settlements from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, establish a clear and defensible national border and help set up a Palestinian state next door."

It's not clear that this is what polls show; it is clear that this is what the Times thinks is equitable. But however generous Israelis are, they are apparently not suicidal. That's a point that the Times can't accept. Douglas Altabef contributes another valuable observation:

"The fallacious assumption underlying Gadi Taub's "pick your poison" scenario for an Israel that has not withdrawn from the West Bank (Op-Ed, Jan. 29) is that Palestinians are incapable of changing. This mind-set has always beset the peace movement: the future is solely a function of what Israel chooses to do."

That assumption underlies much of the conventional wisdom about the Middle East. At least from the West. Taub's column, "The Results are in and Peace Lost" is an obnoxious amalgam of left wing pieties that have been so prevelant in analyses of the Middle East: "Arafat and Sharon are partners out to destroy peace; Israel's hold onto communites in Yesha and Azza make peace impossible; only Mitzna had a realistic solution to the problem; etc." It's the end that really gets my goat:

The rejection of Mr. Mitzna's plan, coupled with Mr. Sharon's clear victory, could be one more step toward turning Israel into another Lebanon.

Given the proliferation of Lebanon originated suicide bombing into Israel; this is a bad joke. The surrender to the PLO/PA has, unfortunately done a lot to turn Israel into Lebanon. In Labor's successful campaign in 1992 it promised to take Gaza out of Tel Aviv - a reference to the killing of 15 year old Helena Rapp. Instead by giving the PLO/PA territory and room to operate unimpeded, Oslo brought Lebanon into Israel.
To it's great shame the Times also published "The Wrong Words" by Abdel Monem Said, which claims:

"The historical bond between the United States and the moderate Arab states and mainstream Arabs in general contributed to the stability of the Middle East. For half a century, the bond worked well — to thwart Communist expansion in the cold war, to contain the waves of Iranian Islamic revolution and to end in 1991 Saddam Hussein's radical and regional ambitions."

Notice not a word of the aid that the US gives to Egypt (Said is Egyptian) or an acknowledgement that the so-called moderate Arab states consistently vote against American interests in the UN. What's changed is that America - I think - is starting to see that there is a terrible cost to be paid for ignoring evil. America won't simply turn a blind eye to its totalitarian sometime allies in the Middle East simply because they have a lot of oil.

2003-01-29T17:55:00.000-08:00

Is APN undermining Israel?

Folks from American for Peace Now often complained that "right-wing American Jews" who are out of touch with the mainstream Israeli view advocating peace undermined the left wing governments in Israel. Now the shoe's on the other foot. It appears that APN is not only seeking to undermine the legitmately elected Israeli government; it's undermining Israel's peace movement. Last week I pointed to an article by Debra DeLee asking the Bush 43 to emulate his father and use the withholding of loan guarantees as a way to force Israel to withdraw from Judea, Samaria and Azza. Today IMRA published an interview with Yuli Tamir who says:

I don't believe that we should do anything that would prevent loan guarantees because we know how difficult the economic situation is right here and therefore I don't think it's the right thing to do.

Ms. DeLee, one of the people you purport to be speaking for doesn't want your help. Give it up.

2003-01-29T17:44:00.000-08:00

The PA Constitution (some comic relief)

Thanks to IMRA we can see all 220 articles of the PA's constitution. Apparently the PA decided to take calls for reform seriously and drafted a constitution. Some of it has a quality of my 4 year old. If a sibling claims that he's bothering them and he replies "I didn't hit him." I can be reasonably sure he did hit his brother. If he identifies the offense; he probably did it. (If he were innocent he'd just say his brother/sister was bothering him.) Some of these articles have a quality that is so patently false, you know that the PA is admitting that the opposite will occur (and has occurred). I'm providing relevant news and commentary to selected articles of this legal masterpiece.

Article 4
Palestine is an independent state with complete sovereignty that cannot be conceded. Its system shall be republican and its lands are unitary and indivisible.

Yes it is. It is indivisible and here they are honest. Take a look at the insignia at the Fatah website if you think it means that indivisible is only referring to Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

Article 6
Islam shall be the official religion of the state. The monotheistic religions shall be respected.

Article 7
The principles of the Islamic Shari`a are a primary source for legislation. The legislative branch shall determine personal status law under the authority of the monotheistic religions according to their denominations, in keeping with the provisions of the constitution and the preservation of unity, stability, and advancement of the Palestinian people.

These are of course inconsistent. Here's a sample of the "equality" Shari'a calls for thanks to dhimmi.com:

"DHIMMI: A BRIEF OVERVIEW
7th-21st century. The notion of Dhimmitude, originating in the 7th century, still applies today to non-Muslims under Islamic rule—whether Jews or Christians, whether in Saudi Arabia or in Sudan. Dhimmitude began in 628 CE when Mohammed and his forces conquered the Jewish oasis at Khaybar. They massacred many of the Jews and forced the rest to accept a pact ("Dhimma") which rendered them inferiror to their Muslim conquerors. Over the centuries, the ideology of Dhimmitude expanded into a formal system of religious apartheid.
Institutionalized apartheid. In Shari’a law, there are official discriminations against the Dhimmi, such as the poll-tax or jizya.
No legal rights. Jews may not testify in court against a Muslim and have no legal right to dispute or challenge anything done to them by Muslims. There is no such thing as a Muslim raping a Jewish woman; there is no such thing as a Muslim murdering a Jew (at most, it can be manslaughter). In contrast, a Jew who strikes a Muslim is killed.
Humiliation and vulnerability. Jews and Christians had to walk around with badges or veils identifying them as Jews or Christians. The yellow star that Jews had wear in Nazi Germany did not originate in Europe. It was borrowed from the Muslim world where it was part of the apartheid system of Dhimmitude."

Yes the yellow star was not a German invention.

Article 32
The right of the Palestinian refugee to return to his home and the original home of his ancestors is a natural right which cannot expire. Its exercise may not be delegated nor surrendered.

And what happens when someone surrenders this right voluntarily? According to Carol Greenwald there's a law governing that:

The PA passed legislation in 1998 making Israeli ownership of Palestinian real estate a "harm to national security" that constitutes a "crime of high treason" punishable by death. 33 The murders of five Palestinian land dealers who sold property to Israelis indicated that the Palestinian Authority was not simply using rhetoric.

The PAL-PLC website is down, but this law was indeed written. Isn't it amazing the PA has no trouble finding real estate dealers but can't find terrorists?

Article 59
Private education has freedom provided it does not violate the public order and public decency or offend the monotheistic religions. The law shall regulate the supervision of the state over its organization and curricula.

Teaching the children about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion doesn't offend the monotheistic religion of Judaism. Does it?

Article 38
The accused my not be subject to any coercion or torture. The accused must be treated as innocent until his guilt has been proven in a fair trial granting him the guarantees of self-defense and the assistance of an attorney.

There are many examples of how the PA has fulfilled this take a look at the paragraph entitled "Executing the Retarded" here or the original article at the Jerusalem Post. This story also emphasizes the PA's commitment to due process as well as its progressiveness in treating women much the same as it treats men. (See the next article of the constitution.)

Article 63
Women are the full sisters of m. They have rights and duties as guaranteed by the shari`a and established in law.

Ever hear of honor killings?

Article 130
The remuneration of the president shall be determined by law.

And I'm sure the remuneration of all other officials will also be determined in such an honest manner illustrated in the following paragraph (emphasis mine):

As Arafat Critics Close In, Deputies Vie in the Wings
By JOHN KIFNER
A central part of this competition is between Mr. Rajoub and Mr. Dahlan, both heads of branches of the powerful Preventive Security Service, whose task under the Oslo accords was to keep Palestinian militants from attacking Israel. Both men rose from obscurity to be street-fighting leaders in the first intifada, and both endured years in Israeli jails, where they learned Hebrew. Both have also been living large: Mr. Dahlan built a mansion in Gaza so huge that Mr. Arafat had to tell him it was ostentatious. When an outraged Mr. Rajoub led a press tour of his damaged house after an Israeli rocket attack, journalists were fascinated by his marble whirlpool bath.

Any of these articles from the American Center for Democracy show us the money of the PA and where it goes. Finally, Morton Klein does a fine job of summing up the PA's past commitment to the principles of the rule of law. No doubt this overblown constitution will be the roadmap for a cleaned up PA. Not.

2003-01-21T10:28:00.000-08:00

Peace now is oblivious

Peace Now is nothing if not persistent. In today's Washington Post APN's CEO Debra DeLee argues that the United States should be "Aiding Israel In Ending the Settlements." In short, even at this time of great trials for the Jewish state, Peace Now wants Bush 43 to emulate his father and use loan guarantees that Israel might need right now as a club with which to force Israel to transfer Jews out of their homes into areas she approves of Jews living. (DeLee, is a very prominent activist in the Democratic Party and was one of the organizers of the 1996 Democratic convention in Philadelphia. Maybe the president should consider that before taking her suggestion.) In the mind of DeLee and people like Thomas Friedman, it's those damn settlements that prevent peace in the Middle East; not the Muslim hatred of Jews.
One of the outrages of Peace Now - in addition to suggesting that the President pressure Israel when Israel is in distress - is that it shows more sympathy to the PA than it does to the country whose security it says is so important. Go to the section on the APN website called Peace Links and you'll find a link to the PA's official propaganda outlet the WAFA "news" agency but not to the IDF website, which contains some of Israel's best hasbara.
Why am I going here?
Well the only current article that you can access right now at WAFA is "Address of President Arafat on the occasions of the National Day and the New Year" (There is an archive.) Well that address is Arafat's annual celebration of the PLO's first terror attack in the Israeli city of Beit She'an on January 1, 1965. That's 2 1/2 years before there was occupied territory!!! Arafat still believes that the issue is Israel in its 1948 borders; not its 1967 borders. Peace Now even provides a link to it. But the folks who run that organization simply ignore the obvious implications of Arafat's speech.

2003-01-17T01:17:00.000-08:00

Zionism a relic of the Past?

To understand Matt Rees's assessment of Zionism in Time magazine is to understand that Zionism is a reaction to the past reality of Arab hatred of Israel:

"For the past decade, Israelis felt they were leaving behind the pioneering days of Zionism, the movement that campaigned to found the Jewish state and create a strong character in its young people, all of whom had to serve in the army. The phrase post-Zionism came to describe the country's effort to build an individualistic, high-tech economy. Most Israelis hoped their country would become like anyplace else: ordinary, boring and safe. But two years of violent intifadeh — bloody Israeli occupation of West Bank towns and frequent Palestinian suicide bombings, like the twin attacks in Tel Aviv that claimed 22 lives on Jan. 5 — have snapped Israelis back into the mixture of nationalism and fear at the root of Zionism. What used to be a minority view — the conviction that Israel's enemies mean to wipe it off the map and that to make peace is to invite extinction — is now mainstream thinking. It can be measured in the high level of response to call-ups for army reserve duty by ordinary Israelis, and it's erased almost entirely any lingering support for the concessions offered to the Palestinians in the 1993 Oslo peace accord."

The fact is that Zionism exists quite apart from Arab hatred. Zionism is simply the belief that Jews came from the land originally known as Israel and that the Jewish right to the land is rooted in that history. The Arab hatred of Israel, is in no small part a reaction to Zionism; Rees has it backwards. The historical Jewish right to the land of Israel is incompatible with the tenets of Islam. In case anyone doubts that the Arabs still hate Israel and have hated Israel (and would wipe it off the map if given a chance) despite sometimes making "peace" with Israel, he should read this interview with Meir Litvak, which says, in part:

“Even for Egyptian intellectuals today, many years after the Peace Treaty, Israel's existence represents an admission of the defeat of the Arab national vision. It is a confession that Egypt has failed to realize its historical destiny and greatness. For Arab regimes it is convenient to let the anti-Semitic propaganda flourish in order to divert the attention of Arab public opinion away from their own failures. A rulers' covenant of convenience exists with the intellectuals who can vent all their frustration on the status of the Arabs against the Jews and Israel. That is much more agreeable to the Arab governments than focusing on the economic, cultural and social failure of the Arab world."

And if that's how Egypt feels do you think the feelings for Israel are any warmer in Syria?

2003-01-17T01:16:00.000-08:00

If this is success...

Well the conference between Jack Straw and various Palestinian politicians was a success. Or at least according to the enthusiastic headline the New York Times, "Britain Calls Its Conference on Palestinian Reform a Success. The Times, to its credit notes the Israeli objection to the conference by getting a pretty good quote from Zalman Shoval:

"Then this same Yasir Arafat sends people who are part of his terrorist organization in order to bask in the diplomatic limelight in London . . . If the Palestinians want to effect reform, reform should be effected right here."

to end the article. A more thorough debunking of the Palestinian reform efforts is a available at the IDF website (an excellent resource; better than MFA sometimes) here:

"In the political sphere, after successfully muting the "change demanding" voices from within, calling for significant reform in the composition of the Palestinian government, Arafat is presently engaged in removing the international pressure to make administrative changes in the Palestinian Authority including appointing a fully empowered Prime Minister (as opposed to the capacity of the Prime-Ministerial office as described in the constitution that will only become valid in the future after the establishment of a Palestinian State).
In addition, Arafat displays a positive attitude regarding the "Road Map" and the reforms it implicates. However he channels these reforms in directions that are of no threat to his personal position and is in fact unwilling to concede to the primary demand that is the very foundation of the "Road Map" which is his withdrawal from the center of Palestinian decision making.
In the constitutional sphere, The Palestinians have recently undertaken intensive high media-profile action in an endeavor to establish a constitution for the future Palestinian State. This was done by the reappearance of the "Constitution Council" headed by Nabil Sha'ath intended to write an inaugural draft of the Palestinian Constitution by January 2003 in order to gain positive points with those who endorsed the advancement of the reforms in facets that do not obligate immediate implementation. The completion of the draft on the night of the "London Conference" was intended to conceal the lack of genuine and sincere action on the Palestinian side in other facets of the reform and to assist in shifting the "spotlight" to the demands stipulated of Israel.
In the security sphere, Arafat executed a number of personnel changes, appointing a new Internal Affairs Minister, dismissing the Chief of Police, Jabali, and the Head of Palestinian Preventive Security, Rajob. These measures were damaging to the performance of these apparatuses.
Regardless, Arafat maintains exclusive control over the Palestinian apparatuses. No genuine change has occurred in the manner in which the security apparatus acts or in its reputed activity against terror. The new Minister of Internal Affaires, Hani Alhasan, has yet to take real action to restore control and peace on the ground. Hani AlHasan recent Moves in the Gaza Strip are a manifestation of the increasing acknowledgment that action must be affected in light of the demands within and from abroad and concern over Israeli action in the Gaza Strip. Nevertheless, This does not implicate a change in the policy towards terror factors in the Gaza Strip and does not include clear and encompassing instruction to act against them, but an attempt to reach understandings and agreements.
In the financial sphere, Minister of Finance Fiad led a number of positive meaningful acts that restrain Arafat's control of the Palestinian Authority budget and open the possibility of deeper transparency in the institutional monetary system. Notwithstanding, he has not yet been successful in preventing Arafat's involvement and control over a large portion of the assets that the Arafat himself owns."

Very worthwhile reading.

2003-01-15T12:31:00.000-08:00

Gal Luft presents a case and history of Israel's policy of killing terrorists. Hillel Halkin presented the case for it in OpinionJournal back in September 2001.

2003-01-13T02:46:00.000-08:00

This is not about Israel but it is of Jewish interest. Today's Times has an article about Al Sharpton. Note how Nagourney uses the passive voice "He has been embroiled in polarizing disputes throughout his career ..." Give me a break!!! He has initiated those disputes. Why is the Times deodorizing this guy? He does it himself at his exploratory website (with the help of others.) Inexcusably and shamefully, New York's The Jewish Week gets in on the act of sprucing up candidate Sharpton. Here's a guy who tells it like it is, starting off with a picture of Sharpton and Arafat!!! It's long but worth reading. (Even if the Central Park jogger was not attacked by the young men who were convicted for nearly killing her; neither was she attacked by her boyfriend.) Fred Siegel wrote a shorter but no less outraged article for the New York Observer that is reprinted here.

"The memory hole into which Freddy's disappeared fits the pattern of Mr. Sharpton's political career. After each major outrage, Mr. Sharpton draws in the press and some selected rubes, and assures them that this time he's really reformed. The first New Sharpton, complete with fawning profiles in the New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker, came after the Tawana Brawley hoax."

Siegel remembers well. Crown Heights was 1991; the fawning New York Times Magazine cover article was 1992 and Freddy's was in 1995. It doesn't take long for Sharpton to initiate a new controversy. It takes less time for his liberal defenders to forget his sins.
Of course, not only is there no Democratic politician who will criticize Sharpton, there are plenty who seek out his endorsement such as Bill Bradley and Hillary Clinton. A few weeks ago Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott lost his position on account of an unguarded remark he made suggesting that he had the warm and fuzzies for segregation. Al Sharpton's outrageous remarks are not unguarded. They are carefully tailored to bring out a strain of racism that is all too present in the African American community. Liberals obfuscate and suggest, like Nagourney, that these controversies "embroil" Sharpton. He is no passive bystander, but the instigator. He may not have been responsible for starting the riots in Crown Heights, but he kept them going. And his behavior at the Freddy's massacre was, at best, marked by reckless disregard of the threats made by those marching with him. (Funny in its history of itself and Sharpton, the National Action Network does not mention Freddy's!) If Sharpton were white he would be poison to whichever political party he attached himself. He will garner at least 10% of the vote in the primaries in which he participates. I wouldn't be surprised if that total ended up between 15% and 20%. Is there any Democrat with the guts to call Sharpton a racist and an antisemite?

Getting back to today's article, the title refers to Sharpton as "wily." He is not wily so much as he's untouchable. He knows that the most influential newspapers in the country will defer to him and not question him too closely. (Nor apparently will Tim Russert according to the article.) So if it's wily to benefit from white liberal guilt, I guess he's wily. "Cynical" is probably a more accurate description. Then there's the reflective picture of Sharton looking out a window accompanying the text. Give me a break. The New York Times should not be the campaign website of any candidate. Certainly not of Al Sharpton. This is PR that he could not buy for any price.

Guess what? This isn't the first time the Times has gone easy on Sharpton. In this excellent article here's a bit more of his "eulogy" from Gavin Cato's funeral.

2003-01-12T19:40:00.000-08:00

I'd have thought that Daniel Pipes's positive assessment of the situation in Israel is overly optimistic. But then I read this article by Dexter Filkins of the New York Times or this article by Khaled Abu Toameh of the Jerusalem Post. Are the walls around crumbling around Arafat? To be sure the Filkins article attempts to absolve Arafat from responsibility by claiming "... the Israelis blamed a faction linked to Mr. Arafat ..." for last week's terrro attack in Tel Aviv. Actually it would more truthful to claim that the faction linked to Arafat claimed credit for the attack.
So is the Likud sinking in the polls? I'm not so sure. This poll from Ha'aretz says, "yes;" this one from Yedioth Ahronot says, "maybe not." A recent editorial in the Jerusalem Post argues that the Judge from the election board overstepped his bounds by cutting of Sharon's press conference. David Weinberg pointed to the hypocrisy in the Israeli media's emphasis on the Sharon scandals. Indeed, the Likud scandals (the vote buying scandal too) seemed to be convenient distractions from the Ginnosar scandal, which would have hurt Labor (and the Left).

2003-01-11T21:33:00.000-08:00

Perhaps I'm too fast to dismiss journalism. Occasionally newspapers do good work. The Jerusalem Post reported that Achille Lauro mastermind, Muhammed Abbas, had visited Egypt. That led to this. Bravo. (Remember the Egyptians are our friends.)
Too often we don't hear of the Israeli heros. Fiama Nirenstein just wrote an article for Commentary "Israel's last Line of Defense." If it gets up on the web I'll post the link. Recently Jonathan Medved wrote Remembering Noam, about Noam Apter, who saved scores of people even as he was dying recently in the Yeshiva at Otniel. Here's an older reminisce about Chaim Smadar.

2003-01-10T10:05:00.000-08:00

Middle East Forum has a couple of provocative articles recently. One, by Ilan Berman, is about the emerging alliance between Israel, Turkey and India. It bolsters a shorter - and less rigorous but no less encouraging - article at OpinionJournal.com by Tunku Varadarajan. The other article is a blistering critique of the Bush administration's conduct of the war on terror by Angelo Codevilla. While we're on the subject of OpinionJournal.com it's worth reading Insane Asylum Policy by Claudia Rosett. She makes it seem as if the Palestinian problem is one big welfare state supported and perpetuated by the UN.
On the subject of United Nations Relief and Works Agency, yesterday Paul McCann, a spokesman for the organization had a letter published in the New York Times denying the Israeli claim that when Iain Hook was killed there was gunfire coming from the UN compound. I had no reason to believe McCann. But I inadvertantly found him involved in an earlier controversy about Jenin in the Weekly Standard. Read his claims and David Tell's refutations.

2003-01-10T02:27:00.000-08:00

Here's and oldie but goodie on the PA's corruption. What's most telling are the first two paragraphs:

"Reporters traipsed through the master bathroom of Jibril Rajoub's house today, getting a highly unusual glimpse of a Palestinian security chief's whirlpool bath and shampoo collection. The marble floor was still littered with the brown glass that blew from the windows when Israeli tanks' shells struck on Sunday.

Pushed for details, Mr. Rajoub revealed that he was naked and dripping wet when the firing began, having stepped out of the shower and run into his bedroom to answer the telephone. By his account, the first of three shells missed him by 30 seconds. All told, his house was hit from three sides, his armored Mercedes was destroyed, and his 11-year-old son's bedroom, complete with Batman rug, was left with bullet-pocked walls."

The whirlpool bath, shampoo collection, and the Mercedes are all signs of very conspicuous consumption. And in a society where most everyone else is deprived these items stand out. If they made Sontag wonder where Rajoub got these resources, she doesn't let on. She doesn't investigate in the course of this article or any other. The lack of curiosity is astounding. So when the Times reports that someone in the PA is fighting corruption it feels like its trying to cover for the PA not cover it. (Rajoub and his fellow security chief Mohammed Dahlan made their fortunes by holding monopolies in certain products and taking a cut of imports/exports to/from PA territory.) Incidentally, I see no reason to distrust the Israeli claim that they were fired upon from someplace near Rajoub's house.

2003-01-09T02:20:00.000-08:00

A few day's ago I included an item about the PA's corruption. I'd hoped to find links to an article of four years ago by Michael Kelly in the Washington Post. Good news, I just found a copy of "Investing in Yasser Arafat." Read it.

2003-01-08T10:12:00.000-08:00

The Israeli election committee's decision to ban two Arab candidates has caused a bit of consternation on the Left. David Newman wrote in the NY Times A Decision That Hurts Israeli Democracy that "[w]ith their two most outspoken representatives banned, Israeli Arabs are saying that once again, they will stay away from the polls." That's far from certain. The Jerusalem Post reported that Arab turnout is not expected to decrease. Two letters to the editor at the Times take opposing views of this decision. Dr. Aaron Lerner of IMRA points out that the law supports the election committee's decision. (Scroll down to the second item.)

2003-01-07T13:24:00.000-08:00

Earlier I linked to Amos Harel's pessimistic analysis of the Tel Aviv terror attack. Not everyone views the event so negatively. Continuing to believe that Israel's resistance to Palestinian violence has been successful, Daniel Pipes sees many signs that Israel is winning its war with the PA.

Speaking of Pipes Stanley Kurtz writes in a recent National Review Online column that Pipes has been disinvited by two different venues sponsored by institutions of higher education. I won't give you all the links, Kurtz does that quite nicely. I did follow one to Colltown, a consortium of Baltimore area colleges. Guess what? One of the institutions of higher learning that is part of Colltown is Baltimore Hebrew University. BHU, under the presidency of Robert O. Freedman was a very friendly home to Peace Now. Events for Peace Now were often publicized on official BHU stationery. Freedman is no longer president, but apparently BHU went along with the boycott of Pipes. I wonder if it went quietly or not.
I am no fan of the New York Review of Books but there is an excellent resource about suicide bombing called "The Suicide Bombers" by Avishai Margalit. To be sure, the article contains some typical leftist pieties such as,

"In December 2001, Arafat delivered a speech in which he called for the terror to stop. He had done this several times before, but always with what seemed a wink. On that occasion, he seemed serious. In the aftermath of September 11, Arafat, according to many reports, was desperate not to repeat his mistake of the Gulf War, when he sided with Saddam Hussein. When Colin Powell called for the future establishment of a Palestinian state, his speech was seen as an achievement for Arafat, at least among his followers. I have heard from well-informed Palestinian and Israeli sources that Arafat's loyalists believed that Arafat wanted in December last year to regain control and to stop the suicide bombings. People close to Arafat also believed that this was clear to the Americans and to the Israelis.

Three weeks of calm followed. Then Sharon ordered the "targeted killing" of Arafat's popular lieutenant, Raad Karmi, and Palestinian protests erupted throughout Israel and Gaza. Arafat's activists became convinced that there was no way that they could reach even a limited understanding with Sharon; the only way to fight was to adopt Hamas's tactic of using suicide bombers. It was at that point, my Palestinian sources told me, that Arafat's people joined in the deadly game of dispatching suicide bombers into Israel proper. Arafat himself, they say, most likely went along with his activists so as not to lose his control over the Palestinian Authority. At the same time it seems likely that he lost control over the al-Aqsa Brigades. In its recent report, Human Rights Watch blames the Palestinian Authority for not acting to stop the terror strikes when it could—that is, before its security apparatus was destroyed by Israel in 2002."

Still Margalit tells in chilling detail the process of convincing a bomber to kill himself.

"In preparing the shuhada for their mission, the idea of winning an instant place in paradise used to have a major part. In a remarkable account, Nasra Hassan talked to a member of Hamas who described to her how people are given instructions on how to act as a shahid: "We focus his attention on Paradise, on being in the presence of Allah, on meeting the Prophet Muhammad, on interceding for his loved ones so that they, too, can be saved from the agonies of Hell, on the houris"— i.e., the heavenly virgins. When she talked to a volunteer who was ready to carry out his mission, but for some reason stopped, he told her about the sense of the immediacy of paradise: "It is very, very near—right in front of our eyes. It lies beneath the thumb. On the other side of the detonator."

Much of the information here is excellent, even it is slightly tainted by leftist sentiments.
Incidentally Max Boot observed

"Much the same calculus seems to govern Yasser Arafat's thinking. He is, you might say, the chief exploiter of the Palestinians, followed closely by his senior goons. They reap the adulation of useful idiots abroad who celebrate them as 'freedom fighters,' but senior PA officials aren't the ones strapping dynamite to their chests and blowing up Israeli buses. Arafat's wife Suha has generously said that there would be 'no greater honor' than to sacrifice her son as a martyr. But she doesn't have a son. She has a daughter and they live in Paris."

I'll have more on the subject of how the dispatchers of the bombers exploit them, when I have time.

Whether or not you read Margalit, it's worth it to read what Pipes writes about what's involved in suicide bombing.

2003-01-06T19:28:00.000-08:00

There are other things that I'd like to get to, but this Douglas Davis article is excellent. This is a variation on the "Hamas is killing peace" canard. However this is not so naive.

"For the harsh reality is that Palestinian terrorism is not, as conventional wisdom has it, a sign of 'frustration and rage' at the slow pace of diplomatic progress. The opposite is true: Palestinian terrorism is never more intense than when peace is in the air."

The violence is managed to keep the Palestinian issue alive. It is not frustration.
Maybe I shouldn't be so quick to dismiss Palestinian frustration. I'm just not convinced that it's necessarily due to the occupation. It's due to their exploitation by other Arabs as well as by their leadership as Max Boot reports in the Weekly Standard.

For Middle Eastern states, championing the Palestinian cause is even more vital because doing so provides an important pillar of legitimacy for their manifestly illegitimate governments. Naturally the Arab states' interest is in preserving "the struggle," not in succoring the Palestinian people who (along with the Israelis) are its chief victims. There are almost 4 million Palestinians and most live in conditions of unrelieved squalor; large swaths of the West Bank and Gaza Strip make the South Bronx look like Club Med by comparison.

and

Anyone who visits the West Bank and Gaza Strip is struck by the contrast between the general conditions of abysmal poverty and a few glittering villas that wouldn't be out of place on the French Riviera. Who owns these palazzos? Arafat's men, of course. Since the Palestinian Authority keeps a ruthless grip not only on politics but also on the economy, anyone who gets rich within PA jurisdiction, by definition, must be one of Arafat's apparatchiks.

The pervasive corruption of the PA has long been known and resented by ordinary Palestinians, but it seldom comes out into the open, since Arafat doesn't allow freedom of the press. Revelations in the Israeli press during the past month have lifted the veil of secrecy a bit, revealing a circle of exploitation that includes not only Arafat but also some of his Israeli negotiating partners.

2003-01-06T05:38:00.000-08:00

Reading letters to the New York Times is an interesting exercise. On January 3 and 4 2003, the Times published 4 letters responding to an article about a recent court decision concluding that soldiers did not have a right to refuse to serve in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Not surprisingly, of the four letters published were three that supported the soldiers. The fourth reasonably asked how conscientious objectors would be treated in Arab countries and suggested that, unlike in Israel where objectors can get their day in court, Arab objectors wouldn't have many days left. The other three letters were

More surprising were the responses to a recent editorial advocating the "Quartet's roadmap." Of the five letters the Times published, four of them took issue with the editorial's viewpoint. Usually the Times uses its letters page to pad its "cocoon," of validating views compatible with its own. I wonder if the opposition's letters to the editor on the "roadmap" editorial outnumbered those of Times' loyal supporters by 100 to 1.

2003-01-05T20:17:00.000-08:00

Here's a chilling interpretation of today's deadly terror attack. WHAT IT MEANS: Ha'aretz's Amos Harel on the Tel Aviv attacks. I don't know if I agree that a Hamas attack would be deadlier. This was about as deadly as any attack has gotten in the past two years.

But I think this raises a question of the way the violence is portrayed in the media. Most analysts will point to Palestinian rage against the occupation. But how has this level of violence be maintained for two plus years? Motive only explains so much. Means also have to be explained. The likelihood is that the PA used the years 1994 (from when it returned to rule in Gaza and Jericho) until 2000 to stockpile weapons and chemicals. The PA either encouraged, cooperated or simply allowed Hamas and Islamic Jihad to to build their infrastructures. (My money is on encouraged and cooperated.) When the time came in September 2000 to fight instead of negotiate everything was in place. Arafat cynically calculated that at some point he would not get everything he wanted and that a gullible world would buy his excuse that violence was a result of Palestinian frustration, finessing the question as to where and how they obtained their weapons.

2003-01-05T12:03:00.000-08:00

Something to enjoy about the NY Times coverage of Israel - the way the Times's correspondents bend over backwards to make members of the PA seem reasonable or honest. In contrast to this effort, the Times (or more specifically its correspondents) makes every effort to undermine the credibility of Israeli government positions. (When Israel captured the Karine-A last year, the Times, in its coverage, mustered every statement it could find that exonerated the PA from complicity in the outrage.) So guess what we have this week? There's a charming headline, "Palestinian Seeks Reform by Following the Money" for an article that tells the uplifting tale of Salam Fayyad, a trained economist, to inject some accountability into the PA system of malfeasance, um, er, government. Nowhere does the article address why it's taken so long for the PA to even address such problems. Wasn't accountability one of the obligations the PA took upon itself with the Oslo Accords? For all the effort James Bennett spends on promoting Mr. Fayyad's efforts, the Times did not note last week that "P.A. Official Responsible For Stealing Donated Food." Nor is the PA's corruption a new thing. Back when the PA was the PLO Daniel Pipes showed that it ran quite a lucrative enterprise in Lebanon 20 years ago. More recently Rachel Ehrenfeld has written extensively on the PA's corruption. So the Times only covers PA corruption when the PA is making its minimal PR efforts to fight it. And the Times wonders why some people believe that it is biased.

2003-01-05T10:40:00.000-08:00

There have been a number of good end-of-the-year features. Few have the bite of Michael Kelly's "2003, Through the Looking Glass" Read it, smile, and wish that the world was really like this.

2003-01-02T10:31:00.000-08:00

Clifford Krauss of the New York Times reports that "U.S. Welcomes Thaw in Relations With 'Pragmatic' Syria." (Thanks for the scare quotes around "pragmatic!") I suppose that the following paragraph says it all,

"The two countries are still in dispute over Syria's prolonged intervention in Lebanon, stubborn hostility toward Israel and the wide-ranging support for Hamas and Hezbollah militants that keeps Damascus on the State Department terrorist black list. Mob attacks against the American Embassy here in 1998 and 2000 opened new wounds, which have been salted by Syria's opening of its borders to Iraqi oil exports in violation of the United Nations-sanctioned embargo."

(Note how the Times calls the Syrian ongoing occupation of Lebanon an "intervention!") But given these sins and the additional evidence that Iraq may be arming Syria's client Hezbollah isn't the United States coming close to appeasement by overstating Syria's importance in the war on terror. Maybe Syria's helped catch 20 some suspected terrorists; but the possible damage to America's interest by Syria's other actions is much greater. I hope that the "Thaw" excites the Times more than it excites American officialdom!

2003-01-02T10:15:00.000-08:00

This has nothing to do with Israel. One of the best online articles I've read recently is The Last Battle of the Civil War
by Andrew Ferguson at the Weekly Standard. Ferguson investigates whether Dr. Samuel Mudd was an accomplie of John Wilkes Booth or the victim of an out-of-control military prosecution.

2003-01-01T18:20:00.000-08:00

Many of Israel's critics are quick to cite Ha'aretz as proof that you can be critical of Israel and not be anti-Israel. After all if Israel's most prestigious paper criticizes the country, why can't we? But every once in a while Ha'aretz publishes an article that refutes some of the basest claims against Israel such as A constantly narrowing gap by Amnon Rubinstein. Will the New York Times or Washington Post pick this article up? I doubt it. But when Ha'aretz publishes an article alleging that Israeli soldiers are committing some sort of atrocity, you can be sure that they will.

What can we make of Sharon's support for a Palestinian state? In Sharon means what he says Gabriel Danzig writes that Sharon is trying his best to shape a bad outcome. I think he's right. However David Weinberg - Will the real Sharon please stand up? interprets some of the same observations in a less flattering light.

Poor Azmi Bishara. His brother, Marwan, wants us to believe that he's a peace loving democrat. The Guardian can always be counted on to publish articles that sound like they come from ArabNews; so they carried My brother's fight for democracy . Marwan Bishara writes "Azmi Bishara is no advocate of violence. ... His party, the National Democratic Assembly, has helped contain the religious fundamentalist camps in both Israel and the Palestinian territories." However when Bishara abused his legislative immunity and travelled to Syria, IsraelInsider reported that "Appearing on the podium beside Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, head of the Lebanese Hezbollah group, and leaders of Hamas and other Syria-based militant Palestinian groups, Bishara called for 'expanding the sphere of resistance' against 'Israel's dictates' so that 'people can carry on with the struggle.'" I guess that Hezbollah and Hamas are secular democrats just like Bishara. The Jerusalem Post argues that contrary to Azmi's brother, there is no double standard in the decision to outlaw Bishara's candidacy and allow Baruch Marzel's. If nothing else the Post's editorial notes that Baruch Marzel has professed his commitment to democracy; Azmi Bishara has not disavowed his seditious statements of the past.