Category Archives: Israel

One State: Is It The Solution Or The Final Solution To The Jewish State?

English, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Neoconservatism, Palestinian Authority

For at least a decade now, Ambassador Yoram Ettinger has been sending me his newsletter. The Ettinger Report is devoted to debunking the myth of Palestinian demographic superiority. Thus the idea that the fertility rates of Israeli Jews are gaining on and even greater than those of the Palestinians is hardly new.

Cut to the Mark Levin Show. The other day I heard a whiny woman talking Israel with the host. It tuns out the woman was the neoconservative writer Caroline Glick, whom I had never heard before. She was promoting her Levin-endorsed book, The Israeli Solution, in which the fertility and immigration rates on which Ettinger had been reporting for years serve as the basis for Glick’s support for a “One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East,” namely a one-state solution.

The Jewish fertility rate has increased as the Palestinian rates have collapsed along with those of the Muslim world as a whole. Israeli Jews now have higher fertility rates than the Arabs of Judea and Samaria, (3.04 vs. 2.91 children per woman). Israel’s immigration rate is high and rising. Palestinian emigration rates have skyrocketed over the past decade.

Why does the one-state solution follow from “the demographic good news,” as the writer puts it? (Doesn’t “the good demographic news” make for a better-ordered sentence?)

I read Glick’s FrontPage article hoping to find a decisive argument as to why the author has concluded that, in the absence of the threat of death by demographics–a one-state solution would be in Israel’s best interests.

I found nothing of the sort in Glick’s rather weak (and not terribly well written) article.

UPDATE II: Cutting And Clever Comments About John Kerry

Critique, Foreign Policy, Intelligence, Israel

What I love about Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon’s remarks about John Kerry is their intelligence. The guy is sharp. Witty too.

Ya’alon lambasted Kerry “as ‘inexplicably obsessive’ and ‘messianic’ in his efforts to coax” Israel and the Palestinians into a peace agreement.

“All that can ‘save us’ is for John Kerry to win a Nobel Prize and leave us in peace,’ Ya’alon was quoted saying to the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper.

I’m not sure if this last hilarity qualifies as a syllogism, but the allusion to the trajectory of Obama’s peace-making efforts works magnificently.

Defense Minister Ya’alon is also passionately vested in his analysis of the Kerry character.

I can’t imagine one of our feeble-minded morons in public office coming up with a cutting or clever comment on any topic.

Ditto our columnists. Other than yours truly, Ann Coulter and Mark Steyn—I can’t think of a columnist who is in possession of a funny bone. And I don’t mean potty humor; I mean stringing concepts together to come up with some absurdly funny reductio.

UPDATE I: Greg Gutfeld is really really funny, although he is not someone I read. He’s a riot. Clever too.

UPDATE II (2/16): Fred Reed rocks.

A Soldier In The Style Of ‘Stonewall’ Jackson

Barack Obama, Bush, Foreign Policy, Israel, Military, Nationhood, War

“A Soldier In The Style Of ‘Stonewall’ Jackson” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

“Barack Hussein Obama at war and George W. Bush at war: How does the 44th president of the United States differ from the 43rd?

If nothing else, former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has settled that question. Bush sent troops to fight futile battles without flinching; Obama did the same with some reservation.

Hardly a peacemaker, Obama questioned the mission in Afghanistan and was skeptical of the military brass’s motivation in securing for itself—to the detriment of the grunts on the ground—a long-term commitment to the theatre of war in that country.

Like Obama, 82 percent of Americans oppose the war the president is being panned for having embraced publicly, but agonized over privately. On Afghanistan, Obama is more aligned with the American people—and the truth—than the former defense secretary and his Republican champions.

This I say with reluctance. I awarded Barack Obama brownie points thrice in his tenure: for doing not a thing about the 2011–2012 protests in Iran, for ceasing the criminalization of cancer and AIDS patients for their medicinal use of illegal substances, and for breaking with Bush and his neocons in refusing to step on the Russian Bear’s claws. Obama scrapped the missile-defense shield in Russia’s backyard.

Yet this revelation in Gates’ ‘Duty,’ a book that hangs on one hook, has Republicans gurgling with pleasure. Limitless is the GOP’s zest and zeal for ignoring the negative right of the American people to be free of the Sisyphean (and Jacobean) struggle to save the world.

If anything, it sounds as though Gates might have had misgivings of his own about the missions in which his “soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines” were dying for nothing.

A bereft Gates tells of ‘evening sessions’ during which he’d write condolence letters ‘to the families of service members killed in action.’ There ‘probably wasn’t a single evening in nearly 4 1/2 years when I didn’t — when I didn’t weep,’ he confessed. Gates relates how focused he became ‘on the strain on our troops and on their families.’ After all, ‘they’d been at war for 10 years.’ ‘My highest priority,’ he averred in an interview with NPR, was ‘trying to avoid new conflict … in terms of recommending against intervention in Libya,’ and expressing ‘concerns about going to war in Syria, much less in Iran.’

It just seemed to me that some of the areas where we were looking at potential conflict were more in the category of wars of choice. And it was those that I was trying to protect the troops from.

Having fought for the survival of his people—and never to democratize or ‘save’ another—Ariel Sharon was far less of a study in contradictions than poor Mr. Gates. …

Read the complete column. “A Soldier In The Style Of ‘Stonewall’ Jackson” is on WND.

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Ariel Sharon, Soldier In The Style Of ‘Stonewall’ Jackson

Homeland Security, Israel, Judaism & Jews, libertarianism, Middle East, Military

As a child growing up in Israel, this 1973 image of the late Ariel Sharon was seared in my mind. Had Sharon himself not performed military miracles, who knows if Israelis, myself included, would have survived. How many Americans can point to a leader who had actually saved their lives, rather than send other men to die in foreign countries and then propagandized his countrymen about having fought for their freedoms?

Seen in the image above, former Israeli Prime Minister Sharon led his men into battle and won the 1973 Yom Kippur War in which the Israeli government and the intelligence failed. Here Sharon is seen during that war “on the western bank of the Suez Canal in Egypt. Sharon said his greatest military success came during that war. He surrounded Egypt’s Third Army and, defying orders, led 200 tanks and 5,000 men over the Suez Canal, a turning point.”

Sharon died, Jan 11, after languishing in a vegetative state for 8 years.

During the Bush years, “libertarian who loathe Israel” would often compare Emperor Bush with Sharon, whom they detested too.

Hated though he was abroad, Sharon was a soldier in the style of “Stonewall” Jackson, not Dubya the Deserter. As a Special Forces commander, he personally led his troops into battle, performing daring assaults that saved Israel in the 1967 and 1973 wars.

Agree or disagree with his methods, it is unarguable that Sharon’s overriding concern was with the security of his citizens. He saw himself as bearing a “historic responsibility” for “the fate of the Jewish people.” By contrast, Bush’s Wilsonian, global missionary movement related not even tangentially to the future and safety of the American people.

Unlike George Bush the internationalist, Arik Sharon was a fierce nationalist who cared first and foremost about his country. Under pressure from the U.S. for his treatment of terrorists, he was expected to make concessions to murderers who kill civilians, while Bush and the international community made no such allowances for al-Qaida.