Category Archives: Israel

“Rhymes With Fagin”

Anti-Semitism, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Middle East

That’s the title of the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens article describing last week’s TIME magazine cover story, “Why Israel Doesn’t Care About Peace”:

“If you’re a reader of a certain age, you might understand the headline.

In May 1977, when Menachem Begin was elected Israel’s prime minister, Time magazine set out to describe the man, beginning with the correct pronunciation of his last name: ‘Rhymes with Fagin,’ the editors explained, invoking the character from Oliver Twist. Modern Israeli leader; archetypal Jewish lowlife: Get it?

The magazine’s other characterization of Begin was that he was ‘dangerous.’ A year later, he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Egypt’s Anwar Sadat.

Maybe there’s something in the magazine’s DNA. This week, readers were treated to a cover story by Karl Vick titled, suggestively, ‘Why Israel Doesn’t Care About Peace.’ That’s one way for Time to address the current state of negotiations between the Jewish state and its neighbors, which otherwise barely rate a mention in the article.

Mr. Vick’s essay draws on the testimony of a pair of real estate agents, a columnist for a left-leaning newspaper, and a few others to explain that Israelis are too blissed-out by the fruits of their economic prosperity to pay much attention to the subject of peace, much less whatever sad things may transpire among their neighbors in Ramallah and Gaza. ‘We’re not really that into the peace process,’ says Gadi Baltiansky, a peace activist quoted in the story. ‘We are really, really into the water sports.'”

It’s hard to say what to make of this, since the article concludes by contradicting its central thesis: ‘For all the surf breaks, the palms and the coffee, the conflict is never truly done, never far away,’ Mr. Vick writes.

Indeed it isn’t: Nearly every Israeli has a child, sibling, boyfriend or parent in the army. Nearly every Israeli has been to the funeral of a fallen soldier, or a friend killed in a terrorist attack. Most Israeli homes and businesses come equipped with safe rooms or bomb shelters; every Israeli owns a gas mask. The whole country exists under the encroaching shadows of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, and the prospect of a nuclear Iran. How many Americans, to say nothing of Europeans, can say the same about their own lives?” READ ON.

[SNIP]

What TIME cretin Karl Vick is describing, and depicting with the aid photos of good looking Israelis on the beach, is a plucky people engaged in LIFE; working, playing, making money (horrors!), and having fun, in the face of daily existential threats. This is to be admired not condemned.

My daughter, who was decidedly not pro-Israel when she visited there, came back enthralled with the country and its people (she wrote about it HERE). Never before had she met such tough, positive, feisty sorts (and certainly not in the Jewish school she once attended in South Africa. Israelis and diaspora Jews: never the twain shall meet).

As admirable as is the Israeli absorption with the good life, I’m afraid that regular Israelis need to learn to be more guarded with creeps likes Vick of TIME. And maybe to revive some of that founding patriotism, once again.

Middle East Musical Chairs

Foreign Policy, Hillary Clinton, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Middle East

Gleaned from its sources in the bowels of the Obama administration, DEBKAfile has provided the likely backdrop, and backroom deals, that have led to the tiresome and futile reunion of Bibi Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas, second-in-command in the Palestinian Authority, after the Hamas leader du jour.:

“Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is misleading his ministers by presenting the direct talks opening with the Palestinians on Sept. 2 as a diplomatic victory. He has omitted to disclose that the Obama administration has reneged on the secret deals for paving the way to the talks it concluded with Netanyahu’s senior aides Yitzhak Molcho and Uzi Arad.

Part of the deal was for Israel to line up with the Obama administration’s non-reaction to Iran’s activation of its Russian-built nuclear reactor at Bushehr last Saturday, Aug. 21. The United States promised, for its part, to deliver the Palestinians to the negotiating table for face -to-face talks after dropping their pre-conditions (determination of the 1967 lines as the final borders of a Palestinian state and a moratorium on Jewish construction on the West Bank and Jerusalem).

But most of all, the secret deal obliged Obama to refrain from twisting Israel’s arm on behalf of the Palestinians should the dialogue founder – as it is widely expected to do.

Wit this deal in the bag, Netanyahu was able to showcase the Obama administration’s endorsement of his diplomatic strategy and is rejection of Palestinian demands.

However, the deal was shown to have sprung a leak in the formal announcements in Washington of Friday, Aug. 20, debkafile discloses.
Whereas Secretary of State Hillary Clinton kept faith with Israel and turned down a last minute White House demand to insert this phrase in her announcement: ‘The United States could offer bridging proposals if necessary,’ into her announcement, the euphemistic phrase turned up in special presidential envoy George Mitchell’s remarks elaborating on the Clinton statement.'”

MORE.

UPDATED: Wild About Wilders

Freedom of Religion, IMMIGRATION, Islam, Israel, Jihad, Multiculturalism, Neoconservatism, The West

HERE are some astute observations by Larry Auster (along the lines made a while back in “Dhimmis At Ground Zero?”) prompted by decent (and thus rare) journalism practiced by the Australian media with respect to Geert Wilders. He is the Dutch politician (more like statesman), who speaks clearly (as opposed to our incoherent activists) and honestly about Islam, its religionists and their compatibility with life in the West:

“An Australian TV news program has a long (about 20 minutes) segment on Geert Wilders. Despite the host’s open hostility to Wilders, the program–utterly unlike what would happen on U.S. television–gives a fair view of him and his positions. It is the fullest media presentation of Wilders, and of his place in Dutch politics, that I’ve seen. To be watching a mainstream television news show and see Wilders say, in his reasonable yet firm and determined manner, that Islam is a threat to the West and that its ingress into the Netherlands must be stopped, period, is thrilling. Among other things, he is light years beyond the American conservative anti-jihadists, who to this very moment, and despite their support for Wilders, are unable to state that Islam is the problem, that Islam must be stopped, that Islam doesn’t belong in the West. The anti-jihadists–with their attacks on ‘Islamism,’ not Islam, with their ‘I love Muslims, I just don’t want the mosque to be so close to Ground Zero,’ are frightened and uncertain children who stick their toe into the water of the Islam problem and then run back to mommy. Wilders is an adult who has grasped the simple truth about Islam and states it without equivocation.”

“When the West has acquired more adults like Wilders, it will proceed to save itself. And–who knows?–maybe some of the currently still frightened Islamism critics will be among them.”

MORE.

UPDATE: Quote of the Day on LauraIngraham.com:

“In a true peace, Israel will, in our lifetimes, become one more Arab country, with a Jewish minority.”
– Ground Zero mosque Imam Feisel Abdul Rauf, in a 1977 letter to the editor.

The One-State Solution is promoted by many left-liberals, paleo-cons and libertarians; that is true. But not if Geert has anything to do with it.

Bibi’s Paleo Position

IMMIGRATION, Israel, Labor, Nationhood, Paleoconservatism

“We have created a Jewish and democratic nation, and we cannot let it turn into a nation of foreign workers,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at a conference of the Israel Manufacturers Association in January. … Although the Israeli government issued a record 120,000 foreign work permits in 2009, the country’s political leaders say they want to phase out migrant labor. .. [that it] threatens the nation’s Jewish character” …

The New York Times has awoken to the story about “Netanyahu Wanting To Retain Israel’s National Character,” discussed on BAB in March.

Bibi’s is quite an extraordinary a position; it’s a paleoconservative position.

NYT: “Since the first intifada of the early 1990s, more than a million migrants from the developing world have come to Israel to replace the Palestinians, who were the country’s original source of cheap labor.”

Bibi thinks that unemployed, minimally skilled Israelis and Palestinians (provided they don’t smuggle bombs under their clothes) should do the jobs foreigners want so badly to do in Israel. Just as the same segment of American society should have dibs on those jobs in the US. While no one owns a job, and one cannot tell employers who to hire—people who care about the fabric of the society in which they live will want to see low-skilled locals making a living.

Israel is fortunate to have a better class of foreign laborers; these poor Chinese workers—some treated atrociously—do not march demanding political rights and calling their employers racists; they sue for the wages they’ve earned.