I. Bye, Bye Peres (I)

Gershon Baskin, a prominent left-wing activist and the architect of the outrageous Gilad Shalit prisoner swap, tells a story of learning of a series of tunnels under the Philadelphi Corridor. According to Baskin’s account, the information came from a senior security official in Gaza, a year after arriving in the coastal strip with the chief PLO terrorist Yasser Arafat. The tunnels had been constructed by Hamas, and the Palestinian Authority was asking for Israel’s assistance in located and destroying the underground smuggling network.

But when Baskin called the prime minister to report on his finding, he was met with a stony silence. Israel chose to ignore the warning, as it did with other indications at the time that the PLO was using its “temporary authority” to create a terrorist army in the heart of the Land of Israel. It was the heyday of the Oslo years, and individuals who produced evidence to question the wisdom of the land-for-peace formula were virtual enemies-of-state.

The Foreign Minister at the time was Shimon Peres, who’s retirement from the presidency today at age 91 will mark the end of his career as an elected official in Israel. Ironically, Peres leaves the stage during a conflict that points directly to his political legacy: Israel’s willingness to build foreign policy based not on intelligence information and cold analysis of actual situations,but rather on hopes. Residents of the south and coastal regions have been paying for that approach for more than a decade, and dozens of IDF soldiers have lost their lives in repeated battles as a result.

As Peres leaves elected political life, one can rest assured that he will continue agitating for Israel to continue the willing blindness policy from outside politics, and that local and international media will give him an open platform for his message. But if Israel is to avoid a future, more serious flare up (likely in 18 months or so), the country would be wise to let Shimon Peres fade into the sunset and live out his life in peace and good health, and to leave foreign policy to leaders who will deal with political realities in the region as they are, rather than as we wish they were.

II. Nations Don’t Have Friends, Only Interests

US and international media announced this week an $11 billion arms deal between the United States and Qatar. According to reports, Qatar will buy US Patriot missiles, including a free, introductory US offer of 10 Patriot batteries, 24 Apache helicopters, 500 Javelin anti-tank missiles and more. In addition, reports indicated that Washington is hopeful that the current sale is a precursor to a second stage, in which the Gulf state is expected to award a lucrative fighter jet contract to US companies. In every way, the deal will be a boon for US companies.

The huge arms deal is relevant, particularly in light of President Shimon Peres’s statement Wednesday that Qatar’s financial support for Gaza makes the Persian Gulf state the “the world’s largest funder of terror.” Given Qatar’s ongoing support for Hamas, is it unreasonable to suggest that some of the anti-tank missiles delivered to Doha could actually make their way to Gaza, or even to Ramallah? It is  a truism of international relations that nations do not have friends. They only have interests. In that light, the US – Qatar relationship is relevant to those individuals who insist that Jerusalem and Washington enjoy a “special relationship,” and that Israel is a central American “ally” in the Middle East. In actual fact, while Washington has indeed given Israel much-needed political support on the international stage for many years, the fact is also that US businesses who arm both sides of the Israel-Arab divide have much to gain from keeping that conflict alive.

Cause and effect conclusions always are a problem for ideological zanies, both right-wing and left-wing.

Today’s discourse on the stock market deals with the pro-Arab lefties. They call themselves pro-Israel, which is like a talking Trojan Horse uttering praise for the country where it was brought with enemy soldiers.

The truth is that mass media are just as guilty, burying a nasty and misleading leftist agenda under the term “objective reporting.”

Here is Monday’s headline from Mondoweiss, one of the nastiest and most misleading Jewish anti-Zionist sites around: “SodaStream Stock Sinks, and Bloomberg Cites ‘Sanctions Over Jewish Settlements.”

Indeed, that is what Bloomberg also wrote. Its headline on Monday read: “SodaStream Drops Amid Sanctions Over Jewish Settlements.”

Facts: The stock dropped 3.3 percent on Monday, the same day that the Standard and Poor 500 fell 2.28 percent and the NASDAQ index dropped sunk 2.26 percent. SanDisk sank 3.1 percent, and Microsoft outdid SodaStream and fell 3.59 percent.

Maybe Microsoft dropped because settlers in Judea and Samaria bought Office?

Bloomberg concluded, “SodaStream International Ltd., the Israeli maker of home soda machines with a factory in the West Bank, sank to the lowest since 2012 in New York amid growing criticism for businesses operating in a territory that Palestinians seek for an independent state.”

The writer, Elena Popina, did not explain how she knows that is the reason, but she immediately followed up on her conclusion by noting that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry cautioned Israel about the boycott campaign and that Oxfam and Scarlett Johansson broke up their relationship because she is a goodwill ambassador for SodaStream.

Popina added, “The boycott debate comes after pro-Palestinian activists scored several successes in a campaign to blacklist businesses operating in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, land occupied by Israel since 1967 and claimed by Palestinians for a future state.”

After swallowing and regurgitating the media assumption that Israel “occupied” the land, which was previously occupied by Jordan, she reminded readers that a large Dutch fund announced in January it would not invest in Israeli banks because of their involvement in Judea and Samaria. Norway also said its own fund has reinstated a former boycott against two Israel firms active in parts of Jerusalem where Jews are deemed illegitimate and illegal.

It is an axiom that stock market analysts, like many psychologists, invent reasons for a past event, and for this shrinks charge $100 an hour or more.

Mondoweiss also does the same for free.

It wrote on Monday that last month “we reported SodaStream stocks had plunged that Monday morning after the announcement Johansson had signed on as the [SodaStream]corporation’s global ambassador. However, we noted at that time there was ‘no mainstream investment media mention regarding the growing boycott against the corporation.’”

Mondoweiss’ Annie Robbins gleefully wrote that the Bloomberg headline ”screamed” that the drop is because of its factory in the industrial area of Maaleh Adumim, where no one lived before Jews began to settle there 39 years ago.

Bloomberg came up with a cause and effect fallacy, and Mondoweiss ran with it off the field of reality.

“Finally, people are listening,” she wrote. “ And remember that John Kerry only made his offhand remark about ‘boycotts’ that hurt the stock, per the analyst quoted in Bloomberg, a day or so after SodaStream was the talk of the State House briefing. Methinks we’re having an impact. There’s been a massive shift in the discourse since we reported on Jan. 12 that Scarlett Johansson is the new face of apartheid.”

Now here is a little item, actually big item, from the same Bloomberg Business newspaper on January 14 of this year, under the headline “Even Star Johansson Can’t Help SodaStream as Stock Sinks 26%.”

Three Yesh Atid MK quietly skipped out of the room when the vote came up for financing some settlement related expenses, in particular, reimbursing the residents of Beit El’s Ulpana neighborhood whom the government kicked out of their homes when it destroyed their neighborhood last year.

The three Yesh Atid coalition members did not inform anyone they were not going to be at the vote, and Gila Gamliel (Likud) noticed moments before the vote that the three were missing. She called MK Robert Ilytov (Yisrael Beiteinu) to come in to replace them, to ensure there was still a coalition majority.

If the opposition had noticed, the vote could have gone the other way.

Yesh Atid head, Yair Lapid, recently said in an interview, that he doesn’t care if the Palestinian Authority recognizes Israel as a Jewish State or not, contradicting the negotiating position laid down by PM Netanyahu.

Sources in Yesh Atid say the move was not preplanned, and the 3 MKs left the room for other reasons.”

The only question we have is for chareidi MK Dov Lipman (Yesh Atid), “Are you still so sure your views are aligned with the Yesh Atid party?”

Palestinian political party Fatah, along with other Palestinian political organizations, criticized representatives of the Palestinian Authority for meeting with Israeli politicians sympathetic with the Palestinian Authority..

In a meeting this week set up by the left-wing Geneva Initiative, members of the ruling right-wing Likud Party and opposition Shas Sephardi party met with PLO Secretary-General Yasser Abed Rabbo and several other senior Palestinian officials, according to the Jerusalem Post.

Fatah condemned the meeting because it promoted “normalization” with Israel, which is a bit strange since that is what chairman Mahmoud Abbas tries to make people he wants, so long as it is on his terms.

“We condemn normalization and those behind it,” the statement read. “Such meetings are void of political content and a waste of time. They are unjustified, nationally and politically.”

The Palestinian Authority, with direct financing of the  European Union and blind acceptance of lies as facts by media, is swallowing up the southern Hevron Hills, a huge area between Kiryat Arba-Hevron and Arad-Be’er Sheva.

The latest chapter in the Palestinian Authority’s re-invention of history is taking place in Susiya, pronounced “Soos-eeya,” located two miles from the old borders of Israel, on the western edge of the Judean Desert that leads to the Dead Sea, and less than half an hour from Be’er Sheva, the capital of the Negev.

The Arab strategy: An Arab family erects a tent, illegally, near the archaeological site of the ancient town of Susiya. As time passes, the tent becomes a makeshift structure, which expands into several structures. With the support of extreme left-wing activists, the ‘ancient’ town of ‘Palestinian Susiya’ is invented, reported the Tazpit News Agency.

“This makes for a great human interest story, but for one setback – the ‘ancient Palestinian Susiya’ never existed. It shows up on no records,” Tazpit wrote.

Yigal Dilmoni, deputy director-general of the Yesha Council, told Tazpit, “Fifteen-year-old aerial photos clearly show that there was no Arab village at this site… The Arabs have come for the village of Yatta, and… repeatedly disseminate lies. ”

Last week, the Civil Lands Authority issued approximately 40 stop-work orders against projects funded by the European Union and intended to firm up Palestinian Authority claims to land where they never lived until Jews came to the area in 1983.

In that year, for the first time in 1,500 years, Jews began living in the southern Hevron Hills, setting up a community in nearby Beit Yatir, two miles to the south, and in Susiya, where the old Jewish town existed until approximately the 6th century.

Until 1983, the area experienced zero growth. Hot summers, cold winters, with occasional snow, and the lack of roads and water resources kept people away. Any land that was farmed by Arabs was done during the spring and summer and abandoned after harvest time, until the following year.

None of the land was ever registered as owned by anyone. During the Ottoman Empire, and under the British Mandate, the rulers of Hevron would sit in their living rooms and parcel out lands arbitrarily. That was the extent of “ownership.”

When Jews came to Beit Yatir, the Arabs followed. Three families from  Yatta, a city adjacent to Hevron, fled because of family crimes, such as rape, and set up camp on a hill adjacent to Yatir, Their village quickly became known as the “Thieves’ Village,” for obvious reasons. They claim, of course, that they have been living there from time immemorial.

As a resident of Beit Yatir, and a security officer at the time, I and my colleague reported theft after theft to the police –laundry on the clothes lines, tricycles, shoes left outside and anything else that was not nailed to the ground. Further down the road, our moshav’s tractors often were stolen and tracks always led to the Thieves’ Village.

The police, of course, did nothing.

Susiya was established in the same year. No Arab lived there. Nor did they live in the ruins of the old city of Susiya.

But when the Civil Lands Authority last week issued the stop-work orders, the first step towards demolition orders, the left-wing movements and the Palestinian Authority reinvented history.

“The Palestinian village of Khirbet [ruins of] Susiya has existed in the South Hebron Hills at least since the 1830.”

The International Solidarity Movement wrote last week, “The residents of Susiya include more than 30 families, who were all evacuated from their homes in the old Susiya village and forced to relocate 200 meters to the southeast, in 1986,”

It is a lie. They never lived there, not in 1830 and not in 1986 and not in 1996.  A handful of Arabs sowed the land in the spring, harvest the crop in the late summer and went back to Yatta. Period.

“Susiya has been the site of creative non-violent resistance for years, resistance that is continually met with brutality,” according to the ISM.

Part of the “non-violent resistance was the cold-blooded murder of my friend Yair Har Sinai in 2001. He was shot in dead in the head and the back by terrorists while, unarmed, he was tending his flock of sheep.

The police and army, of course did nothing for five years, even though his murderers were known.

The same pattern has repeated itself over the past 15 years.

Rabbis for Human Rights has helped the Palestinian Authority destroy Jewish farms. Across the street from our home on Yatir, the Talya family, converts from South Africa, planted and cared for dozens of acres of land for a decade. The leftists moved in one day, ripped everything out, helped the Arabs plant, and won support from the IDF.

Several years, our community’s children along with hundreds of other school students, celebrated Tu B’Shvat by planting planted more than 1,500 saplings on land adjacent to the our regional headquarters. A “rabbi” from the Human Rights group marched in, and announced that the children were illegal occupiers. The next day, the saplings mysteriously disappeared.

Why? Politics.

There is no law in the southern Hevron Hills. There is politics. There are IDF officers who want to advance in the ranks and have to adopt the government policy, which is “malign neglect” of Jews.

As security officer at the time, I was called by the Talya family to come to their farm becuase five Arabs had trespassed. When I arrived, I saw them surveying the land, well within the fence of the Talya farm which is legally zoned for Yatir agriculture.

I called the authorities, and an officer asked me, “What are they doing?”

“They are  surveying the land.” I answered. “Today, they survey. Tomorrow, they claim it is theirs, and the next day they plant and build.”

His reply was, ”What do you care? They are not bothering you.”

The government looks the other way, preferring to set its red lines around Efrat and Maaleh Adumim.

Losing control of the southern Hevron Hills is a free pass to terrorists who use the back trails to smuggle weapons from Bedouins in the Negev, as far away as the Dead Sea and south of Arab. Terrorists also take explosives from the area and use the same route to travel freely and wait for the right moment to blow up Jews in urban centers, from Be’er Sheva to Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem.

The gradual erosion of Israel control over what is supposed to be Israeli-cojntrolled “Area C” has endangered the entire area. Thousands of Arabs have moved in, set up tents and built homes with the funding of hundreds of millions of dollars by the European Union.

Lacking any history of the area, most media swallow up the Arab story, hook, line and sinker.

Glen Johnson, reporting for the Los Angeles Times, has filed his story late Sunday night: “Thousands in Turkey continue protest over plan to bulldoze park.” Having been keeping up with the situation in Turkey, I took the opportunity to examine how the left wing media report on events that are not in my immediate vicinity. I know that when they report on, say clashes between the murderous IDF and peaceful Palestinian protesters, or on vile Jewish settlers burning down acres of olive groves that have been in this Palestinian farmer’s family since Saladin’s time, they’ll skew the story as best they can, using both code and innuendo, misrepresentations of the law and a warped version of history. But will I be able to catch those same tricks in a story about another country?

It was a challenge, and I must admit I had to labor for almost an entire minute to discover the usual suspects. I won’t bother you with the entire list of examples, because you’ll tire and walk away, so let’s do just a few:

First paragraph:

A weekend of protest in Turkey has left the country reeling, with thousands of DISSIDENTS taking to the streets after a brutal police crackdown, presenting the government with the MOST COHESIVE CHALLENGE in its more than a decade in power.

Dissidents? How are these free Yuppies living in Istanbul dissidents? Are they being thrown in jail? Are they dying in the gulags? How did they become dissidents?

Well, with a few key strokes, is how it happened. The same as in the case of the most cohesive challenge to the government. A government that has enjoyed a growing majority of the vote for 11 years is challenged by some guys burning stuff? Was the U.S. government challenged by the Rodney King riots in L.A.? Is Israel challenged by a bunch of Arabs throwing rocks at passing cars?

A cohesive challenge is when a competing political party manages to attract a sizable portion of the voters, to the point where government has to take notice. A few thousand guys brawling with the cops is the most cohesive challenge in a decade? Then I’m afraid the Erdogan regime is here to stay for as long as they feel like.

Next paragraph:

“The government is passing laws that go against our freedom, that take away our rights,” said 31-year-old Derya Bozkurt as she stood in the heart of Taksim Square in central Istanbul on Sunday evening. She was drinking a beer and smoking a cigar — powerful statements in present-day Turkey, WHERE ISLAMISTS FROWN ON ALCOHOL CONSUMPTION and CIGAR SMOKING IS HARDLY THE SOCIAL NORM FOR A WOMAN.

So, Islamists in Turkey are frowning on alcohol consumption – as opposed to what other Islamists? Alcohol is banned by Islam – much like marijuana is religiously banned by the U.S. government. In fact, while hundreds of thousands of Americans spend time in jail for smoking and selling weed, not one person in all of Turkey has even been charged with drinking alcohol – because it’s legal. The government—like most municipalities in the U.S.—is trying to set limits on where bars can operate—away from schools and religious institutions—and at what age one may start drinking—in Turkey it’s 18, in the U.S. 21—and when the bars should close at night—unless they serve the tourism industry.

What a brave lass this 31-year-old Derya Bozkurt must be, for drinking beer in a country where no one can touch her for doing it. In New York City she could be arrested for drinking in public, unless she kept the can in a brown paper bag.

And the idea that a guy from L.A., the place where cigarette smokers are the lepers of society, is complaining that Turkish women are discouraged from smoking cigars? In L.A. someone would call the cops on her for smoking, if she’s not careful.

Finally:

Plans to redevelop the park were PUSHED THROUGH last year by Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, or AKP, DESPITE CONSIDERABLE OPPOSITION.

The AKP, a center-right nationalist party with Islamist leanings, DOMINATES THE PARLIAMENT and retains significant support in the country, appealing to a conservative Muslim base.

You’ll admit, that if you didn’t know the AKP enjoyed a huge, democratically elected, majority in parliament, you’d think that the development plans were imposed on the suffering Turks by a tyrannical, bullying system, deaf to their pleas. They did it despite considerable opposition of roughly 3 percent of the people, after all, how anti-democratic can you get?

Israel Academia Monitor, an organization devoted to monitoring anti-Israel academics, hosted a conference in Tel Aviv with the goal of drawing attention to the fact that anti-Israel academics exploit their positions of influence in order to promote an anti-Israel agenda.

Unfortunately, this phenomenon does not lie solely within universities abroad, but also exists within Israel. These professors utilize their position as a means to prove the justness of their cause while the fact that they are Israeli adds a sense of legitimacy. The danger is tremendous. As Cicero once wrote, “A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within.”

The first speaker to address the conference was Prof. Ofira Seliktar, who noted the orchestrated campaign to delegitimize Israel utilizing soft asymmetrical conflict.

“Soft components of this conflict are designed to delegitimize the target country and improve the image of the challenged group” as well as the “causes they represent,” Seliktar said.

The founders of the Neo-Marxist critical perspective, according to Seliktar, were the first to adopt soft asymmetrical conflict, which Edward Said in turn applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Michael Gross, another speaker at the conference, pointed to professor Neve Gordon of Ben Gurion University, saying that Gordon has “a long track record of calling for boycotts of Israel” and has referred to “Israel as a so-called fascist Nazi apartheid-like state.” 

In addition, other professors at Ben Gurion University behave similarly, including Oren Yiftachel, who devoted “most of his career to misrepresenting Israel as an apartheid regime;” Lev Grinberg, who is best known for “accusing Israel of committing symbolic genocide” when Israel killed the leader of Hamas and compared Hamas terrorists to the “Maccabee heroes”; and Eyal Nir, who teaches chemistry at BGU and “is not only anti-Israel but was in the media in the past year for openly calling for critics of the left to be murdered.”

Panel at Israel Academia Monitor Conference, Tel Aviv

In the concluding session of this conference, I participated and spoke about how soft asymmetrical conflict was applied at Ben-Gurion University, where anti-Israel activism was quite widespread as part of an orchestrated campaign to educate international students to view Israel negatively.

Examples of this included the social coordinator at the time, Noah Slor, organizing anti-Israel trips, professors teaching about Israel in an anti-Israel propagandist style; and instances of pro-Israel students, such as myself, facing intimidation for having the chutzpah to speak out against the anti-Israel activism that was taking place on campus.

For example, Professor Yiftachel was teaching international students that “Israel is in a colonial situation with the Palestinians,” “the whole Israeli state is what you call an ethnocracy,” “Ashkenazis colonize the Mizrahim,” “Israeli Arabs have ghetto citizenship,” “Israel is like Sudan in ethnocratic structure,” and that “Israel imposes Judaism on her Palestinian citizens.”

When I attempted in the past to write exposés on this, Yiftachel arranged to have me intimidated by the then head of the Middle Eastern Studies department, Dr. Avi Rubin, who threatened “possible ramifications” and the involvement of the university’s legal department. While every thing turned out fine for me in the end, due to Israel Academia Monitor providing me with legal representation, not all students who are outspokenly pro-Israel at BGU are this lucky.

Here’s a brief portion of my concluding remarks:

When you combine people like [Professor] Yiftachel… [and] a social coordinator who, by the way was the one who organized the demonstrations on the campus in favor of the Gaza Flotilla … it has an indoctrinating effect.

I emphasized that choosing to speak out against this intimidation wasn’t an easy decision. Nevertheless, what the international students are taught is important, for many of these students will return to their countries and may hold prominent positions within the government as experts on the Middle East.

I concluded:

[I]t is important to study the Middle East; but not in the way that it is currently being done. It needs to be done in a way that you actually learn; that you actually gain some insight, a marketplace of ideas,” I explained. “It shouldn’t be only one opinion. And oh, you can’t challenge it if you don’t have a Ph.D. That’s not how it works. Students also have academic freedom and my academic freedom should be respected just as much as anybody else.

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