Attackerman

Never Fuck With A Jewish Mother

The NYTM story exploring Israel's value on the freedom of Gilad Shalit is amazing, but before saying anything further on it -- wow, this passage.

If Jibril served as the inspiration for terrorist organizations, on the Israeli side it was Miriam Grof, the mother of one of Jibril’s Israeli captives, Yosef Grof, who became the model for the families of abductees. Without any experience in dealing with the media, Grof instinctively created strategies that have been used repeatedly by relatives of Israeli P.O.W.’s and M.I.A.’s. She grasped that public pressure on the government is a result of being aggressive and proactive: you make demands, not requests; you focus on what is important to you, not on the good of the country. One former high-ranking member of the I.D.F. recalled her saying that half the country could go up in smoke, just as long as her Yosef came home safe.

Eitan Haber, a respected military correspondent who later became a senior aide to Rabin, told me: “It is difficult to explain, but only someone who met that woman could understand how she filled everyone with a deep, blood-boiling, paralyzing sense of shame. We are speaking about three very tough men [Rabin, Peres and Yitzhak Shamir, the foreign minister] who had no problems saying no, but simply could not stand up to Mrs. Grof. What tipped the scales was not her tears or screaming or her teeth-grinding — all of which I remember clearly — it was the whole package. There was something menacing about her that threatened that the world was coming to an end. Her aggressiveness was not of this world. She broke them all down.”

I am certain every Jew who read this piece has a clear mental image of the Mrs. Grof in his or her own life.

The Altalena In Reverse

I've just finished reading Gershom Gorenberg's excellent forthcoming book The Unmaking of Israel. I'll write a separate post delving into it and grappling with what Gorenberg proposes will lead to what he calls "The Reestablishment of Israel," but for now, let's focus on an unrepresentative section of the text.

The Unmaking of Israel is a clincal, mostly dispassionate investigation into the unraveling of Israel under the corrupting stress of occupying Palestinian territory for 44 years. His thesis is a familiar one from 20th century experiences worldwide: Zionism had a difficult transition from revolutionary movement to institutional governance, and the aftermath of the Six Day War allowed it to defer that final reconciliation. I say mostly dispassionate because while Gorenberg writes to persuade and not to inflame, he has flashes of passion. The fate of the Israel Defense Forces causes one of them. 

First, a bit of context. Every student in Jewish day school in the diaspora learns about something called The Altalena Affair. To make a long story short, the Altalena was a weapons shipment for the rightist paramilitary called the Irgun, which had little problem committing terrorism. After Israel declared statehood in May 1948, the Irgun was supposed to be incorporated into what became the Israel Defense Forces, the national military. In reality, there was an unsettled political arrangement about how to integrate the Irgun's leadership into the new civilian government and politics of Israel. As long as that ship could keep the Irgun armed, the rightists would have an armed option if politics didn't shake out their way; the new state wouldn't have a monopoly on violence; and the young state of Israel would be at risk of civil war. So in a tense operation in and around Tel Aviv, the new IDF shelled the Altalena and effectively settled the question. 

We learn about the Altalena in Hebrew school for a few reasons. One is to so kids understand that difficult and painful steps -- Jew attacking Jew -- are necessary if a broader interest is at stake. Another, uglier lesson is that Jews take these steps and decide against being terrorists, while Palestinians don't. Tribalism has an ugly side. 

Anyway, Gorenberg spends a chapter on the relationship between the West Bank settlers and the military and distills it into three passionate paragraphs that bear excerpting.

[A] vicious cycle is at work. Israel continues to hold the West Bank and expand settlements. Policing occupied territory and protecting settlers are military burdens, increasing the need for combat soldiers and officers who have no qualms about the occupation. To meet that need, the army depends ever more on recruits from the religious right. Yet this increases the danger of fragmenting the military when an Israeli government finally does decide to pull out of the West Bank.

For politicians, this is one more reason to postpone difficult, necessary decisions. The longer they wait, though, the greater the risks. The problem is not one of individual conscientious objectors. There are already whole units that the IDF fears using. As men who believe in the inviolable sanctity of the Whole Land of Israel climb the ladder of command, possibilities loom that are worse than refusal: outright mutiny, even decisions by senior officers to deploy their units to prevent withdrawal.

Watching this process is like watching a film of the Altalena run in reverse: the smoke returns to the ship, the shell to the cannon. The opposition unloads its arms at the Kfar Vitkin beach. Israel evolves backward, returning to the moment of a fragile state facing an armed faction dedicated to fantasies of power and expansion.

There is a reason that the second chapter in Gorenberg's book is called "Remember the Altalena." Gorenberg, a religious Israeli, desperately wants his country to remember one of its finest hours and act accordingly.

Gilad Shalit And Bowe Bergdahl

It's great that Gilad Shalit is finally a free man, reunited with his family. In the cold calculus of war, it is hard to see how Israel did not make a mistake in trading Shalit for thousands of Palestinian prisoners, unless it's willing to contend that those prisoners are not dangerous men, which seems to be the opposite of what it's saying. 

Ever since Shalit's capture, Israel effectively made his capture a potent international symbol of Hamas' perfidy. Shalit held no value to Hamas except as a symbol; well, if that's the way they wanted it, Israel would highlight the emotional resonance of holding a young soldier hostage for so long. The problem with that approach is that it bargained up Shalit's price in negotiations. Shalit's capture was already very raw for Israelis --  and very, very understandably -- and successive Israeli governments' emphasis on Shalit only increased domestic pressure to get him home at any price. Hamas saw an opening and took it. 

It's worth contrasting Shalit's case with that of PFC Bowe Bergdahl. Bergdahl has been a prisoner of the Taliban for two years. The Taliban sporadically release risable, pornographic videos of Bergdahl for propaganda purposes. But the U.S./NATO military command, as much as it wants Bergdahl released, do not make Bergdahl a major public symbol. That would only increase the Taliban's negotiating position, making it more likely that ISAF would box itself into the corner that Israel just faced.

I don't want to criticize Benjamin Netanyahu for striking the deal with Hamas to release Shalit. The decision must have been agonizing. It's just important to recognize the steps that led to such an awful decision, and not to repeat them. 

Update, 5:37 p.m.: Herman Cain. Wow. Just... wow.

BLITZER: Could you imagine if you were president…and there were one American soldier who had been held for years and the demand was al Qaeda or some other terrorist group, “You got to free everyone at Guantanamo Bay” – several hundred prisoners at Guantanamo. Could you see yourself as president authorizing that kind of transfer?

CAIN: I could see myself authorizing that kind of transfer but what I would do is I would make sure that I got all of the information. I got all of the input, considered all of the options. And then, the president has to be the president and make a judgement call. I can make that call if I had to.

Every Gitmo detainee for one American soldier? So, Cain: would you empty Gitmo for Bowe Bergdahl?

Cain doesn't have any kind of foreign policy, and doesn't care. His only foreign policy concern, via Dan Drezner, is this:

I can tell you what the Cain Doctrine would be:  if you mess with Israel, you're messing with the United States of America.  Is that clear? 

So I wonder if this "Gitmo for one soldier" thing is the sort of insanity that results when "Thou Shalt Not Criticize Israel" becomes a first principle. 

 

The Future of West Bank Terrorism Is Jewish

I was having a conversation with my mother on Sunday. Like many American Jews of her generation, her politics are to my left on pretty much everything -- except Israel. We got to talking about the settlements in a future/hypothetical State of Palestine. She asked: Post-statehood, why can't Israel just tell the settlers that now they're citizens of Palestine? If you live on one side of the border, shouldn't you just be Israeli; and on the other side, you're Palestinian?

And I sympathize! Life should work like that. And to some extent, it will: both sides agree in principle to negotiated land swamps during final-border negotiations, in order to -- for the purposes of this conversation -- incorporate the biggest and most contiguous settlement blocs (Ma'ale Adumim, for instance) into Israel. Lots of settlers live in the West Bank because successive Israeli governments made it financially sensible to settle there, rather than out of an ideological project of preventing the State of Palestine from ever existing.

But here's why Israel really does have to uproot most of the settlements. 

After setting the fire in the early-morning hours, vandals spray-painted the words "revenge" and "price tag" on the walls of the mosque in the Bedouin village of Tuba-Zangaria.

Similar messages have been left in the West Bank, where attackers have burned mosques, cars belonging to Palestinians and olive trees. They have also vandalized an Israeli army base and the Jerusalem home of an Israeli anti-settlement activist.

Monday's mosque attack didn't happen in the West Bank. It happened in northern Israel. But what's happening there is a lagging indicator of what's happening in the West Bank. So says the Shin Bet. This is from a September 13 Ha'aretz piece:

Extreme right-wing Jewish activists in the West Bank have moved from spontaneous acts against Arabs -- following the demolition of Jewish homes by Israeli authorities, or terror attacks against Jews -- to organized planning that includes use of a database of potential targets, according to new analysis by the Shin Bet security service.

The small groups of Jewish extremists are difficult to infiltrate and carry out surveillance on Arab villages and collect information about access points and escape routes in the villages. They are also collecting information about left-wing Israeli activists.

This is a potential future, if the IDF and Israeli intelligence do not treat these settlers like they do Palestinian terrorists: imagine a Palestinian state that incorporates thousands of Israeli settlers as part of a final-status deal. Suddenly, the State of Palestine includes among its citizenry lots of wealthy, ethnically separate people who live in enclaves and stockpile weapons*. Unless Palestine bulldozes lots of access roads, they will have access to numerous transit routes.

They are not ethnic separatists in a traditional sense. They don't merely believe that they ought to live in the political entity known as Israel -- actually, in many cases they don't recognize Israeli political authority. They believe they must live in the West Bank for religious purposes. And their premiere political project is to stop the West Bank from falling under Palestinian sovereignty. Failing that, their premiere political project will be to roll that Palestinian sovereignty back. The only way to do that is the way that Palestinians have tried for decades on Israel: terrorism.

What Israelis, Palestinians, Americans and all other interested parties need to consider is what happens after the first incidents of Jewish terrorism inside the State of Palestine. Palestine will need to retaliate, as any state does. You can imagine a Palestinian defense or interior minister even picking a deliberately provocative title for an operation to uproot Jewish terror cells, like, say, Operation Defensive Shield. You can also imagine what will be on the minds of those Palestinian security forces: payback. 

Suddenly we can imagine televised images of Palestinian cops in riot gear and soldiers in armor attacking people who look like -- and, probably, in many cases, are -- Jewish civilians. Women and children. The pressure on any Israeli government to retaliate will be overwhelming. The race to the violent bottom will accelerate.

Uprooting settlements will be emotionally wrenching work. We know this because the IDF already does it. And for its efforts, the settlers vilify the IDF; they also infiltrate it in the hopes of preventing settlement destruction. There will be many cries about making this-or-that part of the West Bank "Judenrein," designed for maximum emotional resonance. (It's been a standard settler tactic for decades.) But outside of incorporating select settlements into Israel through negotiated land swaps, the alternative is a continuation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after a (hypothetical) final status deal. 

*When I was younger, my father had an apartment on Avenue J in Brooklyn's Midwood neighborhood. It's one of the commercial hearts of a rather, ah, conservative part of Jewish Brooklyn -- during the Second Intifada, you could see wheatpasted posters of Meir Kahane on streetlamps and the sides of buildings. When we'd go to get sandwiches at the deli, we'd see tzedakeh (charity) boxes on the counters. The small placards accompanying the boxes had pictures of snarling dogs. Their legends advertised that donations were needed to help our fellow Jews in Judea and Samaria defend themselves against the Arabs.

"Huh," I remember once saying to my dad after we left the deli, "so they buy Rottweilers for the settlers?"

"Are you kidding me?" he responded. "That's to buy them AK-47s."

Judis Wins

I'm proud to have worked with John Judis when I was coming up. Articles like this are why: rigorous, humane, and intolerant of intellectual laziness. It's not just that Judis argues that Obama should have backed a Palestinian state at the United Nations. It's the methodical, incontestable case he constructs, aimed at the heart of Zionist consistency:

I have heard some arguments for why the United States should not favor UN membership for Palestine, but they sound very much like arguments for why the United States should not favor a Palestinian state at all. Moreover, they are the sorts of arguments that easily could have been used in 1947 against UN support for a Jewish majority state.

The United States, it is said, should not assist Palestinians in gaining membership at the UN because some Palestinians still don’t recognize the right of Israel to exist. But guess what? In 1947, there were Zionists identified with the Revisionist movement (parts of which later came together to create Likud) who denied the right of Palestinians to a state. They wanted all of Palestine and even Jordan for a Jewish state; and some of them were willing to use terror and assassination to achieve their ends. And there are still many Israelis who deny the right of Palestinians to a state. That didn’t preclude our helping Palestine’s Jews achieve statehood through the UN, and it shouldn’t impede our helping the Palestinians.

Brave and bold, that's John. 

I should say something else. Good for TNR and its new editor, Richard Just, for publishing this. I'm not going to open old wounds or relitigate an ugly incident that's long past. It's just a credit to the magazine that it lent its digital pages to Judis' argument, knowing full well what it means. That's in line with TNR's best traditions of intellectual honesty, the history that made me fall in love with the magazine way back when. 

In Defense of Moral Equivalence

Via Jeffrey Goldberg, Robert Satloff of the Washington Institute for Near East Affairs really liked President Obama's U.N. speech. Here's something he positively adored:

Perhaps most remarkably, Obama did not pair that recitation of a fundamentally pro-Israel narrative with an equal but opposite recitation of the Palestinian narrative -- the themes of rootlessness, humiliation, and dispossession that he has cited on previous occasions. (In last year's UN address, for example, he said: "This time, we will think not of ourselves, but of the young girl in Gaza who wants to have no ceiling on her dreams, or the young boy in Sderot who wants to sleep without the nightmare of rocket fire.") Instead, with no discussion of Israeli settlement activity, building in Jerusalem, or the difficulties of Palestinian movement through checkpoints, Obama limited himself to one side of the story.

As a descriptive statement, that's completely correct. But it would have been helpful if Satloff explained what was wrong with last year's U.N. address. Because that excerpt is precisely the kind of example where moral equivalence is, well, necessary.

Yes, yes, I know: "moral equivalence" is a horrible rhetorical mistake, the handmaiden of useful idiocy, etc. But that's only true when an equivalence is drawn between unequal moral claimants. Here, however, the girl in Gaza and the boy in Sderot are equal moral claimants. She really does have the right to freedom and security. He really does have the right to freedom and security. It would be a moral lapse not to draw an equivalence between them.

Satloff is unquestionably correct that Obama went before the United Nations and told Israel's story. But left unsaid is what the girl in Gaza thought about that. If she ever thought the United States took her plight seriously, what must she think now?

How Obama's Palestine Position Sounds In Arabic

Now we have an answer, from the streets of Ramallah:

“We are choking on the American double standard,” said Muhammad Ali, an engineer. “America supported the movements for freedom in Egypt, Tunis, Libya and Yemen, but this stops when it comes to the Palestinian people. We are asking, why?”

It's almost Rosh Hashanah. All I can hope for is the avoidance of new anti-Israeli terrorism; the avoidance of any further immiseration of the Palestinian people; the avoidance of a new, steep, cataclysmic descent of American prestige in the region because of Obama's giant blunder; and, finally, after 44 years, the free and independent State of Palestine.

The Weekly Standard Has Cracked Abbas's Code

See, you think Mahmoud Abbas is seeking an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza because he's, like, submitted a plan for the United Nations to recognize such a state and his last decade's worth of political actions point to that. But that's anti-Jewish naivete. Because the Weekly Standard has cleverly deciphered the truth. Abbas obviously is out to take all of Israel. After all, it's all there, plain as day, in a logo on Abbas' own stationary. Now it can be told. 

All us other reporters need to hang our heads in shame. If only we had paid attention to the logo! 

Other People's Shoes

Count on Jeffrey Goldberg to come up small in the biggest moments:

I'm running around a bit doing some other journalism today (there are apparently other issues in the world besides the demand to create a 23rd Arab state)

-- Um. That's the most offensive possible way to put it. I'll be charitable and presume that Goldberg's running around and didn't think that phrase through. Since I'm constantly told what a fair-minded observer he is, I'm sure he doesn't actually believe that the aspirations of millions of Palestinians are just about getting yet another "Arab state." Nor does he truly believe that 22 states are indistinguishable aside from the fact that there's a bunch of A-rabs in 'em.

But c'mon, man. You should know better than this:

...but I'll try to watch the Abbas speech, and the Netanyahu speech, later on. I hope my expectations are wrong, and that these two sometimes-very small men manage to surprise us, though I doubt it. Mahmoud Abbas, in particular, doesn't seem -- these days especially -- interested in putting himself in the shoes of Israelis, when he declares that the occupation of his people's lands dates back 63 years -- namely, to the creation of Israel itself, not the Six Day War, which was provoked by the allies of the Palestinians, and then lost by the allies of the Palestinians. 

Do herrings come any redder? Whatever Abbas' rhetoric -- and his rhetoric was pretty damn good, to a liberal American Jew's ears -- Abbas' actions should give any sane Israeli leader a boner. Check the Palestine Papers for his extraordinary sensitivity to Israeli, uh, sensitivities. If Abbas put himself in Israelis' shoes any more, he'd have his own foot on his neck at a West Bank checkpoint.

Anyone who thinks that Netanyahu would make a deal with Abbas if only Abbas rhetorically started the Palestinian experience in 1967 is clowning himself.  And the Israelis have occupied the West Bank for over four decades. It's not Palestinians who need to put themselves in Israeli shoes. And if Netanyahu ever came close to even a moment of empathy, that would be the first emotional fact that would dawn on him.

Mahmoud Abbas Tears The Roof Off

If you'd like to read Abbas' speech to the United Nations on Palestinian statehood, it's here. On paper, however, it's a bunch of boilerplate rhetoric and familiar history. And then this happens:

When we bring our plight and our case to this international podium, it is a confirmation of our reliance on the political and diplomatic option and is a confirmation that we do not undertake unilateral steps. Our efforts are not aimed at isolating Israel or de-legitimizing it; rather we want to gain legitimacy for the cause of the people of Palestine. We only aim to de-legitimize the settlement activities, the occupation and apartheid and the logic of ruthless force, and we believe that all the countries of the world stand with us in this regard.

I am here to say on behalf of the Palestinian people and the Palestine Liberation Organization: We extend our hands to the Israeli government and the Israeli people for peacemaking. I say to them: Let us urgently build together a future for our children where they can enjoy freedom, security and prosperity. Let us build the bridges of dialogue instead of checkpoints and walls of separation, and build cooperative relations based on parity and equity between two neighboring States - Palestine and Israel - instead of policies of occupation, settlement, war and eliminating the other.

I didn't read those words. I listened to them, in translation, as Abbas delivered them. And they were electric. Abbas blew the doors off the United Nations, with a clarion call to rectify a perpetual injustice, in the absence of realistic alternatives, and issuing a call that resonated, emotionally, with many in that room.

Imagine what they sound like in Arabic. And imagine what it sounds like in Arabic when the U.S. objects. I actually thought President Obama's U.N. speech made as strong an argument as can be made for why Abbas' move is misguided. But I didn't hear it in Arabic. 

Does anyone seriously believe that after Abbas' move comes in spite of Israel and the United States, and after he forces a vote, that the Palestinian leadership that succeeds him will be more quiescent to Israel or the U.S.? More accomodating? More empathetic? 

It's difficult to watch that speech -- to see the reaction to it -- and avoid the conclusion that the United States isn't placing itself on the wrong side of a watershed moment in the Arab/Israeli conflict. 

Update: My friend Mark Leon Goldberg adds, "This is about as a dramatic as it gets for a General Assembly here at the United Nations."