Despite the wishes of many — if not most — of the people in the streets, the masses who identify with the ‘social protest’ are callous to those whose complaints are so much more urgent than theirs.  

Even though I’ve always agreed with the stated goal of the “social protest” – to redistribute Israel’s wealth more equitably – I can no longer sympathize with it. While many if not most of the people in the streets would like to turn the movement against the occupation and not only against “swinish capitalism,” this hasn’t happened after two years of protest. It’s not going to happen, either, because the moment it does, the social protest loses its legitimacy to speak in the name of “the people,” because “the people” of Israel couldn’t care less about the Palestinians. This was clear to everyone from the beginning; left-wingers hoped that what began as a demand for economic justice would extend to a demand for justice for the Palestinians, but that hope remains as hollow today as it did in the summer of 2011.

Regardless of the politics of the street protesters and the organizers, the masses at home who identified with the cost-of-living protests two years ago, and who identify today with the protests against the new budget, are dominated politically by the Jewish middle-class and their concerns. Those concerns not only exclude the Palestinians, they exclude the Arab citizens of Israel – and they largely exclude the genuinely poor Jews of this country, too. While many middle-class demands happen to coincide with those of the poor – for instance, opposition to higher consumption taxes and to cuts in education – the poor are hangers-on in this movement. (Again, I’m not talking about the protests in the street, but the wave of popular discontent over the economic policies of Finance Minister Yair Lapid and the government.)

The days when poor Jews from the urban slums and peripheral “development towns’ could mount an attention-getting protest in this country are over. (For Palestinians and Israeli Arabs, of course, they never began.) Those days ended in the early-to-mid 2000s when then-finance minister Netanyahu outlasted the single mothers’ hunger strike led by Vikki Knafo. At the same time, he was slashing aid to the poor amid the worst recession and terrorism in the country’s history, which in turn expanded poverty and economic...

Student Union members at a large college outside Tel Aviv make a grotesquely racist film, and they don’t understand what they did wrong.   

I wish I could say that the young Israelis who made this film and the “thousands” who immediately gave “positive reactions” to it were marginal in this society – that they were “hilltop youth” in the West Bank, or slum-dwellers growing up amid severe poverty, ignorance, violence and crime. But they’re not. They’re college students in their early twenties from the heart of the country, from the College of Management Academic Studies in Rishon Lezion, outside Tel Aviv. And the ones who made this little film aren’t marginal on their 12,000-student campus, either – they’re in the Student Union, they’re involved, they’re the leaders of tomorrow, as people like to say of such young adults.

I am very relieved to read there was an outpouring of protest against the four-minute film from other students at the college. In this country, there are both children of light and children of darkness. The problem is that there are so many children of darkness; wherever you go in the Middle East’s only democracy, some of them are guaranteed to be in the vicinity.

The film was a “comedic” promo for the college Student Union’s annual party in Eilat last weekend. It showed a busload of students being waylaid in the desert by three Arabs depicted in the equivalent of how the worst Nazi propagandists depicted Jews – grotesquely ugly and hairy, howling, leering, bent on homosexual gang rape. Playing in the background was twangy Arabic music.

The students posted the film on the college Student Union’s Facebook page, and the outraged comments started appearing. But so did the approving ones, according to the Student Union, as reported by The Times of Israel: 

I wish there was a kinder, gentler way than acts of ostracism to get Israel to end the occupation, but those ways have failed terribly.  

I would not join a BDS protest; I’m a “two-stater” who believes Israel should remain a Jewish state because the alternatives would be worse, who believes Israel’s “original sin” is the occupation, not Zionism, and so I don’t think I’d really feel at home at your average BDS demonstration. There seems to be way too much loathing for everything about Israel in the movement – which is not to say everyone in the movement thinks that way; I know that’s not true. But the main thrust and tone of the BDS campaign is such that there’s no way I can identify with it.

But when I read Wednesday that Stephen Hawking was boycotting the President’s Conference, I was glad. He doesn’t hate Israel; he’s been here four times. In his letter canceling his participation, he wrote that he’d originally planned to come because “this would not only allow me to express my opinion on the prospects for a peace settlement but also because it would allow me to lecture on the West Bank. … Had I attended, I would have stated my opinion that the policy of the present Israeli government is likely to lead to disaster.” What Hawking hates is the occupation, not Israel, and he believes that by striking a blow against Israel’s rule over the Palestinians, he is helping not only the Palestinians but Israel as well. I think he’s right, and what’s more, I think he succeeded in a seismic way.

Israel and its advocates can wave off boycotts by some college students and left-wing professors, even by a few well-known pop musicians, but not by a giant and hero of the Western world like Hawking. What he’s done is a threat to the status quo – and except for the potential that lies in the Palestinians’ UN strategy, (specifically their plan to take the occupation to The Hague), Hawking’s boycott is the only such threat that’s appeared in a very, very long time.

I wish there were kinder, gentler ways than such acts of ostracism to get Israel to end its 46-year dictatorship over the Palestinians. Ideally, of course, the public would elect a government that would do it. Failing that, its best...

How long can Israel’s luck hold out? How many more times can it attack Syria without Assad or Hezbollah hitting back?  

People in this country have been worried that the fighting in Syria is going to “spill over the border,” and now Israel, unprovoked, unattacked, has gone and bombed Syria twice in the last 72 hours. Is anyone in this vibrant democracy protesting? I haven’t heard it.

That’s because the missiles from Syria and/or Hezbollah haven’t started falling here. So far so good, people figure. As long as we get away with it, hooray. If, however, our neighbors to the north start retaliating with some of their tens of thousands of rockets and missiles on the Israeli home front or other targets, maybe then people here will wonder why we decided now of all times to punch Syria and Hezbollah in the nose.

What was the Air Force trying to do – stop Assad’s chemical weapons from falling into the hands of global jihadists, the same ones who supposedly can’t be deterred because they have no address? No. Both times, the Air Force reportedly hit not chemical weapons but caches of long-range, accurate, conventional missiles that came from Iran and were meant not for “undeterrable” global jihadists without an address, but for Hezbollah, which has an address and is being deterred very nicely by Israel – so far.

Why did Israel take out these missiles? The Israeli official quoted after Friday morning’s attack said it was to prevent Hezbollah from obtaining “game-changing” weapons. Which game was in danger of being changed? The game of Israeli military superiority, of the Israeli “qualitative edge.” The rules of this game are that Israel continually flies spy planes over Lebanon, bombs Syria now, and may bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities later, secure in its belief that the targets can’t do much in return – like bring down Israeli spy planes over Lebanon with anti-aircraft missiles (which were hit in January), or terrorize the home front with long-range, accurate missiles (which were hit Friday and yesterday).

In other words, Israel’s air strikes in Syria were meant to maintain its ability to carry out continued acts of aggression against its enemies without fear of challenge. This is the game, and this is what Israel doesn’t want anyone to change.

The strange thing, though, is that Hezbollah and Syria, as noted, already have...

Sending armies or air forces to stop jihadists from grabbing Syria’s chemical weapons would be inordinately daunting and dangerous – and inconclusive.   

I, too, would like to neutralize the threat of the jihadists in Syria, and Hezbollah, and the possibility that they will take control of Assad’s chemical weapons (and worse, much worse, his possible biological weapons). But how is that going to be accomplished? Here, according to Haaretz’s Amos Harel, is what the Americans think it will take.

If it were possible to do the whole thing by remote control, to simply bomb the chemical/biological weapons out of commission, I’d be in favor of that – so long as innocent people weren’t anywhere remotely close to the explosions, and so long as all that poison couldn’t be carried on the wind anyplace. But such conditions, obviously, are impossible. So bombing the weapons out of existence isn’t an option, either. (The Free Syrian Army says Israel hit a chemical weapons site in the country on Saturday, but there’s been no word from Damascus or Jerusalem on it.)

In all, I can’t think of anything Israel, the United States or anybody else can do to ensure that Syria’s chemical and maybe biological weapons don’t come into the possession of Islamic terrorists. The prospective “no-fly zone” that a lot of Americans are...

The birth and growth of an utterly baseless, extremely damaging claim.

If you Google “Gazans celebrate Boston Marathon bombings” or variations of that entry, you will have your reading cut out for you. Such a scene was reported by Pamela Gellar, possibly America’s best-known Muslim-basher, on her website Atlas Shrugs. The story was headlined “DANCING IN THE STREETS OF GAZA OVER BOSTON BOMBINGS,” and carried the intro, “End US aid to these savages. Now.”

Such a spectacle in Gaza was also mentioned in a column by Ruthie Blum in the English-language website of Sheldon Adelson’s Israel Hayom, this country’s most widely-circulated newspaper:

Another of America’s most prominent Islamophobes, David Horowitz, carried the story on his Frontpagemag.com in a column by Ari Lieberman:

The spectacle of Gazans dancing in the street and handing out sweets after the Boston Marathon bombings was reported as well in the website of The Jewish Press, an Orthodox paper that bills itself as “America’s largest independent Jewish weekly.”

Likewise, the tale was repeated on all sorts of far-right pro-Israel/anti-Muslim blogs, on YouTube, on Twitter. By now, it is no doubt an article of faith among this crowd that Gaza was jubilant over the massacre in Boston.

Where did they get this idea? From going through the links posted, the origin was a story written on the day of the bombing by Israel News Agency, a right-wing pro-Israel website run by Joel Leyden, a long-time New York Jewish immigrant to Israel who describes himself on the site as a “journalist, media consultant, social media and SEO [search engine optimization] pioneer working with both the Israel Defense Forces and the US Army in Haiti.”

Datelined Jerusalem, the story is headlined “Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah Celebrate Boston Terror Attack.” It shows a photo of a boy handing out pastries to a smiling man in a car. The photographer isn’t identified, and the caption is somewhat less than precise and verifiable, though it does at least acknowledge that the photo was NOT taken after the Marathon bombing. It reads: “The above photo was taken after a recent terror attack.”

Everything the story has to say about the reaction in Gaza is contained in the opening sentence, which leads a long story about the bombings:

The story says the celebrations “were reported.” By whom? It doesn’t say. No...

Today is not only a day of sadness for fallen Israeli soldiers, it’s also one of public declarations that all those bloody conflicts were righteous and necessary – just like the current ones and those that lie ahead. 

Maybe in another country, a country that goes to war once in a generation or longer, Memorial Day can be a day strictly of sadness for the soldiers who were killed, and can even be a day to look back and ask: Was that war, or the one before it, really necessary? Did some of these soldiers we’re mourning, did this family’s son, really have to die like that, before his time?

But in Israel, where Memorial Day began last evening and ends this evening, the opposite happens: It is the one day of the year where it’s absolutely forbidden to question the justice of any war or clash in which any Israeli soldier ever died. On Israel’s Memorial Day, every war, every operation, every hostile encounter in this country’s history is implicitly declared to have been unavoidable, an unquestionable act of national self-defense. On Memorial Day, even Israel’s most controversial wars, those that are by now often described publicly as wars of choice, of missed opportunities, of aggression – the 1956 Sinai Campaign, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the 1982-85 Lebanon War, the late-1980s first Intifada, and the hundreds of attacks and counter-attacks of this occupation and that war of attrition – are implicitly declared to have been morally pure, and all the soldiers who were killed in them died for the most glorious possible cause. On Memorial Day, each and every one of this country’s thousands of bloody fights was a fight for its existence, freedom and security, as the nation’s leaders, followed by the media, solemnly intone.

But what else are they going to say? That some of these fallen soldiers, or a lot of these fallen soldiers, died in vain? That the government, backed by the public, sent them into wars that shouldn’t have been fought, or exposed them to guerrilla attack by acts of aggression? Obviously, no government or army leader wants to say that – on Memorial Day or any other day – and the great majority of the public doesn’t want to hear that, and I imagine that very few families of fallen soldiers want to hear it, either. (Although some do.)

So Memorial Day...

In remarks to Haaretz today, ‘senior Israeli official’ shows Netanyahu to be the rejectionist, making it easier for Abbas to take ‘unilateral’ steps soon.  

Well, that was quick. No sooner does John Kerry wind up his first trip to Israel-Palestine to restart the peace process than the Netanyahu government publicly trashes his plans. Haaretz diplomatic correspondent Barak Ravid reported today that a “senior Israeli official” said Kerry asked Netanyahu to free prisoners, transfer weapons to the Palestinian Authority and give up control of certain parts of the West Bank for the sake of Palestinian economic projects. Netanyahu, however, won’t consider any of these “confidence-building measures” until after peace talks get underway, said the official.

The Catch-22 here is that Netanyahu’s conditions for starting negotiations ensure that they won’t start. Kerry, reasonably enough, wanted Israel and the Palestinians to try to solve their long list of disputes in stages, and to start with borders and security arrangements. That would require Netanyahu to delineate for the first time where he thinks the borders of a Palestinian state should lie, something PA President Mahmoud Abbas, reasonably enough, is asking for. Netanyahu, though, doesn’t want to give the Palestinians anything, certainly not a state, so he’s insisting that the peace talks address all the most contentious issues at once. Haaretz:

This is the argument of someone who has no intention of reaching an agreement, who only wants to structure the negotiations so the other guy says “no” before he does and thereby gets the blame for the talks’ failure. The truth is that in any good-faith negotiation, the more issues on which you reach agreement, the more incentive you have to compromise on the ones that remain. If the Palestinians got an acceptable deal from Israel on the borders of its state, they would have that much more motivation to give ground later on refugees, which is indeed necessary if they and Israel are ultimately to sign a peace treaty. Netanyahu, however, knows that if he divulges the borders he has in mind for this so-called Palestinian state, as well as the security arrangements he would demand of it, neither Abbas nor Kerry nor anyone else outside of Israel and the Republican Party would take him seriously as a partner for peace negotiations, and he would be blamed for torpedoing them at the start. Better, from Bibi’s point of view, to kick...

The Holocaust lends itself perfectly to Israel’s two reigning ‘isms’ – nationalism and emotionalism. 

PM Netanyahu speaks at Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at the Knesset in Jerusalem, April 8, 2013 (Raffi Shamir/GPO)

Aren’t historic events supposed to diminish in their impact over time? Not the Holocaust, not in Israel. Today’s Holocaust Remembrance Day just seems bigger, more enveloping, more sanctimonious, more commanding than ever.

John Kerry just arrived last night to kick off what is supposed to be the Obama administration’s last-gasp attempt at Middle East peacemaking, and I open up Yediot Aharonot – which, along with Channel 2, is the most accurate reflection of the Israeli public’s personality – and it’s page after page after page of Holocaust – more than half the paper.  I don’t remember Israeli newspapers giving that much space to Yom Hashoah. Even Haaretz went to town today.

The official explanation for this would be that the Holocaust survivors are dying of old age and soon there won’t be any of them left, so this is a way of hanging onto to them, or showing them respect at the end of their lives. But knowing how Israel has treated Holocaust survivors over the decades, especially when they first arrived, I’m not convinced. I think the reason for this counter-intuitively growing impact of the Holocaust, and by extension Yom Hashoah, is because it lends itself perfectly to the two reigning “isms” in this country – nationalism and emotionalism.

The connection between nationalism and the Holocaust isn’t new, of course, but with Bibi Netanyahu settling into his third term as prime minister, the association has become so much more raw and crude than ever before. Last night at Yad Vashem, Netanyahu delivered his annual Yom-Hashoah-bomb-Iran speech, and nobody raised an eyebrow – it’s become a ritual, like matza on Passover, and the idea of using the Holocaust to beat the drums for war with Iran has become so matter-of-fact around here, so embedded in the culture, that nobody notices it anymore.

The other factor in the Holocaust’s increasing impact – the rise of emotionalism, of tear-jerking as the key to mass appeal – is relatively new...

Given the likely options, I’m glad Obama is coming here tomorrow to do nothing rather than to try to revive the peace process. Today, reviving the peace process, Obama-style, would mean coercing Mahmoud Abbas to enter negotiations with Netanyahu in return for nothing, or next to nothing, such as a token prisoner release, some musical chairs with a few checkpoints and a vague statement of good intentions. And for that, Netanyahu would get what he very much wants: “peace negotiations” with no end, which would provide diplomatic cover for his terribly right-wing, settlement-crazy new government. At the same time, Abbas would be constrained from taking any more “unilateral actions” like going to the U.N., or to The Hague, or seeking any advantage outside the framework of negotiations opposite Bibi Netanyahu and under the auspices of the United States, otherwise known as Israel’s lawyer.

That would be much, much worse than the nothing Obama reportedly plans to achieve in his visit this week (beyond getting the Israeli public to warm up to him, which I’m sure he’s capable of doing, and which will last until some future moment when he says one mildly critical word about Israeli policy or Israeli anything, at which point the Israeli public will forget this charm offensive in Jerusalem as if it never was).

Obama tried to revive the peace process once before, at the start of his presidency, when he demanded that Israel impose a total settlement freeze and agree to a Palestinian state on the pre-Six Day War borders with land swaps. Now that would have been something, had he stuck to his guns. But he “learned his lesson,” which is that the domestic political price for taking on the occupation is much, much higher than what he’s willing to pay, so the only real pressure Obama’s been willing to apply since then is on the Palestinian side, notably at the U.N.

Who needs more of that? I only hope he keeps to his plans this time, and that by the end of the visit, those of us who’d like to see freedom and democracy around here will be able to say, as sincerely as hell: Mr. President, thanks for nothing.

Related:
Ariel students call for Obama protest – in comically broken English
Waiting for Obama: Hebron youth take cue from U.S. civil rights movement

Join the discussion:

Netanyahu used to be in a class by himself as a vainly handsome Israeli political leader obsessed with his appearance. Now he’s got company, and competition. 

Binyamin Netanyahu and Yair Lapid (Photo: IsraeliinUSA/CC BY 2.0, Activestills.org)

Oh God — Netanyahu and Lapid in the same cabinet meetings. I don’t know if so much preening, posing and mugging can be contained in one room without the walls starting to buckle. One thing I advise Lapid — don’t wear a tie. Nobody, but nobody can knot a tie like the Beebs. Check out that knot — it’s so symmetrical, so solid and tightly-packed — and you rarely see even a sliver of white shirt between it and the collar. So Lapid, buddy, stick with the black T-shirts and blazers. If you really want to throw down on Bibi, wear the leather jacket. Do you have a motorcycle? If not, buy one.

It used to be that Bibi Netanyahu was in a class by himself as a vainly handsome Israeli political leader obsessed with his appearance, one who had a strange love affair going with the camera, who always seemed to be looking in the mirror. Ariel Sharon’s nickname for him was “ha’doogman” — the fashion model. The more up-to-date term is metrosexual. Not only does Netanyahu comb his hair over to hide the baldness, but he’s been dyeing his white hair gray for over a decade. You see him on TV and he doesn’t have a hair or a thread close to being out of place. He even keeps his facial expressions to a minimum, like he doesn’t want to spoil the look. He’s taken on the aspect of a wax figure, or a manikin in a Brooks Brothers store. He looks perfect — not particularly human, but perfect.

And now there are going to be two raging metrosexuals at the top of Israeli government. I don’t think I have to make the case that Yair Lapid is head over heels in love with his face, his hair, his body, his comforts. He’s given up the gel, and reportedly the cigars, too, but not all the million different little tilts of the head and grins and eyelash-battings, not the pouting stares. “We’ve come to make a change,” he says with that plaintive look. This guy is a...

The controversial Venezuelan leader, who died Tuesday, did more good than bad – and the good he did was extraordinary.    

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (Victor Soares / CC 3.0)

Any political leader who buddies up conspicuously with Ahmadinejad and Assad, showing indifference to their victims and freedom-seeking opponents at home, loses his shot at dying a hero, at least with me. So, like most left-liberals, I have mixed feelings about the legacy of Hugo Chavez. His alliance with the Iranian and Syrian regimes were the worst things that could be said against him, so I’ll deal with them first: They are black marks on his record, but they do not blacken it entirely. They do not make  Chavez a moral untouchable – because most respected modern Western leaders, certainly in the United States and Israel, have buddied up with any number of dictators across Asia, Africa and Latin America who made A’jad’s and even Assad’s crimes look tame.

There is one other capital offense that’s been associated with Chavez, but this charge is pretty hollow: that he fomented anti-Semitism. He was certainly hostile to Israel, comparing its bombing campaign in the Second Lebanon War to the Holocaust, which was typically reckless Chavez demagoguery, and breaking off relations with Israel after Operation Cast Lead, which I can’t fault him for on moral grounds. Regarding the claim that he encouraged the harassment of Venezuelan Jews, it’s based on a raid on a Caracas Jewish school by police who said they were looking for evidence in a crime, and the accusation by opposition journalists and local Jewish activists that state intelligence spied on a Jewish organization it considered a Mossad front. In all, I’d say that falls well short of the evidence necessary to call Chavez an anti-Semite. Also, it’s nothing compared to the truly vicious anti-Semitism practiced by some of the fascist South American generals of the past whom Israel did business with. Furthermore, Arabs in Israel suffer incomparably worse bigotry and abuse in a week than Jews in Venezuela did during Chavez’s 14 years as president. So I think the accusation against him of anti-Semitism not only doesn’t stand up, it backfires.

There are lots of other things to be said against him – he was an autocrat...

People who see Netanyahu as the great Jewish avenger should know how low he’s willing to go in exploiting the memory of Jewish suffering.  

I can never get over the shamelessness with which Israeli nationalist power freaks will exploit people’s memories of anti-Semitic persecution for their own low purposes. Nobody’s better at it than Netanyahu; he can barely make a speech without waving around a document or two from some Holocaust-era archive. And he’s always got that furious expression on his face, as if to warn his audience not to even dare think that he’s faking it, that he’s using the memory of Jewish tragedy in the most calculated way, strictly to help him and his team get away with some new or old outrage – bombing Iran, killing Palestinians, building settlements, whatever. Netanyahu is very far from being the only Israeli nationalist known to work this scam, of course, but he’s the best at it. He looks so hurt and angry up there when he’s going on about Jewish victimhood, and he’s so audacious in wrapping himself in that mantle, that the average shmo is too intimidated to even say to himself that this guy is obviously laying it on too thick, he’s been doing it for 30 years, it’s a highly polished act. After all, that’s Bibi Netanyahu up there; snickering at him is like snickering at the Holocaust. So our leader goes on getting away with it.

I wish people who see Bibi as the Jewish avenger, brave and true, would be aware of how this guy used the memory of Jewish persecution yesterday. He broke new ground. For the purpose of removing Yair Lapid as the obstacle to his forming a right-wing/ultra-Orthodox government, Netanyahu likened the Yesh Atid party leader’s refusal to sit in a government with Haredi parties to past boycotts against Jews. He also identified Lapid’s stance with current international boycotts of Israel and of products made in the settlements. For the goal of pressuring Naftali Bennett, leader of the settler-backed Habayit Hayehudi party, to break his alliance with Lapid and join up with the Haredi parties in his next government, Netanyahu told a news conference last night:

As Jews who have suffered from bans, we cry out in protest. So, Mr. Bennett, are you with Lapid, that boycotter of Jews, or are you against him?

I suppose I should give Bibi...