It’s hard to read this news feature in today’s Haaretz and continue to believe that Israel, even if it were to end the occupation, is a worthy cause. The article is about a new Hebrew University study on philanthropy in this country and others:

In 2010, $575 billion was sent around the world for philanthropic purposes, but only $11 million came from Israel. According to figures from the past decade, 48 percent of charitable funds raised in Belgium were earmarked for international relief, compared with 38 percent in the Netherlands, 13 percent in Italy, 9 percent in Britain, 5 percent in the United States – and 0.1 percent in Israel. …

Not only do we Israelis, unlike people in other prosperous countries, give basically nothing to charity abroad, but at the same time we receive an ordinately huge amount of charity from the rest of the world. (By the way, the figures make it clear that the great bulk of that charity we got came from goyishe sources.)

The amount sent overseas by Israeli nonprofit groups in 2009 reached just NIS 107,000 – 0.1 percent of their revenues. In contrast, more than NIS 9.2 billion was received in Israel from donors and foundations abroad.

The most ironic (and, for a Jew, merciful) part of this story is that Diaspora Jews are world-renown for their philanthropy – and (to the enduring exasperation of stout-hearted Zionists) the large majority of it goes to non-Jewish causes. From a 2007 study of American Jewish philanthropy written up in the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles. (I couldn’t find figures for the rest of the Diaspora, but I imagine the picture there is about the same):

We examined about 50 of the largest and most prominent foundations established by Jews and looked at where they made their more than 8,000 grants in 2004 and 2005, the latest years for which comprehensive information is available.

The findings confirm our previous research: About 80 percent of the dollars they gave away went to general causes — higher education, health care, arts and culture, programs for the poor and elderly, the environment and more. About 20 percent went to Jewish causes, including 7 percent for Israel-related purposes.

Oh well. I don’t think these statistics need a lot of analysis for what they say about the way Israeli Jews see themselves in the world vs the way Diaspora Jews do, or about which way is good and which way is shitty. At any rate, though, thank you for your generosity, chaverim. The people of Israel are eternally grateful.

Footage of the Muhammad al-Dura shooting (Screenshot: France 2)

In the 13 years since Muhammad al-Dura was killed in an Israeli-Palestinian shootout in Gaza while cowering behind his father, masses of right-wing Jews have eagerly embraced a conspiracy theory of the 12-year-oid boy’s killing – that it was staged, a hoax perpetrated by Palestinians to blacken Israel’s name. This theory, promoted most avidly by Boston University Prof. Richard Landes and French media analyst Philippe Karsenty, depends on a view of Palestinians being superhumanly clever and fiendish, and a view of reality that comes from the movies. The mentality here is essentially the same one that drives the 9/11 “truthers,” the anti-Obama “birthers,” those who say the Shin Bet assassinated Rabin, or those who say ultra-rightists assassinated JFK – a fevered imagination activated by political antagonism that knows no bounds. In the right-wing conspiracy theories of the al-Dura shooting, the boundless antagonism goes out to the Palestinians and their supporters.

This week, the State of Israel officially joined the movement. Its report on the al-Dura affair adopts the conspiracy theory in full. (To be precise, it adopts the relatively “restrained” conspiracy theory – that the al-Duras were never shot. The other, wholly unrestrained conspiracy theory in circulation holds that the Palestinians killed the boy deliberately to create a martyr.) The report was commissioned last September by Netanyahu and current Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, the “investigative” committee was headed by Yossi Kuperwasser, the former director-general of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs and staffed by officials in the Foreign Ministry, Defense Ministry, IDF Spokesman’s Office and Israel Police. The panel’s conclusions were pronounced by Netanyahu to be “the truth.” This is the State of Israel talking.

The most fitting adjective I can think of for the report, and for the thinking behind it, is “creepy.” The government suggests that such a line-up (whose members aren’t even named) is somehow going to be fair or objective; this is how the State of Israel now goes after the truth. There are several prominent American and French journalists who investigated the al-Dura shooting, and who are entirely unconvinced that it was staged – but they are not mentioned in this report. The possibility that what appears to have happened in September 2000 actually happened – that Muhammad al-Dura was shot to death and his father Jamal badly wounded, that the boy’s death was confirmed in detail by doctors at Gaza’s Shifa Hospital, that he was buried in Gaza, that his father was treated for severe gunshot wounds at Shifa and afterward at a Jordanian hospital – is not even considered. The report just spins this outlandish hoax narrative, with very little explanation of where all the “facts” came from, while citing only people who back up the story and never anyone who disputes it. The Kuperwasser Committee report is a product of the echo chamber in which Israel and its most zealous overseas supporters live.

I’m not going to recap the whole al-Dura controversy; here’s a long op-ed I wrote about it for The Jerusalem Post in 2008. (The only update I have is that one of the anti-hoax investigative journalists I cite, German documentary filmmaker Esther Schapira, evidently has since gone over to the conspiracy camp.) But I want to mention a few things that aren’t mentioned in the new Israeli report that I think illustrate its dishonesty and that of the movement it grew out of, and which show why the claim that the al-Dura shooting was staged is plain garbage.

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Referring to the original, exclusive news report of the shooting broadcast by France 2 television, the Kuperwasser Committee states:

Contrary to the report’s claim that the boy was killed, the committee’s review of the raw footage showed that in the final scenes, which were not broadcast by France 2, the boy is seen to be alive.

This is one of the key claims of the conspiracy theorists: that in the unedited video of the “alleged” shooting, the last you see of Muhammad al-Dura is him lifting his arm, moving his head and looking into the distance, something he obviously couldn’t do if he was dead. The problem is that this is not true: the last you see of Muhammad al-Dura in the unedited video – after he lifts his arm, moves his head and looks into the distance – is him drooping little by little into his father’s lap, which he might well have done if he was dead, and which certainly is no evidence that he was alive. This segment of the video is all over YouTube: here’s one copy. Watch the last seconds, after the boy lifts his arm. Somehow the Kuperwasser Committee didn’t mention this.

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Another familiar “proof” of the hoax cited by the Kuperwasser Committee is that “the injuries and scars presented by Jamal [al-Dura, Muhammad's father] as having been inflicted during the incident were actually the result of his having been assaulted in 1992 by Palestinians wielding knives and axes …” This revelation was supplied by Dr. Yehuda David, a hand surgeon at Israel’s Tel Hashomer hospital who treated Jamal for those earlier injuries in 1994. His statement to the committee says the Jordanian hospital medical reports on Jamal “support my assertion that the paralysis of Mr. Al-Durrah’s right hand was not a result of an injury allegedly suffered at the Netzarim junction several days before, as he claimed, but had been caused by the earlier injuries which I had treated in 1994.” (Underlined in the original.)

When a French appeals court in 2012 overturned David’s conviction for libel in a suit brought against him by al-Dura, Netanyahu said he had “proved Israel’s righteousness to the world,” and assured him the state would foot his legal expenses. (The appeals court did not find that David’s account was accurate, only that he’d given it in “good faith”; meanwhile, a French journalist who used David’s account to denounce al-Dura, and who was included in the original libel suit, was ordered to pay al-Dura 6,000 euros.)

Shortly after David’s victory in court and blessing from Netanyahu, Dr. Rafi Walden, deputy director of Tel Hashomer Hospital  and co-chairperson of Physicians for Human Rights – Israel, wrote an op-ed in Haaretz about Jamal al-Dura’s injuries and David’s claims.

My sole intention is to address testimony provided by Dr. David, who has been praised by the prime minister for having acted with integrity and persistence to defend the reputation of the state of Israel. The facts are completely different. After the incident in 2000, Jamal al-Dura was treated in Gaza, and transported the next day to Amman’s King Hussein Hospital. His entire medical file has been relayed to me; it is 50 pages in length, and features pictures of the wounds and x-rays.

Dr. David claimed it was indisputable that the wounds were identical to ones treated eight years previously. The fact is that the medical documentation compiled in Amman shows completely different wounds: there is a gunshot wound in the right wrist, a shattered forearm bone, multiple fragment wounds in a palm, gunshot wounds in the right thigh, a fractured pelvis, an exit wound in the buttocks, a tear in the main nerve of the right thigh, tears in the main groin arteries and veins, and two gunshot wounds in the left lower leg.

Diagnoses in this file also provide detailed documentation of the 1992 wounds, including a paralyzed nerve in the right hand which was, in fact, treated by Dr. David. Photographs, x-rays, surgery reports, expert consultation reports and the rest of the data compiled in this medical file corroborate the diagnoses. I regretfully state that the statements made by my colleague, formulated as though “there isn’t a shadow of doubt,” are not well founded.

But Walden, a very well-known figure in Israel (he’s also Shimon Peres’ son-in-law), was not consulted by the Kuperwasser Committee, which left David’s statement, like all the other “factual information” in its report, to stand unchallenged.

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Probably the most vital contributor to the al-Dura conspiracy theory has been Nahum Shahaf, a prominent Israeli physicist, engineer and developer of defense technology. In an April profile of him in the Times of Israel, he is described taking a phone call from Kuperwasser to discuss the progress of the libel suit against Karsenty. Shahaf’s reconstructions of the shooting scene at Netzarim Junction and his examination of videos from the incident are bedrock material for the movement. His so-called findings are all over the Kuperwasser report, for instance his discovery that what appears in the France 2 video to be blood on Muhammad al-Dura’s stomach is actually a “red rag” the boy is holding there so it will look like blood (!!!). Shahaf has been interviewed in the media since the report came out; he’s the go-to guy in Israel on al-Dura hoax theory. Yet his name is not mentioned in the committee’s report; a look at the Hebrew Wikipedia, which cites some of his other “findings” with links to his blog, might explain that:

He also investigates the Rabin assassination, claiming that the photo of the “Shir Hashalom” lyric sheet stained with Rabin’s blood was faked, and he supports the conspiracy theory of the murder…

Here is what Shahaf had to say about the 2008 Na’alin shooting affair, in which an IDF battalion commander held a blindfolded, bound Palestinian while a soldier shot him in the toe from close range, and which was filmed by a Palestinian resident with a camera provided by B’Tselem:

In October 2010, prior to the verdict in the Na’alin shooting affair, Channel 10 aired a report that featured Shahaf’s alleged evidence that the film published by B’Tselem, and which served as key evidence in the trial of the soldier who did the shooting and of the battalion commander, had important scenes edited out, and that the Palestinian was not hit at all by the rubber bullet fired by the soldier.

The shooter and the battalion commander were convicted in court and a police forensics expert testified that the film was authentic and undoctored. This, of course, hasn’t affected Shahaf’s status as the Sherlock Holmes of the al-Dura conspiracy movement, the fountainhead of so much of the State of Israel’s “proof” that it was all staged.

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When individuals buy into this theory, it’s one thing; when official Israel buys into it too, it’s, well, creepy. These people are not stupid (neither, by any means, is Shahaf, nor many other people in the movement), but they’ve been stupefied by their radical antagonism toward the Palestinians and anybody else who goes against Israel, and so they’ve come to believe in demonstrable absurdities. Look at the original video of the shooting by France 2′s Charles Enderlin: at the beginning you see bullets hitting the wall a couple of feet from the al-Duras. Did father and son agree to sit still for such a “staging”?

Think about it: the France 2 cameraman who shot the footage in Gaza, Talal Abu Rahme, couldn’t have known beforehand the extraordinary effect his footage would have – yet according to the Kuperwasser Committee and Co., this was a pre-ordained plot between the cameraman and the al-Duras. In the middle of a crossfire between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians, Abu Rahme and the al-Duras were faking it – there were no real bullets, no real fear, no real blood, no real wounds, no real death. As if a Palestinian cameraman in Gaza on the second day of the intifada had no hope of getting footage that would inspire hatred of Israel, and so he had to make it up.

Think about it: if Mohammed and Jamal al-Dura were never shot, that it was all a hoax, how many people would have to be covering it up all this time? Start with the al-Dura family, then the people near the scene of the shooting, at least some of the people at the funeral, plus doctors and nurses at the Gaza hospital and the Amman hospital, plus the Jordanian ambassador to Israel who brought Jamal al-Dura to Amman for treatment – and that’s just off the top of my head. Each and every one of them would have had to keep this incredible secret for 13 years. Yet with all the legions of Palestinian collaborators Israel has managed to conscript over the years despite the danger to their lives, not one Palestinian has ever been found to corroborate the al-Dura conspiracy theory.

These are just some of the inconvenient details that have to be ignored to believe that the al-Dura killing was a hoax – and official Israel, starting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, believes it.

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The ironic thing, though, is that the Kuperwasser Committee’s minimal finding – that there’s no proof Israeli soldiers shot the al-Duras – is absolutely true. What’s more, the same prominent foreign journalists who were wholly unmoved by the hoax theory – American James Fallows and Frenchmen Denis Jeambar and Daniel Leconte, as well as Israeli communications expert Gabriel Weimann – were also thoroughly unconvinced by France 2’s claim that Israeli soldiers had fired the bullets that hit the father and son. Because of the angles and obstacles on the impromptu battlefield, they all concluded it was much more likely that the al-Duras had been shot accidentally by Palestinian gunmen in the crossfire.

That’s also the explanation I believe. On the basis of the known facts (as opposed to “facts”), that’s the most reasonable explanation, the easiest to accept – and it clears Israel of the terrible, almost certainly false accusation that its soldiers deliberately, demonically gunned down a frantic 12-year-old boy trying to hide behind his father, who was pleading vainly for the shooting to stop.

So why couldn’t Netanyahu and the Kuperwasser Committee defend Israel with a simple, plausible explanation, instead of this bizarre, through-the-looking-glass bullshit? Because as keepers of the consensus in 21^st century Israel, they are naturally vulnerable to the al-Dura conspiracy theory. Finally, all you have to do to believe it is believe that Palestinians – doctors, patients, ambassadors, whoever – will tell any lie, no matter how gargantuan, to score a point against Israel, and that they are capable of performing uncanny feats to that end. And that’s what the defenders of Israel believe – about Palestinians and the rest of the neighbors, too. Which is why they so readily drank the Kool Aid on the al-Dura affair.

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 inequality to levels never before seen here and which have not diminished since. But because overall economic growth returned (based largely on the vast enrichment of the prosperous minority) and unemployment went down (while a giant class of “working poor” was created), the consensus today is that Netanyahu, in his years as finance minister, saved the Israeli economy.

With this sort of thinking taking over the country in the last decade, the poor and their problems are no longer a national concern: if they’re not working, it’s because they don’t want to; if their schools are lousy, it’s because of the parents; if their neighborhoods are slums, let them earn the money to move out. Poverty and poor people haven’t been an issue in Israeli politics since the 1999 election campaign, when Ehud Barak made effective use of the image of “the old lady lying on a gurney in the corridor of Nahariya hospital.” By now, the only economic victims anybody wants to hear about are the middle class, and their problems are the only ones that count – not homelessness or unemployment or “food insecurity,” but rather high prices and, now, slightly rising taxes.

In line with this mentality, the “social protest” began over the high price of cottage cheese, moved on to problem of high rents in Tel Aviv, then to the high cost of daycare for working moms. If there is a poster family of the social protest, it is the young, college-educated, hard-working couple in their late 20s with a kid or two, and who don’t know how they’re going to afford to buy their own home in the center of the country with housing prices going up like they’ve been. People of the middle-class who are finding it hard to hold onto their standard of living, and whose grown children are finding it even harder to attain it – these are the voices of economic protest that count today. Whether they’re in the streets or not, these are the masses who make the “social protest” the powerful mass movement that it is.

These people’s greatest moment during the last government was the lowering of the price of cellphones; that it was accomplished by a communications minister who was a hardline Likudnik (Moshe Kahlon), did not stop “the people” from hero-worshipping him. Likewise, the Israeli masses’ greatest moment during the current government was the “open skies” agreement that will soon lower the price of airline flights to and from Europe; that it was carried out by a vicious Arab-hating transportation minister, Yisrael Katz, didn’t hurt him a bit, either. Lapid, too, was a hero regardless of his newfound allegiance to the settlers and disparagement of the “Zoabis.” Only now that the middle-class is coming in for some budgetary pain is he in trouble; when Lapid was showing nothing but callousness to the Palestinians, Israeli Arabs and Jewish poor, he was an Israeli middle-class hero, and the chief political beneficiary of the social protest.

If this is a social protest, it’s about the most smug, bourgeois one I’ve ever heard of. It’s a social protest that shows contempt for this society’s No. 1 victims, the Palestinians, and No. 2 victims, Israeli Arabs, while showing indifference to its No. 3 victims, the Jewish poor.

When the masses behind this mass movement don’t give a damn about people here who have it so much worse than they do – and in the case of the Palestinians, who live under their country’s military dictatorship – why should anyone give a damn about them? When they are deaf to complaints ranging from poverty to tyranny, why should anyone listen to their middle-class blues?

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: 

The clip was quickly taken down by the student union, which said it would exercise more caution in the future while insisting that the film had been taken out of context and blown out of proportion.

“The clip is meant for comedic purposes only, and it was only meant to entertain while getting the students excited about the traditional vacation in Eilat that will take place this weekend,” the union said. “In less than one day, the video received thousands of positive reactions alongside criticism. We had no intention of hurting any population, and if someone was offended from the video directly or indirectly we sincerely apologize.”

I don’t know which is more stupefying in its moral numbness, the movie or the “apology.” They were just having some good clean fun. They didn’t mean to hurt anybody. It was taken out of context, blown out of proportion. And my favorite - if anyone was offended (which they still can’t understand why that should be, but, being the noble, humble people they are, then by all means) they apologize.

They honestly don’t know what they did wrong. They’re genuinely stumped that anyone could find what they did not funny, but ugly, sickening, vicious, sadistic. And when they realize that a whole lot of people reacted that way, that they’re in trouble, they immediately try to cover their asses by pleading innocence and pointing out all the support they got – and they truly don’t understand what’s wrong with that, either.

I know that there are people like this in every country. But I also know that this is an authentic Israeli type. Those college kids are the real-life basis of countless stock characters in Israeli comedy – the crude, dependably racist boor who says whatever he wants to anyone he wants, who thinks he – or she – is funny but is, of course, unbearable. The thing is, in the comedy routines, they’re usually lower-class, salt-of-the-earth characters; the people who made this film go to college, they run their college’s Student Union. Education doesn’t seem to have helped them, or the thousands of their peers who registered “positive reactions” to the film.

I wish I could say that if we end the occupation this sort of behavior will fade away in this country. But it won’t. It might diminish by a fraction, but Israel is a breeding ground for boors, always has been – in fact I think there are a lot fewer of them here than when I arrived nearly 30 years ago – and boors just naturally gravitate to racism. Why Israel produces so many of them, at every level of society, is a huge question. I think the answer starts with the hard origins of the people, the circumstances, the land, and who knows where it ends.

Whatever, these people are here, they’re on patrol and checkpoint duty in the West Bank, and they’re coming home to take their place in society. And the fact that there are masses of Israelis who are utterly appalled by them doesn’t make up for their prevalence, their conspicuousness, and their resilience.

Every nation has its racist boors, but Israel has more than its share. Interestingly, it’s a type that used to be virtually unknown among Jews, before we became, as the song says, a free people in our own land.

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 friend, America, would prod the public and its leaders with “tough love.” Failing that, the Palestinians would rally the world against the occupation through diplomacy and nonviolent protest.

Like a lot of other people, I put my hope in one after another of the above tactics, and one after another, they have so far come to nothing.

So, as they say, desperate times require desperate measures, and for the cause of Israeli justice and Palestinian freedom, that means ostracizing Israel, including by such means as boycotting the President’s Conference.

At this point, at least, I can’t lay down a precise rule on which means would be fair and which ones foul, but I know, for instance, that I would be sickened at the sight of a shopper in a foreign supermarket refusing to buy Bamba; that’s pathological, that’s treating Israel as if it’s got the cooties. Likewise, I wouldn’t want Hawking or anyone else to refuse to visit Israel privately. I loathe the idea of a hands-off policy toward everything and everybody Israeli.

But if Madonna were to announce that she won’t play here again until the occupation is over, I would cheer. What I’m in favor of above all is a psychological campaign aimed at Israelis and their leaders – declarations by the democratic world, backed by action, that it will ostracize Israel until it stops denying the Palestinians their independence. That is the one thing that can succeed, the one thing that can scare Israelis into a radical change of course, and when a boycott can advance that goal without indulging in Israel-hatred – which the BDS campaign in the West has largely failed to do – then it’s a good thing. Harsh medicine, but ultimately, excuse the expression, good for the Jews as well as the Palestinians.

The strongest argument against punishing Israel for the occupation, in any way, is that Israel shouldn’t be singled out, that there are other countries doing much worse things than what we do to the Palestinians, so why not punish them? I have nothing against boycotting all sorts of countries, but the problem with that question is that it looks at a boycott of Israel, of any sort, as punishment and nothing else – and even while much of the BDS movement intends it that way, that is not necessarily the effect. A boycott is, of course, punishment, but if Israel learns the right lesson from it – that the occupation is wrong and must be ended – then it’s a punishment that will save this country.

Again, if Israel would reverse the status quo of its own volition, through elections, or do it in response to pressure from its friends like the U.S. and European governments, then I’d oppose punishing it by any means. But the fact is that there’s no rational hope of this happening; the right wing owns Israeli politics, while the U.S., European Union and the other democratic states, for a variety of reasons, won’t force Israel’s hand. The kinder, gentler ways haven’t worked on this country, so it’s either acts of ostracism or occupation forever, and given those two choices, I’d say Israel is best served by the former.

In retrospect, the sanctions on South Africa were a gift to that country. If Israel ends its long tyranny over the Palestinians, such conscientious boycotts as that of Stephen Hawking will be remembered for having been a gift to this one.

Related:
Stephen Hawking’s message to Israeli elites: The occupation has a price
Techwashing: Hasbara group strikes back after Hawking boycott

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 tens of thousands of rockets and missiles, some of which can hit anywhere in Israel. How much of a difference would these Fateh-110 missiles that Israel destroyed in the last couple of days have made in Hezbollah’s hands? It doesn’t seem there was anything so urgent about bombing them; it seems Israel did it because it believes there was no real risk involved, as former Military Intelligence chief Amos Yadlin told Army Radio, as quoted in Haaretz.

Yadlin said that he doesn’t expect Syria to retaliate. “A confrontation with Israel would bring more danger, not responding would let Assad maintain the upper hand in the fight against the rebels.”

So far, there are no reports of people being killed in the Israeli attacks, although there are reports of injuries from last night’s strike on a military research center. But how long can Israel’s luck hold out? How many more times can it attack Syria without Syria or Hezbollah hitting back?

(UPDATE: The New York Times on Monday quotes a doctor at Syria’s military Tishreen hospital saying at least 100 soldiers were killed and dozens of people were injured. It also quotes a senior military official saying dozens of elite troops were killed.)

Could that be what Israel wants? Could Israel also be trying to draw Iran into the fray and give it an excuse to hit Tehran? At any rate, is the possibility of a regional war something that doesn’t scare Israel, so it sees no risk in taking out a few batches of advanced weapons before Hezbollah gets them?

One thing is sure – Israel is provoking a war. (Imagine what this country would do if some enemy attacked its weapons sites.) Meanwhile, the Obama administration is backing Netanyahu and the generals 100 percent. As for this country, there isn’t a word of protest from anyone, certainly no one who matters. Israel may or may not be at war in the very near future, but if it isn’t, it won’t be for lack of trying.

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Related:
Arguments against intervention in Syria are losing steam
The least terrible policy in Syria: Doing nothing

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.

In briefings recently for American media representatives, administration officials have said that removing the chemical weapons threat in Syria would require ground operations involving no fewer than 75,000 U.S. troops, probably with assistance from other countries. …

A military operation in Syria would require precise intelligence at an extraordinary level. It’s reasonable to assume that it would also involve military resistance on the part of the Assad regime … Intelligence experts are divided over whether Iran and Hezbollah would help defend the Syrian chemical weapon sites in the event of a U.S.-led military operation targeting them. But that would just be the beginning of America’s headache.

The weaponry would have to be collected on the ground and perhaps transported outside of Syria so it could be neutralized and buried; either that or the facilities in which the weapons are stored would have to be destroyed. That’s a task of rare proportions which would take many months to carry out, even if the capture of the weapons proceeded more easily than expected.

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 talking about might make it harder for Assad to prosecute the war and thus bring down the level of killing – or it might not. At any rate, a no-fly zone is not going to remove the chemical/biological weapons from Syria or the jihadists who would like to have them.

And I don’t believe Israeli leaders think the air force can stop those weapons from being smuggled out by repeating indefinitely what it did in January – bombing a weapons convoy that was moving from Syria to Lebanon, without Israelis getting injured. If the air force bombs Syria repeatedly, it seems pretty likely that Syrian or Hezbollah missiles will start falling in Israel, and after that anything could happen.

But the thing is, even if Israel or the United States could neutralize all the chemical and biological weapons and all the terrorists in Syria and Lebanon, there would still be plenty more of them around and plenty more being created all the time. And one other thing – the terrorists and those sorts of weapons have been around for a long time, many decades, and so far they haven’t come together. I don’t think it’s because the jihadists are incapable of getting and using such weapons. I remember after 9/11, Rudolph Giuliani said the thing he feared most was somebody going up with a crowd of tourists to the observation deck of the Empire State Building, taking a tiny plastic bag out of his pocket and sprinkling a few specks of anthrax into the winds over Manhattan and killing hundreds of thousands. It hasn’t happened, and it doesn’t seem that hard to do. There have to be other reasons why Al Qaeda-style groups have not used chemical or biological weapons or “dirty bombs” or other reasonably accessible mass killing instruments against its enemies, and I think one of the reasons is deterrence: The reaction against the jihadists and their world, or worlds, would be catastrophic beyond imagination.

I’m not saying such an attack can’t or won’t ever happen. But since it hasn’t yet, and since there’s no way to get rid of the threat, and since an attempt to get rid of it in Syria would seem to be so inordinately daunting and dangerous – and inconclusive – I think the least terrible option is to do nothing and go on trusting to deterrence.  To refrain from attacking anything and anybody in Syria unless they attack first.

As for the humanitarian consideration – the need to stop Assad from killing people by the tens of thousands – if a no-fly zone could help, then by all means. But foreign soldiers should not be ordered to get between Assad and the jihadists who are leading the fight against him. If anybody wants to volunteer to go there as a peacekeeping troop, good luck to him, but no country owes it to Syria or to humanity to risk its soldiers’ lives on such a mission.

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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:

This is the same Hamas that runs Gaza, the terrorist enclave that celebrated last week’s bombings in Boston by cheering, dancing in the streets and handing out cake and candy to passersby. It was like 9/11 all over again, and the residents of Gaza were rejoicing.

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

On April 16, Palestinians in Gaza cheered. They danced in the streets and handed out candy and sweets to motorists and pedestrians alike. They were not however celebrating the inauguration of a new school or the completion of a hospital. Instead, they were celebrating death. On April 16, Palestinians of Gaza celebrated the Boston marathon atrocity. While our first responders were picking up severed limbs and tending to the wounded, Palestinians reveled in Boston’s misery.

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:

Shortly after terror bombs exploded and murdered at least three people at the Boston Marathon, members of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah were reported to be dancing in the streets of Gaza, handing out candies to passerbys.

The story says the celebrations “were reported.” By whom? It doesn’t say. No news agency with journalists in Gaza reported such sights and sounds, and since Israelis aren’t allowed into the Strip, I was interested to know where Leyden (whom I met 25 years ago, and who is a Facebook friend of mine) got this information. I asked him on FB, and he wrote back that he got it from “security sources.” Whatever.

So until further notice, it appears that the words “were reported” constitute the complete body of evidence that Palestinians in Gaza celebrated the Boston Marathon bombing, as first “reported” by Israel News Agency and circulated as fact by Pamela Gellar, Israel Hayom, David Horowitz’s website and many, many other pro-Israel/anti-Muslim mass media.

Not that it will matter, though; the great crowds of people who want to believe this story will keep on repeating it.

NOTE: This post has been corrected to show that Israel News Agency is run by Joel Leyden and not by the pro-settler radio station Arutz Sheva (whose English-language website Israel National News, not surprisingly, also picked up Israel News Agency’s “scoop”).

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 is a day when every military move the Israeli government and Israeli army ever made was as righteous and necessary as World War II. And what is the inevitable conclusion from this? That whatever war or occupation Israeli soldiers are involved in now is righteous and necessary, and the next one will be, too. From President Shimon Peres’ Memorial Day address:

The fighting spirit of the IDF’s soldiers and commanders, their bravery and faith in their mission, together with their devotion to moral values, guarantee that the IDF will always prevail. We know this. Our enemies have tested it. They should not err again.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:

[The Jewish people] have always had to fight for our liberty and our existence. The haters of Israel deported us, persecuted us and wished to erase the memory of Israel. Today, too, there are those who threaten to destroy us. They have not succeeded; they will never succeed. We do not wish to fight, but if forced, we will wield our sword and step out into the battlefield.

IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz:

The land is rife with turmoil, and a storm is brewing beneath the surface, full of dangers and developing threats. … Tonight, while we soberly gaze at our enemies, and the steel of the IDF and its soldiers, forged in the flames of unity, I say to you: Our people’s defensive wall is always ready. Our sword is sharper than ever. Our deadly flame can reach any distance. Those who need to, know that there is no place, and no target too far away for the long arms of the IDF to reach. I know that when we will once again be needed, we will be prepared, as always, and readier than ever. We will continue our struggle to guarantee the safety of the people of Israel.

So Memorial Day in Israel is not just about sadness over the soldiers who were killed, it’s also a day of militarism, a somber day when Israel’s past, present and future battles are sanctified with heroes’ blood.

Every country should have a Memorial Day to remember its soldiers who died, and to comfort their families. But in a country like this one, which is very simply addicted to fighting enemies, Memorial Day, while rightly remembering the fallen soldiers and comforting their families, also inevitably becomes a banner day for aggression and a black day for peace.

There is another way. Last night at the Tel Aviv Fairgrounds, thousands of Israelis and 44 Palestinians – 65 others who wanted to come were denied entry – gathered for an alternative Memorial Day ceremony organized by Combatants for Peace. From the address by former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg:

Memorial Day is the result of wars. Wars don’t happen by themselves. Anyone who wants to escape the cycle of war and reach a different place must respect the other side’s victims. The margins have begun moving toward the center. What this means is that Israelis and Palestinians together want to remember their dead and stop the killing. There are thousands more like these throughout the country, if not tens of thousands, who want to look into the heart of things rather than at their demagogic wrapping.

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:

Israel demands that if negotiations are to be resumed they will need to address, in parallel, all core issues of the final settlement – including the issue of recognition of Israel as a Jewish state , and a solution to the refugee problem. “If the discussion commences with talks about borders and security, Israel will only give, and will get almost nothing in return,” the senior official said. “When we get to the issues where the Palestinians will need to give something up – like the right of return – we won’t have any bargaining chips left.”

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 off the talks with demands that Abbas can’t fairly be expected to meet – like renouncing the right of return and recognizing Israel as a Jewish state. That way he gets the blame.

These are the mechanics of Israel’s rejectionist strategy, as spelled out by a typically blinkered senior Israeli official in today’s Haaretz. It seems, then, that the speech Obama gave in Jerusalem three weeks ago didn’t really change the world.

The ball is now in Kerry’s court. I don’t see him going to war with Netanyahu – the Obama administration clearly doesn’t have the guts for that – nor do I think he’ll try too hard to pressure Abbas to agree to Netanyahu’s terms – Abbas is not going to commit suicide.  Kerry will probably try to get the two sides to meet somewhere in the middle, which I don’t believe will happen because they’re on two different planets politically – the Palestinians want independence and Israel doesn’t want to give it to them – so this current U.S. attempt at Middle East peacemaking will fade to nothing like so many before it.

But by blowing off Kerry’s mission so brazenly, Israel, presumably, has pissed off the Americans – not enough, unfortunately, for them to sanction this country, but maybe, just maybe, enough for them to let Israel suffer the consequences of its policies. Today’s statement of Israeli rejectionism is good news, a possible small step in the right direction: it makes it easier for Abbas to follow through on his promise to take the occupation to the International Criminal Court and proceed with other “unilateral” steps unless Kerry’s efforts deliver meaningful results within three months, which ain’t gonna happen. As long as the right wing is in power here, nobody’s going to sweet talk Israel into giving up the occupation; this can only be done by uncompromising, adversarial means that magnify Israel’s crime against the Palestinians before the world, that threaten Israel with pariahhood – and only the Palestinians can do that, because nobody else cares enough. Hopefully, then, the senior Israel official quoted in Haaretz today brought the occupation one step closer to The Hague.