(Translated by Sol Salbe)

One of the more repulsive concepts underlying Israeli hasbara (the Hebrew term for the public relations efforts geared at disseminating information about Israel) is “redemption through technology.” The concept states that since Israel is a technology leader, it is exempt from any criticism for the fact that it oppresses the Palestinians and other minorities. The same get-out-of-jail card should apply to the fact that it is an ethnocracy, which just happens to be best thing that has ever happened to anti-Semites since the 19th century. This is usually expressed as “ah, so you write some criticisms of Israel, you despicable lowlife? Are you aware that you are using Israeli technology?!” As if somehow this provides some sort of rebuttal to the criticism.

Even if we accept the assumption that Israeli technology is somehow indispensable to modern life – and I certainly do not buy this assumption – there is a conflation here between the activities of individual Israelis or Israeli companies and Israel’s political pursuits. An American female blogger, whose name I have unfortunately forgotten, noted that this minor psychosis is really strange: when someone criticises the United States government, it does not occur to her to say “but we gave the world a whole range of Apple products!”

This psychosis has now reached its zenith, an example of which can be seen here: one the most repulsive hasbara organisations, Shurat HaDin, is calling physicist Stephen Hawking a hypocrite for daring to boycott Israel while simultaneously using an Intel chip which is at the core of the system with which the handicapped physicist engages with the world . This chip, claims the lawfare organization organization, was manufactured in Israel. Thus, the brutes of Shurat HaDin suggest that if Hawking wants to be an honest man, he ought to shut the fuck up. This, in essence, is the emblematic Israeli response: shut your mouth when you criticize me.

Intel is an international company with branches in Israel. It is far from certain whether the chip that Hawking uses was created or designed by Israelis. Moreover, I doubt that Intel is all that keen about this kind of attention by Shurat HaDin. In free countries, those in which one may call for a boycott of Israel, Shurat HaDin’s atavistic approach may certainly lead to a call for a boycott of Intel until it ceases its activities in Israel. Naturally, this doesn’t apply in Israel where anyone calling for a boycott runs the risk of hundreds of settlers prosecuting them and demanding up to NIS 30,000 ($8250) without having to prove actual damages.

A boycott of Intel could be a good idea: the Israeli taxpayer has been subsidizing the corporation for many years under the program of “socialism for the rich, swinish capitalism for the have nots.” So those taxpayers might indeed be delighted when Intel — one of the most predatory corporations around — goes on to exploit other country. But that’s a different story.

Related:
Stephen Hawking’s message to Israeli elites: The occupation has a price
A Zionist defense of Hawking

Palestinian refugees ‘making their way from Galilee in October-November 1948′ (Fred Csasznik, copyright expired)

A few weeks back I watched The Gatekeepers, a movie which interviews six of the chiefs of Shin Bet, from Avraham Shalom to Yuval Diskin. The movie is shocking and well worth your time. The most surprising character was Diskin, who obviously underwent a great change upon leaving the service: at the end of the movie he adamantly agrees with Yishayahu Leibowitch’s famous dictum that the occupation will turn Israel into a ”Shin Bet state.” And over the weekend we learned Diskin went through another metamorphosis: he recommended to the Turkel Committee that the Shin Bet start video-taping its interrogations, which the service has long resisted.

Diskin is merely the latest in a series of senior security officials who, as soon as they leave office, see the light and understand just how ruinous the office they headed was, and how they represented positions that were damaging to the country. The last great show in this genre was the bunch of senior commanders of the IDF’s Northern Command, who upon retirement were astonished to find out that the Security Zone in Lebanon was a huge mistake – often, after defending it in uniform as vital to security just a few weeks prior.

In that regard, the most interesting speaker is certainly Avraham Shalom, the oldest interviewee. Shalom thinks strategic errors were made, particularly by the politicians, but he himself regrets nothing. When asked about moral problems, he laughs. “Morality?” He asks, “Morality? Look for it first among the terrorists.” One assumes former chiefs, assuming they would even bother to be interviewed, would supply similar remarks. It’s very hard to see Issar Har’el, for instance, the closest thing we’ve got to J. Edgar Hoover, providing the camera with anything aside from a mocking, world-weary grin, saying in effect “you’ll never understand, so don’t even try.”

Superficially, Shalom, born in 1928, and Diskin, born in 1956, are separated by just one generation. Actually, they come from different worlds. Diskin grew up in Givatayim, possibly Tel Aviv’s most secure suburb. Shalom was born in Vienna. It was not a safe place for Jews even then, and in 1938 came the Anschluss, the annexation by Nazi Germany, which the Viennese used as an excuse for an orgy of violence against resident Jews. Shalom was lucky: his family understood early on where things were going, and fled to Palestine in 1939. They arrived penniless – this was Adolf Eichmann’s specialty, how he made his name – but they survived.

Not everyone was that lucky. Uri Ben-Ari, who would one day create the IDF’s doctrines of tank warfare, saw as an eight-year-old child in Berlin (he was still called Heinz Benner) how a gang of SA gunmen severely beat his father, after which they urinated on him. On Kristallnacht, the father and son saw the synagogue where he had recently celebrated his bar mizvah being set on fire. Several days later, Benner was kicked out of his school in a humiliating public spectacle: “Heinz Benner! You are a member of the Jewish race which committed heinous crimes against mankind and against the German people! The school vomits you from its ranks and you are hereby expelled! Go through our gate and be gone from our sight forever. Forward march! Heil Hitler!” Ben-Ari emigrated to Palestine, alone, in March 1939. His father was left behind.

In that regard, Ben-Ari was more typical than Shalom. The Palmach generation is often described as composed of native-born, but a significant number of them were European refugees, not natives. For a generation, the symbol of the Palmach sabra was Dan Ben-Amotz. He was actually born in the Ukraine under the name Moise Tehilimzuger. Like Ben-Ari, he too came to Palestine alone; his family, too, was murdered. The number of Jews then residing in Palestine who lost their family in Europe was staggering. To the rest of their trouble – the relative poverty and primitiveness of Palestine, at least when compared to central Europe; the conflict with the Arabs; the significant suffering inflicted on teenaged refugees by teenage sabras and often even by the grown-ups, who couldn’t comprehend what was happening “over there” – must be added survivor’s guilt. The refugees who made it to Palestine prior to 1941 believed they were pioneers, and that their family and friends would join them after a while; many of them saved money diligently to aid in this immigration. At the end of 1945, most of them would realize they were either the last survivors of their family or very nearly so. The fact that they not merely survived, but lived in relative comfort, must also have been a burden.

Ben-Ari and Shalom joined the Palmach in 1946, the year the organization began preparing itself for the coming independence war, which would come within 18 months. This was the same period in which Eastern Europe convulsed in a series of terrifying national struggles which followed the border changes the Soviet Union forced on the region following its victory over Nazi Germany. These struggles – a more apt title would be “ethnic cleansing” – were bloody, and included the murder of possibly millions of people: Ukrainians, Poles, and many Germans. The Czechs murdered, in a savage outburst of hatred only occupied people who felt their chains slip away can understand, some 20,000 Germans in the days immediately following liberation. Most of the victims were women, children and the elderly. The Czech don’t talk much about it nowadays, nor are they fond of speaking of the expulsion of some 1.5 million Germans, or the pillaging of their property. During a tour in Prague two months ago, the tour guide described what happened there as ‘genocide.’ Most of his people prefer to look the other way. The Poles made it clear to Jews who thought they could return home, with the pogrom in Kielce and by hundreds and thousands of terror killings on the roads and on trains, that they, too, are an ethnic minority whose historical role is over. Without understanding these events, it’s impossible to understand some of Alterman’s most haunting, poisoned lines in “The Child Avram”:

Before him stand, then, the Seventy Nations,
And say: We are upon you!
With seventy acts of laws and seventy axes,
We shall return you to this house!
We shall make you lie down in the ready bed,

And you slept in it as still as your father!

Orwell understood what was going on in 1946, in his Politics and the English Language, so reminiscent of Tacitus about the ways the Roman used language: “Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers.” Orwell was speaking of the need of newspapers written in English to speak about what their governments agreed to, without making the readers understand what is it that they mean. In Eastern Europe, it was well understood. There, a “mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details” would simply not be enough; hence they spoke of the events as little as possible.

As far as its Jewish population is concerned, Palestine in 1947 was a branch of Eastern Europe, and it can be argued that its history in 1947-1948 simply cannot be understood without knowing what happened, two years earlier, in Europe. What took place there, echoed here, and when “normal” acts of hostility exploded, in November 1947, into war, tens of thousands of people who could not bring their families back, and who could not avenge themselves on the Germans – for other people already did that, yet another so-called proof of Jewish powerlessness – did on their new land what Eastern Europeans carried out on their side: they acted out an ethnic cleansing and looted the property of the other people. Afterwards they removed everything which might remind them of the people who lived here before them. And when the refugees tried to return, they shot at them. And that, not the expulsion during wartime but the refusal to let them back at peacetime, was the true birth of the refugee problem.

And then came the great silence. There are things of which you cannot speak, because you cannot live with the words. The generation of Ben-Ari and Shalom was famous for its silence. Even the well-known expulsion order, Ben-Gurion’s famous hand gesture when he was asked what to do with the captured population, was a wordless order.

“Hold on to that,” sang the Biluiym (for full English lyrics, click here),

“We tried very hard,
We covered all the ruins,
Changed the names of the streets,
We tried very hard,
We silenced the rumors…”

We silenced the rumors. Anyone who wanted to know, could. The ethnic cleansing of 1947-1948 was an ill-kept secret. But most of that generation did not want to know. And several years later massive waves of immigration changed the country irrecoverably. Many of those immigrants came from Eastern Europe, where people were experienced in entering a house whose occupants abandoned it in a hurry, leaving most of their property behind. A decade after 1948, and Ben-Ari and Shalom’s generation was already a minority. Most of the people did not know on whose lands they were sitting and liked it that way. A common legend arose, which said that the Palestinians left of their own will. A Czech history textbook, published recently, sums up the events of 1945-1946 with the words “and then the Sudeten Germans returned to their homeland.”

Shalom, as a representative of his generation, knew full well why he must not enter a debate about morality. It would open the gaping bottom under Israel’s feet, expose it as a country whose very existence relied on ethnic cleansing. It would open the question whether, given for instance Israel’s way of treating the Negev Bedouin – it now wants to expel thousands of them from the places to which it expelled them in 1948 – can we speak of the Nakba as a finite, finished event, or is it an ongoing process.

The East European ethnic cleansing had a certain advantage over the one carried out by Shalom and his generation: they were final. The German groups in Eastern Europe, which caused much of the instability following the First World War, ceased to exist. Eastern Europe, which until Stalin’s victory was a bubbling cauldron of minorities, some of them with delusions of grandeur, became homogenized. The process was murderous and agonized, caused the death of millions and brought untold suffering to many millions – only the war itself caused more suffering – but it is over. There are no active nationalist conflicts in Eastern Europe today.

The conflict in what used to be Mandatory Palestine never ended. To a certain extent, this was for two reasons: Israel was too weak to conquer the West Bank in 1948, and 1967 was not 1948. While a minor ethnic cleansing took place in 1967, Moshe Dayan knew it was too late to do in the West Bank what the IDF did in would-be-Israel in 1947.

When the Czechs prefer to keep silent and repress their history, it’s a problem, but it is not an imminent danger to the country, just to its national character; and a young and aware generation is trying to raise the issue. When Israelis prefer to pretend there was no ethnic cleaning here, it’s a wholly different question: the conflict won’t end unless Israel admits to the injustice it caused.

But it is so deep, so basic, that many Israelis would prefer to give up a solution so long as they don’t have to face the injustice and admit to it. We would be better off were Shalom’s generation to open its mouth at last; they would be believed. But he who grew accustomed to silence for so long, will not break it easily. Perhaps he is afraid of what he might say.

NGO Monitor (ngo-monitor.org screenshot)

NGO Monitor is one of the most influential organizations in Israel. A group of irksome right wingers with too much money originating from foreign donors, NGO Monitor is in fact one of the main engines propelling Israel’s new Right. If one follows Ben-Dror Yemini’s texts, for example, one finds that he often relies on their reports without doing too much fact-checking. If one reads the reports published by “Im Tirzu” and then searches those by NGOM, one soon discovers that “Im Tirzu” reports are but a watered-down version of NGO Monitor’s reports, sans the difficult words. In short, it is a kind of “Hasbara” Perpetuum mobile.

Now, relying on their reports is really not a very smart idea. As exposed by Noam R last week, NGOM specializes in half-truths and Ad hominem attacks. Those who uncritically swallow their claims might even believe that “Resolution 19/7 was initiated by the abusive regimes of Cuba, Venezuela, Mauritania (on behalf of the Arab Group), Pakistan (on behalf of the Organization for Islamic Cooperation), and the Palestinian Authority”. NGOM dearly hopes that you don’t check the facts and find that states like Norway, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland and others – none of whom, last I checked, were members of the Arab League or the Organization for Islamic Cooperation – signed that mandate.

Never mind their distortions, that is to be expected. We are talking about a “Hasbara” organization after all. But the stupidity! The stupidity! For example, NGOM’s latest report claims that B’Tselem received NIS 4,144,203 from foreign governmental sources. The correct sum, NIS 6,714,025 is alas, much higher, as can be seen in the NGO’s quarterly reports. In effect, by its own logic, NGOM is an organization subverting Zionism by assisting extreme-left non-profits hide the funding they receive from anti-Israeli sources – even when these non-profits declare it openly!

How could such a staggering mistake happen? Well, NGOM didn’t bother to actually read B’Tselem’s information. They took their information from the website of Israeli Registrar of Non-Profits, whose work is criminally incompetent even in comparison with the average Israeli public body. The registrar’s website only presents three quarterly reports by B’Tselem for some reason – even though B’Tselem submitted the second quarter’s report, it is missing from the registrar’s website. So, as far as NGOM is concerned – it does not exist. Furthermore, they managed to ignore two reports – for NIS 449,891 and NIS 61,433 – that do actually appear online.

This is not the only case. The registrar’s website only includes two quarterly reports submitted by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) in 2012, the sum of which was quoted by NGOM as ACRI’s 2012 income from foreign governmental sources – NIS 3,614,668. Same thing for Gisha: the sum appearing in NGOM’s report is the sum of the reported donations to Gisha for the first and fourth quarters, NIS 1,632,285. In the case of Ir Amim, there is only one quarterly report online and this is the figure quoted by NGOM, NIS 1,055,806. As for Rabbis for Human Rights, NGOM quotes the figure received by the organization for the first and second quarters – it seems that the registrar is rather idiosyncratic in its choice of quarters to update – which is NIS 982,049. There are probably further examples, but the game isn’t amusing enough to continue. (To see for yourself, visit the Registrar of Non-Profits website, enter the NGO’s name, and view the quarterly reports, or at least those that registrar bothered to upload.)

Now, if NGOM was serious about its job, someone there might have remembered that a year includes four quarters, not two or three, and to suspect that they may have found their holy grail: irregularities in the activities of human rights NGOs. But they don’t say that. They admit that all the organizations follow the law and have all the relevant paperwork. So what actually happened here? The pathetic truth is that NGOM’s “researchers” couldn’t be bothered to leave their office, drag themselves to the office of the Registrar of Non-Profits, pay the necessary NIS 65 (about $16) and get the CD containing all of the information.

This is what NGOM’s reports are worth to those who write them. Keep that in mind the next time they issue a report.

Truth springs eternal

The State of Israel overdid it two weeks ago, when it summoned the Argentinian ambassador for a reprimand. The reason behind it? Argentina had the audacity to include Iran in the investigation of the terror attack against the Buenos Aires Jewish Community building. They will set up a truth commission, with neither Argentinians nor Iranian citizens as representatives. Previous investigations attributed the attack to Hezbollah.

This week, Argentina kicked back, with gusto. Argentinian Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman summoned the Israeli ambassador, Dorit Shavit, for his own brand of diplomatic reprimand. The ambassador reported that the conversation was “harsh, tense and unpleasant.”

During the conversation, Timerman said things that Israeli representatives haven’t heard in a while. He told Shavit that Israel’s meddling with the investigation is interfering with his country’s internal matters and that it encourages anti-Semitism. He stressed that “Israel doesn’t speak on behalf of the Jewish people and does not represent it. Jews who wanted and want to live in Israel have immigrated there and have become Israeli citizens and those who live in Argentina are Argentinian citizens. The terror attack was against Argentina and Israel’s desire to be involved in the matter only gives ammunition to anti-Semites who accuse Jews of a dual loyalty.” Every word. And it is about time that more countries say this to Israeli representatives.

Related:
EU throws out NGO Monitor case, tells Gerald Steinberg to pick up the tab
Foreign influence, transparency problems of NGO Monitor 

As a rule, junior or mid-level officers and officials, particularly spokesmen, prefer to stay behind the wall of anonymity of their office. They are termed “IDF spokesman” or an “officer in the Southern Command.” They are rarely mentioned by name. However, as part of the IDF Spokesman’s victory lap after Operation Cast Ballot, in which it tries to convince the natives it won the hard battles in the burning-of-consciousness theater, it exposed some of the people in its New Media unit in an article in Tablet. One of them, New Media Department Chief Lt. Sacha Dratwa, then became the focus of a cheap item in Gawker, of the kind we have become accustomed used to: he’s a sensitive man, he’s a normal guy, he likes macchiatos, he posts pictures to Facebook. The people in the IDF Spokesman unit probably thought this was good for showing the human side of their hasbara warriors; good for scoring a few points, if not with their target audience, then with the dying breed of kind Hadassah aunts from the United States.

But, as Eden Abergil and Avi Yakobov (Hebrew) have already learned, exposure on Facebook is a double-edged sword. Someone bothered to dig deep into Dratwa’s account, and dug up an unpleasant photo: Dratwa, mud spread over his face, with the subtitle “Obama Style.”

Oops. Dratwa was caught in homage to the genre of blackface shows, in which white actors would paint themselves black in order to portray blacks as caricatures. The Hadassah aunts, who still remember the golden age of the 60s fondly, are not likely to enjoy this particular sort of bad humor. Why does mud remind Dratwa specifically of Obama? Excellent question.

Which Dratwa leaves unanswered. He writes, in an IDF-sanctioned response, that “I am, and have always been, completely candid about my beliefs and have nothing to hide – as reflected by my Facebook profile.” A profile which he promptly closed to the public. The pictures, claimed Dratwa, “do not reflect my beliefs and have no bearing whatsoever on my position in the IDF.” Well, if it doesn’t reflect his beliefs, what was the picture doing there? And if it has no bearing on his position, why did Dratwa close his page to the public?

The simplest answer is that Dratwa was caught expressing soft racism towards blacks, which is pretty common in Israel; it is reflected in the attitude towards asylum seekers, and even in the attitude towards Jewish immigrants from Ethiopia. Israel is one of the few countries in the world where a large segment of the population believes Obama is a secret Muslim. One wonders whether the hostility of the Israeli media towards Obama – which was expressed even before he was elected in 2008 – would reach such heights if he were a white man.

But even if this is not racism on Dratwa’s part, this is gross stupidity. If you don’t know what blackface is, why it is considered offensive, then you are an ignoramus who has no business being in the media business. Particularly when your target audience is largely American. The behavior of the Dratwa and the IDF Spokesman, which sticks to the position (Hebrew) that that there’s nothing to see here, as Dratwa was only using his own private Facebook account, is unprofessional. Hmmm. Another IDF Spokesman soldier, Yair Netanyahu, was ordered to remove racist posts from his Facebook page, as soldiers are not allowed to express political opinions. Is Dratwa exempt from this rule? However, this unprofessionalism does not surprise me in the least.

Seeing as Sacha Dratwa decided to lift the clock of official anonymity and become a player, not just a part of an establishment, I have something to add to his public resume. When I exposed the case of Rabbi-Colonel Qarim and how he used religion to condone rape, Dratwa was the officer who called me in a rage, told me that my query to the army “disrespects the IDF, the State of Israel and the Jewish religion,” and informed me the IDF Spokesman will no longer answer my questions. I guess they got used to receiving only questions that respect all three. I still don’t know why the IDF took upon itself to defend the Jewish religion. Mission creep?

Now, the IDF Spokesman certainly has more serious problems than Dratwa’s blackface photo. One could begin with the blatant lie they sold us over the weekend (Hebrew): the Spokesman claimed IDF forces “fired in the air” at “300 Palestinian demonstrators,” some of whom were trying to plant Hamas flags on the wall in southern Gaza. As a result, one Palestinian was killed and several wounded. If you want to gauge the difference between the truth and the position of the IDF, watch the videos in the link above.

But Dratwa is important, nevertheless, because he is a perfect example of everything that is wrong with Hasbara: The fact that it is directed, even in English, to Israeli ears only; the fact that it is boorish, ignorant, tone-deaf; the fact that everything existing outside of Israel is foreign to it, and suspect.

Several years ago, the hasbara machine went into overdrive, demanding – and receiving – the head of Human Rights Watch’s military expert, Marc Garlasco. The latter exposed several war crimes by the IDF, and his findings were used by the Goldstone Committee, and the hasbara people demanded he be removed because of his hobby of collecting Nazi military memorabilia; he was described as a Nazi. However, when it is an IDF officer caught expressing either blatant racism (and I think the “Obama Style” subtitle clinches this argument) or stunning ignorance, suddenly we are asked to accept the excuse that he did so on his private Facebook page. Dratwa’s commanders should have sent him on his way simply for becoming a liability, but – as usual for the IDF – they prefer that the country take the hit, as long as no IDF soldier is harmed.

After all, the country is here to serve them. Not vice versa.

Operation Cast Ballot, or as it is formally known, “Pillar of Defense,” has come to an end. Childish to the end, the Palestinians and Israelis managed to miss a ceasefire on Tuesday, as they quarreled over who would fire the last shell. The practice of announcing a ceasefire in advance, so as to make certain that all troops know of it in time and observe it, has been perverted into a competition of who can fire more in less time. Israel has been at it for at least three decades; I still remember how, in 1982, Israeli television enthusiastically reported about Israeli artillerymen making use of the last hours before the ceasefire to spread more death and destruction in Beirut.

A ceasefire has been announced, and we can officially mark Cast Ballot as a failure. It is a failure as far as Binyamin Netanyahu is concerned: he could have made it to the polls with four years of relative quiet, and he chose to end his second term with Tel Aviv being bombed (for the first time since 1991), as well as Jerusalem (first time since 1970), and a terror attack on a bus to boot, seemingly a first since 2006. As in 1997, when he ordered the botched assassination of Khaled Meshal and ended up empowering Hamas by releasing Ahmed Yassin from prison, Netanyahu – whose slogan once was “strong against Hamas” – will end yet another campaign by strengthening Hamas.

It is a failure as far as Ehud Barak, possibly the most hated man in Israeli public life, is concerned. Once more, he proved he learned nothing, and that his image as a military genius is a self-perpetuated myth. He was at it before, in Cast Lead, and he knew what happened in Lebanon; he should have known that the most important thing, before opening fire, is to have a solid exit policy, so that it can be quenched. He didn’t have any.

It is a failure as far as the Israeli economy is concerned. We’ve spent NIS 3 billion just to be where we were before it all began – ahead of early elections, with us heading to the polls because the prime minister is unwilling to expose his planned budget cuts. Now we are three billion deeper in the hole, and the Treasury has already found the solution. No, no, don’t be absurd – we wouldn’t raise the capital gains tax or corporate taxes. That would shift the burden towards the rich. Can’t have that. We’re going to hike VAT again, for the second time in less than a year. No, it won’t happen until the elections – Netanyahu and Steinitz are not that dumb. You’ll be served with the bill afterwards.

And Cast Ballot was a failure, first and foremost, for the holiest of Israeli behemoths, the IDF. It has proven itself, again, to be a blunt instrument incapable of carrying out its mission. As expected, the Air Force – which a common joke says is so different from the regular IDF that it ought to be considered a friendly foreign force – began the attacks by taking out quality targets. Then, after three days, it ran out of such targets, and the killing became much more random. First a family of 12 is extinguished; then a family of four, two of which are children; and on the last day of the operation, our brave flying death squad blows a vehicle sky-high, only to later find out it held three journalists. Oops.

This isn’t new and shouldn’t surprise anyone: That’s how it went during the last round and the one before that. The IAF has a three-day grace period, no more. And in all three conflicts, it was wasted.

The main problem is with the ground forces. They were hardly involved in the campaign. The government allowed the mobilization of 75,000 troops, 56,000 of them were actually mobilized -  and then the government didn’t dare use them. They served only as sitting ducks, deployed in open territory without much shelter. An Al Jazeera journalist noticed they were practically exposed to mortar fire, and by that observation expressed more military sense than the IDF officers who sent the troops there.

When you announce that you are mobilizing 75,000 people and then refrain from using them, you are waving an empty pistol. No one will take you seriously the next time you mobilize, and with good reason. But what could Netanyahu do with this clumsy force?

When you use ground forces in attacking a compact, densely populated region like Gaza, you have two choices: you can charge in, which means casualties. Or you can take cover, and use heavy, wild and inaccurate fire (during Cast Lead, the IDF managed to kill five of its soldiers by friendly fire – the same number lost to Hamas activity). Taking the second option leads, almost automatically, to a diplomatic defeat and a loss of the war. But the first option exists only on paper: the Israeli public is not willing to lose soldiers (the death of one soldier was much more heavily reported than the death of three civilians), and no politician will risk dozens of military funerals – and during an elections, to boot.

War is famously merely the continuation of policy by other means; but Israel preferred renting out policy to its officers. The IDF has been the prime architect of Israel’s Gaza policy, and has failed at it miserably. On the other hand, when Netanyahu asked for a  new Gaza policy, the State Comptroller found that the IDF torpedoed (!) any debate on it.

When a militia of some 400,000 people can’t dislodge a militia of some 20,000 people, even as the first force is infinitely more powerful in explosive tonnage and in its ability to deliver its artillery where it needs to be, then to call this a bleeding tie would be charitable to the larger militia. And I’m not at all sure such charity is in order.

The IDF, in short, failed Israel by being unable to bring a Gaza campaign to a satisfactory resolution while, at the same time, preventing a change of policy. For this stellar performance, we are now asked to pay even more money than it drains from us usually. It also managed to make it clear to anyone paying attention that our ground forces are out of shape.

This is the army that, they tell us, is about to take on Iran. Let’s take this a step further. Our dear prime minister, and the army as well, have been pumping up war with Iran for quite some time. The commander of the IAF is known informally as “commanding general, Iran front.” Let’s extrapolate from the IDF’s performance in the last three campaigns – 2^nd Lebanon, Cast Lead and Cast Ballot – on how it will deal with Iran.

Thankfully, our ground forces won’t play much of a role. The IAF will get its three days of grace. Let’s assume it’ll manage to take out some of the more important targets. But it won’t be able to do much more than that: Teheran is much, much further away than Gaza.

The IAF failed miserably in stopping the rocket fire from Lebanon in 2006 and from Gaza in 2008-9 and 2012. This is no surprise: it also failed in doing the same when it was the PLO lobbing rockets into Israel from Lebanon in 1981. The only thing that stopped the fire was a ceasefire – which, as usual, was broken by Israel. We should reasonably assume that, particularly given its limited range of operations, the IAF will not be able to stop Iranian rockets from landing in Israel – and there’ll be plenty of them.

The Gazans have proven they can take much more than the residents of Israel can, and the stories of heroism Iranians tell themselves deal mostly not with the dismal Iraqi front, but with the survival of the awful years of the rocket wars, in the mid-1980s. I wish anyone who wants to awaken this old trauma and make Iranians hate Israel as much as their regime tells them they should all the best; just don’t tell me you’re acting responsibly.

When it comes to Gaza, Israel has some leverage. The most prominent, of course, is its ability to throttle the Strip by besieging it. Then there are the Egyptians, the Europeans and even the Turks, whose interests often mesh with those of Israel. There is no such leverage with Iran, which is already laboring under heavy sanctions as it is. In order to force it to stop firing rockets at Israel, you’ll need either an extensive air campaign or a proper, old fashioned invasion. Israel can do neither, and I fail to see Obama volunteering for yet another land war in Asia.

We’ve known that the IDF is a broken tool, harmful to its wielders, since the Second Lebanon War. The militarist hysteria which followed managed to bury this truth, and switch the blame for what was a purely military defeat from the army to the government. Then a self-proclaimed military messiah, Gabi Ashkenazi, came along, and while using his job to undermine his civilian superiors, he was serving us with heavy-laden plates of bullshit about “reconstructing the IDF.” The public was all too willing to swallow it, but anyone who was taking a closer look saw that Ashkenazi was giving us more of the same: he was preparing the IDF for yet another glorious tank campaign a la 1973. The chances that such a war will repeat itself are about as slim as those of the Polish cavalry against the German tanks. We’re in another era.

The fact that the reservists were complaining about the same problems they complained about in 2006 – lack of proper equipment, sometimes lack of food – show us just how hollow Ashkenazi’s promises were. One also wonders why the IDF deploys so many reservists, if it can neither supply them properly nor use them.

But fear not: the public will not ask embarrassing questions. This did not happen after 2006, when Hezbollah held its ground against four IDF divisions, and it certainly will not happen after a much smaller skirmish. The militaristic public will once more swear allegiance to the IDF and the troops, being blissfully unaware that this oath is what destroys the army.

The cold and merciless duty of a military force is to trade the lives of soldiers for the accomplishment of military goals. You can’t conquer the mountain unless there is a grave downhill, says the old poem; and no, bombing the mountain until its mother can’t recognize it without dental records is not a substitute, never was. The IDF likes to pretend that the inversion of the proper roles – the fact that the public prefers civilians to die and not soldiers – is the fault of the public. It conveniently ignores the fact that it was the army that decided to fortify its bases – but not towns. It also would like us to forget it intended to use Iron Dome for defending bases, not towns, and then retreated from this under public pressure.

The public demand that no soldiers be harmed is reasonable, if you consider what the usual IDF operation has become: an armed company, complete with air support, taking out less than a squad of encircled, semi-armed, Palestinian youth. Only this isn’t a battle, this is a man-hunt; and the IDF has long forgotten how to win a battle.

And, following Cast Ballot, the public will refrain from debating this. Again.

Click here for more +972 coverage on the Israel-Gaza conflict.

Activist Ilan Shalif, who regularly takes part in weekly protests in Bil’in, reviews a military order declaring villages in the West Bank ‘closed military zones’ (photo: Oren ZIv, Activestills.org)

At least 11 leftist activists were surprised on Sunday morning when they were woken up by cops. The cops, all plainclothes and in groups of three, knocked on their doors between 6 and 7 in the morning, and handed them what they claimed to be administrative restraining orders, signed by the commanding general, prohibiting them from entering four villages in the occupied West Bank: Bil’in, Qaddum, Ni’lin and Nabi Saleh. Activist Alma Biblash reported that the policemen entered her apartment without a warrant, taking care to video not just her but her sister as well. The cops also waved in her face a file with her name on it. In another case, the cops woke up the parents of an activist who had moved out long ago. Activist Leehee Rothschild, also served with a warrant, was told they were issued under the 1945 Emergency Ordinances.

Commanding general? What the hell, you say? Oh. Despite Israeli propaganda claiming it is the only democracy in the Middle East, the 1945 Emergency Ordinances – defined by Menachem Begin, a noted leftist radical, as worse than Nazi legislation – are still in effect in Israel. They allow the military commander (in the case of all residents of Israel proper, that would be the Home Front Command) to do basically what he damn well pleases, or, to be more precise, to do what his ISA (AKA Shin Bet) handler damn well pleases he do. By writs signed by the Home Front Command, the settler Neryah Ofan was exiled from Pisgat Ze’ev, where he lived and worked; Tali Fahima was administratively arrested by such a writ; and the same writ enables draconian measures against John Crossman (AKA Mordechai Vanunu), even though he finished serving his prison sentence eight years ago. As part of the facade of the rule of law, the courts serve as a rubber stamp for those writs, though from time to time they sigh pathetically as they do so. The judges know full well which side the rabble will take, if it has to choose between the secret policemen and the general, or the judge.

What all of the above share in common is the fact they highly irritated the ISA. Ofan by riding in circles around the Jewish Department of the ISA and openly mocking them (they’ve been using administrative writs against him since 2005, but never took him to court); Fahima broke every Israeli taboo, crossed the lines, saw Palestinians as humans, and humiliated the ISA by refusing to serve as an agent; and Crossman, as we know, is responsible for the ISA’s worse debacle: failing to realize a nuclear technician is radicalized and about to leave the country and inform the world (insert insensible mantra) that according to foreign media reports (end insensible mantra), Israel has nuclear weapons.

But when the activists calmed down and actually read the papers they were served, they were stunned to find out this was a run of the mill closed-military-zone order, and that it was signed by the Central Command, not his colleague at Home Front. The spokesman of the SHAI police district (Judea and Samaria, i.e. the West Bank) went on to say that his people gave out 16 such writs, and that “the serving of the writs went on without incident, and at the moment we are unaware of any plans to disturb the peace as a result.” If you say so, Sherlock.

So what just happened? The most plausible explanation would be that the cops, being Israeli policemen, were clueless of the law they were supposed to enforce, and confused the closed-military-zone orders they were serving with administrative restraining orders. Attorney Michael Sfard said, in a phone interview, that Israeli courts have already ruled several times that Israeli activists cannot stand trial for violating those orders, since they are enforceable by military courts only; and, as part of the apartheid regime in the occupied territories, Israelis are not tried in military courts. A Palestinian who violated a closed-military-zone order can be dragged to court; his Israeli comrade cannot.

Sfard further said that as far as he knows, this is the first time that closed-military-zone orders – which are aimed at specific territories, not specific persons – were personally delivered. So what we have here is the policemen of the SHAI district – which is outside Israel – galloping around Israel, serving writs not written by an Israeli court but by the sovereign of the West Bank. Which, assuming Israel was not annexed to the West Bank, has absolutely no power in Israel.

This looks very much like a heavy-handed attempt at intimidating the activists: We know where you live, you’re in our sights, we have you on file, we can knock at your door at 6 a.m. Don’t piss us off and don’t try to use the fact that legally, we can’t touch you, or we’ll dig something up.

Something less plausible is that administrative restraining orders were indeed issued, that the cops were aware of them, and that they may be served soon. If that happens, we’d have the Home Front Command signing writs intended to prevent activists from disobeying orders of the Central Command – i.e., a clumsy attempt to indict people for violating closed-military-zone orders, which would only serve to remind us that we live in a military dictatorship which pretends, since such pretense is useful to it, that it is subservient to the law.

And Sfard’s final remark was even more depressing; There is a strong correlation, he says, between worsening attitude towards activists in the West Bank and military action in the Gaza Strip. The IDF uses the noise of the guns in Gaza to disguise actions in the West Bank which would normally draw critical attention.

Related:
Police ban Israeli activists from West Bank demonstrations

Prime Minister Netanyahu speaks before the UN General Assembly, September 27th 2012. The effect of the cartoon bomb made most people miss the fact that Netanyahu moved the deadline for an attack till next spring (Photo: Avi Ochayon, Government Press Office)

Unless Netanyahu is crazier than is commonly assumed, Israel will not attack Iran in the near future. Until quite recently, Netanyahu stubbornly claimed that Israel must attack Iran before the 2012 U.S. presidential elections. This was a calculated attempt by Netanyahu to put pressure on Barack Obama and advance the chances of Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney.

This attempt at psychological warfare utterly failed: Obama, ice-cold, didn’t blink; he referred to Netanyahu’s demands as “background noise,” and adamantly refused to change his position. He left Netanyahu with no choice but to go to his Canossa, the UN General Assembly, and to make a retreat speech there. The bomb and fuse drawing (“this is the bomb, this is the fuse…” – possibly the lowest point ever reached by an Israeli prime minister) devoured all the attention – and camouflaged the only important part of that speech. Netanyahu announced that he postponed his threat to attack Iran to the spring or summer of 2013. Anything can happen until then – and as it looks, Netanyahu will dismiss the Knesset and go to elections before that time.

So Netanyahu’s attempt at a nerve war failed. Now we must ask how much it cost us. Let’s begin with the intangibles: How much damage will Israel suffer from a president who has to consider its prime minister to be a political rival or, at the least, an ally of his political rivals? How much damage will Israel take in U.S. liberal opinion, and actually in the mind of any American patriot, when the American public will begin to understand that Israel is no ally, but at best a cross the U.S. has to bear?

Obama’s former Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, told Obama last summer that Israel is “an ungrateful ally.” As part of the shadowboxing between the U.S. administration and the government of the country it funds and arms, Gates also said recently that neither Israel nor the U.S. has the military capability to stop the Iranian nuclear plan, and that such an attack would only hasten it. The first part is not new – Gen. Dempsey said as much back in August. The second part, however, may indicate that a faction in the U.S. administration is moving away from supporting an attack an Iran, or may provide cover for Obama when he decides not to attack. This cannot be seen as a success by Netanyahu.

For years, Netanyahu’s supporters told us he is a master at reading the U.S. public, but ever since he landed in the PM’s office he has failed time after time. Well, those same people also told us he was a brilliant ambassador to the UN. Given that his last three major speeches in the United States involved waving a cartoon bomb, the plans of the death camp Auschwitz, and muttering something about a nuclear duck, we may safely assume this is another self-manufactured legend.

We cannot put a price on the diplomatic damage caused by Netanyahu’s phony war, but we do have a fiscal price tag for it. Haaretz columnist Amos Harel estimates (Hebrew) that the preparations for attacking Iran under Netanyahu and Barak cost some 10 billion NIS (some $2.5 billion). Nahum Barnea, writing in Yediot Ahronot on Friday, cites a similar sum: he writes that Netanyahu and Barak spent some NIS 11 billion (somewhat less than $3 billion) on the preparations for war with Iran. Barnea finishes that part of the column by writing that “if I was an American president, I would conclude there is some irony in the fact that a country which receives generous military support from America and spends it in putting pressure on America. Someone may conclude Israel bites the hand that feeds it.”

Netanyahu and Barak spent some 10 to 11 billion shekels on their failed maneuver. Neither Harel nor Barne’a cite their source, but I’ll take the risk and wager that it is Ehud Barak, playing his usual role of the scorpion biting the frog which carried it to safety, now attacking Netanyahu in the media (actually, counter-attacking: Netanyahu’s people spent a lot of energy attacking Barak this week.)

So, we spent at least NIS 10 billion on nothing. Money which could be spent on healthcare, on education, on our shaky infrastructure, dissipated like gas fumes. Barak and Netanyahu took our fate to the casino – their war game could easily have gotten out of hand – and lost unimaginable sums of money. And, given the fact that we give our leaders carte blanche when it comes to so-called “security” expenses, no one will ever pay the price.

The public erupted in outrage when our ministers wanted a few measly millions for new fancy cars. NIS 10 billion evaporated, and all the government has to show for it is diplomatic damage and the promotion of Israel’s image as the region’s mad dog, and no one is protesting.

It should also be noted that while NIS 10 billion is a large sum indeed, it is relatively small compared to the lakes of dollars spent by the IDF in the last 20 years on preparing for attack on Iran. We now know the IDF knows it can’t attack in Iran – it was making such noises as long back as 2006 – yet it took the money and spent it anyway. The colonels and generals responsible for this criminal waste of public money are likely to carry on their careers, and retire on a fat public pension for their dubious service.

It’s hard to disagree with Yedioth Ahronoth columnist Yigal Serna, who wrote passionately and well (Hebrew) that “therefore, every time they shout at you: Iran! Shout back: Pillage. Remember that Bibi’s ‘Iran’ shout is not meant to save your lives or that of your children, but for protecting the right to pillage. Iran is merely a campaign of distraction, carried out in full cooperation between Mr. Ahmadinejad and Mr. Netanyahu. Two loquacious-inciting politicians of many interests, one protecting the franchise holders of the Revolutionary Guards who became rich as Croesus, and the other is guarding the tycoons and the [Likud] Party Center members. Both sides made plenty of lucre under the nationalistic distraction.”

And that is what the coming elections should be about: How much did your scaremongering campaign cost us, Mr. Netanyahu, and what do you have to show for it?

Last Thursday, says Adv. Omer Shatz of the Anu Plitim (We Are Refugees) NGO, he showed up at the Supreme Court with his colleague, Adv. Yiftah Cohen, to ask for an injunction ordering the 21 refugees caught between the borders of Israel and Egypt to be brought into the country. Surprisingly, he said in a phone conversation, the process went well: the judges asked the state’s counsel some difficult questions, at one point asking her whether she would agrees to the injunction.

Common court courtesy says that when the justices suggest an injunction, you cordially accept. The state’s counsel bucked protocol, and refused – and furthermore, asked for a secret session with the justices, invoking “secret intelligence” surrounding the refugees. The secret session, to which only the state’s counsel and the justices were privy, ended with the justices postponing their decision to Sunday. Several hours later, the Prime Minister’s Office announced that a “solution was reached,” as part of which two women and a boy entered an Israeli prison, and the rest of the refugees “turned back.”

This was a lie from start to finish. The state lied when it told the Court it supplied the refugees with food. It only supplied them with water – and very little water at that. Adv. Shatz interviewed the three refugees allowed into Israel – he noted he interviewed each of them separately, not as a group – and was told the soldiers only gave them three 1.5 liter bottles of water a day. That’s 4.5 liters of waters a day – for 21 people. In the desert heat. That’s about 214 ml a person per day. Less than a small soft drink bottle, which contains 220 ml.

The refugees noted that bread was thrown at them twice – a bag of sliced bread. This was probably due to a single soldier disobeying orders. The bread was thrown in the early stages of the incident, before the media and the NGOs understood what was going on. One of the bags was caught on the fence, and the refugees looked at it, unable to reach it. The second one sailed clear over the fence. The famous cloth to provide shade, supposedly supplied to the refugees by the IDF gunmen, wasn’t, actually. It was, one of the refugees said to Adv. Shatz, “a gift of God”: it blew to them with the wind. From time to time, in order to keep the refugees from the fence, the gunmen fired in the air; sometimes they fired tear gas canisters at them.

None of the refugees wanted to return to Egypt. They knew they were destined for torture and death. Two or three days before it all ended, five of the men, who were stronger than the rest, dragged themselves to the Egyptian fence and asked the Egyptian gunmen whether they could return; the reply was that if they did, they would be shot. But, the Egyptian gunmen added, should they attempt this, they should bring the women with them, as the gunmen wanted to rape them.

And then the High Court of Justice decided to postpone its ruling to Sunday. A short while afterwards, IDF gunmen cut through the fence, crossed it, pulled the two women and the boy inside, and dragged the rest of the refugees on the cloth towards the Egyptian fence. The refugees, few of whom could move at this stage, screamed and begged to be shot, telling the gunmen they preferred this to a return to Egypt. The gunmen of the army famous for being more moral than Hamas ignored their cries, dragged them to the Egyptian fence, lifted the ramshackle obstacle, and pushed them through. Their fate is unknown. Maybe, as the Egyptian gunmen promised, they were shot; maybe they are in some dungeon; maybe they were sold to the notorious Bedouin tribes of Sinai, already making a brisk business of torturing refugees and demanding ransom from their relatives. Nobody knows.

All this is encapsulated in the PM Office’s statement that the refugees “turned back.” Netanyahu’s antiseptic, careful phrasing makes you think some deal was made with the Egyptians, or at any case that the IDF wasn’t actively involved in the deportation. Yet another lie. Not that anyone expected anything else from Netanyahu.

On Sunday, Shatz and Cohen went back to the HCJ. The state’s counsel said that, as the refugees were no longer on the border, their petition ought to be declined. She presented a very short text, very similar to Netanyahu’s. Shatz and Cohen tried to tell the court that it is unheard of for people whose case lies before it to simply disappear; that the court ruled in the past against precisely this sort of action; that it is unheard of that… but they went unheard. The HCJ ruled that if they want an investigation into the fate of the people it refused to defend, they will have to begin a whole new process, which would take years.

The famous selective blindness of the court worked overtime. No one knows what happened during the secret hearing on Thursday, when the state claimed it had “secret intelligence.” But I am willing to hazard a guess: the state’s counsel hinted that if the court would only grant it some time, and refrain from issuing an injunction, it wouldn’t have to deal with this mess any more. And the court got the hint, and agreed.

To sum: we had gunmen supplying 214 ml of water per person per day to refugees, firing tear gas canisters at them, throwing them two loaves of bread in eight days; an army that declared the area a closed military zone in order to prevent journalists and human rights activists from finding out what was happening in real time; a state attorney lying to the Supreme Court; a Supreme Court breaking its own record in turning a blind eye while procedurally washing its hands, not even trying to maintain its honor while being lied to; a prime minister who lied to the public and to the court; and a soldier telling Yedioth Ahronoth a week ago that “it’s true that sometimes it’s somewhat unpleasant seeing people with cuts, thin like skeletons, but they may endanger the state’s security, and what we do is very important to us.”

Behold the brave sons of the Maccabees, shaking in their boots from 21 people “with cuts, thin like skeletons”; behold a country whose security will crumble at the sight of refugees being treated humanely. Responsibility, of course, lies with the country’s leaders: this time the order seems to have come directly from Netanyahu. But the guilt lies with the gunmen – whose eyes are blind and their hearts closed and corrupt – who obeyed it.

And why wouldn’t they? They’ve already grown accustomed to consider unarmed demonstrators protesting the theft of their lands as a “risk to state security,” and they don’t bat an eye while firing tear gas canisters at them. For the last year, they were exposed to a systematic incitement campaign, led by the prime minister and the minister of the interior, who spoke of the refugees as a “risk to the Zionist state.” The common Jewish gunman does not understand that “a risk to the Zionist state” is code for “a risk to the Jewish regime of privileges,” and he decodes – as he is expected to – “risk to the Zionist state” as “risk to state security.” And then, it becomes “somewhat unpleasant,” because he cannot help making the obvious comparison (you mustn’t compare! You mustn’t compare!), but then he hardens his heart, and drags screaming human skeletons towards their fate, comforting himself with “what we do is very important.”

In Israel’s case, history repeats itself not as a tragedy or farce, but as grotesque.

The Israeli court system was, for a long time, the most successful fig leaf of the only Jewish state in the Middle East.  Now it has gone diving into the Hasbara morass. After “diplomatic terrorism” (opposing Israel in the world, a phrase favored by our foreign minister) and “economic terrorism” (boycotting settlements) we now have the District Court of Haifa blaming (Hebrew) the ISM organization of being  ”practically violent,” even though the court admits it had nothing to do with violence.

The court wrote this in the decision on the civil suit filed by the family of Rachel Corrie, who was run over and killed by an Israeli D-9 bulldozer in 2003 in Rafah. Corrie was trying to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian house by the IDF for reasons few can remember anymore.

The court claimed the iDF was engaged in hisuf, a technocratic Hebrew term meaning literally “an act of exposure,” which in practical terms means the destruction of property, most often agricultural property but sometimes houses as well. Often, hisuf – which IDF gunmen often claimed was intended to prevent ambushes – had little to do with military necessity and everything to do with state terrorism: terrorizing the Palestinian residents out of supporting the uprising against Israel.  B’Tselem noted at the time that under the guise of hisuf, the IDF gunmen often destroyed fields of tomatoes and zucchini, often causing irreparable damage. B’Tselem called (Hebrew) this policy a policy of collective punishment.

The chief of the Civil Administration in the West Bank at the time, Brig. General Dov Tsdaka, said at the time (Hebrew):

…in Gaza, I think, they did cross the limit. After the events in Eley Sinai and Dugit, they carried out a very massive hisuf. They uprooted hundreds of dunams of strawberries, plantations and hothouses. I think this is unfair…. It will cause hatred and inflammatory [behavior?], and will draw more people into the circle of hostility. This is simply unwise. We have some instances of this in the RJS (Region of Judea and Samaria, IDF parlance for the West Bank – YZG].  Sometimes I approve a certain amount of hisuf, but when I visit the place I find our forces acted hyperactively […] Have we exaggerated in some places? With my hand on my heart I tell you – yes, certainly, certainly. You allow them to take down 30 trees, and the next day you come and see they took down 60. The soldier or the company commander in place gets carried away. There were such cases, and we cannot ignore them. We are responsible for this. We hold investigations, people are brought to justice.

Really? Well, Tsdaka smilingly admitted that no one was actually prosecuted, but “they were given a very clear nu nu nu,” a term often used to tell children they’ve crossed a line.

So that’s what hisuf looks like: collective punishment acting against the interests of people carrying it out, who are themselves vandals bent on destruction who know the military system won’t punish them, at most will nu nu nu  at them.

A year after the death of Rachel Corrie, even some Israelis were shocked by the mass demolition of houses in Rafah, and Justice Minister Yossef Lapid said that the picture of an old refugee rummaging through the ruins of her house, looking for her medicine, reminded him of his grandmother, who lived in A Dark Period™, as Israelis are wont to call the Nazi regime when they don’t want to just name it. This made then-Chief of Staff Yaalon very wroth. And yet, a year later, a committee appointed by the same Yaalon told us what anyone can figure out quite easily (Hebrew): that collective demolition of houses is ineffective, actually counterproductive, when it comes to preventing terrorism. This is just the practical side of things, of course; there is no point in discussing morality with an army proud of being more moral than Hamas.

And then, the verdict of Judge Oded Gershon turns us back ten years, as if by a time machine. As if none of the above happened, Gershon ruled that ISM activists served as “human shields”  -a common claim, never substantiated, of the Hasbara system – and gave “financial, logistical and moral aid to the Palestinians, including terrorists and their family members, and disrupted the demolition or the sealing of the houses of terrorists who carried out suicide attacks, killing many.”  All of which, said the judge, shows that “the organization is misusing the language of human rights and morality, in order to obfuscate the severity of its actions, which are practically violent.” Wow. I was unaware the judiciary joined the Hasbara project.

Let’s begin by saying it takes a lot of chutzpah for an Israeli judge to preach about “human shields” when the Israeli High Court of Justice took more than three years to forbid the IDF from using Palestinians as human shields – and, alas, we have no reason to believe the army actually obeyed that order. Further, in the mirror world of Judge Gershon, if you are trying to prevent the demolition or sealing of houses – which even the IDF now concedes is harmful, and which constitutes illegal collective punishment – that is, if you are opposed to the punishing of people who committed no offence themselves, then your very objection to a crime against international law is “practically violent.” Your actions, not those of the people kicking people out of their homes for no crimes of their own, with limited time to get their belongings, and then destroying those homes. Your actions, not those of the people who made being the relative of an enemy – all too often, a dead enemy – a punishable offense, are “practically violent.” Needless to say, all of this has absolutely nothing to do with Rachel Corrie’s death. She was not defending the house of a suicide bomber. The Israelis killed in Rafah were anything but civilians. But this shows us where Judge Gershon comes from.

The judge, natch, accepted the army’s position that the soldier who ran Corrie over did not see her – and this despite the fact that the Criminal Investigations Division (CID) didn’t complete its interrogation. It was stopped, or rather disrupted, when General Doron Almog – who, years later, would flee London for fear he would be prosecuted for his actions in Rafah’s dirty war – ordered the driver to shut up and say nothing (Hebrew). This little incident, naturally, has slipped from Almog’s memory – but not from those of the CID investigators, or their memos. The U.S. administration was also not impressed with the IDF investigation into the death of an American citizen.

So if the CID investigation was disrupted, and the military investigation only relies on the testimony of the driver – who, naturally, wants to keep his distance from Corrie’s death – which contradicts the testimony of others, is there any surprise that the Israeli courts, which routinely serve as the rubber stump of the Israeli security system, prefer throwing blame at the ISM? Maybe no one will notice that it’s not the ISM that was on trial, but the IDF; that it was not the ISM that killed Corrie, but the IDF; and that the judge follows Almog’s example, and whitewashes the investigation of Corrie’s death.

And prefers transferring the blame from those who shot and ran over to those who were shot and run over.

Israel officially condemned last week the fact Jewish terrorists attacked a Palestinian vehicle with Molotov cocktails, wounding six of its passengers. Prime Minister Netanyahu quickly had an envoy call Palestinian President Abbas, and promised him Israel would put those responsible on trial. If Abbas is buying this, given Israel’s record regarding the price-taggers, then I have some juicy bridges to sell him at very reasonable prices.

This attack took place on Thursday afternoon. Several hours later, a gang of proud Jewish hoodlums tried to lynch three Palestinians in Jerusalem. The attackers, most of whom appear to have been juveniles, were uttering cries like “a Jew is a soul, an Arab is a son of a whore” and the all-time crowd pleaser, “Death to Arabs.” The goons also tried to prevent emergency forces from treating the victims. One of them is critically wounded.

During the attack on the dorms of Palestinian students in Safed two years ago, inspired by the town’s rabbi Shmuel Eliahu’s ban on renting apartments to non-Jews, the calls of “A Jew is a soul” were heard (Hebrew). The same cry is common (Hebrew) among the fans of racist group Beitar Jerusalem (which sidelines as a soccer team). The supremacists we’re dealing with have nothing to be proud of aside from the fact of their Jewishness, used in the minimalist Orthodox sense of thinking every Jew is a priori superior to every non-Jew.

Hence the speaking of “souls” as a battle cry: a common Orthodox concept is that non-Jews do not have souls. This concept is very strong in Kabbalah (I guess Madonna is in for some nasty shock; being not just a gentile but a woman makes her a particular object of hatred), but exists elsewhere (such as in the Talmudic concept of “you [Jews] are human, they [non-Jews] are not, and Yehuda Halevi’s Kuzari, which rates being on an “inanimate-vegetable-animal-speaking being-Jew” scale).

The attackers quickly spread the lie that they went on the warpath because one of the victims tried to flirt with a Jewish girl. This fiction, the attempt to violate a pure-blooded female of the master race, is well known to us from any racism regime, from the American South to Nazi Germany. Such attacks are becoming common: in at least one case, that of Pinhas Aburamed, it ended in murder (Hebrew). One organized pogrom against Palestinians took place in Pisgat Ze’ev in 2008, and drew some short public attention because the attackers chose the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day as their time of attack. After some suspects were arrested, eight rabbis – most of them employed by the state – wrote a public letter in their defense (Hebrew).

The pogromchiks from Jerusalem would be able to say in their defense that they were only doing what their political leadership urged them to do. They will have a very strong case. Last year, Likud MK Hotovely invited the racist organization Lehava (more about it here) to speak about the risks of “assimilation” in the Knesset. The leader of Lehava, Benzi Gopstein, is on record (Hebrew) saying Pinhas Aburamed, who murdered a Palestinian he thought was trying to flirt with a Jewish girl, is a hero and should receive a medal. While Gopstein was playing the extremist in Hotolevy’s comittee, the general manager of the Education Ministry was telling the committee much the same thing, albeit in more controlled language: he said (Hebrew) the Ministry will attempt curb “assimilation” by “acting to increase Jewish identity” through “education for family life.” The ministry, in short, accepted Gopstein and Lehava’s basic assumption: “assimilation” – a relationship between a Jew and a non-Jew – is a problem the ministry ought to address. This is the same ministry, under the same minister (Likud’s Gideon Sa’ar) that forbade the teaching of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to students, fearing they may learn they have the right to convert to another religion (Hebrew).

In one of the Knesset’s worse moments. MK Danny Danon claimed that Bedouins in Israel are responsible for over 1,000 kidnappings of Jewish girls every year (Hebrew). The police said in response it is unaware of even one such case. Danon merely repeated his lies.

Lehava (the Hebrew acronym stands for for “preventing assimilation in the holy land”) has a record of expressing satisfaction with lynch attempts – including against African refugees. So, naturally, its main activist is supported by the government, through an NGO ironically called Hemla (“compassion”). Other NGOs opposed to “assimilation,” such as the veteran Yad Le’Ahim, are supported by the Interior Ministry and aid it unofficially.

Assuming the attackers – both in Jerusalem and the West Bank – need legal aid, the NGO Honenu, dedicated to the defense of Jewish terrorists, would spring to action. Honenu receives tax exemption status from Netanyahu’s government; at the same time, the government denied that status to Rabbis for Human Rights, claiming it is “political.” Honenu is connected to “Ha’Kol Ha’Yehudi,” a leading extremist Jewish pride site which was quick to celebrate the Jerusalem pogrom (Hebrew). In turn, it is operated by the students of the extremist yeshiva of Yitzhar, which so worried the ISA that it tried to close it; but the Ministry of Education keeps funding the yeshiva. Recently, the prosecution decided not to indict two of the yeshiva rabbis, who wrote a gentile-killing manual; it also sent the aforementioned Shmuel Eliahu home scot-free. The reasoning was that Israeli law against racism does specifically exempts racism, if it is expressed in religious terms.

To sum, Eliahu, Honenu and Lehava, as well as the yeshiva of Yitzhar, are funded by the State of Israel. At the same time, MKs like Danon and Hotolevy are warning us (quietly supported by the Ministry of Education) that the Palestinians are after our women. I wonder whether the cops who arrested the Jerusalem goons uttered the famous quote from Casablanca, that they were shocked, shocked at what they did. The hoodlums themselves could claim, with reason, they merely did what they were taught to do in school and urged to do by their elected officials. The Netanyahu government, in short, provides the “infrastructure” of the Jewish Brotherhood.

Israeli leftists often compare their country to apartheid South Africa or the dying Weimar Republic. The comparison is not without merit. (Even though one suspects it is the left’s infatuation with martyrdom that makes the Weimar comparison so popular.) But perhaps another model needs to be examined: that of Pakistan. A country whose identity is violently religious, with an army too strong for its own good, nuclear weapons (according to foreign reports), and a rapidly-disintegrating claim to support the United States, which funds it generously while its education system teaches its students to hate all infidels, and its young people, considering themselves victimized, engage in state-supported terrorism.