Is the U.S. Ready to Fight Syrian Rebels?  Michael Rubin  2-14-13

There’s an unfortunate tendency among foreign policy decision makers in Washington to believe that all options remain on the table indefinitely. Hence, President Obama may believe that the same debates and policy options that occurred two years ago, at the start of the Syrian uprising, still exist today.

The fact of the matter, be it in Syria, Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea, or anywhere else is that realistic policy options and opportunities to achieve the most favorable outcome for the United States diminish over time. Two years ago, it made sense to support the Syrian opposition. President Bashar al-Assad, far from being the Western-educated reformer in which the Clinton administration and State Department officials placed so much hope, was a brute who supported Hezbollah, transformed Syria into an underground railroad for Al Qaeda terrorists infiltrating Iraq, and sought to build a covert nuclear program.

The United States is never the only player in the sandbox, however. By standing on the sidelines, the United States took a pass as supposed allies like Qatar and Turkey aided not the more liberal or nationalist Syrian opposition, but rather the most extreme elements. Qatar did so for ideological reasons, and Turkey did so both because of its leadership’s ideology and because it would rather support religious radicals than allow more secular Kurds to establish a canton across the border in Syria.

John McCain is right to be frustrated by President Obama’s refusal to head the advice of his national security and diplomatic advisers and aid the Syrian camp at a time when U.S. intervention—via a no-fly zone or a safe-haven—might have averted 70,000+ Syrian deaths (and just as many disappeared) and also could have hastened an end to the brutal war before Assad succeeded in his campaign of ethnic and sectarian cleansing, and before Al Qaeda-affiliates like the Nusra Front took root.

Now it appears that al-Nusra has established itself on the Iraqi border, where it can wage sectarian terrorism not only in Syria but in Iraq as well. Al-Nusra today has released footage of yet another suicide bombing it perpetrated in Idlib. Its statements read like Al Qaeda-themed Mad-Libs.

Make no mistake: Seeing what the Syrian opposition is now does not make Bashar al-Assad a better option. The simple fact is that both Assad and the opposition are now both equally detrimental to U.S. national security interests. Washington has no good options. The idea that some moderate force might emerge in Syria committed to rebuilding their shattered state rather than perpetrating terror against Syria’s own population and that of its neighbors is now an unrealistic dream.

In his State of the Union address, Syria was an afterthought. “We’ll keep the pressure on a Syrian regime that has murdered its own people and support opposition leaders that respect the rights of every Syrian,” Obama declared in his last minutes on the podium. That’s too little, and two years too late. The simple fact of the matter is this: Because of Obama’s Syria bungling, we will face a potent threat from that regime for years to come regardless of whether Assad is overthrown. Against the backdrop of sequestration, it would behoove the United States to start planning not simply for next month, but for how it handles the threat from the Levant and Eastern Mediterranean in 2016, 2017, and 2018, for the Syrian opposition–not the five-star hotel exiles who carry little weight on the front line of battle, but rather the Nusra front and the radicals on the ground–is quickly becoming as potent a threat as the Assad regime itself.

Contentions

Inspections? Iran May Already Have a Bomb  Jonathan S. Tobin  2-14-13

It didn’t take long for the optimistic story about Iran’s nuclear program in yesterday’s New York Times to turn sour. The paper reported on Wednesday that talks were resuming between the International Atomic Energy Agency and Iran about resuming inspections of the Islamist regime’s nuclear facilities had resumed. It also noted the report in an Iranian news agency about Tehran diverting its efforts from a bomb to research, a development that might cause the West to treat the issue with less urgency. But, less than 24 hours later, the IAEA announced the talks with Iran had failed and that the United Nations watchdog was still unable to inspect the Parchin site where it suspects military applications of the project including nuclear triggers are being constructed. That means the Iranians are free to go on pushing toward their goal without any annoying inspectors forcing them to hide their work.

This is the sort of development that should cause the Obama administration to drop the air of complacency about the other nuclear talks being held with Iran by the P5+1 group whose goal is to talk the regime out of its nuclear weapons dream. The Iranians have already used those talks to stall the West for over a year and there is nothing to indicate that they view the next round of discussions as anything but another opportunity to buy more time until their bomb is ready.

If that isn’t scary enough, as Lee Smith writes today in Tablet, there is yet another reason to believe that the belated sanctions imposed by the West won’t be enough to stop Iran: North Korea.

As Smith notes, the nuclear test conducted by the North Koreans is more than a threat to South Korea, Japan and the rest of the Far East. Given the close ties between Pyongyang and Tehran, it could be, as one U.S. government told the Times earlier this week that “the North Koreans are testing for two countries.”

Smith makes a strong case for belief that Iran already has access to the North Korean nuclear program and that if they were able to pay for that, there’s no reason why they won’t be able to buy a bomb. Despite the problems the sanctions have imposed on Iran, they still have more than enough cash, oil and other commodities to pay a poverty-stricken and isolated North Korean regime anything they want in exchange for what they need. The fact that this is the third such North Korean test has conducted also raises suspicions that what they are doing is at Iran’s behest rather than for their own nuclear ambitions.

Given the secretive nature of both North Korean and Iranian society, there is much that we don’t know about what either country is up to. But informed speculation about the history of cooperation between the two regimes is pointing toward the North Koreans assisting the Iranian effort to match their success in creating a bomb despite the determination of the international community to prevent them from doing so.

The North Korean precedent by which a rogue regime gulled the United States into thinking they would abide by agreements to stop their nuclear program already was a strong argument against the sort of compromise that the European Union has been pushing for in the P5+1 talks.  But if the North Koreans are actively aiding the Iranian effort, the mindset in Washington that there is plenty of time to wait and negotiate before a red line is crossed by Tehran may turn out to be terribly wrong.

The notion that President Obama’s implied threat of the use of force against Iran would be enough to convince the ayatollahs to give up was always something of a fantasy. But when you combine Iran’s progress with the help the North Koreans may be providing them, the scenario starts looking very grim. If, as Smith rightly notes, the president owes the Israelis an apology for working so hard to restrain them from forestalling the Iranian threat, that will be cold comfort for a world that has become a lot more dangerous on his watch.

The Importance of the Eisenhower Debate Dore Gold 

FEBRUARY 11, 2013 

Israel should stay clear of the internal American debate over the candidacy of former Senator Chuck Hagel to be the next defense secretary. The identity of the defense secretary can have profound implications for Israel, but this is an internal American decision. At the same time, it is impossible to ignore one aspect of this issue which touches on the history of U.S.-Israel relations. Recently, David Ignatius, one of the leading columnists of The Washington Post tried to compare Hagel’s worldview to that of President Dwight Eisenhower, who had to contend with the joint operation of Britain, France, and Israel against Nasser’s Egypt.

In particular, Ignatius reminds his readers how back in 1956, Eisenhower was willing to use the threat of sanctions to force Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula. The hardest U.S. pressure was actually employed in 1957, after Eisenhower was re-elected and he began his second term of office. But is it correct to view Eisenhower’s policy of pressure on Israel as a success story, worthy of imitation, that defended U.S. interests? Would Eisenhower have wanted his administration’s actions in the aftermath of the Suez Campaign to be remembered as his legacy?

Professor Isaac Alteras wrote a comprehensive history of this subject published in 1993 entitled “Eisenhower and Israel,” which reveals that Eisenhower actually came to regret the tough line he took against Israel in 1956. In a meeting in 1965 with the Republican Jewish leader Max Fisher, according to Alteras, Eisenhower said: “You know Max, looking back at Suez, I regret what I did. I should have never pressured Israel to evacuate Sinai.” Richard Nixon, who served as Eisenhower’s vice president, verified Fisher’s description of the former president’s view of what he had done. According to Nixon, Eisenhower even said that the Suez Crisis was the biggest foreign-policy “blunder” of his administration. In short, there is substantial evidence that Eisenhower came to renounce his own Suez policy.

Why did Eisenhower change his mind? His administration had hoped that by distancing itself from Israel, it would be able to erect a set of Cold War alliances in the Middle East modeled after NATO, like the famous Baghdad Pact, that would help the U.S. to contain the Soviet Union. But his strategy totally backfired. As one former U.S. official pointed out, Eisenhower’s support for Nasser in 1956 strengthened the Egyptian leader significantly and led to a wave of revolutions across the Arab world that eventually required active Western intervention in Lebanon, Jordan, and eventually in the Arabian Peninsula.

Moreover, in the wake of the revolutionary storm that followed the Suez Crisis, the Hashemite regime in Iraq was also overthrown in 1958; its leaders modeled themselves after Nasser and adopted an anti-Western orientation. The American-sponsored Baghdad Pact was finished. In the meantime, Eisenhower’s policy helped to drive the British out of the Middle East, while in the years that followed the Soviet Union managed to set up air and naval bases across the region.

Eisenhower’s changed attitude toward his own policy directly influenced events in the Middle East on the eve of the Six-Day War. Ten years earlier in 1957, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told Abba Eban, who served as both the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. and to the U.N., any American statement made about the Israeli withdrawal from Sinai “would lack any binding effect.”

Yet in May 1967, President Lyndon Johnson telephoned Eisenhower and asked him about Nasser’s latest decision to block Israel’s freedom of navigation in the Gulf of Eilat. Eisenhower now stated that the U.S. made a “commitment” to Israel that if the Egyptians used force to close the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, Israel would be entitled to exercise its right of self-defense.

Bill Quandt, who served on the National Security Council in the Nixon and Carter administrations, wrote that after the Six-Day War, President Johnson and his advisers were determined not to adopt Eisenhower’s approach to Israel from 1956. They refused to force Israel to withdraw from the territories that the Israel Defense Forces captured in the war, without it obtaining a peace agreement first.

Despite his Middle Eastern setbacks, President Eisenhower will always be remembered for his role as the commander of allied forces in World War II that defeated Nazi Germany and helped rescue the remnant of European Jewry that survived the Holocaust. But to turn his policy at Suez into some kind of heroic moment for U.S. foreign policy is a mistake, not only from an Israeli perspective, but also taking into account the wider interests of the West as a whole.

Not a Mistake, Misunderstanding, or Well-Intended Criticism But a Deliberate Campaign to Bash Israel   Barry Rubin 2-8-13

The first, most important thing to understand about the Western and especially American debate on Israel is this:

Never before in history has there been such a concerted, systematic, and vicious campaign to discredit and demonize Israel, especially seeking to undermine its support in the Jewish community.

Without comprehending this fact, the massive attacks from academia, mass media, groups, and even in mainstream political and intellectual debate cannot be understood. We aren’t dealing with lots of mistakes but with the mass production of hate speech.

Obviously, one should always judge based on the specific people and places involved. Yet a good point to keep in mind is this:

1. Don’t believe that they may have gotten it right this particular time. Many of them aren’t trying to get it right; most of them are incapable of getting it right.

These assaults cannot be taken in isolation and with naivete as if this time a wild accusation is accurate. Some are obviously outrageous—the British politician accusing Israel of genocide; a cartoon showing Ariel Sharon eating Palestinian children; Egypt’s president calling Jews sub-humans; the Swedish newspaper claiming Israel murders Palestinians to steal their organs—but even better-constructed items are equally fallacious.

The craziest stuff is just the most incautious end of far more apparently credible lies and distortions. And the key “mistake” made is to use the word “Jews,” unacceptable, rather “Israel,” “Israelis,” or “Zionists.”

In other words, “The Jews want to take over the world.” No. “Israel wants to take over the Middle East.” Okay. “The Jews use children’s blood in Passover matzoh.” No. “Israel deliberately murders Palestinian children.” Okay.

Not all are aware, of course, of what they are doing, especially those originating or spreading the more “moderate” hate speech. There are dupes as well as demonizers, though dupes often seem all too credulous to be wholly innocent.

Here are two more aspects:

Once having been defined as the “bad guy,” Israel can be accused of anything, as in a film narrative in which the villain is, well, always villainous.

Second, Israel is one of the few categories that can be attacked with unbridled vituperation, though some limits still apply in American political life at least. You cannot say the slightest thing against other nations or nationalities, as well as races, religions, or genders. One wrong word, even if uttered carelessly, and the person’s career is finished. With Israel, the bile can flow unbridled.

Equally, there are so many lies—new ones appear each day–and so many facts to counter them with that it is partly a waste of time to counter each offensive in itself. What’s necessary is to understand that this is all based on lies, ignorance, and conscious bad faith.

The categories include, but are not limited to, falsification of photographs and fabrication of events; distortion of history; making up of quotes; publishing disproportionate numbers of anti-Israel books and articles; indoctrination in schools; refusal to mainstream Israeli views and overwhelming emphasis of radical, critical ones; excessive credibility to hostile sources for outlandish tales (a worldwide story on an alleged, since proven false massacre in Jenin based on a single mysterious informant is just one example).

There is also the creation of new categories of sin designed specifically as part of the anti-Israel campaign and applied only to Israel, i.e., “pinkwashing” (talking about the good treatment of gays as a cover for other crimes!) or the idea of “disproportionate force” in wartime or the idea that causing any civilian casualties at all is a war crime (in sharp contrast to the previous and current wars of every other country in the world).

Aside from obsessions and double standards is the eagerness, uncontrollable hatred, self-righteousness, unconcern for fairness or balance, and passion that shows the hidden agenda of those involved. They are indifferent to real war crimes, intolerance, and oppression by others in the world. Their behavior should have destroyed their credibility but they are protected instead.

Some details of interest:

1. –This campaign’s intensity and one-sidedness has relatively little effect on the actual Middle East situation or on Western government policies.
   –The main single issue is to try to portray Israel as responsible for the lack of peace, just as Jews were historically blamed by those hostile to them for antisemitism. Since the experience of the 1993-2000 “peace process” era, the fact that the conflict continues because of the intransigence of Israel’s enemies should have been obvious. Yet this history has been forgotten and its impact on Israeli thinking buried or censored.
   –Much of the new antagonism stems from Western intelligentsias’ sharp turn to the left. The question, of course, is why Israel is such a prominent issue among the many causes available to them.
   –What is important is not so much to define specific things as “antisemitic”—which generates distracting debates—but to explicate the creation of a situation equivalent in effect to pre-1945 antisemitism. Since about 40 percent of the world’s Jews live in Israel and most of the rest support Israel, the resulting slander and demonization is also a slur and hatred against the vast majority of Jews. The irrationality, obsession, intimidation, and slander is quite equivalent to what Jews suffered under historic antisemitism.
   –Israel, Israelis, and their supporters are portrayed—as in classical antisemitism–as irrational creatures involved in incomprehensible behavior. Removing from public consciousness their experiences, attitudes, and sufferings leaves the conclusion that their behavior is evil, racist, bloodthirsty and seeking total power. 

For example, as a country under assault, Israel has to act militarily at times. The army and government have no interest in wasting credibility and resources by injuring Palestinians for fun or out of pure meanness. Yet this is how Israeli behavior is often portrayed.

Similarly, Israel has lots to gain from peace since, if secure and lasting, it would provide such benefits as fewer deaths, less time and money spent in the military, beneficial trade with neighbors and higher living standards, etc. To believe Israel doesn’t want peace is to believe it is aggressive and has devious ends.

And again, if Israel really doesn’t face an existential threat—or only an easily defused one—then its acting otherwise is psychotic behavior.

A major and new theme of this campaign is to convince American Jews that either Israel has become illegitimate or must be bashed for its own good. Undeniably, this campaign has enjoyed success on that front. Others are temporarily taken in by nonsense like the Western expert/media spin on the last Israeli elections as headed toward fascism or some individual event.

What exists here on the surface as disproportional insanity is actually ideologically determined and politically intentional. The result is an environment in which the virulently antisemitic, genocidal, anti-Christian, anti-American, and pro-terrorist Muslim Brotherhood is the beneficiary of apologetics while Israel is “bad.”

A nut from an extremist cult spit on a teenaged Jewish girl in a small town in Israel and the next thing you know there is a serious Western debate over Israel losing its soul. A few fans from Israel’s most nationalist football team don’t want Muslim players—Arabs already play for all the other teams and are never harassed—and the next thing you know the New York Times compares Israel to Nazi Germany.

Or the Israeli election was widely presented as the impending triumph of neo-fascist forces even though the far-right party received less than 10 percent of the vote, what that category usually receives. The New Yorker gave us a hitherto unknown professor at a university in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip as its expert on Israeli politics. Or the New York Times article claiming that many Israelis were complaining that the Iron Dome system shot down Hamas missiles because it would be better–the reporter lied–if more Israelis were killed or wounded since that would impel the country to change its evil, hard-line ways and seek peace.

One thing comforting about this campaign is that its activists so often have to resort to lies and exaggerations, showing how little genuine material they possess.

How much effect is this all having in the real world? Ironically, it is less damaging to Israel itself (attempts at economic boycotts, for example, have yielded no real damage) but on Western Jews who live in the societies so affected. The growing pressure will result in some running for cover—or even joining the assailants—but far more will ultimately wake up.

Yet again this situation can no longer be dealt with as an ordinary, though rather spirited and emotional, debate. It is a massive, often conscious and deliberate, campaign of defamation. No longer on the margins, this campaign has penetrated into using the commanding heights of the Western mass media, intellectual, and academic institutions.

The reason for pointing this all out is that there are millions of well-intentioned, honest people who would be shocked if they had the paradigm shift between taking a good portion of this material as honest and well-intentioned and understood that they are being subjected to a concerted propaganda campaign of lies. If they comprehend that, they are far more likely to reject these lies as well as having their eyes opened to wider disinformation campaigns going on today.

Update: The New York Times editorial claims (as its lead no less!), in what is starting to look like an antisemitic pattern (I’m not accusing the paper of antisemitism but merely of using such a theme) that Hagel’s only problem is that he isn’t sufficiently servile to Israeli interests: “One dispiriting lesson from Chuck Hagel’s nomination for defense secretary is the extent to which the political space for discussing Israel forthrightly is shrinking.” The man showed himself to be an embarrassing fool and this is their claim–that it’s the Jews’ fault? Let’s be clear here. If Hagel said everything he ever said about Israel and had no other problemmatic statements or if Hagel said everything he ever said about Israel and had done a mediocre to minimal job at the confirmation hearings, no one would be talking about his not getting an overwhelming majority in the Senate. A sign of antisemitism: Blame the Jews first. By the way, Obama, Kerry, and Brennan don’t have a sterling record on Israel but they had no problem getting elected, appointed, and confirmed.

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest book, Israel: An Introduction, has just been published by Yale University Press. Other recent books include The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center and of his blog, Rubin Reports. His original articles are published at PJMedia.

Why did Mr. Obama overrule his advisers on Syria?

By Editorial Board, Published: February 7, 2013

WE NOW know that President Obama’s national security team overwhelmingly supported providing arms to the rebels in Syria. On Thursday, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told a Senate committee that he and Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, backed a plan that would have vetted, trained and armed selected opposition groups, which have been pleading for such U.S. support for more than a year. According to the New York Times, the strategy was developed by former CIA director David H. Petraeus and supported by former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton.

As we have frequently argued, the rationale for such action is compelling. Syria’s civil war, which has killed more than 60,000 people, grows steadily worse and more dangerous for the United States and its allies. An opposition that once was a peaceful pro-democracy movement has been all but overtaken by jihadist organizations, including an al-Qaeda affiliate, that receive ample funding and weapons supplies from abroad.

As Obama administration officials have frequently said, the longer Bashar al-Assad’s regime survives, the worse the outcome will be for Syria, its neighbors — all of which are U.S. allies — and the United States. Failure to back more moderate forces, which have been chronically short of effective weapons, will prolong the war and could leave the United States and its allies confronting a postwar Syria in which they have no friends and al-Qaeda and other extremists are ascendant.

So why was the Petraeus plan rejected? According to the Times, Mr. Petraeus and Ms. Clinton were rebuffed when they presented the plan to the White House. At the time, Mr. Obama was in the midst of an reelection campaign in which he frequently assured voters that “the tide of war is receding.” Hopes of reviving the plan after the election were thwarted when Mr. Petraeus resigned and Ms. Clinton was sidelined by illness.

Mr. Obama’s reasons for quashing the Syria plan were surely not purely political. But the president’s only public explanation for his resistance, in a recent interview with the New Republic, amounted to excuse-making. He wondered why he should concern himself with Syria and not the civil war in the Congo, as if the United States cannot intervene in any war unless it does in all; he asked whether providing weapons to rebels would “trigger even worse violence,” ignoring the testimony of his own aides that, under his present policy, the carnage “every day . . . it gets worse,” as new Secretary of State John F. Kerry put it.

Mr. Kerry and some other administration officials continue to talk up far-fetched hopes that the Syrian war will be ended by a negotiated settlement in which Mr. Assad voluntarily steps down. Even that unlikely ending would require the regime to conclude that it cannot defeat the rebels, and for moderate forces to rise among the fragmented opposition. As long as the United States and its allies refuse to directly supply those forces with money, training and more powerful weapons, that is very unlikely to happen.

Foundations for Holocaust: The Final Solution, its Execution

Published on JPost by David Turner on Wednesday Feb 06, 2013

This, and the previous article, The Final Solution, the Decision, are the most difficult to write, and read. Yet appreciating how a modern and enlightened state so recently was able to arrive at a "rational" solution to the West's Jewish Problem is, in some respect, the keystone to my project: the Past and Present as Future. 

The first submission to this evolving series, Anti-Judaism and the Origins of Christianity, appeared barely six months ago; six months from scripture to Shoah. My guess is that by the end of three more months we will have arrived at a conclusion which I, myself, have yet to recognize: a Jewish Solution to the West's Jewish Problem, a possible path to survival.

My purpose from the beginning is to reframe Zionism post-Shoah: Zionism for the 21st century. For Pinsker and Herzl the survival of the Jews may have been easier. After all, the population of the world was but a fraction of today, the numbers of states far fewer. Escape Russia to Argentina, to Uganda, to Palestine? Will Israel be able to serve its Zionist purpose as refuge to a mass Western migration when time arrives? If not, do alternatives exist? 

These are questions for my final writings. For the present I am just providing a roadmap towards our destination. Thank you for accompanying me!

Antisemitism and Jewish Survival

Published on JPost by David Turner on Wednesday Feb 06, 2013

Foundations for Holocaust: The Final Solution, its Execution

“I refer to the conference held in Berlin today and once more point out that the planned overall measures [the Final Solution] are to be kept strictly secret.”

(Reinhard Heydrich, September 21, 1939)

"’The Jewish people is being exterminated,’ every Party member will tell you, ’perfectly clear, it's part of our plans, we're eliminating the Jews, exterminating them, ha!, a small matter."

(Heinrich Himmler's Poznan speech of October 4, 1943) 

Introduction: Many historians assign the “Holocaust decision” to the invasion of Russia in July, 1941 or the Wannsee Conference in January, 1942. Certainly Russia greatly expanded the numbers of Jews available for murder by Heydrich’s Einsatzgruppen. But Heydrich had already been actively murdering Jews both systematically and massively since 1939, more than a year before Russia. If before Russia mass murder was “personal” by bullet, after the invasion “impersonal” by asphyxiation: the purpose, a German state policy of murdering all Jews within reach was unchanged. And that, to my mind, is what is meant by, “the Holocaust.” 

Historians can debate the meaning of this “fact” or that “document” endlessly. A Holocaust denier once insisted to me that Endlösung does not mean “extermination,” and offered such supposedly nonlethal intended “solutions” as emigration and Jewish reservations as evidence. We recently saw that the reservation idea in Nisko, far from a “zionist” solution to the Jewish Problem was actually an expanded concentration camp feeding surrounding slave labor camps, where “arbeit mach frie” explicitly referred to death by labor. Those not passing “selektion,” would be gassed. 

So much for a “compassionate” Endlösung.

Not only is a date for the “start” of the Holocaust disputed but many areas of the unfolding Final Solution are subject to disagreement. Take, for example, Reichsführer-SS Reinhard Heydrich’s September 21, 1939 order to his Einzatsgruppen, “Jewish Question in the Occupied Territory”:

“I refer to the conference held in Berlin today and once more point out that the planned overall measures (i.e., the final aim) are to be kept strictly secret. Distinction must be made between:

(1) The final aim (which will require extended periods of time), and

(2) The stages leading to the fulfillment of this final aim (which will be carried out in short terms).

“The first preliminary measure for achieving the final aim is the concentration of the Jews from the countryside in the larger cities. It must be speedily implemented. … as few concentration points as possible should be established so that only those cities are designated which are either railway junctions or at least lie on a railway line.”

Does the German word for “aim/solution” imply a collection depot for transshipment to a non-lethal, proto-Zionist “solution” to the Jewish Problem; did “the east” refer to an intended Jewish “reservation” at Nisko, “liberated” Poland? In such “controversies” do Holocaust historians provide Holocaust deniers support for their imaginings. 

Rather than joining the debate over the meaning of the word, “solution” I suggest reading Heydrich’s speech in the context in which it appears: as early as 1939 his SS Einzatsgruppen were already tasked to murder Jews; by the time of Auschwitz and the launch of industrial extermination a million and a half Jews had already been murdered. 

           

An Einsatzgruppe D member about to shoot a Jew kneeling at a mass grave in Vinnitsa, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union, in 1942. The photograph is inscribed: The last Jew in Vinnitsa, (Wikipedia) 

The Einzatsgruppen: were special police units consisting of men, usually above military age or otherwise deemed not suitable to serve in army units. They included men from all professions and trades, including present and retired police, professors and pastors. A unit might consist of from several hundred to several thousand executioners. Part of the SS these “police” were not directly attached to the Wehrmacht but trailed after army units. Einzatsgruppen began operating during the 1939 invasion of Poland and murdered 15,000, mostly Jews, during the winter, 1939-40. 

“The Jäger Report is the most precise surviving chronicle of the activities of one Einsatzkommando. It is a tally sheet of the actions of Einsatzkommando 3 — a running total of their killings of 136,421 Jews (46,403 men 55,556 women, 34,464 children), 1,064 Communists, 653 mentally disabled, and 134 others, from 2 July-1 December 1941 [six months before Wannsee].”

By “Auschwitz” I refer to that period of the Final Solution of industrial extermination. There is overlap between the face to face murders at the killing fields and the introduction of gas chambers. In December, 1941 the Einzatsgruppen began gassing their victims by carbon monoxide in hermetically sealed trucks designed to handle up to 100 victims at a time. Some 500,000 people, nearly all Jews, were murdered in this manner. 

 

"Selektion" on the Judenrampe, Auschwitz, May/June 1944. To be sent to the right meant slave labor; to the left, the gas chamber. This image shows the arrival of Hungarian Jews from Carpatho-Ruthenia, many of them from the Berehov ghetto.”

 

Photograph of Auschwitz staff enjoying a  “day off.”

A solution to its Jewish Problem haunted Christendom for two millennia before Hitler. It was only in the 20th century that the technological means to achieve a final solution became a realistic possibility: Henry Ford’s assembly line; IBM’s data collection; IG Farben’s Zyklon gas: Together these provided the means to finally achieve the full and complete eradication of Jewish existence from the world. All that was absent was a government committed to that end. 

Once adopted the War Against the Jews was of such high priority that having to choose between using transport, personnel and supplies to defend Germany from the Allies or to murder Jews Hitler chose the latter. Well afterAmerica entered the war Roosevelt and Churchill were uncertain of victory. The Wehrmacht must have understood that those resources spelled the difference between conditional and unconditional German surrender. 

One thing should be clear: Had Hitler achieved the victory Roosevelt and Churchill thought possible there is little doubt that the Final Solution would not have ended at Europe’s Atlantic shore. Hitler saw his mission as the final solution to Christendom’s two-thousand year long Jewish Problem: 

“I believe to-day that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator. In standing guard against the Jew I am defending the handiwork of the Lord.”

Afterword: A long-standing debate exists between “schools of historians” over whether and when Hitler gave an order for the extermination of world Jewry. And if, as seems likely, no such written document survives, if it ever existed, does a missing Führerbefehl change anything? What if it turns out that the only documentary evidence is Wannsee, does that become the default start date simply based on a documentary trail? And what of the one million Jews systematically murdered before that date? Common sense informs that intention to wage war may long precede a formal declaration.

Hitler began clandestinely rebuilding the Wehrmacht in 1933; began disenfranchising the Jews that same year. These actions do not thereby constitute a declaration of war, the beginning of the Final Solution. Yet both led inexorably to those ends. And while the 1935 Nuremburg Laws are a historical document, their appearance was sufficiently ambiguous that even today its meaning in terms of the Holocaust is open to interpretation. What is not in doubt is the fact of the Holocaust, that with or not a written führerbefehl the Holocaust murdered each and every Jew within reach, that Hitler made no secret in interview and speeches of his intention to annihilate each and every Jew alive in the world. And had he won the war there should be no doubt that that the Final Solution would have achieved that outcome. 

 

Jewish refugees from Czechoslovakia being marched away by British police at Croydon airport in March 1939. They were put on a flight toWarsaw

A week before this was to appear, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day JTA reported that Switzerland, officially neutral in the Second World War, “threw out asylum seekers,” even though that government, 

“was aware of German leader Adolf Hitler’s extermination plan and the existence of German concentration camps as early as 1942, the year that Germany decided on its so-called “final solution” for the Jews.”

Despite clear evidence that Hitler proposed a final solution to Christendom’s millennial Jewish Problem for more than a decade before attaining office, much of academic history prefers controversy and debate. But the Holocaust represents far more than an academic exercise. It did not arrive out of the blue, merely responding to frustrations following military defeat, of economic collapse. To suggest such misses the crucial question: Why the Jews? Why, instead, not the Lutherans, or the Catholics or the French? 

It was no accident that the Jews were targeted; in fact it fits neatly into a very long history of persecution. The Holocaust, the final solution to the Jewish Problem already describes a foreordained target: the Jews. And if so what, beyond ego and sport, is served by academic debate over a missing notarized order by Hitler, the missing blueprint representing intention? If in 1922 Hitler publicly announced his intention, 

"Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews;”

if his own words, recorded in print at that time are discounted, if evidence such as this does not achieve acceptance as historically valid, then denial will always shadow the Holocaust, doubt always available providing antisemites a “logical” doorway to promote their own agenda. But far more serious is that doubt provides we Jews the comfort of our own denial, that we are secure in our Diaspora our self-defined "exceptional" homeland. 

That the Holocaust is but one event in a long history of a very long tradition of anti-Jewish persecution; that by our own denial will our children, more distant from the Holocaust, one day be victim to the next. 

Recent writings in this Series: 

1. Foundations of Holocaust: The Final Solution, the Decision

2. Foundations of Holocaust: 1924, Congress decides No More Jews

3. Foundations of Holocaust: Corporate America, camp inmates and slave labor

4. Foundations of Holocaust: Corporate America and the Fuhrer, a Love Story

The “peace process” is not dead

.

Since the first publication of this article in April 2010, Obama committed to the idea that Israel must return to the ’67 lines subject to mutually agreed swaps. Though many argue that the peace process is dead, the truth of the matter is, that the US remains committed, as it always has been, to  ensuring that “the political struggle [between Israel and the Arabs] is settled in [a] manner satisfactory to [the] Arabs.”  Ted Belman

By Ted Belman (first published in April 2010)

After his inauguration, President Obama made it his business to end the Mideast conflict within two years. To achieve that end he embraced the “Saudi peace plan” and put enormous pressure on Israel to accept it.

The hallmark of this plan was “ending the occupation that began in 1967 and the division of Jerusalem.

Can we conclude from this that Obama is anti-Semitic, just hostile to Israel, or intent on changing U.S./Israel relations? The answer is not immediately self-evident.

Let’s go back to Israel’s founding, when these relations began.

Richard Holbrooke, in a fascinating article titled “Washington’s Battle Over Israel’s Birth,” explains the tug of war President Truman and Clark Clifford were involved in at that time: one side favored recognition, while Secretary of State George C. Marshall and his entourage at the State Department favored a UN trusteeship instead of partition.

Secretary of Defense James Forrestal explained to Clifford what motivated his group:

There are thirty million Arabs on one side and about 600,000 Jews on the other. Why don’t you face up to the realities?

According to Holbrooke, what motivated Truman and Clifford was moral conviction. Acting on their convictions was made more problematic by “the substantial anti-Zionist faction among leading Jews, [including] the publishers of both the Post and the New York Times.”

Nevertheless, the U.S., under Truman, was the first country to recognize Israel. Holbrooke concluded:

[To] this day, many think that Marshall and Lovett were right on the merits and that domestic politics was the real reason for Truman’s decision. Israel, they argue, has been nothing but trouble for the United States.

But Holbrooke begged to differ:

Truman’s decision, although opposed by almost the entire foreign policy establishment, was the right one — and despite complicated consequences that continue to this day, it is a decision all Americans should recognize and admire.

In the intervening years, the State Department has done its best to prevent Israel’s expansion. Presidents, to one degree or another, have lent their support. The U.S. maintained an arms embargo on Israel which commenced before the War of Independence in 1948 and ended after the Six Day War in 1967. During that period, Eisenhower forced Israel to retreat from the Sinai in 1956.

After Israel’s stunning victory in 1967, the State Department collaborated with the Arabs to prevent Israel’s expansion. United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 started with the recital “Emphasizing the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” before going on to envisage secure borders which envisioned the retention of some land. Thus, full withdrawal was not intended. The Arabs were livid and refused to negotiate. As a result, the U.S. proposed the Rogers Plan in 1969, which adopted the Arab position with these words:

We believe that while recognized political boundaries must be established, and agreed upon by the parties, any change in the pre-existing lines should not reflect the weight of conquest and should be confined to insubstantial alterations required for mutual security. We do not support expansionism.

Why not? Under international law, Israel, because it fought a defensive war, had the right to retain territory.

On Jerusalem, it provided:

We cannot accept unilateral actions by any party to decide the final status of the city. We believe its status can be determined only through the agreement of the parties concerned.

…

Specifically, we believe Jerusalem should be a unified city.

It left unresolved how to reconcile withdrawal to the 1967 borders and Jerusalem being a unified city. As the Obama administration has now highlighted, there is a conflict between the two. Similarly — is a “unified” city synonymous with a “united” city?

You will recall that Israel annexed East Jerusalem lands right after the war, but such annexation was not recognized by the U.S. and most other countries. So on the subject of Jerusalem, the U.S. has been consistent.

When Israel was attacked in 1973 by Egypt and Syria, Kissinger did his best to put Israel at a disadvantage. Thanks to General Haig, and later President Nixon, Israel turned defeat into victory. But Kissinger was there to limit the victory. This was not good enough for the Saudis, who imposed an oil embargo on the West.

In The Vast Power of the Saudi Lobby, written in response to the publication of The Israel Lobby, John R. MacArthur notes:

As the historian J.B. Kelly recounts, the U.S. ambassador to Riyadh, James Akins, did his best to placate King Faisal by urging the Saudi’s American-owned oil concessionaire ARAMCO to, in Aken’s words, “hammer home” to the White House that the embargo wouldn’t be lifted unless “the political struggle [between Israel and the Arabs] is settled in [a] manner satisfactory to [the] Arabs.”

In 1975, Kissinger advised an Iraqi diplomat:

On the contrary, Israel does us more harm than good in the Arab world. … We can’t negotiate about the existence of Israel but we can reduce its size to historical proportions. … I think the Palestinian identity has to be recognized in some form. … No solution is possible without it.

Thereafter, the U.S. worked — surreptitiously at first, and then openly — to cultivate the Palestinian identity and entity. Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton, and Bush 43 all did their part.

In the lead-up to the Iraq War in 2003, Thomas Friedman introduced the Saudi plan and advised that he got it from King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. But I think that it was in fact drafted by the State Department, who for one reason or another did not want to take ownership of it. I set out my reasons in my blog post “Unifying Theory.” The plan called for:

Israel’s full withdrawal from all the Arab territories occupied in 1967 in implementation of Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, backed by the Madrid conference resolutions in 1991 and the principle of land for peace, and for Israel’s acceptance of the establishment of an independent and sovereign Palestinian state, whose capital is East Jerusalem, in return for the Arab states’ establishment of normal [tabi'iyah] relations within the framework of a comprehensive peace with Israel.

Its intent was to make a claim on East Jerusalem and to emphasize full withdrawal.

The State Department, in exchange for getting Saudi agreement for the invasion of Iraq, agreed to incorporate the Saudi plan in the road map — which also was in the process of being drafted. The road map was announced one week after the invasion.

The road map covered new ground in requiring that an independent Palestinian state be created which was contiguous and viable. Normally these three matters would be subject to negotiations. No longer. By incorporating the Saudi plan, it also endorsed the division of Jerusalem and insubstantial changes in the 1967 borders. If that weren’t enough, it required Israel’s commitment to stop settlement construction pursuant to the Mitchell Report. Israel’s fate and Kissinger’s prophecy were sealed.

When Sharon announced his disengagement plan, he negotiated for the support for such a move by President Bush.  This support took the form of a letter from Bush to Sharon in ’04 in which Bush softened the State Department’s position with this paragraph,

As part of a final peace settlement, Israel must have secure and recognized borders, which should emerge from negotiations between the parties in accordance with UNSC Resolutions 242 and 338. In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949, and all previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution have reached the same conclusion. It is realistic to expect that any final status agreement will only be achieved on the basis of mutually agreed changes that reflect these realities.

Notice, he did not reference the Saudi plan and rejected the idea of a full withdrawal. While this wording may fall short of a binding commitment, this sentence in the letter doesn’t: “The United States will do its utmost to prevent any attempt by anyone to impose any other plan.”

Obama took the position that the U.S. was not bound by this letter as he wished to return to the Saudi plan with its “insubstantial changes” and division of Jerusalem. Elliot Abrams, who was involved in the negotiations surrounding the letter, was of the opinion that the letter did in fact amount to an agreement.

By rejecting this letter as binding, Obama was now free to permit the imposition of another plan, i.e., the Saudi plan. By doing so he is also negating all the caveats inserted by Bush for Israel’s protection.

President Obama does not have a new plan in mind. He just wants to force Israel to agree, and failing this, to impose a solution on Israel, thereby removing her one remaining right: the right to negotiate. This includes the right to reject offers.

Throughout the years, the American people and their representatives in Congress and the Senate have been very supportive of Israel, though they never confronted, much less thwarted, the State Department as Truman did.

Obama is not sensitive to American public opinion, but he is sensitive to Arab opinion, just as the State Department is. He is prepared to go to the mat on this. And why not? He has the backing of the liberal/left in America, Jews included.

The time has come for Israel to say “no” to further concessions or the imposition of a solution not to her liking. She must appeal to the American people to thwart the Arabist State Department. It is not enough to get Congress to pass resolutions supporting Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel, which they have done a number of times in the past.

Congress and the Senate must commit to making it a reality.