Tuesday, July 9, 2013


Shamir, the man who said no   Ofir Akunis  7-10-13


"When people talk to me about something that will be taken away from this land, I become ill; I physically can't take it," the late former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir once said. Today we mark one year since his passing.
The seventh prime minister of Israel, Shamir is generally not considered one of the country's most charismatic leaders, and he is usually not described as someone who enraptured audiences. But still, he served in the post for seven years, during which he led Israel to some impressive accomplishments.
Shamir led with a deep, intrinsic belief in the righteousness of his views, with tenacity and without overemphasizing how his decisions would be construed by others. All that was important to him -- and nothing was more important -- was the welfare of the Jewish people and the unity of the Land of Israel.
In the last several years of his life, I had the opportunity to meet Shamir several times. He lived relatively close to me, and he insisted on his daily walks even in old age. My conversations with him were piercing. Shamir shared with me his earnest concerns over the concessions made by former prime ministers Ehud Barak (whom he had initially appointed IDF chief of staff) and Ariel Sharon (his longtime rival in the Likud Party). "I never relinquished a single grain of sand from Israel's soil," he used to boast.
That is a fact. Shamir knew how to withstand all kinds of pressure. He was very convincing (even when it cost him harsh, sometimes hurtful criticism) that the entire Land of Israel belonged to the Jewish people. He insisted on this even when it went against the prevalent trend in Israel and certainly in the world. He insisted on it to more supportive American administrations (Ronald Reagan) and less supportive ones (George H. W. Bush and James Baker). He did and said what was in his heart. His was an entirely different approach to leadership.
Today's leaders could learn from Shamir's consistent, and persistent, policies. The only thing that brought him to the negotiating table was the insistence on the supremely justified principle of conducting direct talks with our neighbors, without preconditions. There were no promises, no gestures and no construction moratoriums. On the contrary: there was a marked upswing in construction all over the country. And still, Jordanian, Syrian and Palestinian delegations all came to the Madrid Conference in 1991. The obstinance of Shamir's policies did not alienate our neighbors. In fact, it brought them closer.
"They say that I am a man who only says no," he said once. "Sometimes you have to say no."
Shamir was not afraid to say no to our American friends, and they only respected him more for it. Alongside his uncompromising adherence to the vision of a unified Israel, he had to withstand the Left's constant, worn-out campaign of fear known as the "demographic problem." According to the Left, if Israel doesn't retreat to pre-1967 borders, the Arabs between the Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea will outnumber the Jews. Then, like now, that demographic scare tactic lacked vision. Shamir, however, did not. Encouraging immigration to Israel and realizing the Zionist vision were fundamental building blocks in his policy, and he was wise enough to absorb a million Jews from the former Soviet Union, none of whom were left homeless, and the tens of thousands of Ethiopian Jews whose courageous trips to Israel he orchestrated himself.
The unity of Israel and immigration absorption -- these are staples of Shamir's legacy. On the one-year anniversary of his death, this legacy is as relevant as ever.
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Islam's civil war moves to Egypt by David P. Goldman Asia Times July 8, 2013




The vicious crosswind ripping through Egyptian politics comes from the great Sunni-Shi'ite civil war now enveloping the Muslim world from the Hindu Kush to the Mediterranean.
It took just two days for the interim government installed last week by Egypt's military to announce that Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States would provide emergency financing for the bankrupt Egyptian state. Egypt may not yet have a prime minister, but it does not really need a prime minister. It has a finance minister, though, and it badly needs a finance minister, especially one with a Rolodex in Riyadh.
As the World Bulletin website reported July 6:
"The Finance Ministry has intensified its contacts [with Gulf states] to stand on the volume of financial aid announced," caretaker Finance Minister Fayyad Abdel Moneim told the Anadolu Agency in a phone interview Saturday. Abdel Moneim spoke of contacts with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Kuwait for urgent aid ... Defense Minister Abdel Fatah al-Sisi phoned Saudi Kind Abdullah bin Abdel Aziz and UAE President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nuhayyan yesterday on the latest developments in Egypt. King Abdullah was the first Arab and foreign leader to congratulate interim president Adly Mansour after his swearing-in ceremony. [1]
Meanwhile, Egypt's central bank governor, Hisham Ramez, was on a plane to Abu Dhabi July 7 "to drum up badly need financial support", the Financial Times reported. [2] The Saudis and the UAE had pledged, but not provided, US$8 billion in loans to Egypt, because the Saudi monarchy hates and fears the Muslim Brotherhood as its would-be grave-digger. With the brothers out of power, things might be different. The Saudi Gazette wrote July 6:
Egypt may be able to count on more aid from two other rich Gulf States. Egypt "is in a much better position now to receive aid from Saudi Arabia and the UAE", said Citigroup regional economist Farouk Soussa. "Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE have promised significant financial aid to Egypt. It is more likely that Egypt will receive it now." [3]
Media accounts ignored the big picture, and focused instead on the irrelevant figure of Mohamed al-Baradei, the Nobel Peace Prize winner whose appointment as prime minister in the interim government was first announced and then withdrawn on Saturday. It doesn't matter who sits in the Presidential Palace if the country runs out of bread. Tiny Qatar had already expended a third of its foreign exchange reserves during the past year in loans to Egypt, which may explain why the eccentric emir was replaced in late June by his son. Only Saudi Arabia with its $630 billion of cash reserves has the wherewithal to bridge Egypt's $20 billion a year cash gap. With the country's energy supplies nearly exhausted and just two months' supply of imported wheat on hand, the victor in Cairo will be the Saudi party.
I predicted this development in a July 4 post at PJ Media, noting,
The Saudis have another reason to get involved in Egypt, and that is the situation in Syria. Saudi Arabia's intervention in the Syrian civil war, now guided by Prince Bandar, the new chief of Saudi Intelligence, has a double problem. The KSA wants to prevent Iran from turning Syria into a satrapy and fire base, but fears that the Sunni jihadists to whom it is sending anti-aircraft missiles eventually might turn against the monarchy. The same sort of blowback afflicted the kingdom after the 1980s Afghan war, in the person of Osama bin Laden.
Saudi Arabia and Qatar have been fighting for influence among Syria's Sunni rebels (as David Ottaway reported earlier this week at National Interest). Cutting off the Muslim Brotherhood at the knees in Egypt will help the KSA limit potential blowback in Syria." [4]
There wasn't before, there is not now, and there will not be in the future such a thing as democracy in Egypt. The now-humiliated Muslim Brotherhood is a Nazi-inspired totalitarian party carrying a crescent in place of a swastika. If Mohamed Morsi had remained in power, he would have turned Egypt into a North Korea on the Nile, a starvation state in which the ruling party rewards the quiescent with a few more calories.
The head of Egypt's armed forces, Field Marshal Abdel-Fatah al-Sisi, is not a democrat, but a dedicated Islamist whose wife is said to wear the full niqab body covering, according to Naval Postgraduate School professor Robert Springborg. "Islamic ideology penetrates Sisi's thinking about political and security matters," Springborg observes. [5]
The question is not whether Islamism, but whose. Some Saudi commentators claim al-Sisi as their Islamist, for example Asharq al-Awsat columnist Hussein Shobokshi, who wrote July 7, "God has endowed al-Sisi with the Egyptians' love. In fact, al-Sisi brought a true legitimacy to Egypt, which will open the door to hope after a period of pointlessness, immaturity and distress. Al-Sisi will go down in history and has gained the love of people." [6] The Saudi-funded Salafist (ultra-Islamist) Nour Party in Egypt backed the military coup, probably because it is Saudi-funded, while other Salafists took to the streets with the Muslim Brotherhood to oppose it. Again, none of this matters. The will of a people that cannot feed itself has little weight. Egypt is a banana republic without the bananas.
Whether Egypt slides into chaos or regains temporary stability under the military depends on what happens in the royal palace at Riyadh, not in Tahrir Square. It appears that the Saudis have embraced the military-backed government, whoever it turns out to include. It is conceivable that the Saudis vetoed the ascension of al-Baradei, hilariously described as a "liberal" in the major media. Al-Baradei is a slippery and unprincipled operator who did great damage to Western interests.
As head of the International Atomic Energy Agency until 2009, the Egyptian diplomat repeatedly intervened to distort his own inspectors' reports about the progress of Iran's nuclear program. In effect, he acted as an Iranian agent of influence.
The Saudis have more to fear from Iran than anyone else. Iran (as Michael Ledeen observes) is trying to subvert the Saudi regime through the Shi'ite minority in Eastern Province. If Riyadh did not blackball his nomination as prime minister, it should have.
There isn't going to be a war with Israel, as some commentators have offered. Israel is at worst a bystander and at best a de facto ally of the Saudis. The Saudi Wahabists hate Israel, to be sure, and would be happy if the Jewish State and all its inhabitants vanished tomorrow. But Israel presents no threat at all to Riyadh, while Iran represents an existential threat.
The Saudis, we know from WikiLeaks, begged the United States to attack Iran, or to let Israel do so. The Egyptian military has no interest in losing another war with the Jewish state. It may not have enough diesel fuel to drive a division of tanks to the border.
The Saudi regime, to be sure, sponsors any number of extremist malefactors through its network of Wahabist mosques and madrassas. But the present Saudi intervention in Egypt - if I read the signals right - is far more consistent with American strategic interests than the sentimental meanderings of the Barack Obama administration, or the fetishism of parliamentary form that afflicts the Republican establishment.
The Saudi regime is an abomination by American standards, but the monarchy is a rational actor. As Michael Ledeen observed a year ago, "The big oil region in Saudi Arabia is in Shiite country, and the Saudi Shi'ites have little love for the royal family. If the rulers saw us moving against Tehran and Damascus, it would be easier for us to convince them to cut back their support for jihad outside the kingdom." [7]
The United States has less influence in the region than at any time since World War II, due to gross incompetence of the Obama administration as well as the Republican establishment. The Obama administration as well as Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham courted the Muslim Brotherhood as a prospective vehicle for Muslim democracy, ignoring the catastrophic failure of the Egyptian economy as well as the totalitarian character of the Brotherhood.
Americans instinctively ask about any problem overseas, "Who are the good guys?" When told that there are no good guys, they go to see a different movie. There are no good guys in Egypt, except perhaps for the hapless democracy activists who draw on no social constituency and wield no power, and the endangered Coptic Christian minority. There are only forces that coincide with American interests for reasons of their own. It is a gauge of American foreign policy incompetence that the medieval Saudi monarchy is a better guardian of American interests in Egypt for the time being than the United States itself.
David P. Goldman is Senior Fellow at the London Center for Policy Research and Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

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Monday, July 8, 2013

MAKING MOURNING MATTER By DANIEL GORDIS 7-4-2013

A dose of nuance: Making mourning matter
By DANIEL GORDIS  07/04/2013

For our challenge today is not simply to mourn, but infinitely more importantly, to make our mourning matter.

The Jews were exiled from their ancestral homeland, and after 2,000 years of displacement, they finally came home and restored their sovereignty,” we commonly say, and it’s true. Sort of.

“The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people,” begins Israel’s Declaration of Independence. “Here, their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped.” That, too, is accurate – sort of.

“Sort of,” because to start with a picky point, the Israelites became a people not in the Land of Israel, but in Egypt. “Sort of” because much of our identity was shaped in Babylonian exile. And “sort of” because the unspoken assumption of all these narratives is that the default status of the Jewish people was as a sovereign, united people in its homeland. Exile, we insist, is the aberration. When the Jews returned to Zion, we ended that aberration and restored the condition that had long been our “normal.”

But is that really true? In our (give or take) 4,000-year history, during how many of those years were we sovereign in one united Jewish state? Not long at all, it turns out.

Let’s consider the first commonwealth, which began with King Saul. No one know how long Saul ruled. I Sam 13:1 says two years, but every scholar notes that the verse’s language is corrupt.

Josephus suggests both 20 and 40 years; the Septuagint says 22; John Bright, the biblical scholar, says “at least a decade.”

So let’s guess high and say 20. After Saul, King David ruled for 40 years. And Solomon, the last king of a united Israelite kingdom, ruled for about 39 years.

Then the kingdom split. The first united Israelite kingdom, therefore, lasted about a century.

In a history spanning thousands of years, that’s not much.

To those who would point out that sovereignty continued even after the split, that is true – but small consolation.

Merely five years after the division into northern and southern kingdoms, an Egyptian military expedition destroyed most of the northern cities and farmland.

Though the south was largely spared, it was clear to all (and especially to the prophets) that sovereignty was all but over, and Jewish flourishing was a thing of the past. Despite a few reprieves, the post-division period was one of more or less uninterrupted decline, with exile and permanent defeat always looming.

How about the second commonwealth? Though Cyrus sent the Jews back to Judea to build the Second Temple in approximately 538 BCE, they did so under his rule. Indeed, the only period between Ezra/Nehemiah and the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE during which the Israelites were genuinely independent was during the Hasmonean (aka Maccabees) Dynasty, from 140 BCE until 37 BCE (all these dates are approximate and highly contested, obviously). That means, more or less, that the second round of Jewish independence also lasted, give or take, 100 years.

And then the Jews were exiled – again – this time for 2,000 years, until 1948.

Exile, despite our narrative to the contrary, was not a distortion of the “Jewish normal.” Exile was the norm. In 4,000 years of history, we’ve had a united, sovereign state for less than 300 years.

Why does that matter now? It matters, in part, because we’re in the middle of the Three Weeks.

The Three Weeks, which began with the fast of the 17th of Tammuz (commemorating the date of the Romans’ breach of Jerusalem’s walls) and will end with the fast of the Tisha Be’av (when the Temple was destroyed), evoke almost no serious contemplation in the Jewish world. In the non-observant community, this period is scarcely noticed. And even in the observant community, they are typically marked more by rigorous attention to fulfillment of halachic prohibitions (live music, weddings, swimming, etc.) than by introspection.

The very few who do think hard about the Three Weeks associate them with mourning the Temple. How many of them genuinely want the Temple restored is an issue no one discusses aloud with any honesty.

Is that the best we can do? The Jewish calendar was meant not just to be marked, but to provoke us, to challenge us. Is there no way in which both observant and non-observant Jews, those who would like to see a Temple rebuilt and those who would not, can make of the Three Weeks something that matters, the setting for a conversation about issues in Jewish life and Israel’s future that are critical to us all? I believe we could, if we began by internalizing how brief have been our periods of sovereignty. The first two instances of Jewish sovereignty lasted a mere 100 years each. Today, we’re already 65 years into round three. The first two times, it was menacing empires – Egypt and Babylonia/Persia – which destroyed us. Today, Egypt is more problematic than it was 20 years ago, the Syrian border (which had been dormant for decades) is extremely worrisome, and Iran, more or less the Persia of today, is, says David Albright (a former UN weapons inspector), within a year of having “the capacity to produce enough fissile material for a single bomb in one or two weeks,” according to The Economist.

If menacing neighbors weren’t sufficient, the Israelites managed to toss in a huge dose of internal division, contributing mightily to the defeat of both the first and second commonwealths.

Like them, we are bitterly divided over how to deal with our enemies. Like them, we often despise each other more than we fear our enemies. And like theirs, our commonwealth could also fall.

There is nothing natural or inevitable about Jewish sovereignty.

It is not clear that the Israelites would have survived had they been wiser, but it would not have hurt. Nor is it clear that we will survive. There may be a Jewish state in 100 years, but there may not.

There may be a Jewish state in 50 years, but there may not. What is clear is that if we have any hopes of being around for the long term, we must first internalize how utterly fragile Jewish sovereignty has always been, how dangerous are Jewish divisions that know no boundaries, and how strategic and thoughtful we must be when dealing with the powers that threaten us.

Israel may make it, and it may not. But surely we want to be able to say, regardless of whatever transpires in the decades to come, that we were not blind to the lessons of history, and that we thought hard and acted carefully, based on the accumulated wisdom of thousands of years of history.

If the Three Weeks fostered a transnational Jewish conversation about the historic brevity of Jewish sovereignty and the fragility of Jewish independence, is there anyone who would think it irrelevant? I doubt it. So let’s start, marking this period first and foremost by talking about the issues it raises.

For our challenge today is not simply to mourn, but infinitely more importantly, to make our mourning matter. 

Daniel Gordis is senior vice president and Koret distinguished fellow at Jerusalem’s Shalem College, Israel’s first liberal arts college. His most recent book, The Promise of Israel: Why Its Seemingly Greatest Weakness is Actually Its Greatest Strength, was recently named by Jewish Ideas Daily as one of the best Jewish books of 2012. His new book, Menachem Begin and the Battle for Israel’s Soul, will be published by Nextbook in 2014.



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Sunday, July 7, 2013

ISRAEL'S REVILED STRATEGIC WISDOM Caroline Glick July 5, 2013




On Wednesday, Egypt had its second revolution in as many years. And there is no telling how many more revolutions it will have in the coming months, or years. This is the case not only in Egypt, but throughout the Islamic world.

The American foreign policy establishment's rush to romanticize as the Arab Spring the political instability that engulfed the Arab world following the self-immolation of a Tunisian peddler in December 2010 was perhaps the greatest demonstration ever given of the members of that establishment's utter cluelessness about the nature of Arab politics and society. Their enthusiastic embrace of protesters who have now brought down President Mohamed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood regime indicates that it takes more than a complete repudiation of their core assumptions to convince them to abandon them.

US reporters and commentators today portray this week's protests as the restoration of the Egyptian revolution. That revolution, they remain convinced, was poised to replace long-time Egyptian leader and US-ally Hosni Mubarak with a liberal democratic government led by people who used Facebook and Twitter.

Subsequently, we were told, that revolution was hijacked by the Muslim Brotherhood. But now that Morsi and his government have been overthrown, the Facebook revolution is back on track.

And again, they are wrong.

As was the case in 2011, the voices of liberal democracy in Egypt are so few and far between that they have no chance whatsoever of gaining power, today or for the foreseeable future. At this point it is hard to know what the balance of power is between the Islamists who won 74 percent of the vote in the 2011 parliamentary elections and their opponents. But it is clear that their opponents are not liberal democrats. They are a mix of neo-Nasserist fascists, communists and other not particularly palatable groups.

None of them share Western conceptions of freedom and limited government. None of them are particularly pro-American. None of them like Jews. And none of them support maintaining Egypt's cold peace with Israel.

Egypt's greatest modern leader was Gamal Abdel Nasser. By many accounts the most common political view of the anti-Muslim Brotherhood protesters is neo-Nasserist fascism.

Nasser was an enemy of the West. He led Egypt into the Soviet camp in the 1950s. As the co-founder of the Non-Aligned Movement, he also led much of the Third World into the Soviet camp. Nasser did no less damage to the US in his time than al-Qaida and its allies have done in recent years.

Certainly, from Israel's perspective, Nasser was no better than Hamas or al-Qaida or their parent Muslim Brotherhood movement. Like the Islamic fanatics, Nasser sought the destruction of Israel and the annihilation of the Jews.

Whether the fascists will take charge or not is impossible to know. So, too, the role of the Egyptian military in the future of Egypt is unknowable. The same military that overthrew Morsi on Wednesday stood by as he earlier sought to strip its powers, sacked its leaders and took steps to transform it into a subsidiary of the Muslim Brotherhood.

There are only three things that are knowable about the future of Egypt. First it will be poor. Egypt is a failed state. It cannot feed its people. It has failed to educate its people. It has no private sector to speak of. It has no foreign investment.

Second, Egypt will be politically unstable.

Mubarak was able to maintain power for 29 years because he ran a police state that the people feared. That fear was dissipated in 2011. This absence of fear will bring Egyptians to the street to topple any government they feel is failing to deliver on its promises - as they did this week.

Given Egypt's dire economic plight, it is impossible to see how any government will be able to deliver on any promises - large or small - that its politicians will make during electoral campaigns.

And so government after government will share the fates of Mubarak and Morsi.

Beyond economic deprivation, today tens of millions of Egyptians feel they were unlawfully and unjustly ousted from power on Wednesday.

The Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists won big in elections hailed as free by the West. They have millions of supporters who are just as fanatical today as they were last week. They will not go gently into that good night.

Finally, given the utter irrelevance of liberal democratic forces in Egypt today, it is clear enough that whoever is able to rise to power in the coming years will be anti-American, anti- Israel and anti-democratic, (in the liberal democratic sense of the word). They might be nicer to the Copts than the Muslim Brotherhood has been. But they won't be more pro-Western.

They may be more cautious in asserting or implementing their ideology in their foreign policy than the Muslim Brotherhood. But that won't necessarily make them more supportive of American interests or to the endurance of Egypt's formal treaty of peace with Israel.

And this is not the case only in Egypt. It is the case in every Arab state that is now or will soon be suffering from instability that has caused coups, Islamic takeovers, civil wars, mass protests and political insecurity in country after country. Not all of them are broke. But then again, none of them have the same strong sense of national identity that Egyptians share.

Now that we understand what we are likely to see in the coming months and years, and what we are seeing today, we must consider how the West should respond to these events. To do so, we need to consider how various parties responded to the events of the past two-and-ahalf years.

Wednesday's overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood government is a total repudiation of the US strategy of viewing the unrest in Egypt - and throughout the Arab world - as a struggle between the good guys and the bad guys.

Within a week of the start of the protests in Tahrir Square on January 25, 2011, Americans from both sides of the political divide united around the call for Mubarak's swift overthrow.

A few days later, President Barack Obama joined the chorus of Democrats and Republicans, and called for Mubarak to leave office, immediately. Everyone from Sen. John McCain to Samantha Power was certain that despite the fact that Mubarak was a loyal ally of the US, America would be better served by supporting the rise of the Facebook revolutionaries who used Twitter and held placards depicting Mubarak as a Jew.

Everyone was certain that the Muslim Brotherhood would stay true to its word and keep out of politics.

Two days after Mubarak was forced from office, Peter Beinart wrote a column titled "America's Proud Egypt Moment," where he congratulated the neo-conservatives and the liberals and Obama for scorning American interests and siding with the protesters who opposed all of Mubarak's pro-American policies.

Beinart wrote exultantly, "Hosni Mubarak's regime was the foundation stone - along with Israel and Saudi Arabia - of American power in the Middle East. It tortured suspected al- Qaida terrorists for us, pressured the Palestinians for us, and did its best to contain Iran.

And it sat atop a population eager - secular and Islamist alike - not only to reverse those policies, but to rid the Middle East of American power. And yet we cast our lot with that population, not their ruler."

Beinart also congratulated the neo-conservatives for parting ways with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu who counseled caution, and so proved they do not suffer from dual loyalty.

That hated, reviled Israeli strategy, (which was not Netanyahu's alone, but shared by Israelis from across the political spectrum in a rare demonstration of unanimity), was proven correct by events of the past week and indeed by events of the past two-and-a-half years.

Israelis watched in shock and horror as their American friends followed the Pied Piper of the phony Arab Spring over the policy cliff. Mubarak was a dictator. But his opponents were no Alexander Dubceks. There was no reason to throw away 30 years of stability before figuring out a way to ride the tiger that would follow it.

Certainly there was no reason to actively support Mubarak's overthrow.

Shortly after Mubarak was overthrown, the Obama administration began actively supporting the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Muslim Brotherhood believed that the way to gain and then consolidate power was to hold elections as quickly as possible. Others wanted to wait until a constitutional convention convened and a new blueprint for Egyptian governance was written. But the Muslim Brotherhood would have none of it. And Obama supported it.

Five months after elections of questionable pedigree catapulted Morsi to power, Obama was silent when in December 2012 Morsi arrogated dictatorial powers and pushed through a Muslim Brotherhood constitution.

Obama ignored Congress three times and maintained full funding of Egypt despite the fact that the Morsi government had abandoned its democratic and pluralistic protestations.

He was silent over the past year as the demonstrators assembled to oppose Morsi's power grabs. He was unmoved as churches were torched and Christians were massacred. He was silent as Morsi courted Iran.

US Ambassador to Egypt Anne Patterson and Obama remained the Muslim Brotherhood's greatest champions as the forces began to gather ahead of this week's mass protests. Patterson met with the Coptic pope and told him to keep the Coptic Christians out of the protests.

Obama, so quick to call for Mubarak to step down, called for the protesters to exercise restraint this time around and then ignored them during his vacation in Africa.

The first time Obama threatened to curtail US funding of the Egyptian military was Wednesday night, after the military ignored American warnings and entreaties, and deposed Morsi and his government.

This week's events showed how the US's strategy in Egypt has harmed America.

In 2011, the military acted to force Mubarak from power only after Obama called for it to do so. This week, the military overthrew Morsi and began rounding up his supporters in defiance of the White House.

Secretary of State John Kerry was the personification of the incredible shrinkage of America this week as he maintained his obsessive focus on getting Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians.

In a Middle East engulfed by civil war, revolution and chronic instability, Israel is the only country at peace. The image of Kerry extolling his success in "narrowing the gaps" between Israel and the Palestinians before he boarded his airplane at Ben-Gurion Airport, as millions assembled to bring down the government of Egypt, is the image of a small, irrelevant America.

And as the anti-American posters in Tahrir Square this week showed, America's self-induced smallness is a tragedy that will harm the region and endanger the US.

As far as Israel is concerned, all we can do is continue what we have been doing, and hope that at some point, the Americans will embrace our sound strategy.


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Syria and Egypt Can’t Be Fixed By David P. Goldman (Spengler) 6-19-13



Cross-posted from Asia Times Online.
Syria and Egypt are dying. They were dying before the Syrian civil war broke out and before the Muslim Brotherhood took power in Cairo. Syria has an insoluble civil war and Egypt has an insoluble crisis because they are dying. They are dying because they chose not to do what China did: move the better part of a billion people from rural backwardness to a modern urban economy within a generation. Mexico would have died as well, without the option to send its rural poor – fully one-fifth of its population – to the United States.
It was obvious to anyone who troubled to examine the data that Egypt could not maintain a bottomless pit in its balance of payments, created by a 50% dependency on imported food, not to mention an energy bill fed by subsidies that consumed a quarter of the national budget. It was obvious to Israeli analysts that the Syrian regime’s belated attempt to modernize its agricultural sector would create a crisis as hundreds of thousands of displaced farmers gathered in slums on the outskirts of its cities. These facts were in evidence early in 2011 when Hosni Mubarak fell and the Syrian rebellion broke out. Paul Rivlin of Israel’s Moshe Dayan Center published a devastating profile of Syria’s economic failure in April 2011. [1]
Sometimes countries dig themselves into a hole from which they cannot extricate themselves. Third World dictators typically keep their rural population poor, isolated and illiterate, the better to maintain control. That was the policy of Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party from the 1930s, which warehoused the rural poor in Stalin-modeled collective farms called ejidos occupying most of the national territory. That was also the intent of the Arab nationalist dictatorships in Egypt and Syria. The policy worked until it didn’t. In Mexico, it stopped working during the debt crisis of the early 1980s, and Mexico’s poor became America’s problem. In Egypt and Syria, it stopped working in 2011. There is nowhere for Egyptians and Syrians to go.
It is cheap to assuage Western consciences by sending some surplus arms to the Syrian Sunnis. No-one has proposed a way to find the more than US$20 billion a year that Egypt requires to stay afloat. In June 2011, then French president Nicholas Sarkozy talked about a Group of Eight support program of that order of magnitude. No Western (or Gulf State) government, though, is willing to pour that sort of money down an Egyptian sinkhole.
Egypt remains a pre-modern society, with nearly 50% illiteracy, a 30% rate of consanguineal marriage, a 90% rate of female genital mutilation, and an un- or underemployment rate over 40%. Syria has neither enough oil nor water to maintain the bazaar economy dominated by the Assad family.
Both were disasters waiting to happen. Economics, to be sure, set the stage but did not give the cues: Syria’s radical Sunnis revolted in part out of enthusiasm for the ascendancy of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and partly in fear of Iran’s ambition to foster Shi’ite ascendancy in the region.
It took nearly two years for the chattering classes to take stock of Egypt’s economic disaster. The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman, the benchmark for liberal opinion on foreign policy, gushed like an adolescent about the tech-savvy activists of Tahrir Square in early 2011. Last week he visited a Cairo bakery and watched the Egyptian poor jostling for subsidized bread. Some left hungry. [2] As malnutrition afflicts roughly a quarter of Egyptians in the World Health Organization’s estimate, and the Muslim Brotherhood government waits for a bumper wheat crop that never will come, Egypt is slowly dying. Emergency loans from Qatar and Libya slowed the national necrosis but did not stop it.
This background lends an air of absurdity to the present debate over whether the West should arm Syria’s Sunni rebels. American hawks like Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, to be sure, argue for sending arms to the Sunnis because they think it politically unwise to propose an attack on the Assad regime’s master, namely Iran. The Obama administration has agreed to arm the Sunnis because it costs nothing to pre-empt Republican criticism. We have a repetition of the “dumb and dumber”consensus that prevailed during early 2011, when the Republican hawks called for intervention in Libya and the Obama administration obliged. Call it the foreign policy version of the sequel, “Dumb and Dumberer”.
Even if the Sunnis could eject the Assad family from Damascus and establish a new government – which I doubt – the best case scenario would be another Egypt: a Muslim Brotherhood government presiding over a collapsed economy and sliding inevitably towards state failure. It is too late even for this kind of arrangement. Equalizing the military position of the two sides will merely increase the body count. The only humane thing to do is to partition the country on the Yugoslav model, but that does not appear to be on the agenda of any government.

Notes:
1. See Israel the winner in the Arab revolts, Asia Times Online, April 12, 2011.
2. Egypt’s Perilous Drift, New York Times, June 15, 2013.

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INTO THE FRAY: WHY ISRAEL IS LOST By MARTIN SHERMAN 7-7-13






The future of Israel is being forfeited by a determined Left, refusing to relinquish a disproven delusion of two states; and by a despairing Right embracing a fanciful formula for one state.


We were watching the unraveling of Israel and despairing about whether or not it can be saved. 
– A distraught email received last week from a prominent pro-Israel activist 

I see Israel as a lost polity, one full of talent, energy and resolve but lacking direction.
– Daniel Pipes, “Israel’s Strategic Incompetence,” January 2009 

Time is running out for Israel. Don’t let the soaring skyscrapers, plush offices and luxurious penthouses that make up its rapidly changing urban sky-line fool you. Something is gravely amiss with the direction in which the nation is drifting.

Devoid of direction and destination 

“Drifting” is the operative word. For there is an overwhelming sense of “rudderlessness,” of lack of leadership, or, at least, of elected incumbents devoid of commitment to any charted direction, much less an envisioned destination. Perhaps the starkest illustration of the syndrome of aimlessness was the fact that the dominant faction in the ruling coalition, Likud Beytenu, felt it appropriate to compete in the last election without even presenting a platform.

This amounts to asking for voters’ support without informing them of what they were being asked to support.

Dismissing the importance of notifying the public of his faction’s intended policies, Gilad Erdan, then-environmental protection minister, who together with then-education minister Gideon Sa’ar, was largely responsible for the Likud campaign, scoffed, “Asking a ruling party what its platform is, [is] a bit petty.”

With disturbing disdain for electoral pledges, Erdan belittled their value: “At times, any connection between the platform and reality is purely coincidental.”

This attitude might explain, at least partially, why the Likud fared so poorly in the election. After all, you can’t reach your destination if don’t have one, and if you don’t have one, there is little reason to expect voters to “get on board” without knowing where they are bound.

Normal standards don’t apply 

Of course, by normal standards, Israeli governments have been remarkably successful.

Since its inception Israel has achieved staggering successes, against daunting odds, in virtually every field of human endeavor – agricultural, scientific, economic, social, cultural and military.

Clearly, the credit for all these accumulated accomplishments must in part be ascribed to the quality of the country’s governance.

Yet despite the undeniable achievement in face of great adversity, there is a feeling that something has gone – or at least, is going – badly awry. The burgeoning GDP per capita, the vast newly found energy resources, the amazing technology of the IDF armaments cannot disperse a sense of foreboding that afflicts growing circles of the public.

Israel is not like other nations. It faces a range of existential threats of intensity and immediacy, unlike any other industrial nation. Accordingly, the Israeli leadership cannot be judged by normal standards – because they simply do not apply.

Given the abnormal challenges that confront the country, economic prosperity and technological advancement, on their own, cannot ensure survival.

Paradoxically, they may even jeopardize it by allowing success to lull it into a deceptive illusion of normalcy, and dull the sense of urgency needed to contend with the ever-accumulating threats to the nation’s existence.

Management instead of leadership 

The sentiments expressed earlier by Gilad Erdan, deriding the need for enunciating clear policy prescriptions and objectives, indicate that elected incumbents tend to view their role far more in terms of management, than in terms of leadership.

But management, however talented, will not cut the mustard when imaginative leadership is called for. Managing, even optimizing, prevailing realities, will not suffice when generating new ones is what is required.

Political leadership, as opposed to managerial technocrats, must give the nation a sense of direction, and destiny. It must provide it with an idea of where it is headed and how it intends to get there. It must look for solutions to problems, not merely play for time, employing stop-gap measures for containing them.

It is difficult to overstate how formidable the hazards that Israel needs to contend with are. Yet increasingly, the measures adopted to deal with them seem ever-more out of kilter with their severity. There are growing signs that the Israeli leadership has despaired of formulating a solutionoriented approach, and has retreated from a leadership role into a managerial one.

Conflict management as a cop-out 

This state of mind is reflected in the growing prevalence of the “conflict-management” school of thought in the public discourse – arising from the purportedly lucid and sober recognition that if conflicts cannot be resolved they must be managed.

Typically, this approach has been applied to the seemingly intractable conflict with the Palestinians – arguably the gravest item on Israel’s national agenda, particularly as it has engendered the accelerating and expanding campaign of international delegitimization, not only of Israel, but increasingly, of the conceptual validity of a Jewish nation state.

A cursory glance at events over the past two decades will quickly reveal how ineffectual such an endeavor has proved, and how severe an erosion of Israeli positions it has resulted in. Conflict management is little more than an evasive cop-out to avoid serious confrontation with root causes.

For a vivid illustration of the futility of conflict-management, take for example the last address by Yitzhak Rabin in the Knesset on October 5, 1995, a month before his assassination, in which he sought parliamentary ratification for the Oslo II Accords.

In it, Rabin detailed his vision of the permanent resolution of the conflict with the Palestinians. In the positions he set out, he rejected full statehood for the Palestinians; endorsed a united Jerusalem (including the “settlements” of Gilo and Ma’aleh Adumim) under Israeli sovereignty as the nation’s capital; stipulated the Jordan Valley, “in the broadest meaning of that term,” as Israel’s security border; called for the inclusion of existing settlements (or as he put it, “communities”) including Efrat, Betar Illit and Gush Etzion within the final frontiers of Israel; and urged “the establishment of [new] blocs of settlements in Judea and Samaria, like the one in Gush Katif,” later destroyed by Ariel Sharon in the 2005 disengagement from Gaza.

Remember, this address was given after Rabin was awarded the Noble Peace Prize, and after he was hailed as a valiant warrior for peace. Remember that at the time this proposal was harshly condemned by the Likud, and roughly half the Israeli public, as craven capitulation and betrayal of Zionist ideals.

Yet today, if any Israeli leader were to embrace Rabin’s final vision of a permanent solution, he/she would be dismissed as an unrealistic extremist.

So much for “conflict management!”

Politics abhors a vacuum

Much like Nature, politics abhors a vacuum – and the ideo-intellectual vacuum left by the aversion of successive (mainly Likud-led) governments to fashion a durable Zionist-compliant blueprint for an end to the conflict with the Palestinian Arabs, is now being filled by perilous prescriptions advanced by civil society activists, from both Left and Right.

Both would irretrievably undermine the ability of Israel to survive as the nation state of the Jewish people. Both would herald the eventual end of the era of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel. Both seem oblivious to sea-changes in Israel’s geopolitical environment that invalidate their core rationale. The one would make Israel untenable geographically; the other, untenable demographically.

As I mentioned in recent columns, on the Left a two-prong attack is being made on public opinion and on decision-makers’ attention. The one is to advance the Arab Peace Initiative calling for a return to the indefensible pre-1967 lines (with minor insignificant adjustments), the right of return for Palestinian refugees, the transfer of the Golan to Syria (really?), as “a basis for negotiation.”

The other advocates that irrespective of the outcome of negotiations, Israel should renounce any claims to sovereignty across the pre-1967 line in Judea-Samaria, and unilaterally withdraw to a line that approximates the present route of the security barrier – compensating the Jewish residents for their evacuation to locations within pre-1967 Israel.

On the Right, a plan is being advanced to annex all of Judea-Samaria and grant citizenship to the Arab residents of the area, under varying restrictions and reservations.

In this case, the proponents are more or less “betting the farm” on optimistic – albeit plausible – demographic assessments, but ignoring the devastating socioeconomic and cultural impact such a measure would likely entail, even if a sizable Jewish majority could be maintained.

Danger from the Left 

As I have frequently pointed out, the proposal from the Left would, in all likelihood, result in the establishment of a mega-Gaza with a 400-km. front on the fringes of Israel’s most populous region, overlooking its only international airport, major sea ports, vital infrastructure installations/ systems (including power generation/ transmission, water supply and communications), and abutting the Trans- Israel Highway (Highway 6).

Demilitarization of this area would mean little, since even without modern artillery, armor and airpower, renegade elements, armed only with light short-range weapons of the kind that abound in Gaza, could totally disrupt the socioeconomic routine and cripple the commercial hub of the country.

Given the precedents in which territory ceded to Arab regimes have invariably become launching pads to attack Israel, the working assumption must be that such a scenario is highly probable.

Given recent events in the Arab world, the instability and the blood-curdling brutality, it seems almost inconceivable that any allegedly loyal Israeli would advocate such a hazardous course, without being able to provide iron-clad assurances that what has happened in the past will not happen in the future. Clearly they cannot.

Danger from the Right 

As I pointed out last week, even if the optimistic demographic assessments are correct, the proposal from the Right would result in more than doubling the enfranchised Muslim population in Israel – bringing the total to anywhere between 30 and 40 percent, depending on whose statistics one prefers to believe.

It seems almost beyond belief that the advocates of this approach could suggest one can make a dramatic change in one societal parameter, without inducing commensurately dramatic changes in other societal parameters, which would gravely undermine the ability to preserve the Jewish character of the state.

For anyone who might doubt the effect of an emboldened and enlarged Muslim presence might have on the socio-cultural attributes of a modern host society, the examples of the Netherlands, Belgium, Scandinavia, the UK and France should provide sobering case studies, where more and more indigenous Europeans are choosing to emigrate because of ever-more assertive Muslim minorities, considerably smaller than that envisaged in Israel.

Even if one assumes that Israel’s approach might be somewhat more muscular than that of the Europeans, it is clearly improbable that such a sizable enfranchised minority would not become increasingly dominant in determining the socio-cultural fabric of the country. And I can’t put it any more delicately than that.

Why Israel is lost 

The future of Israel is being forfeited by a determined Left refusing to relinquish a disproven delusion of two states; and by a despairing Right embracing a fanciful formula for one-state. With US foreign policy everywhere beleaguered by failure and paralysis, the only hope of any foreign success for the administration is by pressuring a pliant Israel on the Palestinian issue.

In the absence of a firm, imaginative Zionist-compliant initiative from the elected leadership (don’t hold your breath) , these two detrimental proposals will define the debate on the fate of Judea- Samaria.

Although I have only touched briefly on the harm they will wreak upon Israeli society, it should be clear that the implementation of either would make Jewish existence in the Land of Israel increasingly tenuous and difficult to sustain.

Unless the nation can produce leadership that can formulate a policy that will ensure that the country can be viable both geographically and demographically, Israel will be lost.



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