ISIS- Two-staters’ excuse du jour

 MARTIN SHERMAN 5-14-15

For two-staters the prevailing conditions—no matter what they are—are always favorable for implementing the land-for-peace doctrine and establishing a Palestinian state.

There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true. – Søren Kierkegaard, Danish philosopher (1813-1855)

Not since the time of Dr. Goebbels has there ever been a case in which continual repetition of a lie has borne such great fruits... Of all the Palestinian lies there is no lie greater or more crushing than that which calls for the establishment of a separate Palestinian state in the West Bank... – Amnon Rubinstein, former education minister, far-left Meretz party, “Palestinian Lies,” Haaretz, July 30, 1976

I am sure you have noticed how it is with “twostaters” – a.k.a. adherents of the dogma of political appeasement and territorial concessions as an effective measure for assuaging despots.

For them, the prevailing conditions – no matter what they are – are always favorable for implementing the land-for-peace doctrine and establishing a Palestinian state, and in fact comprise a compelling imperative, indeed, a veritable “historic opportunity” for doing so, which cannot, must not be missed, lest it be regretted for generations to come.

Come rain, come shine – ‘Palestine’...

If it rains, we are told we need a Palestinian state – because it is raining. When it is dry, we must have a Palestinian state – because dry weather is ideal for setting up such a state. When it is freezing cold – only the establishment of a Palestinian state can bring any warmth. When it is sizzling hot, it’s time for a Palestinian state – for only it can bring relief from the wilting heat...

So, whatever the existing conditions, they are seized upon as the irrefutable and urgent rationale for the establishment of a Palestinian state – even if they constitute the utter negation of the previous conditions, which formerly had been invoked as the exigent and incontestable rationale for such a state.

If this sounds flippant, just look back at the history of the last three decades and any misgivings will be dispelled.

Thus when in the months following the 1992 election, the Rabin government found that – in contradiction to its declarations during the campaign – no agreement on autonomy with Palestinian Arabs in Judea-Samaria was forthcoming, it adopted precisely what it had always rejected: the notion of negotiating with Yasser Arafat’s terrorist organization, the PLO, with which all contacts had hitherto been punishable by law. So when negotiations with local leaders, which were undertaken to avoid engaging Arafat and the PLO, produced no progress, Arafat/ PLO were engaged – despite the fact that previously such engagement was dismissed as an unacceptable and futile anathema.

Rather than admit error, what was once to be stringently avoided was now enthusiastically embraced.

More was yet to come.

Any excuse – or the opposite – will do 

The rationale for engaging Arafat was the diametric reversal of that invoked for eschewing such engagement previously. Whereas his murderous past was originally invoked as the reason for avoiding him, the implied “authority” his legacy of brutality allegedly bestowed upon him was cited as the reason for believing he could induce the Palestinians to accept compromise and end the bloodshed.

However, when contacts with Arafat soon degenerated into a bloody spiral of terrorism, culminating in the second intifada, two-staters began to despair of efficacy of his “authority.”

So they embraced Mahmoud Abbas (aka Abu Mazen), on the rationale that he was not Arafat, portraying him as everything that his predecessor wasn’t – devoid of Arafat’s grisly authority but with a genuine desire for nonviolent reconciliation with the Jewish state.

Soon, however, it became evident that Abbas had neither the will nor ability to deliver what Arafat could or would not deliver.

Then came the 2006 Palestinian Authority elections, in which Hamas swept to victory, trouncing Abbas’s Fatah in a stinging rejection of his leadership. Yet, even though Hamas vehemently rejected any acceptance of Israel as the nation-state of the Jews, some two-staters were perversely buoyed by this development. Indeed, I remember participating in a morning TV program with an indefatigable two-state supporter, who expressed optimism that now, finally, there were folk with the requisite authority in place that Israel could deal with and forge binding peace – all this despite the fact that the rejection of peace comprised the raison d’etre of Hamas and, in large measure, the basis for its electoral success.

Recalling the record 

Of course, when it comes to advancing their political “philosophy” (for want of a better word), two-staters have always been adept at invoking some or other argument, and when that proved totally unfounded, invoking precisely the opposite argument for endorsing the very same policy.

Thus, for those old enough to remember, prior to the start of the Oslowian “peace process,” the two-state proponents insisted that the terrorist attacks, then perpetrated mainly with axes and knives, were the “acts of extremists,” precipitated by the frustration at the “lack of a peace process.” However, after the initiation of the Oslowian “process,” when terrorist attacks not only continued unabated, but – now that the Palestinians had access to military grade explosives – escalated to unprecedented levels, two-staters adamantly resisted admitting error. Instead, they still maintained that the “process” must continue. Terrorist attacks were still dubbed the “acts of extremists,” but now allegedly precipitated by a desire to halt the “peace process” – whose prior absence was invoked to “explain” the previous acts of terrorism.

So, first it was the “extremist anger” at the lack of a “peace process,” and then “extremist anger” at its existence, that two-staters presented as the “rationale” for endorsing a policy of concessions and withdrawal to facilitate Palestinian statehood.

The record (cont.)

With the initiation of the Oslo process, two-staters argued that Israel should withdraw from the “territories” on the basis of a negotiated agreement because “there was someone to talk to” on the Palestinian side. However, when the horrors of the second intifada proved this to be unfounded, rather than concede error, two-staters endorsed the idea that Israel should withdraw unilaterally, without negotiation, “because there was no one to talk.”

So again, first the existence, and then the nonexistence, of a Palestinian negotiating partner was invoked to justify the two-state compliant policy of concession.

Originally the two-staters claimed that Israel could afford to relinquish territory for a Palestinian state, because it was strong enough to contend with the risks involved in forgoing it. Later, however, when it was clear that conceding territory did not produce the desired results, rather than admit error, two-staters insisted that Israel should continue to relinquish territory because it was not strong enough to contend with the risks involved in retaining it.

So yet again, first Israel’s strength, and then its lack of strength, were invoked as the rationale for their two-state-compliant policy of withdrawal.

Two-stater desperation 

Almost a quarter-century has come and gone since the days of heady optimism when the Oslo process was launched on the White House lawn. Every argument – and its subsequent converse – for the two-state paradigm has been dashed on the unforgiving rocks of reality.

Every time land has been relinquished in the hope of advancing peace, the opposite has occurred, and that land has – either immediately or eventually – become a platform for attacks against the Jewish state.

None of this has induced the slightest doubt, much less regret, on the part of two-staters. Immune to both prudent reason and proven results, they plow on regardless, in a desperate search for some new contention, no matter how far-fetched, to justify their efforts to preserve the alleged validity of the failed and fatally flawed formula on which the personal prestige and professional standing of so many depend.

Of late, this process has begun a descent into the depths of such absurdity that it approaches intellectual depravity.

For today, there is an increasing chorus of two-stater voices that, in all seriousness, suggest that now that the Mideast has proved to be totally different from the suppositions the Oslo process was founded on, Israel should adopt exactly the same policy they prescribed before those suppositions were disproved.

Positively perverse prescription 

For now, with Islamist fundamentalism sweeping the region, Israel is being urged by obsessive two-staters to make precisely the same concessions (arguably even more radical ones) that they urged beforehand.

Now, we are told, since radical extremists are threatening a number of “moderate” Arab regimes, there is a “convergence of interests” between these states and Israel. Consequently, we are told, with a straight face, that in order for these regimes to allow Israel to assist in pursuit of their interests (of self-preservation), Israel must not only undertake the very policy they prescribed prior to that alleged convergence, but relinquish territory that, in all likelihood, will fall to the control of precisely the forces the “moderates” are threatened by.

This, of course, is a positively perverse prescription – at once gravely flawed in the logical foundations it is based on, and seriously counterproductive in outcomes it is likely to produce.

For if there is a genuine confluence of interests between the regimes in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and several Gulf states, trenchant questions arise: • Why should Israel have to make any concessions to help these regimes (I use the word “regime” rather than “state” or “country” deliberately) pursue or preserve their own vital interests? • Why would it be in the interests of those regimes for Israel to relinquish any territory for the establishment of a Palestinian state? After all, both precedent and prudent projections strongly indicate that such territory would soon be taken over by the very elements which imperil the vital interests of both Israel and the allegedly allied regimes, considerably empowering the forces that jeopardize those purported common interests.

Eclipse of common sense 

When it comes to the Palestinian issue, the eclipse of common sense – even self-interest – is the rule.

For as the Gaza precedent, and a large body of expert evaluation, clearly indicate, the best, arguably the only, way to ensure that the territory designated for a prospective Palestinian state, well-funded by Iran, Qatar and the burgeoning ill-gotten coffers of Islamic State, will not become a mortal threat to both Israel and its professed potential Arab allies, is for Israel to retain control of it.

After all, who would protect the nascent state from external threats or a compliant incumbent regime from domestic ones? The IDF? Some Arab army, deployed east of the Jordan River – something every Israeli government since the late 1960s has refused to consider? But even more troubling questions arise: What if Israel makes the perilous concessions twostaters prescribe, and all, or some, of purportedly allied Arabs regimes (among the most decadent on the face of the planet today) succumb to their Islamist adversaries? What will become of the “convergence of interests” then? What would, indeed, could, Israel do to redress the situation? This is particularly pertinent in the case of Jordan, which if it fell to, or even fell under the influence, of Islamic State/al-Qaida affiliates, would create a huge Islamic expanse, from Islamic State-controlled central Iraq to the eastern approaches to the sedate sidewalks of Ra’anana and Kfar Saba, and to the runways of Ben-Gurion Airport.

And if the presumed Arab allies did vanquish the Islamist threat to their survival, with the common threat gone, what would there be to sustain the convergence of interests and prevent a reversion to the inimical status quo ante – after Israel has made the prescribed two-state compliant concessions? 

Depraved indifference? 

All these – and other unmentioned – deadly dangers, which with a high degree of probability, could arise from the implementation of the two-state prescription in an Islamic ascendant Middle East, are so starkly discernible, predictable and plausible, it is difficult not to question the motivation of anyone blatantly unmindful of them.

The following is the legal definition of “depraved indifference” in US law: “To constitute depraved indifference, [one’s] conduct must be so wanton, so deficient in a moral sense of concern, so lacking in regard for the life or lives of others, and so blameworthy as to warrant the same criminal liability as that which the law imposes upon a person who intentionally causes a crime.”

I leave the readers to judge whether this adequately characterizes the conduct of today’s two-staters.

In any event, when Islamic State becomes the excuse du jour for their policy, Israel and Israelis have much to worry about.

Martin Sherman (www.martinsherman.org) is the founder and executive director of the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies. (www.strategic-israel.org)

‘A Perverse Consequence’  MICHAEL MAKOVSKY AND WILLIAM KRISTOL 5-25-15  VOL. 20, NO. 35  Let’s begin by doing something we don’t often do, and that is quoting the New York Times at some length. We do this because David Sanger’s report of Thursday, May 14, makes clear how mistaken are the premises underlying President Obama’s forthcoming Iran deal: When President Obama began making the case for a deal with Iran that would delay its ability to assemble an atomic weapon, his first argument was that a nuclear-armed Iran would set off a “free-for-all” of proliferation in the Arab world. “It is almost certain that other players in the region would feel it necessary to get their own nuclear weapons,” he said in 2012. Now, as he gathered Arab leaders over dinner at the White House on Wednesday and prepared to meet with them at Camp David on Thursday, he faced a perverse consequence: Saudi Arabia and many of the smaller Arab states are now vowing to match whatever nuclear enrichment capability Iran is permitted to retain. “We can’t sit back and be nowhere as Iran is allowed to retain much of its capability and amass its research,” one of the Arab leaders preparing to meet Mr. Obama said on Monday, declining to be named until he made his case directly to the president. Prince Turki bin Faisal, the 70-year-old former Saudi intelligence chief, has been touring the world with the same message. “Whatever the Iranians have, we will have, too,” he said at a recent conference in Seoul, South Korea. .  .  . [B]y leaving 5,000 centrifuges and a growing research and development program in place — the features of the proposed deal that Israel and the Arab states oppose virulently— Mr. Obama is essentially recognizing Iran’s right to continue enrichment of uranium, one of the two pathways to a nuclear weapon. .  .  . Although “the small print of the deal is still unknown,” [Prince Turki] added, it “opens the door to nuclear proliferation, not closes it, as was the initial intention.” So: One of the main justifications of the Iran deal was that it would slow down nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. But it turns out it will do the opposite. This is a “perverse consequence” of the deal only from President Obama’s point of view, as expressed by the New York Times. From the point of view of anyone familiar with the Middle East, it is in fact a predictable consequence. The Iran deal is making nuclear proliferation in an unbelievably unstable region of the world — one made more unstable, we would add, by President Obama’s policies of retreat in Iraq and inaction in Syria — more likely and more imminent. Maybe this is an unfortunate price one has to pay if a deal could, as President Obama said this past week in an interview with the Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat, “strengthen the hands of more moderate leaders in Iran.” But there’s no sign of that. Quite the contrary. This past week Reuters reported that Iran tried just a few months ago — in violation of its 2013 interim agreement with the United States and our allies — to procure “a large shipment of sensitive technology usable for nuclear enrichment.” The Czech Republic blocked the attempted purchase. As Reuters explains, this is detailed by an expert U.N. panel, which reports that in January Iran attempted to buy compressors useful for extracting enriched uranium from cascades of the sort that Iran possesses — cascades that Iran will continue to possess under the agreement. Furthermore, according to the U.N., “the procurer and transport company involved in the deal had provided false documentation in order to hide the origins, movement and destination of the consignment with the intention of bypassing export controls and sanctions.” The U.N. panel also notes that Britain had discovered a further illicit Iranian nuclear procurement network linked to blacklisted firms. Reuters concludes, in an understated way: “The incident could add to Western concerns about whether Tehran can be trusted to adhere to a nuclear deal being negotiated with world powers under which it would curb sensitive nuclear work in exchange for sanctions relief.” In sum: Iran is cheating, as it always has, despite all the concessions and happy talk and group hugs from Western diplomats. Given the weak inspections and verification regime envisioned by the final deal, how likely is that to change? Furthermore, given this evidence of very recent Iranian behavior, how likely is it that the deal will strengthen the forces of moderation in Iran? In fact, achieving a deal that amounts to a huge series of concessions by the West and that allows Iran to leave its nuclear infrastructure in place — a deal that legitimizes Iran as a nuclear threshold state — will have the opposite effect. It will leave the regime in Iran strengthened and emboldened. After all, to say nothing of other considerations, if there’s a deal, the regime will, thanks to the unfreezing of sanctioned assets, quickly receive a “signing bonus” of $30-50 billion from the deal, an immediate cash infusion equivalent to more than 10 percent of Iran’s GDP. Indeed, when pressed, even the Obama administration acknowledges that enriching the Islamic Republic of Iran may only accelerate its mischief-making. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said on May 5 that the administration hopes “that the influx of resources will be devoted to meeting the needs of the population there and to strengthening the economy that has taken a terrible toll on the daily lives of millions of Iranians.” But he admitted that “even while these sanctions have been in place we have not seen Iran significantly scale back their support for terrorism or their destabilization activities in the region.” Ultimately, he said with resignation, Iran “is a sovereign country that will make their own decisions.” So there are two fundamentally flawed assumptions— really, hopes — underlying the Obama administration’s deal. The hope is that such a deal (a) would lead to improved Iranian behavior and (b) would slow down nuclear proliferation in the region. But based on current Iranian behavior and today’s reactions in the region, both hopes are false. In fact, they are the complete opposite of the dynamics we already see playing out. The nuclear deal with Iran would have the “perverse consequence” both of making the Iranian regime stronger and more apt to engage in bad behavior, and of contributing to instability and nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. It’s up to Congress to kill the deal, and thereby to save us from the predictable consequences of the Obama administration’s perverse view of American interests and of how the real world works.

ICC Prosecutor Continues Examining Palestine Situation and Warns Israel 

 Joseph A. Klein  May 14, 2015 

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/71958

International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda told reporters at United Nations headquarters in New York, following her May 12th briefing to the UN Security Council on the ICC’s Libya-related activities, that her previously announced “preliminary examination” concerning the situation in Palestine is still open. She has not set any deadline for completing her examination.

Ms. Bensouda is continuing to look into whether crimes subject to the ICC’s jurisdiction were possibly committed in the Palestinian territories since June 2014. She is considering information, if any, submitted to her office by both sides to the conflict and from other sources. Ms. Bensouda decided to undertake the preliminary examination, which she described as “a quiet process,” on her own initiative once the so-called Palestinian state acceded to the ICC’s governing Rome Statute. Israel is not a party to the Rome Statute and has not consented to its jurisdiction.

Ms. Bensouda said that she is currently assessing the gravity of any alleged crimes that she determines would be subject to ICC jurisdiction, such as war crimes and crimes against humanity. She will also examine any national efforts to deal with them in a just manner as factors in deciding whether to proceed to the next stage of conducting a more formal criminal investigation.

The ICC prosecutor claimed she will be completely impartial and will be assessing possible crimes committed by Israelis and the Palestinians. However, Ms. Bensouda chose to warn only Israel, in an interview with the Associated Press, that if it does not cooperate with her initial examination it may face the prospect of a full investigation based on information submitted by its critics. In this connection, Ms. Bensouda is likely to take into account the recent findings of a commission of inquiry set up UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, blaming Israel’s armed forces for conducting attacks on several UN sites in Gaza.

Ms. Bensouda appears unmoved that Israel’s military has opened several criminal investigations into its conduct during the Gaza war and that Israel also has an independent judiciary with a demonstrated record of effective, transparent operation. This is despite the fact that the ICC is not supposed to expend resources on matters that can be handled in the first instance by national courts, under the principle of complementarity.

A group of experts invited by the ICC’s Office of Prosecutor to examine complementarity, wrote in 2003:

“The ICC may only exercise jurisdiction where national legal systems fail to do so, including where they purport to act but in reality are unwilling or unable to genuinely carry out proceedings. The principle of complementarity is based both on respect for the primary jurisdiction of States and on considerations of efficiency and effectiveness, since States will generally have the best access to evidence and witnesses and the resources to carry out proceedings.”

Libya illustrates the incredibly low bar that a state’s legal system has had to meet in order to convince the ICC that it should defer to the state’s jurisdiction over an alleged crime rather than take over the case itself. Libya is near total collapse, with no rule of law at all in many parts of the country. The International Federation for Human Rights stated in March of this year that “hundreds of cases of alleged grave violations, including extrajudicial killings, widespread use of torture and arbitrary arrest have been submitted to Libya’s General Public Prosecutor, during 2012, 2013, and 2014 against a number of armed groups with no concrete measures taken to date towards achieving accountability. The national courts in Libya are unable to prosecute alleged perpetrators of serious crimes due to continuing threats to judges, lawyers and prosecutors by armed groups.”

Yet the ICC decided that Libyan authorities were capable of handling the trial of a former intelligence chief from Colonel Qaddafi’s regime, Abdullah al-Senussi, rather than assume jurisdiction for the case itself. The former prime minister under Qaddafi, al-Baghdadi al-Mahmudi, and a number of Qaddafi government ministers are also being tried in Libya. True, the ICC is requesting that Libya hand over Qaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam al-Qaddafi to the ICC for prosecution and has asked the Security Council for assistance in this regard. However, Saif al-Islam al-Qaddafi remains in Libya where Libyan authorities insist that they will prosecute him, while the ICC and Security Council are doing nothing effective about it.

If Libya can handle the investigation and prosecution of alleged crimes against the people of Libya, surely Israel itself can be relied upon to handle the investigation and prosecution of any crimes allegedly committed by its military or political leaders without ICC involvement. However, Ms. Bensouda shows no signs of letting go of the Palestinian situation as her preliminary examination drags on.

Preliminary examinations can take a very long time. The Afghanistan examination is in its eighth year. The Georgia examination is in its seventh year. However, with pressure exerted by the Palestinians and their many allies who are member states of the ICC, Ms. Bensouda will likely conclude that she must move forward with a formal investigation and possible prosecution of Israeli political and military leaders in absentia. African countries, whom have already complained that the ICC focuses far too much of its attention on alleged crimes committed on the African continent, may add their voices to the chorus calling for ICC action against Israel, which some perceive to be a Western, neo-colonial state as a result of Palestinian propaganda. Additional pressure will come as a result of the Secretary General’s report and another one due soon from the UN Human Rights Council.

Ms. Bensouda may try to thread the needle and focus a formal investigation and possible prosecution on very specific incidents of alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, such as the alleged Israeli attacks on UN facilities in Gaza that resulted in civilian casualties, as well as Hamas’s use of some UN facilities to hide weapons and its rocket firings at civilian populations in Israel. This way she would appear to be taking a balanced approach. She may also try to duck the more political issue of Israeli settlements, at least on the first go-around, although she said she would not rule out looking at Israel’s settlements activities during her current examination phase.

Even if Ms. Bensouda does include Hamas as a potential target for prosecution, it would serve only as a cover to try to legitimize her decision to go after Israel. A superficially balanced prosecution would amount in reality to the ICC’s complicity with the Palestinians’ strategy of asymmetrical lawfare against Israel.

Hamas operates completely outside of the rule of law. Hamas has no meaningful institutions of justice to investigate and prosecute the conduct of its own forces, which Hamas considers to be part of its legitimate acts of resistance. The Palestinian Authority does not have an independent judiciary either. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his aides have repeatedly obstructed the work of the Palestinian Authority judges. It has gotten so bad that some brave Palestinian judges have been complaining and even went on strike. In any event, the Palestinian Authority won’t dare investigate Hamas’s conduct, not wanting to further inflame tensions with Hamas and lose whatever standing it has left with the Palestinian people. At the same time, Abbas will unlikely face any formal investigation and prosecution himself, because he has managed to disassociate himself (publicly at least) from Hamas’s tactics during the Gaza war.

For the ICC to treat Israel, which is a functioning democracy with an independent judiciary, on the same level as Hamas is a travesty of justice.

Moreover, Hamas’s leaders, even if subject to an ICC arrest warrant, will be able to easily elude capture by hiding out either in Gaza itself or in sympathetic countries such as Qatar. All they have to do is to look at the example of Sudan’s President Omar Al Bashir, against whom an ICC arrest warrant has been issued. Bashir is still free and traveling to countries where he knows he will be safe from arrest by local authorities.

Israeli officials, on the other hand, will be subject to arrest throughout the world if the ICC moves forward with prosecution and issues arrest warrants, including in Western Europe where the tide of public opinion has turned against the Jewish state. The ICC’s intervention will provide more momentum to the growing campaign of boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. The Palestinians’ propaganda efforts to completely de-legitimize Israel and isolate it from the international community will be provided an enormous boost.

ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda should wrap up her preliminary examination forthwith and conclude that there is an insufficient basis for the ICC to proceed to a criminal investigation or to take any other action with regard to Israel’s conduct at this time.

Five ways Washington can help bring peace

MAY 12, 2015, 

Doug Lamborn

Doug Lamborn, a Member of Congress from Colorado, is a member of the House Armed Services Committee and co-chairs the bipartisan Congressional Israel Allies Caucus 

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/five-ways-washington-can-help-bring-peace/?utm_source=emailcampaign2284&utm_medium=phpList&utm_content=HTMLemail&utm_campaign=ISRAPUNDIT+DAILY+DIGEST+MAY+14%2F15

• Dangerous friendly policy

A new Israeli coalition and government is taking form. Warnings have surfaced regarding the right-leaning government and its ability to cooperate with the Obama Administration. The chief worry on the mind of the White House is the hawkish character of this Israeli government that, in their mind, mayP!

Recently Under-Secretary of State Wendy Sherman indicated that the U.S. support of Israel in the international arena will depend on whether the new government will meet the administration’s expectations on support for a two-state solution. This was a hint that the President might support a U.N. Security Council resolution to force Israel’s withdrawal from the disputed territories.

Speculations on this change of policy are not new to the Administration. Last December, Secretary of State John Kerry chose to remain ambiguous and refused to clarify whether the U.S. will use its veto power in the U.N. Security Council to thwart unilateral action by the Palestinians. The resolution failed so the hinted threat was never tested.

Speculations on this change of policy are not new to the Administration. Last December, Secretary of State John Kerry chose to remain ambiguous and refused to clarify whether the U.S. will use its veto power in the U.N. Security Council to thwart unilateral action by the Palestinians. The resolution failed so the hinted threat was never tested.

Speculations on this change of policy are not new to the Administration. Last December, Secretary of State John Kerry chose to remain ambiguous and refused to clarify whether the U.S. will use its veto power in the U.N. Security Council to thwart unilateral action by the Palestinians. The resolution failed so the hinted threat was never tested.

This should really worry anyone who wants to see stability and quiet between the two parties in our lifetime. A forced solution to the conflict will not bring the two sides closer but would only generate more tensions and conflict.

A basic condition for the success of negotiations is that each side has an incentive to negotiate. Every party must believe negotiating will allow it to reach chief goals and therefore render some concession worthwhile and profitable. A resolution that will dictate a solution to the conflict will remove this element for both sides.

Dictating the borders or a time of Israeli withdrawal from the territories will allow the Palestinians to achieve the majority of their feasible goals. However this will remove any incentive to compromise on the remaining issues. This will undermine any hope of moderation or the recognition of the state of Israel.

This should not be left to President Abbas’ good will. Abbas’ record on incitement against Jews and Israel does not seem promising. More importantly, portrayed by State Department as the last moderate leader and over 80 years of age, the question remains what will happen the day after Abbas.

Israel for its part will hardly be persuaded into cooperation with a forced resolution. Failure to follow a Security Council resolution will likely bring about additional pressure to the little state. Yet, as Israel learned many times before, conceding land and following U.N. resolutions does not secure the international community’s support. Sadly it may also carry a heavy price of lost lives. The last war in Gaza serves as a good example on both accounts.

Faced with the current impasse it seems wise and necessary to review and revise our policy. Here are some suggestions:

1. De-sanctify the two-state solution.

Having two states living side by side may be the end result of the conflict, and it may not. What is clear is that prematurely confining the negotiations to one final result constrains the flexibility of both parties, and makes finding a solution all the more complicated.

2. Moderate our short-term goals.

Prime Minister Netanyahu’s remarks on the feasibility of a two-state solution reflect what any observer of the conflict realized long ago. Neither side is ready to sign a final clear-cut treaty to end the conflict. Insistence on such a demand frustrates all parties and portrays the failure to achieve that goal as political incompetence and failure. Our aim should be incremental steps of increased political, economic and security cooperation between Israel and the Palestinians. This is in both parties’ interest — and ours.

3. Promote grassroots cooperation and tolerance.

Recently the Palestinian Authority declared a boycott on basic Israeli products. At the same time the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign has been gaining traction not only in Europe but here in the U.S. as well. Such actions are not helpful; they feed the incitement and radicalization narrative that rejects any understanding between Israelis and Palestinians.

4. Prevent American money from supporting educational institutions and camps that teach incitement.

Some will challenge that conditioning transfer of funds to the Palestinian authority and UNRWA upon compliance will cause instability in the west bank, however we can’t a become hostages of our own policy. Allowing American funds promote incitement of young students will prove destructive to our policy on the long run.

5. Incentivize business and economic cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians in the private sector realm.

Creating grassroots cooperation and mutual business dependence may result in pressure on the political leadership of both sides for stability and quiet.

These steps will not bring an immediate solution. However as Van Gogh once said: “great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.” Surely Van Gogh was speaking of art; successful foreign policy is in fact a form of art

Iran: We’ll Build Five More Underground Nuclear Plants

Michael Rubin

05.13.2015 

There has likely not ever been an administration that has politicized intelligence to the degree that Obama’s has, systematically ignoring any information that would undercut the White House and State Department narrative first on Russia, then on Syria, and now on Iran. As anyone who has ever dealt with intelligence knows, 90 percent if not more is what appears in the open sources every single day. And so, in that spirit, here is an interview with Mohammad Javad Larijani that the Iranian news agency Tasnim just published in Persian. Now, like Rouhani (and, for that matter, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini), Larijani spent time in the West. In Larijani’s case, it was to study mathematics at Berkeley. He has had quite a career, mostly in the judiciary, and today, he is among Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s most trusted advisors. So what did Larijani say earlier today with regard to the “historic” agreement that Obama and Kerry have embraced? “…Our facilities will not only remain underground, but will go deeper in the ground,” he said, expressing indignation at Vice President Joseph Biden’s assurances at a recent speech to the Washington Institute that all options remain on the table should Iran cheat on its commitments. He then condemned any slowdown of research and development at the once-covert nuclear enrichment center that Iran built under a mountain at Fordo, and called on Iran to build five new underground facilities.

As talks continue (and sanctions collapse apace), it is important to step back and consider a few broader patterns with regard to Iranian behavior.

First, what the Iranian government is doing is engaging in an elaborate game of good cop, bad cop. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif might whisper sweet nothings into Secretary of State John Kerry’s ear, and like a naïve schoolgirl on the night of the senior prom, President Barack Obama might believe that Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s statement that if Obama gives up everything, Rouhani will love him for eternity, but there is ample evidence that Iran simply intends to screw the United States. Sincere partners do not play these games.

Second, it is Diplomacy 101 to only strike deals with those who can enact them. Bill Clinton’s Arab-Israeli negotiating team learned this the hard way in 2000, when they called the president to Camp David after Palestinian and Israeli negotiators agreed to a deal. When Palestinian chairman Yasir Arafat arrived, however, he not only flatly refused to agree to what his negotiators had committed him to, but he also refused to make a counteroffer. It was a lesson some of George W. Bush’s diplomats learned the hard way. When the United States negotiated with Zarif back in 2003, Iranian authorities did not abide by the deal that Zarif had struck. There are two possibilities: Either Zarif lied to Ambassador Ryan Crocker and then-National Security Council official Zalmay Khalilzad, or Zarif was sincere but he did not have the influence and ability to guarantee that all of Iran’s myriad power centers would abide by his agreement. And confusing the target with ever shifting power centers—the Iranian equivalent of Three Card Monte—is Iranian strategy 101, whether it comes to revising commercial contracts, undercutting diplomacy, or even negotiating a cultural exchange.

This brings us to the issue of who in Iran has committed themselves to resolving Iran’s nuclear program through negotiations. For a moment, let’s assume that Rouhani and Zarif are sincere (although there is ample evidence that they are not). Has the Supreme Leader really endorsed a diplomatic resolution to the nuclear deal as proponents of the talks have suggested? Take the issue of “heroic flexibility.” That doesn’t mean, as proponents of the deal have suggested, that Khamenei has thrown his weight behind the talks. His own advisors have explained that what Khamenei blessed was a change in tactics, not a change in policy. In other words, so long as Iran gets its nuclear capability, the Supreme Leader doesn’t care if it comes through subterfuge or if he holds his nose and has representatives talk to the Americans. How sad it is that Obama and Kerry have such faith in the Supreme Leader, when he refuses to meet American officials, and yet doesn’t hesitate to find time for Gambians, Belarusians, and Eritreans. What the White House and the news media have not realized, however, is that the term “Heroic Flexibility” also has religious connotations. It’s sad to see the State Department and the media—both bastions of multiculturalism—so myopic on issues of culture. Now, none of this even begins to touch the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that has said no to any deal from the very beginning.

So what to make of Larijani’s interview? His proximity to the Supreme Leader should concern anyone who does not have political blinders on. Whether because of personal ambition (in the case of some diplomats or Kerry’s destructive quest for a Nobel Peace Prize), ideological sympathy, or just naiveté, too many do. Simply put, it’s strange to see the White House and the State Department convince themselves that Khamenei is onboard with a substantive nuclear deal that will end Iran’s military nuclear program and illicit nuclear activities when so many statements that come from his office and his proxies suggest the opposite.

What Does It Mean to Be ‘Pro-Israel’?

05.01.15 | Sohrab Ahmari

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/what-does-it-mean-to-be-pro-israel/

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As Barack Obama’s presidency stretches into its final quarter, relations between the United States and Israel have reached the breaking point. Having come into office determined to put “daylight” between Washington and Jerusalem, as the president told Jewish leaders in 2009, the Obama administration is now discarding the basic assumptions underpinning the U.S.-Israel alliance. The equities of the Arab–Israeli conflict, the nature of the Iranian threat, the region’s security architecture—all the old certainties have given way to the president’s quest for a rapprochement with the Iranian regime and a new balance of power in the Middle East.

Even as it seeks a regional order that will come at Israel’s expense, however, the White House professes a great love of the Jewish state. Those who doubt this love, administration spokesmen say, are “politicizing” the Israel issue. This raises a critical question: What does it mean to be pro-Israel in the age of Obama?

That America and Israel are in some fundamental sense diverging is beyond question. Speaking in March before a gathering of the progressive advocacy outfit J Street, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough called for ending “an occupation that has lasted 50 years.” He was probably referring to the “occupation” of territories the Jewish state acquired after winning a defensive war in 1967. The 50th anniversary of that victory is still two years away. Perhaps McDonough was rounding up.

Ending the occupation of the West Bank through a negotiated settlement has been a bipartisan aim of U.S. diplomacy. But to speak of it as McDonough did—as if the Jews made a wanton land-grab half a century ago and must now disgorge its fruits—was a stunning departure from the traditions of American policy, not to mention the historical record. Here was the U.S. president’s chief of staff sounding not unlike, say, a Norwegian anti-Israel activist.

Days earlier, in the wake of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reelection, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest issued a thinly veiled threat that Washington might withdraw its support for Jerusalem at the United Nations. Netanyahu, in the heat of the campaign, had just made remarks ruling out the
formation of a Palestinian state during his premiership. These ill-phrased comments were open to misinterpretation by a hostile press, and his later warning to supporters that Arab Israeli voters were coming out “in droves” was ugly.

The prime minister soon clarified his statehood position and apologized to Israeli Arabs, but the White House kept hounding him. Speaking to the Huffington Post after the election, Obama reiterated the UN threat: “We take him at his word when he said that [statehood] wouldn’t happen during his prime ministership, and so that’s why we’ve got to evaluate what other options are available to make sure that we don’t see a chaotic situation in the region”—as if Netanyahu’s hardnosed view of Palestinian statehood was the only cloud in the otherwise friendly Mideast skies.

By contrast, when Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei called Israel a “rabid dog” in 2013, an unnamed senior U.S. official told BuzzFeed that this made him feel “uncomfortable.” Khamenei’s genocidal sloganeering—for what does one do with a rabid dog?—didn’t draw condemnation, let alone delay Obama’s nuclear diplomacy with the Tehran regime. Having reportedly dissuaded Netanyahu from taking military action against Iran’s nuclear-weapons program during his first term on the grounds that he would make sure Iran never got the bomb, Obama in his second term started talks that quickly became predicated on the inevitability of Iran’s becoming a nuclear power.

For his cooperation, Netanyahu was labeled a “coward” and a “chickenshit” by Obama officials speaking anonymously to the press. And Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein told the child Netanyahu to “contain himself.”

Israel’s defense on the world stage, once a transcendent cause, is now hostage to the whims of a vindictive president who has pinned his legacy to turning away from America’s traditional allies, Israel above all. The administration’s cheerleaders in the media and surrogates within the American-Jewish community may pretend otherwise, but the Jewish state now faces a White House that is oblivious to regional realities, is disdainful of the Israeli body politic, and is flirting with the lexicon and tactics of delegitimization.

Yet this turn away from Israel has been accompanied at every step by barrages of pro-Israel platitudes. The worse the White House’s treatment of Jerusalem gets, the more ardent its pro-Israel rhetoric becomes.

“Ours is a deep and abiding partnership between two vibrant democracies,” said McDonough in the same speech that saw the administration adopt the logic of Arab rejectionists. “Our commitments to our partnership with Israel are bedrock commitments, rooted in shared fundamental values, cemented through decades of bipartisan reinforcement,” said U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power, days before the White House hinted at the possibility of abandoning Israel at the Security Council.

National Security Adviser Susan Rice even broke into Hebrew in her ode to the U.S.-Israel bond at this year’s gathering of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. “Our alliance grows l’dor va’dor, from generation to generation,” she said, adding: “President Obama’s commitment to Israel is deep and personal. I know, because I see it every day. I first saw it when I accompanied then–Senator Obama to Israel in 2008. I saw it when he surveyed with horror the stacks of charred rockets that Hamas had fired on Israel.” This, from the same White House that tried to block munitions transfers to the Israel Defense Forces amid last summer’s Gaza operation, which was launched to silence Hamas rockets targeting civilian population centers.

The dissonance between the Obama administration’s rhetoric and reality isn’t limited to its Israel policy. From the Sunni Arab states to Ukraine, American allies have grown accustomed to a White House that professes the deepest love even as it shirks old commitments and embraces their enemies. In Israel’s case, the gap between rhetoric and treatment is especially wide, and appalling, since few American allies enjoy as much popular support as the Jewish state does. Saudi Arabia, the Baltic States, France, and Brazil are all allies, but you don’t see thousands of Americans descending each year on Capitol Hill to lobby on their behalf.

The administration’s bet all along has been that it can degrade the alliance from within while maintaining an outward narrative of stalwart support for Israel. This strategy has largely succeeded, and the best measure of its success is the sense of disorientation today within the pro-Israel camp, especially among many pro-Israel Democrats as they come to grips with how, in 2015, abandoning Jerusalem to the diplomatic wolves at the UN is not only a possibility—but can even be justified as an act of tough love for a wayward Jewish state.

How did we get here? The Obama administration’s efforts to redefine the term pro-Israel to mean nearly its opposite have benefited from three broad developments that have blindsided the actual pro-Israel community.

First, beginning in the president’s first term, administration supporters in the journalism and think-tank worlds began promoting figures and ideas once relegated to the fringe into the mainstream of elite opinion. Anti-Israelism, often bleeding into Jew-hatred, has long thrived on the American far left and especially among academe. But whereas in Europe post-1967 anti-Israelism quickly found a home within mainstream social democracy, the U.S. Democratic Party largely resisted its tug.

Until the arrival of Barack Obama, that is. The Obama administration didn’t create the anti-Israel waves now engulfing the Democrats. The hostility had already been bubbling beneath the surface in the early-2000s Net-roots and blogs, such as Democratic Underground and Daily Kos, which began shaping progressive discourse on foreign policy after the attacks of 9/11. But the Obama administration learned to harness that hostility, opening the door to some of its messengers.

Consider the Center for American Progress (CAP). The progressive think tank has served as a brain trust for the Obama administration, with leaders and fellows cycling in and out of government in the Obama years. CAP’s blog, Think Progress, is where many of the administration’s talking points first percolate. It has also been a hotbed of anti-Israel sentiment. In the winter of 2011, CAP faced a crisis over a Think Progress staffer’s repeated use of Israel-firster—a term with origins in the white-nationalist movement—to describe American supporters of the Jewish state. The staffer resigned, and CAP issued an apology.

The “Israel-firster” brouhaha and its aftermath masked a still more troubling fact: that Think Progress’s approach to the Middle East as a whole is Israel-obsessed, shaped by the belief that Israel’s presence in the Palestinian territories is a unique evil, a stain on the American soul. “Like segregation in the American South, the siege of Gaza (and the entire Israeli occupation, for that matter) is a moral abomination that should be intolerable to anyone claiming progressive values,” wrote Think Progress blogger Matt Duss in May 2010. Five years later, Chief of Staff Denis McDonough would speak about the conflict in similar, if more muted, terms.

Or take the liberal New America Foundation, which in 2013 lent its platform to Max Blumenthal, an anti-Israel agitator who routinely compares the Jewish state to Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa. Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former director of policy planning in the Obama State Department, was then and remains president and CEO of New America. Pressed on its invitation to Blumenthal, New America took refuge in its commitment to free inquiry. “Free societies need this kind of cleansing discussion, and they need to be able to tolerate and hear it even when it’s ‘unbalanced’ or ‘goes too far,’” wrote Atlantic magazine correspondent and New America board member James Fallows at the time. This was a dodge. Critics weren’t calling for Blumenthal to be censored, but for New America to account for failing to fulfill its gatekeeping function against cranks.

And herein lay the crux of the matter. Slaughter and Fallows were correct that inviting Max Blumenthal isn’t tantamount to endorsing all his views. Even so, such invitations shift the margins of the debate, so that positions that seemed outlandish and reprehensible a few years ago attain respectability, or at least they enter the realm of the possible. One day it seems crazy for the United States to join with the tyrants and anti-Semites at the United Nations to pressure the world’s sole Jewish state. The next day, it doesn’t.

Influential think tanks and journalists would have taken the Obama administration only so far. To radically alter the U.S.-Israel relationship, the White House also needed the backing of a domestic lobby to counterbalance the pro-Israel establishment led by AIPAC. Bonus points if this new lobby could lay claim to Jewish values and identity.

Enter J Street. Founded in 2008, J Street presented itself as the progressive alternative to Jewish organizations that, it charged, march in lockstep with Israeli leaders, no matter how misguided or immoral their policies. The organization was to be a “home for pro-Israel, pro-peace” Americans, who worry that Israel’s failure to extricate itself from the lives of some 5 million Palestinians will soon threaten its status as either a Jewish or democratic state. If Israelis on their own lacked the will to make the necessary sacrifices to achieve a two-state solution, then it was up to progressive American Jews to bring peace, by pressing the levers of U.S. power if need be.

To meet this aim without abetting Israel’s enemies would have required immense ideological discipline on the part of the new lobby. J Streeters would have to take seriously the perils facing the Jewish state, including Iran’s nuclearization, the rise of political Islam, and the campaign in elite quarters to delegitimize Israel. They would have to respect the sovereign decisions of the Israelis, recognizing that it is they—not American Jews with anguished consciences—who would have to pay the price in blood for any ill-conceived land-for-peace schemes. And they would have to retain a sense of perspective about the relative importance of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict: The moral coarsening wrought by a decades-long occupation is a real tragedy, but it is a minor one in a region of Sudanese génocidaires, Baathist chemical warriors, and homosexual-hanging ayatollahs.  

As it soon became clear, however, J Street’s leaders had entirely different notions of what it means to be pro-Israel. J Street has flirted with elements of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement and lobbied against congressional sanctions on Iran. It helped promote the UN’s Goldstone report, which accused Israel of war crimes in 2009’s Gaza operation only to be retracted by its author, the South African jurist Richard Goldstone. A campus chapter of J Street discarded the “pro-Israel” half of its motto in 2009. “We don’t want to isolate people,” the chapter reasoned, “because they don’t feel quite so comfortable with ‘pro-Israel,’ so we say ‘pro-peace.’” And Executive Director Jeremy Ben-Ami has refused to say whether his organization is Zionist: “It is silly to insist that any organization that supports Israel say it is Zionist.”

Most important, the organization has been a standard-bearer for the hoary theory of “linkage,” which holds that much if not all the instability in the Middle East, and the threats to the United States emanating from the region, can be attributed to the absence of a negotiated settlement to the Israeli–Palestinian dispute. As Ben-Ami wrote in a 2010 New York Times letter to the editor: “An analysis of the Obama administration’s calculus on Middle East policy should reflect that many in the Jewish community recognize that resolving the conflict is not only necessary to secure Israel’s future, but also critical to regional stability and American strategic interests.”

The eruption of popular uprisings across the Arab world, the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, and North Africa’s descent into Islamist chaos have shattered the linkage theory, and yet it remains at the heart of J Street’s Mideast vision—notwithstanding the more than 200,000 people killed and millions more displaced in Syria’s civil war, the collapse of several Arab states, the ISIS rampage in Mesopotamia, and the widening sectarian war pitting the Sunni world against Shiite Iran and its proxies. In this way, J Street melds the parochialism of Jewish politics with the Israel obsession of the progressive left.

It has often been so with the Obama administration. Recall how Secretary of State John Kerry spent days conducting shuttle diplomacy between Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas while a slaughter of biblical proportions was underway next door in Syria. True to linkage-theory form, Kerry even blamed the absence of a two-state solution for the rise of Islamic State, telling reporters last October that stalled Israel–Palestine peace talks are “a cause of [ISIS] recruitment and of street anger and agitation.” As a Hill lobby, J Street has had triumphs few and far between—one of the Iran sanctions measures it opposed passed the House 414 votes to six, a typical legislative outcome for the group—but that was never the point. In J Street, the Obama administration found a Jewish voice to echo its own misconceptions about the Middle East, and its antipathy for Israel.

Finally, the Obama White House brought the mainstream Jewish establishment to heel by framing low-cost assistance—military aid and, until recently, support at the UN—as unprecedented acts of generosity. And the president and his senior officials learned that parroting vapid pro-Israel-speak suffices to persuade many American Jews that the administration has Israel’s back. There’s a reason journalists have created parody bingo charts for speeches at AIPAC confabs: Check off unbreakable bond, all options on the table, and special relationship, and you win.

The Obama administration’s turn against Israel, moreover, benefited from a new style of pro-Israel advocacy that has come into fashion in the last two decades. Under this model, the case for Zionism first formulated more than a century ago by Theodor Herzl doesn’t suffice to legitimize the Jewish state. Rather, pro-Israel organizations must highlight every sign of the tolerance of the Jewish state: Look at this gay-pride parade in Jerusalem! Behold this Arab Muslim serving proudly in the IDF! It’s not that these achievements should be ignored: Zionism has proved an extraordinary triumph of liberal nationalism. But the trouble with such feel-good hasbara is that it betrays an inner insecurity or defensiveness about Israel rather than confidence. It does little to persuade the convinced Israel-haters, who are rarely known for their faith in liberal democracy to begin with. Such advocacy, moreover, is a double-edged sword: The more you uphold Israel as exceptionally moral, the more every moral failing will count against the Jewish state. One should be proud of the achievements of Israeli liberalism but remember that even if the Jewish state were a tenth as tolerant, it would still be as legitimate as every other nation, with politicians just as prone to occasional lapses into demagogy as the ones occupying the White House.

Groups such as AIPAC, moreover, prize access to lawmakers and civic leaders above all—an understandable reaction to the bitter lessons of Jewish history. That, plus the fact that American Jews still vote overwhelmingly Democratic, has meant that these groups are cautious to a fault about confronting a president who carried nearly 80 percent of their community in 2008 and nearly 70 percent four years later. That forbearance at crucial points in the past six years allowed the White House to have its way on key personnel and substantive debates. AIPAC, for example, stayed out of Chuck Hagel’s nomination battle for secretary of defense, despite the former senator’s cringe-inducing record of apologetics for Iran. The group was also slow to embrace the Kirk-Menendez sanctions bill, aimed at strengthening the administration’s hand in negotiations with the Tehran regime.

As the White House’s anti-Israel outrages pile up, patience might run out. The administration senses the threat. In an interview published after the Lausanne talks, Obama told the New York Times:

It has been personally difficult for me to hear…expressions that somehow…this administration has not done everything it could to look out for Israel’s interest—and the suggestion that when we have very serious policy differences, that that’s not in the context of a deep and abiding friendship and concern and understanding of the threats that the Jewish people have faced historically and continue to face.

American and Israeli leaders, the president said, shouldn’t “try to work with just one side” in each of their countries. This appeal for bipartisanship was a classic Obama rhetorical gesture. Having upended the alliance, in part by deploying politics of the basest sort, the president now says those opposed to the changes are politicking an arena that should be left beyond politics. When I launch policies that harm you, it’s out of love and because I know your interests better than you do. Let’s not get political.

Perhaps the Obama administration and its allies will stretch the term pro-Israel beyond all recognition, thus prompting a more honest discussion, in the United States and in Israel, about what it means—and what it doesn’t mean—to support the Jewish state. Such a debate would have a salutary, clarifying effect within the pro-Israel camp. If we’re lucky, being pro-Israel will once again come to mean treating an ally like an ally; not demanding a beleaguered democracy in the world’s least free and least stable region to behave like a Scandinavian country when defending itself; and giving Israelis, like free people everywhere, the space to determine their own national destiny and even make their own mistakes.

Why are European powers (and Oxfam) funding  Breaking the Silence, a radical Israeli group?

By Jake Wallis Simons World 

  THE TELEGRAPH   Last updated: December 17th, 2013

In a grimy corner of downtown Jerusalem, tucked away on the top floor of an anonymous-looking block of offices, is the headquarters of an organization called Breaking the Silence.

This is a group of former Israeli soldiers who have served in the West Bank, and aim to “expose the Israeli public to the reality of everyday life in the Occupied Territories”.

They accomplish this via a database of testimonies that offer first-hand accounts of human rights abuses by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). They also organize tours of the West Bank, offering “an unmediated encounter with the reality of military occupation”.

Essentially, this is another anti-settlement group. But it derives especial power from the fact that it is made up of former members of the Israeli armed forces, who are willing to confess openly to their own wrongdoing and that of their comrades.

Although I had been aware of this organisation for a long time, my first encounter with it came last summer. I was spending some time on the West Bank, carrying out interviews and research for Meet the Settlers, an in-depth Telegraph multimedia feature about the Israeli settlements.

I was looking forward to interviewing members of Breaking the Silence. The group had been highly recommended to me by various people, including a British diplomat who had taken part in one of their tours in an official capacity (a Foreign Office spokesman confirmed that “FCO staff maintain links to a wide variety of non-government organisations, including the Israeli non-profit group Breaking the Silence”).

I liked all the members personally, and at first found them to be sincere in their beliefs. But when the interviews began, something didn’t feel right.

For one thing, the majority of the testimonies seemed to reflect the roughness of the military rather than any human rights abuse. The indignity of checkpoints; the intrusion of house-to-house searches; the unpleasantness of curfews. All of this stuff is awful, but only a small percentage of it appeared to warrant court martial.

Some of the material was genuinely shocking, of course, and it is beyond dispute that IDF soldiers do indeed commit human rights abuses. This is something from which all armies suffer (to wit, Marine A); whether the Israeli military is guiltier than others is a debate for another time.

For now, my point is this: I couldn’t shake the feeling that Breaking the Silence was milking it.

It was only a hunch at first. But later, the bias of the organization became clearer. During a break between interviews, I asked Yehuda Shaul, one of the founders of the organization, how the group is funded. It was with some surprise that I learned that 45 per cent of it is donated by European countries, including Norway and Spain, and the European Union. Other donors include UNICEF, Christian Aid and Oxfam GB. To me this seemed potentially problematic.

As is the case in all democracies, the IDF is an organ of the state, not a political decision-maker. If the goal of Breaking the Silence was simply to clean up the Israeli military, it wouldn’t be such a problem. Instead, the aim is to “end the occupation”, and on this basis it secured its funding.

It appeared, therefore, that these former soldiers, some of whom draw salaries from Breaking the Silence, were motivated by financial and political concerns to further a pro-Palestinian agenda. They weren’t merely telling the truth about their experiences. They were under pressure to perform.

Indeed, I later discovered that there have been many allegations in the past that members of the organization either fabricated or exaggerated their testimonies.

The matter became more unsettling when one of Breaking the Silence’s former soldiers accompanied me to Hebron, a thriving Palestinian city in the southern West Bank. This is the only Palestinian city to have a Jewish settlement embedded in its centre, and as such is the most acrimonious and violent place in the region.

Whereas most settlements are surrounded by relatively lightweight security – some of the most ideological outposts refuse to put up fences on principle, because they believe they have a God-given right to the entire area – Hebron is segregated into Palestinian and Jewish sectors, and a military buffer zone has been established between them. (You can read about my journey through the city, and watch the accompanying films, here.)

We set up our video camera outside an army base in the Israeli sector of Hebron, and I began to interview the former soldier from Breaking the Silence. He was talking about his army service, and came out with the line, “the first time I ever met a Palestinian was when I entered his house in the middle of the night”.

While he was speaking a car drove by behind him, drowning out his words. I said: “Just give me it one more time about how… the first time you ever met a Palestinian was when you kicked down his door in the middle of the night”. This was my mistake; he hadn’t said that he kicked down anything.

He duly repeated it. This time, however, he took my lead and changed his account from “entered his house in the middle of the night” to “kicked down his door in the middle of the night”. On the surface it may seem like a small detail. But when we played back the tape I found the ease with which he exaggerated his story very troubling. We didn’t use the interview.

Most worryingly of all, Breaking the Silence focuses almost exclusively on Hebron, presenting it as typical. Several times a month it ships foreign diplomats, officials and ordinary folk to this unhappy place, showing them the grim military infrastructure and providing testimony about the abuses carried out by settlers and soldiers.

The group does not offer tours to any other settlements on the West Bank (there are about 120 of them, and roughly the same number of illegal outposts). Its lectures and exhibitions are likewise focussed on Hebron and its environs. This one city, they say, is a “microcosm of occupation”.

Now, there is no doubt that Hebron is a highly disturbing place, or that violence takes place there on a regular basis. But all the anti-settlement organizations I spoke to, including Peace Now, B’Tselem and Rabbis for Human Rights, acknowledged that Hebron is the exception rather than the rule. Most settlements are far more peaceful and less abusive. A few even have supermarkets where Arabs and Jews shop side-by-side.

This isn’t to justify the existence of the settlements, or to soften the debate about their legality. It is to illustrate the simple point that Breaking the Silence appears to be sexing up the harshness of the Israeli presence on the West Bank by focussing only on its very worst manifestation. That is to say, it is warping the terms of the debate. And it is funded largely by Europe, and by extension the UK.

Whatever your view on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is surely self-evident that it must be based on the truth of the situation, not a biased and partial interpretation of it.

It is debatable whether Breaking the Silence should be criticised for publicly undermining their own military, and showing no impulse to view with leniency the actions of soldiers in extremis (again, think of Marine A). But the fact that their personal testimony is harnessed to a political agenda is indisputably problematic.

The European Union (together with the overwhelming majority of world opinion) believes that the Israeli presence on the West Bank contravenes international law. As such, it is able to put pressure on Israel through various channels; recently, for instance, it imposed a requirement to label all produce made in Israeli settlements as such.

These measures all have some basis in legitimacy. Funding Breaking the Silence, in my view, does not.