The Volokh Conspiracy

Last week, I noted that Human Rights Watch had appointed Shawan Jabarin to its Middle East Advisory Board. Jabarin runs a Palestinian human rights NGO based in the West Bank. He also has been found in a series of Israeli Supreme Court opinions to secretly lead a double life as a top official of the Palestinian terrorist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Iain Levine of Human Rights Watch responds to the criticism here. (I find it interesting that HRW has decided to let Mr. Levine speak for the M.E. division; I think their p.r. people have realized that Ken Roth and M.E. director Sarah Leah Whitson are so hostile to Israel that they just add fuel to the fire whenever a controversy erupts). The thrust of his remarks is that HRW chose to disregard the Israeli Supreme Court opinions because they were based on secret evidence. (Since when is “secret” a synonym for “baseless?”)

Critic Stuart Robinowitz, who has longstanding ties to HRW, responds to Levine here. Robinowitz points out that Whitson and Roth, when recommending Jabarin to the HRW board of directors, asserted that he had discontinued his ties to the PFLP more than twenty-five years ago. Whitson and Roth failed to even mention the Israeli Supreme Court’s findings to the contrary.

Robinowitz concludes: “In 2006, Jordan barred [Jabarin] entry for security reasons. Do staff members of HRW have more reliable information about Jabarin than the supreme court and security services of Jordan and Israel?”

Understating matters considerably, Robinowitz told the Jerusalem Post that “the Jabarin incident, I believe, is part of a pattern of conduct that casts doubt about Mr. Roth’s and Ms. Whitson’s ability to deal with matters affecting Israel in a balanced and objective manner.”

[The comments section on the previous thread on this matter was far from enlightening, so I'm not going to bother with comments here.]

UPDATE: Anne Herzberg of NGO Monitor emails to point out a series of misstatements (i.e., lies) in Levine’s defense of Jabarin.

The most telling one relates to this claim by Levine: “In addition to his criticisms of Israeli violations, [Jabarin] has been one of the leading Palestinian voices condemning … suicide bombings and rocket attacks against Israeli civilians by Palestinian armed groups in the West Bank and Gaza.”

Hertzberg retorts: “I have been personally monitoring Al Haq [Jabarin's NGO] and Jabarin for nearly 5 years. I have never seen any evidence that either has condemned suicide bombings or rocket attacks.” I (Bernstein) checked Al Haq’s website, searching for, among other things, “rocket” and could find no criticism of Palestinian rocket attacks, suicide bombings, or other attacks on civilians.

And here, an official Al Haq statement explaining Jabarin’s position sure seems to try to differentiate between “Palestinian resistance” (i.e., Palestinian terrorism), and other forms of terrorism:

After the events of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 the United States succeeded in establishing linkages between legitimate resistance against occupation and terrorism. She has imposed its own definition of “terrorism” and considered the Palestinian resistance against the Israeli occupation as a form of terrorism. Such a position by the United States was in the interest of Israel and gave her an opportunity to relate the Palestinians legitimate resistance to terrorism also.

While there is no explicit defense of the suicide terrorism that was plaguing Israel at this time, it’s hard to read this statement as anything other than a claim that this suicide terrorism was in fact a form of legitimate “resistance.” Of course, this is hardly surprising for someone who is entwined with the PFLP terrorist group.

FURTHER UPDATE: I sent a polite email to Al Haq via its website asking for evidence that Jabarin has ever condemned Palestinian rocket attacks or suicide bombings. I’d be happy to publish such evidence if it were presented, but it hasn’t been.

Meanwhile, Kevin Jon Heller finds that Al Haq has, in fact, pointed out that Palestinian rocket attacks are illegal, albeit in one line out of thousands published in the last several years, so I hereby acknowledge that Al Haq has done so. Heller also finds one ambiguous paragraph in a press release that may or not mean that Al Haq claims to have criticized Palestinian rocket attacks.

Even reading these statements generously, they still don’t come close to justifying Iain Levine’s claim that Jabarin “has been one of the leading Palestinian voices condemning torture by the Palestinian Authority, and suicide bombings and rocket attacks against Israeli civilians by Palestinian armed groups in the West Bank and Gaza.” Indeed, the only statement I’ve found attributed to Jabarin himself is his claim that “Palestinian resistance” is distinguishable from “terrorism.” And of course, the most relevant point remains Jabarin’s ties to the PFLP.

As regular readers know, I’m often critical of the New York Times’ reporting on various matters. But this morning, the ninth most popular article on the New York Times website, about the hard-leftist “Jewish Voice for Peace,” is not even a Times piece, but reprinted from a local San Francisco online startup called the Bay Citizen.

Journalistically, it’s a disaster. A few examples:

(1) Out of context quotes. After recounting a few incidents where left-wing Jews were treated badly, the piece goes on: “What’s happening is outlandish; the era of civil discourse has disappeared,” said Rabbi Stephen S. Pearce of Congregation Emanu-El, San Francisco’s largest synagogue. Was Pearce referring to these incidents and/or the general hostile attitude of the Jewish community to JVP, to the mutual hostility of JVP and the organized Jewish community, or to JVP’s own confrontational tactics? The piece makes it seem like the first, but there’s no way to know from this out of context quote, and I’m guessing the quote is misleading. [UPDATE: Here's a report of Rabbi Pearce participating in a delegation to Israel, a purpose of which was "to express the urgent need for all members of our communtiy to learn and use constructive tools for sharing concerns about Israel without descending into hurtful, hateful, and destructive vitriol." Looks like Rabbi Pearce is concerned about the lack "civil discourse" emanating from groups like JVP, exactly the opposite of the impression you'd get from the article.]

(2) Credulity “Jewish Voice for Peace’s mailing list has risen to 100,000 from 35,000 since the start of the Gaza conflict, according to the organization; the number of chapters has grown to 27 from 7. From 2008 to 2009, the group’s operating budget, fueled by donations, grew 44 percent.” Who cares how big the mailing list is? JVP clearly has only hundreds of activists, not enough to fill a regional AIPAC meeting. Some of them, according to JVP itself, are non-Jews (“Jews and allies“), who like the idea of hiding their anti-Israel views behind a “Jewish” cloak. And many of them are “as a Jew”s–Jews, especially prominent among anti-Zionists, who have no affiliation with the rest of the Jewish community, other than to be able to say that “As a Jew, I.”* And a 44 percent increase from what? Without a baseline, who knows if this is significant. (UPDATE: And for that matter, it’s 2011. Wouldn’t it be useful to know if the 44 percent increase caused, apparently, by Operation Cast lead, continued in 2010?)

(3) Leaving out relevant information The article features one Rae Abileah, described as a JVP activist. It’s more than a little relevant, though, that Ms. Abileah is a national organizer for the radical left “Code Pink.” As numerous sources have pointed out, JVP isn’t a “Jewish” organization, but a leftist organization composed mostly of people of Jewish descent, who use the fact that they are Jewish strategically to support the leftist cause of being anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian. But you wouldn’t learn of Ms. Abileah’s Code Pink activism from the Bay Citizen piece. Here are questions an enterprising reporter might have asked to JVP: “Can you identify any Bay Area JVP members who aren’t involved in far-left-wing activism more generally?” “Can you identify any Bay Area JVP activists who are involved in non-Israel-related Jewish causes?”

(4) Accepting your subject’s narrative The narrative of the piece, what it starts and ends with, is that unlike mainstream Jewish organizations, who are concerned about who and what will replace Hosni Mubarak, the JVP is uncritically supporting the Egyptian protesters. But wait a minute, the mainstream Jewish organizations’ concerns rest on the fact that Mubarak has preserved peace between Israel and Egypt, while a future Egyptian government may not. The article raises this point only obliquely, stating that Jewish organizations are concerned that the “demonstration in Cairo may ultimately threaten Israel.” But it’s all really about the peace treaty, and put in those terms, a good reporter might ask, “isn’t the Jewish Voice for Peace” at all concerned about “Peace?” And then a JVP spokesperson’s statement would make sense: “Ms. Surasky said she hoped a new political order in Egypt would help speed the end of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, which her group opposes.” Peace, in other words, is secondary (at best) to “ending the occupation.” A more probing reporter would have discovered that many JVP members also support the dismantlement of Israel (see here for an acknowledgment that JVP welcomes “anti-Zionists”), which is, shall we say, unlikely to come about by peaceful means.

Despite my criticisms of the Times, it clearly contains a lot of good reporting, and has a brand name to defend. Why does it want to dilute that brand by importing dreck from other sources?

[*UPDATE: This is important context in a piece about the relationship between JVP and mainstream Jewish groups: if much of JVP's membership is composed of "non-Jews" and "as a Jews", who are all welcome to be "anti-Zionists," it's hardly surprising that they aren't welcomed with open arms by Jewish groups. "Hi Jewish community, we're JVP. Some of us aren't Jewish, and of the rest of us, many of us haven't been affiliated in any way with the Jewish community in our adult lives. We want to boycott Israel, and welcome those who seek Israel's destruction. Can we join the local Jewish Community association?" Fat chance.]

FURTHER UPDATE: Here’s a shocker: Article co-author Aaron Glantz is a veteran of leftist radio network Pacifica. And could the other co-author, Daniel Ming, be the same Daniel Ming as the Vasser student who was the author of a now-private anti-Israel blog? Given that there is a “Daniel Ming” on LinkedIn who studied at BirZeit University in the West Bank, who is now an intern at the Bay Citizen, I’d say it’s very likely. [UPDATE: Yes, it's the same Daniel Ming.]

These are the folks on whom the Times is willing to stake its reputation? Admittedly, even ideologues can be good, objective journalists. But judging from this article, Glantz and Ming fail the test.

I’ve pointed out several times before that contrary to mythology created by leftists (e.g., Juan Cole) and paleoconservatives who dislike both right-of-center Israelis and American neoconservatives, the latter are not “Likudniks” and the former are not “neocons.” ["Short and sweet, the Likud is not neoconservative, and neoconservative foreign policy, while pro-Israel and hawkish, is otherwise not much like Likud's."]

At the heart of neoconservative ideology is the use of American hard and soft power to promote democracy around the world. With the prominent but lone exception of Natan Scharansky, meanwhile, Israeli right-wingers not only have shown little interest in democracy in the Arab world, they positively fear and oppose it, believing that the Arab “street” is (and is inherently) far more hostile to Israel than is the governing elite, particularly in Egypt and Jordan.

And, indeed, the op-ed pages are currently filled with neoconservatives calling for the U.S. to take the side of pro-democracy demonstrators in Egypt (e.g.), while the Likud-led Israeli government is calling for stability and preserving Mubarak’s power.

The great neocon-Likud conspiracy was always a product of fevered imaginations, helped along, too often, by a large dollop of anti-Jewish prejudice, or at least a willingness to play to such prejudice.

So say documents leaked by Wikileaks. This shouldn’t be very surprising, but over the last several years I’ve seen many, many commentators (update: as has Jeffrey Goldberg) claiming that the only parties plugging for U.S. military action against Iran are Israel and its American “Likudnik” supporters. [Update: Omri Ceren provides some examples of "experts" who claimed that the Saudis opposed U.S. military action against Iran. For examples of focus on the "Israel lobby" with no mention of Arab support, see Stephen Walt and Joe Klein. Andrew Sullivan, however, suggests that it's "preposterous" to think that such people exist. It would be nice if they were actually just products of Jeffrey Goldberg's Zionist imagination, but no such luck.] Don’t expect many mea culpas, either.

In other Wikileaks news, Iran used the services of the Iranian Red Crescent, including Red Crescent ambulances, to smuggle men and weapons into Lebanon during the Israel-Lebanon War in 2006. Expect no condemnatory press releases from Human Rights Watch.

UPDATE: It’s quite a blow to conspiracy theorists, is it not, that the combined weight of two of their favor bogeymen, “the Zionists” and “the Arabs” haven’t been able to get the U.S. to take military action against Iran.

I’m going to leave it to Co-Conspirator Stewart and other cybersecurity legal experts to discuss the legal issues, but regarding the recent Stuxnet worm that Iran reports infected its computers and, we are told, particularly its nuclear program, the New York Times says …

Experts dissecting the computer worm suspected of being aimed at Iran’s nuclear program have determined that it was precisely calibrated in a way that could send nuclear centrifuges wildly out of control.

Their conclusion, while not definitive, begins to clear some of the fog around the Stuxnet worm, a malicious program detected earlier this year on computers, primarily in Iran but also India, Indonesia and other countries.

The paternity of the worm is still in dispute, but in recent weeks officials from Israel have broken into wide smiles when asked whether Israel was behind the attack, or knew who was. American officials have suggested it originated abroad.

The new forensic work narrows the range of targets and deciphers the worm’s plan of attack. Computer analysts say Stuxnet does its damage by making quick changes in the rotational speed of motors, shifting them rapidly up and down.

Glenn Greenwald, in the midst of a typically ridiculous, over-the-top [update: and false in its underlying premise] screed about American policy toward Israel, writes (emphases mine):

In other words, Cantor wants American citizens to sacrifice in the extreme, to lose all sorts of benefits and security in the name of austerity, but wants to shield Israel — with a higher standard of living — from those cuts. Put another way, Americans should give up Social Security and Medicare benefits so that they can continue to transfer billions of dollars every year to Israel, a foreign country which offers far more of a safety net to its own citizens.

For the record, the U.S.’s GDP per capita is about 75% higher than Israel’s, Israel has about the same level of income inequality as the United States, and Israel has approximately 25% of its population living below (a much lower) poverty line, compared to 15% of American living below the U.S.’s (much higher) poverty line.

I understand that these facts don’t directly address the issues raised by Greenwald regarding whether Israel “deserves” U.S. foreign military aid , much less whether Eric Cantor is a neocon pro-Israel stooge who is disloyal to America, or whatever exactly Greenwald’s broader point, beyond his well-known obsessive hostility to Israel and all supporters of Israel, is.

But at least it’s worth pointing out that Greenwald’s obsessive hostility is not based on much actual knowledge of the country in question. Indeed, while Israel’s economy is indeed booming of late, no one with any real familiarity with Israeli life would suspect, even without looking at formal statistics, that Israelis have a higher standard of living or a stronger social safety net than do Americans. And it’s really not worth getting into a debate over the substance of policy with someone who substitutes vituperation for knowledge.

UPDATE: In a response, Greenwald reiterates “that the notion that the Israeli standard of living is higher is perfectly accurate,” and cites a few statistics [update: none of which go to "standard of living" per se] that he claims support his point. [He apparently concedes that Israel doesn't have such a great "safety net."]

We can go back an forth on precisely how to measure standard of living all day [update: which is not to suggest that Greenwald has come up with anything that remotely rebuts the evidence from the GDP data], but here’s a rather simple metric, which is hardly surprising given the GDP numbers: I know many Israelis who’ve emigrated to the U.S., and a smaller number of Americans who’ve moved to Israel. If you ask members of the former group why they’ve moved here, they will almost always respond that “a higher standard of living” or something similar was at least a significant factor, as, often, is getting away from mandatory military and reserve service, a not insignificant drag on quality of life. The Americans who’ve moved to Israel (many of whom have come back because, tellingly, they couldn’t make a decent living there), by contrast, almost never cite standard of living as a factor, but rather as a sacrifice they decided to make to pursue their dream of living in Israel. This is true even of Modern Orthodox families with three or four kids who get free religious public school education for those kids in Israel, as opposed to paying three or four day school tuitions in the U.S. [While I understand that this is "merely" my anecdotal experience, as I wrote in the comments, EVERYONE who knows anything about Israel and American Jewry knows that Israelis move to the U.S. for economic reasons, and the reverse very rarely occurs. And there’s an obvious reason for that, which is that Israel is a much poorer country with a much lower standard of living]

Maybe the Israeli government can hire Greenwald to explain to prospective emigrants and reluctant potential immigrants that they are exhibiting false consciousness, not recognizing the dazzling value of Israel’s national health system and public universities.

FURTHER UPDATE: Commenter Manju writes:

I find it hard to believe Greenwald is unaware of the role resentment has historically played in enabling anti-Semitism, and how economic populism and racism go hand-in-hand during recessionary times. The Greenwald quote provided by Bernstein is the biggest cornucopia of xenophobic fear-mongering this side of Joe Arpaio…. Back to GG. Considering the role memes like the “all powerful rich Jew” play in anti-Semitic lore, and considering how anti-Semitism explodes during economic downturns, Greenwald’s unique metrics for calculating the standard of living of a Jewish state is about as transparent as Rush Limbaugh calling Obama a “Juvenile Delinquent.” [Editor's note: I haven't followed, or for that matter even been aware of, the latter controversy.]

Of course, Greenwald can’t be guilty of xenophobic fear-mongering because he’s a progressive and a civil libertarian.

A few weeks ago, Israeli newspapers reported that an Arab man had been convicted of “rape by deception” after having intercourse with a Jewish woman while pretending to be a Jew.

Various blogs ran with the story. The more sober blogs noted that the crime of rape by deception was established as a crime in Israel in a context having nothing to do with inter-ethnic/religious sex, and various law professors noted the interesting hypotheticals that could arise under this crime.

The more hysterical anti-Israel blogs (do I even need to mention Juan Cole?), by contrast, found that the case reflected a deep illness in Israeli society. For example, Andrew Sullivan:

But it’s the visceral emotional core of this that is so offensive. It’s about racism, religion and the risk of miscegenation. It’s about the deep disgust of some Israeli Jews toward Arabs, upheld by the courts. It’s a variant of the racial sexual panics of the Jim Crow South.

Gideon Levy, an Israeli whose vitriol for his own country puts Sullivan to shame, added:

It was no coincidence that this verdict attracted the attention of foreign correspondents in Israel, temporary visitors who see every blemish. Yes, in German or Afrikaans this disgraceful verdict would have sounded much worse.

It turns out, however, that the victim actually accused the perpetrator of “simple” violent, forcible rape, and the charge of “rape by deception” was a plea bargain (original Hebrew, but here’s an English translation) agreed to by the defendant to avoid trial on the real charge, and agreed to by the prosecutor because the victim, a past victim of significant sexual violence, would have been traumatized by pursuing the case.

We sometimes see a similar dynamic in the U.S., where, say, a 22 year old is convicted of statutory rape of a 17 year old. This seems absurd, an abuse of prosecutorial discretion, until you learn that the 22 year old was accused of a forcible rape, and the statutory rape charge was a plea bargain.

I would severely admonish Sullivan, Levy and others for leaping to conclusions based on a single, unverified and uninvestigated news story, but I’m not at all certain that I never do the same thing. (Even worse are the various news outlets that reported and embellished the original story (e.g.) without investigating the facts.) However, I do try to post corrections and retractions when I turn out to have made inferences that turn out to be mistaken. We’ll see if Sullivan, et al. do the same. Put it this way: if you read a blog that gave this story an anti-Israel spin and you don’t see a correction in the next day or two, you can cross it off your credibility list.

H/T: Michael Davis and Steven Lubet.

Jerusalem Post:

The Jerusalem District Labor Court last week rejected a temporary appeal by a Muslim teacher at a private Christian school to allow her to continue working after she decided to wear a hijab in class after teaching without one for 27 years.

Essentially, the court rule that as a private Christian school that sought to maintain a strict equality between its Muslim and Christian students, the school was entitled to enforce its dress code even though it infringed on the teacher’s statutory religious freedom rights.

A certain group of aging and mostly otherwise irrelevant academics have reinvented themselves as prophetic critics of Israel, despite a lack of real knowledge of the relevant subject matter. Mearsheimer and Walt are two; Tony Judt, whose academic specialty is European history, is another. Judt has a rather predictable op-ed in today’s Times, replete with (at best) tendentious contentions (Hamasistan Gaza is a democracy? Really? When are the next elections scheduled?). Most interesting to me, though, was the following addendum:

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 10, 2010

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Israel has a written constitution.

If you don’t know enough about Israel to know that it doesn’t have a written constitution–a very significant omission that comes up all the time in debates over a vast array of Israeli policies–and, indeed, are so confident that Israel does have a written constitution that you don’t, say, bother to even check Wikipedia before you submit an op-ed to the Times, you have no business writing such op-eds, and no one should take your views about Israel seriously. [Okay, that last bit may have been too harsh; but it certainly detracts from Judt's credibility.]

UPDATE: To give you a sense of why Judt’s error is so egregious, imagine that Judt had been writing a series of controversial essays critical of the U.S. and its system of government, and had mentioned that the “U.S. has no written Constitution.”

FURTHER UPDATE (edited): In the original version, quoted here, Judt wrote

Perhaps the most common defense of Israel outside the country is that it is “the only democracy in the Middle East.” This is largely true: the country has a constitution, an independent judiciary and free elections, though it also discriminates against non-Jews in ways that distinguish it from most other democracies today.

So, contrary to the wording of the correction, Judt didn’t say explicitly that Israel has a written constitution. A commenter raises the possibility that he didn’t mean a written constitution, but a constitution in the English sense.

I doubt it. First, one would think that the editors who posted the correction checked with Judt to ensure the correction itself was accurate. If so, they confirmed that when he wrote “constitution” he meant “written constitution.”

Second, it would be very odd to praise Israel, or even damn Israel with faint praise, regarding democracy and civil liberties by mentioning its constitution, given that civil libertarians in Israel are constrained by the lack of a constitution. If anything, one would think Judt would have written, “the country has a constitution, an independent judiciary and free elections, though, in part because it lacks a constitution guaranteeing minority rights, it also discriminates against non-Jews in ways that distinguish it from most other democracies today.

Third, there are constant proposals in Israel to adopt an “Israeli constitution,” (e.g.) because people in Israel typically don’t think of themselves as having a constitution, so it would be odd for Judt to assert that they do without caveat, unless he simply erred.

Finally, if Judt, an Englishman (though he has lived in the U.S. for many years), was thinking of the English constitution, it would be odd to pair “constitution” with “independent judiciary,” given that the English constitution is not judicially enforceable.

But, to be fair, I wanted to point out the issue.

N.Y. Times:

Jewish communities in Europe and the Middle East share many genes inherited from the ancestral Jewish population that lived in the Middle East some 3,000 years ago, even though each community also carries genes from other sources — usually the country in which it lives.

That is the conclusion of two new genetic surveys, the first to use genome-wide scanning devices to compare many Jewish communities around the world.

A major surprise from both surveys is the genetic closeness of the two Jewish communities of Europe, the Ashkenazim and the Sephardim. The Ashkenazim thrived in North and Eastern Europe until their devastation by the Hitler regime, and now live mostly in the United States and Israel. The Sephardim were exiled from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1497 and moved to the Ottoman Empire, North Africa and the Netherlands.

The two genome surveys extend earlier studies based just on the Y chromosome, the genetic element carried by all men. They refute the suggestion made last year by the historian Shlomo Sand in his book “The Invention of the Jewish People” that Jews have no common origin but are a miscellany of people in Europe and Central Asia who converted to Judaism at various times.

Of course, as I noted previously, the genetic evidence was already quite clear when Sand wrote his book. He’s aware of the evidence, but has so far chalked it up to a conspiracy of Zionist geneticists intent on obscuring the true Khazar origins of Ashkenazic Jews.

Sand’s book won a French journalism prize for the best non-fiction book of the year, which just does to show that in the anti-Zionist atmosphere of the European intelligentsia, no idea is too preposterous to embrace if it serves the cause. Nevertheless, if the French journalists have any integrity, they might reconsider whether this book was eligible for a nonfiction award.

UPDATE: I wrote previously:

I don’t think that Zionism, etc., depends on whether Jews really have common genetic origins or not, anymore than Palestinian identity is any more or less real depending on whether, as some claim, a large percentage of “Palestinian Arabs” had immigrated rather recently from other countries in the Middle East. But I do think that manipulating history for ideological purposes is bad…

As readers know, I am sympathetic to Israel, especially when compared with its vile enemies like Hamas and Hezbollah, and that’s reflected in my blog posts. But it’s frustrating, because the Israeli government has proven to be so incompetent [beyond the general standard of incompetence one can expect from any government]. This is to a large extent a reflection of the country’s broken political system. Each coalition government is composed of several parties, the leaders of which may have very different ideas of what Israeli actions are supposed to accomplish. Even within each party, there are always “backbenchers” hoping to move up who disagree, for real or strategic reasons, with the party leaders’ strategy.

The result is a cacophony of views about what Israel is trying to accomplish. The only unanimity, or virtual unanimity, Israeli governments can reach is that there is a point where the country needs to use force–against Hezbollah in 2006, against Hamas in 2008, and with regard to the continuing embargo against Gaza.

The problem is, in the absence of agreement within the government as to what the force is meant to accomplish, the government can’t announce under what circumstances it will cease to use force. So instead of setting out clear parameters, and saying, for example in 12/2008, “we regret the loss of life in Gaza, but if Hamas would do the following …. we will ceasefire immediately,” and thus try to put the onus on Hamas for the violence when it fails accede to what at least many would find to be reasonable Israeli demands, Israel instead just keeps shooting until either world opinion or popular exhaustion gets the better of it, and doesn’t achieve its goals. Consider:

When Israel attacked Hezbollah in southern Lebanon in 2006, its leaders suggest many distinct goals, including: (a) to rescue the three soldiers Hezbollah had kidnapped, (b) to retaliate for that kidnapping, (c) to degrade Hezbollah’s ability to attack Israel, (d) to topple Hezbollah and establish Lebanon’s sovereign authority in South Lebanon, (e) to get the international community to intervene to stop Hezbollah’s smuggling of weapons into south Lebanon. Of these goals, Israel achieved only (b) (and (c), but very temporarily), but at the cost of over a hundred of its own dead and great suffering in northern Israel. On (e), a potentially realistic and important goal, Israel eventually settled for a toothless U.N. resolution that accomplished precisely nothing. With regard to (a) Israel eventually turned over hundreds of live Hezbollahniks for the bodies of its three soldiers, something that surely could have been “accomplished” without war.

When Israel attacked Gaza in December 2008, the primary stated goal was to halt or limit missile attacks against Israel. That goal was accomplished, but the attack probably dragged on significantly longer than it had to for that purpose. Various Israeli officials also had the goals of driving Hamas from power, winning the release of Gilad Shalit, destroying the ability of Hamas to govern effectively, and so on, but insisted on none of these additional goals and achieved none of them. [By contrast, the 1982 Lebanon invasion was misbegotten in various ways, but Israel insisted it that regardless of world opinion it wouldn't leave Beirut until the PLO was forced out of Lebanon, and that goal was achieved.]

Finally, with regard to the Gaza embargo, it’s been reasonably effective in preventing an Iranian-sponsored Hamas military buildup. But there are many “dual use” items that Israel could allow or ban, depending on how strictly it wants to enforce the embargo. The more dual use items that are restricted, the greater the propaganda for the other side. There have been proposals over time to ease the embargo on dual use goods to ease the burden on the citizens of Gaza. This hasn’t been done, because again Israeli officials have various unannounced goals: (a) to limit the standard of living for Gazans such that they will be inclined to dislike and eventually get rid of their Hamas government; (b) to make a point about Gilad Shalit, purely for domestic political consumption: “we’re not going to let the Gazans live well so long as Gilad Shalit is treated so poorly”; (c) to control the channels of aid to Gaza so as to create alternatives to Hamas; (d) to emphasize that Israel in a state of war with Gaza–and what nation at war has ever allowed more than the barest of humanitarian aid to its enemy?, and so on.

The problem in each situation is that Israel never announces what its goals are, or if does, it announces them haphazardly through different government factions, and then doesn’t insist on them, which means the world (and its enemies) just ignore them. I don’t have a solution for this problem, but I think it goes a long way to explaining why even individuals who are not inclined to think poorly of Israel often get exasperated by what seems to be a lot of violence for a little gain. It’s not that Israel, in most cases, doesn’t have legitimate goals that it has every right to achieve through military force; it’s that the government can’t agree on what those goals are, and doesn’t ensure that any such goals are actually achieved by military action. This means that on the “left” Israel winds up looking cruel, which harms Israel with regard to public opinion, and on the “right” Israel winds up looking ineffectual and incompetent, which harms Israel’s value to the U.S. and the West as an ally.

In short, in recent years, Israeli officials across the political spectrum have agreed that military force is the solution. But they haven’t agreed on what the problem is. And that’s a problem. [UPDATE: Note that this is an entirely separate problem from whether Israel has the legal and moral RIGHT to use military force against the likes of Hamas and Hezbollah, which many anti-Israel bloggers deny. My take has generally been to defend Israel's RIGHT to do so, without necessarily expressing an opinion on the WISDOM of the particular action, which seems duly modest, given that I don't have even 1/100 of the information before me that the decisionmakers have. And I should add that the cacophony of voices coming from Israeli officials inevitably results in propagandists hostile to Israel always quoting the dumbest-sounding rationale for Israel's actions as "official" Israel policy, when it may simply be the "official" policy of the number 3 person in a party with 10 seats in the 120 member Knesset, who also happens to have an official title in the government.]

(The exception that proves the rule was when Ariel Sharon launched Operation Defensive Shield in 2003, against the wishes of much of the Israeli Left. In that case, there was a clear, definable, achievable goal, which Israel pursued until it achieved it: to utterly destroy the ability of West Bank Palestinian factions to engage in terrorism within Israel’s borders).

A bunch of eyewitness accounts are collected here. Various left-wing blogs are trumpeting these accounts as contradicting the Israeli account, but there are actually more commonalities, or at least more important commonalities, than differences. The commonalities:

(1) Ship passengers armed themselves with makeshift weapons to prevent the Israeli navy from boarding. Israel claims that these passengers were well-organized with quasi-military discipline and had trained for this task. I don’t see anything in the eyewitness accounts to contradict that.

(2) When the first Israeli commandos landed, they were attacked by the armed passengers, beaten, and taken hostage. According to the eyewitnesses, some of the other passengers tried to protect the soldiers from being killed, and I haven’t seen Israeli accounts that say otherwise.

(3) All hell broke loose thereafter.

Note that the agreed-upon points contradict the initial claims of the Free Gaza spokespeople that their passengers would never, ever, intentionally engage the IDF with violence. Either they were lying, or didn’t realize they had passengers on board who were planning on a violent confrontation.

The differences:

(1) Passengers claim that Israel first sent noise bombs and perhaps tear gas on to the ship, and also tried to land from the sea with grappling hooks, before the commandos started to land via helicopter. This is not so much a contradiction as it is the claim that the videos Israel has released don’t start at the very beginning of the operation, but only when the commandos start to land from the air. But assuming that there were armed men on board obviously trying to prevent the navy from boarding, I’m not sure why using noise bombs and tear gas changes the substance of the story; if anything, it reinforces the view that Israel was trying to take the ship with non-lethal force, and the response was a severe beating of the sailors who boarded by armed men who organized in advance for that purpose.

(2) A few eyewitnesses, in particular an Al-Jazeera reporter, claim that Israel used live ammunition before the navy boarded. It seems to defy credulity that Israel would fire bullets into an crowd of angry protesters, and then drop commandos armed with paint guns one by one into the midst of that crowd. Charitably, perhaps the reporter mistook other sounds for live fire. The other option is that the Israeli navy is murderous, its leaders completely oblivious to world opinion, and even more incompetent than what’s obvious from what we otherwise know.

(3) Israel says that the some of the activists had guns, and tossed them overboard to avoid capture. The activists claim that the weapons they tossed overboard were taken from the soldiers they disarmed. Since everyone agrees that the weapons are overboard, we may never know the truth. One oddity: the activists claim that they stripped the weapons of ammo, then tossed them overboard. But if you are going to toss weapons overboard, why take the ammo out first? Also, Israel claims that when Israel took control of the ship some of the activists still had the guns they took from Israeli personnel.

(4) Israel claims that all of the dead were armed and violent. The eyewitnesses claim some of them were journalists. At least one example may have involved a “fog of war” error–an eyewitness claims that a journalist was shot when he pointed a camera at an Israeli soldier. Pointing things at a soldier in the midst of a violent incident is not a good idea.

UPDATE: Here’s an account from the Israeli commando who turned the battle around and shot six of the nine fatalities. He says that Israel fired warning shots before commencing the helicopter landing. So a picture is emerging. Israel expected non-violent resistance, with perhaps some scuffling or whatnot. So the navy tried to board from the sea with the help of noise bombs and maybe tear gas. This didn’t dissuade the armed faction on board, which was armed and prepared for battle. (“The group was well trained and was split into a number of squads of about 20 mercenaries each distributed throughout the upper deck, the IDF said. All of the mercenaries wore gas masks and ceramic bulletproof vests and were armed with either bats, slingshots, metal bars, knives or stun grenades.”) With the sea route stifled, Israel send commandos to land via helicopter. The commandos fired warning shots and stun grenades, which they expected would disperse the crowd, as it would if they were simply activist rioters putting on a minor show of resistance. What the commandos didn’t know is that they were facing trained operatives, who didn’t flinch at the warning shots. This is when the navy made its huge error. When the warning shots failed to disperse the crowd, the commander should have recognized that this wasn’t a random crowd of activists as expected, but trained individuals intent on a violent confrontation. The mission should have been aborted right then and there, and a new strategy devised. Instead, some genius decided to send naval commandos one by one down into the hostile armed crowd. The first several to land were beaten to pulp and taken hostage, and, at least according to Israeli reports, the oncoming commandos were fired on, and also beaten. At this point, the commandos who were not captive began to use lethal force to defend themselves, rescue their comrades, and gain control of the ship.

I obviously can’t vouch for this, and governments and militaries have been known to engage in CYA after botched operations. And Israel lost its chance to thoroughly investigate the ship rioters when it decided to release everyone immediately to placate Turkey. With all that said, the highlights:

(1) Some passengers tried to take captive three commandos who lost consciousness as a result of the activists’ blows, according to early findings of a navy investigation. The three were dragged into one of the passenger halls below deck and were held there for several minutes.

(2) As seen on a video documenting the takeover, the first four commandos to rappel onto the deck were attacked by activists with bars, axes and knives. The fourth commando, K., saw his team leader on the deck, with a Turkish activist holding the pistol he had grabbed from him and pointing it to his head. K. jumped from the rope and managed to shoot the activist holding the gun. This happened 20 seconds after the first soldier landed on the deck.

(3) The soldiers reported that the activists had fired on them during the confrontation and that at least two commandos suffered gunshot wounds. After the incident, 9mm bullet casings were found – a kind not used by the naval commandos.

The Israel Defense Forces says that during the operation a number of pistols and an M-4 rifle were taken from soldiers, but they believe that the Turkish activists had other weapons. The captain of the ship told the naval commando chief that the guns were thrown overboard before the ship was completely taken over. [Note to Israeli p.r. people: if this is true, why don't you have a video of him saying so on YouTube?]

(4) Post-operation assessments have the number of hard-core activists involved in the fighting at between 60 and 100. It appears that they were well trained and experienced, especially in view of the arsenal found and code books used to pass on orders from group leaders…. All were apparently experienced in hand-to-hand fighting. Some of them did not retreat when shots were fired.

(5) No real peace activist* was injured.

*Remember how I pointed out a few days ago that Israeli officials buy into the other side’s story line by referring to pro-Palestinian activists as “peace activists”? What they mean here as is that none of the pro-Palestinian (Hamas?) activists who were not engaged in violence were injured. As I noted previously, it’s precisely this mentality–that the other side is composed of misguided but well-meaning “peace activists”, that likely led to the lack of proper preparation to begin with.

UPDATE: The flotilla was organized by the “Free Gaza” movement. Here’s its website. Are they “peace activists?” I can’t find anything on the site suggesting that Hamas should declare its peaceable intentions toward Israel and act on them, which would not only be a peaceable action in and of itself, but would lead to a cessation of violence between Israel and Gaza, and a lifting of the embargo. A real peace activist wants “peace”, not an Israeli surrender to Hamas.

Via Avi Bell, here’s a fascinating interview with Itai Epstein, Director of Amnesty International in Israel.

The interviewer asks some fairly sharp questions, and he gets answers filled with addled logic that amount to, “Whatever Israel does, Amnesty is still going to say it was acting illegally/violating human rights.” Here’s an excerpt (but read the whole thing), in which the interviewer asks Epstein what Israel needs to do before Amnesty will acknowledge that Israel is not “occupying” Gaza. The short answer is there’s nothing Israel can do, only steps Israel could take toward that goal, but whatever Israel does there will still be “other components related to agreements of the international community” whatever that means.

Q. What is required of Israel to stop it from being an occupying force under Amnesty’s definition?

A. That there will be another sovereign power and that the border crossings to Gaza not be under Israeli control. That’s the meaning of occupation, there’s no other sovereign power there, there’s no control over the border crossings for free movement of people and goods and that’s why Gaza is under occupation.

Q. Is an exit by the Navy from Gaza’s waters an end to the occupation?

A. No.

Q. Is opening the border crossings with Israel ending the occupation?

A. That’s a step towards ending the occupation….

Q. So what actions must Israel take? You say that the occupation ends if Israel opens the crossings, so if the occupation ends, Israel needs to close the borders since Gaza is defined as an enemy state. There’s a logical contradiction here.

A. I don’t understand where the contradiction is.

Q. The border between Israel and Lebanon is closed since Lebanon is an enemy state. You’re claiming that Israel needs to open the borders to Gaza and then the occupation will end. And then Israel will have to close the crossings.

A. I’ll ask you another question. Can Lebanon control the transfer of goods and people to Lebanon not opposite Israel but opposite other countries?

Q. So the problem is with the control by sea and air. If the seas are open there is no occupation?

A. Of course, had it been possible to enter Gaza freely through the air, by sea and land, that would certainly be one component of the occupation ending.

Q. What are all the components to end the occupation? Amnesty does not present a plan in which Israel stops the occupation. It says that Israel needs to stop the occupation and deepen the occupation by opening the borders. I don’t comprehend that.

A. Amnesty International does not deal with solving conflicts.

Q. It’s not conflict solving. It’s ending the occupation. Amnesty says that Gaza is under occupation. According to Amnesty, what actions must Israel take in order to stop the occupation?

A. One of the things which need to be done is to allow the passage of people and goods through the air, the sea and land. That’s one component. There are other components related to agreements of the international community since Amnesty International does not deal with solving conflicts.

Q. If Amnesty claims that there’s an occupation there should be a definition of when there’s no occupation. Amnesty claims that Israel needs to open all the crossings for free movement from Gaza to Israel and remove the sea and land siege on Gaza, meaning let Gaza be open to the entire world with no connection to Israel, but under those circumstances the occupation no longer exists. So why is there a need to transfer supplies to Gaza? Does Amnesty by the same logic demand the American forces in Afghanistan to help the Taliban? And take care of the sick among the Taliban? That’s the question, when does the occupation end?

A. I admit that I don’t understand the question. I’m unclear as to what kind of answer you expect.

Q. What are the necessary steps on which you can elaborate?

A. One, allow the Palestinians in Gaza free access to drinking water. Israel hasn’t done this in all the years of the occupation until now, and it has a responsibility to ensure that Gaza’s residents have access to water. The same thing goes for health services. For dozens of years the rights of those residents have been prevented and the formations of civil infrastructures were prevented and this became worse during the attacks of last year, and a large part of those infrastructures were destroyed and not rebuilt to this day. This is an obligation of which Israel cannot free itself.

Q. It’s an obligation of which Israel cannot free itself, but it has nothing to do with the occupation. Those are two different things.

A. It’s related to the situation of the continuing occupation.

Turkey’s Islamist government, not known for its compassion to, say, Kurds in Turkey, has been shedding crocodile tears over Gaza for several years now, and helped instigate the flotilla fiasco. So I have a modest proposal: if Turkey is so concerned with the welfare of Gazans, why not let Turkey run the place. Israel doesn’t want it, and never has; it tried to give it back to Egypt several times, but Egypt doesn’t want it, either. Meanwhile, Gaza is controlled by a terrorist government that is both cruel and incompetent; and Israel is not going to lift its siege to long as Hamas is in charge.

But maybe Hamas, which of course is concerned with nothing more than the welfare of its subjects, would be willing to turn the administration of Gaza over to Turkey. Gazans would benefit from Turkey’s trade ties with the rest of the world; Gazans and Israelis would be rid of Hamas; and Turkey would be able to send all the aid it wants to Gaza! Win-Win-Win! And if Hamas doesn’t agree, let’s just say that Turkey, or at least its Ottoman predecessors, has been in charge in Gaza before, and knows how to deal with violent local factions.

So, P.M. Netanyahu–why not announce tomorrow that if Hamas will abdicate, you’d be happy to let the Turkish military in to establish a government, immediately after which you will lift the blockade?

Since Glenn Greenwald is showing up on MSNBC and elsewhere, as an “expert” on Israel and Gaza, this is as good a time as any to recall his record with regard to the last major Hamas-Israel blowup, the Gaza incursion in 2008-09.

Greenwald consistently accused Israel of a “disproportionate” (and therefore illegal under international law) military response to the missile attacks from Gaza, but he refused to specify what he would consider a proportionate military response. He finally justified that refusal by claiming that since the military response was not going to work, only diplomatic means were lawful:

I’ve answered this repeatedly. Do you know of anyone who actually believes that at the end of this Israeli attack, there will be no more Hamas, or no more rockets? The only military solution to the rocket attacks is total annihilation of the residents of Gaza and a complete flattening of their cities. If Israel were to do that, what possible objections would those here be able to make who are arguing that “proportionality” has no role to play in restricting the means used to fight justifiable wars? Terrorism ends when the causes of it are addressed, typically via diplomatic means. That’s what history proves. [Editor's note: But cf. Israel's successful counter-terrorism operations in the West Bank in the 2000s, among other examples.]

Putting aside the obvious strawmen (no one was arguing that there would “be no more Hamas,” or not a single rocket), what history has shown is that 3,000 rockets, missiles, and mortars landed in Israel in 2008 before the Gaza incursion, and that includes a lengthy cease-fire period. Since the end of the Gaza incursion, only about 200 projectiles have fallen in Israel from Gaza, and, I believe, none have caused physical injuries. Other commentators (but not Greenwald) have acknowledged that they were wrong about the efficacy of Israel’s military action.

But let’s repeat the initial point: Greenwald thinks that ANY military action that Israel may take against Hamas is illegitimate, and that Israel’s only proper response to whatever violence Hamas unleashes is diplomacy. If Hamas decides to adhere to its stated policy that its goal is the destruction of Israel and the exile of its inhabitants, and acts accordingly, Israel’s only resort is apparently to surrender.

And while we’re on the subject of Greenwald, here’s an interview with Greenwald in which he (a) claims that Israel’s boarding of a blockade-running ship violates international law because the ship was in international waters. Ruth Wedgwood, an actual expert in international law, then comes on to rebut him. I’m not an international law expert, and it’s not my cup of tea, but if you’re going to cite international law, you might as well get it right, and my understanding is that Greenwald is simply wrong here. Greenwald, also accuses Israel of piracy [UPDATE: More specifically, he writes, perserving I suppose plausible deniability: "What's so odd about that is that the U.S. has been spending a fair amount of time recently condemning exactly such acts as 'piracy' and demanding 'that those who commit acts of piracy are held accountable for their crimes'," though he doesn't actually link to anything suggesting that the U.S. has said that a state enforcing a blockade on the high seas is "piracy"], even though piracy is by definition undertaken by non-state actors; and (b) accuses everyone who disagrees with him about Israel’s blockade of simply regurgitating propaganda, which is amusing coming from someone who unhesitatingly repeated the following false propaganda from the “Free Gaza” activists: “Those on the ships emphatically state that the IDF came on board shooting.” (He later added a “but see” (without acknowledging that it wasn’t there initially), linking to video that rebuts the claim he regurgitated.) And this from someone who constantly accuses journalists he doesn’t like of being “mindless stenographers.”

UPDATE: Greenwald updates: “for an excellent discussion of the illegality of the Israeli raid, see this analysis from former British Ambassador and maritime law expert Craig Murray, and this one from International Law Professor Kevin Jon Heller (the Post has a decent article on this topic today as well).”

The first piece simply asserts that the raid was illegal. Heller, meanwhile, argues that the blockade itself is illegal, but seems to acknowledge that if the blockade is legal, the raid is legal. The Post piece presents different perspectives, but the “illegality” argument seems come down to the bizarre position that a state can board ships heading to another recognized state to enforce a blockade, but it can’t board ships heading to a terrorist entity that acts as a state to enforce a blockade.

Noah Pollak:

Those who sent an elite unit into a hostile confrontation armed with toy weapons made an incredibly stupid decision. And a uniquely Israeli one. In recent memory, Israeli military action has been violent but not decisive, bloody enough to provoke the outrage and condemnation of the world (at this point, a stubbed toe will do), but not enough to actually change facts on the ground (the Hamas and Hezbollah wars being prime examples). These halfhearted wars and battles have earned Israel demerits in world opinion without enough to show in improved strategic position.

I think Israel has been trying to avoid truly decisive, and very bloody, military action in the hope that by containing the situation, time will be on its side, and the strategic situation will change for the better, e.g., the Iranian mullahcracy will be overthrown (seemed plausible last year), the Lebanese government will get the strength to kick out Hezbollah (seemed plausible a few years back), Hamas will collapse, etc. So far, not so good, and the strategic situation has seriously deteriorated in at least two ways: Turkey has gone from an ally to a virtual enemy, and Hezbollah has rearmed itself in Lebanon with much better missiles than it had previously. Actually, three ways: instead of having a clear friend in the White House, Israel has a lukewarm ally.

UPDATE: Further evidence of unique stupidity–IDF: We didn’t sabotage Gaza aid ship in bid to avoid humanitarian crisis. Senior officer hints the IDF disabled the engines of the other five ships in the Gaza aid flotilla, says Marmara was too large and could have been stuck at sea for days.

FURTHER UPDATE: The whole Gaza blockade is an example of this stupidity. Israel claims to be in a state of war with Gaza. But for “humanitarian reasons”, it lets in many tons of supplies every week, provides Gaza with electricity, allows Gaza residents to get medical treatment in Israel, and turns a largely blind eye to smuggling via the Egyptian border. In other words, the blockade lowers the Gazan’s standard of living and causes international outrage, but doesn’t actually put sufficient pressure on the Gazans to cause them to want to either overthrow their government or surrender. And since Hamas controls the smuggling trade, the blockade enriches the government. I’m not saying Israel should enforce a true blockade, including the cutoff of electricity. I am saying that there’s something to be said for either using enough force to accomplish your objective, or not using force at all.

Incredibly (and stupidly), Israeli officials believed the protesters’ claims that they were mere humanitarian peace activists with no violent intent (in fairness to both Israel and the protesters, it appears that the violent passengers were on only one of six boats). An embedded reporter with YNet News sets the scene:

Officials estimated that passengers will show slight resistance, and possibly minor violence; for that reason, the operation’s commander decided to bring the helicopter directly above the top deck. …

Navy commandoes slid down to the vessel one by one, yet then the unexpected occurred: The passengers that awaited them on the deck pulled out bats, clubs, and slingshots with glass marbles, assaulting each soldier as he disembarked. The fighters were nabbed one by one and were beaten up badly, yet they attempted to fight back.

However, to their misfortune, they were only equipped with paintball rifles used to disperse minor protests, such as the ones held in Bilin. The paintballs obviously made no impression on the activists, who kept on beating the troops up and even attempted to wrest away their weapons.

One soldier who came to the aid of a comrade was captured by the rioters and sustained severe blows. The commandoes were equipped with handguns but were told they should only use them in the face of life-threatening situations. When they came down from the chopper, they kept on shouting to each other “don’t shoot, don’t shoot,” even though they sustained numerous blows.

The Navy commandoes were prepared to mostly encounter political activists seeking to hold a protest, rather than trained street fighters. The soldiers were told they were to verbally convince activists who offer resistance to give up, and only then use paintballs. They were permitted to use their handguns only under extreme circumstances.

The planned rush towards the vessel’s bridge became impossible, even when a second chopper was brought in with another crew of soldiers. “Throw stun grenades,” shouted Flotilla 13′s commander who monitored the operation. The Navy chief was not too far, on board a speedboat belonging to Flotilla 13, along with forces who attempted to climb into the back of the ship.

The forces hurled stun grenades, yet the rioters on the top deck, whose number swelled up to 30 by that time, kept on beating up about 30 commandoes who kept gliding their way one by one from the helicopter. At one point, the attackers nabbed one commando, wrested away his handgun, and threw him down from the top deck to the lower deck, 30 feet below. The soldier sustained a serious head wound and lost his consciousness.

Only after this injury did Flotilla 13 troops ask for permission to use live fire. The commander approved it: You can go ahead and fire. The soldiers pulled out their handguns and started shooting at the rioters’
legs, a move that ultimately neutralized them. Meanwhile, the rioters started to fire back at the commandoes.

UPDATE: Have trouble believing Israeli officials could be so naive? Back during the Second Intifada, I was talking to a reporter who consistently referred to International Solidarity Movement activists as “peace activists.” I told him that he should call them what they are, Pro-Palestinian activists, if they were “peace activists” they would be riding Israeli buses targeted by bomb attacks as well as accompanying Palestinian demonstrators. He responded, “you know, you’re right, but the Israeli soldiers I deal with call them ‘peace activists’ so I just adopted their lingo.” I guess it’s a lot easier to believe that your enemies are just naive peace activists than that they hate you and want you dead. Israel can’t afford such naivete, as today’s violence suggests. Anyone involved in planning this fiasco’s head should roll.

FURTHER UPDATE: A “peace activist” aboard the ship, courtesy of Pajamas Media. Note the rather large, sharp dagger, perfect for, oh, spreading hummus or something.

And here’s the ever prescient Juan Cole, last seen predicting that Israel would use the 2006 war in Lebanon to permanently depopulate the south of the country, on what he calls the “peace activists” before the video above was released: “There are two possible reasons for the violence. One is that the Israeli troops boarding the vessels met some sort of resistance and over-reacted. Aid volunteers are unlikely, however, to have posed much real challenge to trained special forces operatives.” Or, more likely, “the deaths and woundings may have been a brutally frank warning to any future Gaza aid activists.”

And finally: Look, if you think that Israel’s blockade of Gaza is illegitimate, and the “Free Gaza” movement has the moral or legal right to ship whatever materials it wants there and to use whatever violence is necessary to resist Israeli attempts to stop them, neither this video, nor anything I am going to post here, is going to persuade you otherwise. But the Free Gaza folks and their supporters (Juan, call your office) have portrayed the violence today as an unprovoked Israeli massacre of nonviolent civilian peace activists. I think the video above pretty much rebuts that story.

Meanwhile, why is the N.Y. Times still repeating this nonsense on its website, without pointing out that it’s contradicted by video evidence?:

Greta Berlin, a leader of the pro-Palestinian Free Gaza Movement, speaking by telephone from Cyprus, rejected the military’s version.

“That is a lie,” she said, adding that it was inconceivable that the civilian passengers on board would have been “waiting up to fire on the Israeli military, with all its might.”

“We never thought there would be any violence,” she said.

FURTHER UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald, showing his usual perspicacity about all things Israeli, still has on his website, without correction: “Those on the ships emphatically state that the IDF came on board shooting.” But cf. video above. Nothing like useful idiots to help you with your propaganda, but at least we have a documentary record of Greenwald’s credulity. (Greenwald has now updated his post to add a caveat, without acknowledging that he did so.)

Reading the news this morning, I got a big dose of he said/she said, with Israeli spokesmen claiming that its naval personnel were attacked with clubs and knives, perhaps even live fire, from one of the “peace activist” boats, and spokesmen for the blockade runners claiming, for example to the New York Times, that they would never, ever, engage in any violence.

So it would be easy enough to miss what I found to be the most relevant information, from the Washington Post:”Short video clips broadcast on various television stations showed demonstrators clubbing the navy personnel with metal bars and showed at least one soldier firing.”

I have my doubts about the wisdom of Israel’s blockade of Gaza, and there was obviously an operational/intelligence failure that led to Israel’s naval commandos having to open fire to defend themselves, giving the other side a propaganda victory. But it does appear that the physical violence started from the other side, which to begin with had the rather unhumanitarian mission of aiding Hamas, and, to the extent there were sincere humanitarian/peace activists involved, allowed themselves to get hijacked by violent Islamic extremists who manned one of the ships.

Net result of the “peace/humanitarian” mission: dead activists, wounded Israeli soldiers, no more humanitarian aid to Gaza than if Israel’s offer to transfer the aid to Gaza from Ashdod had been accepted, and a likely breakdown in the Palestinian-Israeli peace talks that were about to start. Congratulations.

UPDATE: Reuters: “Greta Berlin, a spokeswoman for the Free Gaza Movement that organized the convoy, said: ‘How could the Israeli military attack civilians like this? Do they think that because they can attack Palestinians indiscriminately they can attack anyone?’” Here’s a hint, Ms. Berlin: when you try to run a naval blockade, and then attack the blockaders with weaponry, “civilians” is not an apt description.

Allison Kaplan Summer (via Instapundit): “Israel appears to have stepped directly into a trap of a carefully planned suicide mission dressed up in the clothing of a humanitarian effort.”

Ted Bromund has this interesting follow up to the Noah Pollak piece I linked to Wednesday:

The problem today is not that the peace process has failed or that this reveals the failure of the liberal vision. All that is true enough. The problem is that the liberal vision itself has changed. Not all liberals reject the nation-state, but suspicion of the nation-state as the organizing unit for the world does stem predominantly from the left. In view of the importance that the left attaches to the state as the provider of welfare benefits, this is both ironic and contradictory. But it does not change the fact that one reason liberals (especially those of a European persuasion) have fallen out of love with Israel is that it — along with the United States — was founded on and persists in maintaining a democratic and nationalist vision.

This is why the liberal critics bracket Israel and the U.S. They claim they do so because the U.S. supports Israel. Actually, they do it because they reject the worldview on which both nations are founded, the worldview that has motivated the U.S. to support Israel. For the critics, democracy and nationalism must ultimately be in conflict. Hence the importance of the EU and transnational initiatives like the International Criminal Court. This is a worldview founded in the European reaction to the Second World War. The fact that this war led to the destruction of the European nations and the rise of the Israeli one is another reason for anti-national liberals to look upon it with scorn: to them, Israel appears to be resisting the lessons of history.

I don’t know if Bromund is right or not, but it led to this interesting thought: to the extent that he is right, it turns out that Western leftists (more accurate in this context than “liberals”) despise Israel because they think the Jews have stubbornly chosen to maintain a particularistic, Judeo-centric ideology–in this case Zionism–despite being offered a more rational, enlightened, universalistic, and pacifistic ideology by more enlightened folk. In other words, it’s a secular version of the primary theological rationale for Christian anti-Semitism for the last millenium–that Jews stubbornly clung to Judaism and Jewish particularity when offered more rational, enlightened, universalistic, and (in theory) pacifistic Christianity. If so, no wonder even the most absurd anti-Zionist charges have resonance among European leftists and their American compatriots; it’s not like blood libels, the Deicide charge, and the like made much sense, either.

UPDATE: Hmm, this theory would also explain why certain harsh American critics of Israel, who surely think of themselves as enlightened people with no prejudice against Jews, could launch certain types of venomous attacks against Jewish supporters of Israel. For example, it would explain why John Mearsheimer feels comfortable dividing the Jewish world into “righteous Jews” (leftist Jews who attack Israel) and “new Afrikaners” (everyone else); why Walt & Mearsheimer felt comfortable attacking Elliott Abrams as a stooge of Israel for writing, consistent with traditional Jewish theology (and not in the context of discussing Israel), that “there can be no doubt that Jews, faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are to stand apart from the nation in which they live;” why Juan Cole could write of Douglas Feith: “Having a Likudnik as the number three man in the Pentagon is a nightmare for American national security, since Feith could never be trusted to put US interests over those of Ariel Sharon,” while also noting that “only a small minority of American Jews support the Likud Party or its policies, and that a majority of Jewish Americans opposed the Iraq war;” and so on.

Ancient prejudices unwittingly repackaged into anti-Zionism, anyone?

FURTHER UPDATE: And how can one “unwittingly” adopt ancient prejudices? Well, consider the extent to which the modern environmental movement, a very secular movement, unwittingly incorporates a secular version of Judeo-Christian themes, such as: the Garden of Eden (the world before modern technology); the Tree of Knowledge (modern technology); the Fall (the use of modern technology leading to environmental devastation and the destruction of life in harmony with natures) and so on.

Peter Beinart has written a scathing indictment of organized American Jewry’s “conservative” views on Israel. He claims that “right-wing” Israeli policies, combined with American Jewish groups’ unflinching support for Israel, are alienating young American Jews, and reducing their attachment to Israel.

Beinart’s essay has received a remarkable amount of attention, especially considering that its underlying premise is simply false. It’s true that among the professional liberal Jewish intellectual elite–bloggers like Glenn Greenwald, Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein, journalists like Joe Klein and Beinart himself, sundry New York Review of Book essayists like Tony Judt–Israel has taken a beating, and undoubtedly some of them, and their allies and acolytes, are alienated from Israel.

But the data on “attachment” to Israel doesn’t show any difference between young Jewish conservatives, young Jewish liberals, or anyone in between. Rather, young Jews who are involved in the Jewish community, whatever their ideology, are as attached to Israel as ever, indeed, probably more so (thanks to the Internet and Birthright), especially if one includes the Orthodox, which the data typically does not. Young Jews who are not involved in the community, especially the intermarried, are much less attached to Israel, as they are to any “ethnic” Jewish concerns. (Attachment is a measure of concern and interest, not agreement with policies.) A growing percentage of young, non-Orthodox Jews are not involved in the community and/or are intermarried, hence the overall decline in attachment to Israel among the non-Orthodox.

I confirmed all this in an email conversation with Steven Cohen, the sociologist whose studies on American Jewish attachment to Israel have prompted much handwringing, including Beinart’s. Various gaps in his studies lead me to conclude that I’d want more data before I’m completely persuaded that there is no liberal/conservative gap in young Jews’ attachment to Israel, all else held constant (the most sticky point is that intermarried Jews tend to be more politically conservative than non-intermarried Jews, which mucks up the data), but certainly the reverse hasn’t been shown.

Meanwhile, Noah Pollak has launched a scathing, polemical and generally on-target attack on what one might call Beinartism.

Pollak’s must-read essay makes three essential points:

(1) Beinart claims that he is engaging in an act of courage [update: Beinart, via email, says that this is a misinterpretation of what he meant when he said that he found the piece hard to write, and he has explicitly disclaimed the idea that he was exhibiting courage. Fair enough.] by criticizing Israel and the American Jewish establishment, but nothing is more trite, and better for one’s career in left-wing circles, than to be a Jewish liberal/left intellectual publicly attacking Israel. Exactly how many pro-Israel left-leaning organizations and periodicals are there right now, beyond the New Republic? Even back in 1987, a journalist friend of mine was turned down for a job from The Nation Village Voice because it wouldn’t hire anyone who was sympathetic to Israel, especially anyone Jewish. Things have only deteriorated dramatically since. Fact is, Israel has become a liberal-conservative issue in the U.S., with conservatives overwhelmingly supporting Israel, liberals much less so, and liberal intellectuals often hostile. If you’re someone in Beinart’s shoes, writing an essay like his is, as Pollak puts it, “a spectacle of conformity,” not a profile in courage. [UPDATE: Okay, Beinert didn't claim to be a profile in courage. But the fact remains, even if we grant that Beinert is sincere and not a careerist, if you're Jewish it's hard to stay in good graces with the intellectual left, here and abroad, unless you write the obligatory hand-wringing piece criticizing Israel.]

(2) The failure of the Oslo peace process was a failure of liberal-left assumptions about foreign policy, and how the world works more generally. Instead of revisiting their ideological assumptions, it’s a lot easier for the left to blame Israel: “The failure of the liberal vision is transformed from being a verdict on liberalism to being a verdict on Israel.” By contrast, in Israel, where the public actually has to live with Continue reading ‘Peter Beinart–Trite’ »

My Opinio Juris co-blogger, Julian Ku, has posted up a note on submissions recently made to the International Criminal Court prosecutor’s office on the question of ICC jurisdiction:

Last year, the Palestinian National Authority filed a declaration accepting the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.  This declaration is controversial, to say the least, because it could potentially give the ICC jurisdiction over Israeli military forces operating in Gaza or the West Bank.  Today, the ICC released a summary of the submissions it has received on whether the Palestinian’s declaration should be accepted …

Julian’s post gives the full list of submissions and links with the curious omission, as he notes, of the Palestinian National Authority’s own submission.  He and I are both co-signatories on a submission authored by David Davenport of the Hoover Institution, arguing against a recognition of acceptance of jurisdiction.  In the comments is a long response from Michael Kearney, one of the authors of the Al-Haq submission arguing the other way.

So the New Republic published the most thorough critique to date of Human Rights Watch’s record on Israel this week. Contrary to its typical belligerency, HRW has not responded [beyond this tepid and largely unresponsive letter to TNR from a co-chair of HRW's Middle East advisory committee, who is not an employee of HRW, but not from HRW itself--thanks to a reader for pointing this out]. That’s unusual, but not too strange; given how often HRW spokespeople get themselves into trouble when they defend the organization’s record on Israel, they are clearly better off keeping quiet.

What is very strange is that members of the left blogosphere who have previously vigorously (and reflexively) defended HRW have all been silent. Where is Matthew Yglesias? Andrew Sullivan? Daniel Levy? Aryeh Neier? Adam Horowitz? Even Kevin Jon Heller has blogged not a word about the TNR story.

I’m not given to conspiratorial thinking, but it’s almost as if “headquarters” has sent out word to ignore the TNR piece in the hopes it will go away.

I understand that John Mearsheimer, co-author of The Israel Lobby, was once considered a respected “realist” scholar of international affairs. If so, it’s a shame he’s gone more and more off the deep end into the Mondoweiss/Finkelstein–two individuals he identifies as Jewish heroes, along with such prominent foreign policy “realists” (not) as Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein!–territory of belligerent anti-Israel propagandist with due disregard for scholarly integrity.

I’ve just stumbled across a speech he just gave at the “Palestine Center” called The Future of Palestine: Righteous Jews [Weiss, Finkelstein, et al.] vs. the New Afrikaners [the entire Jewish and pro-Israel establishment].

Putting aside the inflammatory nature of the title [as if Jews need like the likes of an-ignoramus-on-Jews-and-Judaism like Mearsheimer to bestow his judgment on them], the scholarly content of the piece is a joke. Mearsheimer points to some legitimate obstacles to Israel accepting and implementing a two-state solution, but simply assumes that the Palestinians will peacefully and willingly accept a two-state solution. No mention of Hamas. No mention of the rejectionist factions of the Palestinian Authority. No mention of anti-Semitic propaganda in Palestinan schools and in the Palestinian media. No mention of Palestinian insistence on the right of return. No mention of the violence that greeted Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza and parts of Samaria. No acknowledgment, indeed, in his discussion of the purported future Israeli “apartheid” state, that Israel occupies not one inch of Gaza, and less than half the West Bank. The only mention of problems on the Palestinian side is as follows: “The Palestinians are badly divided among themselves and not in a good position to make a deal with Israel and then stick to it. That problem is fixable with time and help from Israel and the United States.”

More to the point, here’s how Mearsheimer describes the obvious solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, in terms I (more or less) agree with:

The outcome that gets the most attention these days is the two-state solution, which was described in broad outline by President Clinton in late December 2000. It would obviously involve creating a Palestinian state living side-by-side with Israel. To be viable, that Palestine state would have to control 95 percent or more of the West Bank and all of Gaza. There would also have to be territorial swaps to compensate the Palestinians for those small pieces of West Bank territory that Israel got to keep in the final agreement. East Jerusalem would be the capital of the new Palestinian state. The Clinton Parameters envisioned certain restrictions on the new state’s military capabilities, but it would control the water beneath it, the air space above it, and its own borders – to include the Jordan River Valley.

Fair enough. But Mearsheimer fails to mention the recent public opinion poll that shows that Palestinians overwhelmingly reject this solution [Do you accept the creation of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders with some land exchange as a final solution for the Palestinian problem? Yes 28.3% No 66.7%].

Mearsheimer also neglects to note that Israeli prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert both offered this solution to the Palestinians.
With regard to Barak, Mearsheimer describes him as having “seriously flirted with the idea of creating a Palestinian state at Camp David in July 2000.” There was no flirting. He offered a Palestinian state to Arafat within the approximate parameters Mearsheimer describes above, first at Camp David and then at Taba, backed by billions of dollars in U.S. and European aid. Arafat rejected the offer, preferring the terrorist war of the Second Intifada.

As for Olmert, Mearsheimer writes that it is by “no means clear that” he “would be willing or able to make the concessions that would be necessary to create a legitimate Palestinian state. Certainly Olmert did not do so when he was prime minister.” Yet, it’s well known that Olmert was “willing.” He made Abbas an offer within, or at least very close to, Mearsheimer’s parameters. Abbas, according to Olmert never even responded. When the offer became public, Abbas’s spokesmen replied that there was not point even using Olmert’s offer as a starting point for negotiations: “The Palestinian side will only accept a Palestinian state with territorial continuity, with holy Jerusalem as its capital, without settlements, and on the June 4, 1967 boundaries.” Mearsheimer is either ignorant of Olmert’s offer, in which he knows even less about the Arab-Israel conflict than an amateur like me, or he is intentionally distorting the truth.

In short, Mearsheimer, ironically, has become the mirror image of the stereotypical pro-lsrael “lobbyist” he decries. One-sided, obsessed with Israel-bashing, willing to sacrifice scholarly standards and honesty to promote his political agenda, and willfully blind to the faults of the side he supports.

UPDATE: It’s almost quaint to note Mearsheimer’s protestation back in 2006:

“I don’t have an agenda in the sense of viewing myself as proselytizing or trying to sell this,” Mearsheimer told the Forward. “I am a scholar, not an activist, and I am reticent to take questions from the media because I do believe that this is a subject that has to be approached very carefully.”

Benjamin Birnbaum’s investigative piece for The New Republic on Human Rights Watch and Israel is now up. The piece mentions, but does not dwell on, the various scandals that engulfed HRW last year—the fundraising trip to Saudi Arabia in which HRW Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson invoked the organization’s hostility to Israel and the “pro-Israel lobby”; reports that deputy director Joe Stork’s prior “human rights” background primarily consisted of editing and writing for a radical left, anti-Israel publication; and the revelation that HRW military analyst Marc Garlasco was an avid collector of Nazi memorabilia.

Instead, the piece focuses on the longstanding conflicts within HRW regarding its Israel-related activities that eventually led founder Richard Bernstein to denounce HRW in an op-ed in the New York Times last Fall.

Much of the piece will be of great interest to both donors and critics of HRW, but will strike those without a deep interest in HRW as so much inside baseball. Nevertheless, there are several newsworthy nuggets within the article:

(1) Whitson’s hostility to Israel. Birnbaum quotes an anonymous insider for what should by now be obvious: she “has no sympathy for the Israeli side” and “has a lot of personal identification [fwiw, her Armenian mother was born in East Jerusalem] with the Palestinian cause.” Birnbaum backs this up with a few telling quotes from Whitson.

(a) Whitson recently professed HRW’s neutrality on the Hamas-Israel conflict to a Moroccan newspaper. But then she added, “Of course, no one can deny that the pain and destruction that Israel causes cannot be compared to what Hamas is doing.” A more objective observer might point that whatever “pain and destruction” Israel is leveling on Gaza is itself Hamas’s fault, because Hamas has chosen to live in a state of war with Israel, whereas Israel would be happy to leave Hamas and Gaza alone if Hamas would cease inflicting missiles on southern Israel.

(b) Why does Whitson seem to only hire staffers who have an anti-Israel activist background? “For people who apply for jobs to be the researcher in Israel-Palestine, it’s probably going to be someone who’s done work on Israel-Palestine with a human rights background,” she explained. “And guess what? People who do work with a human rights background on Israel-Palestine tend to find that there are a lot of Israeli abuses. And they tend to become human rights activists on the issue.” Apparently, no one ever applies for an HRW job who has determined that the Palestinian Authority terrorist kleptocracy and the Hamas Gaza terrorist theocracy engage in a “lot of abuses.”

(c) There is perhaps no American anti-Israel activist who is more poisonous to anyone with the least bit of sympathy for Israel than avowed Hezbollah supporter Norman Finkelstein. As I’ve described him before: Imagine a leftist, male version of Ann Coulter who instead of attacking liberals and the liberal establishment, has devoted his career to attacking Israel and the American Jewish establishment. Imagine, though, that this male version of Coulter was a less talented writer, and even more offensive in his description of his adversaries. Whitson’s verdict: Finkelstein has a “brilliant mind and a generous spirit” [!!!!!!] and “I continue to have tremendous respect and admiration for him.”

(d) Whitson’s office has a poster for “Paradise Now,” the film that attempts to humanize (and perhaps create sympathy for) Palestinian suicide bombers. Deliberately murdering civilians is hardly compatible with any accepted notion of human rights, making Whitson’s choice for office decoration rather remarkable, kind of like Abe Foxman having a poster of a Leni Riefenstahl film in his office.

(2) Also of interest is HRW head Ken Roth’s and Whitson’s reactions when Birnbaum asked Roth why HRW has refused to condemn Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s threats to wipe out Israel as an incitement to genocide, a violation of international law. Roth first quibbled over Continue reading ‘Birnbaum on Human Rights Watch and Israel’ »