| What Happened to Israel's Reputation? (Oren) (updated) Posted: 15 May 2012 03:56 PM PDT Nice piece in WSJ by Michael Oren. Since it will be paywalled soon, I'm posting the entire article. This year Israel is celebrating . . . a series of accomplishments that have surely exceeded the expectations of its most visionary founders. It is one of the most powerful small nations in history. . . . [It] has tamed an arid wilderness [and] welcomed 1.25 million immigrants. . . . The Israelis themselves did the fighting, the struggling, the sacrificing in order to perform the greatest feat of all—forging a new society . . . in which pride and confidence have replaced the despair engendered by age-long suffering and persecution.
So Life magazine described Israel on the occasion of its 25th birthday in May 1973. In a 92-page special issue, "The Spirit of Israel," the magazine extolled the Jewish state as enlightened, robustly democratic and hip, a land of "astonishing achievement" that dared "to dream the dream and make that dream come alive."
Life told the story of Israel's birth from the Bible through the Holocaust and the battle for independence. "The Arabs' bloodthirsty threats," the editors wrote, "lend a deadly seriousness to the vow: Never Again." Four pages documented "Arab terrorist attacks" and the three paragraphs on the West Bank commended Israeli administrators for respecting "Arab community leaders" and hiring "tens of thousands of Arabs." The word "Palestinian" scarcely appeared.
There was a panoramic portrayal of Jerusalem, described as "the focus of Jewish prayers for 2,000 years" and the nucleus of new Jewish neighborhoods. Life emphasized that in its pre-1967 borders, Israel was "a tiny, parched, scarcely defensible toe-hold." The edition's opening photo shows a father embracing his Israeli-born daughter on an early "settlement," a testament to Israel's birthright to the land.
Would a mainstream magazine depict the Jewish state like this today, during the week of its 64th birthday?
Unlikely. Rather, readers would learn about Israel's overwhelming military might, brutal conduct in warfare and eroding democratic values—plus the Palestinians' plight and Israeli intransigence. The photographs would show not cool students and cutting-edge artists but soldiers at checkpoints and religious radicals.
Why has Israel's image deteriorated? After all, Israel today is more democratic and—despite all the threats it faces—even more committed to peace.
Some claim that Israel today is a Middle Eastern power that threatens its neighbors, and that conservative immigrants and extremists have pushed Israel rightward. Most damaging, they contend, are Israel's policies toward the territories it captured in the 1967 Six-Day War, toward the peace process and the Palestinians, and toward the construction of settlements.
Israel may seem like Goliath vis-à-vis the Palestinians, but in a regional context it is David. Gaza is host to 10,000 rockets, many of which can hit Tel Aviv, and Hezbollah in Lebanon has 50,000 missiles that place all of Israel within range. Throughout the Middle East, countries with massive arsenals are in upheaval. And Iran, which regularly pledges to wipe Israel off the map, is developing nuclear weapons. Israel remains the world's only state that is threatened with annihilation.
Whether in Lebanon, the West Bank or Gaza, Israel has acted in self-defense after suffering thousands of rocket and suicide attacks against our civilians. Few countries have fought with clearer justification, fewer still with greater restraint, and none with a lower civilian-to-militant casualty ratio. Israel withdrew from Lebanon and Gaza to advance peace only to receive war in return.
Whereas Israelis in 1973 viewed the creation of a Palestinian state as a mortal threat, it is now the official policy of the Israeli government. Jewish men of European backgrounds once dominated Israel, but today Sephardic Jews, Arabs and women are prominent in every facet of society. This is a country where a Supreme Court panel of two women and an Arab convicted a former president of sexual offenses. It is the sole Middle Eastern country with a growing Christian population. Even in the face of immense security pressures, Israel has never known a second of nondemocratic rule.
In 1967, Israel offered to exchange newly captured territories for peace treaties with Egypt and Syria. The Arab states refused. Israel later evacuated the Sinai, an area 3.5 times its size, for peace with Egypt, and it conceded land and water resources for peace with Jordan.
In 1993, Israel recognized the Palestinian people ignored by Life magazine, along with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the perpetrator of those "Arab terrorist attacks." Israel facilitated the creation of a Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza and armed its security forces. Twice, in 2000 and 2008, Israel offered the Palestinians a state in Gaza, virtually all of the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. In both cases, the Palestinians refused. Astonishingly, in spite of the Palestinian Authority's praise for terror, a solid majority of Israelis still support the two-state solution.
Israel has built settlements (some before 1973), and it has removed some to promote peace, including 7,000 settlers to fulfill the treaty with Egypt. Palestinians have rebuffed Israel's peace offers not because of the settlements—most of which would have remained in Israel anyway, and which account for less than 2% of the West Bank—but because they reject the Jewish state. When Israel removed all settlements from Gaza, including their 9,000 residents, the result was a terrorist ministate run by Hamas, an organization dedicated to killing Jews world-wide.
Nevertheless, Israeli governments have transferred large areas to the Palestinian Authority and much security responsibility to Palestinian police. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has removed hundreds of checkpoints, eased the Gaza land blockade and joined President Obama in calling for the resumption of direct peace talks without preconditions. Addressing Congress, Mr. Netanyahu declared that the emergence of a Palestinian state would leave some settlements beyond Israel's borders and that "with creativity and with good will a solution can be found" for Jerusalem.
Given all this, why have anti-Israel libels once consigned to hate groups become media mainstays? How can we explain the assertion that an insidious "Israel Lobby" purchases votes in Congress, or that Israel oppresses Christians? Why is Israel's record on gay rights dismissed as camouflage for discrimination against others?
The answer lies in the systematic delegitimization of the Jewish state. Having failed to destroy Israel by conventional arms and terrorism, Israel's enemies alit on a subtler and more sinister tactic that hampers Israel's ability to defend itself, even to justify its existence.
It began with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat's 1974 speech to the U.N., when he received a standing ovation for equating Zionism with racism—a view the U.N. General Assembly endorsed the following year. It gained credibility on college campuses through anti-Israel courses and "Israel Apartheid Weeks." It burgeoned through the boycott of Israeli scholars, artists and athletes, and the embargo of Israeli products. It was perpetuated by journalists who published doctored photos and false Palestinian accounts of Israeli massacres.
Israel must confront the acute dangers of delegitimization as it did armies and bombers in the past. Along with celebrating our technology, pioneering science and medicine, we need to stand by the facts of our past. "The Spirit of Israel" has not diminished since 1973—on the contrary, it has flourished. The state that Life once lionized lives even more vibrantly today. I would say that the plot to delegitimize Israel came a few years before the 1974 speech, in 1968, but otherwise this is right on. I could not find the Life article online, alas. But here's a copy of the cover (h/t Brad): (h/t David G) UPDATE: I found the link the the 1968 PLO document I was referring to. 
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| Lawrence of Judea Posted: 15 May 2012 01:45 PM PDT An interesting 2009 article by Martin Gilbert: T.E. Lawrence—better known in Britain and throughout the Middle East as Lawrence of Arabia—was a lifelong friend of Arab national aspirations. In 1917 and 1918 he participated as a British officer in the Arab revolt against the Turks, a revolt led by Sharif Hussein, later King of the Hedjaz. He was also an adviser to Hussein's son Feisal, whom he hoped to see on the throne of Syria. For generations of British Arabists, Lawrence was and remains a symbol of British understanding of and support for the Arab cause. Virtually unknown, however, is his understanding of and support for Jewish national aspirations in the same era....
[I]ndeed, Lawrence's view of the potential evolution of the Jewish National Home in British Mandate Palestine was far from hostile to Jewish hopes. In an article entitled "The Changing East," published in the influential Round Table magazine in 1920, Lawrence wrote of "the Jewish experiment" in Palestine that it was "a conscious effort, on the part of the least European people in Europe, to make head against the drift of the ages, and return once more to the Orient from which they came."
Lawrence noted of the new Jewish immigrants: "The colonists will take back with them to the land which they occupied for some centuries before the Christian era samples of all the knowledge and technique of Europe. They propose to settle down amongst the existing Arabic-speaking population of the country, a people of kindred origin, but far different social condition. They hope to adjust their mode of life to the climate of Palestine, and by the exercise of their skill and capital to make it as highly organized as a European state."
As Lawrence envisaged it in his Round Table article, this settlement would be done in a way that would be beneficial to the Arabs. "The success of their scheme," he wrote of the Zionists, "will involve inevitably the raising of the present Arab population to their own material level, only a little after themselves in point of time, and the consequences might be of the highest importance for the future of the Arab world. It might well prove a source of technical supply rendering them independent of industrial Europe, and in that case the new confederation might become a formidable element of world power." Which is exactly how the Zionists at the time felt. (h/t Aaron) 
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| And now...FemTechWashing Posted: 15 May 2012 12:00 PM PDT More hasbara from the US Embassy in Israel. 
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| Iran executes "Israeli spy" Posted: 15 May 2012 10:20 AM PDT From BBC: Majid Jamali Fashi, 24, was convicted of killing Professor Massoud Ali Mohammadi by detonating a bomb outside his home in January 2010.
Fashi was also accused of being a spy for the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad and receiving $120,000 (£72,000) for the killing.
Israel does not comment on such claims.
"Majid Jamali Fashi, the Mossad spy and the person who assassinated Masoud Ali Mohammadi, our nation's nuclear scientist was hanged on Tuesday morning," Iran's Irna news agency reported.
Professor Massoud Ali Mohammadi was a particle physics professor at Tehran University. He is one of several high-profile nuclear scientists to have been killed in Tehran in recent years.
Iran has repeatedly accused Israel and the US of trying to harm its nuclear programme.
Fashi, who was tried and convicted in August 2011, appeared on Iranian TV in January confessing to the professor's killing, and giving details of the intelligence gathering operation he said he was involved in.
Opposition sources in Iran have accused the government of killing Professor Mohammadi because he was one of their supporters. Al Arabiya adds that he was convicted of Moharebeh (waging war against God) and notes "Western analysts said Ali-Mohammadi, a 50-year-old Tehran University professor, had little, if any, role in Iran's sensitive nuclear program. A spokesman for Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation said at the time he was not involved in its activities." The Mossad may have been involved in the assassination, but it is far from certain that Fashi had anything to do with it. Sounds like an Iranian hit job where they got the opportunity to kill 2 people they wanted to get rid of. (h/t John W.) 
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| Thousands of Jews go on pilgrimage to Morocco Posted: 15 May 2012 08:50 AM PDT From AFP: Thousands of Jews from Morocco, Israel and other parts of the world have over the past week carried out an annual pilgrimage to the Islamic nation to honour celebrated rabbis.
Morocco may not be the likeliest of Jewish pilgrim destinations, but the north African nation has for centuries had a vibrant Jewish population and some 1,200 of the faith's pious ancestors are buried in cemeteries here. In recent days, about 5,000 pilgrims have gathered to pray for peace at sanctuaries and gravesites.
Perhaps the most famous of these burial grounds is that of Amran Ben Diwan, a venerated rabbi who was interred 250 years ago in the mountains of Ouazzane, about 200 kilometers (125 miles) north of the capital Rabat.
Ben Diwan's tomb, nestled in a Jewish cemetery among acres of olive trees, was placed under police guard and only people who had been authorised by Morocco's Jewish community were allowed access.
The pilgrimage will finish Saturday, following five days of prayers and celebration, with pilgrims hurling candles into a large fire by Ben Diwan's tomb. Arab media reports that no Israelis attended last week's Lag B'Omer pilgrimage to Tunisia, but this one in Morocco is attracting many Israeli Jews. 
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| Gaza exports clothes to British retailer. Who will boycott them? Posted: 15 May 2012 07:20 AM PDT From Reuters: Israel allowed on Monday the export of Palestinian-made clothes from the Gaza Strip for the first time in at least five years, a Palestinian official said.
Raed Fattouh, who coordinates supplies into Gaza, said a truck carrying 2,000 pieces of mainly woolen garments were exported through the Israeli-controlled Kerem Shalom crossing towards an Israeli seaport en route to Britain.
Gaza's Ashour knitwear company, which was rebuilt with UK aid after it closed in 2007, will export the goods to Britain's J.D. Williams clothes outlet, a UK official said. Since Hamas is systematically repressing Palestinian Arabs - unjustly jailing them, evicting them from their homes, and so forth - and since Hamas controls Gaza and collects taxes from these exports, I'm sure that the "pro-Palestinian" crowd will want to boycott these clothes - and the entire JD Williams company - to help bring down the Hamas government. That is the logic of the "pro-Palestinian" boycotters, isn't it? 
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| "Nakba" protesters attack worshippers at Rachel's Tomb Posted: 15 May 2012 05:50 AM PDT YNet Hebrew reports that dozens of masked Palestinian Arab youths tried to stone about about 20 Jewish worshippers at Rachel's Tomb. The Jews were forced to go back inside the shrine to protect themselves. Both Israeli border police and PA security forces came to break up the riot. Palestinian Arabs also threw stones and burned tires near the Ma'arat HaMachpela in Hebron. 
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| Turkey freaks over "Israeli spy bird" Posted: 15 May 2012 03:04 AM PDT Add another member to the Zionist Attack Zoo.  A bird found in Turkey, with markings indicating it was from Tel Aviv, has been called an Israeli spy by Turkish media. The already dead bird was caught by beekeepers. Besides the words "Tel Aviv Israel" they saw the most nefarious tag saying "C43917," obviously a secret spy code. The bird's left nostril was three times the size of its right nostril, leading Turkish authorities to conclude that it might be hiding spy equipment in its beak. It took a few days before Turkish media noted that researchers tag birds all the time to note migration patterns. One article noted that Turkey accused Moscow of using spy birds over 60 years ago. This bird is clearly a martyr for the Zionist cause. I hope that his or her body can be returned so Israel can give it a proper burial with the full military honors it deserves.(After the secret photos are extracted from its beak electronics, of course.) UPDATE: It looks like the bird is the European Bee-Eater. (h/t Ian) 
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A bird found in Turkey, with markings indicating it was from Tel Aviv, has been called an Israeli spy by Turkish media. 
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