Israel

Still catching opprobrium for just trying to exist

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This post is going to delve into some layers of historical implication, but let’s start with a Hill column I came across this morning.

I wasn’t previously familiar with the author, Avraham Shama, so I looked him up. I habitually do that in such cases. I feel it’s only fair to get some overall sense of where someone is coming from before I either express support for, or take issue with, his or her position on a particular issue.

His website bio depicts him as an affable, not-really-puffed-up thinker on a fairly wide array of subjects:

Hello,

​

I am Avraham Shama, but people call me Avi.

Thank you for visiting me on these pages.

​

I am a writer, university professor, business school dean, and consultant. I work with words; big and small, bold and shy, happy and sad, and share them with my readers, students, clients, and the public.

My tales are about life, spying, business, and innovation.

Though I already spoke two other languages, I started out as an English major because I wanted to be a writer. I switched to economics in order to make a living. 

My writing, teaching, and consulting reinforce each other.

Done right, they are very rewarding. My many writing and teaching awards attest to this.

I hope you find this website useful.

​

- Avi

​

His Hill column shows that, among his traits as an observer, he can be downright disingenuous. From the piece’s title, “A Palestinian State Is Inevitable; Biden Should Speed Up the Process” to its opening sentence, he dives directly into a defense of his position.

Oh, he qualifies it by pointing out what happened in the runup to modern Israel’s birth:

On Nov. 27, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted to partition the land of the British Mandate in that part of the world into a Jewish state and a Palestinian state. The Palestinians rejected the partition and declared war against the Jewish people, who won.

But before and after including that pretty important nugget, he slathers on the indiscriminate-bombing-kids-are-dying preening that we’ve come to expect from the likes of Joe Biden and Antony Blinken.

His framing of Israel’s reaction to the recent UN Security Council vote calling for an immediate ceasefire is loathsome:

When the U.S. did not veto a U.N. resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire in the Gaza Strip last week, Netanyahu retaliated by canceling a Washington meeting between his delegation and the Biden administration to discuss Israel’s strategy in Rafah. 

Imagine a junior partner like Netanyahu, who has been benefitting from U.S. monetary, arms and diplomatic support, treating the U.S. like this. And this is not the first time. Chutzpah doesn’t even begin to describe Bibi’s behavior.

The reason I started this post with a look at Shama’s column is that it allows me to offer differing viewpoints on a number of things he brings up.

Matthew Continetti’s recent Washington Free Beacon column titled “Biden Has No Israel Policy” makes clear why a ceasefire, let alone talk of a Palestinian state, is a bad, bad idea:

To change a policy, you must have a policy. And it is increasingly clear that the Biden administration has no coherent Israel policy, nor a coherent policy for the Greater Middle East. What the Biden administration has instead is a wish list. The items on this list sound nice to liberal ears: Defeat Hamas, free the hostages, capsize Netanyahu's coalition, end the war, jump-start the peace process. But the items are also numerous. They conflict with one another. They aren't prioritized in any way.

A policy implies a strategy, an alignment of ends with means. Yet Biden's end—the resolution of an irreconcilable conflict—is utopian. And his means—a Palestinian state—is worse than farfetched. A Palestinian state, if established under current conditions, would be a dictatorship that threatens the lives of everyone in its vicinity. A Palestinian state would not be a gain, but an error of galactic proportions.

To believe that a ceasefire would lead to a nonviolent Palestinian state and Israeli-Saudi normalization is to succumb to delusion. A ceasefire would leave Hamas's remaining brigades intact, emboldening its leadership and its followers in the West Bank, Lebanon, and elsewhere. A ceasefire would tempt Hezbollah to escalate its simmering conflict with Israel. A ceasefire would strengthen Iran and its proxies, including the Houthis. There is one way to restore security, reduce tensions, and promote regional integration: Allow Israel to prove its strength by ending Hamas as a coherent military force.

And this matter of releasing the hostages has been flatly rejected by Hamas all along.

Is anybody really giving thought to what those hostages are enduring on a day-by-day, minute-by-minute basis?

It’s not pretty:

Amit Soussana has become the first Israeli woman to speak publicly about enduring what she says was a sexual assault and other forms of violence during her 55 days in captivity following the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, according to reporting by The New York Times on Tuesday.

Abducted from her home by at least 10 men, Soussana said she was subjected to a horrifying series of events that saw her beaten and dragged into Gaza. The details of Soussana’s captivity paint a grim picture of her suffering; from being locked alone and chained by her ankle to being forced into performing sexual acts under the threat of a gun, according to The New York Times.

Soussana, a lawyer, was released in late November of 2023 as part of an exchange of hostages in Gaza who were kidnapped during the Hamas attack for Palestinian prisoners.

“Amit Soussana’s courageous testimony detailing her horrific captivity is one of many harrowing accounts from hostages held by Hamas,” the Hostages Families Forum said in a statement.

It added, “Amit is a hero, as are all hostages enduring this living hell for 172 agonizing days. We must bring these brave women and men home before it is too late.”

Soussana’s eight hours of interviews with The New York Times shed light on the psychological and physical torment she said she experienced at the hands of her captors, offering extensive details of her ordeal across several locations in Gaza, including in private homes and a subterranean tunnel.

Several days into her captivity, she said, her guard began asking about her sex life.

Soussana said she was held alone in a child’s bedroom, chained by her left ankle. Sometimes, the guard would enter, sit beside her on the bed, lift her shirt and touch her, she told The New York Times.

Soussana added that the guard repeatedly asked when her period was due. When her period ended, around Oct. 18, she tried to put him off by pretending that she was bleeding for nearly a week.

Around October 24, the guard, who called himself Muhammad, attacked her, she said.

Early that morning, she said, Muhammad unlocked her chain and left her in the bathroom. After she undressed and began washing herself in the bathtub, Muhammad returned and stood in the doorway, holding a pistol.

“He came towards me and shoved the gun at my forehead,” Soussana recalled. After hitting Soussana and forcing her to remove her towel, “Muhammad groped her, sat her on the edge of the bathtub and hit her again,” The New York Times reported, citing Soussana.

Dr. Ayelet Levy Shachar, mother of 19-year-old hostage Naama Levy, who was captured on video being dragged by her hair from the back of a Jeep at gunpoint in Gaza, her sweatpants stained with blood said, “Amit’s horrifying testimony is more proof that our loved ones in Gaza endure physical, sexual, and psychological torture every single day. Each day there is like an eternity.”

She said what happened to Amit “is the same nightmare so many other hostages, women and men, are facing every day in captivity. Maybe even at this very moment. We are begging – their lives hang in the balance. Bring our daughters and all our loved ones back to us now – before it is too late”.

And regarding the 1947 rejection of the UN proposal for two states, it was not the first such thumbs-down. There was the rejection ten years earlier of the Peel Commission proposal:

The commission was established at a time of increased violence; serious clashes between Arabs and Jews broke out in 1936 and were to last three years. On 11 November 1936, the commission arrived in Palestine to investigate the reasons behind the uprising. The commission was charged with determining the cause of the riots, and judging the grievances of both sides. Chaim Weizmann made a speech on behalf of the Jews. On 25 November 1936, testifying before the Peel Commission, Weizmann said that there are in Europe 6,000,000 Jews ... "for whom the world is divided into places where they cannot live and places where they cannot enter."^[13]

The Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, testified in front of the commission, opposing any partition of Arab lands with the Jews. He demanded full cessation of Jewish immigration. Although the Arabs continued to boycott the Commission officially, there was a sense of urgency to respond to Weizmann's appeal to restore calm. The former Mayor of Jerusalem Ragheb Bey al-Nashashibi—who was the Mufti's rival in the internal Palestinian arena, was thus sent to explain the Arab perspective through unofficial channels.

The Arabs seem to have had a distaste for the advancement Jews had brought to the area:

The causes of the Arab rebellion that broke out in the previous year were judged to be

First, the desire of the Arabs for national independence; secondly, their antagonism to the establishment of the Jewish National Home in Palestine, quickened by their fear of Jewish domination. Among contributory causes were the effect on Arab opinion of the attainment of national independence by ‘Iraq, Trans-Jordan, Egypt, Syria and the Lebanon; the rush of Jewish immigrants escaping from Central and Eastern Europe; the inequality of opportunity enjoyed by Arabs and Jews respectively in placing their case before Your Majesty’s Government and the public; the growth of Arab mistrust; Arab alarm at the continued purchase of Arab land by the intensive character and the "modernism" of Jewish nationalism; and lastly the general uncertainty, accentuated by the ambiguity of certain phrases in the Mandate, as to the ultimate intentions of the Mandatory Power.^[15]

The Commission found that the drafters of the Mandate could not have foreseen the advent of massive Jewish immigration, that they considered due to "drastic restriction of immigration into the United States, the advent of the National Socialist Government in Germany in 1933 and the increasing economic pressure on the Jews in Poland."^[16] They wrote that "The continued impact of a highly intelligent and enterprising race, backed by large financial resources, on a comparatively poor indigenous community, on a different cultural level, may produce in time serious reactions."^[17]

The Commission found that "though the Arabs have benefited by the development of the country owing to Jewish immigration, this has had no conciliatory effect. On the contrary, improvement in the economic situation in Palestine has meant the deterioration of the political situation".^[17] Addressing the "Arab charge that the Jews have obtained too large a proportion of good land cannot be maintained", the Commission noted that "Much of the land now carrying orange groves was sand dunes or swamp and uncultivated when it was purchased."^[18] They write that "The shortage of land is, we consider, due less to the amount of land acquired by Jews than to the increase in the Arab population".^[18]"Endeavours to control the alienation of land by Arabs to Jews have not been successful. In the hills there is no more room for further close settlement by Jews; in the plains it should only be allowed under certain restrictions."

Now, Shama’s piece seems to have been written before the furor over Israel’s mistaken targeting of the World Central Kitchen convoy, but we need to get into that. Israel has accepted full responsibility for it and is conducting an inquiry to determine how it happened.

But President Biden wasted no time in indulging in moral preening about it, as did several Democrat legislators.

Before running his mouth about this, maybe Biden should have recalled how the US killed ten Afghan civilians in a drone strike in 2021.

Now, let’s juxtapose this unfortunate incident with something that occurred in New Jersey on Monday:

Pro-Palestinian activists protested the ZAKA first aid and Jewish burial preparation organization at the Teaneck, New Jersey, Bnai Yeshurun synagogue on Monday over the humanitarian group's members sharing what they witnessed during the Hamas-led October 7 Massacre.

The Rabbinical Council of Bergen County and Bergen County Jewish Action Committee said on Monday in response to local authorities being unable to cancel the demonstration that they would hold a counter-protest of speeches, singing, and prayer led by rabbis and community leaders.

Both organizations urged community members to conduct themselves properly and not allow themselves to be baited by obscenities and provocations. Within Our Lifetime, one of the anti-Israel organizers, said on Telegram on Monday that they needed all their supporters to join because "there is an anti-Palestinian counter-protest."

BJAC and RCBC said in a joint Sunday statement that the protest was antisemitic for rallying at a Jewish holy site and against a humanitarian organization who provided final dignity for October 7 victims by collecting body parts and preparing victims for religious burial.

The ZAKA event had planned to hear first-hand accounts of the ZAKA workers and their search and rescue operations during the pogrom, and for local Jewish community members to show support and gratitude.

"This protest is a violation of all that we hold sacred," RCBC and BJAC said. "First and foremost, it is a desecration of the memory of those who died at the hands of genocidal terrorists...second it is a brazen attack on every member of the Jewish community, as the twelve hundred kedoshim [holy ones] of October 7th -- men, women, and children -- were killed simply for being Jewish."

RCBC and BJAC said that the demonstration was "yet another attack on our holy spaces of worship," referencing the March 10 protest of a Israeli real estate exposition at the Congregation Keter Torah Synagogue.

The Jewish groups had requested that local authorities intervene and prevent the protest, but were informed that thus would not be possible. RCBC and BJAC said that they would hold a peaceful counter protest if law enforcement could not prevent the anti-Israel rally from moving forward.

"This will not pass," RCBC and BJAC said. "The Jewish people will never be broken."

I highly recommend listening to yesterday’s Commentary magazine podcast, which makes clear that the mistaken targeting of the food convoy is forgivable and the riot in New Jersey is not.

Now that Iran is preparing to retaliate for Israel’s elimination of a senior Quds force commander, it will be interesting to see how the Biden administration weighs in. The stakes are pretty damn high for it to continue with its self-congratulatory grandstanding.

They’re not going to be significantly lowered as long as there’s rampant hatred of God’s chosen people.