Peter Hitchens reports from Israel.
Which of these is the greater threat to Israel?
Could this be the way the Middle East conflict ends, not with a mushroom cloud or a peace deal but with the slow disappearance of the Jewish state? It seems a real possibility.
Israel must cope with two far deeper dangers than Iran’s amateur atom bomb, or even unending waves of suicide bombers.
Those perils come instead from maternity wards, where Arabs are slowly winning a long-distance population race with Jews – and from Israel’s own foolishly forgotten Arab people, finally beginning to pump up their political muscle.
13 comments:
Hitchens makes the extraordinary claim that multiple thousands of Russian settlers in Israel are not jews. Does anyone know more about this? (Some of them are even selling anti-semitic literature in Israel!).
Over discussions at lunch today, Dan, Andy & I were discussing the future of Israel. The question came up of Israeli law re: naturalization of non-Jews. I have found this, which shows that Israel's laws are comparable with that of any other free, open, western democracy:
Digging deeper: Israeli citizenship and non-Jews
Israpundit
03/09/02
4. Naturalization
A person 18 years of age or older may acquire Israeli nationality by naturalization if he meets these criteria: (1) is currently in Israel, (2) has been in Israel for 3 of the 5 preceding years, (3) intends to settle in the country (4) has some knowledge of Hebrew (former Palestinian citizens are exempt from this provision), (5) renounces any and all foreign nationalities, and (6) takes an oath of loyalty to the State of Israel. Completion of all of the above requirements is not essential in all instances, however, as the Minister of the Interior at his discretion has the power (for a special reason) to waive requirements (1), (2),(4), and (5) above.
I found this article summary on the Jerusalem Post website. It seems to make a passing reference to the Russian Christian immigrants mentioned in the Hitchens piece.
In the JP article summary the author complains that the Israeli government applies immigration restrictions on observant Ethiopian Jewish immigrants while 'tens of thousands of Russian Christians are made citizens of Israel'.
Not sure about the Israpundit website. Their slogan 'There is no diplomatic solution' seems a bit of an extreme position to me.
As previously mentions, Peter Hitchens is off his rocker...
...a couple of observations: give how nicely the Israeli Arabs do, compared to Arabs everywhere else and ESPECIALLY in Gaza, is there any suggestion anywhere that Israeli Arabs are opposed to the continuation of the state of which they are citizens...
...and the recent fascist coup in Hamastan aka Gaza does give a fantastic opportunity to pour American, European and Israeli aid into the West Bank... turn the West bank into a supported, successful and self-sufficient Palestinian state and let the contrast speak for itself...
...ultimately, the long-term security and prosperity of Israel depends upon the quality of relations with its neigbours, and there is/will be no better advert for western democracy than the relative propserity of arabs and muslims either within Israel, or in neigbouring countries that participate in the global liberal economy...
...or is that just too damn hopeful?
Peter Hitchens follows up on his report from Israel to post a comment on the two state solution:
The two-state delusion
Having spent most of last week in Israel, with some brief incursions into the West Bank, and having got as close as I care to go to Gaza, I thought it would be a good moment to look at the ridiculous falsehoods and self-deceptions which infest the coverage of the issue.
Outstanding Hitchen's article found there by Andy. I was going to quote some but would have ended up quoting the lot. Suffice it to say he makes very important points about:
* the clan system in the Muslim world (brilliantly described in Infidel)
* the history and real intentions of Palestinian nationalism
* the culpability of Palestinian Arabs in the Holocaust
If you are ever asked (as I was recently) to give a potted history of Israel, you can now stop at 1917 and refer the listener to this article for the 20th century part.
To answer Wembley's points:
* have no links or stats at hand, but it would not surprise me if many Israeli Arabs were (at least publicly) anti-Zionist.
* supporting Fatah may be better than supporting Hamas to the same degree that Mao wasn't as bad as Stalin. Indeed given that they are both equally anti-Israeli but at least Hamas are open about it, Fatah may be even worse (though Fatah are markedly less competent than Hamas, so are possibly less dangerous). Still, there's obvious merit in preventing a political reunification of Gaza and West Bank. But no amount of aid could make the West Bank prosperous, any more than pouring gazillions into Mobuto's Congo would have made that prosperous.
* the destruction of Israel is a far greater priority than material prosperity for vast numbers in the Arab Muslim world. The 2nd Intifada itself is an example, shredding as it did the vestiges of any post-Oslo recovery.
An article on anti-Zionist Israeli Arabs.
Israel's Domestic Enemy
by Daniel Pipes
New York Sun
December 19, 2006
And an opinion from an Israeli lawyer. No idea how representative or accurate it is.
The Assault on Israel by Israeli Arab Judges
Eli Weinstein
danielpipes.org
Dec 20, 2006
I've got to say that I don't think Peter Hitchens' reputation for being 'off his rocker' is entirely fair.
Regarding Joe's point about Israeli Arabs, I know far less about Israel than JP so I can't comment with any certainty, however, it wouldn't surprise me to find that this following quote from the original Peter Hitchen's report accurately describes Arab Israelis feeling towards the state of Israel:
'The Israeli Arabs, meanwhile, have begun to ask why – if they are a fifth of the population – they must salute a wholly Jewish flag or stand to attention for a wholly Jewish national anthem, or vote for Jewish political leaders, or support an immigration policy that favours Jews and blocks the borders to Arabs.'
Grumpy ol' Peter Hitchens has posted a long comment on the thread to his own blog on Israel.
Here it is:
'In response to the posting by 'Grant' at 2.28 p.m. on 20th June:
I do not 'imply that Arabs are more tribal than us'. I state that Muslim
Arabs ( not Christians) tend to have strong tribal loyalties which make
their societies different from ours and which make it unlikely that they
will develop strong institutions based on national representative democracy.
Several commentators have concluded this is mainly to do with Islam, in the
form it takes in the Middle East, being more willing to accept cousin
marriage than Christianity. It is nothing to do with the fact that they are
Arabs, but with the culture in which they live. I do not think there is much
of a comparison with strict Orthodox Jews, a minority in a secular country,
whose political influence in Israel (like that of several other minorities)
is magnified by Israel's system of proportional representation, much
disliked by many Israelis but still a feature of the only operational
law-governed free country in the Middle East. The problem is not 'impossible
to solve' because of Arab tribalism
or because of Orthodox (or Zionist) inflexibility, but because there is no
Arab party or force which is interested in a permanent compromise - while
it's demonstrable that there are Israeli parties and a substantial body of
Israeli opinion open to such a compromise.
In terms of massacre, deaths in the 'troubles' need to be carefully analysed
and distinguished from one another. Numbers alone ( distressing as they are)
do not tell the complete story in the eyes of anyone except propagandists.
In my view, the intentional murders of innocents by suicide bombers,
celebrated with joy afterwards by official and semi-official media, are in a
category of their own. I do not excuse ( and have specifically condemned)
the deaths of innocents in Israeli military attacks or clashes between armed
men. But they do not have the same moral character as deliberate murder of
unarmed non-combatants. In terms of undoubted massacres, I was referring in
particular to that at Deir Yassin, committed against Arabs by Jews in 1948,
and those in Jerusalem (1920) and Hebron (1929) committed by Arabs against
Jews. As a British subject, I also cannot omit the murder of Lord Moyne, the
bombing of the King David Hotel or the terrorist murder of British soldiers
and the
booby-trapping of their bodies, all the work of Zionist terrorists.
As to whether my expectation that a future US President will place severe
pressure on Israel is correct, I would cite, as past examples of such
pressure, the Madrid conference and the stoppage of weapons supplies during
the 1973 war, to pressure Israel into refraining from destroying the
Egyptian Third Army. As for the future, just wait and see. I think you will
find that I have the right of it. National Interest is the highest law of
foreign policy, and the USA has no further use for Israel, though it would
never specifically, abruptly and openly abandon Israel to invasion or
dismemberment, for domestic political reasons. My belief is that the
disengagement will be slow, and accompanied by significant migration of
Israelis to the USA, and by the demographic process outlined in my MoS
article.
Finally, Grant says "I have never understood the argument that as Palestine
was never a country its original inhabitants have no rights over any
invaders. If France invaded Surrey and set up a French homeland there, could
they claim that the locals had no rights?" Really? It seems quite simple to
me, though the argument is actually that many ignorant critics of Israel are
so ill-informed about the subject that they think that 'Israelis' invaded an
Arab country called Palestine and stole the Arabs' land. Very few people,
often most especially those with strong opinions on this subject, have more
than the vaguest idea of the origins of the dispute.
Three points. The argument is not about whether the indigenous Arabs have
any 'rights' or about 'invaders'. Many of the indigenous Arabs do, to some
extent, have rights and are citizens of Israel, under the unsatisfactory but
not intolerable conditions that I described in my MoS article. If Israelis
were the Hitler-like ethnic cleansers portrayed by extreme anti-Israel
propaganda, this could hardly be the case, could it? Secondly, what
invasion? The important invasion was that of General Allenby, who invaded
the Ottoman Empire and expelled its Turkish masters. Subsequent changes in
territory have been Jewish or Israeli responses to invasions, or threats of
invasions, by Arab armies. Jews have always lived in Jerusalem( and had
always lived in Hebron until the massacre) and Zionist immigration into the
area long predated the Balfour Declaration or any serious idea that there
might be a Jewish national home or state. There are other interesting
arguments about Arab migration into the
area from other parts of the Middle East, which are worth studying and do
not seem to me to have been resolved. Surrey is not a sovereign country, but
is a part of one, not an imperial possession of some other country, and a
French invasion or colonisation of any part of Britain would be an invasion
of a sovereign country. The people of Surrey are not the voteless, powerless
subjects of a foreign ruler, as the people of the area now known as
'Palestine' were before 1917. The British invasion and seizure of Ottoman
Turkish imperial territory in the First World War does not have the same
character, and cannot be portrayed in the same way. It also could not happen
now, since the age of the old colonial empires is gone, and only the
Chinese, American and Russian Empires( plus the growing EU empire) are
permitted to exist and viewed as correct. But it happened then.
It was a transfer, by violent conquest, of subjugated territory from one
empire to another. The subsequent disposition of the territory by the then
imperial power, Britain, was the original act, and the quarrels about that
disposition have been continuing unabated for the last 70 years. Had the
Arab leaders of the region accepted the Peel Commission recommendations of
1937, or the UN partition plan of 1947, the Jewish homeland or state would
be far smaller than it is now and there might be no Arab refugees. Neither
would the Arab leaders accept the 1948 armistice line (about which they now
claim to be so keen) , and their continued belligerency led to the 1967 war
and a further loss of territory. Repeatedly, the Arab leadership's
unwillingness to accept peaceful compromise and to choose unending war has
cost the Arab people very dear. I do not know whose purpose this has served,
but I cannot see that it has been much use to the Arab people of the region.
Posted by: Peter Hitchens | 22 June 2007 at 11:53 AM'
Mad, bad Melanie Phillips writes a typically defiant piece in this week's Spectator marking Israel's 60th anniversary. Judging from her comment below, she sides more with the religiously orthodox, rather than the secular, Israelis:
'And although unprecedented numbers of mainly secular Israelis now choose to live abroad, there are rapidly growing numbers of the religiously orthodox who know exactly what they are fighting for and are prepared to die for it'
I highly recommended these two articles on Israel:
1) Richard Holbrooke in the Washington Post on the tensions within the Truman administration over the recognition of the Jewish State.
2) Ethan Bronner in the New York Times about the Israeli Arabs mixed feelings towards the state of Israel on her 60th anniversary.
In an article marking Israel's 60th Anniversary, Christopher Hitchens asks:
"Can Israel Survive for Another 60 Years?Perhaps, but not necessarily as a Jewish state.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, May 12, 2008, at 12:26 PM ET
It's somehow absurd and trivial to use the word Israel and the expression 60th birthday in the same sentence or the same breath. (What is this, some candle-bedecked ceremony in Miami?) The questions before us are somewhat more antique, and also a little more pressingly and urgently modern, than that. Has Zionism made Jews more safe or less safe? Has it cured the age-old problem of anti-Semitism or not? Is it part of the tikkun olam—the mandate for the healing and repair of the human world—or is it another rent and tear in the fabric?
Jewish people are on all sides of this argument, as always. There are Hasidic rabbis who declare the Jewish state to be a blasphemy, but only because there can be no such state until the arrival of the Messiah (who may yet tarry). There are Jewish leftists who feel shame that a settler state was erected on the ruins of so many Palestinian villages. There are also Jews who collaborate with extreme-conservative Christians in an effort to bring on the day of Armageddon, when all these other questions will necessarily become moot. And, of course, there are Jews who simply continue to live in, or to support from a distance, a nerve-racked and high-tech little state that absorbs a lot of violence and cruelty and that has also shown itself very capable of inflicting the same.
I find that no other question so much reminds me of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his aphorism about the necessity of living with flat-out contradiction. Do I sometimes wish that Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann had never persuaded either the Jews or the gentiles to create a quasi-utopian farmer-and-worker state at the eastern end of the Mediterranean? Yes. Do I wish that the Israeli air force could find and destroy all the arsenals of Hezbollah and Hamas and Islamic Jihad? Yes. Do I think it ridiculous that Viennese and Russian and German scholars and doctors should have vibrated to the mad rhythms of ancient so-called prophecies rather than helping to secularize and reform their own societies? Definitely. Do I feel horror and disgust at the thought that a whole new generation of Arab Palestinians is being born into the dispossession and/or occupation already suffered by their grandparents and even great-grandparents? Absolutely, I do.
The questions of principle and the matters of brute realism have a tendency (especially for one who does not think that heaven plays any part in the game) to converge. Without God on your side, what the hell are you doing in the greater Jerusalem area in the first place? Israel may not be the rogue state that so many people say it is—including so many people who will excuse the crimes of Syria and Iran—but what if it runs the much worse risk of being a failed state? Here I must stop asking questions and simply and honestly answer one. In many visits to the so-called Holy Land, I have never quite been able to imagine that a Jewish state in Palestine will still be in existence a hundred years from now. A state for Jews, possibly. But a Jewish state …
Israeli propaganda for a long time obscured this crucial distinction. If all that was wanted was a belt of Jewish territory on the coast and plains, such as that which was occupied by the yishuv in pre-state days, the international community could easily have agreed to place it within the defense perimeter of "the West" or the United Nations or, later, NATO. Aha, say the Zionists, the bad old days are gone when we were so naive as to rely on gentiles to defend us. Very well. But also mark the sequel. Israel is now incredibly dependent upon non-Jews for its own defense and, moreover, rules over millions of other non-Jews who loathe and detest it from the bottom of their hearts. How long do you think the first set of non-Jews will go on defending Israel from the second lot and from their very wealthy and numerous kinsmen? In other words, Zionism has only replaced and repositioned the question of anti-Semitism. For me, the Israeli family is not the alternative to the diaspora. It is part of the diaspora. To speak roughly, there are three groups of 6 million Jews. The first 6 million live in what the Zionist movement used to call Palestine. The second 6 million live in the United States. The third 6 million are distributed mainly among Russia, France, Britain, and Argentina. Only the first group lives daily in range of missiles that can be (and are) launched by people who hate Jews. Well, irony is supposed to be a Jewish specialty.
That last point, however, brings me to my own closing observation. It is a moral idiot who thinks that anti-Semitism is a threat only to Jews. The history of civilization demonstrates something rather different: Judaeophobia is an unfailing prognosis of barbarism and collapse, and the states and movements that promulgate it are doomed to suicide as well as homicide, as was demonstrated by Catholic Spain as well as Nazi Germany. Today's Iranian "Islamic republic" is a nightmare for its own citizens as well as a pestilential nuisance and menace to its neighbors. And the most depressing and wretched spectacle of the past decade, for all those who care about democracy and secularism, has been the degeneration of Palestinian Arab nationalism into the theocratic and thanatocratic hell of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, where the Web site of Gaza's ruling faction blazons an endorsement of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This obscenity is not to be explained away by glib terms like despair or occupation, as other religious fools like Jimmy Carter—who managed to meet the Hamas gangsters without mentioning their racist manifesto—would have you believe. (Is Muslim-on-Muslim massacre in Darfur or Iraq or Pakistan or Lebanon to be justified by conditions in Gaza?) Instead, this crux forces non-Zionists like me to ask whether, in spite of everything, Israel should be defended as if it were a part of the democratic West. This is a question to which Israelis themselves have not yet returned a completely convincing answer, and if they truly desire a 60th, let alone a 70th, birthday celebration, they had better lose no time in coming up with one.'
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