Rescuing Biden from Afghanistan

 Rescuing Biden from Afghanistan

The think-tank crowd and Jewish former officials of the State Department are desperately trying to undercut the notion that the U.S. debacle demonstrates American unreliability where Israel is concerned.

 (August 30, 2021 / JNS) The obvious lesson for Israel from America’s abandonment of Afghanistan to the Taliban is that it can’t count on the U.S. to protect it from the consequences of ceding more territory.

Sgt. Nicole Gee, killed in Kabul

 This reality, however, is a disaster for those who have been banking on the idea of offering “American security guarantees” to facilitate additional Israeli withdrawals. It explains the recent flurry of statements from the think-tank crowd and Jewish former officials of the State Department trying to undercut the notion that the Afghanistan mess demonstrates U.S. unreliability.

 Writing in The Hill on the eve of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s arrival in Washington, ex-State Department “peace processor” David Makovsky urged Bennett to publicly express “confidence that the U.S. is a steadfast ally” of Israel. That, Makovsky asserted, is needed as a “rebuke to the new narrative”—coming out of Afghanistan—“that the U.S. has given up fighting extremism.”

 Meanwhile, Washington think-tanker Lucy Kurtzer-Ellenbogen told The New York Times: “A lot of the criticism about Afghanistan is that it’s an abandonment of traditional U.S. allies. [Bennett’s meeting with President Biden] was an opportunity to sit with a longstanding, steadfast ally and say this is still a focus and we will work side by side.”

 Two other failed “peace processors” weighed in with strikingly similar advice. Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer told The Forward that the events in Afghanistan “change nothing” concerning America’s reliability and Israel. “I don’t think [Afghanistan] will impact the [Bennett-Biden] meeting at all,” he said, claiming that “the American people are very happy” with Biden’s actions in Afghanistan.

 Kurtzer’s colleague, Aaron Miller, writing on CNN.com, urged Bennett to “be supportive rather than demanding” with Biden, by “strengthening the Palestinian Authority” (meaning, making more concessions to the P.A.) and “taking steps to avoid provocation of the Palestinians in Jerusalem” (meaning, banning Jews from living in some parts of the city).

 What these commentators have in common (aside from Makovsky and Kurtzer-Ellenbogen oddly using the same language) is that they are all trying to achieve the same goal: to rescue Biden’s image from the rubble of Afghanistan, lest Israelis derive the obvious lessons from that debacle.

 And there’s a specific reason they are so anxious to do that.

 Makovsky, Kurtzer, Miller and Kurtzer-Ellenbogen all advocate creating a Palestinian state in Israel’s back yard. That would reduce Israel to just nine miles wide and leave its security dependent on the good graces of the P.A. But they know that most Israelis think the statehood proposal is too risky. So Makovsky et al think they can sugarcoat the pill by offering American “security guarantees.”

 For years, pro-Palestinian pundits and State Department officials have been floating various versions of this scheme. They speak of stationing American or multinational forces along Israel’s border or setting up American-manned “early warning” posts.

 Occasionally, they have pushed for a U.S.-Israel mutual-defense treaty. Perhaps they could model it on the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty that the U.S. signed with South Vietnam.

 The U.S. abandonment of Afghanistan is a disaster for Makovsky and his colleagues, because it exposes the fragility of America’s overseas commitments. It reminds Israelis that, in the end, no U.S. president can “guarantee” something that one of his future successors might not uphold. The ex-peace processors are desperate to get that Afghanistan lesson out of the limelight as quickly as possible.

 But carefully orchestrated soundbites will not suffice to pull the wool over the Israeli public’s eyes, because Israelis have long memories.

 The Israelis remember how they withdrew from the Sinai after the 1956 war in exchange for a U.S. guarantee of freedom of passage in the Straits of Tiran. When Egypt closed the straits on the eve of the 1967 Six-Day War, the Johnson administration suddenly couldn’t remember the promise that the Eisenhower administration had made.

 They remember how the Nixon administration pressured Israel to accept a premature ceasefire in the 1970 War of Attrition, in exchange for a U.S. promise to stop Egypt from moving missiles close to the Suez Canal. But when the Egyptians went ahead and moved their missiles forward, President Nixon didn’t honor that promise. Israel paid a heavy price when those missiles were deployed in the Yom Kippur War three years later.

 There have been American technicians stationed in the Sinai Desert since 1975. That was how former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger got the Israelis to give up strategically vital mountain passes and oil fields there. In fact, ex-Ambassador Martin Indyk—Makovsky was his right-hand man—has just written a book glorifying that Kissinger mission.

 Indyk obviously sees the involvement of Americans on the ground as a useful way to get Israelis to take extreme risks, then and now. It’s important to keep in mind, however, that those Americans in the Sinai have never been tested. You can bet they would be on the first plane out if a new Egyptian regime sent its tanks into the Sinai.

 Afghanistan is another vivid, tragic illustration of the fact that, in the end, Israel is on its own. And Israelis can see that with their own eyes in the scenes of desperate Afghans clinging to the wheels of American planes departing from Kabul. That’s an image that’s hard to erase.

 Stephen M. Flatow is an attorney in New Jersey and the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He is the author of “A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror.”

Joe Biden supports the "Occupation"

 

Biden supports the "occupation"

By Stephen M. Flatow, Israel National News

 

The Biden administration has announced that it supports “The Occupation.”

 No, not that “occupation,” it’s the British-American occupation of territory which belongs to the nation of Mauritius.

 Yes, the same Biden administration that opposes Israel’s “occupation” of Judea-Samaria and that demands creation of a Palestinian Arab state there, has now publicly declared its support for the colonialist, imperialist, and possibly racist occupation by Britain of islands belonging to the Indian Ocean country of Mauritius.

Chagos Archipelago

 It’s an occupation in which the United States is complicit because the British allow the U.S. to maintain a military base there. So, since the U.S. benefits from this particular occupation, suddenly all those high-sounding principles that our State Department regularly hurls as accusations against Israel— “self-determination,” “illegal occupation” and all the rest—are out the window. 

 And guess who’s going along with this British-American Occupation? That’s right—all the folks who rail about “colonialism,” “imperialism,” “racism” and “occupation” when it comes to Israel. 

 Bernie Sanders. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. J Street. Ben & Jerry’s. Not a word from any of them about The Occupation—that is, when a Democratic administration is the party to blame. They’re only interested when they can blame Israel.

 The name “Mauritius” is familiar to those who know the history of England’s attempts to keep Jews out of the Land of Israel. In 1940, some 1,600 Jews whom the British caught trying to enter the ancient Jewish homeland were deported to Mauritius, which is 1,200 miles off the southeastern coast of Africa.

 Mauritius was just one of the many small countries around the world that British colonialists illegally occupied and exploited for centuries. The British authorities chose that remote island for the Jewish deportees in the hope that the world would forget about them. The fact that Mauritius is so remote has no doubt contributed to the ability of the current British and American governments to keep their ongoing Occupation out of sight. 

 But no longer. A series of recent diplomatic exchanges and little-publicized United Nations actions has shed light on the whole sordid story of the Occupied Mauritian Territory and its hypocritical enablers.

French racist colonialists invaded and occupied Mauritius in 1715. British racist imperialists conquered it in 1810. The newly acquired territory included a series of islands called the Chagos Archipelago.

 In 1966, the British allowed the United States to build a military base there. But the world was changing, the British empire was crumbling, and in 1968 London granted Mauritius its independence.

 But the Brits kept the Chagos Archipelago. Not that they ever asked the indigenous inhabitants what they wanted. “Self-determination” is only for Palestinian Arabs. The black and brown residents of the Chagos Archipelago were not only ignored, but persecuted. Between 1968 and 1973, the British violently expelled all 1,500 of the native Chagossians. 

 According to documents revealed in a lawsuit by one of those deportees, the U.S. and the United Kingdom agreed at the time that it would be “awkward” if the expulsions became known, so they suppressed all publicity about it. In the pre-internet age, colonialists got away with a lot of stuff like that.

 In 2019, the United Nations General Assembly voted, 116 to 6, that Britain had to leave the Chagos Archipelago within six months. The British ignored the UN resolution. Can you imagine how the international community—including Britain!— would respond if Israel ignored some six-month deadline set by the United Nations?

 The Washington Post this week pressed the Biden administration to explain its position. The State Department spokesman responded that the U.S. “unequivocally supports UK sovereignty” in the Occupied Mauritian Territory. He said: “The specific arrangement involving the facilities on Diego Garcia is grounded in the uniquely close and active defense and security partnership between the United States and the UK.”

 Oh, I see. If an Occupation is useful to the Biden administration, then it’s perfectly fine. If nobody is talking about the Occupied Mauritian Territory in trendy Manhattan cocktail parties or on MSNBC, then J Street stays silent, and Ben & Jerry’s can continue selling its ice cream to the personnel in that Occupation Military Base. 

 Nobody is demanding a “right of return” for Chagossians to go back to their archipelago. Nobody claims that the British and American governments are in danger of “losing their souls” because of their Occupation of other people’s land. Nobody is calling for boycotts, or divestments, or sanctions against the Occupation Regime. Nobody is criticizing the American military “settlement” in Chagossian territory. 

 File this one under “H” for hypocrisy. There could be no more blatant example.

 Stephen M. Flatow is an attorney in New Jersey and the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He is a member of the board of Nishmat and author of “A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror.”

 

Abba Eban and the "Auschwitz Borders"

 What exactly are ‘Auschwitz borders’?

 Longtime Israeli statesman Abba Eban made no bones about what would happen if Arab forces overran the nine-mile-wide coastal plain he was referring to.

 By Stephen M. Flatow

 (August 17, 2021 / JNS) Politicians and pundits sometimes invoke the term “Auschwitz borders,” but all too often, they completely misunderstand the meaning of the term.

 Consider Professor Shaul Magid of Dartmouth College. Writing this week in 972, an extreme-left online Israeli magazine, he complains about what he calls “Holocaust-centrism” and “Holocaust messianism.”

 He continues: “This worldview led Israeli politicians as disparate as Abba Eban and Yitzhak Shamir to assert that Israel’s borders are ‘the borders of Auschwitz.’ The utter incoherence of such a claim—that a sovereign state with a modern military is comparable to disempowered masses rotting in a concentration camp—is not only grotesque but a sign of deep collective failure.”

 Wrong, wrong and wrong again. 

In a letter to the editor that was published in The Jerusalem Post on Aug. 13, 1993, Eban explained that the phrase “Auschwitz lines” originated in the famous speech that he delivered at the United Nations on June 19, 1967.

 Less than a week had passed since the Six-Day War, and the Soviet representative in the United Nations was already demanding that Israel retreat to the narrow borders that had prevailed before the war.

 Eban told the world body that going back to the old borders was “totally unacceptable.” He pointed out that during the conflict, Israel on its eastern front was faced by “the mobilized forces of Jordan, with their artillery and mortars trained on Israel’s population centers in Jerusalem and along the vulnerable narrow coastal plain.”

 That coastal plain was just nine miles wide—narrower than Washington, D.C., or the Bronx. Eban made no bones about what would happen if the Arab forces overran that narrow stretch.

He called it “the approaching stage of genocide.” He recalled that with the Arab armies massing on its borders and blockading its waterways, Israel was “hemmed in by hostile armies ready to strike, affronted and beset by a flagrant act of war, bombarded day and night by predictions of her approaching extinction.”

 Eban did not hesitate to invoke memories of the Holocaust: “June 1967 was to be the month of decision,” he declared. “The ‘final solution’ was at hand.”

 He reminded the United Nations that the population of Israel was “the remnant of millions, who, in living memory, had been wiped out by a dictatorship more powerful, though scarcely more malicious, than [Gamal Abdel] Nasser’s Egypt.”

 And more. Eban compared Israel’s self-defense action to “the uprising of our battered remnants in the Warsaw Ghetto,” to “the expulsion of Hitler’s bombers from the British skies” and to “the protection of Stalingrad against the Nazi hordes.”

 Eban did not actually mention Auschwitz anywhere in that speech. But he obviously had the Holocaust on his mind then, and later— because in that 1993 letter to the Jerusalem Post, recalling how the term “Auschwitz lines” began, he wrote that in response to the Soviet delegate’s advice to retreat, “I said that a people that has suffered the agonies of Auschwitz is not likely to take such suicidal advice.”

 Eban added, in his letter to the Post, that “a German correspondent once ascribed a similar expression to me.”

 So, the editor of The Jerusalem Post then added an explanatory note: In an interview with the German newspaper Der Spiegel on Nov. 5, 1969, Eban had said, “We have openly said that the map will never again be the same as on June 4, 1967. … The June map is for us equivalent to insecurity and danger. I do not exaggerate when I say that it has for us something of a memory of Auschwitz.”

 So, Professor Magid got it all wrong. Eban was not saying that “a sovereign state with a modern military is comparable to disempowered masses rotting in a concentration camp” (as Magid put it). Eban wasn’t an idiot. He understood the difference between the State of Israel and the death camp of Auschwitz.

 What Eban was saying, obviously and repeatedly, is that borders that are nine miles wide are so incredibly vulnerable that Israel would again be in extreme jeopardy. With advanced weapons, the Arab forces attacking that narrow region would be able to inflict severe damage and casualties on the Jewish state. Israel could find itself on the verge of destruction—the equivalent, for the Jewish people, of a second Auschwitz

.Obviously, the Arab armies in 1967 would have killed every Jew they could. That’s why Eban called their approaching attack “the approaching stage of genocide.” Not literally Auschwitz; not gas chambers and crematoria. But, once again, enormous numbers of dead Jews.

 Eban’s position was neither “grotesque” nor “a sign of deep collective failure,” as Magid puts it. It was a realistic assessment of the dangers that Israel faced when it was just nine miles wide.

The only “collective failure” I can see is that of some of our professors and other intellectuals to appreciate the dangers Israel still faces. It’s their attempts to belittle and mock that very real danger, which is grotesque.

 Stephen M. Flatow is an attorney in New Jersey and the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He is a member of the board of Nishmat and the author of “A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror.”

Poverty doesn’t cause Arab terrorism

 The main cause of terrorism is ideology. That’s hard for Americans to comprehend because it’s so different from our own experience.

My column on jns.org.

Is poverty the root cause of Palestinian Arab terrorism?

That’s what U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken seems to think. At a press conference during his recent visit to the Middle East, Blinken argued that the forthcoming U.S. aid package to Gaza will defeat the terrorists.

“Reconstruction and relief for the people of Gaza” will “undermine Hamas,” he claimed. “I say that because Hamas thrives, unfortunately, on despair, misery, desperation, on a lack of opportunity.” If the United States provides “genuine prospect for opportunity, progress and material improvement in people’s lives,” then “Hamas’s foothold in Gaza will slip. We know that, and I think Hamas knows that.”

We know that? How, exactly? Usually, the way we know things is from past experience. We know something happened in the past, so we conclude that if we duplicate those conditions, that thing will happen again. If the billions of dollars in aid that the United States sent to the Palestinian Arabs in the past had led to a decrease in terrorism and the undermining of Hamas then, yes, it would be reasonable to conclude that we should do more of that. But in reality, the exact opposite happened.

With the signing of the Oslo Accords, America began sending $500 million annually to the Palestinian Arabs, including to Gaza, then ruled by the Palestinian Authority. That’s a total of $10 billion-plus from 1994 to 2006.

If anything would have “undermined” Hamas, that largesse should have done it. Yet somehow, all the “opportunity, progress and material improvement” that money brought didn’t convince the people of Gaza to reject terrorism. On the contrary, in the Palestinian parliamentary elections of 2006, the voters democratically gave Hamas a majority of the seats.

In June 2007, Hamas became the ruling regime in Gaza. Every few years since then, Hamas has attacked Israel, the Israelis have bombed Gaza, and the United States and the international community have rushed in with hundreds of millions of dollars in “humanitarian aid.” Yet that aid has never undermined Hamas. Fourteen years later, Hamas is still in power.

Certainly, it’s true that in the United States, poverty contributes to crime. The mistake that Blinken is making is to assume that the Mideast is similar to the American Midwest and that terrorism is just another form of crime. Neither of those assumptions is valid.

Viennese terrorist Kujtim Fejzulai

The main cause of terrorism is ideology, not poverty. That’s hard for some Americans to comprehend because it’s so different from our own experience. Most Americans are not ideological. American culture doesn’t accept political violence. The American government does not promote the use of violence. The religions that most Americans embrace do not espouse violence.

Contrast that with the Middle East, where Muslim fundamentalism actively encourages violence, and governing regimes such as the Palestinian Authority actively promote terrorism and glorify terrorists as heroes and martyrs. The Palestinian Arab public is inculcated daily through the regime-controlled media, with pro-violence messages. Children in P.A. schools absorb those messages daily in their classrooms. Summer camps in Gaza teach children to crawl under barbed wire with weapons, albeit fake ones, in their hands.

The stereotype that Palestinian terrorists are all single, unemployed young men who are lashing out because of their poverty is nonsense. Studies of suicide bombers, for example, have found that many were well-educated, employed, and family men and even women.

Remember the 415 Hamas terrorists whom then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin deported to Lebanon in 1992, in response to a wave of terrorist attacks against Israelis. The Chicago Tribune reported at the time that “many” of the deported terrorists were “businessmen, academics, lawyers [and] doctors.”

Likewise, the co-founder and longtime leader of Hamas, Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, was a practicing pediatrician. By day, he treated Palestinian children; by night, he organized the murder of Israeli children. Rantisi, of course, is just one example of a successful, educated Palestinian Arab professional who chose to become a mass murderer.

There are countless others.

This applies to other Mideast terrorist groups as well. In 2016, the World Bank undertook a study of 4,000 foreigners who joined ISIS. Here were the report’s key findings:

• “These individuals are far from being uneducated or illiterate … 69 percent of recruits report at least a secondary education … a large fraction have gone on to study at university. Only 15 percent left school before high school and less than 2 percent are illiterate.”

• “Foreign recruits from the Middle East, North Africa and South and East Asia are significantly more educated than what is typical in their region.”

• “The vast majority … of [ISIS] recruits from Africa, South and East Asia and the Middle East … declared having an occupation before joining the organization.”

The authors of the study wrote that, as a result, their conclusion “is consistent with a number of other studies that come to a similar conclusion: poverty is not a driver of radicalization into violent extremism.”

Blinken is wrong. The Biden administration’s plan to send hundreds of millions of dollars to Gaza will not undermine Hamas. It won’t promote moderation. It won’t increase the chances for peace. It will just be throwing good money after bad.

Stephen M. Flatow, an attorney in New Jersey, is the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He is the author of “A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terrorism.”

Captions worth a thousand words, but don't tell the truth

 Captions worth a thousand words

Unfortunately, caption writers editorialize

My latest column on Israel National News

Captions worth a thousand words

The art of writing anti-Israel skewed photo captions is another step on the slippery slope unobjective journalists and their anti-Israel editors have chosen to slide down.

 By Stephen M. Flatow

 If a picture is worth a thousand words, what are the words under the picture worth?

 Plenty—to those who want to turn international public opinion against Israel.

 The Reuters news agency recently distributed a dramatic photo of—according to its caption—“a Palestinian jumping next to a barricade with tires during an anti-Israel protest over cross-border violence between Palestinian militants in Gaza and the Israeli military.”

 Wow. How many facts can you distort in a single caption?

 Let’s start with the phrase “a Palestinian.” The young man in the photo is not just “a Palestinian.” For starters, he’s wearing the kind of headdress favored by Palestinian teenagers who are hoping the Israeli police won’t be able to identify and arrest them. That’s not a Covid mask. Law-abiding citizens don’t wrap their entire faces in cloth. Of course, the fact that he’s leaping through the air should make it obvious that he was not just an innocent civilian out for a stroll.

 And how about all the black smoke billowing behind him? It’s obviously the scene of a riot. The caption calls it a “barricade of tires.” They’re not just a “barricade.” They’re on fire—which is why there’s so much smoke. Palestinian Arab mobs roll flaming tires at passing Israeli automobiles. They burn piles of tires in the middle of roads in order to force Israeli motorists to slow down, so they can ambush them with rocks and firebombs.

 They should be called “Palestinian terrorists.” Or at least “Palestinian rioters.” But certainly not just “Palestinians.”

 Why were they rioting that day? According to the caption-writer at Reuters, it was a “protest over cross-border violence” in Gaza. In other words, the rioters with the flaming tires were actually peace activists. They were violently protesting against violence!

The Reuters editors evidently don’t consider Hamas or Islamic Jihad to be terrorists, even though they are on the official list of terrorist groups maintained by the United States and other governments around the world. And even though they fire rockets into kindergartens and blow up buses—including the one on which my daughter Alisa HY”D was riding in 1995. No, they’re just “militants.” Never “terrorists.”

 And, finally, there is the caption’s outrageous characterization of the Gaza wars: “cross-border violence between Palestinian militants in Gaza and the Israeli military.” Are they kidding? Hamas fires rockets; Israel shoots back. That’s “cross-border violence?” In the 1941 version, the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, America shoots back, and the Reuters caption reports “naval clashes between Japanese militants and the American military.”

 An even worse photo caption came out of the Middle East last week, courtesy of the Jerusalem-based “Flash 90” photo service. It read: "Palestinian worshippers gather rocks to throw at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem's Old City."

 Have you ever been to a synagogue--or a church, or a mosque, or a Hindu temple—where the congregants worshipped by trying to stone their neighbors to death? I haven't.

 A cynic might say: Yes, whoever wrote that caption actually got it exactly right, because these violent Palestinian Arabs have made a religion out of trying to murder Jews—they "worship" with rocks, knives, guns, and bombs.

 But that would be letting the caption-writer off way too easy--and missing an important lesson.

 The Flash 90 photo showed five young men, two of then wearing the classic rioters’ face-masks. While the caption claimed they were "gathering rocks," two of them are clearly poised to throw the rocks and we can assume the others were doing likewise.

 Anybody with even minimal knowledge of Israeli history—or just a modicum of common sense—knows that a rock, when hurled at a person or an automobile's windshield, can maim and even kill. We know that because it's happened so many times. By my count, at least 14 Israeli Jews, and two Israeli Arabs mistaken for Jews, have been stoned to death by Palestinian Arabs since the 1980s. Thousands upon thousands more have been injured, some of them permanently maimed, in such rock attacks.

 So, when young Arab men are “gathering rocks to throw,” as the young men in the Flash 90 photo were doing, they were doing so with the full knowledge that they were engaged in attempted murder. Of course, they were not trying to murder fellow-Arabs. They were throwing the rocks at Israeli Jewish police officers. Meaning, they were trying to stone Jews to death.

 Why would caption-writers call a riot a “protest,” describe Israeli self-defense against Hamas aggression as “cross-border violence,” and characterize rock-throwers as “worshippers”? And why would their editors approve such language?

 It can’t be that they don’t know the difference between riots and protests, between aggressors and victims, between terrorists and worshippers. So that leaves just one plausible explanation: Hostility to Israel and sympathy for the Palestinian Arabs. They may claim to be responsible editors and objective reporters and caption-writers, but in reality they have a political agenda. Their agenda is to hurt Israel.

 And the captions under the photos—the captions that, in their own way, help shape public opinion—are just another vehicle for achieving that despicable goal.

The captions may be seen here and here.

 Stephen M. Flatow is a vice president of the Religious Zionists of America, an attorney in New Jersey and the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He is the author of “A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror,” and an oleh chadash.