Ukraine crisis shows Israel the international community won't rescue you

Even though Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria is fully supported by history and international law, and Russia illegally occupies large parts of Ukraine, accusations against Israel will continue.

By STEPHEN M. FLATOW Published: https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-698728 

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has only just begun, yet the lessons for Israel are already obvious and they’re not very encouraging.

 Lesson #1: The international community will not rescue you.

People take cover as an air-raid siren sounds, near an apartment building
damaged by recent shelling in Kyiv, Ukraine February 26, 2022
(photo credit: REUTERS/GLEB GARANICH)

If ever there was a situation in which the international community would be totally justified to come to the armed defense of a beleaguered ally, this is it.

 Ukraine is the innocent victim of Russian aggression. Ukraine is a democracy; Russia is de-facto totalitarian. Ukraine’s location makes it strategically vital to the West. Yet, none of that matters.

 Not a single country is willing to take up arms to defend Ukraine against the Russian assault. Every one of the reasons cited above and many more would apply if Israel was again invaded by its Arab neighbors. And not a single country, including Israel’s closest allies, would pick up a gun if Israel faced annihilation.

 For years, the Jewish Left and the United States (US) State Department crowd have been proposing that US peacekeeping troops should be stationed in Judea-Samaria and the Golan Heights. The idea is to lure Israel into surrendering those territories, based on the assumption that a Palestinian state or its allies would never attack American troops.

  However, the American peacekeepers would flee the moment war seemed imminent, exactly as the United Nations (UN) peacekeeping troops fled from the Sinai on the eve of the 1967 war and exactly as the UN troops in southern Lebanon have proven to be completely helpless in the face of Hezbollah’s de facto control of that region.

 Israelis watching the unfolding of the Ukraine crisis undoubtedly recall Israel’s own bitter experiences with international indifference in the face of Arab aggression.

 When Arab armies invaded the newborn Jewish state in 1948, the Truman administration declared an arms embargo and refused to give Israel a single bullet.

 When Arab armies surrounded Israel in 1967 and prepared to attack, the Johnson administration refused to lift a finger.

 When Arab armies prepared to invade Israel in 1973, secretary of state Henry Kissinger pressured the Israelis not to strike first and then withheld weapons for ten days in order to prevent Israel from achieving a decisive victory.

 When Israel defended itself against mass rocket attacks by Hezbollah in 2006 and by Hamas in 2008, 2014, and 2021, the US pressured the Israelis to end their operations prematurely, thus granting de facto victories to the terrorists.

 Lesson #2: The hypocrisy will never end.

Regardless of Russia’s own behavior, Russia and its allies will continue to falsely accuse Israel of illegally occupying Arab territory.

 Even though Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria is fully supported by history and international law, and even though Russia illegally occupies large parts of Ukraine, the accusations against Israel will continue.

 Human rights groups will continue to obsessively focus on the Israeli occupation, while paying little or no attention to Russia’s occupation of Ukraine. The UN will continue to adopt mountains of resolutions condemning Israel and will ignore Ukraine.

 Lesson #3: Appeasers will look for ways to appease.

World leaders who see appeasement as the easy way out will continue look for ways to appease dictators rather than confront them.

The entire world heard President Biden’s initial statement that a “minor incursion” by Russia into Ukraine would not result in a serious western response. In the face of intense criticism, the administration retracted that position. But the whiff of appeasement was clearly in the air.

 Others have been more explicit. Italy’s foreign minister has declared that international penalties against Russia should not include “the energy sector.” Inevitably, other European leaders will soon look for ways to weaken or evade imposing real sanctions on Russia.

 Lesson #4: It matters who your neighbors are.

Throughout history, dictators have constantly assaulted their neighbors. Sometimes they have been motivated by religion or nationalism; sometimes they have wanted to distract their own population from domestic problems. Usually, some combination of those motives has been involved. Whatever their motives, the indisputable fact is that authoritarian regimes often turn aggressive.

 Israel is right to be concerned about the fact that the Palestinian Authority and Hamas (in Gaza) are dictatorships, not democracies. And Israel is right to worry about the fact that those regimes are deeply corrupt, deny civil rights to their citizens and refuse to hold truly democratic elections. Democracies tend to be peaceful neighbors, dictatorships tend not to be.

 Thus, the Ukraine crisis is a reminder to Israel that this is what happens when you have a hostile, fascist dictatorship next door. And when a hostile Palestine and its Arab allies prepare to attack, nobody will come to Israel’s rescue.

 

The writer is an attorney 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 a new Israeli citizen.

The crime? Walking a dog while Jewish. In the news? No, because reporting Palestinian violence undermines anti-Israel agenda

 Reporting Palestinian violence undermines anti-Israel agenda

 Everything about these attacks undermines everything that J Street and the slam-Israel media and the State Department crowd are trying to promote.

 By Stephen M. Flatow  

 Did you hear about the young Arab man who was walking his dog in Jerusalem one evening last spring, and was assaulted and nearly lynched by Jewish extremists?

No, of course you didn’t hear about it – because it didn’t happen. Oh, there certainly was an assault. But the victim was a Jew. And the would-be lynchers were Palestinian Arabs. That’s why it wasn’t covered by the international media. That’s why there were no angry press releases from J Street or Americans for Peace Now. That’s why the usually-vocal Jewish ex-State Department officials were all silent.

Two of the attackers were convicted this week, so the ugly episode was back in the news—in the Israeli media, that is. Not in The New York Times or The Washington Post or CNN. They didn’t report the attack when it happened, and they didn’t report the conviction – because everything about the attack undermines everything that J Street and the slam-Israel media and the State Department crowd are trying to promote.

 It was a lovely spring evening – April 24, 2021. Eli Rosen, 27, decided to walk his dog along Pierre van Paassen Street, part of which runs through the mixed Arab-Jewish neighborhood of Shimon HaTzadik, also known as Sheikh Jarrah.

A number of Palestinian Arabs had gathered nearby. “When they noticed that the victim had a Jewish appearance, they began throwing rocks at him,” according to the bill of indictment.  (A video of the attack can be found here.)

Civil rights activists in the US have coined the term “driving while black” to describe unjust arrests of African-American motorists. I guess Eli Rosen didn’t realize that to some Palestinian Arabs, it’s a crime to walk your dog while Jewish.

The bill of indictment continues: “The rioters – including the defendants  – ran toward him, surrounded him on all sides and began attacking him with fists, kicks, wooden batons, bricks, rocks, various objects and a shocker. All out of a nationalist-ideological motive.”

When Adnan Harbawi, 18, and Ibrahim Zaatari, 26, were convicted this week of taking part in the mob attack, the Israeli media mentioned an additional fascinating aspect of the story: “The rioters uploaded documentation [of the attack] to the social media.”

Before I go any further, I want to emphasize that I don’t like to compare contemporary events to the Holocaust. I don’t like it when the right does it, and I don’t like it when the left does it. Such analogies overstate what is happening today, and by implication understate what the Nazis did.

So, I’m not going to say that a mob beating up a Jew in Jerusalem is “like the Holocaust.” But this phenomenon of publicly boasting about one’s evil deeds should not pass without comment. Holocaust researchers have repeatedly uncovered photo albums which Nazi concentration camp commandants kept, to remember and celebrate what they did to the Jews.

There is a chilling book called “The Good Old Days: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders.” The title is from the cover of one such album, which was kept by a commandant at Treblinka.

It is worth reading. Not because the attack on Rosen was “like the Holocaust.” But because the depraved evil of which human beings are capable of committing – and being proud of – is an aspect of human psychology that is worth contemplating, whether it took place in 1945 or last year.

Those who assaulted Rosen were so proud of their violence that they wanted the whole world to see their vile actions. They celebrated. This, they said, is what should be done to Jews.

The Sheikh Jarrah/Shimon HaTzadik neighborhood has been in the news a lot lately. Arab squatters have been illegally occupying several Jewish-owned apartments, setting off a years-long court battle. Meanwhile, other Arab residents don’t want Jewish neighbors, so they have been using violence to stop Jews from moving into the area.

J Street and the ex-State Department peace-processor crowd have been portraying the Jewish residents as wild-eyed extremists who are the villains in the conflict. They say that the Palestinian Arabs are victims of Jewish aggression, that the Jews should be kept out of the neighborhood, and that the Palestinians should be given their own state, with Sheikh Jarrah/Shimon HaTzadik as part of the capital of “Palestine.”

So now you can see why the critics of Israel – in the media, in the punditry, in the think tanks – haven’t said a word about the assault on Eli Rosen. The near-lynching of a Jew walking his dog undermines the pro-Palestinian narrative. It reveals the ugly, antisemitic hatred that consumes so many Palestinian Arabs. It reminds the world how crazy it would be to give a sovereign state to people whose response to a Jew walking his dog is to try to murder him.

And that’s something that J Street and The Washington Post don’t want anybody to be reminded of.

 The writer is the father of Alisa Flatow, murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. He is author of A Father’s Story: My Fight for Justice Against Iranian Terror, and a new oleh.

The above column originally appeared on February 17, 2022 in the Jerusalem Post and on JPost.com.

Rabbi Jill Jacobs calls Mahmoud Abbas an antisemite. Oops.

 

Jewish left leader accidentally calls Palestinian Authority chief an anti-Semite

I hope she will confront the powerful implications of her own words.

 By Stephen M. Flatow

 (February 14, 2022 / JNS) Jewish left-wing critics of Israel say the darnedest things—sometimes by accident.

Last week, Rabbi Jill Jacobs—a prominent and oft-quoted figure on the American Jewish left—declared that “denying Jewish history” is anti-Semitic. She probably didn’t realize that she was thereby declaring Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, to be an anti-Semite. But she said it, and she was right, and it’s too late to take it back.

Jacobs is the longtime CEO of “T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights,” which is the U.S. arm of an extreme-left Israeli group called Rabbis for Human Rights. It’s a small organization, but it garners a lot of attention because many journalists sympathize with its pro-Palestinian positions. Thus, Jacobs is frequently quoted in the news media and invited to appear on radio and television programs.

Last week, for example, Jacobs was quoted by The Washington Post in its article about the Senate hearing concerning the nomination of Holocaust historian and Emory University professor Deborah Lipstadt as U.S. envoy for combating anti-Semitism. Jacobs has no particular connection to Lipstadt and no particular expertise on anti-Semitism; nonetheless, the Post chose to present her as a Jewish leader commenting on the issue.

Now here’s where things got interesting.

Jacobs made a few general, unremarkable statements about examples of anti-Semitism. One of her examples was “denying Jewish history.” And that’s obviously true.

But Jacobs, who fervently supports the Palestinian statehood cause, does not seem to have considered the implications of her statement with regard to the man who would become the head of the Palestinian state that she wants to see established in Judea and Samaria, and the Old City of Jerusalem.

I’m talking about the fact that Abbas is one of the most outspoken deniers of Jewish history in the world today. He has made so many statements denying Jewish history that they could fill a book—and, in fact, they have; he is the author of an entire book claiming that the Nazis killed only 1 million Jews and accusing Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, of collaborating with the Nazis. But for now, I’m going to cite just two of his speeches because they are particularly revealing.

On Jan. 14, 2018, Abbas addressed the Palestinian Central Council at P.A. headquarters in Ramallah. A few excerpts from his lie-filled tirade:

— “Israel … is a colonial project that has nothing to do with Judaism.”

— It was not the British White Paper or mass murder by the Nazis that kept Jews from going to Palestine, but rather, “the Jews did not want to emigrate, even with murder and slaughter.”

— Jews in Yemen and Iraq “didn’t want to come” to Israel, but Ben-Gurion forced them to by collaborating with Iraqi officials “to take away the citizenship of Jews and force them to emigrate.”

— When Theodor Herzl visited Palestine, he said: “We must wipe out the Palestinians from Palestine so that Palestine will be a land without a people for a people without a land.”

On April 20, 2018, Abbas addressed the legislature of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which he chairs. Here are a few of the slurs, lies and assorted absurdities that he mouthed:

— The Jews in Europe provoked the Holocaust because of their “social function” as money-lenders.

— Jews are to blame for communism because Josef Stalin was a secret Jew.

— Today’s Jews are not authentically Jewish, but are actually descendants of the Khazars, a medieval Turkish tribe, “which means they are not Semitic and have no relation to Semitism and have nothing to do with the prophets Abraham or Jacob.”

— There were never any pogroms in Arab countries, as proven by the fact “that there were Jews in Arab countries. Why wasn’t there ever one incident against Jews because they’re Jews? Not even once … in over 1,400 years.”

Abbas’s denials of Jewish history were so egregious that even some of Jacobs’s closest allies on the American Jewish left were compelled to condemn him. Americans for Peace Now charged that Abbas made “vile anti-Semitic statements.” J Street acknowledged that Abbas’s address “featured absurd anti-Semitic tropes and deeply offensive comments on the history of the Jewish people and Israel.”

Even The New York Times, despite its strong pro-Palestinian leanings, reported that Abbas’s remarks were “laced with deeply anti-Semitic tropes.” And Nickolay Mladenov, the U.N. special coordinator for the Middle East, said Abbas was “perpetuating conspiracy theories that fuel anti-Semitism.”

All of which creates a bit of a problem for Rabbi Jill Jacobs and her colleagues at T’ruah.

According to her own definition, the P.A. boss is an anti-Semite. Which means that she will now either drop her call for a Palestinian state—since, of course, it’s crazy to give a sovereign state to a rabid anti-Semite; or she will argue that even though Abbas is an anti-Semite, he should be given a sovereign state just a few miles from Israel’s major cities—which, of course, is crazy since it would mean putting millions of lives in direct danger.

I suppose the rabbi may look for the easy way out—that is, to hope that nobody asks her that question so she can go on pursuing her political agenda. But I hope she will choose a different path; I hope she will choose to be intellectually honest and confront the powerful implications of her own words.

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.”

This column first appeared on JNS.org.

Did a N.Y. Times columnist call his colleague an antisemite?

We will never effectively combat antisemitism until we are willing to speak out when the guilty party is in our own camp.

 By Stephen M. Flatow

My Arutz Sheva column 

A New York Times columnist has defined antisemitism in a way that implicates one of his most prominent colleagues.

In a recent column, Bret Stephens described how “the common denominator” in a wide range of antisemitic accusations, whether on the extreme right or the extreme left, “is an idea, based in fantasy and conspiracy, about Jewish power.” That’s certainly true.

 According to Stephens, some religious antisemites in the past “believed Jews had the power to kill Christ.” And secular antisemites “believed Jews had the power to start wars, manipulate kings and swindle native people of their patrimony.” No doubt about it.

On the far right, antisemites believe Jews are trying “to replace white, working-class America with immigrant labor.” On the far left antisemites “attribute to Israel and its supporters in the United States vast powers that they do not possess.” Again, all true.

 There’s just one problem. Stephens’ description doesn’t fit only David Duke or Ilhan Omar. It also fits one of his most prominent colleagues at the Times, longtime foreign affairs columnist Thomas L. Friedman. 

“Jews have the power to manipulate kings”? 

“Israel and its supporters have vast powers”? 

Friedman has written exactly that—on multiple occasions. 

Thomas Friedman - Reuters

In his column in the New York Times on February 5, 2004, Friedman declared that Israel "had George Bush under house arrest in the Oval Office.”  

On December 13, 2011, Friedman infamously wrote that the standing ovations which Israel’s prime minister received in Congress were "bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.” 

On December 13, 2011, Friedman infamously wrote that the standing ovations which Israel’s prime minister received in Congress were "bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.” 

And Friedman asserted in his column on November 19, 2013, that "many American lawmakers [will] do whatever the Israel lobby asks them to do in order to garner Jewish votes and cam donations." 

The fact that Friedman happens to be Jewish doesn’t get him off the hook. We all know plenty of examples of Jews who—for whatever reason—choose to perpetuate anti-Jewish stereotypes.

It’s equally irrelevant that Friedman himself occasionally complains about antisemitism. Most outrageously, he wrote on February 4, 2015 that if Israel’s prime minister spoke to Congress against the Iran deal, "anti-Semites, who claim Israel controls Washington, will have a field day.” In other words, it’s antisemitic to claim Israel controls Washington—except, apparently, when Friedman is the one making that claim.

 We will never truly be able to effectively combat antisemitism until we are willing to speak out when the guilty party is in our own political or ideological camp. If liberals acknowledge antisemitism only when it comes from conservatives, and conservatives acknowledge it only when it comes from liberals, then we will all be mired in little more than a sleazy political power game.

 We’ve had a good dose of that one-sided, partisan approach in recent weeks. Political figures on both the right and left have made outrageous remarks comparing certain domestic American policies to Nazism or the Holocaust. Liberal Jewish leaders have angrily denounced only the right-wingers who made those comparisons; conservative Jewish leaders have furiously criticized only the left-wingers who have said such things. That reduces the entire discussion to a cheap attempt to score points, not a serious effort to stop antisemitism.

 The same is true when it comes to Thomas Friedman. The fact that he is an influential journalist is no reason to be afraid of speaking the truth about him. The fact that one may agree with positions Friedman has taken on other issues is no reason to treat him as if he is immune from criticism.

 According to Bret Stephens, “the fantasy about Jewish power may seem outlandish, but it’s far more pervasive than many think.” He’s right—and it’s so pervasive that, according to Stephens’ own definition, it’s right up there in the list of New York Times columnists.

 

Stephen M. Flatow is an attorney 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.” He is an oleh chadash.

This column can be read on line at Israel National News - Arutz7.