Good News Friday

Even if the world around us is exploding in flames, there can always be found some little nuggets of good news to cheer us up for Shabbat, so I present you with this week’s Good News Friday installment.

We start this week with a few anti-BDS victories for Israel.

SodaStream machine

The Israeli company SodaStream which has been the target of a vicious BDS campaign, has seen its stock price shoot up from $55 per share to almost $100!

Israeli home carbonation king SodaStream got a big boost Monday when Barclays raised the firm’s price target on the stock to $100 per share, up from $55. The company’s stock shot up 8% on the news. Shares of SodaStream are up almost 28% over the past month and 54% year to date in 2013, according to Dailyfinance.com.

The at-home beverage maker has often been the target of anti-Israel boycotts, but that doesn’t seem to be slowing down its growth and popularity.

Globes reported Thursday that both Pepsi and Coca-Cola were in talks with Sodastream about possible acquisition or strategic co-operation.

The Daily Finance article linked above attempts to offer some explanation of SodaStream’s amazing success:

After all, while SodaStream offers a variety of flavor options, many of its customers aren’t particularly worried about calories as they take advantage of the system’s ability to make sparkling water at home for an average of just 25 cents per liter. Better yet, SodaStream machines cut down the number of plastic bottles otherwise required to distribute traditional soda, and each refillable SodaStream carbonation canister can make between 60 and 110 liters, saving the equivalent of 170 to 310 aluminum cans.

In addition, according to SodaStream, an average can’s worth of their soda costs just 25 cents, and a single 8-ounce serving of SodaStream Cola contains just 35 calories, 8 grams of carbs, 8 grams of sugar, and only 10 milligrams of sodium.

But perhaps it’s simply because BDS nearly always backfires.

Kartysh pictured in the center. Mostafa is immediately to her right.

A story which is not quite about BDS but is connected to the traditional Arab hatred of Israel and its boycott of anything Israelis was seen this week when an Egyptian wrestler tried every illegal move in the book against her Israeli opponent, and yet the Israeli wrestler won the gold medal:

The only revenge Israeli wrestler Ilana Kartysh exacted on her Egyptian opponent, Enas Mostafa, in the Golden Grand Prix tournament in Italy – after Mostafa refused to shake her hand and, during the match, reportedly broke two of her fingers and bit her on the neck – was emerging victorious in the bout and, having secured the gold, basking in her national anthem as she stood on the podium.

Kartysh, 22, who competed in the the  67-kilogram (147.7 pound) weight category, experienced an incident unlike any other in her career.

Per Ynet:

“In wrestling you must shake hands at the beginning of a match,” Kartysh said. “But not only did [Egyptian wrestler Enas Mostafa] refuse to shake my hand, she even broke my fingers and bit me until I began bleeding.”

However, she continued, “Because of her dirty behavior my desire to beat her grew stronger.”

Kartysh said she felt “some kind of hatred” directed at her by Mostafa, but that she did not know whether it was political or personal.

“It’s never happened to me before,” the 22-year-old wrestler said. “She really attacked me.”

The gold medal that Kartysh won was Israel’s first in a Golden Grand Prix tournament.

At the end of the match, the Egyptian again refused to shake hands with her.

Words cannot express my disgust at the Egyptian wrestler, nor at the international media which have failed to report on this extremely unprofessional conduct which should by rights have disqualified the Egyptian altogether. However, kol hakavod to Ilana Kartysh on her excellent performance and mazal tov on her gold medal. She has done herself and Israel proud!

American pop singer Alicia Keys

Staying with the BDS campaign and moving on to the arts scene, the American singer Alicia Keys has also been the subject of an intense campaign by the BDS brigade, led by the slightly demented author Alice Walker (who participated in the second Gaza flotilla)  to persuade her to cancel her upcoming performance in Israel. But the lady is not for turning, and Alicia Keys will be coming to Israel as planned:

Pop star Alicia Keys announced Friday that she plans to go ahead with her scheduled July 4 concert in Tel Aviv, despite calls to cancel the show for political reasons.

“I look forward to my first visit to Israel. Music is a universal language that is meant to unify audiences in peace and love, and that is the spirit of our show,” Keys said in a statement to the New York Times.

On Wednesday, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and activist Alice Walker, a prominent American supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, asked Keys to cancel her upcoming Tel Aviv concert appearance.

In an open letter posted online, Walker wrote that Keys was putting herself in “soul danger” by performing in “an apartheid country that is being boycotted by many global conscious artists. You were not born when we, your elders who love you, boycotted institutions in the US South to end an American apartheid less lethal than Israel’s against the Palestinian people.”

[...]

The debate over Keys’s appearance in Israel has branched out to social media, with Israel supporters launching multiple Facebook pages in support of her arrival, only to be countered by pro-BDS campaigns.

Keys’s official Facebook page on Wednesday, in the wake of the additional publicity generated by Walker and Rogers, featured multiple extended debates on her Tel Aviv concert, with fans sounding off both for and against in comments underneath unrelated pictures from Keys’s world tour. She is currently in England.

[...]

“I’m excited to go to new places on this tour, among them Tel Aviv. I plan on bringing with me a show full of emotion and inspiration,” Keys said when the concert was announced.

Kol hakavod to Alicia Keys for withstanding the barrage of boycott calls. It must be very difficult for pop stars and other artistes to withstand the public pressure, but Ms Keys has shown that she has backbone and principals. As I wrote back in February, I’m really looking forward to her performance!

Still with the culture scene, the Israeli pianist Boris Giltburg won the prestigious Queen Elisabeth Music Competition in Brussels.

Giltburg, 28, of Tel Aviv, was named the winner in the piano category early Sunday for his “impeccable and unusually moving rendition of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3,” the Belgian-Jewish magazine Joods Actueel reported.

The Moscow-born musician is the second Israeli to win the international competition, which began in 1951; Miriam Fried won in the violin category in 1971.

Giltburg won a cash prize of $32,450 from the competition’s fund and another $3,245 from the VRT broadcaster.

Mazal tov to Mr. Giltburg and kol hakavod on wining the competition. May he go on to win many more competitions.

Daniel Pipes

From reading the items in my Good News Friday series, it becomes evident that despite all the efforts of our enemies to boycott, delegitimise and otherwise isolate us, we are still a thriving, successful and essentially happy people. This depiction is very much based in reality and how better to conclude this week’s installment than to prove this point by bringing you Daniel Pipe’s wonderful column in Israel Hayom entitled simply “Happy Israel”: (h/t Dad):

In a typically maladroit statement, U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry recently complained that Israelis are too contented to end their conflict with the Palestinians: “People in Israel aren’t waking up every day and wondering if tomorrow there will be peace because there is a sense of security and a sense of accomplishment and of prosperity.”

While Kerry misunderstands Israelis (Palestinian rejectionism, not prosperity, caused them to give up on diplomacy), he is right that Israelis have a “sense of security and … of prosperity.” They are generally a happy lot. A recent poll found 93 percent of Jewish Israelis proud of be Israeli. Yes, Iranian nuclear weapons loom and confrontation with Moscow is possible, but things have never been so good. With thanks to Efraim Inbar of Bar-Ilan University for some of the following information, let us count the ways.

– Women need to give birth to 2.1 children to sustain a country’s population; Israel has a birthrate of 2.65, making it the only advanced country to exceed replacement

[...]

– Israel enjoyed a 14.5% growth of gross domestic product during the 2008-12 recession, giving it the highest economic growth rate of any OECD country. [...] Israel invests 4.5% of its GDP in research and development, the highest percentage of any country.

– Due to major gas and oil finds, Walter Russell Mead observes, “the Promised Land, from a natural resource point of view, could be … inch for inch the most valuable and energy-rich country anywhere in the world.” [...]

– With Syria and Egypt consumed by internal problems, the existential threat they once posed to Israel has, for the moment, nearly disappeared. Thanks to innovative tactics, terror attacks have been nearly eliminated. [...] Inbar, a strategist, concludes that “the power differential between Israel and its Arab neighbors is continuously growing.”

– The Palestinian diplomatic focus that dominated the country’s politics for decades after 1967 has receded, [...] Kerry may obsess over this issue but, in the acerbic words of one politico, “Debating the peace process to most Israelis is the equivalent of debating the color of the shirt you will wear when landing on Mars.”

– Even the Iranian nuclear issue may be less dire than it appears. Between the vastly greater destructive power of Israel’s nuclear arsenal and its growing missile defense system, military analyst Anthony Cordesman predicts that an exchange of nuclear weapons would leave Israel damaged badly but Iranian civilization destroyed. [...]

– Successes of the “boycott, divestment, and sanctions” movement are pretty meager (Stephen Hawking snubbed the president’s invitation! A United Nations body passed another absurd condemnation). Israel has diplomatic relations with 156 out of the United Nations’ 193 members. [...]

– In public opinion surveys in the United States, the world’s most important country and Israel’s main ally, Israel regularly beats the Palestinians by a 4-to-1 ratio. And while universities are indeed hostile, I ask handwringers this question: Where would you rather be strong, the U.S. Congress or the campuses? To ask that question is to answer it.

– Ashkenazi-Sephardi tensions have diminished over time due to a combination of intermarriage and cultural cross-pollination. The issue of haredi nonparticipation is finally being addressed.

– Israelis have made impressive cultural contributions, especially to classical music, [...]

Listen up, anti-Zionists and anti-Semites, Palestinians and Islamists, extreme right- and left-wingers: You are fighting a losing battle; the Jewish state is prevailing. As Inbar rightly concludes, “Time seems to be on Israel’s side.” Give up and find some other country to torment.

What a wonderfully optimistic, and even realistic, column!

With those happy thoughts in mind I wish you all Shabbat Shalom!

Will it be Hezbollah or Al Qaeda on Israel’s Syrian border?

Fighting at the Israel-Syrian border

As has been widely forecast, the Syrian civil war, which has occasionally spilled over Israel’s border, has now reached the Israeli border crossing itself. The town of Quneitra, where the Israel-Syria crossing point is located, today briefly fell into the hands of the rebels before being retaken by Assad’s forces. This translates as Quneitra falling into the hands of Al Qaeda before being retaken by Hezbollah.

Rebels seized then lost a border crossing on the demilitarized zone between Israel and Syria on Thursday, activists and the Israeli army said, as heavy clashes raged between the opposition and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces at the border crossing and in “Old Quneitra” town just adjacent to the border.

On Thursday morning, the Israel Defense Forces confirmed that the crossing had fallen into rebel hands. This was also confirmed by the Austrian Defense Ministry, which has peacekeeping troops on the Golan. Reuters reported that the Austrian troops in the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force had “gone into their bunkers” during the battle. A few hours later, the Syrian army, using tanks, had retaken the border crossing, the IDF said.

The IDF said two shells originating from the Syrian fighting landed in the Israeli-held part of the Golan, with no casualties caused.

Israel is worried that the Golan, which it captured from Syria in 1967, will become a springboard for attacks on Israelis by jihadi fighters, who are taking part in the armed struggle against Assad. On Wednesday, Israel Hayom reported exclusively that Israel believes Hezbollah is working to open a front against Israel on the strategic plateau.

“The rebels have seized the crossing near the old city of Quneitra in the occupied Golan Heights,” said Rami Abdelrahman, head of the Observatory. “There are heavy explosions and fierce clashing ongoing in the area.”

View Larger Map

Eli Malka, head of the Golan Regional Council, told Channel 2′s internet news site that residents were closely following the developments: “There is errant fire and some concern here on the Golan. We are working in complete coordination with the Israel Defense Forces.” According to Army Radio, the authorities decided to close farmers’ access to orchard fields located some two kilometers (1.2 miles) from the fighting. Highway 98 between the communities of Alonei Habashan and Ein Zivan was also closed.

According to Israel Radio, the IDF has again agreed to treat some of the wounded rebel combatants, several of whom were taken to Israeli hospitals. There is a military field hospital on the Israeli side of the Golan close to the border with Syria.

Israel’s humanitarianism in treating its enemies almost came to catastrophe today when one of the injured fighters taken to Ziv Hospital in Safed for treatment was found to have an unexploded grenade in his pocket!

The emergency room in Safed’s Ziv medical center was briefly evacuated Thursday after hospital staff, while undressing a wounded Syrian national brought in for treatment, discovered a hand grenade in one of his pockets. Sappers were called in to remove and defuse the explosive device, a lethal fragmentation grenade. There was no suggestion the injured man aimed to use it against the hospital staff.

The man was one of two Syrians who were transferred to Israel for medical treatment on Thursday.

The two were brought in, both in critical condition. One had a chest wound and the other a stomach wound.

They were being treated in the hospital’s trauma center and were slated to undergo surgery later in the day.

On Wednesday, a Syrian man wounded in fighting near Israel’s border died en route to Ziv hospital after he was administered medical care by Israeli army personnel at the border. A second man was hospitalized in stable condition with shrapnel injuries.

According to figures released by the hospital, the two men admitted Thursday were the eighteenth and nineteenth Syrians to be treated at the medical center since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war two years ago.

Three other Syrians, including the patient admitted on Wednesday, remain hospitalized at Ziv, bringing the total number of Syrians currently there to five. Other injured Syrians have been hospitalized in Haifa’s Rambam Medical Center.

Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon on Monday confirmed for the first time that Israel is operating a field hospital on the Syrian border. He said the IDF was transferring severely wounded Syrian nationals to Israeli hospitals for treatment.

Returning to the Israel Hayom story on the Quneitra fighting, it looks like the UN peacekeeping force is going to fold:

The Quneitra crossing is used primarily by U.N. peacekeepers and the Druze population on the Golan Heights.

Its initial fall to the rebels, and then the Syrian army’s counterattack, is likely to expedite the complete withdrawal of the U.N. peacekeeping force from the area. IDF officials have said recently that the fall of Quneitra, perhaps one of the regime’s most important symbols of power, would signify a dramatic development.

Speaking to Army Radio on Thursday, Hebrew University Professor Moshe Maoz said, “The identity of the rebels is crucial. There are reports that members of al-Qaida were in the area. This is bad news and it requires caution.”

The Times of Israel has more on the fighting near the border:

Some of the fighting was taking place some 200 yards from Israeli territory. An Israeli military source told the Times of Israel that the “situation is still very fluid. Rebels are fighting in both the town [of Quneitra] and the border crossing.”

Israel on Thursday lodged a complaint to the UN over the Syrian military’s use of tanks and armored personnel carriers in the de-militarized zone, a move it said was in violation of the two countries’ ceasefire agreement.

Explosions were heard in the area in the early morning and a mortar shell was reported to have landed at the UN base located at the crossing, injuring at least one person.

With all the violence and associated instability in the area, it should come as no surprise that some Syrians are now attempting to flee to safety in Israel:

Dozens of Syrians arrived at the Quneitra border crossing between Israel and Syria at around noon Thursday and requested entry into Israel.

The group was received by the IDF, which examined them at the crossing. However, after the IDF decided the Syrian side of the Quneitra crossing was no longer dangerous, it decided to send the group back to their war-torn country.

I hope someone in Israel has given some thought as to what will happen on “the day after”, when Syrian refugees will attempt to flood into Israel, and Israel will not be able to return them to Syria due to the violence there.

In the meantime, fighting on the Syrian side of the Golan has led to a number of wildfires on both sides of the border. The fires began in Syria and spread through minefields mediating between the two countries.

Golan shrubbery goes up in flames from Syrian fire

According to assessments, hundreds of dunams have gone up in flames, some of which have come near the IDF’s Golan positions. An Israeli firefighter squad is currently at the scene attempting to take control of the fire and the IDF has instructed local farmers to stay away from their lands near the border for the time being.

With the choice of either Hezbollah, assisting Assad as Iran’s proxy, or Al Qaeda jihadists in the form of Syrian rebels, which would be the least bad option for Israel? According to one Israeli official, Al Qaeda is the “preferred” option:

Israeli officials are concerned about the growing strength of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in recent days, Army Radio reported.

Senior Israeli officials were quoted as saying that “al-Qaida control over Syria would be preferable to a victory by Assad over the rebels.”

This view is based on the assessment that a victorious Assad would be much more dependent on Iran than in the past. In such a scenario, Iran would have greater ability to threaten Israel than it does today. Also, the ties between Iran, Syria and Hezbollah would become even tighter, increasing the dangers facing Israel.

Israeli officials said one country in the world was openly seeking the destruction of Israel — Iran.

“Assad is now Iran,” the officials said, making any other group preferable to govern Syria, even al-Qaida or other radical Islamists. “Any of these groups would be less problematic for Israel than an Assad regime that is a puppet of Iran,” the report quoted the officials as saying.

Last month, a senior Israeli intelligence official sounded a different tune, telling The Times of London that Israel preferred the survival of the Assad regime over the takeover of Syria by Islamist rebels.

“Better the devil we know than the demons we can only imagine if Syria falls into chaos and the extremists from across the Arab world gain a foothold there,” the official was quoted as saying in an article published on May 17.

In case further proof were needed of the extreme danger posed by Hezbollah, The Tower (a new online magazine) reminds us how the organization has turned Southern Lebanon’s homes and villages into military installations:

Hezbollah is attempting to move advanced weapons into civilian areas in Lebanon in preparation for another conflict with Israel. The Iran-backed terror group has an extensive, video-documented history of exploiting Lebanese civilians, and during its 2006 war with Israel successfully created incidents in which human shields were endangered and killed.

The organization has spent the subsequent years creating a network of weapons storage facilities and bunkers in civilian areas throughout southern Lebanon:

[...]

Another expose published earlier this year detailed how Hezbollah exploits poor Shiite families, subsidizing their homes in exchange for those families becoming human shields:

[...]

Israeli intelligence officials believe that one in ten houses in southern Lebanon is used as a storage facility for Hezbollah weapons.

Compounding matters for Israel, Russia might be entering the imbroglio by sending in warships to resupply Assad:

Russian warships believed to be carrying arms to resupply the Syrian regime were spotted in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, CNN reported on Wednesday.

The report cited U.S. intelligence sources that stated they had identified the ships leaving Russian ports several days ago. Using U.S. satellite imagery, they had further identified containers that are thought to possibly carry parts of the advanced S-300 anti-air missile system in them, as well as other weapons to be used by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s military.

According to the report, the U.S. did not identify helicopters being loaded onto the ships, which the Syrians are believed to have wanted to acquire from the Russians to use in their fight against the rebels.

Russia maintains its only port in the Mediterranean is in the Syrian city of Tartus.

Is Russia really intending to resupply Assad or is it playing a double game like it did with the on-again off-again S-300 missile shipments?

Clifford May in Israel Hayom compares the two terrorist organizations but his main conclusion is simply one question:

In the final analysis, “which is the A team-of terrorism” is not the paramount question. What is? In the years ahead, does the U.S. have what it takes to be the A-team of counterterrorism?

I’m not sure the answer to that is “Yes”. Israel will have to step into the breach, pray to G-d and look after itself as it always ends up doing.

Palestinian intransigence and preconditions – but it’s all Israel’s fault

Here we go again: Palestinian “President” (when was his term up? 4 years ago? 5?) Mahmoud Abbas has threatened to dismantle the Palestinian Authority (the PA) if peace talks with Israel don’t start.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has threatened to dismantle the PA should US Secretary of State John Kerry fail to “salvage the peace process,” a senior PA official said Tuesday.

Hussein al-Sheikh, the PA minister for civilian affairs, said that Abbas has informed Kerry that the PA’s functional role would end if current efforts to revive the peace process did not succeed.

“Israel, as an occupying force, would then have to assume full responsibility [over the Palestinian population],” Sheikh told the PA’s Voice of Palestine radio station.

I would ask if dismantling the PA is a bug or a feature. But Abbas plays a dangerous game: Walk out of the room, dump the problem on the Israelis, and then declare them “occupiers” by default. It’s a win-win situation for the Palestinians. Either the Israelis have to give in on all the Palestinian pre-conditions for the “privilege” of having them agree to sit down at the table and talk, or turn them into de facto occupiers, i.e. the evil monsters that the Palestinians always make the Israelis out to be.

What are these pre-conditions? Read on:

He added that Abbas also informed Kerry that he agreed to extend the deadline for the secretary of state’s mission until June 20, on condition that Israel releases Palestinian prisoners arrested before the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993. Sheikh said the PA rejects the idea of a gradual release of the prisoners, insisting that they all be freed together.

Who are these mysterious prisoners that the Palestinians are so keen to see released? These are not mere political prisoners as some media outlets would have you believe. BBC Watch has a long list of links to the BBC whitewashing of the Palestinian prisoners’ crimes.

According to the narrative frequently and habitually promoted by the BBC in relation to the Middle East peace process, the main stumbling block to negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority is the subject of building in towns and villages in Judea & Samaria. Typically, the BBC does not inform its audiences that the PA has quite a list of preconditions for returning to peace talks – one of which is the release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli prisons, with particular focus on those imprisoned before the Oslo Accords were signed.

In the past few months we have seen numerous BBC reports focusing on Palestinian prisoners, most of which severely downplayed or even completely ignored the crimes committed by their subjects and included quotes from Palestinian officials and prisoner-focused NGOs such as Addameer. One BBC report in particular – from April 2^nd 2013 – advanced the erroneous notion that the jailed Palestinians are “political prisoners” – a theme which is promoted by the Palestinian Authority, along with anti-Israel campaigners both in the region and abroad, and one which is being increasingly adopted by the mainstream media as a whole.

CAMERA has produced a comprehensive list of the pre-Oslo Palestinian prisoners, their crimes, and an in-depth survey of how the media suppresses information about these prisoners.

All too often, mainstream media outlets have whitewashed the terrorist acts and violent crimes of Palestinian prisoners by failing to mention the crimes at all or by falsely minimizing the degree of violence. In some cases, media outlets euphemistically refer to prisoners incarcerated since before 1994 as ”political prisoners,” covering up the atrocities they carried out. CAMERA is the first to publish a detailed list (below), obtained from Israel’s Ministry of Justice, of 118 pre-Oslo Palestinian prisoners, including their names and violent crimes.

The following is a sampling of some of the most egregious examples of the media’s whitewashing of violence on the part of Palestinian prisoners. A portion of them were subsequently corrected following communication from CAMERA or its affiliated sites, BBC Watch and CiF Watch.

Read it all and you’ll be shocked at how these criminals and terrorists are lionised by the Palestinian Authority. Then you will also gain some understanding into he difficulty facing Israel when trying to make peace with people who think these terrorists are heroes.

Another Palestinian precondition is a complete settlement freeze, and despite Palestinian claims to the contrary, there actually is a de facto freeze in place in Judea and Samaria:

Warning that a de facto freeze exists for housing tenders in West Bank settlements and Jewish east Jerusalem homes, settler leaders and Construction and Housing Minister Uri Ariel (Bayit Yehudi) met Tuesday night.

They are urging Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to allow Ariel’s office to authorize thousands of new housing tenders over the pre-1967 lines.

Netanyahu has refused to cede to the Palestinian demand to freeze West Bank settlement activity and Jewish building in east Jerusalem.

But Netanyahu has quietly placed a temporary hold on issuing new housing tenders over the pre-1967 line as part of his understanding with Washington that he will not take active steps to thwart American efforts to re-kindle direct talks with the Palestinians.

“In spite of the prime minister’s repeated promises, including public pledges, tenders have not been published, including those promised more than a year ago,” said Avi Ro’eh who heads the Council of Jewish Communities of Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip.

However, all this freeze has done is harm Netanyahu domestically while gaining Israel nothing from the Palestinians or the internatinal community.

In the face of this Israeli compliance and Palestinian intransigence, what does Secretary of State John Kerry have the chutzpah to ask the American Jewish community? “Ma Nishtana?. We are running out of time“. In fact, the Ma Nishtana (What’s different?) should be thrown back at Kerry, for the truth is that nothing has changed. It’s the same old Palestinian intransigence, the same old pre-conditions and the same old blaming of Israel when their maximalist demands are not met. It’s also the same old claim that time is running out when in fact this situation has been going on for 20 years, since the Oslo Agreements were first signed in 1993.

In his first speech to an American Jewish organization since becoming secretary of state, John Kerry explained Monday why he’s dedicated so much of his first few months in office to breathing new life into the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, which he admittedly described as “hardly a process at all.” “Ma nishtana (what is different) this time?” he asked in Hebrew, riffing on the first of the four questions asked at a traditional Passover Seder.

His answer: “We are running out of time and possibilities.”

The secretary said the US and Israel “may not get another chance at peace” and warned that the current Palestinian leadership won’t be around forever, especially if the West Bank economy “implodes or if the Palestinian security force fails.”

“What would replace them?” he asked. “The status quo is simply not sustainable. A stalemate today will not remain so tomorrow…Are we prepared to live with permanent conflict?”

Ticking off previous peace efforts – Oslo, Taba, Wye, Annapolis, etc – Kerry acknowledged the deep skepticism and cynicism in getting peace negotiations back on track.

[...]

Even though he said the conflict is “not the cause of problems in the Middle East, but rather an excuse for autocrats to shift blame away from themselves,” he said a lasting peace agreement could have far-reaching consequences that benefit Israel.

Well, duh (as teenagers would say). Of course a lasting peace agreement could have far-reaching consequences that benefit Israel. Does Kerry think that Israelis don’t know that? Why does he not address his comments and express his urgency to the Palestinians? Perhaps because the urgency is only in his mind, in order to bring some kind of signed piece of paper, however meaningless, while he is still in office?

Another American with the same dismissive opinion of Israelis sense of self-preservation is our favourite doofus, the pompous Thomas Friedman in the New York Times. This time, while he admits that the Middle East is literally a flaming mess, he still thinks that Israel should give up valuable land and tangible assets for the sake of the above meaningless “peace in our time” piece of paper with the Palestinians. In “Israel lives the Joseph story” he writes:

How would you like to be an Israeli strategist today? Now even Turkey is in turmoil as its people push back on their increasingly autocratic leader. I mean, there goes the neighborhood. The good news for Israel is that in the near term its near neighbors are too internally consumed to think about threatening it. In the long run, though, Israel faces two serious challenges that I’d dub the Stephen Hawking Story and the Joseph Story.

[...]

The Boston Globe said Hawking’s decision was “a reasonable way to express one’s political views. Observers need not agree with Hawking’s position in order to understand and even respect his choice. The movement that Hawking has signed on to aims to place pressure on Israel through peaceful means.”

That was not Al-Ahram. That was The Boston Globe — a reminder that in this age of social networks, populist revolts and superempowered individuals, “international public opinion matters more not less,” notes the Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi, the author of “Imagined Democracies.” And, in Israel’s case, it is creating a powerful surge of international opinion, particularly in Europe and on college campuses, that Israel is a pariah state because of its West Bank occupation. It is not a good trend for Israel. It makes it that much more dependent on America alone for support.

[...]

This global trend, though, is coinciding with a complete breakdown in Israel’s regional environment. Israel today is living a version of the Biblical “Joseph Story,” where Joseph endeared himself to the Pharaoh by interpreting his dreams as a warning that seven fat years would be followed by seven lean years and, therefore, Egypt needed to stock up on grain. In Israel’s case, it has enjoyed, relatively speaking, 40 fat years of stable governments around it.

[...]

With these iron-fisted leaders being toppled — and true, multisectarian democracies with effective governments yet to emerge in their place — Israel is potentially facing decades of unstable or no governments surrounding it. Only Jordan offers Israel a normal border. In the hinterlands beyond, Israel is looking at dysfunctional states that are either imploding (like Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Bahrain and Libya) or exploding (like Syria).

But here’s what’s worse: These iron-fisted leaders not only suppressed various political forces in their societies but also badly ignored their schools, environments, women’s empowerment and population explosions. Today, all these bills are coming due just when their governments are least able to handle them.

Therefore, the overarching theme for Israeli strategy in the coming years must be “resiliency” — how to maintain a relatively secure environment and thriving economy in a collapsing region.

So far, so reasonable, with the exception of my disagreement that it is the settlements that are causing Israel’s “pariah” status, rather than Israel’s existence per se as a Jewish state.

But then Friedman, with his doofus cap on his head once more, jumps to the completely wrong conclusion:

In my view, that makes resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict more important than ever for three reasons: 1) to reverse the trend of international delegitimization closing in on Israel; 2) to disconnect Israel as much as possible from the regional conflicts around it; and 3) to offer a model.

There is no successful model of democratic governance in the Arab world at present — the Islamists are all failing.

In which case, how on earth does he expect Israel to make peace with anyone? What kind of peace would it be, how stable would it be and how long would it last?

But Israel, if it partnered with the current moderate Palestinian leadership

Which moderate Palestinian leadership would that be? The one that demands a full settlement freeze and the release of every single Palestinian prisoner arrested since Oslo days?

in the West Bank, has a chance to create a modern, economically thriving, democratic, secular state where Christians and Muslims would live side by side — next to Jews.

What kind of fantasy land does Friedman inhabit where such a Palestinian state would exist? Democratic? Secular? Christians living in safety with Muslims? And Jews would be allowed to live there too?

That would be a hugely valuable example, especially at a time when the Arab world lacks anything like it.

The Palestinians are not going to be the ones to bring the Good News to the Arab world.

And the world for the most part would not begrudge Israel keeping its forces on the Jordan River — as will be necessary given the instability beyond — if it ceded most of the West Bank and Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem.

That is the most ridiculous claim. Just like Israel was assured that the world would “allow” Israel the right to self-defence after withdrawing from Gaza, and then Israel was walloped with the Goldstone Report, there is no way the world, or even just the Arab world or the Palestinians alone, would allow Israel to keep its forces anywhere outside the 1949 Armistice Lines, which is where they want Israel to withdraw back to.

Elder of Ziyon has a masterful takedown of Friedman in his post “What’s Thomas Friedman smoking?“

1) The delegitimization movement Friedman refers to is not interested in a peace agreement. They want the destruction of Israel. Their basic demands include the insistence that Israel be forced to accept millions of Arab faux-”refugees” and end the Jewish state. They already regard the PA as a sell-out for not restarting the intifada. This is a variation of the “if/then” fallacy that has been fashionable for decades, but is still around thanks to so-called “experts” like Friedman. In this case the fallacy is that the Israel-haters would be weakened by Israeli concessions, but in fact it is the opposite.

2) Friedman thinks that an Israel whose border is in constant threat of being taken over by Islamists would “disconnect” it from the regional conflicts around it? It would ensure that Israel is surrounded by them! Friedman’s bizarre assumption that a Palestinian Arab state would be inoculated from the chaos surrounding it has no basis in reality. Like so many other pseudo-experts on the region, Friedman cannot distinguish between his wishful thinking and the cold reality – in this case, that “Palestine” would be a peaceful, democratic, secular state, inoculated from the Islamist Spring.

Oh, and don’t forget Friedman’s other “if-then” fallacy here – that the world would allow Israel to keep the Jordan Valley as a buffer if only it would offer the Palestinian Arabs a state. Wasn’t that already offered and rejected? The result was nothing less than a six year-long war on Israeli civilians. Again, Friedman is stuck in the 1990s.

3) It takes an amazing amount of willful blindness to ignore Gaza’s Hamastan, to ignore the fact that there haven’t been elections for so long, to ignore the daily incitement in the PA media, to ignore the fact that the PA’s last two prime ministers that the West loved so much were not elected and have no support from the people, and to ignore the daily vitriol between Hamas and Fatah. Friedman’s eyes can shut tightly enough to allow an occasional “Sure, there are problems…” right before ignoring them.

John Kerry and Thomas Friedman are linked by “1990′s think” as the Elder calls it, by a wilful blindness to the realities of the Middle East today, and the dangerously wishful thinking that if only Israel would roll over and play nice, the Arabs would change their spots.

Peace will only come to the Middle East when the Palestinians become a genuinely democratic society, when they can accept a Jewish state in their midst, and when they stop teaching their children to hate Israelis and Jews. Until such time, Israel should not cede any tangible assets for the sake of a piece of paper saying Peace in our Time.

 

Could this be a real Turkish Spring?

Riots in Turkey over the weekend

The “Arab Spring” uprising was originally intended to oust dictatorships and bring in democracy. Unfortunately it rapidly turned into a nightmarish winter with the rise of Islamists, sometimes through the very democracy that the protestors were demanding.

But could the wave of protests in Turkey, which have grown from a simple urban protest against a planned shopping mall to an anti-Erdogan and anti-Islamist protest, usher in a real Spring for Turkey this time? Certainly Erdogan has been overstepping the mark recently with new legislation banning the sale alcohol as well as starting a new battle against tobacco. He defended these moves thus:

Anti-smoking legislation has saved people from falling victim to second-hand smoking, the prime minister said, adding that this was a topic that received great attention from him even back in the early days of his career when he was working as Istanbul mayor.

Erdoğan said places previously used only by “a certain minority” had now been opened to public use.

“We banned drinking, we banned smoking. These places began to fill up. Our people want peaceful places. There is a tyranny of the minority. It is our duty to protect the lawful acts of the minority as well. The fight against alcohol is constitutional,” Erdoğan said.

Erdoğan said it was wrong to describe the recent legislation as an “alcohol ban.” “Did we ban alcohol? No we did not. We only presented a new framework. This is not an issue of banning anything, but simply drawing a framework for it,” he said.

“What’s essential to us is the benefit of our people. I will not back down from taking steps toward the preservation of my people’s future just because someone’s fun is being interrupted,” Erdoğan added.

Parliament has adopted a highly controversial alcohol bill proposed by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), tightening restrictions on the sale and advertising of alcoholic beverages.

Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan

Erdogan has compounded his political mis-steps by back-tracking from the shopping-mall plan in the face of the huge public protests, but then announcing that the Ataturk Cultural Center will be demolished and a mosque will be built instead. One gets the feeling this is not what the secular Turkish public would like.

Erdoğan also said the much debated Atatürk Cultural Center (AKM), also on Taksim Square, should be demolished, proposing to build an opera house and a mosque there instead.

The riots, which began as a local protest at Taksim’s Gezi Park, which was slated to be demolished for the barracks and shopping mall, have spread throughout Turkey to places such as Istanbul and the port city of Izmir:

Turkish protesters clashed with riot police into the early hours of Monday with some setting fire to offices of the ruling AK Party as the fiercest anti-government demonstrations in years entered their fourth day.

Turkey’s streets were calm in the morning after a night of noisy protests and violence in major cities.

In the western port city of Izmir, protesters through fire bombs at AK Party offices overnight and television footage showed part of the building ablaze. Firefighters put out the fire, the Dogan news agency reported.

Bus shelters, paving stones and street signs ripped up by protesters to make barricades that littered a major avenue by the Bosphorus strait in Istanbul where some of the heaviest clashes took place overnight, and graffiti covered walls.

Roads around Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s office in Istanbul were sealed off as police fired teargas to push back protesters in the early hours of Monday.

Erdogan decried the political jumping on the bandwagon of what was originally a civic protest, and he may have a point, but he brought this upon himself with his dictatorial way of governing:

To the root of the matter, Erdogan claimed that the protests had little to do with urban redevelopment, rather hinting at behind the scenes political string pulling.

“It is unfair to label this government anti-green or anti-environmentalist,” he said, “I want my nation to see the game some circles are playing in the country. Nobody has the right to raise tension in this country claiming that trees are being chopped down.”

Regarding claims of Erdogan’s anti-democratic stripe, he said “Everyone should know that Turkey is a country where parliamentarian system fully functions.

“Every method other than elections is anti-democratic. I am not saying the government is not accountable. We are not claiming that the government can do whatever it wants. But, just like the majority cannot pressure the minority, the minority also cannot impose its will on the majority,” he said.

Riot police fire pepper spray at protestors in Istanbul

Medics said close to 1,000 people were injured in the clashes in Istanbul on Friday, the fiercest anti-government demonstrations for years. Half a dozen lost eyes after being hit by gas canisters, the Turkish Doctors’ Association said.

The US State Department said it was concerned by the number of injuries while Amnesty International and the European parliament raised concern about excessive use of police force.

Interior Minister Muammer Guler said allegations that police had used disproportionate force would be investigated.

Protests erupted in the capital Ankara and the Aegean coastal city of Izmir late on Friday and there were calls on social media for similar demonstrations in more than a dozen cities on Saturday

Ozturk Turkdogan, the head of the Turkish Human Rights Association, said hundreds of people in several cities were injured in the police crackdown and a few hundred people were arrested. The Dogan news agency said 81 demonstrators were detained in Istanbul.

The protest was seen as a demonstration of the anger had already been building toward Turkish police who have been accused of using inordinate force to quash demonstrations and of firing tear gas too abundantly, including at this year’s May Day rally.

There is also resentment from mainly pro-secular circles toward the prime minister’s Islamic-rooted government and toward Erdogan himself, who is known for his abrasive style. He is accused of adopting increasingly uncompromising stance and showing little tolerance of criticism.

As mentioned above, there were many reports of police brutality during the demonstrations, which in turn triggered further demonstrations around Turkey:

Istanbul residents on Saturday posted photos and videos of bruised and bloodied protesters, of civilians wearing gas masks and surgical masks to protect them from police offensives and of security forces using pressurized water and tear gas to keep them in check.

The protesters, meanwhile, held up signs denouncing Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his government. “Tayyip is a dictator,” read one sign, while another read “Turkish Spring.” Yet more signs read “Support Gezi Park” or “Occupy Gezi.”

One of the last few green spots left in the center of Istanbul, Gezi Park was once part of the city’s Armenian cemetery. It was confiscated in the 1930s and made into a park. In recent years, Erdogan has expressed his intent to demolish the park, possibly in order to build a mosque there. Earlier this year, he announced that the urban park would be destroyed; on its ruins, a shopping complex and replica of Ottoman-era barracks would be built by a private contractor.

On Friday night, thousands marched from the central, trendy Taksim Square on the European side of Istanbul to Kadikoy on the Asian side, crossing one of the Bosphorus bridges en masse to protest both the demolition of the park and the crackdown on the peaceful sit-in dedicated to saving it.

[...]

If Facebook is any indication, the riots are to become daily occurrences, with over 30,000 people pledging to attend demonstrations until the first of September.

In preparation for a three-month-long series of protests and police retaliations, the demonstrations have been ironically titled the Istanbul Gas Festival, so named after the method used by Istanbul police to disperse them.

Here are more very dramatic and graphic pictures of the demonstrations.

Loth as I am to compare Turkey to Israel, the demonstrations in Turkey have triggered worldwide solidarity protests:

Spontaneous protests broke out worldwide Saturday in support of a series of anti-government demonstrations in Turkey, originally ignited by a call to preserve a recreational area in Istanbul which is scheduled to be demolished in order to construct a shopping mall in its place. Hundreds of protesters in Vancouver, Amsterdam, London, and Berlin, as well as many other cities across the globe, gathered to express outrage at the heavy-handed tactics which Turkish police used to break up a peaceful sit-in at Istanbul’s main Taksim square on Friday.

Boaz Bismuth in Israel Hayom writes that these protests are a warning to Erdogan:

Will Taksim Square become to the Turks what Tahrir Square was to the Egyptians? It is too early to tell and the chances are high that the answers to both questions will be no. But Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, drunk with power following electoral victories in 2002, 2007 and 2011, has been dealt a serious blow by the worst unrest since he took power.

The massive protests, in which a wide range of ideological groups have taken part, are a warning to Erdoğan. It is unclear whether the protesters will save the trees in Gazi Park (Istanbul’s equivalent of Central Park in New York), but they already have given Erdoğan a lesson on the limits of power. His dream of becoming president in 2014, after a constitutional reform to replace Turkey’s parliamentary system with a presidential one, no longer looks as certain as it did before Friday.

How ironic is it that Erdoğan, who lectured Arab leaders about morality during the Arab Spring, let his security forces use excessive force in dispersing protestors? This is the same Erdoğan who in 2011 called on his former friend Syrian President Bashar Assad to deal gently with protesters. Syrian Information Minister Omran al-Zoabi, another of the “righteous” from our region, expressed sympathy for the Turkish people on Saturday, saying they “don’t deserve all this violence” from Erdoğan. What a happy neighborhood.

This is also the same Erdoğan who recommended that Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi separate religion and state. But it was in fact Turkey that passed a new law last week restricting the sale of alcohol, another step meant to change the face of Kemalist Turkey.

[...]

In a speech on Saturday, Erdoğan said that Turkey is a democracy (even though the local media blackout of the unrest proved the opposite) that will not give in to the tyranny of the minority. But the minority in Turkey (49 percent) showed that it knows how to raise its voice. The tyranny of the majority is not what concerns the minority, but rather the tyranny of Erdoğan…

[...]

A stable Turkey is very important to the region, particularly in turbulent times like these. But this is now a card that the U.S. does not have in the poker game in Syria. At this rate, Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will suddenly present himself as a responsible adult.

Which brings us to the final delicious irony. Syria, of all the countries in the world, has issued a travel advisory against travel to Turkey because of the violence.

The Syrian foreign ministry warned its citizens about the deteriorating security situation in several Turkish cities, and the escalating protest violence between the Turkish government and Turkish protesters.

Syria even called on Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan to stop the violent repression of the protesters, and if he can’t, then to resign.

How they wrote this and kept a straight face is a mystery.

Sadly the violence in Turkey is not a laughing matter. Our thoughts are with the good people of Turkey. May the forces of Islamism be defeated without any more violence.

The Syrian missile crisis and other Syria updates

The news coming out of Syria about Russia’s sale of S-300 air-defence missiles to Assad  is more and more confusing.

Syria is getting S-300 missiles.

Oh no they’re not.

Oh yes they are.

Perhaps they are, perhaps they’re not, but Assad fancies opening up a new battle front on the Golan Heights:

Syrian President Bashar Assad gave an interview to the Hezbollah affiliated television network Al Manar Thursday and commented on the state of the civil war currently plaguing his country, the transfer of S-300 missiles from Russia and Hezbollah’s involvement in the conflict.

Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar had already published excerpts from the interview, including Assad’s claim that the first shipment of S-300 missiles had arrived from Russia and that the Russians remain adamant in their commitment to complete the arms deal.

Regarding Israel, Assad said that “There is pressure by the people to open a new front in the Golan, and even in the Arab world there is readiness to join the fight against Israel.”

Yes. Because if there’s one thing you can be sure of in the Arab world is that when the going gets tough for dictators, dictators declare war on Israel. It’s the best way to unify everyone around a common enemy.

Perhaps the missiles have not arrived not after all:

The Lebanese newspaper al-Diyar reported Friday that Israel had succeeded in thwarting the missile deal by threatening to start an all-out war should Russia deliver the S-300s to the embattled Bashar Assad regime.

The report also claimed that Russian President Vladimir Putin offered to compensate Assad with the delivery of other “effective and powerful weapons,” including modern aircraft and helicopters, to use against the Syrian rebels. According to al-Diyar, Putin also passed a message to Assad saying that the entry of Hezbollah into the Syrian conflict was not helpful. Hezbollah has a reported 5,000-7,000 gunmen now fighting with Assad’s forces.

Israeli sources said Thursday that Syria has only paid for one-third of the S-300 contract. They added that, even if the deal is eventually honored, it would take months for the S-300 batteries to be operational.

“It is not clear to me that the Russians are interested in transferring the weapons. Right now, it’s more of a threat,” said Ehud Ya’ari, Channel 2′s veteran, well-connected commentator.

[...]

Russia’s declared intention to deliver the sophisticated systems, which can intercept fighter jets and cruise missiles, has created a tense standoff between Israel, Syria, and Russia, with Israel threatening to do “whatever it takes” to prevent the weapons being deployed, and Syria responding that it would retaliate in kind for any Israeli strike.

Israeli media reports said Netanyahu had warned Putin of a descent into war should Russia make the delivery. Netanyahu said that if acquired by Assad, the S-300 “is likely to draw us into a response, and could send the region deteriorating into war,” Channel 2 reported.

Aside from the unique strategic capacities that the S-300 air-defense missiles would afford Syria, putting planes taking off from central Israel and its main international airport within the missiles’ range, Jerusalem also fears that the system could fall into the hands of terror groups like Hezbollah.

In any event, the missiles are not operational yet, but will Israel bomb them anyway?

As Yiftah Shapir, director of the Military Balance Project at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, recently noted, Syria would require considerable time before it could master the S- 300 air defense system. It needs to train Syrian personnel to use it. Russian technicians are unlikely to operate the batteries on behalf of Assad, as they’d be placing themselves at very high risk.Nevertheless, Assad’s message contains a declaration of intent to eventually cross an Israeli red line on arms proliferation, and this is a serious development which has a real potential to spark a confrontation.

There are several reasons why Israel has no intention of allowing Syria to set up S-300 batteries.

With its sophisticated radars and range of 200 kilometers, the S-300 can target civilian air traffic in northern Israel, hamper Israel Air Force aircraft flying over the Galilee or the Golan Heights, and disrupt IAF surveillance flights over Lebanon to monitor Hezbollah.

The system can also disrupt Israeli efforts to intercept the transit of Iranian weapons to Hezbollah through Syria.

Finally, and perhaps most important, Assad might be tempted to send S-300 batteries to Hezbollah or Iran.

Despite being neck deep in the bloody Syrian war, Hezbollah continues to prepare itself for war with Israel, and obtaining the S-300 would boost its confidence to challenge the IAF.

A more confident Hezbollah might be tempted to resume cross-border attacks on Israel, which in turn could quickly drag the region to war.

The S-300 in Iranian hands will complicate what is already a very challenging potential mission: Striking Iran’s nuclear sites.

In light of these factors, when might Israel take action? Strikes might be ordered against components of the batteries in transit on Syrian soil. Alternatively, Israel might bide its time and attack just before the batteries go online.

It’s worth remembering that Israel possesses advanced electronic warfare capabilities. As one source from the IDF’s Electronic Warfare Section told The Jerusalem Post last month, “The government instructed us to prepare and know how to operate in every operational arena.”

Assad is surely aware that Israel won’t wait for the batteries to become operational, and may therefore choose not to cross that line at all.

Behind closed doors, it is safe to assume, diplomatic pressure is being applied on Moscow to refrain from taking a step that can further destabilize an explosive region.

If Israel does bomb them, then Syria promises immediate retaliation.

In an odd reversal of roles, Russia is trying to calm Israel down about the missile sale – although with a hint of menace behind those words:

On Tuesday night, the Russian ambassador to the United Nations said that the sale of the weapons was not the start of an arms race and recommended Israel stay calm over the deal.

In an interview with CNN, Vitaly Churkin suggested that Israel consider the risks involved in taking action against the missile delivery.

“The Israelis will keep a cool head and refrain from reckless actions,” he said, adding that in the past Russia has responded to Israeli concerns about advanced weapons shipments falling into the wrong hands by guaranteeing that the arms only go to their intended destinations and not to third parties.

As if the S-300 missile sale was not enough, further security complications  arose with an announcement that Russia is going to provide Syria with 10 MiG-29 fighter planes:

Russian arms manufacturer says it is signing a contract to deliver at least 10 fighter jets to Syria.

Sergei Korotkov, general director of the MiG company that makes the jets, told Russian news agencies Friday that a Syrian delegation was in Moscow to discuss terms and deadlines of a new contract supplying MiG-29 M/M2 fighters to Syria.

Korotkov did not say how many MiGs Syria were buying, but says it would be “more than 10.”

Meanwhile, pass the popcorn: Hezbollah has ordered Hamas out of Lebanon:

Lebanese Shi’ite group Hezbollah has ordered Palestinian Sunni group Hamas to have its operatives leave Lebanon effective immediately.

A senior Hezbollah security official informed Ali Baraka, the Hamas representative in Lebanon, of the demand, the Middle East Online news agency reported on Thursday.

The move came because of Hamas support for the Syrian rebels fighting to oust President Bashar Assad, according to the report. Both Hezbollah and Syria are allies of Iran, which provides them with financial and military support.

[...]

Jonathan Schanzer, vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the The Jerusalem Post from Washington, “Whether or not Hamas is being driven out of Lebanon is not as important as the fact that it has been minimized in the Iranian ‘Axis of Resistance.’” Hamas abandoned its headquarters in Damascus last year, in a sign of tension with Iran, Hezbollah and Syria, said Schanzer. Hamas is getting far less aid from Iran now, and more from Sunni sponsors such as Qatar and Turkey, he said.

It’s not all roses for Hezbollah though. Eighteen rockets fired by Syrian rebels hit a Hezbollah stronghold in Lebanon on Saturday:

Eighteen rockets and mortars rounds from Syria slammed into Lebanon on Saturday, the largest cross-border salvo to hit a Hezbollah stronghold since Syrian rebels threatened to retaliate for the Lebanese terror group’s armed support of Syrian President Bashar Assad. On Sunday two rockets exploded in a Hezbollah-controlled area of Beirut.

The rockets targeted the Baalbek region, the latest sign that Syria’s civil war is increasingly destabilizing Lebanon. On Friday, the Lebanese parliament decided to put off general elections, originally scheduled for June, by 17 months, blaming a deteriorating security situation in the country.

In Qatar, an influential Sunni Muslim cleric whose TV show is watched by millions across the region, fanned the sectarian flames ignited by the Syria conflict and urged Sunnis everywhere to join the fight against Assad.

“I call on Muslims everywhere to help their brothers be victorious,” Yusuf al-Qaradawi said in his Friday sermon in the Qatari capital of Doha. “If I had the ability I would go and fight with them.”

“Everyone who has the ability and has training to kill … is required to go,” said al-Qaradawi, who is in his 80s. “We cannot ask our brothers to be killed while we watch.”

He denounced Assad’s Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, as “more infidel than Christians and Jews” and Shiite Muslim Hezbollah as “the party of the devil.”

[...]

The Syrian conflict, now in its third year, has taken on dark sectarian overtones. It has escalated from a local uprising into a civil war and is not increasingly shifting into a proxy war.

Predominantly Sunni rebels backed by Sunni states Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey are fighting against a regime that relies on support from Alawites, Shiites and Christians at home, and is aided by Iran and Hezbollah. The Syria conflict is also part of a wider battle between Saudi Arabia and Iran for regional influence.

Sunni fighters from Iraq and Lebanon have crossed into Syria to help those fighting Assad, while Shiites from Iraq have joined the battle on the regime’s side.

Western officials said the number of Hezbollah terrorists taking part in the Syrian war is lower than previously estimated. They claimed only about 2,000 Hezbollah men are fighting in Syria, not several thousand.

[...]

On Saturday, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nation’s two top officials dealing with human rights and humanitarian issues said they were alarmed by reports that thousands of civilians are trapped in Qusair and that hundreds of wounded people are in urgent need of medical care.

The UN officials called for a cease-fire to allow the wounded to be evacuated. They said more than 10,000 people have fled to two nearby towns and need food, bedding, water and medical care.

The Red Cross said it has requested access to Qusair and is prepared to enter the city immediately to help the civilians there.

Syria’s political opposition cited Hezbollah’s role in the war and the dire situation in Qusair as reasons for not attending peace talks with the regime in Geneva, which the US and Russia had hoped could be launched at an international conference this month.

[...]

Meanwhile, Hezbollah’s role in Syria set off a mounting backlash from the rebels who threatened to target the militia’s bases in Lebanon if the militant group does not withdraw its fighters.

Over the past week, Syrian rebels have fired dozens of rockets on Lebanon’s northeastern region of Hermel, across the border from Qusair, but Saturday’s attack was the first on the Baalbek region, a Hezbollah stronghold.

[...]

Lebanon and Syria share a complex web of political and sectarian ties and rivalries that are easily enflamed. Lebanon, itself plagued by decades of strife, has been on edge since the beginning of the Syrian crisis, which began as mostly peaceful protests against Assad’s regime but later degenerated into all-out civil war.

Some Lebanese Sunnis support the Syrian rebels, while some Shiites back Assad’s regime. In the majority Sunni city of Tripoli in northern Lebanon, Sunnis backing the rebels and Alawites supporting Assad have repeatedly fought each other with rockets and grenades.

Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah has firmly linked the militia’s fate with that of the Assad regime, but in a speech last week also pledged to keep the fighting out of Lebanon.

[...]

Syrian opposition activists say Assad’s army has fired dozens of devastating Scud-type missiles at rebel-held areas in the last six months, out of a ballistic arsenal believed to number in the hundreds.

Israeli child being measure up for his gas mask

Amid these extremely heightened tensions, Binyamin Netanyahu has ordered the government to spend another $350 million to equip the entire Israeli population with gas masks:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking Thursday at a meeting concluding this week’s Home Front drill, instructed government ministries to equip all of Israel’s residents with gas mask kits. The exercise, called “Turning Point 7,” tested the country’s readiness for chemical and conventional rocket attacks.

Only 58% percent of Israelis have gas masks, and it is estimated that it will take NIS 1.3 billion (some $350 million) to cover the rest of the population. In addition, it will cost NIS 300 million (some $80 million) annually to maintain the kits.

Demand for gas masks has risen by 30 percent over the past two weeks, as Israelis have become increasingly skittish over the prospect of war breaking out in the north. The rise comes in the wake of two aerial bombings near Damascus earlier this month, reportedly carried out by Israel. An Israeli analyst said Thursday that Syrian-Israeli tensions are now “incendiary.”

[...]

Facing the threat of thousands of enemy rockets, Israel’s home front is more vulnerable than ever, Netanyahu added at the meeting.

“We are deep in the era of missiles that are aimed at civilian population areas,” Netanyahu said during a meeting of the Emergency Economy Committee. “We must prepare defensively and offensively for the new era of warfare. The state of Israel is the most threatened state in the world. Around us are tens of thousands of missiles and rockets that could hit our home front.”

Netanyahu said that November’s Operation Pillar of Defense, during which Hamas terrorists fired hundreds of rockets from Gaza at Israeli civilian areas, was a small example of the change in the nature of the threats Israel faces.

I’ve been wishing for both sides to lose in Syria, but the way things look at the moment, that neither looks likely nor do any of the options promise peace and quiet for Israel.

Good News Friday

Good News Friday’s 1st anniversary!

It’s time for my next Good News Friday installment, and amazingly enough, one whole year has passed since I began this series.  In fact the first anniversary was almost 2 weeks ago, but I only noticed that a year had gone by when I saw the url of last week’s installment, which was numbered 51.  (If a post title is identical to a previous post’s, WordPress automatically numbers the following post).  A couple of Good News Friday posts weren’t numbered because they included other wording (e.g. “special edition) so the year passed without my being aware of it.  I’m delighted that what started out as an experiment which I wasn’t sure I would be able to keep up has become one of the favourite features of this blog, both for me and for my readers.  I hope to be able to continue with this series for a long time to come. If any of you comes across some item of good news about Israel you are welcome to send me tips to my email address (anneinpt at gmail dot com) and I will try to incorporate them.

And now onto some “real” good news!

Personalised Coke bottles with Hebrew names

My first item (or second, depending on where you start counting) is a quirky story from Israel’s hi-tech industry (h/t Reality). Israeli technology is powering Coca Cola’s marketing gimmick of printing individual names on Coke bottles:

Israeli technology is powering a popular new campaign by Coca-Cola, both in Israel and across Europe. Popular names that appear on hundreds of millions of bottles of the soft drink are all being printed on equipment produced using technology developed by Israel’s Indigo (a division of HP).

The Coke campaign, called “Share a Coke,” was launched May 1, and has already proven to be one of the most popular by Coca-Cola in recent years, a company spokesperson said. The centerpieces of the campaign are the “individualized” bottles consumers can buy, with their names on the label. The bottles are not produced to order; rather, the company said, the bottles use a range of about 150 of the popular first names of residents of each country (mostly in the younger demographics) where the campaign has been running. There are also nicknames, as well as generic titles, like, husband, wife, boyfriend, etc.

[...]

But the label is the centerpiece of the campaign, and getting those labels printed proved to be a major challenge for Coke. Although the company has been printing labels by the billions for decades, this printing job was different, company officials said. Personalized label printing – meaning, changing the text or design of a label – is different from conventional label printing, in that it requires changes to the print run to be made “on the fly,” without shutting down label production and recalibrating the printing equipment to change the name on the label.

Coke generally handles its own label printing, industry reports quoted company officials as saying, with equipment that is set to print the “normal” labels of Coca-Cola, Diet Coke, and Coke Zero — Coke’s three main offerings. That’s only three labels. But in the new campaign, Coke needed to be able to turn out, on schedule, 150 or so separate labels, for 32 markets – or close to 5,000 different labels.

It was a major challenge for the company, said Marit Kroon, marketing manager of Coca-Cola Europe, and after much experimentation, the company decided to print all the labels on HP Indigo printers, developed in Israel by the Indigo division of HP.

[...]

The Indigo presses ran 24 hours per day for approximately three months to produce the 800 million-some labels, the largest job on record for the HP Indigo WS6000 series Digital Presses used for the job. Alon Bar Shani, HP Vice President and General Manager of HP Indigo said, “Indigo’s personalization technology provides a great opportunity for large companies like Coca-Cola to build better relations with their customers. Our digital printers have proven their capabilities for the long haul, providing a solution for such a major project, completing it in time, and maintaining Coca-Cola’s high standards.”

Good for Coca Cola for an imaginative marketing idea, and kol hakavod to Indigo for being the ones to provide the solution.

Palestinians like pizza with all the toppings

Staying with the food industry, here’s a great story from NRG (Hebrew only) about coexistence between Palestinians and settlers via an Israeli pizza bar. (h/t Zvi). Here’s my translation:

When Jacky Zaafrani opened his pizza bar in Bet Aryeh 5 years ago he expected his clientèle to be fairly regular. Indeed in the last 5 years his pizza bar became established as Bet Aryeh’s main hangout for the youth where they would meet up, watch TV, eat pizza and pass the evenings together.

About a year ago residents of the neighbouring Palestinian village Luban started to take an interest in the pizza. “On the day the UN declared the new status of the Palestinian Authority I started to receive pizza orders from Luban residents” says Jacky. “In the beginning it was a bit strange because I didn’t realise that Palestinians eat pizza, and from that evening our Palestinian neighbours have not stopped ordering pizza”.
Jacky explains that “in the village there’s a meeting point next to the shop of the village’s Mukhtar. That’s where the delivery boy meets up with the pizza’s happy customers to hand over their order”.

It turns out that also during the Eid festival, which finished recently, many village residents chose to finish their fast with a large pizza laden with all good things. “During the Eid we noticed a real rise in pizza orders. When Luban residents call to order pizza, I joke and tell them that I have a kosher certification from Beit Yusuf (a play on words on the kashrut certification of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, called Bet Yosef) added Jacky with a smile.

[...]

Avi Naim, the head of Bet Aryeh-Ofarim Council, reveals that relations with the neighbouring village are excellent. “Many of them are my close friends. We are invited to weddings in the village, and residents of our region invite their Palestinian friends to events. This is a wonderful example of real coexistence”.

This happy little story just goes to prove that the settlements are no stumbling block to peace, and that both settlers and Palestinians are regular people who want no more than to share a pizza in peace. Kol hakavod to Bet Aryeh’s residents and to Jacky Zaafrani’s pizza parlour.

Indian-Israeli relations

My third item for this week is still with the food industry, but this time from the agricultural side, and with an international flavour: Israel has been helping India to grow olives:

In a sign of growing relations between the two countries, Israel has extended an olive branch to India. Quite literally, in this case.

Over the last five years, Indian farmers have joined hands with Israeli agribusiness to produce a crop that the majority on the subcontinent have only seen in books and films: fresh, green olives.

The project started out as a joint venture between Israeli firm Indolive and the agricultural board representing the Indian state of Rajasthan, a desert state on the western border. An Indian private company, Finolex Plasson Industries Ltd, joined the business alliance in 2007 through its subsidiary Plastro Plasson, drumming up greater investment for the enterprise. All parties involved in the joint venture now fall under an umbrella group called the Rajasthan Olive Cultivation Ltd (ROCL).

“We really got on to the project by chance after we happened to hear that there was already something happening between State of Rajasthan and an entrepreneur in Israel,” says Satish Ghatpande, executive director at Plastro Plasson Ltd.

The idea of including a private sector company in the deal particularly appealed to the Israeli investor, given the complexities of engaging with Indian bureaucracy.

Since Plastro Plasson was already in the drip irrigation business, they were a natural fit for the project.

Ghatpande says the scale of investment in India is relatively large, even though olives are hardly a staple crop in India.

“The current investment includes the state government and us putting in Rs. 15 million [about $270,000] each towards share capital,” he says, adding that Indolive imports the saplings to India.

While the venture began as a pilot experiment, it has now developed into a system of organized cultivation across six regions in Rajasthan. Ghatpande forecasts a 200-hectare yield from the current harvest.

“Our results have been mixed since the nature of soil differs from place to place,” he explains. “So, we try different saplings based on soil conditions.”

It hasn’t been smooth sailing for the venture either. From water shortages in the arid western desert and input resource bottlenecks to the paucity of skilled labor, the project has repeatedly hit stumbling blocks.

“The difficulties are there. We have to train people, create the right infrastructure and many times, the olive crop is very difficult to monitor as well,” Ghatpande says.

Also, despite initial investment, projects such as these are often sidelined by the government as they do not represent mainstream economic activity, he adds.

This ties up with the overall state of agriculture in India, where the government sees more bang for their buck in the manufacturing and services sectors, which deliver swifter and larger returns. According to World Bank data, the total share of agriculture in India’s gross domestic product is 21 percent — a worrying statistic when you consider 72 percent of the total population lives in rural agrarian communities.

However, Ghatpande says farmers in Rajasthan are still keen to get in on olive cultivation despite the crop’s limited exposure to the Indian markets.

“Farmers are now willing to jump from their current crops to olives because the yields on many crops in Rajasthan are declining,” says Ghatpande. Given that most of the olive crop is for exporting, farmers see this venture as lucrative in the long term.

The government, however, sees value in keeping some proportion of the fruit and pressing it locally within India.

“In August, we’re expecting the oil pressing machinery to come from Italy,” says Yogesh Verma, manager of ROCL. This means we can now press the oil in India.”

And while the import of olive oil has increased to eleven thousand metric tons over the last five years, Verma says this number could fall once olives are pressed locally. He also forecasts harvests will soon hit 5000-hectare yields in the next three or four years.

[...]

The olive experiment, if anything, points to a larger development in business ties between India and Israel. The latter see India, an emerging economic powerhouse, as a great global market for technology transfers and trade.

“The potential of cooperation and synergy between Israeli and Indian companies has become more and more clear with the increasing number of Israeli companies that want to come here,” says Orna Sagiv, the Israeli consul general in Mumbai, India.

The growth in technology exports from Israel to India explains why the Israeli embassy was keen to set up shop in Bangalore, a southern Indian city known for its high-profile IT companies. The consulate in Bangalore, which was formally inaugurated on May 20, is the third one in India.

Only three other countries in the world have over three Israeli missions, Ambassador Alon Ushpiz mentioned at the inauguration ceremony. He added that it is the growth in small and medium businesses in both countries that drives successful entrepreneurship and innovation.

On the same subject, the Hindu newspaper reports that Israel is to help India diversify fruit, vegetable crops:

Israel will offer technology and know-how to India to diversify its fruit and vegetable crops and raise their yield, senior Israeli officials has said.

New Delhi will also get help to set up 28 centres of excellence in 10 states over the next three years.

“We are providing technologies and know-how. Our focus is on training the trainers,” Daniel Carmon, head of Mashav, Israel’s Agency for International Development Cooperation, said.

Mr. Carmon said Israel will help set up 28 centres of excellence in 10 states, of which eight are likely to be functional by the end of 2013. Each centre will be focussed on specific fruit and vegetable crops.

Israel is a world leader in agriculture technologies. Despite limited water resources and a difficult environment, the yield per acre of most of the farm products in that country is among the highest in the world.

Mr. Carmon said yield can rise manifold in India with the help of generic Israeli technologies and agricultural techniques.

“We congratulate India on being self-sufficient in food. Feeding 1.2 billion people is not an easy task. But with improvement in technology, a lot more can be achieved,” he said.

Mr. Carmon said Israel would also offer help in increasing milk output in India. Average milk output per cow in Israel is around 12,000 litres, the highest in the world.

According to Uri Rubinstien, counsellor for international cooperation (Mashav), science and agriculture, at the Israeli embassy in New Delhi, Israel is providing seeds and technologies to help grow new variety of vegetables and fruits like capsicum, cucumber, mango, dates and herbs.

“We will be introducing a variety of coloured capsicum and a new variety of cucumber and other vegetables,” Mr. Rubinstien said.

Most vegetable and fruit crops in India are seasonal and have short life span. “Increasing the life span will boost output and earnings to farmers,” Mr. Rubinstien said.

This is great news for India, and very good news for Israel too. Improving and developing relations with a huge country like India can only improve Israel’s standing in the world, and of course there is the added mitzva of helping a country feed its people.  Kol hakavod to India for recognizing Israel’s technological prowess and kol hakavod too to Israel’s various ministries involved in these projects.

The Eindhoven High Tech Campus in Braban

A final extra bonus item, since this is my first anniversary after all, comes from Holland, where despite all the talk of BDS, boycotts etc., a the province of Brabant wants Israeli tech, BDS be damned:

sraeli start-ups seeking a home in Europe might want to have a look at the Netherlands — specifically, in the southern Brabant area of the country. There, start-ups will find a good location and infrastructure, motivated partners and maybe some working capital, according to Ben Engel of BOM Foreign Investments, a government-sponsored venture capital firm dedicated to attracting business to the region.

“We are finalizing a program that will invest 125 million euros in high-tech companies in our region,” Engel told The Times of Israel. “This is Dutch government money, and for the first time these funds will be available to foreign companies that establish themselves in our region.”

Brabant is already home to the local offices and research centers of more than 1,400 non-Dutch companies, mostly from the rest of Europe but also from the Americas and Asia, including powerhouses like Acer, Apple, IBM, GE, Dell, Sony. There are a few Israeli companies there as well, but Engel would like to see many more, especially in the life sciences area.

“We have a very well-developed high-tech and life sciences ecosystem, so any company that locates its European offices here will benefit from extensive knowledge and assistance, as well as the guidance we can give them in getting set up, finding customers and contacts, and financial assistance as well,” he said.

“Brabant is a good steppingstone for Israeli companies seeking European markets,” added Engel. “We’re very centrally located, in close proximity to Germany and Belgium, and a steppingstone from the big ports in Holland, like Amsterdam.”

[...]

Engel is quite enthusiastic about potential deals between Brabant and Israeli companies. Possible interference by supporters of the BDS — boycott, divestment and sanction — movement against Israel doesn’t disturb him a bit. “I am not a politician, but I can say that every deal we make gets the explicit approval of our provincial government, and we have expressly chosen to set up a long-term cooperation agreement with Israel.

“This move will strengthen our economy, as it will that of Israel,” continued Engel, adding that any resident of Brabant would understand that the arrangement was a plus not only for the region, but for Holland in general.

“I do not foresee any problems from the boycott, divest, and sanction groups,” he added. “But if they do ask, I would sit them down and explain to them, very rationally and firmly, that we intend to do business with Israel.”

Wow, this is brilliant. I take my hat off to Mr. Engel and say kol hakavod to him for recognizing the strength of Israel’s hi-tech industry and for not being deterred by the BDS brigade.

With all these happy thoughts of Coke, pizza, olives and hi-tech, I wish you all Shabbat shalom!

How antisemitic propaganda seeps into the cultural mindset

The Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet published a cartoon this week which would have made the editor of Der Stuermer proud.

The Anti-Defamation League issued a statement on Wednesday condemning a cartoon appearing in the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet, which grossly demonized Jewish ritual circumcision, as “deeply offensive and appalling.”

The cartoon, which was printed on May 28, depicts a bloodied crying baby lying on a table with his toes being cut off with pruning shears and severed toes scattered around.  A bearded and hatted man is holding what appears to be a Jewish holy book in one hand, while with the other, he holds the baby down on the table with a pitchfork.  A woman, who is also holding what appears to be a prayer book, says to entering policemen “Mistreating?  No, this is tradition, an important part of our belief!”  The police say, “Belief?  Oh yes, then it is all right.”

“This grotesque cartoon of a bloodied, mutilated baby, suffering at the hands of adults, is a deeply offensive and appalling distortion of a core Jewish ritual,” said ADL National Director Abraham Foxman. “The image harkens back to the centuries of anti-Semitic illustrations depicting Jews engaged in ritual ceremonies involving gratuitous and fabricated bloodletting.”

“In no way can this sickening cartoon be justified as an acceptable graphic representation in support for the campaign to legislatively restrict ritual circumcision, which unfortunately has gained some traction in Europe.

“We call on the editors of Dagbladet to issue an official apology and for other government and societal leaders in Norway to speak out against this monstrous cartoon and its deeper messages,” he said.

In November 2011, ADL voiced concern to the Dagbladet regarding a cartoon equating the situation in the Gaza Strip with the Holocaust.

The European Jewish Congress has previously said that it is “carefully considering the possibility of taking legal action” over the cartoon.

The Algemeiner adds:

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a leading Jewish Human Rights NGO,  who is currently attending the Global Forum on Antisemitism in Jerusalem, denounced the “blood libel cartoon” as “so virulently anti-Semitic it would make Hitler and Himmler weep tears of joy.”

“We call upon Norway’s leaders to denounce this incitement to hate and especially urge the Ombudsman for Children’s Rights to denounce this outrageous denigration of a core Jewish rite dating back to the biblical times of Abraham,” Cooper added.

Incredibly, the cartoonist innocently claims he never meant to offend the Jews and was just commenting on religion in general:

According to the JTA, “Dagbladet cartoon artist Tomas Drefvelin said he did not mean to draw Jews in his caricature, which he meant ‘not as criticism of either a specific religion or a nation [but] as a general criticism of religions.’”

“I gave the people in the picture hats, and the man beard, because this gives them a more religious character … Jew-hatred is reprehensible. I would never draw to create hatred of a people, or against individuals,” he added.

Riight. So that’s why he didn’t draw a picture of Muslims performing anything religious, let alone something as cruel as female genital mutilation; and he also didn’t mention Christians of any denomination. It’s funny how “religion” only made him think of men with hats and beards holding a baby while cutting bits off him.

Honest Reporting remarks:

While Drefvelin may not have intended to employ classic anti-Semitic tropes and caricatures, his cartoon now takes its place as the latest in a long line of fiendish depictions of Jews in black coats and hats carrying out outrageous and morally offensive acts designed to inspire reactions of disgust from the public.

Dr. Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress, compared the cartoon to Nazi propaganda, which often exaggerated Jewish rituals to give them a demonic appearance. “This is a violent cartoon which is meant to inspire hate and contempt against one particular people,” he said.

Speaking of Nazi propaganda and the ease with which antisemitic tropes are absorbed almost sub-consciously into the public mind,  my friend and commenter Brian Goldfarb (who also writes at Engage and at Simply Jews) wrote the following item which fits in well with this subject, entitled “On deconstructing and denouncing Richard Wagner”:

Like many, maybe even most, of my fellow Jews, including lots of lovers of classical music, I am less than enamoured of Richard Wagner and his music. I find that I cannot separate the man and his beliefs from his music and neither, it seems, can Robert Wistrich, Neuberger Professor of History at the University of Jerusalem and Head of the Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of Antisemitism (yes, that Vidal Sassoon, the hairdresser: more on him below).

A small personal preamble: one Christmas Day (remember, I live in the UK, and it’s a holiday here), with nothing better to do (no family around, miserable weather outside, rubbish on television), I switched on the BBC’s classical music radio station. They were playing religious music: fair enough: Britain is, at least nominally, a Christian country. But then, horror of horrors, they decided to play some Wagner, from The Ring Cycle, of all things! Come on, I yelled at the radio (which took no notice), this is PAGAN, not Christian, music, and rushed to turn it off. I had other reasons, of course: Wagner was Hitler’s favourite composer – which would be enough to condemn anyone in my eyes, but is hardly a considered critical judgement; the Bayreuth Wagner festival used to reek of antisemitism and Nazi propaganda; and, anyway, I didn’t like his bombastic and overly teutonic music at all. It even puts me off Bruckner, in whose music I can detect strong Wagnerian influences. We once, at a concert, rushed out of the hall immediately the Bruckner symphony ended, just in case they played an encore! You could have fitted a whole Haydn symphony into his First Movement and got more joy at hearing wonderful music in the process.

Anyway, back to Wagner and Robert Wistrich. Writing in the Times of Israel on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of Wagner’s birth (22 May, 1813), he examines the links between Wagner and antisemitism. Even bearing in mind that the term “antisemitism” wasn’t even coined until the 1860s, Wistrich finds Wagner guilty as charged. Wistrich starts as he means to go on:

“There is little doubt that the great German composer Richard Wagner was one of the most virulent anti-Semites in modern history as well as being Adolf Hitler’s most revered cultural role-model.”

 

Fair enough, but what’s his evidence for that unequivocal opening line?

Indeed, as the good academic that he is, Wistrich raises the obvious intellectual objection to his own opening line:

“is it, in fact, correct to see in Wagner a kind of proto-Nazi before his time?“

He goes on to raise further objections:

“What, indeed, we might ask, would modern music be without Wagner’s aesthetic revolution, his universal artwork…of the future, his dramatic expressiveness or masterful merging of text and music? Even the legendary Jewish conductor Leonard Bernstein had to admit: “I hate Wagner, but I hate him on my knees.””

Wistrich himself makes further intellectual objections to the simplistic, straight line ‘Wagner = Nazis’ when he says that



“It might, of course, be objected that Wagner can hardly be held responsible for the monstrous way in which the Nazis implemented some parts of his vision half a century later.”  

Of course he can’t. Still, even though many Wagnerians were, and are, nice people who wouldn’t hurt a fly, let alone eat meat, raw or cooked, Wagner can’t escape adverse judgement, not when a critic as perceptive as Nietzsche (a former fan) “denounced Wagner’s art as diseased, narcotic, morbid, hysterical and brutal. His scathing portrait of Wagner as a master of hypnotic trickery, a neurotic tyrant with an actor’s genius, an incomparable histrionic personality – seems at some points to uncannily prefigure Hitler.”

And we must remember that Nietzsche himself has been badly misused by the far right.

Read the full article. It is highly recommended:

And a final note on Vidal Sassoon: for anyone who missed the obituaries on him recently, Sassoon was too young to be called up to fight fascism during World War 2. So, as a good Jewish boy from the working class of East End London, he attached himself to the 43 Group – 43 Jewish ex-servicemen who pledged themselves to fight, literally, the resurgent fascists of Mosley’s Union Movement on London’s streets. As an apprentice ladies hairdresser, he occasionally turned up for work somewhat bruised (having fought a street battle the night before). One story goes that, in response to the shop manager asking what happened, he replied that he’d tripped over a hair ribbon! Be it noted that he volunteered for (and fought in) the Israeli War of Independence in 1948 (he had, by then, done his UK National Service in the army).

He became the “go-to” hairdresser of the 1960s, famously creating Mary Quant’s iconic “bob”. Having made a fortune as a result of his fame, he then spent a large amount of this fortune on funding the Institute for the Study of Antisemitism that bears his name at the U. of Jerusalem.

He never forgot his roots.

What these two seemingly disparate stories tell us is that no matter how irrelevant an artist’s views appear, they can seep into the public sub-conscious through their art. Wagner’s antisemitism inspired Hitler. Drefvelin has apparently  imbibed his antisemitism unconsciously, for he claims not to understand what is antisemitic about his cartoon. Who will be influenced in turn by his cartoon?

We must challenge antisemitism wherever it is found, even in something as irrelevant as a cartoon.

The impossibility of making peace with those sworn to kill you

Further to my previous post about the US’s futile efforts at peace-making in the Middle East, how can anyone expect peace to be achieved when one side consists of pathological liars?

At the World Economic Forum earlier this week, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas delivered a wonderful speech, full of sweetness and light. The video is below:

From the Algemeiner article:

During a speech delivered Sunday at the World Economic Forum, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas claimed that the PA does not incite to hatred and does not educate to discriminate against Judaism, but strives to “spread the culture of peace” among Palestinian Arabs.

“We don’t teach and we don’t educate our children to hate or even discriminate against any religion, be it Judaism or any other,” Abbas said.

However, Palestinian Media Watch, a watchdog group that monitors Palestinian Authority media pointed out that it has identified numerous instances in which Abbas’s claims are contradicted.

In an email to reporters, PMW says its executive director Itamar Marcus recently presented a 35 page report to members of congress about Palestinian Authority incitement.

The report documents “that US funding of the PA was supporting PA hate promotion, terror glorification, and denial of Israel’s right to exist,” says PMW. The full report can be read online here.

PMW also pointed to the following hateful videos shown on official PA TV. This one shows children being taught that Jews are “pigs” and “Allah’s enemies.”

Watch the shocking and disgusting videos in the Algemeiner article that PMW have recorded from Palestinian TV shows and see what incitement and hatred they are inculcating into the next generation. What chance will there ever be of achieving peace between Israel and the Palestinians when Palestinian children are taught to hate Israel and the Jews at such a visceral level.

Stressing the cognitive dissonance between Abbas’s words at the WEF and the Palestinians’ deeds, David Horowitz in the Times of Israel pulls no punches in telling Secretary of State Kerry “It’s not the economy, stupid“:

Before he took office, Kerry was touted as a secretary of state who truly believed he might succeed where his predecessors had failed, in brokering Israeli-Palestinian peace — and never mind the discouraging context: a weak PA president who failed to confront the false Arafat narrative that denies Jewish sovereign roots here; a region in free fall where the Hamas takeover in Gaza and the bloodshed on the Syrian side of the Golan constitute spectacular disincentives to relinquish territory; and a battered Israeli public who saw Ehud Olmert’s unsurpassable peace offer brushed aside by Abbas in 2008 and now have a settler-sympathetic prime minister, with a heavy settler element in his coalition, who is in no mood to repeat it.

As the businesspeople who fashioned “Breaking the Impasse” correctly recognized, the path to an accord requires compromise and pragmatism by the politicians. It requires a Palestinian leader like the English-speaking Abbas, who told Channel 2 last year that there would be no third intifada under his leadership, that he had no demands on pre-1967 Israel, and that he felt he had no “right” to return to live in Safed, the town of his birth in today’s northern Israel. It does not require a Palestinian leader like the Arabic-speaking Abbas, who went to the UN last November seeking statehood without the inconvenience of negotiating modalities with Israel, told the watching world Israel was born in fundamental sin through ethnic cleansing, and who, at the Dead Sea on Sunday, delivered a speech made all the more unpalatable and extreme by the plaintive call for peace from the business community that preceded it.

In the Abbas account of the conflict as detailed on Sunday, Israel’s refusal to simply up and leave from the West Bank is plain incomprehensible. After all, he argued, the Palestinians have never and would never harm so much as a hair on an Israeli’s head.

Why on earth, he wondered — this picture of bafflement, this elderly, well-intentioned gentleman, rendered impotent by the stupidity of those aggressors on the other side of that inexplicably constructed wall — would Israelis be wary of what might happen were they to pull out of the West Bank? What harm might possibly befall them? The Second Intifada? Obviously a figment of Israel’s imagination. The no-nonsense ousting of Abbas from Gaza by Hamas, with its acutely worrying implications for a post-IDF West Bank? Presumably never happened.

Israel in 1999 threw out Netanyahu because it believed there was a peace deal to be made with Arafat, and that the intransigent prime minister was missing the chance. There was no such sentiment when Israelis voted four months ago — no sense that opportunities for peace were going begging because of obdurate, settlement-building Netanyahu. Arafat shattered Israelis’ confidence in their Palestinian negotiating partners. Abbas has signally failed to restore it. And the collapse of stability in the Middle East is working against all those who seek to heal the rift.

As if to exemplify the Palestinians’ hatred and contempt of Israel, we learned of the appointment of an arch-terrorist, responsible for the murder of 38 innocent Israeli civilians, as an adviser to the Palestinian Authority:

Hussein Fayyad, one of the commanders of the terror group that carried out the 1978 Coastal Road massacre, revealed on Tuesday that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas had appointed him as one of his advisers.

The attack, which led to the killing of 38 Israeli civilians, including 13 children, was planned and carried out by Abbas’s Fatah faction.

Fayyad, who was released in a prisoner swap with Israel in 1985, said that Abbas signed a decree in 2008 promoting him to the position of “advisor” to the PA president.

Some peace. Some process.

US attempts to restart Israel-Palestinian peace talks: why do they bother?

John Kerry meets President Shimon Peres last week

For the umpteenth time the US Secretary of State, this time it is John Kerry, visited Israel and the PA to attempt to restart peace talks between the two sides. And as in umpteen times before, nothing happened. The only thing we can be sure of is that the Palestinians will be “disappointed” and that will the excuse to renew terrorist violence against Israel – as if they needed an excuse.

A little sanity emerged when for a change, Kerry did not demand a settlement freeze in order to entice the Palestinians to the negotiating table although he did hint that it would be a Nice Thing™.

US Secretary of State John Kerry urged Israel’s government on Friday to prevent further settlement construction where possible to help revitalize Middle East peace hopes, but stressed that the Jewish state and Palestinians alike should remain focused on the larger goal of restarting direct negotiations. Explaining part of the strategy of his now 2-month-old peace initiative, Kerry said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government can stop only some of the settlements being built in lands contested by the Israelis and Palestinians — and in those cases it should act. Unlike in previous American-led mediation efforts, however, he stopped short of demanding a full settlement freeze and said the contentious issue could better be handled through a quick restart of direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

[...]

Kerry said it was important not to let settlements stand in the way of talks that could finally set borders as part of a peace agreement. Then, he said, the issue would be resolved because each side would have clear boundaries for their two states.

[...]

On Thursday, Kerry praised Netanyahu for the “seriousness” with which he is looking at ways to revitalize peace hopes.

Kerry’s trip, however, only seemed to prompt more pessimism from Palestinian officials about chances for peace.

[...]

Kerry brought “nothing new” to his discussions Thursday with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, lamented one Palestinian official familiar with the talks. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly on the private meetings, said Palestinian expectations remain low because they see Kerry “trying to accommodate the Israelis, not pressure the Israelis.”

While Palestinians have praised Kerry’s efforts, they say there has been little progress ahead of what they believe to be a June 7 deadline for action. They are already beginning work on a “day-after” strategy.

And they say there is no point in negotiating while Israel continues to build Jewish settlements. More than 500,000 Israelis now live in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, making it increasingly difficult to partition the land between Israel and the Palestinians. Israel also captured the Gaza Strip in 1967, though it withdrew from the territory in 2005.

The Palestinians as per usual demanded the whole shebang: that Israel freeze all settlement activity and recognize the borders of a Palestinian state before negotiations. The question then arises, what is left to negotiate?

The Palestinian Authority’s chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, said Sunday that his side would only agree to renew peace talks if Israel ceased all settlement activity and openly declared that a future state of Palestine would be created on the 1967 lines with minor land swaps. He sounded exceedingly skeptical about the prospects of a breakthrough in the stalemate. “We need to know what are the terms of reference for these negotiations. What are we negotiating about?” Erekat told Israeli reporters on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum here. “If you have an Israeli prime minister who cannot utter the sentences two states on 1967 — come on, guys. Stop being politically blind.”

I don’t know if Erekat is aware of the contradiction in terms in his statement. My guess is he is aware and is happy playing the West for fools.

“We need to know what are the terms of reference for these negotiations. What are we negotiating about?” – If Israel accedes to all his preconditions, then indeed, what are we negotiating about, besides Israel’s unconditional surrender, that is.

“We all agree with President Shimon Peres on the need for two states based on ’67,” Erekat said. “He should focus on convincing the Israeli prime minister, Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu,” to accept that framework.

The Americans,too, added Erekat, must push for Netanyahu to declare “publicly his acceptance of two states based on ’67.”

In case it escaped Erekat’s attention, and I’m sure it didn’t, there were no borders in 1967. There were only armistice lines from 1949.  The Palestinians were happy enough living under Jordanian, Egyptian and Syrian occupation during those 19 years and never demanded independence or statehood. That idea only occurred to them when Israel regained those territories.

“The Palestinians have no preconditions whatsoever. The Israelis have to understand the difference between your obligations and our conditions,” Erekat said.

Anyone who managed to read the whole article, where Erekat spells out all the preconditions that Israel has to fulfill before the Palestinians will agree to come to the table, and then read the above statement without laughing or gasping at the barefaced lying, probably suffers from a serious sense of humour failure.

Honest Reporting picked up on Erekat’s lies in the following video:

The question remains, why does the US continue to invest valuable political capital in its cosntant attempts to renew the peace process, when they must know that these attempts are doomed to failure?  Haviv Rettig Gur has an interesting analysis on why America’s peace push may actually make sense:

“People in Israel aren’t waking up every day and wondering if tomorrow there will be peace,” Kerry complained, “because there is a sense of security and a sense of accomplishment and of prosperity.”

[...]

Kerry’s own analysis last week of the Israeli public’s views on peace suggests American understanding has not improved. Countless polls tell us that Israelis are not, as Kerry implied, blissfully unaware of the conflict or of the need for peace. Rather, they’re openly cynical about the ability of diplomacy to deliver an agreement that has the power to guarantee real security. Just hours after Kerry offered his interpretation of the Israeli mindset, an interview was published with Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli PM, in which he called Abbas “not a big hero” and explained that the Palestinian leader had rejected out of hand a generous Israeli offer.

[...]

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is no mere border dispute. It is a war over national identity, independence and long-term security. Foreigners often remark in blasé indifference that compromise is painful, as though the only obstacle is psychological pain. But in this conflict, both sides view compromise as fraught with massive risk, as a gamble with their nation’s future freedom, security, and deepest-held beliefs about itself.

It’s enough to make a pessimist out of any rational observer, and many such observers in the region are scratching their heads over the American willingness to expend apparently infinite political attention on a conflict it cannot meaningfully influence.

[...]

And so the question must be asked: Does American naïveté know no bounds? Why is the secretary of state investing so much in a conflict historically so resistant to outside influence?

To judge by Kerry’s latest visit to the region, the answer may be, counterintuitively, that US investment in the peace process is increasing because Israeli-Palestinian peace is actually declining in importance.

[...]

In Obama’s Jerusalem speech in March, he offered Israelis a rather different assessment of their skepticism than that offered last week by his secretary of state.

“Today, I want to tell you – particularly the young people – that so long as there is a United States of America, [you are not alone],” Obama said.

“You made credible proposals to the Palestinians at Annapolis. You withdrew from Gaza and Lebanon, and then faced terror and rockets. Across the region, you have extended a hand of friendship, and too often have been confronted with the ugly reality of anti-Semitism. So I believe that the Israeli people do want peace, and you have every right to be skeptical that it can be achieved.”

But, he added, “[T]he Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and justice must also be recognized. Put yourself in their shoes – look at the world through their eyes. It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of her own, and lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements of her parents every single day.”

“Israel must reverse an undertow of isolation” in the international community, he said.

Or, to paraphrase: We’re family, but you’re embarrassing us. We’re not walking away; we need each other. But we’re also not comfortable and less than completely happy about our relationship – because of the occupation.

The administration’s insistence on visible efforts toward peace has little to do with the actual likelihood of success. The alliance with Israel is more desirable than ever, but the US is also keen on not letting that alliance damage its standing in the Middle East.

The solution: a visible, energetic peace process that is seen, especially in the Arab world, to benefit the Palestinians. And if it actually leads to peace, all the better.

To that end, the administration has invested (or promised to invest) almost unlimited diplomatic prestige and a great deal of money. Both are plentiful and politically cheap in Washington. Meanwhile, the US is not doing things that are politically expensive, such as overly pressuring the sides. Any attempt to impose negotiations or confidence-building steps on Israel won’t work, administration officials now believe, and in any case won’t be worth the domestic political fallout in the US or the strain on the increasingly valuable military alliance with Israel. But neither will the administration make overly aggressive demands of the Palestinian leadership, both because they don’t believe that would work either, and because they don’t want to pay the political price with Arab states.

Instead, America is investing enough money in the process itself that the Palestinians will think twice before walking away, but maintaining enough of a distance politically, with no Clinton-like involvement on President Obama’s part in the minutiae of peacemaking, to prevent any real cost to the US if the talks fall through.

This might make a convoluted kind of sense but I’m not sure I agree with the assessment. And even if the assessment is right, I certainly disagree with the Americans’ approach. Despite the fact that their heart is (probably) in the right place, we all know what the way to hell is paved with.

As has been proven time and again, whenever peace negotiations are attempted and fail, the Palestinian “street” claims to be disappointed and the violence begins anew, or rather, it strengthens.

Debating Israel’s natural gas boon

Map of Mediterranean gas fields

Israel’s newly discovered natural gas finds have given a huge boost to the country, economically, politically and with positive implications on the security front too. However there is now fierce debate going on in Israel over what to do with the gas. Should it be used for domestic purposes or exported? And in what proportions?

This week we had some more good news: Significant signs of natural gas have been found at the Karish 1 Well:

Noble Energy Inc. (NYSE: NBL) and Delek Group Ltd. (TASE: DLEKG) have announced that significant signs of natural gas have been found in the target strata of the Karish 1 well in the Alon C license. The target strata are at a depth of 4,790 meters, including the depth of the water.

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Noble Energy, the well operator, said that the target strata had natural gas. The companies have not yet stated how much gas has been found, as it is necessary to wait for the results of the electrical logs.

The best estimate of the Alon C reservoir by Netherland Sewell & Associates Ltd. (NSAI) previously published by Delek indicates that it contains two trillion cubic feet (TCF) of gas. However, Clal Finance analyst Yaron Zar believes that 0.9-1.5 TCF of gas will be found at the reservoir.

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“This is further proof of the power of Israel’s gas industry and the great potential of the gas along Israel’s coastline, and we must keep up the momentum,” said Avner CEO and Delek Drilling chairman Gideon Tadmor. “The news from Karish follows the increase in the estimated quantities of gas at Leviathan announced just two weeks ago. Israel’s energy security strengthens with each discovery, and we must not stop the momentum towards building a thriving Israeli natural gas industry, which will generate hundreds of millions of shekels for the government in the coming decades, since the government’s take in taxes and royalties is 60%.”

The drilling of the Karish 1 well began in March, and cost $90 million. According to the prospective resources report, published in December 2012, there is a 77% chance of find gas at the well, which is located 75 kilometers northwest of Haifa. The geologic structure of the license’s target strata is Tamar sands.

“I welcome the announcement about the Karish reservoir,” said Minister Energy and Water Resources Silvan Shalom. “Increasing the natural gas supply in reservoirs will make it possible to supply more gas to the domestic market and boost the state’s revenues, which will be channeled to investment in education, welfare, health, and investments in the Negev and Galilee, for the good of Israel’s people.”

Silvan Shalom’s above statement is something of an about-turn, perhaps connected to the fact that protestors demonstrated in front of his house and surrounded Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fisher in protest at their intention to export Israel’s natural gas rather than use it for domestic purposes.

Dozens surrounded Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer, crying out “Where’s our money?” and calling against exporting gas. Police officers at the scene guarded Fischer from the crowd and helped him to his car. No one was arrested.

The protesters arrived at Tel Aviv after some 400 demonstrated in front of the Ramat Gan residence of Energy and Water Minister Silvan Shalom, against his intention to export natural gas.

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Mor Gilboa, director general of the Megama Yeruka environmental group, said that “Natural gas can serve us for dozens of years and cheapen costs of living. That’s the message we would like to deliver to the minister.”

As Yisrael Hayom reports, Silvan Shalom is now supporting the idea that the natural gas resources should be primarily for domestic use:

Energy and Water Resources Minister Silvan Shalom would like to drastically cut the amount of natural gas that Israel would export.

According to a Channel 2 report Wednesday, Shalom plans to reject some of the findings of the Tzemach Commission that recommended exporting most of the gas Israel extracts from the Mediterranean Sea. The recommendations have drawn criticism from environmentalists and others who believe Israelis’ would pay less for electricity and enjoy better quality of life if Israel uses its newly found gas for domestic consumption.

The commission was named after its head, Ministry of Energy and Water Resources Director-General Shaul Zemach. In 2012, after a year of deliberations, it recommended Israel export 53 percent of the gas it produces, which would allow it to stay energy independent for 25 years. The commission said the profits of exportation would spur competition and induce more exploration.

Shalom apparently wants to allocate 39% to 43% of the gas for exportation. But government officials stress that Shalom would endorse a specific figure only after his staff reviews the matter thoroughly. “The minister has held many meetings on this matter for the past several weeks; when he decides on a figure he will ask the government to adopt his recommendations,” one official said on Wednesday.

Israel’s natural gas reservoirs have an estimated 38 trillion cubic meters (tcm) of natural gas. The Energy and Water resources Ministry believes Israel would require less than17 tcm through 2040.

“Gas gives you much more power than you had. It is something that is very helpful in the geopolitical arena and helps to narrow the gaps,” Shalom, who also serves as Israel’s minister for regional development, told Reuters in an interview.

“It is a tool we can use in a sensitive and very clever way to enable us to develop relations … and to have better relations with many other countries,” he added when asked if future gas trade could warm up chilly Israeli-Turkish ties.

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Shalom, a former foreign minister and veteran member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, declined to discuss the issue. But he revealed that Russian President Vladimir Putin had raised the question of Israel’s gas projects only last week.

“President Putin and Prime Minister Netanyahu talked about it…[but] it is not something we are dealing with these days,” he said, giving no further details.

Russian energy group Gazprom said in February it was in exclusive talks to buy liquefied natural gas from Israel’s Tamar field and has also made clear it wants to buy from the larger, nearby Leviathan field.

Some Israeli leaders have suggested the country should adopt a “gas for peace” strategy, offering its energy resources to neighbors at discounted prices to cement peace ties.

Shalom appeared to dismiss the idea of one day selling gas to Egypt, saying its southern neighbor had more reserves than Israel, but he did not rule out deals with Jordan to the east.

The Association of oil and Gas Exploration Industries in Israel cautioned against the new move away from exportation. “Such a decision would deal a heavy blow to the Israeli consumer,” it said in a statement.

Alon Tal, in a very interesting assessment in the JPost, calls this a debate over values, not numbers:

The discovery of natural gas in the Mediterranean is a development that even the gloomiest environmentalists greet with elation. Israel’s air pollution takes a terrible toll on public health, with high asthma and cancer rates in major cities reflecting pervasive shortcomings in international air-quality standards. And while President Shimon Peres promised the world at the 2009 UN Copenhagen climate summit that Israel would soon reduce greenhouse gases by 20 percent, emissions since then actually have steadily increased.

Natural gas could dramatically transform both these pathologies.

The discovery of gas will also produce major economic dividends for Israeli citizens.

After a major public campaign, the government agreed to accept the recommendations of the Sheshinski Committee, gradually increasing a levy on oil and gas to reach 60% of excess profits. This constitutes a major new source of revenue for the public coffers. Recently, the Tamar fields went “on line,” and development of the Leviathan fields should be imminent.

And yet the Knesset corridors were filled last week with a heated debate over the question of gas exports.

The question that the Netanyahu government is pushing to resolve is this: How much of the gas that the private companies pump from Israel’s national reserves should be sold overseas as exports? Last year, another government committee, headed by Energy and Water Ministry director-general Shaul Tzemach, considered the matter. It called for allowing exports of 50% of present reserves.

Ostensibly this seems like a good thing. If Israel has excess reserves of natural gas, exporting them should bring in considerable tax dollars. Moreover, access to the world market will serve to “incentify” international corporations to expand local exploration activity and create much-needed competition for future gas concessions.

Such benefits, unfortunately, tend to be overstated while the potential downsides are understated. Approving massive exports of natural gas based on what we know about proven reserves today is poor public policy.

To start with, the Tzemach Committee’s present projections regarding gas reserves are far too optimistic. Natural-gas production is measured in units of bcm (billion cubic meters). Tzemach assumes a total reserve of 950 bcm. But verification of such massive reserves has not yet been confirmed by geological experts. The Bank of Israel, for instance, says the numbers are far lower.

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Argument over “numbers” sounds like nitpicking and can quickly lead even concerned citizens’ eyes to gloss over. In fact this is an argument about values. How much gas do we want to sell today – and how much do we want to leave to our children and grandchildren so that they might enjoy energy independence? Once the Israeli economy and infrastructure makes the transition to natural gas, to run out and be forced to import would be hugely expensive.

That is precisely what has happened in the UK. After exporting huge quantities of the North Sea’s seemingly unlimited gas reserves, more and more natural gas today is imported – but for three times the cost its own gas was sold for. Even Egypt has begun to import natural gas! Over the past decades, the price of natural gas has only risen. With the ongoing increase in demand for energy from China, India and the developing world, there is no reason to think that it will not continue to do so. It is prudent to take a precautionary approach and only sell off excess reserves when we are sure they actually exist. The worst thing that can happen by delaying a decision on gas exports is to increase future revenues.

[...]  Tzemach estimates that over the next 25 years domestic demand will not exceed 450 bcm. But once a reliable supply of natural gas becomes available, the entire Israeli economy can and should change. Dror Strum, a leading local expert and president of the Israeli Institute for Economic Planning, recently released a detailed report showing that a realistic 35-year Israeli projection of demand for natural gas reaches 815 bcm.

Strum bases his projection on experience in other countries with natural-gas reserves.

Once they became available, the infrastructure transition was dramatic. For instance, some 50% of the vehicle fleet moved to natural gas as a fuel source within seven years.

Once factories realize that they can cut their energy costs in half, pragmatic Israeli industrialists will also convert their factories to utilize the cleaner, cheaper resource. New plants for industries such as ammonia and methanol (that Tzemach never considered) can and should emerge to take advantage of this inexpensive and clean source of energy.

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Perhaps the central question that needs to be debated is the length of time we want to guarantee reserves. Rather than offering a range of policy options, the Tzemach Committee decided to recommend that Israel ensure domestic natural-gas supply for 25 years. But is that a long enough time? Israel has known economic boycotts and needs to make energy independence a higher priority than other, less diplomatically isolated, countries. A cautious approach would guarantee reserves for the coming 50 years and an intermediate position for 35 years.

Clearly, such a decision is a value judgment that should be made after a transparent and robust public debate – and not by a small clique of government technocrats who are subject to intensive lobbying by the very powerful and wealthy natural-gas industry.

One of the most important misconceptions that needs to be raised in that debate over present versus future sales involves the overstated expectations about tax revenues from exports. To begin with, it will take about a decade for the first taxes to arrive because first the investment in exploration and infrastructure by the gas companies is to be paid out.

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While it is only fair that the international consortiums that develop Israel’s gas fields at considerable costs receive a fair return, surely the Israeli public should benefit from the higher prices available for exports! In short, advocates correctly argue that the proposed 50% export rates are a bad idea for many reasons: It would be bad for the environment, limiting the potential transition to clean fuels. It could be bad economically, as Israel in the future may well end up importing very expensive alternatives. And it could be bad socially, with poorer populations ultimately paying higher prices for electricity and fuel when local sources are exhausted, when it could enjoy the benefits of Israel’s newly discovered natural resource for generations.

A consensus position that seems to be emerging in the Knesset is twofold:

• Firstly, there is no reason why the issue of natural-gas export policy needs to be resolved immediately with such imperfect information. As more reliable data about the actual reserves become available, a more informed and responsible decision can be made. Once export contracts are signed, it will become very difficult politically (and hugely expensive) to cancel them if projections turn out to be overstated and Israel needs to cut exports back.

• Secondly, the issue needs to move from the government to the Knesset to ensure a robust debate that presumably will lead to a better decision. That at least was the lesson of the Sheshinski experience, where the Knesset’s intervention led to a far more equitable position regarding taxing gas profits.

The issue of natural-gas exports should not be framed in the tired old paradigmatic battle between Left and Right, or capitalist versus socialist values. Rather, it is a question of whether we want to err on the side of caution in considering the country’s energy future. Should we ensure that the next generation of Israelis and local industries enjoy virtually unlimited access to clean, inexpensive energy? Or should we opt to maximize profits immediately for the international corporations that stand to benefit from a policy of massive exports?

I hope our economic and political leaders have the wisdom to make the correct decision for Israel both for the present and for future generations.