Why the Jews hate Hamas: understanding the goals and beliefs of Islamist totalitarian movements | Shurat HaDin – Israel Law Center

What can be more obnoxious than Holocaust denial?

Holocaust denial that then asserts that we will do it for real if given the chance. The only thing more obnoxious than denying the Holocaust is to say that it should have happened; it didn’t happen, but if we get the chance, we will accomplish it.

Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic delves into a frightening inquiry: what would the world look like for the Jews if Hamas and Hezbollah held greater firepower than Israel?

This inquiry is necessary, not only to understand why Israelis fear Hamas, but also to understand that the narrative advanced by Hamas apologists concerning the group’s beliefs and goals is false:

“Going there” also does not require enormous imagination, or a well-developed predisposition toward paranoia. It is, in my opinion, a dereliction of responsibility on the part of progressives not to try to understand the goals and beliefs of Islamist totalitarian movements.

To read Goldberg’s analysis, please click here.

How Romney plans to deal with Iran

Jeffrey Goldberg publishes an email he received from Mitt Romney in which the candidate answers questions about how he would deal with Iran as President. 

“I have always talked about the diplomatic process,” he wrote. “I will not rule out diplomatic options, so long as we would not be rewarding bad behavior and so long as the Iranian leadership was truly cornered and ready to change its behavior. A crumbling economy is not enough. Because even with a crumbling economy, the Iranian leadership is still racing towards a bomb right now.”

Romney went out of his way to suggest that the Obama administration plans to spring some sort of late-November surprise on America’s Middle East allies, citing a recentNew York Times report that Iran and the White House had agreed to face-to-face negotiations after the election (a report denied by the White House). “Our closest allies, likeIsrael, will not learn about our plans from the New York Times,” Romney wrote. “And I’ll be clear with the American people about where I’m heading. I won’t be secretly asking the Ayatollahs for more flexibility following some future election.”

...

He also denied that his new emphasis on negotiations means that he would accept less than a complete halt to Iran’s nuclear work: “To be clear, the objective of any strategy will be to get Iran to stop spinning centrifuges, stop enriching uranium, shut down its facilities. Full stop. Existing fissile material will have to be shipped out of the country.”

I asked Romney to name the biggest mistake he thinks Obama has made on Iran. “President Obama has sent the Ayatollahs mixed messages throughout the past four years,” he wrote. “That’s why he has lost credibility on the negotiating track. Round after round after round of talks and nothing to show for them. Iran continues to race to a nuclear weapons capability and continues to become more brazen in its support of terrorism around the world, including a terror plot in Washington, D.C.,” a reference to a thwarted plot, hatched in Tehran, to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the U.S.

Romney went on: “What do I mean by mixed messages? In the first year of his administration, the President said he would sit down with Ahmadinejad without pre-conditions, and President Obama deliberately remained silent during the Green Revolution, signaling to the Ayatollahs that Iran’s dissident movement would not have America’s support. President Obama also pursued a policy of creating ‘daylight’ -- his word -- between the U.S. and Israel. And through the end of the third year of his administration, the president fought congressional efforts -- bi-partisan congressional efforts -- to pass crippling sanctions on Iran’s Central Bank. This all happened against the backdrop of the president’s top advisors and cabinet secretaries broadcasting the risks of the military option, therefore conveying to Iran’s leadership that the threat is simply not real. Add all of this together, one can understand why Iran’s leaders are not taking the United States very seriously these days.”

 I would add a couple of other points. I believe that Romney would be less likely to leave Israel hanging out to dry if it were to decide to go it alone against Iran. And I believe that Romney would be more amenable to reducing Israel's risks by acting sooner against Iran than would Obama. And I believe that Israel would be more willing to let Romney take the lead than would be the case with Obama, who is not trusted by much of this country's population, including most of its politicians.

But it doesn't sound like Goldberg asked him about any of that.

Judge Richard Goldstone: 'Never Mind'

This is as shocking as it is unexpected: the South African Jewish judge Richard Goldstone, who excoriated Israel for allegedly committing premeditated crimes against civilians in Gaza -- contributing, more than any other individual, to the delegitimization and demonization of the Jewish state --  now says, well, Israel didn't actually set out to target Palestinian civilians, unllike Hamas, whose plainly-apparent goal was to murder Israeli civilians.

It is not clear, reading Goldstone's mea culpa in The Washington Post, that he fully understands the consequences of his work:

Our report found evidence of potential war crimes and "possibly crimes against humanity" by both Israel and Hamas. That the crimes allegedly committed by Hamas were intentional goes without saying -- its rockets were purposefully and indiscriminately aimed at civilian targets.

The allegations of intentionality by Israel were based on the deaths of and injuries to civilians in situations where our fact-finding mission had no evidence on which to draw any other reasonable conclusion. While the investigations published by the Israeli military and recognized in the U.N. committee's report have established the validity of some incidents that we investigated in cases involving individual soldiers, they also indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.

Well, I'm glad he's cleared that up. Unfortunately, it is somewhat difficult to retract a blood libel, once it has been broadcast across the world.

Dear Reuters, You Must Be Kidding, by Jeffrey Goldberg

This is from a Reuters story on the Jerusalem bombing earlier today:

Police said it was a "terrorist attack" -- Israel's term for a Palestinian strike. It was the first time Jerusalem had been hit by such a bomb since 2004.

Those Israelis and their crazy terms! I mean, referring to a fatal bombing of civilians as a "terrorist attack"? Who are they kidding? Everyone knows that a fatal bombing of Israeli civilians should be referred to as a "teachable moment." Or as a "venting of certain frustrations." Or as "an understandable reaction to Jewish perfidy." Or perhaps as "a very special episode of 'Cheers.'" Anything but "a terrorist attack." I suppose Reuters will mark the 10th anniversary of 9/11 by referring to the attacks as "an exercise in urban renewal."

The mind reels. 

Israel Matzav: What if Israel ceases to be a 'democracy'?

Jeffrey Goldberg worries that Israel will one day cease to be a democracy.

I will admit here that my assumption has usually been that Israelis, when they finally realize the choice before them (many have already, of course, but many more haven't, it seems), will choose democracy, and somehow extract themselves from the management of the lives of West Bank Palestinians. But I've had a couple of conversations this week with people, in Jerusalem and out of Jerusalem, that suggest to me that democracy is something less than a religious value for wide swaths of Israeli Jewish society. I'm speaking here of four groups, each ascendant to varying degrees:The haredim, the ultra-Orthodox Jews, whose community continues to grow at a rapid clip; the working-class religious Sephardim -- Jews from Arab countries, mainly -- whose interests are represented in the Knesset by the obscurantist rabbis of the Shas Party; the settler movement, which still seems to get whatever it needs in order to grow; and the million or so recent immigrants from Russia, who support, in distressing numbers, the Putin-like Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's foreign minister and leader of the "Israel is Our Home" party.

Let's just say, as a hypothetical, that one day in the near future, Prime Minister Lieberman's government (don't laugh, it's not funny) proposes a bill that echoes the recent call by some rabbis to discourage Jews from selling their homes to Arabs. Or let's say that Lieberman's government annexes swaths of the West Bank in order to take in Jewish settlements, but announces summarily that the Arabs in the annexed territory are in fact citizens of Jordan, and can vote there if they want to, but they won't be voting in Israel. What happens then? Do the courts come to the rescue? I hope so. Do the Israeli people come to the rescue? I'm not entirely sure. There are many Israelis who value democracy, but they might not possess the strength to fight. Does American Jewry come to the rescue? Well, most of American Jewry would be so disgusted by Israel's abandonment of democratic principles that I think the majority would simply write off Israel as a tragic, failed experiment.

Am I being apocalyptic? Yes. Am I exaggerating the depth of the problem? I certainly hope so. Israel is still a remarkably vibrant democracy, with a free press and an independent judiciary. But on the other hand, the Israel that I see today is not the Israel I was introduced to more than twenty years ago. The rise to power of the four groups I mentioned above has changed, in some very serious ways (which I will write about later) the nature and character of the Jewish state.

Rabbi Meir Kahane HY"D (may God avenge his blood) predicted all along that the day would come when Israel would have to choose between being a Jewish state and being a democracy. And indeed it could happen.

But a couple of points need to be kept in mind. First, Israel can be a democracy without being identical to either the United States or Western Europe. We can be a democracy in our own style - indeed, we must be our own style of democracy in order to preserve our Jewish character. Neither the United States nor the Europeans (with the nominal exception of the Church of England) has an established religion. Most other democracies have nothing like the Law of Return, which clearly discriminates in favor of Jews. Does that make us not a democracy? Not at all. It just means that in some less-than-absolute sense, we have already chosen to put the State's Jewish character ahead of Western notions of democracy.

Second, Goldberg assumes that we can push a button and be rid of 'the territories.' We can't even if we wanted to. We can't because it would make us militarily vulnerable. We can't because it wouldn't bring peace and it would encourage war. We can't because it's not what the Arabs are after. What Goldberg and those who 'worry' about Israel's democracy don't or won't understand is that Israel's war isn't a war about territory. It's existential. Once you accept that, you can more easily accept necessary limitations on democracy to cope with that reality.

Merry Christmas From Jerusalem by Jeffrey Goldberg

Last night, Christmas Eve (erev Christmas, as it is known in West Jerusalem), we spent Shabbat dinner with friends at the Inbal Hotel, which makes gefilte fish the old-fashioned way (by Arab cooks) and then we we headed to the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in the Christian Quarter of the Old City for a beautiful and slightly bizarre Christmas service. Beautiful because the church is itself beautiful (soaring and simple, with clean lines, very much unlike the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which is dark and dank and mysterious) and because the service opens with a gorgeous candle-lighting ceremony and is lifted-up by a choir singing "Silent Night" in German) and bizarre -- in a good way, bizarre -- because many of the visitors to the church last night were Israeli Jews, there to experience multicultural Jerusalem, and the Germans who run the church made them feel thoroughly welcome (without proselytzing, of course), so welcome, in fact, that the minister read from Luke in Hebrew. Who woulda thunk it?

James Snyder, the director of the stunningly re-imagined and reinvigorated Israel Museum (which I will write about later) brought us to the service, and whispered to me -- when I took note of all the various incongruities -- that "the dirty little secret of Jerusalem is that it is a fully-functioning intercommunal city."  I think this is true. Yes, there are terrifically difficult issues (not least of which is the seizing of several Arab homes by Jewish settlers eager to make their presence felt in Arab neighborhoods), but this city is so much more complicated than news accounts would suggest. Earlier yesterday, I took one of the junior (and under-the-weather) Goldblogs to a local medical clinic for a strep test. The clinic, called Terem, is well-known in Jerusalem in part because it was started by a physician named David Applebaum, who was killed in the September 9, 2003 terrorist bombing of a cafe in the Germany Colony neighborhood, along with his daughter Naava, who was scheduled to get married the next day. The physician who saw my son at Terem, like many of the clinic's physicians, is an Arab from East Jerualem. In Terem, and at Hadassah Hospital, and the other hospitals in town, Jews treat Arabs, Arabs treat Jews, and no one thinks twice about it. No one who lives here, I mean. For visitors (even one, like myself, who once lived in Jerusalem), these sorts of commonplace facts of life -- Germans praying in Hebrew, Arab physicians treating Jews in  a clinic founded by a terror victim, and on, and on -- can be astonishing.  Merry Christmas.