Guardian “As-an-Israeli”, Aluf Benn, fumes at his country’s narrow concerns over their own safety

Aluf Benn

Adam Levick
CiF Watch
25 March '11

Aluf Benn is angry with Israel.

Benn is angry with his country over their myopia and narrow self-interest in responding to the Arab revolutions.

How angry is he with his fellow countrymen? Well, he’s at least angry enough at Israel to give him a platform at the Guardian to express his disgust.

Indeed, as Ha’aretz circulation continues to dwindle to minuscule numbers – indicating that an increasing number of Israelis no longer take their fanciful pseudo-intellectual musings seriously – we likely can expect their enfeebled political analyses to appear more often on the pages of ‘Comment is Free’.

In “Israel is blind to the Arab revolution“, CiF March 23, Aluf Benn, the Ha’aretz editor-at-large, displays an impressive ability to avoid allowing stubborn, undeniable political realities to get in the way of his puerile idealism.

Benn lectures Israeli leaders who don’t possess his sophisticated political imagination and “can not see beyond the recent escalation across the Gaza border“, and have not “reached out to the [Arab] revolutionaries, celebrating their achievement or suggesting we need to know them better…”.

Benn then diagnoses our political myopia:

“there’s a deeper motive underlying the Israeli attitude. They see their country as a western bastion, a modern democracy that is unfortunately surrounded by less developed nations.”

Is he implying that Israel’s political exceptionalism in the region is even debatable?

Ben then digs deeper at the roots of Israeli ethnocentrism:

(Read full "Guardian “As-an-Israeli”, Aluf Benn, fumes at his country’s narrow concerns over their own safety")

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Ha’aretz kicks off the anti-Bibi season

Fresnozionism.org
31 October '10

Israelis in general don’t read Ha’aretz — its circulation runs a poor third (Actually 4th, as Yisrael HaYom has moved to #1. Y.), after Yediot Aharonot and Ma’ariv. It exists for its English Internet edition, which is apparently taken seriously by ‘important’ folks in Europe and the US, despite the fact that its extreme left-wing bias reflects the views of only a tiny minority of Israelis.

This makes it dangerous at worst, or annoying at best. Here’s an example of the latter, by Aluf Benn, Ha’aretz Editor at Large:

Netanyahu rejected Obama’s request for a two-month extension of the settlement freeze; the president had wanted quiet on the Middle East front while he concentrated on the midterm elections. For his part, Netanyahu explained that he needed to show “credibility and steadfastness” at home, and indeed the incentives promised by the U.S. president in exchange for the extension did not sway the prime minister. One can surmise that Netanyahu did not want to help Obama ahead of the U.S. elections, and thus annoy the president’s Republican rivals. [my italics]

Actually, one can’t surmise that at all, unless one is a fool — or, like Benn, is trying to make trouble. There are clear reasons having to do with Israeli, not American, politics that make it impossible for PM Netanyahu to extend the freeze any further, even if he wanted to.

(Read full post)

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Obama and Netanyahu: Not Pals

Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations
09 November 09

Aluf Benn, a serious journalist at Haaretz, has some cool words to say about Netanyahu's rising sense of confidence about facing down Obama:

Netanyahu may be an experienced diplomat and politician, and Obama may be a novice, but Obama is the president of a superpower, and Netanyahu represents a small country that depends greatly on the United States. It sometimes appears that Netanyahu forgets this, and pretends he is the head of a superpower, for example when he identifies himself with Winston Churchill, or in declaring that the Israeli mind will free the world of oil dependency in a decade.

This is of course true, and needs to be kept firmly in mind at all times. The fact that the Obama administration clearly does not yet understand the real world out here (I'm not talking about the internal American scene, where the jury's still out), doesn't change the fact that for the next three or seven years, the Obama administration will be the single most important and powerful actor on the international scene, and also extraordinarily important for Israel. Maybe they'll learn. Even if they don't, Obama will be re-elected or not because of domestic issues, not his relationship with us.

There is however also the flip side of the coin. In seven years at the latest Obama will be packing. As will his successor in 15 years at the most. And that one's successor, in 23 years. At which time, Israel will still be in this highly volatile neighborhood.

Most political leaders most of the time cannot ever make decisions which will reverberate much beyond the term of their successor. Can anyone think of anything Helmut Schmidt did that makes any difference today? Does anyone even remember who Helmut Schmidt was? John Major? Romano Prodi? Bill Clinton? (Oops. Sorry).

The prime minister of Israel has in his (or her) power to make decisions which will directly impact on the Jewish existence in the 24th century; the status of Jerusalem being merely the most obvious of them. We've been around for a very long time, and are in for the long haul. No Israeli leader should ever make historical decisions for an immediate political reason alone. It must fit in to the long term, too.

Civil Fights: Don't Make Me Laugh

Evelyn Gordon
JPost
02 September 09

There must have been something in the air last month: Two prominent Israeli leftists publicly acknowledged fundamental problems in the "peace process" that will make a deal unachievable if not resolved.

Aluf Benn, Haaretz's diplomatic correspondent, articulated one problem in an August 7 column describing a conversation with a "senior European diplomat." Benn posed one simple question: How would a deal benefit ordinary Israelis? The diplomat was stunned. Wasn't it obvious? It would create a Palestinian state! After Benn pointed out that most Israelis care very little about the Palestinians; they want to know how peace would benefit them, the diplomat tried again: "There would be an end to terror." "Don't make me laugh," Benn replied.

When the IDF withdrew from parts of the West Bank and Gaza under the Oslo Accords, Israelis got suicide bombings in their cities. When it quit Gaza entirely, they got rockets on the Negev. But the bombings stopped after the IDF reoccupied the West Bank, and the rockets stopped after January's Gaza operation. In short, the IDF has done a far better job of securing "peace" as Israelis understand it - i.e., not being killed - than the "peace process" ever has.

NORMALIZATION WITH the Arab world is also scant attraction, Benn noted; most Israelis "have no inherent desire to fly El Al through Saudi Arabian airspace or visit Morocco's 'interests section.'" And the downsides of a deal - financing the evacuation of tens of thousands of settlers and "the frightening prospect of violent internal schisms" - are substantial.

Benn's conclusion from the conversation was shocking: Thus far, the international community has never thought about how a deal might benefit Israelis; that was considered unimportant.

But to persuade Israelis to back an agreement, he noted, the world is going to have to start thinking. For Israelis already have what they want most, "peace and quiet," and they will not willingly risk it for "another diplomatic adventure whose prospects are slim and whose dangers are formidable."

A week later, Prof. Carlo Strenger - a veteran leftist who, as he wrote, thinks "the occupation must end as quickly as possible" - addressed a second problem in his semi-regular Haaretz column. Seeking to explain why Israel's Left has virtually disappeared, he concluded that this happened because leftists "failed to provide a realistic picture of the conflict with the Palestinians."

For years, he noted, leftists claimed a deal with the Palestinians would produce "peace now." Instead, the Palestinian Authority "educated its children with violently anti-Israel and often straightforwardly anti-Semitic textbooks," failed to prevent (or perhaps even abetted) repeated suicide bombings in 1996, torpedoed the final-status negotiations of 2000-2001 and finally produced the second intifada.

But instead of admitting it had erred in expecting territorial withdrawals to bring peace, Strenger wrote, the Left blamed Israel: The 1996 bombings happened "because the Oslo process was too slow"; the talks failed because Israel's offers were insufficient; the second intifada began because Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount.

In short, the Left adopted two faulty premises: First, "anything aggressive or destructive a non-Western group says or does must be explained by Western dominance or oppression," hence "they are not responsible for their deeds." Second, "if you are nice to people, all conflicts will disappear"; other basic human motivations, like the desire for "dominance, power and... self-respect," are irrelevant.
(Continue)

Column One: The Lonely Israeli Left

By Caroline Glick
JPost
31 July 09

Israel's leftists are lonely these days. This was the central thrust of an opinion column in Tuesday's New York Times authored by Aluf Benn, editor-at-large of the left-wing Haaretz newspaper.

Benn's article, "Why won't Obama Talk to Israel?" was a plaintive call for US President Barack Obama to woo the Israeli public. As Benn put it, "Next time you're in the neighborhood, Mr. President, speak to us directly."

Benn's article has been touted by Obama supporters and detractors alike as evidence that the president has a credibility problem with Israelis. Jewish Obama supporters sought to soften the impact of Benn's article on their fellow Jewish leftists by claiming that Obama is listening to the likes of Benn. For instance, the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg reported without irony that administration officials defend Obama's silence toward Israel by arguing that his June 4 speech to the Muslim world in Cairo was also geared toward Israelis.

The June 4 address of course was the one where Obama compared Israel's treatment of the Palestinians to the Nazi Holocaust of European Jewry and to black slavery in the antebellum American South. It was also the speech where he embraced Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's claim that Israel owes its existence to the Holocaust and not to the Jewish people's legitimate right to self-determination in our homeland.

Benn's piece is an interesting read, but not for the reasons that have been widely cited. It is interesting for what it says about the Israeli Left on the one hand, and what it says about Obama and his American Jewish supporters on the other.

Although Benn gives a long bill of particulars on why Israelis mistrust Obama, the general thrust of the article is supportive of the administration. Far from an attack on Obama, it is a cry for help. Benn and his fellow Israeli leftists want the administration to help them by changing the tenor of its policies, not the policies themselves.

WHEREAS THE American Left was triumphant in the 2008 elections, the Israeli Left was decimated in Israel's general elections in February. Its two standard bearers - Meretz and Labor - were effectively wiped out. Its new flagship, Kadima, failed to win the support of any other party in its bid to form a governing coalition. Worse still, consistent polling shows that the general public rejects every one of the Israeli Left's central policies. From the swift establishment of a Palestinian state, to the mass expulsion of Jews from Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem, to unilateral land giveaways to the Palestinians, the Israeli Left today speaks for a but a small minority of Israelis.

Benn cited last month's Jerusalem Post poll which showed that a mere 6 percent of Israeli Jews view Obama as pro-Israel while some 50% of Israeli Jews perceive the president as more pro-Palestinian than pro-Israel. As he sees it, Obama's failure to win the trust of the Israeli public will make it impossible for him to coerce the Netanyahu government into freezing Jewish construction in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. This is a disaster for Benn and his colleagues. For unless the US can force the government's hand, there is no chance that they will be able to see their radical policies implemented.

It is in his attempt to convince Obama to help the Israeli Left that Benn makes his most consequential critique of the US leader. As he puts it, Obama "seems to have confused American Jews with Israelis."
(For full article)
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