If you are a believer in Israeli democracy, then stop trying to override it - by Jonathan S. Tobin

Those Americans who claim to care about Israel are entitled to their opinions about its policies, but they have no business declaring that they are defending democracy by essentially seeking to invalidate it. Israel has many problems, and there are valid criticisms to be made of its new government. However, the only real threat to Israeli democracy comes from those who are falsely claiming to be its defenders.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
JNS.org..
04 May '20..

Israel’s critics talk a lot about threats to its democracy. When they use this phrase, they are generally referring to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters, who are widely damned in the international media as would-be authoritarians with no respect for the rule of law.

Netanyahu bears his fair share of the blame for his country’s problems. But if there’s a real foe of democracy in the Jewish state, it isn’t him. It’s his opponents who want an out-of-control judiciary and foreign powers to override the verdict of Israel’s voters.

That became plain again this week when left-wing opponents of Netanyahu asked Israel’s High Court of Justice to invalidate the coalition government he forged with erstwhile rival Blue and White Party leader Benny Gantz. The petitioners say the court should intervene in the process and declare that a person who is currently under indictment on criminal charges—as is the case with Netanyahu—should be ruled ineligible to be prime minister.

Irrespective of whether or not it would have been wise for Netanyahu to resign when he was indicted or his right to be considered innocent until proven guilty, there was no law in the books that compelled him to do so. Indeed, according to Israeli law, he can remain in office while being tried and even convicted until his last appeal has been denied.

Let’s hope it never comes to that. However, as the dialogue between the judges for the lawyers for both the plaintiffs and the opponents of the petition illustrated on the first day of arguments, there is no legal foundation for the court to declare that the will of a majority of the Knesset—the Netanyahu-Gantz coalition will command the support of more than 70 members of the 120-person parliament—is to be not only ignored, but suppressed in the name of an undefined notion of good government with no basis in law.

Chief Justice Esther Hayut made this clear when she demanded that the lawyers who were asking the court to declare that Netanyahu could not serve as prime minister to give her a good reason to do so:

“Show us something! A law? A verdict? From this country’s [history]? From [somewhere else] in the world? Something! After all, [you’re asking us to set] a global precedent? You want us to rule without a basis simply according to your personal opinion?”

(Continue to Full Column)

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Do Israel's critics want a proportionate response? How about no response at all

...So what is it that we want? Do we want the troops, the bombs, the cruise missiles, the drones, the artillery, the death squads, the blockades or the sanctions? Because if we say Israel has a right to defend itself, and mean it then, then we’re going to have stop handwringing and start choosing. And if we don’t, then we’re going to have to be honest and admit we don’t want Israel to defend itself at all.

Dan Hodges..
The Telegraph..
23 July '14..

Over the past couple of days, as the debate over Israel’s military intervention in Gaza has raged, I’ve noticed the same phrase being repeated. It’s basically a variation on the following: “Yes, Israel has a right to defend itself. But the response must be proportionate. And what we’re seeing is anything but proportionate.”

Nick Clegg has joined this chorus, accusing Israel of imposing a "disproportionate form of collective punishment" on the Palestinian people. His words were echoed on Monday by the United Nations Relief and Works agency, which warned that “Maximum restraint must be exercised and measures of distinction, proportionality and precaution must be respected.” During Monday’s House of Commons debate, a succession of MPs rose to make a similar point.

And who can argue with it? Who would want to see a disproportionate response to a crisis such as this?

But if we are calling for “proportionality” from Israel, then I’d like to ask a question: what would a proportionate response actually look like? If everyone accepts the principle of Israel defending itself, how should that defence operate in practice?

One way Israel is able to defend itself from the ongoing Hamas missile strikes is, of course, to send in ground troops to locate and destroy them and the terrorists who operate them. But as we’ve seen, according to Israel’s critics, this represents a terrible escalation of the conflict.

An alternative is air strikes. But again, Israeli air strikes have resulted in global condemnation. Cruise missile strikes are also an option. But I can’t quite to imagine the Stop the War coalition issuing a press release welcoming Israel’s use of precision munitions in central Gaza.

What about a more surgical approach? Perhaps Israel could send in assassination teams to target the Hamas leadership and other key operatives? “Today the UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon welcomed the news that Israeli hit squads had been deployed to the Palestinian territories. 'This represents a timely de-escalation of the conflict,' he said.”

And Now a Preview of Coming Comments

...In a situation where deadly terrorist kingpins hide behind their human shields, it boils down to them or us. If the human shields are granted immunity, it will be at the cost of Israeli lives. There’s no getting around this underlying reality of the dirty Hamas war. When the Arab world and the oft-biased choir of international pontificators disregard this, they in effect announce that they care less about Israelis than they do about those who deliberately and repeatedly attack Israeli civilians. Disingenuous demands for artificial proportionality are nothing less than clamoring for Israel to cease protecting its citizens.

Sarah Honig..
Another Tack..
09 July '14..

The hardly unexpected reactions to Operation Protective Edge, from those who rarely react when Israel is attacked, may be regarded as a preview of coming comments.

At first hearing, some Israelis took heart from the fact that players like the UN Secretary General and EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton at all denounced the missile barrages from Gaza. But the devil is in the further details. It’s instructive to pay heed to the entirety of their messages.

Thus Ban Ki-moon, according to a statement released by his spokesman in NY, “condemns the recent multiple rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza. These indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas must stop.” But then comes the clincher: “The Secretary-General is extremely concerned at the dangerous escalation of violence, which has already resulted in multiple Palestinian deaths and injuries as a result of Israeli operations against Gaza.”

It’s noteworthy that Ban mentioned only Islamic Jihad as the wrongdoer and not Hamas, which has gallingly gained respectability from the unity pact struck with Ramallah’s Mahmoud Abbas.

The identical singular focus on Islamic Jihad is evident of Ashton’s statement. Ashton, who was remarkably unperturbed by persistent rocket fire on Israel’s south from Gaza, woke up only after Israel was forced to respond.

Ashton “strongly condemned” the Gazan rocketing of Israel “for which the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which is listed by the EU as a terrorist organization, has claimed responsibility.” Hamas isn’t in the picture and its seeming absence appears to absolve it of culpability.

Her statement then continued: “The EU deplores the growing number of civilian casualties, reportedly among them children, caused by Israeli retaliatory fire. The safety and security of all civilians must be of paramount importance.”

Both Ban and Ashton – and others as well – appear to have conveniently lost sight of cause and effect.

These “True Friends” of Israel Don’t Understand What Neighborhood It’s Living In

Evelyn Gordon..
Commentary/Contentions..
10 January '13..

In a rare moment of perception, Thomas Friedman wrote recently that if you want to be taken seriously in Israel, “there is an unspoken question in the mind of virtually every Israeli that you need to answer correctly: ‘Do you understand what neighborhood I’m living in?’”

Roger Cohen

What brought this to mind was the latest broadside by Friedman’s fellow New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, who reiterated what has become the favorite mantra not only of those who support Chuck Hagel for secretary of defense, but of liberal American Jewish groups like J Street and even the Union for Reform Judaism: that Israel’s “true friends” are those who tell it, loudly and publicly, that its policies are “self-defeating and wrong,” in an effort to stop what they perceive as its rush to self-destruction. I fully agree that friends should warn against behavior they view as self-destructive. But anyone who thinks that confronting Israel publicly is helping rather than hurting it doesn’t understand what neighborhood Israel is living in.

As even Cohen acknowledged, Israel has real enemies. He cited Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal’s eliminationist threats; one could quote identical rhetoric from Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, “moderate” opponents of Ahmadinejad like former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, and Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Egypt. A good example is this clip (courtesy of MEMRI) of Egyptian cleric Mahmoud Al-Masri being interviewed on Egypt’s Al-Nas TV in November: After gleefully prophesying that the Brotherhood’s rise in Egypt and a successful conclusion to the revolution in Syria will enable Egypt and Syria to unite in a war of annihilation against Israel, Al-Masri assures his followers that this is just the beginning: “Ultimately, not a single Jew will be left on the face of the earth.”

Rubin - How Do We Know Definitively That Israel’s Critics Are Wrong? Because of What They Say

Barry Rubin
Rubin Reports
pajamasmedia.com
07 October '11

http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/2011/10/07/how-do-we-know-definitively-that-israel%E2%80%99s-critics-are-wrong/

Note: You might well want to read this in conjunction with my article, “It Isn’t Israel in Danger of Disappearing, It’s The People Who Think That Way.”


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People frequently ask me to respond to the latest article of You Know Who, Complete Ignoramus, or even the World’s Most Pompous Columnist, and various others of that ilk. I almost always respond that I’ve done that kind of thing already, or at this point one should only ignore such people, or it is better to spend one’s time writing constructively to explain reality than to waste time combatting endlessly recycled lies and nonsense.

But then I realized that there was a totally different and far more revealing way of approaching this issue, a way of using this kind of criticism to show precisely how wrong it is.

The basic line of criticism being used is that Israel doesn’t know what’s good for itself. Here it has this wonderful opportunity to have an independent Palestinian state next door, thus the conflict would be over, Arabs and Muslims would all accept Israel, and there would be no more war, no more bloodshed. The West would also love Israel.

All of the country’s problems would be over! Why are Israelis so blind to elect such a government when they should elect one that is willing to go back to the 1967 borders, accept a Palestinian state with minimal conditions, and stop making any demands of its own? Don’t worry, be happy!

Israel’s Critics Cry About Being Repressed … from Their Usual Soapbox at the New York Times

Jonathan Tobin
Contentions/Commentary
10 December '10

That the New York Times’s Roger Cohen has a problem with Israel is not exactly a secret. As far as he is concerned, the country’s democratically elected government and the people who elected it don’t measure up to his moral standards. Moreover, he and those who share his views, like writer Peter Beinart, think that any Jewish or non-Jewish friends of Israel who prefer to focus their efforts on continuing to defend Israel against an Arab/Muslim siege and anti-Zionist campaigners who seek to isolate it rather than spend their time flaying it for perceived sins are also not living up to the standards they are setting for them.

Today Cohen weighs in again to tell the sad tale of a liberal American who went to Israel to work for left-wing causes there and claims to have gotten into a scuffle with right-wingers after a demonstration in Tel Aviv during which he and his friends waved signs that said “Zionists Are Not Settlers.” Politics in Israel can be a bit rougher than what we’re used to here in America, but there’s no excuse for violence. It would have been far better for his antagonists to merely point out that Zionists have always been “settlers,” since there would be no state of Israel had not some Jews had the chutzpah to jump-start the rebirth of Jewish life in the Jewish homeland by planting roots in places where Arabs didn’t want them to be. Like, for example, the metropolis of Tel Aviv, where the demonstration took place, which a century ago was nothing but a small annoying Jewish settlement on the outskirts of Arab Jaffa.

(Read full post "Israel’s Critics Cry About Being Repressed")

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The New Media Giveth, The New Media Taketh Away

Judeosphere
19 June '10

( Interesting point, good ending.)

Critics of Israel who believe that the “mainstream media” (whatever that is, these days) is “controlled” by the minions of the Israel Lobby tend to cite a one-word solution to this alleged stranglehold on the news: Internet.

In his recent editorial declaring his “break-up” with Israel, Andrew Sullivan noted:

The blogosphere has also mattered. Before the internet, opinion journalism in Washington was dominated by a few organs, almost all of which were fanatically pro-Israel. The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard and National Review were all neoconservative on the Israel question – and The New York Times wasn’t far behind. You could barely get any criticism of the Jewish state into the American press. Now, an entire generation of younger writers – Jewish and Gentile – has emerged online outside of the old media gatekeepers to kick-start a real debate.

Likewise, here’s John Mearsheimer:

But the Internet is a game changer. It not only makes it easy for the opponents of [Israeli] apartheid to get the real story out to the world, but it also allows Americans to learn the story that the New York Times and the Washington Post have been hiding from them.

(Read full post)

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Israel’s Critics and Hollow Lies

Rick Moran
frontpagemag.com
10 June '10

In the aftermath of the Gaza flotilla incident, we have witnessed a tsunami of virulent, over-the-top criticism of the state of Israel for its actions in interdicting the so-called “peace activists” before they could dock at the port of Gaza.

Reasonable people can argue whether the decision on the methods used to stop the ships was the correct course for the Israeli government to take. Indeed, there is a healthy debate within Israel itself over this very issue, including questions about intelligence, tactics, and whether the propaganda victory handed to pro-Palestinian activists could have been avoided while still maintaining the blockade.

Even the efficacy of the blockade itself is being discussed in Israel, as it has been since the quarantine was intensified nearly 3 years ago. For these internal critics, and those elsewhere who do not wish to see the state of Israel or its people destroyed, it is much too glib to ascribe their opposition as anti-Semitic or even anti-Israeli. But we can certainly put a reasonable question to these critics that never seems to get answered amidst the bombast and posturing from both the Jew haters and genuine “peace” seekers alike.

What is it you would have the Israeli government do to protect itself?
Indeed, what marks the critic of Israeli policy is a disconnect between the perilous reality of Israel’s exposed position vis-a-vis the Palestinians and those nations that support them. They hold a pie-in-the-sky belief that if Israel would only remove the irritants the Palestinians suffer on a daily basis, that the animosity felt by Israel’s enemies would magically disappear.

Consider what these critics have been harping on for years:

(Read full article)

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After the Flotilla the Jackals are Out

Why's it our fault?

Shoshana Bryen
JINSA
01 June '10

Not those jackals.

The world splits roughly between those who denounce Israel from a religious or ideological base, and those who denounce Israel because they are tired of defending Western civilization to which they are heir but aren't sure why they should care (and those who bash Israel as a cover for their own anti-Semitism). The tired and the impatient might be slightly moved by better PR on Israel's part, and OK, why not? But the others don’t care and those are the ones Israel fights.

The jackals in this case are pundits, including patriotic Israelis and committed friends of Israel, who live to tell Israel publicly how it should have been done. "Israel should have known..." "The IDF should have…" "Better PR would have…" Even when they acknowledge that Israel was within the bounds of international law and moral behavior, nevertheless, "This just complicates U.S.-Israel relations" or its companion, "This just complicates American efforts to: a) find a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, or; b) deal with Iran."

(An example of the Not Jackals, and what support sounds like at BGU)


Whatever Israel did, if only Israel had done the way the jackals wanted it done everything would have been just fine. They are so sure that if the Israeli government had just listened to them it would have produced a different result – the "right" result – and the world would have approved.

Who, other than them, says that a different result would have produced "better PR" (which always figures in the denunciation of whatever Israel did)?

And why is it so important for friends of Israel to publicly berate the Israeli government today, of all days? Are Israel's enemies not doing a good enough job this morning?

Points of order:

(Read full article)

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"What Often Happens to Israel's Critics"?

GI
CAMERA/Snapshots
18 February '10
Posted before Shabbat

Andrew Sullivan, in a series of recent posts his blog The Daily Dish, purports to describe "What often happens to Israel's critics."

What happens, we're meant to believe, is that these critics are met by little more than "smears and character assassinations."

Of course we've heard this all before from the likes of former president Jimmy Carter, Gaza investigator Richard Goldstone, and Independent columnist Johann Hari. And of course, in each of these cases, the cry of "character assassination" was intended to denigrate and distract from the many serious, substantive critiques of their work. Put another way, the smears were not targeted at Israel's critics, but rather employed by them and directed at the critics' critics (including CAMERA).

But what about the latest charge by Sullivan?

Well, his exhibit one is nothing other than a repeat of a May 2008 column by Johann Hari. Apparently Sullivan hadn't seen the Hari column until now. And apparently he didn't realize, or didn't care to reveal to his readers, that Hari's accusation has long been debunked.

(Read full post)
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