Palestine

It’s so cute when politicians like AOC and Rashida Tlaib, to say nothing of hysteric undergraduates and ill-informed lefties across the country, complain that Israel is an “apartheid state” that is illegitimately “occupying” the land West of the Jordan River from the Golan Heights down to the border of the Sinai Peninsula.  Responding to the murderous attacks on Israeli civilians by Hamas on October 7, AOC decried “the occupation of Palestine” while Tlaib urged “ending the occupation, and dismantling the apartheid system” that can “lead to resistance.” Hermeneuts of the world, unite! What does Tlaib mean by “resistance” here? Slaughtering innocent partygoers? Incinerating and beheading babies?

Responsibility for the catastrophe now unfolding in the Middle East belongs to Hamas and its sponsor, Iran. The atrocities we are now discovering — the deliberate killing of innocents, the capture of hostages — were an integral part of Hamas’s military strategy and grew directly out of its vicious hatred of all Jews — and of Western civilization. These are acts of true evil and, in committing them, Hamas has the full backing of Iran. President Biden spoke for America when he said, bluntly, “The brutality of Hamas’s blood thirstiness brings to mind the worst rampages of ISIS. This is terrorism.” It is important to begin with these basic points before discussing mistakes made by Israeli and American leaders.

As the bodies of hundreds of Israelis lay freshly butchered by Hamas terrorists, the group’s supporters from around the world celebrated — including by mourning the dead terrorists and cohosting a rally with a designated terrorist group — and urged them to “globalize the intifada.” The rallies sprouted up almost immediately after Hamas stunned Israel by launching a surprise attack, likely with Iranian assistance, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. The images of Israeli grandparents and infants being held hostage, and of Israeli villages being wiped out shocked the world. It wasn’t just Israelis who were murdered, however; nine Americans have already been confirmed among the dead, along with German, French and Cambodian citizens.

He makes an unlikely prophet, winding his way through the tables at an outdoor café in Jerusalem, scruffy baseball cap cupping his head, flashing a 100-watt smile and laughing too nervously and long. But this is the visionary who may have just found a way to ease the Israeli-Palestinian puzzle. Dr. Micah Goodman is an iconoclast. His 2017 book Catch-67 sought to identify pragmatic ways to “shrink the conflict” between Israel and the Palestinians, rather than aim to resolve it. The left accused him of being too right-wing. The right derided him as a leftist. Catch-67 catapulted Goodman to the bestseller list and instant celebrity.

Following the US setback during the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in 1968, Walter Cronkite, the mythical CBS News television broadcaster, was sent to Southeast Asia to report on the military intervention there. After Cronkite proclaimed in his broadcast that the US lost the war in Vietnam and that it was time to bring the boys back home, then President Lyndon B. Johnson told his advisors, 'If I lost Cronkite, I lost Middle America.' Urban legend or not, it reflected the way I imagined the role of the American media to be when I had served as a press officer at the Israeli Consulate in New York about a decade or so after Cronkite aired that broadcast from Vietnam.

Once, long ago, in a land far away, the best journalists tried to stand aloof from the stories they reported. The idea was simple and powerful. If journalists tried to be neutral and kept their reporting separate from their opinions, analysis, and speculation, then the public would believe them. Those days are long gone — and the media’s credibility is gone with them. Journalists and media organizations are now smack in the middle of many stories they cover, in part because they want to be. They want to spin them, to set ‘the Narrative’. Imbued with this new mission, many journalists have become partisan protagonists.

‘Come in.’ Burly, brisk and maskless, Mike Pompeo indicates a chair before the marble fireplace. ‘It’s all right if we’re six feet — or two meters — apart.’ We are meeting at the State Department the day after Pompeo’s return from Qatar, where US negotiators have opened discussions with the Taliban and other Afghan factions on an end to the war in Afghanistan. It’s also the day before the signing of the Abraham Accords between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain. Cheerful and perhaps a little tired, Pompeo exudes forceful confidence: a man who knows what needs to be done. As Secretary of State since 2018, Pompeo has been the strategist who has translated Trump’s generalities into the specifics of policy.

The issue of Palestinian refugees, and the Arab and Palestinian demand that those refugees be allowed to exercise what they call a ‘right of return’, attracts scant attention. Neither Israel’s leaders nor its public, and certainly not the international community, spend very much time discussing it. This is in stark contrast to other core issues. For example, there is endless discussion of the settlements and the military occupation of the territories, which are indeed important; but the Palestinian refugee issue has barely been subjected to any real strategic discussion. There have been no serious attempts at a resolution, or even efforts to place it on the agenda.

There’s a lot going on in Israel. Due to indiscriminate rocket fire from Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, schools in many Israeli cities, including Tel Aviv, were closed on Tuesday. Some have already been closed for Wednesday. The rockets target anyone and anything, and give everyone, young or old, the same amount of time, usually under one minute, to seek cover. Thanks to the shelters and Iron Dome, an air defense system which today had an interception success rate of 90 percent per the IDF, these rockets typically result in few Israeli deaths. But the collective psychological trauma of constantly being under fire is impossible to measure.