Our "peace partners" incite our genocide

From Algemeiner, January 1, 2015, by Ben Cohen:

Fatah published this image inciting genocide against Israelis hours after the PA applied to join the International Criminal Court. Image: Ali Faour

Barely 24 hours after the Palestinian Authority submitted its application to join the International Criminal Court (ICC,) the Fatah movement of PA President Mahmoud Abbas has published a gruesome image on its Facebook page inciting genocide against Israeli Jews.

The image, by Arab artist Ali Faour, was published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Fatah’s founding on the terrorist organization’s Facebook page. The anniversary was celebrated at a ceremony in Ramallah on Wednesday morning, the Palestinian Ma’an news agency reported.
Faour’s image shows a Fatah flag attached to a gun emerging from a pile of skulls, several of which are marked with a Star of David. The image conjures up memories of the corpses which Nazi execution squads dumped into mass graves during the Holocaust.

Palestinian Media Watch (PMW,) an Israeli monitoring group, noted that incitement against Israel’s very existence has been a key theme in Fatah’s celebration of its anniversary.  “Central to the visual images is the map of ‘Palestine,’ used by both the Palestinian Authority and Fatah, which includes both the PA areas and all of Israel, thus denying Israel’s existence in any borders,” the group said.

PMW also highlighted the host of a children’s program on PA TV who praised a young girl for wearing a pendant shaped like “occupied Palestine, which will return to us some day.”

As The Algemeiner reported yesterday, the PA is focused on joining as many international organizations as possible, following Tuesday’s failed vote on Palestinian statehood at the UN Security Council. Membership of the ICC would, the Palestinians calculate, provide a major opportunity to focus attention on Israel’s alleged “war crimes” while keeping the focus away from the PA’s long record of incitement.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to counter the PA’s moves at the ICC.

“We will rebuff this attempt to force diktats on us just as we repelled the Palestinian appeal to the UN Security Council,” Netanyahu said on Wednesday, insisting the Palestinians had more to fear from the court than Israel.

“It is the Palestinian Authority that has formed a unity government with Hamas – an avowed terrorist organisation that, like the Islamic State , carries out war crimes  – which should be concerned about the ICC,” he said.

America (but not Obama) stands with Israel

From JPost, 31 Dec 2014, by Herb Keinon:

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence: Israel is our most cherished ally in the world.

Indiana Governor Mike Pence. (photo credit:REUTERS)

America should not aspire to be an “honest broker” in the Middle East, but rather communicate to the world that while it wants an honest and fair solution to the conflict, “we are on the side of Israel,” Indiana Governor and possible 2016 Republican presidential candidate Mike Pence said in Jerusalem on Tuesday.

Pence, speaking at a town hall meeting sponsored by Republicans Abroad Israel, said the US can “deal honestly with people on all sides of the equation” while making clear what “side of the table” it is on.

Afterward, in a brief interview with The Jerusalem Post, Pence dismissed the oft heard claims that under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu US-Israeli relations reached an all-time low.

“I think relations between the American people and Israel have never been stronger...I really believe that after a year where Israel saw 51 days of war, with Iranian nuclear ambitions unimpeded, with the rise of a terrorist army in Syria, now more than ever the American people feel a great bond of support with the people of Israel. I think that will be reflected consistently when the congress convenes in January.”

Pence, an Evangelical Christian who came to Israel last week for a nine-day visit – partly to spend Christmas in the Holy Land with his family, and partly on official business – said he told Netanyahu in their meeting on Monday that “Israel is not just our strongest allies in the region, Israel is our most cherished ally in the world.

“If the world knows nothing else, let it know this: America stands with Israel,” said Pence.

Pence, who spent 12 years in Congress – a decade of that on the House Foreign Affairs Committee – won the Indiana gubernatorial election in 2012. His name is consistently mentioned among possible 2016 Republican candidates, something he does not deny.

He has said that he will make his intentions regarding the 2016 race known after the Indiana legislative session adjourns in April.

Pence strongly dismissed the notion that support of Israel was waning in Congress or among the American public.

“If you want to know how the American people feel about Israel, do not look at shifting sands of policies and statements by individuals in the administration, look at Congress, and you will see overwhelming and bipartisan support for Israel in the Congress, and I think that will continue for many years to come,” he said.

During his comments, Pence said that the US “must reject any effort by the United Nations Security Council to impose conditions on negotiations that would undermine Israel’s security.”

He called on Congress, when it comes back into session with a Republican majority in both houses in mid-January, to put a firm deadline on negotiations with Iran. If an agreement is not reached within a “reasonable period of time,” Congress should mandate that all sanctions come back into play, he said. “I believe that the time has come for us to stand strong and firm on behalf of very strong sanctions against Iran,” he said.

He also said that the US should renew production of the state-of the-art F22 Raptor stealth fighter, discontinued in 2012, and consider making it available to Israel to enable it to evade Russian-supplied radar and anti-missile systems that Moscow has said it will make available to Iran.

During his visit here, Pence declined an invitation on Christmas Eve to meet in Bethlehem with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

“We were very pleased to have the opportunity to travel to Bethlehem on Christmas Eve, and to celebrate a very special holiday in that very holy place,” he told the Post.

“We were also very privileged and very grateful to be invited by the local Palestinian leadership to attend a large banquet, and we did so. We we did receive an invitation later in the evening for a private meeting [with Abbas], but we went on ahead with our plans to go to the Church of the Nativity and go to services.”

In a 2010 interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, Pence assailed the Obama administration for its attitude toward Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“I believe the Obama administration is the most anti-Israel administration in the modern history of the state of Israel and our relationship with her,” he said.
Repeatedly calling Israel “our most cherished ally,” Pence said “the American people support Israel’s right to self-defense. The American people support the Jewish state of Israel, and the American people expect the American president to unambiguously do the same.”

Speaking soon after US Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to Israel and the brickbats over plans to build more housing units in the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood in Jerusalem,

...“I’ll be honest with you: I never thought I’d live to see the day that an American administration would denounce the Jewish state of Israel for rebuilding Jerusalem.
But in the wake of the dispute over the construction of apartment buildings in a certain area of Jerusalem, we saw just that. And the American people are fed up with it.”

Antisemitic top ten

From the Wiesenthal Center List of Anti-Semitic Outrages in 2014:

Demonization of Israel was a central theme in 2014's anti-Semitic outrages, according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Photo: Twitter

2014 was a “year of unprecedented explosions of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel hatred,” Jewish advocacy group The Simon Wiesenthal Center declared, as it announced its list of the ten worst anti-Semitic and anti-Israel incidents over the last twelve months.

In a telling sign of the degree to which anti-Semitism presents a threat in Europe, the majority of the incidents described took place in European countries ranging from Belgium to Hungary.

At the top of the list is the shocking story of a doctor in the Belgian city of Antwerp who refused to treat a 90 year-old Jewish woman who’d broken a rib. “Send her to Gaza for a few hours, then she will not feel pain anymore,” the doctor told the lady’s grandson, Hershy Taffel, who later filed a discrimination complaint with the police, when he sought assistance for his grandmother on August 1.  “It reminds me of what happened in Europe 70 years ago,” Taffel told the Joods Actueel newspaper. “I never thought those days would once again be repeated.”

The Wiesenthal Center also noted that Belgium was the site of the deadliest attack on a Jewish target this year, when a terrorist murdered four people during a gun attack at the Jewish Museum in Brussels in May.

Next on the list is the decision of the Jordanian parliament to hold a moment of silence for the Palestinian murderers of four worshippers and a Druze policeman one day after their November 19 attack on a synagogue in Jerusalem’s Har Nof neighborhood.  “I ask God to envelop them with mercy and to grant you with patience, comfort and recovery from your grief…” wrote Jordanian Prime Minister Abdullah Ensour to the families of the terrorists.

In third place was the invasion of a Jewish home in the Paris suburb of Creteil at the beginning of December. “Tell us where you hide the money, you Jews always have money,” one of the assailants demanded of the young man in the house before they tied up and raped his girlfriend. In his condemnation of the attack, French President Francois Hollande commented that the assault targeted “the greatness of France that finds itself wounded, damaged.”

Fourth place is given over to the infamous “Toiletgate” scandal in Germany, involving the popular leader of the Left Party, Gregor Gysi, the American anti-Semitic propagandist Max Blumenthal, and an obscure, Israel-based ‘filmmaker’ David Sheen. Both Blumenthal and Sheen had been scheduled to give a talk at the German parliament under the auspices of the party when Gysi, alerted to Blumenthal’s demonizing of Israel as the reincarnation of Nazi Germany, elected to cancel the event. After he was spotted in a corridor by Blumenthal and Sheen, Gysi was chased into a bathroom by the two activists, both of whom were ranting hysterically, and forced to lock the door for his own safety.

“By stoking obsessive hatred of and demonizing Israel, members of our party in positions of responsibility are promoting anti-Semitic patterns of argument and a relativization of the Holocaust and the German responsibility for the extermination of millions of European Jews,” 

said a group of Left Party parliamentarians in a statement explaining why the event was pulled. Blumenthal and Sheen are now banned for life from the German parliament because of their violent behavior.

Other incidents listed by the Wiesenthal Center include

• the demand by the leader of the extreme right-wing Sweden Democrats, Björn Söder, that Jews must give up their Jewish identity in order to be considered full Swedes, 
• the hanging of effigies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres by the anti-Semitic mayor of Erpatek in Hungary, and 
• the growing support for the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement in U.S. academic circles.

In addition, the Center said, 2014 was “a year of unending genocidal threats against the Jewish state from

• a nuclearizing Mullahocracy in Iran and 
• continuing efforts in Europe to criminalize age-old Judaic practices of Shechita (Kosher slaughter) and Brit Milah (ritual circumcision.)”

Nazis' vast, secret WMD facility uncovered in Austria

The picturesque north-Austrian alpine landscape continues to yield its sordid history of cruelty and evil in dungeons, including the secret activities of the Nazis and their many local collaborators. 

The Nazis ran a system of subterranean factories, commanded by a hell-on-earth regime of concentration camps around Mauthausen that worked and starved its slave workers to death in an average of 4 months. The fact that my father survived enslavement  there for 9 months is a miracle.

More recently these alps achieved international notoriety for secretly imprisoning young girls as sex slaves in soundproof, subterranean apartments.

Read more on this subject in this previous JIW posting.

To learn about the latest sordid discovery, see this from The Times of Israel, 29 Dec 2014: 

A huge, secret, underground Nazi weapons factory, believed to have been built for the development and planned manufacture of nuclear weapons and other WMDs, has been uncovered in Austria.

Now scholars want to know if the SS general who oversaw it was brought to America after the war to help the US with its weapons programs.

The vast weapons facility was uncovered last week near the town of St. Georgen an der Gusen by a team led by Austrian documentary- maker Andreas Sulzer, who said it was “likely the biggest secret weapons production facility of the Third Reich.” 

The 75-acre industrial complex is located close to a second subterranean factory, the B8 Bergkristall facility where the Messerschmitt Me 262, the world’s first operational jet-powered fighter, was produced toward the end of World War II....

The existence of the facility was mentioned in the diaries of an Austrian physicist who worked for the Nazis, and Sulzer used ground-penetrating radar technology to pinpoint its location. His team cut away layers of earth and granite slabs with which the Nazis had sealed the entrance shaft.

“Declassified intelligence documents as well as testimony from witnesses helped excavators identify the concealed entrance,” The Times said. Work on the excavation was halted last week by local authorities who required that he get new permits for the dig, but is set to resume next month.

“Previous research had found increased levels of radiation around the St Georgen site, apparently giving credibility to longstanding claims that Nazi scientists experimented with nuclear weapons in the area, which was under the exclusive command of the SS,” the Times reported.

It quoted Rainer Karlsch, a historian working with Sulzer, saying:

“The SS leadership . . . aspired to create a combination of missiles and weapons of mass destruction. They wanted to equip the A4 [a variant of the V-2] missile, or more advanced rockets, with poison gas, radioactive material or nuclear warheads.”

“The facility, like the Bergkristall factory, relied on slave labor from the nearby Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp...Up to 320,000 inmates are said to have died because of the brutal conditions in the subterranean labyrinth.”

“Prisoners from concentration camps across Europe were handpicked for their special skills — physicists, chemists or other experts — to work on this monstrous project,” Sulzer told the British newspaper, “and we owe it to the victims to finally open the site and reveal the truth.”



Hans Kammler (photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sulzer, whose work is being partly funded by German state TV network ZDF, is also seeking to establish what became of SS General Hans Kammler, who managed the project and reported to SS chief Heinrich Himmler.

“Kammler was in charge of Hitler’s missile programs, including the V-2 rocket used against London in the latter stages of the war. He was known as a brilliant but ruthless commander, who had signed off the blueprints for the gas chambers and crematoria at the Auschwitz concentration camp complex in southern Poland,” The Times reported. “Rumors persist that he was captured by the Americans and given a new identity after the war.”

In the post-war Operation Paperclip, some 1,500 scientists, technicians and engineers from Nazi Germany and other countries — who were believed capable of contributing to US weapons programs, and whose expertise the US did not want going to the Russians — were brought to America. Nazi party participants, activists and supporters were supposed to have been excluded from this program, but this restriction was circumvented, and recruits included rocket scientist Wernher von Braun — the central figure n Nazi rocket development.

Kammler is believed to have lived at the St. Georgen site, and was headquartered in an area captured by the US Army in May 1945.

“Kammler was officially said to have committed suicide after the war. But according to John Richardson, supported by declassified documents from the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), he was interrogated by Richardson’s father and then taken to America as part of Operation Paperclip,” the newspaper reported. Donald Richardson worked for the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the CIA.

What can one say about Europe?

From Arutz Sheva, 26 Dec 2014, by Rabbi Berel Wein:

Protesters in support of Palestinians in Gaza displayed a swastika at a Paris rally. 

(Photo: Etienne Laurent / European Pressphoto Agency)

To Europe, the noble Palestinians – fomenters of worldwide terrorism, intifadas and recurring wars – are worthy of diplomatic recognition, media support, financial aid and moral justification. 

This is Europe's revenge on the Jews for surviving.

What can one say about Europe?
I imagine that if one wants to be bitterly truthful then one could easily say that Hitler has in effect triumphed. He branded the Jews as the root of all troubles and proclaimed that the “final” and only solution to the “Jewish problem” was to eradicate all Jews from the face of the earth.

And as we all know, he followed through on his genocidal program. A great deal of Europe, its leaders, intellectuals and common folk, willfully and almost gleefully cooperated in this genocide. Many did so actively while many more Europeans did so passively.

Once the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed after the war ended, this irrational and pathological hatred of the Jews went underground. After all, it was too shameful to admit that the continent that prided itself on the advancement of civilization could be guilty of such organized, government-sponsored inhumanity and cruelty. So, most Europeans shielded themselves from any true feelings of guilt by simply stating that they were ignorant as to what was occurring.

...As penance for their atrocious behavior, many European countries, though not all, voted for the establishment of the state of Israel and granted the nascent nation diplomatic and sometimes even economic recognition and help.

And there the matter seemed to rest during the decade of the 1950s. But ...the world would not be allowed to so easily forget what had happened.

...Israel captured Adolf Eichmann and placed him on trial for his crimes against the Jewish people and humanity. The trial, which lasted almost a year, revealed in a stark and graphic way what had happened to the Jewish people on European soil from 1939 to 1945.

Thus it was not only Eichmann and the Nazis that were the defendants in that most bruising and bitter trial, but in a very real sense, Europe itself was on trial. And when Eichmann was justifiably found guilty and executed for his crimes, subliminally Europe was also judged to be guilty and complicit in the horror of the Holocaust.

Europe has never forgiven Israel for that trial and verdict. It is well aware that it is guilty but can never own up to this guilt. Therefore, in line with its time-honored obsession with the Jewish people and its innate necessity to scapegoat Jews for all of Europe's problems, Europe has turned its enmity in an unremitting fashion against the Jewish state.

Israel should be pilloried and boycotted, delegitimized and isolated, while the noble Palestinians – fomenters of worldwide terrorism, intifadas and recurring wars – are worthy of diplomatic recognition, media support, financial aid and moral justification. This is Europe's revenge against the Jews for surviving the Holocaust and thereby instilling the unease and guilt that Europe feels.

Hardly an Excessive Demand

From Myths & facts, December 28, 2014, by Eli E. Hertz:

The weight of the evidence of so many scholars, observers, pollsters and monitors make it almost impossible to mitigate, not to mention ignore the enormity of finding a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict [or better described as Arab-Israeli war].

When one grasps the duration of the conflict and its roots, when one fully faces the depth of animosity towards Israel and the antisemitism that permeates the Arab world from the political, religious and intellectual elites down to the grass roots, the sheer magnitude of the challenge for peacemakers becomes painfully apparent.

When one admits the implications of Palestinian society’s behavior – the repetitive pattern of nearly 100 years of rejectionism on the diplomatic front and a penchant for terrorism against civilians, the “readiness” of Arabs for co-existence and the chances of a breakthrough assume their true proportions.

The unwillingness to accept Israel as a legitimate non-Muslim political entity is epitomized by the Palestinians asymmetrical demands for the Right of Return of all Palestinian refugees to the Jewish state coupled with a demand that the West Bank and Gaza be cleansed of all Jews.

One cannot artificially narrow the scope of the conflict. One cannot duck the tough issues – whether in the Palestinian camp or the Arab world as a whole. Western leadership that is “Staying above the conflict” out of fear that demanding Arabs to ‘walk the talk’ will jeopardize one’s status as an honest broker has not and will not bring peace.

There has never been “a cycle of violence.” Resorting to such neutral terminology requires the U.S. and Europe to acquiesce to, and perpetuate a gross misrepresentation of reality.

Putting Israel and its neighbors on the same footing totally ignores the asymmetry of the history of the conflict and something as fundamental as “cause and effect.” The truth is – one side has been the aggressor time-after-time. 

The Arabs have been the initiators of more than five major wars resulting in the death of more than 22,000 Israeli soldiers and civilians. Arabs continuously call for political and economic boycotts and unbridled incitement. The Palestinians have launched wave-after-wave of terrorism against Israelis and other Jews and made hate the fuel that directs and runs their society.

All this began before there was a State of Israel, before there was an “occupation” and it continues unabated to this day.

In response to these onslaughts, Israel has not demanded reparations for the horrific causalities it has sustained in its fight for survival against repeated Arab aggression. It did not ask the Arab countries for restitution on behalf of 899,000 Jews that fled “All Moslem Lands” [NY Times , May 16, 1948]. 

It has only asked that it be allowed to live in peace with recognized and defendable borders as suggested in UN Security Council Resolution 242, and to develop according to its own Jewish ethos, and this is hardly an excessive demand.

It's a WAR ...of propaganda

From JPost, 28 Dev2014, by Greer Fay Cashman:

Former Labor and Independence MK Einat Wilf is not vying for a seat in the next Knesset. She is not even sure about which party - if any - will get her vote.

Former Labor Party lawmaker Einat Wilf. (photo credit:FACEBOOK)

Inasmuch as she is a political activist, former Labor and Independence MK Einat Wilf is not vying for a seat in the next Knesset. She is not even sure about which party - if any - will get her vote.

Speaking last Thursday night at the Sharon Hotel in Herzliya Pituah to members of the Israel Britain and the Commonwealth Association, Wilf said that at the present time, with the proliferation of political parties and the lack of clarity in their platforms, she feels politically homeless.

The absence of a political home was not the key topic of her talk. What she really wanted to get across was the inherent danger in the current non-violent conflict being waged by the Palestinians against Israel. 

When they saw that armed conflict and terrorism didn’t work, said Wilf, they resorted to the war of words - a war that, so far, Israel is losing.

When she had served in the Knesset, she said, she had raised this matter at the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, where she received a symbolic, benign pat on the head. She was indulged to the extent that she was permitted to present her thesis, but no one really took her warning seriously.

The more she travels abroad on speaking engagements in different countries, the more she realizes how successful the Palestinians have been in their campaign.

She cited an example of a debate with a Palestinian spokesperson in London. He had come up with the expression that Israel was committing cultural genocide. There is no such thing and it doesn’t mean anything, said Wilf, but it was a way of linking Israel with genocide and putting that concept into people’s minds. The same thing happens when Palestinians and their supporters talk about settlements, occupation, colonialism and apartheid.

“This is all part of the Palestinian strategy of planting words, images, ideas and arguments into people’s minds,” said Wilf.

“The world’s greatest atrocities were preceded by preparing people’s minds that what they were about to commit was not an atrocity but something they were doing for a noble cause,” said Wilf, noting that most people don’t think of themselves as evil.

But what is happening with the use of specific words she said is “a strategic threat.  It’s a real danger.”

Outlining the methodology, Wilf said that it starts with placard strategy equating Zionism and Israel with racism, imperialism, apartheid and ethnic cleansing. 

“You know what it says even though you don’t believe it.”

Eventually she continued, many people, even Israel’s best friends, start to think that where there’s smoke there’s fire.

In her travels she has found that people who are genuinely interested in peace in the Middle East, including Jews who are not anti-Israel but are against Israel’s policies, fall victim to this strategy and utilize it.  But the Palestinians and other Arabs who are utilizing it have a different purpose. 

They want to get rid of the State of Israel and they don’t want any Jews living in the land which is currently Israeli territory, said Wilf, “but no-one believes it.”

Wilf underscored the misconception in the popular belief that if Israel would only get rid the settlements and allow Palestinian refugees to return there would be peace.

“It’s not what we do but who we are,” she said.  “They hate us.”

Nonetheless, there are large numbers of Israelis who are willing to make peace and share the land, but every time that the Palestinians have had an opportunity to create their own state, they have found a reason not to, she said.

Moving on to unilateral recognition of Palestinian statehood, Wilf pointed out that there is a lacuna in resolutions to this effect. If she was writing the resolution she would add the codicil that once a Palestinian state is recognized, it means the end of the Palestinian refugee situation, because people who have a state are not refugees.

Wilf regretted that in the war of words Israel has not yet been able to emulate the victories achieved in armed conflict.

Livni's treachery will fail

From PJ Media, 26 Dec 2014, by Jonathan Spyer, a senior research fellow at the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center:

With the date of the elections set for March 17th, the campaigning season has begun in Israel.

There was little public enthusiasm for the new polls.  It is only 20 months since the last time Israelis turned out to vote.  The 2015 contest will be the fifth general election in Israel since 2003.  This means the average life expectancy of an Israeli government is less than two and a half years.  It isn’t a recipe for political stability, or for the pursuing by governments of clear and consistent policy objectives.

The too-frequent polls are the product of the Israeli electoral system, which produces the need for complex and inevitably fragile governing coalitions.

Still, the present campaign is shaping up to be an interesting one.  For the first time since the collapse of the “peace process” into war in 2000, Israel’s center and left parties scent the chance of victory.
The optimism of the left derives from a shrewd move by Labor leader Yitzhak Herzog.  Previously regarded as the latest in a long line of no-hopers at the Labor helm, Herzog has united his Labor Party list with that of Tzipi Livni’s “Hatnua” party. Livni drove  a hard bargain.  If the united list forms the next government, the prime ministership will be shared — two years for Herzog, two for Livni.

Current opinion polls have this list neck and neck with Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling center-right Likud.  

A poll taken by the respected Geocartographia Institute on Sunday had the Likud on 27 seats, with Labor-Hatnua on 25.  The right-of-Likud Jewish Home list was third with 11 seats.

Previous polls had put Likud and Labor-Hatnua each on 21 seats, with Jewish Home close behind.

The lines of debate are also emerging as the campaign gets into gear.

All the signs are that this election will be fought largely over national and diplomatic issues, rather than bread-and-butter social questions.

Despite the urgency and importance of many social questions in Israel, this is natural and appropriate.

Because the ground around Israel is burning.  A sectarian war between Sunni and Shia Arabs is raging in the large land area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Iraq-Iran border.  To Israel’s south, an Islamic State-affiliated movement (Ansar Beit al-Maqdis)  is engaged in an insurgency against  the government of Egypt.  The Islamist Hamas movement remains firmly in control of Gaza, from where rockets continue to be launched against Israel.  The Islamic State has begun to make its ominous appearance in Gaza too.

Meanwhile, the government of Israel’s main ally appears to be oblivious to the danger posed by the onward nuclear march of Iran.

On the diplomatic front, the Ramallah Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas abandoned negotiations in April, and is now embarked on a path of seeking to build a campaign of international pressure on Israel, in order to force it into a retreat on the West Bank and in Jerusalem, in return for nothing.  The resolution presented by Jordan to the UN Security Council on behalf of the PA exemplifies this stance.

The PA’s campaign has been encouraged from the growing hostility to Israel in some western European countries, particularly emerging from the growing political strength of Muslim communities in those countries and in turn from the sympathy for political Islam among those communities.  It is possible that societal exhaustion and strong native traditions of anti-Semitism are also playing a role in this emergent stance.

In the face of all this, the center left in Israel needs to explain why it is the government of Israel which is the cause of the country’s difficulties. It needs to outline why its own more accommodating approach is more in tune with the underlying realities.

The form that this will take is already becoming clear.  The center left will argue that Israel’s problems are to a great extent of its own making, and that if there is a danger of extremism it is to be found largely among Israeli Jews, rather than among their neighbors.

Thus, in her most memorable statement so far, Livni recently told reporters that “(Israeli) extremists…are turning our country into an isolated, boxed-in country, and an alienating one — even for its own citizens.”



She later claimed that she was responsible for the U.S. decision to delay the vote on the Palestinian state resolution at the UNSC.  According to a diplomatic source quoted by Foreign Policy magazine, Kerry himself has confirmed this.

Beyond all the inevitable posturing at election time, there is a kernel of dead seriousness here.

The belief underlying the Israeli center-left’s campaign is evidently that if Israel is “boxed in” it is because of its own “extremists” and that the solution to this is greater accommodation to the U.S. administration.

The U.S. administration, however, has opposed or prevaricated over the key measures that Israel has found necessary to take against the threats gathering around it.

Thus, Israel has been infuriated by the administration’s decisions to leak information on Israeli targeting of regime and Hizballah positions in Syria — moves Israel found necessary to prevent the arrival of game-changing weaponry to the Shia Islamist group.

Similarly, during Operation Protective Edge,  Secretary Kerry sought to involve the Muslim Brotherhood bloc of Qatar and Turkey in efforts to mediate  a ceasefire, and was critical of Israel’s tactics during the war.

An Israeli government which believes that Israeli “isolation” is mainly Israel’s fault and which thinks that the solution to this is greater accommodation to the Obama administration is an Israeli government which will be less likely to act in Israel’s vital interests, at the right time and with sufficient determination.

This, in turn, is likely to increase the threat to Israelis — see the 2000-2 period, when a reluctance to abandon the internationally sanctified  illusions of the “peace process” led to a failure to act against the Palestinian terror campaign in a determined fashion.

But if this is indeed to be the thrust of the center-left’s campaign in the elections, success is likely to continue to elude it.

Israelis are deeply aware both of the threats that surround them, and of the cold attitude of the current U.S. administration toward their country.  A campaign which seeks to blur or obscure these or to claim that they are largely of Israel’s own making is likely to win its proponents a further term in the opposition.