Confronting the Holocaust Jewishly - by Rav Meir Kahane, z"l, hy"d

בס''ד

The copyright for this essay belongs to the successors in interest of Rav Binyamin Kahane, z"l, hy"d, the martyred son of Rav Meir Kahane, z"l, hy"d.  I'm copying this article from a comment I posted in 2008 at Desicritics.org.  No copyright infringement or financial harm is intended in republishing that comment to this blog-site.  My purpose is solely to have a URL to use to quote from, as this essay is one of the most important works the late Rabbi wrote, one that faces awful questions that most Jews refuse to face:  "Where Was G-d During the Holocaust?"  

I originally received this as an e-mail almost 10 years ago from Sergio Tezza, a translator and historian.  I have never been able to forget it.

CONFRONTING THE HOLOCAUST, JEWISHLY

Copyright © 2006 HaMeir

These excerpts were taken from an article written by Rabbi Meir Kahane, ZTUQ"L, HI"D (may he be remembered for his goodness, may he be a blessing in his holiness, and may his blood be avenged by G-d) published in Kahane Magazine, Nov. 1985.



What is the fundamental issue of the Holocaust that we avoid speaking about and that, when mentioned, is dismissed with a curt and swift non sequitur?

Why, surely it is the issue that, unless raised and discussed and answered, will guarantee yet another and another national catastrophe. Surely it is an issue that goes to the very nature of the Jewish People, its meaning and role in life, its direction and fate.

What is the fundamental issue that must be met and grappled with?

Why surely the one that asks the question: Where was God? How could He have permitted it?

Our failure to grapple with this issue (instead we corrupt our souls by the terrible reply: It is a question no one can answer) has caused us to be silent accomplices in the worst of all Jewish sins and crimes - Hirúf v'gidúf, blasphemy against the Lord; open insult and attack on His Name - Hillúl  hashém (cursing G-d).

How dare we sit by quietly while Jewish ignoramuses and blasphemers speak of the "death of God", and His Name is dragged through the mud of a theology and philosophy of heresy?

How dare we allow Him to be blasphemed and our children to be turned down the path of apostasy and atheism because our reply to the attacks of the blasphemers is: "No one can answer the question!"

Of course there is an answer! It is a Jewish answer. But, of course, it is the kind of answer that the irreligious Jews, the secularists, the impossible Reformers and Conservatives simply cannot cope with.

It is an answer that can only come from a Jew who believes fully and completely and it is the answer that can only enter the mind and soul of a Jew who believes fully and completely.

And since the non-Orthodox Jew is essentially an atheist (though lacking the courage to admit it), the answer to the Holocaust is simply impossible for him to accept.

And as for the Orthodox Jew, in such great measure, he is responsible for laying the groundwork for the inability of Jews to understand or accept the Jewish answer to the Holocaust. Let me explain and you, dear reader, study the words carefully, They will pain you, but they can also save you.

The reason for the Holocaust, the Jewish reason and answer, is the one that rises out of the fundamental of fundamentals of Torah. What happens to the Jewish People is dependent on their actions and they way they live their lives.

The Jewish People is a Chosen people; chosen for a mission it cannot avoid or escape. At Sinai, the covenant bound us to a life of truth or falsehood, of life or death. "See, I have set before you this day, life and good, and death and evil... And if thy heart turns away and you will not hear... I tell you this day that you will surely perish... I call heaven and earth to record this day against you that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse; therefore choose life, that both your and your seed may live. [Devarim/Deuteronomy 30:15,17,18,19 selections therein]

The clear, direct mission and warning to the Jewish people. The open message of reward and punishment. If the Jew will obey the Torah in all its ways, he will have life, glorious and majestic. If not, he will have death, terrible and
cursed.

Of course we can answer it; but the irreligious Jew, the one who does not accept the Divinity of Torah, refuses to accept an answer that lays the blame upon him, upon the Jew who - knowing of the warning - ignored it and disdained it.

No, since it is impossible to accept the relationship between Jewish suffering and failure to obey the Law, one must blame God. One must create the image of Jewish people in Europe that was saintly and pious and observant, and thus one must ask how the modern God, a beaming Santa Claus who would never take serious our desecration of mitzvót (commandments), could do such a thing. And, of course, using that as a premise, "there is no God..."

And the Orthodox Jew joins in. He creates a picture of European Jewry that must lead to agonized and perplexed questioning of God. He creates a picture of saintly men that must lead to a vision of a God that is a cruel God who punishes a people who, for the most part, were religious and observant and if so, how could He do such a thing unless He does not exist or "there is no answer..."

The picture that is handed down to the American Orthodox youth, of the yeshivas of an East European Jewry that was pious and traditional and observant is one that must be destroyed because it is false.

It is an image that the yeshiva world gave us in its desire to negate the present material western one. But by their falsely idealizing Man, they have laid the groundwork for the desecration of God.

By painting the East European Jew as a saint, they designed a God of cruelty and irrationality. And that most terrible of sins must be ended: We must save God and sanctify His Name by telling the truth about European Jewry in the years preceding the Holocaust. Then and only then will we be able to tell our children and all Jews the truth of the Holocaust.

The false idealizing of the Jewry of Eastern Europe is worse than foolishness. In the words of Kohelet (Ecclesiastes), "Say not: 'How was it that the former days were better than these?' For it is not out of wisdom that you inquire concerning this." [Kohelet/Ecclesiastes 7:10] Then and only then can we save God from blasphemy and ourselves from future horrors. Then and only then can we honestly and truly say: "All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth unto such as keep His covenant and His testimonies." [Tehillim/Psalms 25:10]

Of course we know the real truth of the situation and from that comes the answer, if we wish to be honest. Then and only then can we reply to the wicked and the honestly confused both - honestly. For in the words of Tehillim: "The secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him, and His covenant to make them know it" [Tehilllim/Psalms 25:14] and Mishlei/Proverbs: "Men of evil will not understand justice but those who seek the Lord will understand everything." [Mishlei/Proverbs 28:5]

Yes, as the nineteenth century passed into its third quarter, the Jew of Russia and Poland was, indeed, observant. But what else could he be?

The overwhelming number of Jews lived in a Pale of Settlement that restricted them to the shtetl, the village, where they were isolated from the gentile world, barred from participating in anything else except the society of the shtetl. And that society was religious in toto.

What Jew, even if he wanted to, was prepared to rebel against the society that laid down the religious rules of life?

Who was prepared to accept the ostracism that would be his inevitable punishment if the dared to throw off the halachá that was more than religion in the shtetl, but the entire social fabric of the life of the Jew?

And so, of course, the Jew was "religious". He had no other choice.

But once that choice arrived, look at what happened! And in such a short span of time! The Enlightenment that began to arrive in Eastern Europe in the last third of the nineteenth century swept away, in a relatively few years, a society and structure that had been built up for centuries. The great Torah centers spawned, overnight, a rebellion and revolution that uncovered the reality of Jewish "religiosity".

The same Vilna that had become a byword for piety and Torah learning, the home of the Gaon, the "Jerusalem of Lithuania," now gave birth to' the Jewish labor movement, the Bund, a bitterly anti-religious and anti-nationalistic group that saw Jews, who just yesterday were "religious", flocking to its ranks to spout atheistic socialism.

The Poland and Russia and Lithuania and Galicia, the areas of the Va'ad Arba Ha'aratzot (Council of the "Four Lands" of the 17th Century Kingdom of Poland), the places that had given us the Rama and the Shach and Chassidism and the great yeshivas, overnight gave birth to Jewish communism and socialism and secular Zionism and assimilation. The door was barely opened to enlightenment and emancipation and the Jew rushed to be a Universalist and to throw away Judaism.

This was "religion". This was a "pious, saintly, committed Jewish community" that was cruel and unjustly allowed to be slaughtered by God? Hardly. The Jews who, arriving in America from centuries of "religion" and who threw away their tefillín (phylacteries) and their Shabbat at the first opportunity, symbolized so many other Jews who remained behind. It was not "religion" that had marked them but a social system of ritual that was observed by most only because the outside gentile world refused to allow them entry to it, and there to throw off the yoke of heaven.

The moment the barriers dropped, the Jew rebelled. This was the reality, and the fault dear Jew, lies not in our God but in ourselves.

And there was of course, more. There was the terrible class struggle within East European Jewry.

There was the terrible oppression of Jewish workers and proletariat by the wealthy Jews, the parnessim, the communal leaders.

Not for nothing did the Bund and communism succeed so easily in attracting poor Jewish workers to their ranks.

The low wages and horrible working conditions in the factories owned by Jews are epitomized in the classic story told in the name of the saintly Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev who once visited a matzah bakery on the eve of Passover.

There, he saw the terrible conditions from dawn to dusk. "Dear God", he said, lifting his eyes unto heaven. "What liars are the gentiles! They accuse us of using gentile blood in our matzah. It is not true. We use Jewish blood..."

And too few know of the black chapter of the Hatufím, the kidnapped Jewish children of Czarist Russia. When the Czar decreed that Jewish children be drafted as "Cantonists" in the army for 25 years, the rabbis declared that the quota imposed on each community be filled by casting lots to see which child would be drafted.

Tragically, the wealthy communal leaders would hire gentiles to kidnap the poor Jewish children, lock them in the synagogue and keep them to be turned over to be Czarists.

The lack of Ahavat Yisrael, love of Jews, cried out to the Heavens! Was this "religion"? Was this a saintly Jewish community that was cruelly and unjustly slaughtered by God? Hardly. The fault lies not in our God, but in ourselves.

And this lack of unity and love was epitomized, too, in the incredible number of machlokes, of bitter arguments and splits within the Jewish community, a sin'át Hinám, a needless hatred that split communities and families into warring camps of enemies.

What we have seen in the disgusting attacks of hatred between Satmar and Belz or Satmar and Lubavitch is only a small portion of the bitter hatred between misnagd�m (religious Jews who disagreed with Hassidism) and Hassidim and between Hassidic groups themselves, in Europe.

The bitter divisions between Jews was told to me as a child by my father, of blessed memory, who described to me the bitter split between the Sanz and Rizhin, a hatred that reached its climax with Hassidim going to the Western Wall to put the Sanzer Rebbe, the great Divrei Chayim, into Hérem (a term similar to excommunication). And at a Shabbat seudá shlishít (third Sabbath meal, eaten shortly before the prayers ending the Sabbath), a Hassid attempted to stab the Divréi Hayím...

Families were broken up because of disputes. Needless hatred ran through East European Jewry as a thread, and the classic example of the Munkatcher Rebbe declaring, concerning the Pressburger Yeshiva founded by the Hatám sofér: v'hivdilánu min ha'toím - "and He has separated us from those who err," even as the Pressburger Yeshiva refused entry to any baHúr (student) who was a member of the MizráHi...

And this terrible, terrible hatred was long ago, set up by the Rabbis as an unpardonable sin with a terrible, terribly clear and precise warning:

"How severe is maHlóket, division and split! The Court of Heaven does not punish until one is over the age of 20 and the court on earth from the age of 13, but in the dispute of KoraH, children of one day were burned and swallowed up by the earth..." (Tanchuma, Korach 3) And the Rabbis in Shabbat (33b): "When there are righteous in the generation, the righteous are caught for the sins of the generation. When there are no righteous, then little children are caught for the sins of the generation (this is the explanation for the million and a half Jewish children murdered by the Nazis in the death camps). Let each of us think long and carefully about this. And let us search our souls.

And let us remember, on top of all the sins and the reality of Jewish crimes, the refusal to grasp the Land of Israel to our bosom. "And they despised the desirable land," is the Biblical condemnation of the generation of the desert and its great scholars and leaders who preferred to return to Egypt rather than go to the Land of Israel.

Their actions led to the night of "weeping for generations," Tisha B'Av. What shall we say about the rejection of Eretz Yisrael in the decades preceding the Holocaust by so many great religious leaders in Europe? That, too, must be added to the reality of East European Jewry.

It is time to put an end to the nonsense of "we cannot know the reasons". That answer guarantees the turning away of Jewish youth.

It is time to bury the myth of East European Jewry that was pious and saintly. That insures the creation of a Jewish God who is senselessly cruel.

It is time to put an end to the indictment of God, to Hirúf v'gidúf, blasphemy against the Lord. A Jewish People that clings to the Law, truly and completely, will be saved from Holocausts. And one which rejects it and which turns it into a ritualistic sociological fraud will suffer for it. And until we learn this, that which was will, God forbid, be again.

But do not blame God. He remains the One whose duty compels us "to declare that the Lord is just, He is my rock and there is no unrighteousness in Him." [Tehillim/Psalms 92:15]

Persian Forces on Alert Against Alleged Israeli and American Troop Concentrations in Azerbaijan

בס''ד

Published as a Newsflash at Blogcritics Magazine, 23 June 2010,

Copyright © R. Kossover, 2010

Iranian forces are on alert against alleged Israeli and American troop concentrations in Azerbaijan.
These reports come form two sources, Arutz Sheva and Debkafiles. The details differ in both reports, but the bottom line appears to be that the Revolutionary Guard has been massing troops against what is  expected to be an attack on Iran, that this attack is coming shortly, and that it will be a coordinated attack by Israel and the US. The launching of the Ofek 9 spy satellite late Tuesday night (22 June 2010) apparently was the signal for this attack, if there is to be one.

If an attack is not in the cards and the Iranians are just crying "wolf,"  committing troops to the border is a pretty convincing cry. If an attack does come, we can expect massive bombardment here in Israel from HizbAllah and Syria. That could set off a regional war.

If there is to be American participation in an attack on Iran, the statements by Defense Secretary Gates warning of Iranian missiles striking Europe would appear to have been the straw that broke the camel's back for President Barack Obama. A hint of what may be in the minds of the Americans and Israelis comes from this recommendation from  ex-Mossad director Shabtai Shavit who spoke for many Israelis on Monday when he said:

"Since there is an ongoing war, since the threat is permanent, since the intention of the enemy in this case is to annihilate you, the right doctrine is one of pre-emption and not of retaliation...we are dealing with an enemy that plans all the time and waits for the opportunity to arise in order to attack, so what is the point, even morally, to wait and do something only when we are attacked?"

"Terror! Terror Makes You Piss Your Pants!": Caroline Glick Kicking Ass - Sorta

בס''ד

This article was originally published at Blogcritics Magazine, 23 June 2010;
Copyright © R. Kossover, 2010.

When the world's media mugged Israel before, during, and after its resistance to the Turkish terrorists attempting to break its blockade of Gaza, Caroline Glick, a leading Israeli news commentator writing out of the Jerusalem Post, displayed the kind of guts and moxie sadly lacking in the Israeli prime minister and his cabinet. As part of her Latma TV (látma is Hebrew for slap) "Tribal Update" broadcasts, she included a parody of "We Are the World" called "We Con the World", which made fun of the so-called "peace activists", the Turkish terrorists who were on the Mavi Marmara, of whom nine now are thankfully dead. A cut of this broadcast, called "The Flotilla Crew Sings We Con the World" went viral on YouTube and got over three million hits in a week.

YouTube tried to shut down Caroline Glick. They refused to air her "We Con the World" video alleging copyright infringement. A similar (but far nastier) parody of "We Are the World" about the Obama victory sits undisturbed among YouTube's tens of thousands of videos. Anyone can access it, and the whine of "copyright infringement" will not stop them. It was obvious that the owners of YouTube were kissing Arab ass as they had done previously, when they tried to shut down videos of the IDF fighting in Gaza in 2008-2009. Caroline Glick attacked YouTube, calling them the hypocrites they are. She was polite enough about it - but she warned readers and viewers, ‘For Those People Who Hate Me, Expect More’. Of course, to find the details of what was behind that warning, you would have to go to that conservative echo chamber, Pajamas Media, a difficult trip in the ether not all of you are willing to make.

At Elise Cooper's Pajamas Media article, we see Glick condemning YouTube's hypocrisy saying the following:

They are trying to personalize everything and demonize what they can’t contend with. The left has one card, and they play it over and over again for dealing with issues. They have no answer but to resort to the politics of destruction. Their favorite method is to call anyone who gives them an answer that they can’t contend with a racist. They cry for terrorists who would destroy them, but come out against democracies.

She also condemns the Jews of Hollywood for refusing to defend Israel.

We should note that YouTube is still trying to undermine Caroline Glick - if one searches out episodes 55 or 53 of Tribal Update, they will be virtually impossible to find.

But as a satirist whose nasty humor has all too much truth in it, she attacks many targets, the least of whom are terrorists.

This article is an exploration of Caroline Glick's work, with link after link to her "Tribal Updates" from where her satire is launched. All of these links are in Hebrew, with English subtitles. Let's get a look at her "Tribal Updates" first from the monochromatic leftists who dominate Israeli broadcasting in reality, and were kind enough to have her as a guest on one of their programs. This tape begins with one of the hosts talking about "taking a sharp turn to the right". These leftist "journalists" praise the professionalism of her productions. In spite of all this, they still try to pick apart her funding, going after, as they so rarely do for their favorites, the money.

The first of these Tribal Updates for you to view, #40, is typical, beginning with the newscasters, Elhanán and Ronít, going through the newspapers themselves and reading the news before going live. Elhanán reads of a Sudanese refugee raping a woman. Ronít jumps on him for being racist - until she realizes that the raped woman was a Russian immigrant. Then, apparently, it was alright that she was raped.  Here, Glick goes after the prejudices - and hypocrisies - in Israeli Hiloní society which are so typically found, especially in Tel Aviv. The "Palestinian" "Minister for Uncontrollable Rage" is able to lead the broadcasters along like a pair of fools on a string of lies - while telling them he is doing so.

Next, we see in Tribal Update #46, how the leftist journalists in Israel look and act like total idiots, complete with special spectacles to help them. This video also examines how the left wing media manipulates the news, creating crises out of nothing - and projecting events that will happen.

In Tribal Update #45, Caroline Glick digs further into this one-sided reporting, using two examples; the first is of two "academics" who both agree that the naqba, the el-Husseini view of Israel's creation being a disaster for Arabs, should be covered in the academic curriculum of the high schools in the country - but disagree on whether it should be a subject on the bagruyót, the national matriculation tests in Israel. And typical of leftists, they wind up screaming at each other, calling each other fascist, extremist, etc., while denying the legitimacy of their own country - and not even realizing it. The second example is a parody on the "fact" shows in Israel, the ones that trumpet social crises in the country. In this episode, a stern woman interviews a Sudanese refugee living illegally in Israel who participates in a mugging. The whole tale is told from the point of view of the mugger, who attempts to steal a wallet or handbag, or something of that nature. The way the interview is presented, it is his right to attack and rob Israelis, and the viewer is supposed to sympathize with his terrible plight. He has almost succeeded, when he is caught by the Immigration Police. The interviewer, seeking to elicit sympathy for the mugger, mentions that now he faces deportation to Sudan, where his wife and seven children live. Apparently this is not the case: the Immigration Police force him to move to Ashdod - where cleaners like him will only make $10/hr instead of the $12 or $13 in Tel Aviv..... What is not said is a fact most Israelis know - that Ashdod is filled with S'faradím, MizraHím (Jews from Greece, Turkey, Iraq and Syria) and Russians - whom the élites in Tel Aviv have only contempt for.

In the beginning of this episode of Tribal Update - from 29 April 2010 - Elhanán tries to describe the Turkish slaughter of Armenians without calling it "genocide" and has trouble, until Ronít helps him out. This episode features "President Obama" singing about how he hates the "dirty Jews" and why, revealing his deeply held feelings. While this is only parody, one has to wonder from his behavior how closely Glick has nailed Obama on the head. But this 9 minute video goes further. It reveals the basic corruption underlying Israeli society - as an "investigative reporter" talks about a "Harry Weiss" who it turns out is a "stockholder" of the "company" that puts out "Tribal Update" (shades of CSTV?). As notes get passed back and forth indicating that he is in fact a stockholder or not, the "investigative reporter's" views change from praise to condemnation and back.

Finally, let's look at Tribal Update #55. Because I had so much difficulty picking this up from YouTube, I went to WeJew, Shlomo Wollins' site. Here, you get the operatic rendition of Ahmadinejad, Erdogan and Bashir el-Assad, three performers who do not cancel their appearances here (or their deadly performances), the Three Terrors. Their song is where the title of this article comes from. But you get more. You get a satirical look at the virulent Jew-hatred that has swept Europe and its governments as the "presidency of the European Parliament" explains to Tzar Li, "another" investigative reporter for Tribal Update, that Israelis are turds (the Hebrew is actually "shits") and because they are turds the presidency wants the Arabs to kill Jews. The leftist reporters seem unable to absorb the fact that they are being cursed out and told to die, and keep wondering what it is precisely that is bothering the Jew-haters in the "presidency of the European Parliament". And you will notice that Caroline Glick is giving the world the middle finger, constantly reminding them of her hit, "We Con the World" and selling t-shirts with pictures of the "Flotilla Choir"

Now that we have looked at the satirical aspect of her work, let's look at the serious aspects of it. As a Jerusalem Post Deputy Editor, she has to be restrained in what she says, and she is. This interview is from 1 June, the day after the "flotilla" incident. Note what she does not mention - she does not mention the fact that Erdogan's AKP Party is a Wahhabist party with ideological ties to Hamas and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. This was already known to Mossad and was available to anyone looking at the Mossad's backdoor "drop site", Debkafiles.

In analyzing events as they have transpired over the last three weeks, we see the limitations of what Caroline Glick feels comfortable advocating. She points out correctly that two threats emerge from the "flotilla" crisis of the end of May. One is the possibility of suicide protesters, which is what the "peace activists" on the Mavi Marmara really were. They were there to incite a slaughter - gaining for themselves martyrdom, and gaining condemnation of Israel at the same time. This new wrinkle on the "suicide bomber" is one threat that Israel faces. The other threat, one she feels is a different threat, is the possibility of open warfare. She elaborates:

Syrian President Bashar Assad told the BBC Wednesday (16 June) that the region is moving towards war. And the Turkish government is continuing to escalate its assaults on Israel. On Thursday (17 June) Turkey threatened to cut off diplomatic relations with Israel if Israel does not issue a formal apology for its takeover of the Mavi Marmara and pay restitution to the families of the terrorists killed on board the ship.

Obviously the most disturbing aspect of the war threats is the specter of Turkish naval vessels attacking the Israeli navy. If Turkey — a NATO member - participates in a war against Israel, the repercussions for Israel's relations with NATO member states, including the US, as well as the EU are liable to be unprecedented.

While going to war against Israel would be a major gamble for Turkey, in recent years it has not shied away from high stakes challenges to its NATO allies. Indeed, one of Turkey's ruling AKP party's first actions upon taking power in 2003 was to deny the US military the right to invade Iraq from its territory. The deleterious impact of Turkey's refusal to come to the aid of its NATO ally at the time has been felt by US forces in Iraq ever since.

Note that Glick continues to ignore the fact that Turkish troops, planes and ships were dispatched to Turkish Cyprus before the boarding of the Mavi Marmara, a fact that by now she should have been aware of. She ignores the fact that Turkey's Recep Erdogan has been spoiling for an excuse to further strengthen the Wahhabist AKP régime in Ankara by starting a war with us. As a writer and analyst, she is considerably more circumscribed in what she says than as a satirist. Were she to point all these things out to her readers, as I have, the inescapable conclusions that we must prepare for a decisive and bloody war with Turkey, Persia, and Syria/Lebanon/HizbAllah, dangerous as this confrontation would be, would be an argument she would be impelled to make.

So, in short, the satirist in Caroline Glick goes for the jugular - the analyst in her is very restrained.

Why?

Let’s leave off to the side that this strategy she suggests is probably impossible to follow. It presumes us in Israel having the ability to control the actions of rulers of enemy states. In war, that is generally not possible – even when you attack first and the battle seems to be going your way.

Let’s not suggest that Caroline Glick is not intelligent enough to understand the inherent weaknesses of what she proposes. I’m sure she does. The question remains. Why does she propose a faulty strategy? And why is she so restrained?

For the answer to this, we need to go back to that YouTube video by news “giants” in Israel’s leftist media, the fifth link in this article. They provide the answer. They poke at Caroline and find out who funds Latma TV - the Center for Security Policy in Washington, a think tank she works for. This is at about 06:27 minutes into the tape. When you go to their website, you see a lot of Ms. Glick’s work. You also get an idea of her own orientation. When I look at the United States government, I see an enemy dating back over seven decades. Ms. Glick doesn’t. She constantly argues that the Americans need to recognize the security value of Israel to the the United States and pushes incessantly for an American-Israeli alliance.

In her latest article, it seems, while not necessarily abandoning that stance, she attacks Netanyahu for bowing to Obama's various demands regarding the blockade of Gaza, pointing out that in doing so, Netanyahu is violating international law that requires Israel to structure a blockade in a certain way. And she goes after the obvious bagman for the Obama administration in the Israeli government, Ehud Barak. She points out, as I have elsewhere, that Barak's withdrawal from South Lebanon in 2000 led to the Second Lebanon War in 2006, and the horrible security situation in the north we have now. But she goes further, giving respectability to the allegations of corruption within the Sharon administration; that the Jewish village of Elai Sinai in the Gaza Strip was to be turned into another casino for the PA (the one in Jericho having been destroyed in fighting in 2000) - with Martin Schlaf, the Austrian Jewish businessman, having the sole license to develop casinos in the State of Israel, a deal worked out by Avi Weissglass, a lawyer for both Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon - at the same time. It's not that any of this information is terribly new. Barry Chamish exposed a lot of it over seven years ago. A French speaking engineer who lives in Hebron tried desperately to stop the expulsion of Gush Qatif in 2005 using this information - and the Israel High Court of (in)Justice stopped up its ears and refused to listen. After exhuming the stink of corrupt Israeli politics, after going after Netanyahu with the equivalent of a woman chasing a stupid husband around the kitchen with a rolling pin, she steps back, exercising that restraint she is known for and says, "Netanyahu knows the folly of his decisions."

And that is the point. She is unwilling to go further, even in the face of the obvious servility of Netanyahu to the Dark Prince of the Setting Potomac Sun.

With a stance like this, she cannot argue for the real independence of Israel, or Israeli policy, from the bankrupt régime in Washington. Her videos can poke fun at Israel’s leftist media, they can poke fun at the terrorists, our Arab or Persian enemies, and even suggest that Obama himself is a Jew-hater, or that the soon to be departing Rahm Emanuel is a kapo in the White House. But the piper, the Center for Security Policy in Washington, ultimately calls her tune. She may agree with that tune or not. This I cannot say. But I can say that she is unable to contemplate separating us in Israel from them, the enemies of the State of Israel and the Jewish people in the United States government. In just the same way that Haim Weizmann was tied to the British eight decades ago, Caroline Glick is tied to the Americans. And like his tie to the British was deleterious to us, Glick’s tie to the United States is ultimately deleterious to us as well.

Just as Arutz Sheva has certain limits that they cannot cross, so does Caroline Glick. And that is what this article is really about. Her limits. Fortunately for us, she is not in power. Unfortunately for us, people who are far more subservient to Israel’s enemies in the United States government than she is are in power.

But let's end this on a happy note: a belated lesson from Passover from Latma TV.

Living in the Shadow of the Six Day War: The Unraveling of a Miracle

בס''ד

This improved and consolidated version of a three year old series of articles has been published in Jewish Indy (Indianapolis, USA), Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury's Weekly Blitz (Bangladesh).  I am attempting to have it translated into Hebrew in hopes that my Israeli friends and neighbors will see a painful summary of all that we have lost in the dark and scary Shadow of Six Day War.
Copyright © R. Kossover, 2010
Originally published at Blogcritics Magazine in four parts during 6-9 June 2007.
Copyright © R. Kossover, 2007

Author's note: Now, three years after this article was originally published, we have fought a brief war in Gaza, and now sit on the lip of further war, with Turkey having thrown its lot in with the revivified Persian Empire that stretches from the borders of Afghanistan and Pakistan to the beaches of Lebanon and Syria. We wait for the other shoe to drop, for the time when we will need to pull up the lawn chairs and watch the missiles fly in to destroy Tel Aviv, and pray that they do not hit us here in the midst of Samaria.

I was not yet sixteen when the Six Day War broke out in June, 1967. Over 25 years ago I recorded what happened to me the day before the war started.

"War!"

I jumped out of bed when I heard my mother's voice. Listening to the 7:00 a.m. news, I heard CBS Radio's Israel correspondent Jay Bushinski say that Israel Defense Forces had advanced 10 miles into Egyptian territory and had destroyed the entire Egyptian Air Force. During the following week, I walked around school dazed, distracted. But not so distracted that I couldn't drag out a Hebrew grammar book to study abandoned verb conjugations and forgotten vocabulary. I carried a new dream within me.

Only twenty-four hours before - Sunday morning - it would have been like Vietnam; another war in a far off place.

After Memorial Day, 1967, Brighton Beach was my second home. I soaked up rock-n-roll tunes from the radio as I lay on a blanket playing poker and browning my back.

My best friend at the time was an Israeli, Shlomo Rozenberg. Sunday, June 4th, he and I kicked a soccer ball around while gentle winds blew and sea birds flew over Brighton beach. As afternoon shadows lengthened, the soccer game disintegrated. Shlomo and I made our way to a forest of legs surrounding a centrally located group of beach blankets and umbrellas. This was "Bay 3", the central hangout for Israelis living in New York on hot summer days.

Together with eight others, we clambered over each other's shoulders to form a human pyramid. While I struggled to maintain my balance, someone began to play a Hebrew love ballad on his guitar. A bongo drummer softly kept rhythm.

Almost everybody sang along. Guys put muscled arms around their girlfriends' olive shoulders. Giant Stars of David reflected gold, copper and light.

I was silent.

I neither knew the words, nor understood the language. All I knew at that moment was how lonely I felt. I wanted to walk away from this crowd of foreigners, lay on my blanket and listen to the Beach Boys and the Stones. I didn't. Shlomo had his left leg on my right shoulder. He needed my support.

By the time the unsteady pyramid had collapsed, Jack Goldberg - card sharp and pre-eminent party giver in Brooklyn's felafel ghetto on 13th Avenue - was making a speech about breaking Nasser's noose on the Straits of Tiran. To shouts of "kol hakavód!" and "bravo!," he orated passionately that the Russians could drop dead and that Israel would drive the Egyptian monkeys to the gates of Cairo. He yelled "'am yisraél Hai!" and "long live America!," The rest of the crowd soon took up Ya'akov's calls.

In the midst of the shouting the staccato of a bongo drum pierced the air like a machine gun. A girl began to sing "Hava Negila" and grabbed Shlomo's hand. He grabbed mine and we danced a hora to the steady beat of the knee drums.

I danced and whirled and jumped. Concentric circles formed dancing clockwise and counter-clockwise. I kicked sand, running first to the right then to the left. The knee drums pounded their cadence into my brain. As more and more people joined the hora, I sang the one song I recognized that day in a voice of voices.

The ancient spirit of Israel rose within me. Walls of isolation dropped. I felt my soul link with the souls around me. I shared fear. I shared concern. I shared joy. For the first time in my life, I didn't feel like an outsider. I belonged.

That night we watched a television "special" about the Middle East. My mother looked at the map on the TV and said to my father, "Louie, they have us surrounded." She had never referred to Israel as "us" before.

When I went to sleep that night, He Who guards Israel did not sleep. Only He - and the Israel Defense Force - were prepared for the six days that followed.

What had happened was a miracle. First of all, that event on Brighton Beach and the events of the week that followed it shaped the rest of my life, telling me where my own identity really lay. Even though it would be over thirty years before I would fulfill my own dream of coming home to Israel, the seed leading to its fulfillment had been planted.

But on a far larger level, a small insecure nation surrounded by millions of hateful enemies determined to drive it into the sea and massacre all of its inhabitants had defeated all of its enemies on the field and totally humiliated them. In the words of the great Israeli writer, Ephraim Kishon, "Israel solved the problem of winning a two-front war by fighting a three front war." In six days, David had downed Goliath using airplanes, tanks, and sheer moxie. And the Arabs, just like the Philistines 3,000 years earlier, pulled off their boots in the sand and ran as fast as they could.

From a country with a central section 10 miles wide, Israel had expanded to cover all the land from the Mediterranean to the Jordan, a broad and good land; it had conquered the Heights of Golan, so that never again would Syrian gunners bombard kibbutzim and towns in the north and force the inhabitants to sleep in underground bunkers; it had liberated the city of Jerusalem from foreign rule and re-united it under the rule of the only people who pray for the city's welfare daily, the Jewish people; it had conquered Gaza, an infectious nest of murderous terrorists; and as a security buffer, it had conquered the entire Sinai peninsula, ending forever the danger of a blockade of Israeli shipping in the south, as well as that of a massive land invasion that would overrun Ashkelon, Beersheva, and Tel Aviv. In addition to all this, most of the inhabitants of the territory that had been under Jordanian rule for 19 years waited at three bridges at the Jordan River, seeking to flee Israeli rule.

Rabbi Shlomo Goren, the Chief Rabbi of the IDF, wanted to build a synagogue on the Temple Mount. The opportunity to have Judea and Samaria nearly empty of Arabs stood before the leaders of Israel. Had a synagogue been built on the Temple Mount it would have cemented our claim to it, mosques and domes notwithstanding. Had the Arabs fleeing Israeli rule been allowed to leave, the settlement of Judea and Samaria would have been a far easier and less controversial task. It is likely that the territory would have been annexed to the State and living in Ma'ale Levona, for example, would be looked upon as normal, instead of theft of someone else's land by self righteous, finger-wagging foreigners, and ignorant Israelis who think they know better than G-d Himself.

But this is not what happened.

Spitting at the Miracle

The key person who began the unraveling of the miracle of the Six Day War, was the IDF's Chief of Staff, the late Moshe Dayan. Consulting with a large number of rabbis who tended to feel that entering upon the Temple Mount was an affront to G-d, Dayan banned the idea of the synagogue. Rabbi Goren's view was a minority one at the time. But, as if to lock out the possibility of a synagogue ever being built, Dayan handed control of the Temple Mount to the Waqf, a Moslem community organization. Given that the secular establishment ruling the country then (and now) did not want to see a strengthening of the religious community in Israel, and certainly rejected the view that Israel should be a publicly Jewish state, this act certainly went in line with its vision for the nation. But the rabbis who advised Dayan that a synagogue should not be built on the Temple Mount, advice that gave him cover for his actions, probably do not have the sense to now say "t'aínu" - "we made a mistake". This, in spite of the acts of the Waqf to erase all Jewish presence on our Temple Mount over the last several years.

Additionally, Dayan blew up the bridges at the Jordan River, thus preventing the Arabs living in Judea and Samaria from leaving. So they left the sites of the blown up bridges, returning to their homes. The Israelis attempted a "light-handed" occupation, but there is no such thing as a light-handed occupation of a potentially hostile population being fed hate propaganda daily.

Because Dayan did not allow the Arabs at the Jordan River bridges to leave, he created the problem of wanting to "annex the land but not the people". He handed to the Arabs a legitimacy they would not have had otherwise in demanding the land for themselves and undermined any Jewish claim to our land. He built the stool upon which the PLO stood, the stool upon which the Hamas stands. His act was an act of rank cowardice that has cost thousands of Jewish lives in the last forty years, not to mention thousands more Arab lives.

Very few Jews, living in Israel or elsewhere foresaw the disastrous consequences of these two acts when they were done. But this looks at events only from the point of view of political analysis. The real issue is that the last forty years spent in the shadow of the Six Day War has only made clear what happens when a people, particularly its leaders, spit at a miracle. In 1967, and indeed even into 1973, this nation had land, a sense of security, and a joie de vivre that one could feel in the festive air. The history of the last 33 years at least is the history of how this nation has lost all it gained in the Six Day War, along with the joie de vivre it had possessed when going into battle in June, 1967.

Tremendous victories were achieved by Israel in the 1967 War. Israelis called it a miracle.

It slowly unraveled.

The first unraveling was the "War of Attrition," which in essence was the attempt by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), particularly the artillery and air, to prevent Egypt from rebuilding its military forces - the war machine it had built up before 1967 with immense Soviet aid. While primarily costly in matériel, the real cost of this war forced Israel into dependency on American military aid. Prior to the Six Day War, Israel's leaders had done what they could not to openly rely too heavily on the United States for arms, though it had received heavy tanks from the States via aid to West Germany.

The main foreign supplier of arms to the IDF prior to the Six Day War was France. When the French decided to side with the Arabs in 1967 this began to change. The political atmosphere in the States was favorable to the Israelis, and American Jews gloried in seeking to get aid for the nation that had given them a renewed sense of pride. Thus, almost unnoticed, Israeli sovereignty began to slip from the fingers of her leaders. The most fortunate event that occurred during this period was when the Israelis "acquired" nuclear material to make missiles. It was the one really good thing that Shim'ón Peres did in the service of his country.

The Beginning of Arab Terror

The second strand of the unraveling of the miracle was the beginning of Arab terror against Israeli civilians. The terror campaign had the initial effect of making the Arabs look evil and vicious - they blew up a school in Ma'alót, planted pencil bombs that would blow up in the hands of little children, and similar acts. Innocents were usually targeted. But this was accompanied with a well funded propaganda campaign to reverse the roles of the combatants, constantly referring to the Israeli "Goliath" overshadowing the Arab (and later, "Palestinian") "David."

The turning point in this campaign of terror - revealing the success of the Arab propaganda effort - was the reaction to the murder of the Israeli Olympic athletes in the 1972 Munich games by the Arab terror organization, Black September. As wrong as the terror attack might have been, the distribution of Olympic medals was far more important in the eyes of the corporate world than a terror organization bringing dishonor to the international games.

The shedding of human blood, particularly of Jewish blood, did not matter if it got in the way of the great publicity machine hustling the Olympics. The murder of the Israeli athletes was turned as much as possible into another form of entertainment for the hungry masses. In addition, the Arabs were able to get a certain amount of sympathetic coverage, with the line "poor Palestinians driven to terror" being capitalized upon constantly. The Arab propaganda planted in the late '60's and early '70's has echoed through three and a half decades of murderous terror attacks, always being used as the excuse to cover them and give them legitimacy.

The Yom Kippur War

The next strand in the unraveling was the co-ordinated Arab attack on Israel on 10 Tishrei, 5734 - the Yom Kippur War. That the "empire would strike back" was inevitable. But many other things were not.

Israel's leaders, now dependent on U.S. arms, quailed before American bullying - something that they did not do in 1967 - and waited for an Arab attack when they could have struck pre-emptively. They relied on America to fulfill promises of arms replenishment - which the Americans did not keep until Secretary of Defense Shlesinger informed Richard Nixon, then president, of the duplicity of his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, in holding up arms resupply.

More important was the cold enmity towards Israelis around the world. In 1967, for example, blacks would drive through New York with huge flags of Israel on their cars to show their sympathy. Six years later, blacks in New York, now influenced by Arab propaganda, were cool at best and often openly hostile. I remember one black man telling me that "Israel was not a natural country". The Arab campaign of disinformation and lies - backed by the United States State Department - was succeeding.

Nation after nation broke ties with this country, even nations that had received aid from it. The breaking of ties by foreign nations, the American duplicity, the hostility of the world reflected at the United Nations, ought to have been a signal to the nation's leadership that it was time to assert the true character of the people of Israel, and act as and view itself as a nation reckoned alone. Indeed in 1973, it was. But the desire of the Zionists to be just like all the other nations overruled this impulse, and like a girl desperate for a lover, Israel began to chase for friends. This meant that her leaders caved in to foreign demands when they should have told the foreigners to go to hell.

History will not be kind to Golda Meir, z"l, in spite of all that she did to build this country. But it will be even less kind to Moshe Dayan. During the war, the one Israeli tactic that succeeded - the audacious attack on Egyptian tank lines that broke them by General Ariel Sharon - was fought tooth and nail by Security Minister Moshe Dayan, his superior.

If the enmity of the world, contempt of much of the world's press, and American duplicity weren't enough to signal that something was very wrong, the cease fire agreement reached at Tent 101 should have.

The IDF drove the Syrians off the Heights of Golan entirely and were advancing east northeast towards Damascus. It had invaded Egypt proper (in Africa) and had surrounded its vaunted 3rd Army while forces advanced on Cairo. The IDF, at the cost of over 2,500 dead in about three weeks (the equivalent of 135,000 American dead in a similar type of battle for survival), had repulsed a coördinated attack that could have destroyed the country, and had routed its enemies entirely.

At Tent 101, where negotiations were conducted, Israel was forced to give up land!

Israel was forced to withdraw to the status quo ante (4 October 1973) and surrender to the Syrians control of the city of el-Quneitra. In the Sinai, Israel was forced to withdraw 10 kilometers east of the Suez Canal and withdraw from Africa entirely. A diplomatic defeat was dealt out to the victors in war by the American Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. The bitterness of that defeat acted like a poison that embittered the body politic here for years.

"Zionism is Racism"

The next unraveling was the appearance before the General Assembly of the late Yasser Arafat, a murdering terrorist, who broke the laws of the City and State of New York by carrying a holstered pistol to the meeting without a license. In that speech, he told the delegates that in one hand he had a pistol and in the other he had on olive branch. In truth, he never held an olive branch, but he put on a good enough show to fool millions of people. To top all this was the recognition of the PLO, a terrorist umbrella organization, as the "legitimate representative of the Palestinian people," which created a people out of a non-people on the strength of the lies of the Husseini clan, and a further resolution that condemned Zionism, the movement that built the State of Israel, as racism.

This was the signal for a strong Israeli leadership to expel United Nations personnel from Israel permanently and to take over direct control of the Arab refugee camps in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. The United Nations had just declared war on Israel and did not deserve - as it does not deserve now - one square meter of land here, not to mention a presence in the most strategic spot in Jerusalem, Armon haNetziv. But the weak-kneed YitzHaq Rabin, z"l, did not understand this and did not do it at all. In 1977, when his wife Leah was caught with her fingers in the cookie jar - it really was a penny ante scandal compared to the thefts of Olmert, Martin Schlaf and the late Yossi Ginosar - the anger was such that Rabin and the leftists were driven from office by a true nationalist, MenaHem Begin, z"l.

How Peace and War Both Further Unraveled the Miracle

The miracle further unraveled with two events - the "peace" treaty with Egypt and the invasion of Lebanon. Both occurred on Begin's watch.

The peace treaty appeared to be a good thing - except that Israel was forced to give up all of the Sinai Peninsula. A Pentagon study had shown years earlier that the minimum that Israel required for her security needs was control of Sharm el-Sheikh (Yamit) in the south, and control of parts of the northern and central Sinai. Giving up all of the Sinai did not allow Israel her minimum requirements for security.

This was the first problem. The second problem was that by giving up the entire Sinai, it created a "little" Israel, instead of the spacious mini-empire that control of the Sinai gave. The third problem was that Israel would have to give up oil holdings - the Arabs and the Americans controlling the oil industry had used the Yom Kippur War as a cover to triple oil prices in 1973, which now meant that oil was a valuable asset. But all of these problems were dwarfed by something that the Israelis did not realize at all.

When the late Anwar el-Sadat was able to win back the Sinai from the Israelis without firing a shot, he injected a tremendous amount of hope into the Arabs living under Israeli rule in Gaza, Judea and Samaria that they could eject the Israelis entirely. This hope was to result in the creation of large terrorist bases in refugee camps and Arab towns, and in the intifada of the late 1980's. This then leapfrogged into the development of Hamas and later HizbAllah.

The second event that occurred was the Lebanon War - the first Lebanon War. The original "Peace in Galilee" campaign was to advance to the Litani River and to stop, driving the el-Fatah terrorists from the territory, and occupying it, thus preventing further terrorist attacks from Lebanon. But Security Minister Ariel Sharon turned the campaign into a full-scale invasion of Lebanon, as far as Beirut. This was the first time that the Jewish state had gone to war in a situation that was not an issue of self-defense against attack, and it appeared to many that an unspoken covenant had been broken, particularly after Security Minister Sharon ordered the IDF to advance beyond the Litani River.

The nature of the poison that had spilled into Israeli political life began to show itself at the Battle of Sultan Yakub, where a tank division of largely religious soldiers was allowed to advance into an ambush by their commanders, Colonels Ehud Barak and Amram Mitzna, both secular Jews and later major figures in the Labor Party. Twenty three soldiers were killed in that ambush and three soldiers went missing, including Zechariah Baumel, who remains missing to this day.

But the real problem with Sharon's invasion of Lebanon was that his goal - the destruction of El Fatah as fighting force - thwarted by the United States government, which arranged for Arafat, along with people like Mahmoud Abbas, to live, and to leave for Tunis. This rendered the Israeli invasion worthless and created, for the first time, a real element of questioning the validity of the actions of the IDF among Israelis. This led to an acceptance among some of the elites here of something called "post-Zionism", which revises the history of the country to present it as though we Jews who have sought to re-settle our home as a people are colonial villains with no rights, while the Arabs, many of whom immigrated here from Iraq or Syria during the period of British rule with their encouragement, had rights that extended centuries back.

The event that was decisive in changing the nature of the invasion was a massacre of "Palestinian" Arab refugees at the Sabra and Shatila camps by a Christian Lebanese militia force, known as the Phalangists.  The fact that thousands of Lebanese Christians had been killed during the Lebanese civil war by "Palestinian" Arabs was ignored by the world's press; so was the fact that five thousand "Palestinian" rebels had been killed by General Zia ul Haq in Jordan in 1970. The fact that Security Minister Sharon was supposed to watch over the Phalangist forces for possible abuses was focused in on like a laser.

In the end, Israeli forces withdrew to the Litani and a zone south of it to prevent Arabs from firing missiles into Israel. But not before major internal damage had been done to the country's political structures and the trust that Israelis placed in the IDF.

The End of Israeli Sovereignty

The year 1991 saw the effective end of Israel's sovereignty. This occurred when the United States attacked Iraq in what has become known as the "First Gulf War."

The Iraqi dictator, unable to effectively deal with the United States, attacked Israel. The Scud missiles fired from trucks in Iraq could have been stopped by the air forces of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), but the United States ordered the Israelis not to retaliate, and to make sure that the Israel government complied, withheld codes that would have allowed our air forces to fly over Jordan and Iraq. Israel's self-defense was thus squelched by the minions of George H.W. Bush and his Secretary of State, James "fuck the Jews" Baker.

After this war, Prime Minister YitzHaq Shamir was virtually ordered to a summit in Madrid for "direct talks" with the Arab enemy. Shamir wrecked these talks by calling his Syrian counterpart a terrorist. The Syrian, enraged, threw the accusation back at Shamir, whose group in the War of Independence, known as the "Stern Gang", had assassinated the Swedish "mediator" Count Folke Bernadotte, a man who had planned to force Israel to surrender Jerusalem entirely in his proposals for "peace" in 1949.

This wrecking of the Madrid summit by Shamir was the last sovereign act by an Israeli head of government. Since then, no Israeli prime minister has had the guts to take any action independent of the United States. Not YitzHaq Rabin, who depended on the United States for support; not Benyamin Netanyahu, who had been intimidated by Bill Clinton; not Ehud Barak, who owed his position entirely to Bill Clinton; not Ariel Sharon, who was unwilling to do what he was elected to do, to squelch Arab terror with an iron fist as he had done in Gaza decades previous; and certainly not the clown who pretends to the prime minister's seat and is on the verge of ejection from it, Ehud Olmert. But I get ahead of myself.

A further example of how the United States squelched the sovereignty of the country was how it influenced the settlement of Judea and Samaria after the flood of Russian Jews came here. Aid money that was supposed to be used to build infrastructure was withheld on the condition that Russians be prevented from settling in Judea and Samaria.

In a CRS Report for Congress prepared in January, 2006, it reports how during times of domestic unrest in Israel and regional instability, U.S. aid to Israel had increased. The report stated that in 1991 Congress provided Israel $650 million in emergency grants to pay for damage and other costs from Operation Desert Storm. In addition, Israel was given Patriot missiles to defend against Iraqi Scud missile attacks. After the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union and the ensuing increase in migration of Russian and other Eastern bloc Jews to Israel, Congress approved $10 billion in loan guarantees for Israel to help it absorb immigrants and provide them with adequate social services.

It also explained how Loan Guarantees for Soviet Immigration were to work. In late 1990, the press reported that Israel would request $10 billion in loan guarantees from the United States. Under the proposal, Israel would borrow $10 billion from U.S. commercial establishments, and the United States government would guarantee the loans against default. Israeli officials said the funds were needed to finance housing, jobs, and infrastructure for an anticipated 1 million Soviet Jewish immigrants that were expected between 1991 and 1995. In April 1991 there were negotiations over Israel's request for emergency funds for recovery from Iraqi attacks during Operation Desert Storm.

Israel agreed to postpone its guaranteed loan request until September, 1991. Then, President George H.W. Bush asked Congress to delay consideration of the Israeli request until January 1992 because the President feared that the loan request would jeopardize Secretary of State Baker’s negotiations for a peace conference [Madrid]. Reluctantly, most Members of Congress agreed. When Congress returned in January 1992, Secretary Baker said the Administration would support the Israeli request only if Israel agreed to freeze all settlement activity in the occupied territories (does this phrase look familiar, anybody? - RK).

According to the report, in a series of negotiations among the Administration, Congress, and Israel, several compromises were offered: reducing the U.S. loan guarantees by an amount equal to the Israeli expenditures on settlements in the occupied territories, reducing the annual amount of the loan guarantees, or allowing Israel to complete housing projects underway in the territories but to ban new projects. None of the proposals were acceptable to all the parties. With the stalemate, it appeared that Israel’s loan guarantee request was to be postponed until consideration of the FY1993 foreign aid legislation later that year.

Following the June 1992 Israeli elections, which YitzHaq Rabin and his Labor party won, relations between the United States and Israel improved because the Bush Administration found the new Israeli leaders more accommodating toward peace talks with Arab states. President Bush announced in August that he would propose approving the loan guarantees. Congress attached the loan guarantee authorization to the Foreign Operations Appropriation bill that passed on October 5, 1992 (Title VI, P.L. 102-391, signed into law on October 6, 1992). The United States approved the first $2 billion tranche [portion] in December 1992, and Israel issued the first $1 billion in bonds in March 1993.

The long and the short of all this was that while the United States was willing guarantee the loans to Israel of $10 billion to settle Russian Jews in Israel, they preconditioned all of this by saying that these Russian Jews could not settle in Judea and Samaria. And it should be emphasized here, that these conditions were not on loans per se, but loan guarantees. This means that the private institutions that lent Israel the money will still receive them out of Israeli tax revenues. The "aid" consisted only of guaranteeing the loans.

This preconditioning of loan guarantees effectively hobbled much of the settlement of Judea and Samaria.
The standard Israeli style of getting around things was used to build and settle the city of Ariel, only a few hilltops north of us in Ma'ale Levona. The result is that Ariel is largely a Russian speaking city, with a large population. Without this interference in our internal affairs, it is safe to say that at least 300,000 Russian immigrants would have settled in Judea and Samaria, with many of them concentrated in Hebron and Ma'ale Efraim, to the southeast of here. American interference has meant, among other things, that Ma'ale Efraim, built to be the capital of southern Samaria, is virtually a ghost town with a sense of failure hanging over it. It has also meant that factories in Ma'ale Levona have never been built, that the industrial area of Shiló is nearly deserted, and that all of these communities are "bedroom communities" for Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, when they need not have been.

Oslo - the first serious steps on the road to suicide

Let's look at that report to Congress again. There is a key line in there that tells us where the Oslo road to suicide started. "Following the June 1992 Israeli elections, which YitzHaq Rabin and his Labor party won, relations between the United States and Israel improved because the Bush Administration found the new Israeli leaders more accommodating toward peace talks with Arab states."

Oslo was never a secret process at all. The secrecy was maintained to hide the fact that negotiations with the PLO were a crime at the time that they were taking place under the guiding hand of Bill Clinton's Secretary of State, Warren Christopher. An accurate account of how all this began is excerpted below in an article by Barry Chamish, who has effectively proven why (and how) Rabin was killed.

Chamish begins by explaining that he had received a phone call from a fellow named Henry Gluksman, the advance man for the Oslo negotiations. Gluksman is a political refugee in Norway. The government there provides him with an apartment and pension as protection against mortal retaliation from Israel. According to Barry, Gluksman claims the Shabak made attempts on his life and he was forced to flee Israel in the early 1980s. Argentinian-born Gluksman publicly accused Israel of being behind the Falklands War. "I discovered that it was Israel Aviation Industries that provided the Argentinian planes and missiles and it was they who sunk the Lancaster", he explained. "They convinced the Argentinian government that they could win the war for them".

Gluksman had been impressed with Barry's website and his Rabin murder research. According to Chamish, The first thing he said was, "You missed the real motive for Rabin's murder. It was financial".  Let's have a look at Barry's article.

Gluksman claims the Shabak made attempts on his life and he was forced to flee Israel in the early 1980s. Argentinian-born Gluksman publicly accused Israel of being behind the Falklands War. "I discovered that it was Israel Aviation Industries that provided the Argentinian planes and missiles and it was they who sunk the Lancaster", he explained. "They convinced the Argentinian government that they could win the war for them".

Mr. Gluksman's motives for talking freely to me appear not to be ideological. He is an avowed Marxist. Simply, he believes his Oslo talks became corrupted and that Rabin was murdered by the corrupters of his negotiations. His insider revelations are startling and verify the crux of my own research.

Gluksman: When I began laying the groundwork for the Oslo talks in '88, money wasn't even considered as a political issue. It's when it became the core issue that things turned ugly.

Chamish: What do you mean 1988? The talks began in 1992.

Gluksman: The plans for them were initiated in 1988. We had to wait until Rabin was elected to put them into action. He sent the two negotiators, Pundak and Hirshfeld, to Oslo and the initial talks were aimed at establishing an honest groundwork for peace.

Chamish: I interviewed Ron Pundak in 1996 and he told me something remarkable. He said that his boss, Yossi Beilin, does not believe in borders. Borders cause wars. He told me the end result of the accord would be the removal of Israel's borders. This would be done by dismembering the country piece by piece. After, Israel would blend into a Middle East bloc of united Arab countries.

Gluksman: Yes, that was our objective. The Gush Katif disengagement was agreed to in 1993 as part of the broader plan. To understand how this would lead to peace, look at Hong Kong. It was a colony of six million in a sea of over a billion Chinese. Israel consists of six million Jews in a sea of over a billion Moslems. When Hong Kong was handed over to China in 1999, nothing changed for the people of Hong Kong. They went on with their lives as before but without the threat of attack hanging over them. That was our objective. Israel would become Arab and nothing would change, but the threat would end. The Jews of Tel Aviv would go on with their lives, run their businesses, build their homes but the mayor would be an Arab, the police would be Arabs, the courts would be Arab. It was the ideal solution.[emphases mine - RK]

This details the reasons for the Oslo Accords as they were originally envisioned. Beilin's vision for change in Israel goes even beyond that of Uri Avneri and other "Gush Shalom" types. Perhaps his vision for peace would have made sense if we were all Arabs, and the Arabs were not being convinced daily that they have to kill us all. But as we see, the Arabs leaders do want to kill us all and have been poisoning their people with the desire for Jewish blood for decades.

The remainder of this interview deals more with the death of Rabin, but outlines why our country is on the ropes today. The Israeli leadership saw this as a big money making opportunity. And they had the minds of criminals. Let's read the rest of Barry Chamish's interview with Henry Gluksman to get a better sniff of the rat's nest that is Israeli politics.

Chamish: So if the plans are on course beginning with Gush Katif, what is your problem with the accords?

Gluksman: The problem began when the Labor Party leaders saw Oslo as a way to make a quick buck. Everyone was rushing to join in, Shimon Peres [Peres brought along his friend whom he had mentored, Ariel Sharon], Chaim Ramon, Micha Harish. And they all came with their Palestinian businessmen in tow.

I mean, who were Micha Harish and Chaim Ramon? How did they become peace negotiators? Oslo was drawing the greediest crooks to the money pot. They did not want peace, they wanted a piece of the action.

People who were absolute nobodies suddenly were showing up for discussions. The most absurd was this Rabbi Melchior who Peres brought along. Who ever heard of him before? He had no legitimacy or constituency, never wrote learned tracts and overnight he jumps from Oslo to the cabinet of Shimon Peres.

Everyone the Israelis sent to iron out details were there for what they could get out of Oslo and the P.L.O. more than cooperated in the thefts and corruption. From a Marxist beginning, the discussions turned capitalistic.

Chamish: Where did Rabin fit in? [this refers to the murder of Rabin]

Gluksman: He saw how corrupt everything had turned and decided to abandon the whole enterprise. He was going to put the talks on hold or shut them down for good if the corruption didn't stop. That is why they murdered him. He threatened to bring down the house of crime and that would have been very costly to the crooks. I read your work. Your conclusion is similar to mine but you left out some people who stood to lose big if Rabin stayed alive. It is a broader plot than you've found out.

This little portion of Chamish's interview with Henry Gluksman outlines one of the main problems of the present Israeli régime. It is nothing but a criminal mafia. It had been one for a long time, but "Palestine" was the cash cow that really drew all the cockroaches out of the wall. To be fair, this country is far less corrupt than countries like India or Pakistan, and even in crisis is better governed than either of these aforementioned nations. But the quality of the governance has dropped dramatically, even as the standard of living (for the rich Ashkenazi Jewish élite) has gone up.

What does Oslo really mean?

In the interview with Henry Gluksman, we saw what Yossi Beilin's vision for the Oslo Accords was to have meant and one of the reasons it went so terribly wrong. In this article from Israel Insider, Expelling the Settlers, by Barry Chamish, we see what the reality of the Oslo Accords were to be as they started to be enforced. Let's look at the murder of two boys hiking near Teko'a.

It is no different than the heartbreaking case of the 14 year-old son of Sheri Mandell, an American immigrant living in Teko'a. He took a short hike from his home with a friend, they were set upon by Arabs who tied them up and bludgeoned them to death, cracking open their skulls with rocks.

After delighting in the screams of the boys as each rock opened more of their brains, the murderers took further pleasure in the sadistic coup de grace of ripping the bodies apart with knives.

Days later, Sheri Mandell's home was sniped at, with a bullet entering the bedroom of her nine year old daughter. Had she been in the room, she would have joined the list of double murders. Sheri took the hint and abandoned her home in Teko'a that night. She will likely not be the last to be shot at (author's note: Indeed she has not been. Not a week goes by without another report of Arabs shooting at Jews in Judea and Samaria - RK).

One of the secret parts of the Oslo Accords dealt with Judea and Samaria. In it, it detailed in as few words as possible, the elimination (as in murder) of the leadership of Judea and Samaria. When you talk to folks who have lived here for fifteen years or so, they can see the arm of elimination and murder of their leaders, even if they do not want to. They've been to too many funerals.

Even in the case of a young kid like Kobi Mandell detailed above, the effects of murder and demoralization have their toll. One of the fellows who found the body is a man who works for the Jewish Agency, and who moderates a website for would-be immigrants to this country. On the website, political arguments break out frequently, even though it is a site for the nuts and bolts of moving one's life from an English speaking country to Israel and discussions of religion and politics are banned. Imagine what stoicism it takes to do the job of telling Jews to shut up about the problems of Arabs killing them when you have just found the destroyed body of one of your neighbors - a body destroyed by a mob of savages!

The Oslo Accords have really meant demoralization. One of the reasons this is true is that in 1993, many Israelis embraced the idea of 'peace at last' with a warm enthusiasm. Living in peace means a lot to Israelis. It means possibly dismantling the reserves system and the draft; it means travel to Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, North Africa; it means endless possibilities for business deals and making money. It means reducing taxes because this tiny nation will not have to support a world class army any more. It's a no-brainer to say that peace is a wonderful idea for Israelis.

But no peace arrived with the Oslo Accords. What arrived instead was the steady terror of the Palestine Liberation Organization, with the deaths constantly salved over by the government as "sacrifices for peace." The constant toll of terror, both in attacks through the 1990's and since 2000, have meant demoralization, sadness, pain, depression, fear. When I visited this country in January 2000, that is what I found.

Under the face of "normality" there was a deeply sad feeling. This feeling has only deepened since 2000, but it had a specific price in 2000.

In the year 2000, an organization called Women in Black was featured by the Hebrew (leftist) media. These women were the mothers of soldiers who had died defending the piece of south Lebanon that Israel had held on to when it withdrew from the rest of the country in 1984.

They protested daily that it was a waste of their childrens' lives to have had them stationed in Lebanon, and they demanded that the government withdraw soldiers from there to save lives. At the time, they were the media's darlings. In time, this will change, and they will learn what it is to be shunned in a Jewish society. That time has not arrived yet, though.

In a controversial decision, Ehud Barak decided on a unilateral withdrawal to "recognized international borders" that was to solve the problem of the casualties lost to occupying southern Lebanon up until the Litani River. On the day of the ordered withdrawal, Arab forces attacked and the Israelis ran away. HizbAllah, an Iranian puppet organization of Shi'a Arabs formed to "fight the Israeli occupier" moved soldiers all the way to the border while the Israelis fled south. And the pattern that we were to see until the 2006 rocket attacks by HizbAllah began. The UN moved in an ineffectual force of "peacekeepers" who did nothing.

HizbAllah attacked Israel with rockets, claiming that a farm that was Lebanese territory had not been evacuated, and therefore, Lebanon had not yet been freed of the occupier. The UN ruled that the farm belonged to Israel. But this did not matter to HizbAllah. They continued to bombard Israel with rockets while the Iranian government resupplied HizbAllah, trained their soldiers and the United Nations did nothing to stop any of this.

The Rosh HaShanah Revolt of the Arabs

The further consequences of withdrawing from strategic territory were to have a humiliating price in 2006 - the defeat of Israel by a terrorist organization. But the immediate consequences came much sooner. The infamous Camp David meetings in July 2000 were supposed to produce a final peace agreement between Arafat, the "raïs" of the "Palestinian" Authority, and the Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Barak. But Arafat turned down the best offer that Barak could make him and walked away. What was unknown to the public was that the PLO had begun to secretly plan for war in the autumn of 2000 and went to war - using a visit by Ariel Sharon to the Temple Mount on Rosh HaShanah as the excuse.

This war started as a series of riots at the Temple Mount and Western Wall in Jerusalem, with a whole slew of rock throwing incidents. But it was a war. I learned of this from an e-mail which I still have stored in my computer to remind me of what war looks like from the point of view of an e-mail. A woman who lives in Beitar Illit was writing to a list of would-be immigrants, and I saw this e-mail a couple of days after Rosh Hashanah. In it, she described soldiers laying prone outside her home shooting at the Arab village across the hill.

The rock throwing incidents became shooting incidents, with regular shooting at Gilo in south Jerusalem from the Arab village of Beit Jarrah, and regular bombardment of Gush Qatif from the Arab cities in the Gaza Strip. The public waited for Barak, a former chief of staff of the IDF, to order the crushing of this rebellion and the arrest of the Arab terrorist leaders. But Barak did not do this.

In fact, the IDF was held back from doing anything except crowd control while Barak made desperate efforts to negotiate with Arafat to get back the illusory "peace of Oslo". A mob of Arabs took over Joseph's tomb and the IDF evacuated it - doing something they had never done before - at least not in the public eye. They allowed one of their casualties to die in enemy hands, a Druze soldier named Mudhuf Yussuf.

Rabbi Yossi Baumol from Ateret Kohanim wrote of this incident in the essay which is the religious underpinning of this article. He pointed out that in Jewish tradition there is not one messiah but two: the "messiah, son of Joseph" and the "messiah, son of David". Each of these messianic figures has a separate task and the first messianic figure, the messiah, son of Joseph, had to die before the second one could arrive to do his task of spiritual redemption. The "messiah, son of Joseph" had the task of re-populating the Land with Jews, and with seeing to it that there would be sustenance for them and fighting the "wars of the messiah."

Rabbi Baumol argued that the "messiah, son of Joseph" was really the Zionist movement, noting that yoséf and tzión have the same numerical value in Gematria, the Jewish method of using Hebrew letters to denote numbers. He also pointed out that it was the Zionist movement that had repopulated the land with Jews, developed a self defense force for them and had, as its apotheoses, the founding of the State and the Six Day War. He made the observation that what we were seeing was the gradual destruction of Zionism, as a movement to inspire people to do things, as a force to repopulate the Land and now, as a military force to defend it. Six years on from this analysis, we can see the truth of Rabbi Baumol's words in the events that have transpired since then.

Jew expelling Jew and defeat on the field - final loss of nearly all 1967 gains

Spitting at G-d's gift of easy victory in 1967 has finally lead to a situation where Israeli police expelled Jewish residents of Gush Qatif in 2005, and what was nearly worse, the defeat of the IDF before a force of terrorists in the mountains of Lebanon and the flight of the government from the entire northern portion of the country during a rocket bombardment from south Lebanon - the very area that Ehud Barak thought he was so smart in evacuating in 2000. Both events, taken together, have caused the public to lose all of its confidence in a government of thieves and liars that has led them to defeat. Gone completely is the joie de vivre that I saw in 1973. Gone completely is any sense of optimism or hope. All that we see today is a tired nation waiting for the next blow to fall, for the next shoe to drop and for war to strike again, bringing only death, disaster and funerals.

To be blunt, this is a very depressing topic to write about further. However, the reader can examine the 140 or so articles I have written at Blogcritics Magazine to see how I've attempted to cover the events since November 2005.

In June 2007, forty years after the Six Day War - the shining moment of my youth that inspired me to come home - we again face war with Syria, we again face war with Gaza, and in addition to all this, we face the threat of missile bombardment from south Lebanon, as well as Iran, and portions of Samaria. Again, I can look at the tiny Jewish state on the map in the midst of the Arab enemy and tell my wife, "Dear, they have us surrounded," exactly as did my mother to my father when watching the TV on Sunday night, 4 June 1967.

Our government is so weak as to hardly merit the name, so corrupt that calling it a mafia is an insult to the honor practiced in Italian crime families. Our army is so under-supplied that it can afford only forays and sorties into enemy territory, territory conquered proudly 40 years earlier. When I was a youth, I turned to the IDF for inspiration. Now, I have less hair, and considerably more wisdom. I turn not to an unstable institution that has been eaten into. Its morale is in the toilet.

I turn instead to the G-d of Israel for my security, and I wait for the morning when I will hear the missiles flying overhead, and hear my wife shout "Reuven! War!!"

I wish to thank Barry Chamish for having uncovered the evil tale of the Battle of Sultan Yukub in the First Lebanon War.  Frankly, I would have rather not known - and I suspect that Barry would rather have not known, either.  But the search for truth is like the search for redemption - and one must follow where truth leads in order to be redeemed from evil.  

Israel News Analysis: Mugging Israel in the Media

בס''ד

Originally published in Blogcritics Magazine, 10 June, 2010
Copyright © R. Kossover, 2010

Writer's note - thanks to Ed Driscoll, for the quote of Al Capone used in the movie Goldfinger.

Background

When one uses the term "media" in reference to news these days, one has to realize that it refers to any medium of communication between a relatively small group of individuals and a far larger audience. This holds just as true for the apocryphal 'Gutenberg Gazette' as it does for CBS News. The news media can be manipulated today just as it was in the early 1800's by Napoleone Buonaparte (the Corsican spelling of the name he had as the child of Letizia Buonaparte) with his "bulletins" from the front, by which he manipulated the news of his wars in Europe, by plebiscites, by which Napoleon Bonaparte, and later his nephew, Louis Napoléon, (Napoléon III) manipulated French public opinion, by censorship, which Napoleon (and later his nephew), used to control the press in their respective French Empires.

These methods of control, improved upon with the advent of new technologies, have been used
by dictatorships and illiberal regimes that have sought to suppress freedom ever since. It goes without saying that the international organizations which are coalitions of Arab dictatorships and illiberal regimes, as well as their allies, use these methods as well. One of the goals of these international Arab organizations is the destruction of Israel, and this effort can be carried out on and off the battle field.

'Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action'
Al Capone

This blogsite quoted the full Israel Today article: Obama told the Egyptian foreign minister that he is a Muslim, the son of a Muslim and that he sympathizes with what he calls "the Muslim agenda"; he asked the Egyptian foreign minister to have patience while he cleared the table of domestic problems - then he'd show the world how to deal with Israel. The interview where Obama is reported to have said this took place in March 2010. When one reconsiders the events leading up to the "flotilla" incident on 31 May 2010, one has to realize that Obama's hand was in it, and he was demonstrating to Muslims "how to deal with Israel". The subsequent media lynch is only proof of this.

This media lynch goes beyond the pages of the alleged "mainstream" media in the United States, "al-Reuters" or the Associated Press. These idiots on the Left Coast with the missing brains are going to condemn us for defending ourselves. Northern Irish sources report that on Thursday night (10 June 2010), the Council of USPG (United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel) – Anglicans in World Mission – agreed that a letter should be sent to the British Foreign Secretary, Mr William Hague, expressing “shock and dismay at what happened last week when the Israeli naval forces stormed a Gaza-bound convoy carrying humanitarian aid in international waters, killing nine people and injuring many more.” Turkey is boycotting a holocaust conference in Jerusalem. In the meantime, the Palestinian Authority, while alleging to not indulge in anti-Israel incitement, does precisely this. This video shows how the PA attempts to de-legitimize the existence of our country. The quiz in it asks "which seaport is in "Palestine" and offers three cities in Israel. This is only one tiny event, a single video among tens of thousands, that pursues the goal of destroying Israel in the minds of its Arab viewers.

But the attacks on Israel and its supporters are far wider. Over the Sabbath of ראש חודש תמוז rosh Hodesh tammuz, (12-13 June 2010), Youtube pulled "We Con the World" in its continuing campaign to silence those of us who are pro-Israel. Even though YouTube hides behind the "copyright infringement" claim of Warner/Chappell Music, Inc., one has to note that Edgar Bronfman, who alleged supports Israel, is the CEO of Warner Music Group, the conglomerate that owns Warner/Chappell Music, Inc. One is forced to wonder where Mr. Bronfman's real loyalties lie. YouTube's consistent harassment of the IDF's videos - as opposed to not touching thousands of videos that encourage hate and villify Israel and Jews - impels one to
conclude that YouTube is pursuing an anti-Jewish and anti-Israel agenda, however unsystematically. Caroline Glick, the leading Israeli journalist and commentator who had produced "We Con the World" as part of her Latma.com satire series, fought back with satire. There is another weapon - Wejew. Why use the not so gentle "gentile" media when we Jews can use our own?

That is not the only avenue of attack being used in mugging Israel and its supporters. Paypal generally doesn't do business with Israel directly, but shutting off the money spigot - shutting down freedom of speech by calling anti-terror sites 'hate-speech' is now being used by Paypal. The point is not that all 'hate-speech' sites are targeted by Paypal. Were this the case, Pam Geller of Atlas Shrugged would not have a leg to stand on in her complaints. To her knowledge, and to mine, Paypal does not touch terror sites or other hate speech sites that denigrate or seek to destroy Israel or incite against Jews. This is the same precise pattern we see at YouTube. Were I a mafia don, I might suggest going to Paypal's CEO, tying him to a chair, and "making him an offer he couldn't refuse". One has to wonder if anti-Israel groups haven't beaten me to the punch (pun intended) with that idea. Establishing an alternative to Paypal is a little trickier than establishing an alternative to YouTube.

We should not assume from all of this that all non-Jews hate Jews and hate Israel. This could not be farther from the truth. Even Patrick Comerford, who was a moving force behind that shameful Anglican letter to the British Foreign Secretary referred to above, has written articles condemning anti-Semitism. There is a large grey area in this field, even among those who do not necessarily support Israel. With respect to individuals, Jews and Israelis have many friends and fervent supporters world-wide. But what is the truth is that those in power, those who shape the world's opinions, dislike Jews, and dislike Israel, and would be just as happy to see us dead as see us at all. This includes, one must note with pain, many Jews who hate themselves and the nation their brethren have created as a refuge.

There is a final point that needs to be made with utmost clarity, regarding this media mugging of Israel, which well fits Al Capone's definition of "enemy action". Santayana pointed out that he who fails to learn from history is doomed to repeat its mistakes.

While many of us Jews and Israelis on the ground have absorbed this lesson, the weak-kneed leaders of the State of Israel, who give more evidence each succeeding week of being sellouts and mere puppets of the United States and other nations not at all friendly to Israel or the Jews, fail to absorb the hard lessons they need to. And we, who have learned, must do something about it to survive.

Daily, History's Scythe moves closer, going from Kyrgyzstan westwards.