Israel Matzav

The Esau - Ishmael alliance

Some of you may be wondering where I was all day today. I promised Mrs. Carl that I would set aside one of the two days of the holiday on which there are no travel restrictions and no Sabbath or Festival day in the evening for a day trip with the six children who still live at home (part time or full time). Today was that day. If anyone is wondering what we did, we escaped all the madness in Jerusalem (today was the busiest day here) and went north to Zichron Yaakov. For those of you who are Israelis, please don't make the mistake I did on the way up and go through Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv was actually fine, but once we got past tel Aviv it was one traffic jam after another. It took three hours to get there. By comparison, it took an hour and 38 minutes coming back on Highway 6. What you save in tolls by going through Tel Aviv, you spend in gas and time (Highway 6 is the country's only toll road). A word to the wise.

Jonathan Rosenblum has a fascinating column in the weekend JPost, in which he sees President Obama's romancing of Iran and scorning of Israel as the foretold alliance between Esau and Ishmael. Rosenblum suggests that this could be a little inkling that the Messiah is on his way. Here's part of his column.

Few propositions are so easily refuted as the centrality of the Arab-Israeli conflict to the multiple deformations in the Arab world. Not one of the major bloodlettings in the region is remotely attributable to Israel: the Iraq-Iran War, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and its aftermath, civil wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Algeria, the slaughter of 20,000 Syrian citizens in Homa.

Finally, resolute Western action with respect to Iran might actually achieve something. Iran's economy is highly vulnerable, particularly with oil prices low. Yet rather than exploit Iran's economic weakness and lack of petroleum refining capacity, major European firms have signed billion dollar deals to lessen that vulnerability by helping Iran develop its refining capacity.

But there is scant hope of progress on the Palestinian front, particularly if peace, not just signed agreements, is the goal. "Moderate" Muhammad Dahlan, carefully cultivated by the United States for more than a decade, now admits that Fatah has never recognized Israel's right to exist. Hamas, for its part, repeats over and over again that it will never recognize Israel in any borders. The Palestinian Authority continues to honor as heroes perpetrators of massacres of Jewish civilians. Billions of dollars of international aid continues to go to maintaining multiple security forces and feathering the nests of Palestinian officials rather than building a decent society. And from an Israeli point of view, as long as rockets continue to fall from every area from which we withdraw, there is no chance of further withdrawals.

WESTERN SUBMISSION and passivity are only part of the story. Ever larger segments of elite and left-wing Western opinion have signed on to Hamas's exterminationist agenda. Comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany are so commonplace in European discourse that they no longer even shock. Oliphant's cartoon of a jackbooted Israel has now brought this obscenity to the mainstream American press.

Operation Cast Lead is said to have brought Israel's international standing to a new nadir. Responding to their accusers, Israelis ask: What other country in the world would have tolerated three years of rockets shot from across the border at its civilian population? How would you have brought those missiles to a halt in a more "gentle" fashion than Israel has? Why are you obsessed with the deaths of 300 civilians in Gaza brought about by the policies of their duly elected leaders (think of the civilian population of Germany under Hitler), but so oblivious to the killings of hundreds of thousands of black Muslims in Sudan?

Very good questions to be sure, and not ones to which there are any answers. But their effectiveness depends on the assumption that the one being asked accepts Israel's right to exist at all. Europeans view our very presence in this place as the last vestige of Western colonialism.

Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 7:31 PM