During “All-Stars Week”, CIJR’s Isranet Briefings will highlight the work of outstanding individuals, whose invaluable efforts contribute to strengthening public perception of the Jewish state’s regional and global position. Each Briefing will include a sample of articles written over the last year by a given author, dealing with issues such as Israeli politics and security, as well as matters concerning Diaspora Jewry, and ways of combatting the delegitimation of Israel.
Today’s Briefing:
Caroline B. Glick grew up in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. In 1991, two weeks after receiving a BA in Political Science from Columbia University, she made aliyah, joining the Israel Defense Forces and serving as an officer for five and a half years.
From 1994-1996, as an IDF captain, Mrs. Glick served as Coordinator of Negotiations with the PLO in the office of the Coordinator of Government Activities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. In this capacity she was a core member of Israel’s negotiating team with the Palestinians.
After leaving the IDF at the end of 1996, Mrs. Glick was the assistant to the Director General of the Israel Antiquities Authority, before returning to geo-politics as Assistant Foreign Policy Advisor to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in 1997-1998.
From 1998-2000 Mrs. Glick returned to the US, where she received a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. In the summer of 2000, she returned to Israel and began writing at Makor Rishon newspaper, acting as chief diplomatic commentator. In March 2002, Mrs. Glick accepted the position of Deputy Managing Editor of The Jerusalem Post, where she continues to write two columns per week.
Mrs. Glick’s writings have also been published in The Wall Street Journal, National Review,The Journal of International Security Affairs, The Boston Globe, The Washington Times, The Jewish Press, Frontpage Magazine and Moment Magazine. Mrs. Glick is the senior fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and travels to Washington several times a year where she routinely briefs senior administration officials and members of Congress on issues of joint Israeli-American concern.
In its Israeli Independence Day supplement in 2003, Ma’ariv named Mrs. Glick the most prominent woman in Israel. In December 2005, she was awarded the Ben Hecht award for Middle East reporting from the Zionist Organization of America. In January 2006, she received the Abramowitz Prize for Media Criticism by Israel Media Watch.
Caroline B. Glick is married and lives in Jerusalem.
IRAN’S WAR TO WIN
Caroline B. Glick
Jerusalem Post, October 17, 2011
The Obama administration’s response to Iran’s plan to bring its 32-year-old war against the United States to the US capital is the newest confirmation that President Barack Obama has no intention of taking action to remove or diminish the threat Iran poses to the US, its allies and interests.
Last [month], the Justice Department revealed that law enforcement officials foiled an Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the US and to blow up the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Washington. They arrested an Iranian-American dual national who is a relative of a senior terror mastermind serving in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. The dual national, Mansoor Arbabsiar, contacted an American undercover agent whom he believed worked for one of Mexico’s drug cartels and asked for the cartel to assist Iran in carrying out the plot.
Iran declared war on the US in 1979. Since then, it has used its terrorist arms in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the region to murder Americans. It has used its terror arms in Latin American to target US interests and allies. And now it has been caught in the act of recruiting agents to assist it in carrying out acts of terror in Washington, DC.
Following the Justice Department’s announcement, the Obama administration proclaimed it intends to “isolate” Iran in the international community. While it sounds like a serious plan, particularly when it is stated assertively by Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the fact is that this is not a serious policy at all. Indeed, upon reflection, it is clear that the announced aim of isolating Iran involves doing nothing to retaliate against Iran for its aggression.
There are three reasons that this is the case. First, by placing the burden for punishing Iran on the nebulous “international community,” Obama is signaling that under his leadership, America does not view operational plans to attack US interests on American soil as something that America should deal with.
In Iran’s case, the “international community” means Russia and China. The two UN Security Council-veto-wielding regimes have collaborated with Iran on its illicit activities generally and its development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles specifically. Russia and China have blocked all serious sanctions against Iran in the UN Security Council.… Since Russia and China prefer to see Iran acquire nuclear weapons than authorize any UN measure that could prevent or slow down this development, it is hard to imagine either government suddenly agreeing to isolate Iran just because it planned to kill the Saudi ambassador and blow up a couple of foreign embassies in Washington.
The second reason it is reasonable to conclude that the administration is being disingenuous in its tough talk about Iran is because the administration tells us it is being disingenuous. Speaking to The New York Times, several senior White House officials said they were considering options to steeply escalate the US’s sanctions against Iran. Specifically, they said the administration is mulling the prospect of barring financial transactions with Iran’s central bank. They also said that the White House is thinking about barring contact with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards-owned company that controls the sale of Iranian oil and natural gas to foreign countries.
Then again, administration sources also told the Times that they aren’t certain that the sanctions are such a good idea. If the US blocks the only viable path toward purchasing Iranian gas and oil and otherwise makes it impossible for Iran to sell its natural resources, they warned, the US would cause the market price of both commodities to rise sharply, thus harming its own economy. So probably the US won’t ratchet up sanctions on the regime after all.
Then there is the notion of military retaliation. After the news broke of the foiled terror plot, Obama let it be known that the “military option is on the table.” But then, he didn’t specify the goal of the military option or its target. Is the US developing an option for attacking Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities? Is it preparing to attack Iranian regime targets in an effort to topple the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world? Is it planning a military strike against IRGC targets in Iran or Iraq or Afghanistan? It is highly unlikely that the US is planning to undertake any of these missions.…
Obama’s effectively pro-ayatollah policies have caused him to treat the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran as essentially identical to the threat posed to the US by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. As nuclear proliferation scholar Avner Cohen explained in an interview with The Jerusalem Post…“The US wants itself, and also Israel, to be engaged in a thorough effort to contain Iran—like the way the Soviet Union was contained during the Cold War—meaning that for all practical purposes and short of extreme circumstances, both the US and Israel would have to put aside the military option.…”
The problem…is that the Iranian regime is nothing like the Soviet Union. The regime whose first foray into international diplomacy involved taking a knife to the nation-state system by attacking the US embassy and holding its personnel hostage is not a strategic equivalent of the Soviet Union. A regime that lured 100,000 of its children to their deaths during the Iran-Iraq War by sending them out to the field as human mine sweepers is not a regime that can be contained through mutual assured destruction as the Soviets were.
Iran’s war against the US is a war that only Iran is fighting. And if something doesn’t change very quickly, it is clear that since Iran is the only side fighting the war, Iran is the only side that will win the war.
FUNDING THE ENEMY
Caroline B. Glick
Jerusalem Post, September 19, 2011
Speaking [recently] at the UN’s conference of donors to the Palestinian Authority, Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon warned that while Israel supports economic assistance to the PA now, that is liable to change within the week. As he put it, “Future assistance and cooperation could be severely and irreparably compromised if the Palestinian leadership continues on its path of essentially acting in contravention of all signed agreements which also regulate existing economic relations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.”
Ayalon’s position is eminently reasonable. Unfortunately, it contradicts utterly the official position of the Government of Israel.
The government’s position was transmitted to the same donor conference that Ayalon was participating in. According to the government document, “Israel calls for ongoing international support for the PA budget and development projects that will contribute to the growth of a vibrant private sector, which will provide the PA an expanded base for generating internal revenue.”
Israel’s move was reportedly championed by the Defense Ministry and the IDF senior brass, which reportedly adamantly opposes cutting off any aid to the PA, including aid to the US-trained and financed Palestinian army in Judea and Samaria. As The Jerusalem Post reported, senior Defense Ministry officials argue that an aid cutoff is liable to lead to the PA’s collapse.… As one Defense Ministry senior official told the paper, “It is important that we retain financial stability, even after their unilateral moves. Stopping money transfers could lead to a financial crisis which could lead to a violent escalation.”
In other words, the Defense Ministry argues that if the donor countries stop paying off the Palestinian militias—including the US-trained and funded Palestinian army—then their supposedly moderate forces will turn to the terror business to support themselves. Aside from being strategically insane, this position bespeaks an unjustifiable unwillingness on the part of the leftist-dominated Defense Ministry to understand the basic nature of the Palestinian cause and what it requires from Israel.
Since the IDF and the Foreign Ministry and the rest of the government bureaucracy embraced the PLO as Israel’s “peace partner” 18 years ago, they have been operating on the assumption that the PLO and its spinoffs—Fatah and the PA—are interested in reaching a peace deal with Israel. But this has never been the case.
For the PLO and its spinoffs, the Palestinian conflict has always been and will always be a zero sum game. The goal of the Oslo process, the goal of the PA, of the Palestinian militias, and of the UN bid is one: to strengthen the Palestinians and weaken Israel. As far as Israel’s “peace partner” is concerned, Israel can never concede enough. There is no deal that Israel can ever offer that the Palestinians will ever accept. Even if Israel offered to destroy itself and hand its ruins to the Palestinians, the Palestinians would pocket the concession and then declare war against whatever remnants remain of the defunct Jewish state in order to “liberate” the land from its Jewish “occupiers.”
We know this is the case because this is what the Palestinians—led by the PLO/Fatah/PA—did in Gaza after Israel unilaterally surrendered. The last military vehicle had barely cleared the border when the Palestinians torched the synagogues Israel had left standing. So too, after Ehud Barak essentially offered the Palestinians Israel’s head on a platter when he offered them the Temple Mount, they pocketed his offer and began butchering Israelis in a bid to “liberate” the Temple Mount. The much vaunted Palestinian security forces organized, funded and directed the terror war. And the internationally financed PA budget paid for it.
The reason that the Palestinians are turning to the UN is not because they cannot receive statehood in the framework of a peace deal with Israel. They are going to the UN because they don’t want a peace deal with Israel. They want sovereignty and they want to remain at war with Israel. For 18 years the IDF’s top brass has refused to recognize the game that the PLO has been playing since the onset of the fake peace process. Informed by the leftist establishment, the IDF’s senior officers vacuously argue that Israel’s only option is to strengthen the PA, including its US-trained and funded army. This appeasement mindset has paralyzed the IDF’s ability to develop comprehensive strategies for victory for nearly a generation.…
By supporting continued foreign aid to the Palestinians in the aftermath of their UN bid the government has adopted a classic appeasement policy. It has told the Palestinians that they will pay no price for their act of aggression.…
As for Israel’s friends, the government just pulled the rug out from under their feet. Cong. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is a true friend of Israel. Her bill calling for a cutoff of US aid to the PA and a massive decrease of US aid to the UN in the event the UN upgrades the Palestinians’ diplomatic status is one of the most important pieces of pro-Israel legislation to be introduced in the US Congress in a generation.
By announcing it opposes an aid cutoff, Israel undermined Ros-Lehtinen’s position.…
No doubt Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman were under great pressure from the IDF and from the Obama administration to call for continued international funding of the PA. But the public didn’t elect them with the expectation that they would abandon Israel’s national interest and harm its friends just because they feel the heat.…
If the government thinks that Ayalon’s statement can repair the damage it just caused the country, it should think again. The only way to fix what just happened is for the government to issue a new policy supporting the cutting off of foreign aid to the Palestinians and announcing that Israel will stop transferring tax revenues to them if their status at the UN is upgraded in any way.…
ISRAEL’S ONLY TWO OPTIONS
Caroline B. Glick
Jerusalem Post, July 18, 2011
Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas’…UN gambit, along with [his pending] unity deal with Hamas, makes clear that the time has come for Israel to finally face the facts: There are only two realistic options for dealing with Judea and Samaria.
Either the Palestinians will take control of Judea and Samaria, or Israel will annex them.
If the Palestinians take control, they will establish a terror state in the areas, which—like their terror state in Gaza—will use its territory as a starting point for continued war against Israel. It isn’t only Israel’s experience with post-withdrawal Gaza and South Lebanon that make it clear that a post-withdrawal Palestinian-controlled Judea and Samaria will become a terror state. The Palestinians themselves make no bones about this.
In a Palestinian public opinion survey released [over the summer] by The Israel Project…three-quarters [of Palestinians] support[ed] the annihilation of the Jewish people as called for in the Hamas charter on the basis of Islamic scripture.
As bad as Israel’s experience with post-withdrawal Gaza and South Lebanon has been, Israel’s prospects with a post-withdrawal Judea and Samaria will be far worse. It isn’t simply that withdrawal will invite aggression from Judea and Samaria. It will invite foreign Arab armies to invade the rump Jewish state. Unlike the post-withdrawal situation with Gaza and South Lebanon, without Judea and Samaria, Israel would not have the territorial depth and topographical advantage to defend itself from invasion from the east.…
As then-prime minister Ariel Sharon warned in 2001, the situation would be analogous to the plight of Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. Just as the Nazis deterred the Czech government from acting against its traitorous German minority in the Sudetenland in the 1930s, so Arab states (and a nuclear Iran), supporting the Palestinian terror states in Judea and Samaria and in Gaza, would make it impossible for Israel to enforce its sovereign rights on its remaining territory. Israel’s destruction would be all but preordained.
The second option is for Israel to annex Judea and Samaria, complete with its hostile Arab population. Absorbing the Arab population of Judea and Samaria would increase Israel’s Arab minority from 20% to 33% of the overall population.… Obviously such a scenario would present Israel with new and complex legal, social and law enforcement challenges. But it would also provide Israel with substantial advantages and opportunities.
Israel would have to consider its electoral laws and weigh the prospect of moving from a proportional representation system to a direct, district system. It would have to begin enforcing its laws toward its Arab citizens in a manner identical to the way it enforces its laws against its Jewish citizens. This includes everything from administrative laws concerning building to criminal statutes related to treason. It would have to ensure that Arab schoolchildren are no longer indoctrinated to hate Jews, despite the fact that according to the Israel Project survey, 53% of Palestinians support such anti-Semitic indoctrination in the classroom. These steps would be difficult to enact.
On the other side, annexing Judea and Samaria holds unmistakable advantages for Israel. For instance, Israel would regain complete military control over the areas. Israel ceded much of this control to the PLO in 1996.… Furthermore, by asserting its sovereign rights to its heartland, for the first time since 1967, Israel would be adopting an unambiguous position around which its citizens and supporters could rally. Annexation would also finally free Israel’s politicians and diplomats to tell the truth about the pathological nature of Palestinian nationalism and about the rank hypocrisy and anti-Semitism at the heart of much of the international Left’s campaigns on behalf of the Palestinians.
No, annexation won’t be easy. But then again, the alternative is national suicide. And again, these are the only options. Either the Palestinians form a terror state from which it will wage war against the shrunken, indefensible Jewish state, or Israel expands the size of the Jewish state.…
Since 1993, when the Rabin government adopted the Left’s fantasy as state policy, more than 2,000 Israelis have been killed in its pursuit. Not only has the Left’s third option fantasy facilitated the Palestinian terror machine’s ability to kill Jews, it has empowered their propaganda war against Israel. Israel’s pursuit of the nonexistent two-state solution has eroded its own international position to a degree unprecedented in its history.…
This was eminently foreseeable. The unhinged two-state solution makes Israel’s legitimacy contingent on the establishment of a Palestinian state. And it put the burden to establish a Palestinian state on Israel. Since everyone except Israel and the US always accepted the establishment of a Palestinian state, and no one except Israel and the US always accepted the existence of the Jewish state, by making its own legitimacy dependent on Palestinian statehood, Israel started the clock running on its own demonization. The longer Israel allows its very right to exist to be contingent on the establishment of another terror state committed to its destruction, the less the nations of the world will feel obliged to accept its right to exist.…
Our 44-year dalliance in fantasyland has not simply weakened us militarily and diplomatically. It has torn us apart internally by surrendering the debate to the two ideological fringes of the political spectrum.… Israel’s embrace of fantasy has made it impossible for us to conduct a sober-minded discussion of our only real options. The time has come to debate these two options, choose one, and move forward.
COMPETING VISIONS OF ‘NEVER AGAIN’
Caroline B. Glick
Jerusalem Post, May 2, 2011
In the end, the Holocaust raged until the Allied powers won the war. It didn’t have to be that way. If the Jews had been permitted to leave Europe, the Holocaust could have been averted. But the only place that wanted us wasn’t allowed to take us. The nations of the world closed their gates. Only the Jews in the Land of Israel wanted the Jews of Europe. But the British barred their arrival.
Britain was required by the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine to facilitate Jewish immigration to the Jewish national homeland in order to advance the cause of Jewish sovereignty. But legal obligations couldn’t compete with Britain’s belief that its national interests lay with the Arabs. So from 1939 on, the British closed the doors of the Land of Israel to the Jewish people. In so doing, they effectively sealed the fate of six million Jews.
Both the US and Britain were aware of what the Nazis were up to almost from the beginning, but refused to take any effective action to save the Jews. They refused to bomb the railroad tracks leading to Auschwitz, or the crematoria at the death camp.…
Anti-Semitism is not the main reason the Allies did nothing. The main reason was because, love us or hate us, the allies couldn’t figure out why they should care. Dead or alive, Jews weren’t a part of their war plans.… After the war, world Jewry adopted “Never Again,” as our rallying cry. But “Never Again,” is just a slogan. It fell to the leaders of the Jewish people to conceive the means to prevent a recurrence of the Holocaust.
These leaders came up with two very different strategies for protecting Jews from genocide, and their followers formed separate camps. Whereas in the early years, the separate positions appeared to complement each other, since the 1970s the gulf between them has grown ever wider. Indeed, many of the divisions in world Jewry today originate in this post-Holocaust policy divide.
The first strategy was based on international law and human rights. Its champions argued that the reason the Allies didn’t save the Jews was because the laws enjoining the Allies to rescue us on the one hand, and prohibiting the Nazis from killing us on the other, were insufficiently strong. If they could promulgate a new global regime of international humanitarian law, they believed they could force governments to rise above their hatreds and the shackles of their narrow-minded national interests to save innocents from slaughter. Not only would their vision protect the Jews, it would protect everyone.
The Jews who subscribed to the human-rights strategy for preventing another Holocaust were the architects of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the Genocide Convention. They were the founders of the international human rights regime that now dominates so much of Western discourse on war and peace. Unfortunately, the institutions these idealistic Jews designed have been corrupted by political forces they had hoped to defeat. Consequently, the international human-rights regime they created has failed completely to accomplish what they hoped it would accomplish. Instead, the regime they created to protect the Jews is now a key weapon in the political war being waged against them.…
There are two reasons that the human-rights paradigm has broken down. The first is because it failed to recognize the adaptability of Jew hatred. Anti-Semitism is one of the hardest hatreds to pin down because it is constantly updating itself to suit the political and social trends of the day. Since Nazi-style anti-Semitism went out of fashion with the defeat of Germany, the human-rights visionaries believed that people would be embarrassed into putting the hatred aside. Instead, guided by the Soviets, Jew-haters worldwide simply updated their language. They stopped talking about Jewish control over world affairs and began talking about Zionist control over world affairs.…
The anti-Semites’ corruption of the human-rights paradigm in the service of their Jew-hating agendas is certainly a major reason the human rights model for genocide prevention has failed. But it is not the only cause of the failure. The other reason the model has failed is because it is premised on a naïve and incorrect understanding of statecraft.
Champions of human rights and humanitarian law believed that if laws were placed on the books, if international conventions were ratified by democracies, then the world would abide by them. But this is not the case. Just as the British ignored their international legal obligations to facilitate Jewish settlement of the Land of Israel when they felt it served their interests to favor the Arabs, so today governments routinely ignore their international legal obligations if abiding by them runs contrary to their perception of their interests.
This truth was laid bare last December, with the Nixon Library’s release of a taped March 1973 conversation between then-president Richard Nixon and then-secretary of state Henry Kissinger regarding the prospect of a Soviet genocide of Soviet Jews. Kissinger opined: “If they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.” Nixon responded, “I know. We can’t blow up the world because of it.”
Their views were not merely testament to the two men’s indifference toward the fate of Soviet Jews. They are instructive because they show how leaders prioritize their policies. Nixon and Kissinger probably opposed the genocide of Soviet Jewry, but it was more important to avoid a policy that could “blow up the world.” By the same token, the US opted to do nothing in the face of the genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda and Darfur, among others. US and European treatment of Jews specifically, and of the incidents of genocide generally since the Holocaust make clear that the twin presumptions of the human-rights paradigm were wrong.…
A secondary casualty of the failure of the human rights paradigm has been intra-Jewish relations. Faced with their preferred paradigm’s failure and corruption at the hands of anti-Semites, many Jewish human-rights activists have opted to abandon their fellow Jews and Israel in order to maintain their allegiance to the corrupt, anti-Semitic human-rights model.
Particularly annoying to these human-rights followers is the stunning success of the other post-Holocaust Jewish strategy for giving meaning to the slogan “Never Again.” That policy is Zionism.
Zionism doesn’t concern itself with how people ought to behave, but with what they are capable of doing. Zionists understand that people are an amalgamation of passions and interests. The Holocaust was able to occur because the only people with a permanent passion and interest in defending the Jews are the Jews. And when the Nazis rose to power, the Jews were homeless and powerless.
Jews who embrace the human-rights approach criticize Zionism’s vision as lonely and militaristic. What they fail to recognize is that every successful nation depends on itself, and lives by the sword. Only those who deter aggressors are capable of attracting allies. No one will stand with a nation that will not stand up for itself.
Holocaust Remembrance Day…is nestled between Pessah and Independence Day for a reason. In both ancient and modern times, the only way for Jews—or anyone else—to protect their freedom and their lives is by being capable of defending them, in their own land.
The pseudo human-rights campaign against Israel being carried out in the name of fashionable anti-Zionist anti-Semitism represents a complete vindication of the Zionist model. Zionism is the only way to ensure Jewish survival. It is the only way to ensure that in the face of growing threats, “Never Again” will mean never again.
