Tuesday, August 5, 2014
A History of Obama-Netanyahu Tensions - The New York Times International
http://www.nytimes.com/
MARCH 2010
“The substance and timing of the announcement, particularly with the launching of proximity talks, is precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now.”
During a visit to the country by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Israel’s Interior Ministry announces plans to build 1,600 new housing units in East Jerusalem, a move defying American demands to freeze new settlements.
— Statement by Mr. Biden
NOVEMBER 2010
“I'm concerned that we’re not seeing each side make the extra effort involved to get a breakthrough. Each of these incremental steps can end up breaking trust.”
As the Obama administration works to restart talks between the Israelis and Palestinians, another announcement of new settlement plans comes out of Israel. Mr. Obama expresses concern over the effect of the release on the peace process, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel responds.
— Mr. Obama
“Jerusalem is not a settlement; Jerusalem is the capital of the State of Israel.”
— Statement by Mr. Netanyahu’s office
MAY 2011
“Prime Minister Netanyahu expects to hear a reaffirmation from President Obama of U.S. commitments made to Israel in 2004, which were overwhelmingly supported by both houses of Congress.”
Mr. Netanyahu pushes back against President Obama’s endorsement of using Israel’s 1967 boundaries as a starting point for the creation of a Palestinian state. He cites a letter from President George W. Bush saying it would be unrealistic to expect that negotiations would result in 1967 boundaries.
— Statement by Mr. Netanyahu
NOVEMBER 2011
“You are fed up with him, but I have to deal with him even more often than you.”
During a Group of 20 summit meeting, several French journalists overhear a private conversation between Mr. Obama and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France about Mr. Netanyahu.
— Mr. Obama
SEPTEMBER 2012
“Those in the international community who refuse to put red lines before Iran don’t have a moral right to place a red light before Israel.”
Mr. Netanyahu issues harsh comments in an apparent response to a statement by then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who said the United States was “not setting deadlines” on Iran’s nuclear program before issuing a military response.
— Mr. Netanyahu
APRIL 2014
“Poof, that was sort of the moment. We find ourselves where we are.”
In testimony before a congressional committee, Secretary of State John Kerry says that while both sides bore responsibility for faltering peace talks, the latest announcement of new settlements by Israel was the key event for the deadlock.
— Mr. Kerry
JUNE 2014
“I think the United States must make it absolutely clear to the Palestinian president that his pact with Hamas, a terrorist organization that seeks Israel’s liquidation, is simply unacceptable.”
Mr. Netanyahu expresses frustration over the Obama administration’s decision to work with the new Palestinian government, which was formed with the consent of the militant group Hamas.
— Mr. Netanyahu, to The Associated Press
The New York Times
Middle East|A History of Obama-Netanyahu Tensions
A History of Obama-Netanyahu Tensions
The State Department’s condemnation
of an Israeli strike on a United Nations school in Gaza on Sunday was just the
latest is a series of clashes between the Obama administration and Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. AUG. 4, 2014
“The substance and timing of the announcement, particularly with the launching of proximity talks, is precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now.”
During a visit to the country by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Israel’s Interior Ministry announces plans to build 1,600 new housing units in East Jerusalem, a move defying American demands to freeze new settlements.
— Statement by Mr. Biden
NOVEMBER 2010
“I'm concerned that we’re not seeing each side make the extra effort involved to get a breakthrough. Each of these incremental steps can end up breaking trust.”
As the Obama administration works to restart talks between the Israelis and Palestinians, another announcement of new settlement plans comes out of Israel. Mr. Obama expresses concern over the effect of the release on the peace process, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel responds.
— Mr. Obama
“Jerusalem is not a settlement; Jerusalem is the capital of the State of Israel.”
— Statement by Mr. Netanyahu’s office
MAY 2011
“Prime Minister Netanyahu expects to hear a reaffirmation from President Obama of U.S. commitments made to Israel in 2004, which were overwhelmingly supported by both houses of Congress.”
Mr. Netanyahu pushes back against President Obama’s endorsement of using Israel’s 1967 boundaries as a starting point for the creation of a Palestinian state. He cites a letter from President George W. Bush saying it would be unrealistic to expect that negotiations would result in 1967 boundaries.
— Statement by Mr. Netanyahu
NOVEMBER 2011
“You are fed up with him, but I have to deal with him even more often than you.”
During a Group of 20 summit meeting, several French journalists overhear a private conversation between Mr. Obama and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France about Mr. Netanyahu.
— Mr. Obama
SEPTEMBER 2012
“Those in the international community who refuse to put red lines before Iran don’t have a moral right to place a red light before Israel.”
Mr. Netanyahu issues harsh comments in an apparent response to a statement by then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who said the United States was “not setting deadlines” on Iran’s nuclear program before issuing a military response.
— Mr. Netanyahu
APRIL 2014
“Poof, that was sort of the moment. We find ourselves where we are.”
In testimony before a congressional committee, Secretary of State John Kerry says that while both sides bore responsibility for faltering peace talks, the latest announcement of new settlements by Israel was the key event for the deadlock.
— Mr. Kerry
JUNE 2014
“I think the United States must make it absolutely clear to the Palestinian president that his pact with Hamas, a terrorist organization that seeks Israel’s liquidation, is simply unacceptable.”
Mr. Netanyahu expresses frustration over the Obama administration’s decision to work with the new Palestinian government, which was formed with the consent of the militant group Hamas.
— Mr. Netanyahu, to The Associated Press
The New York Times
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Monday, August 4, 2014
Israel - Winning the battle, losing the war - The Economist
http://www.economist.com/news/
HAMAS has ruled Gaza since 2007 and there is not much to admire. The Islamist party is harsh, narrow-minded and intolerant of dissent. Its charter is anti-Semitic. It fires rockets into Israeli territory and builds tunnels under it to kill or kidnap Israeli soldiers. It knows that the Israeli attacks it provokes will kill hundreds of Palestinian civilians, which will garner sympathy around the world. It is also weaker than it was, for it is now losing the military battle against Israel.
By contrast Israel is the most successful state in the Middle East. It is the region’s only true democracy—a hub of invention, enterprise and creativity. Israel has overwhelming firepower in the fight in Gaza. Most of its people are united behind their soldiers and have the firm backing of America’s Congress. Yet, though Israel is winning the battle, it is struggling in the war for world opinion (see article). That matters in part because Israel is a cosmopolitan trading country that looks to its American ally for security, but also because Israel needs to hear some of what its critics are saying.
Anti-Semitism: a very light sleeper
A generation ago, Israel had the best of the argument with Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation, in many ways a less vile outfit than Hamas. Young Europeans spent their gap years on kibbutzim. The Western world cheered when Israeli commandos rescued Jewish hostages from the terminal building in Uganda’s Entebbe airport in 1976.
But as the occupation of Palestinian territory has dragged on, sympathy has seeped away. In a poll published in June, before the destruction of Gaza, the citizens of 23 countries put the balance of those who think Israel is a good or bad influence on the world at minus 26%, ranking it below Russia and above only North Korea, Pakistan and Iran. A growing number of Europeans call Israel racist (with the sinister flourish that Israelis, of all people, should know better). And even in America, where a solid majority backs Israel, the share that thinks its actions against the Palestinians are unjustified has risen since 2002 by five percentage points, to 39%. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, Israel is backed by just a quarter.
Many Israelis, and their most fervent supporters in Congress, see today’s hostility as the culmination of a long process of demonisation, double standards and delegitimisation. They have a point. Holding a country to high standards, as Israel’s critics do, can be a compliment—yet against Israel, morality is often used as a cudgel. The common slur that Israel is an apartheid state ignores the fact that Israel’s minorities, such as the Druze, Arabs and Bahais, are protected by the country’s independent courts—including the highest, which has a sitting Arab Israeli judge. The “BDS” campaign to impose boycotts, encourage divestment and introduce sanctions calls not just for an end to the occupation of the West Bank and for equal rights, but also for the right of return of all Palestinian refugees—in other words, for the erosion of Israel as a Jewish homeland. Protests in France against the fighting in Gaza led to attacks on synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses.
No wonder that many Israelis feel that the world is against them, and believe that criticism of Israel is often a mask for antipathy towards Jews. But they would be wrong to ignore it entirely. That is partly because public opinion matters. For a trading nation built on the idea of liberty, delegitimisation is, in the words of an Israeli think-tank, “a strategic threat”. But it is also because some of the foreign criticism is right.
Please, hear them
That begins with the scale of the violence in Gaza. Some 1,400 Palestinians have died in the past few weeks, compared with 56 Israeli soldiers and four civilians. Even allowing for Hamas’s brutality, no democracy should be happy with a military strategy that results in the death of so many children (let alone the crass claim from Israel’s ambassador to Washington that its soldiers deserve a Nobel peace prize). The destruction is driving support towards Hamas and away from the moderate Palestinians who are Israel’s best chance for peace.
But more than that, Israel needs to hear what its critics say about the need for a two-state solution, which remains the only one that will work. Time is not on Israel’s side. Palestinians may already outnumber Israelis in the lands they share. Without two states, Israelis and Palestinians will be left with one that contains them both. The risk for Israel is of either a permanent, non-democratic occupation that disenfranchises Palestinians, or a democracy in which Jews are in a minority. Neither would be the Jewish homeland with equal rights for all that Israel’s founding fathers intended.
America’s secretary of state, John Kerry, has made a Herculean effort to forge peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians along the lines of two states for two peoples. When the talks broke down, a few months ago, he blamed Israel’s settler lobby. That outraged right-wing Israelis. And now the left has joined in the derision because he proposed a ceasefire in Gaza that Israelis thought favoured Hamas. But Mr Kerry is right. If Israel continues to build settlements in the occupied territory, it will gobble up land that would belong to an independent Palestinian state, making peace harder to reach.
The same goes for what appears to be Israel’s strategy towards both Gaza and the West Bank. Having created a huge open-air prison in Gaza, Israel remains committed to a blockade that contains Hamas—but also ensures that ever more Palestinians grow up angry. On the West Bank, Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has gone backwards: he has said that Israel cannot relinquish security control of the West Bank for fear of Islamist attack. That implies an intention to consolidate the occupation, thus withdrawing all hope from Palestinian moderates. The West Bank would be likely to explode too, then, while the demographic clock ticked on.
For all the blood and misery in Gaza, Mr Netanyahu will soon have a chance to show he has heard the critics. Having won his battle, he could return to the negotiating table, this time with a genuine offer of peace. Every true friend of Israel should press him to do so.
From the print edition: Leaders
Israel - Winning the battle, losing the war
For all its military might, Israel faces a grim future unless it can secure peace
Aug 2nd 2014 | From the print edition
HAMAS has ruled Gaza since 2007 and there is not much to admire. The Islamist party is harsh, narrow-minded and intolerant of dissent. Its charter is anti-Semitic. It fires rockets into Israeli territory and builds tunnels under it to kill or kidnap Israeli soldiers. It knows that the Israeli attacks it provokes will kill hundreds of Palestinian civilians, which will garner sympathy around the world. It is also weaker than it was, for it is now losing the military battle against Israel.
By contrast Israel is the most successful state in the Middle East. It is the region’s only true democracy—a hub of invention, enterprise and creativity. Israel has overwhelming firepower in the fight in Gaza. Most of its people are united behind their soldiers and have the firm backing of America’s Congress. Yet, though Israel is winning the battle, it is struggling in the war for world opinion (see article). That matters in part because Israel is a cosmopolitan trading country that looks to its American ally for security, but also because Israel needs to hear some of what its critics are saying.
In this section
- Winning the battle, losing the war
- An unloved billionaire
- Eighth time unlucky
- Stuffed
- Fundamental fears
Anti-Semitism: a very light sleeper
A generation ago, Israel had the best of the argument with Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation, in many ways a less vile outfit than Hamas. Young Europeans spent their gap years on kibbutzim. The Western world cheered when Israeli commandos rescued Jewish hostages from the terminal building in Uganda’s Entebbe airport in 1976.
But as the occupation of Palestinian territory has dragged on, sympathy has seeped away. In a poll published in June, before the destruction of Gaza, the citizens of 23 countries put the balance of those who think Israel is a good or bad influence on the world at minus 26%, ranking it below Russia and above only North Korea, Pakistan and Iran. A growing number of Europeans call Israel racist (with the sinister flourish that Israelis, of all people, should know better). And even in America, where a solid majority backs Israel, the share that thinks its actions against the Palestinians are unjustified has risen since 2002 by five percentage points, to 39%. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, Israel is backed by just a quarter.
Many Israelis, and their most fervent supporters in Congress, see today’s hostility as the culmination of a long process of demonisation, double standards and delegitimisation. They have a point. Holding a country to high standards, as Israel’s critics do, can be a compliment—yet against Israel, morality is often used as a cudgel. The common slur that Israel is an apartheid state ignores the fact that Israel’s minorities, such as the Druze, Arabs and Bahais, are protected by the country’s independent courts—including the highest, which has a sitting Arab Israeli judge. The “BDS” campaign to impose boycotts, encourage divestment and introduce sanctions calls not just for an end to the occupation of the West Bank and for equal rights, but also for the right of return of all Palestinian refugees—in other words, for the erosion of Israel as a Jewish homeland. Protests in France against the fighting in Gaza led to attacks on synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses.
No wonder that many Israelis feel that the world is against them, and believe that criticism of Israel is often a mask for antipathy towards Jews. But they would be wrong to ignore it entirely. That is partly because public opinion matters. For a trading nation built on the idea of liberty, delegitimisation is, in the words of an Israeli think-tank, “a strategic threat”. But it is also because some of the foreign criticism is right.
Please, hear them
That begins with the scale of the violence in Gaza. Some 1,400 Palestinians have died in the past few weeks, compared with 56 Israeli soldiers and four civilians. Even allowing for Hamas’s brutality, no democracy should be happy with a military strategy that results in the death of so many children (let alone the crass claim from Israel’s ambassador to Washington that its soldiers deserve a Nobel peace prize). The destruction is driving support towards Hamas and away from the moderate Palestinians who are Israel’s best chance for peace.
But more than that, Israel needs to hear what its critics say about the need for a two-state solution, which remains the only one that will work. Time is not on Israel’s side. Palestinians may already outnumber Israelis in the lands they share. Without two states, Israelis and Palestinians will be left with one that contains them both. The risk for Israel is of either a permanent, non-democratic occupation that disenfranchises Palestinians, or a democracy in which Jews are in a minority. Neither would be the Jewish homeland with equal rights for all that Israel’s founding fathers intended.
America’s secretary of state, John Kerry, has made a Herculean effort to forge peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians along the lines of two states for two peoples. When the talks broke down, a few months ago, he blamed Israel’s settler lobby. That outraged right-wing Israelis. And now the left has joined in the derision because he proposed a ceasefire in Gaza that Israelis thought favoured Hamas. But Mr Kerry is right. If Israel continues to build settlements in the occupied territory, it will gobble up land that would belong to an independent Palestinian state, making peace harder to reach.
The same goes for what appears to be Israel’s strategy towards both Gaza and the West Bank. Having created a huge open-air prison in Gaza, Israel remains committed to a blockade that contains Hamas—but also ensures that ever more Palestinians grow up angry. On the West Bank, Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has gone backwards: he has said that Israel cannot relinquish security control of the West Bank for fear of Islamist attack. That implies an intention to consolidate the occupation, thus withdrawing all hope from Palestinian moderates. The West Bank would be likely to explode too, then, while the demographic clock ticked on.
For all the blood and misery in Gaza, Mr Netanyahu will soon have a chance to show he has heard the critics. Having won his battle, he could return to the negotiating table, this time with a genuine offer of peace. Every true friend of Israel should press him to do so.
From the print edition: Leaders
Saturday, August 2, 2014
In Tunnel War, Israeli Playbook Offers Few Ideas - By ISABEL KERSHNER - The International New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/
In Tunnel War, Israeli Playbook Offers Few Ideas
By ISABEL KERSHNER
AUG. 1, 2014
AUG. 1, 2014
Photo
Israeli soldiers near the
Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza on Friday. A retired Israeli general
said Hamas had “changed its doctrine” in attacking from tunnels.
Credit
Amir Cohen/Reuters
Related Coverage:
JERUSALEM — Israel entered its latest conflict with Hamas armed with a high-tech arsenal, real-time battlefield intelligence and strong domestic support for dealing a heavy blow to Hamas.
But again on Friday, Israeli forces were taken by surprise, this time with two soldiers killed and one taken prisoner when militants once again attacked from a tunnel in Gaza.
As frustration grows in Israel over the military’s limited success so far in trying to neutralize Hamas, the militant Islamic group that governs Gaza, some military experts say it is increasingly evident that the Israel Defense Forces have been operating from an old playbook and are not fully prepared for a more sophisticated, battle-ready adversary. The issue is not specifically the tunnels — which Israel knew about — but the way Hamas fighters trained to use them to create what experts in Israel are calling a “360-degree front.”
“Hamas has changed its doctrine and is using the tunnels as a main method of operation,” said Israel Ziv, a retired general who headed the military’s Gaza division and its operations directorate. “This is something we learned amid the fighting.”
Video
[Please click the original source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/
Of the 32 fortified tunnels that the Israeli military has exposed so far, at least 11 run deep beneath the border into Israeli territory. Others are part of an underground labyrinth inside Gaza connecting buildings, weapons stores and concealed rocket launchers.
Israeli troops in Gaza described Hamas gunmen who vanished from one house, like magicians, and suddenly popped up to fire at them from another. And while Hamas fighters are able to use the tunnels to surprise the forces from behind and to attack those in the rear, Israeli soldiers find themselves having to improvise.
In the Gaza war that began in late 2008, 10 Israeli soldiers were killed, four of them from friendly fire. This time, 63 soldiers have been killed, mostly in combat, and one is now a prisoner.
“The military has been playing it by ear,” said Amos Harel, a military affairs analyst for the newspaper Haaretz, who added that despite the Israeli military’s knowledge of the tunnels, its planners did not draft a new doctrine for prosecuting a land invasion. “But it is pretty good at doing that, and has done it many times.”
In this latest asymmetrical war with Hamas, the third in five years, Israel thought it was prepared. It had built up an integrated communications systems able to transfer intelligence in real time to air and ground forces, an advancement that military officials called a “force multiplier.”
Precision-guided missiles have destroyed up to a third of Hamas’s rocket stocks, according to Israeli officials, as well as hundreds of houses or apartments that the military described as militant command-and-control centers and many other weapons production sites and stores. In 24 days of intense bombing, 4,300 targets have been hit.
Photo
Israeli soldiers prepare to enter Gaza.
Credit
Uriel Sinai for The New York Times
Hamas still has up to 4,000 rockets, beyond the more than 3,000 that it has fired into Israel. More than 1,600 Palestinians have been killed, many of them civilians, according to Gaza officials, stirring international outrage and raising demands for a cease-fire.
And while Israel says it has killed hundreds of militants and arrested scores more, Hamas’s senior military command and political leadership remain intact.
“The leadership hides underground, like under Shifa Hospital,” said Eado Hecht, a military analyst who teaches at the Israeli military’s Command and General Staff College and at Bar-Ilan and Haifa Universities.
What Israel was apparently less ready for was Hamas fighters who are willing to engage and are trained to use tunnels, a tool of war whose roots go back to antiquity. During Israel’s last ground incursion in the winter of 2008-9, Hamas fighters largely avoided clashes, melting into the crowded urban landscape. This time, they were prepared for combat.
“What surprised me was the operational plans they built,” said Atai Shelach, a former commander of the military’s combat engineering unit.
The tunnels themselves, while well known, have also presented a challenge. After years of research there is still no technological solution for detecting and destroying them from afar, officials said.
The shafts leading to Hamas’s labyrinth are “inside houses, so we won’t see them from the air,” said Mr. Hecht, the military analyst.
“You have to go house to house and check,” he added.
On Thursday, the military distributed video footage of two tunnel shafts discovered under a prayer room in a mosque.
As Israel’s forces have slowly advanced, they have pummeled neighborhoods with heavy artillery, which analysts said was militarily necessary to safeguard soldiers. Those tactics have also drawn international condemnation for devastating civilian homes and infrastructure, and taking so many lives. “In a dense urban environment, you need to use aggressive force to save soldiers’ lives,” Mr. Harel, the military affairs analyst, said.
Special forces are equipped with portable Israeli-made Spike antitank guided missiles with ranges of 1.5 to 15 miles. Yiftah Shapir, a weapons expert at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, said they could be used for almost anything, and were so accurate that they could pinpoint a window on a building.
Hamas has also upgraded its weaponry. Aside from its rockets, some of which can reach almost to the northern Israeli port city of Haifa, its arsenal includes antiaircraft and antitank missiles.
The number of Palestinian casualties in Gaza is comparable to that in the 2008-9 conflict, when about 1,400 were killed, according to Palestinian figures. Israel put the figure at closer to 1,120.
Photo
Tanks near the border.
Frustration is growing in Israel over the military’s limited success so
far in trying to neutralize Hamas.
Credit
Uriel Sinai for The New York Times
Still, a decisive Israeli victory over Hamas remains elusive.
“The question is not military; the question is what does Israel want,” said Yaakov Amidror, a retired general who served as Israel’s national security adviser until November. To bring complete quiet to Gaza would require a takeover and occupation of the territory for six months to a year, he said. Israel, which unilaterally withdrew its forces and settlements from the Gaza Strip in 2005, has little appetite to return.
What is left, military officials say, is to create deterrence. In recent years, Israeli strategists have spoken of the “Dahiya doctrine,” referring to Israel’s flattening of the Dahiya district in Beirut, a Shiite neighborhood that housed the command-and-control headquarters of Hezbollah, during its 34-day war in Lebanon in the summer of 2006. The idea was to inflict such damage that the other side would decide confrontation was not worthwhile.
While many Israelis deemed that war a failure, it has restored quiet to Israel’s northern border for the last eight years.
But experts say the Dahiya doctrine does not apply to Gaza. The Hamas command is not concentrated in one area, and the leader of the movement, Khaled Meshal, lives in exile, “in a five-star hotel in Qatar,” as Mr. Amidror put it, where the impact of the destruction is less immediate.
Gabi Siboni, who runs the military and strategic affairs program at the Institute for National Security Studies, said another reason was that Hamas “is not accountable, not to the world and not to its citizens.” By embedding its forces and fighting from within the population centers, he said, Hamas has raised its willingness “to sacrifice” its civilians “to an art form.”
Hamas has said it is fighting to lift the economic blockade from Gaza and wants an opening of the passages controlled by Israel and Egypt, among other things — demands that would be addressed if substantive cease-fire talks were to take place in Cairo. Israel wants blocks on Hamas’s ability to rearm and, eventually, to see Gaza demilitarized.
----- ----- ----- ----- -----
.
-
Gaza Fighting Intensifies as Cease-Fire Falls ApartAUG. 1, 2014
-
Obama Casts Doubt on Chances of Gaza Cease-FireAUG. 1, 2014
-
Quest for Demilitarization of Gaza Is Seen Getting Netanyahu Only So FarJULY 30, 2014
-
Peering Into Darkness Beneath the Israel-Gaza BorderJULY 25, 2014
-
From Gaza, an Array of Makeshift Rockets Packs a CounterpunchJULY 17, 2014
-
Birthright Trips to Israel Continue Despite Mideast ConflictAUG. 1, 2014
JERUSALEM — Israel entered its latest conflict with Hamas armed with a high-tech arsenal, real-time battlefield intelligence and strong domestic support for dealing a heavy blow to Hamas.
But again on Friday, Israeli forces were taken by surprise, this time with two soldiers killed and one taken prisoner when militants once again attacked from a tunnel in Gaza.
As frustration grows in Israel over the military’s limited success so far in trying to neutralize Hamas, the militant Islamic group that governs Gaza, some military experts say it is increasingly evident that the Israel Defense Forces have been operating from an old playbook and are not fully prepared for a more sophisticated, battle-ready adversary. The issue is not specifically the tunnels — which Israel knew about — but the way Hamas fighters trained to use them to create what experts in Israel are calling a “360-degree front.”
“Hamas has changed its doctrine and is using the tunnels as a main method of operation,” said Israel Ziv, a retired general who headed the military’s Gaza division and its operations directorate. “This is something we learned amid the fighting.”
Video
Play Video|2:20
[Please click the original source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/
Hamas’s Tunnels to Israel
An underground look at Hamas’s tunnels into Israel.
Video Credit By Carrie Halperin and Sofia Perpetua on
Publish Date July 22, 2014.
Image CreditJim Hollander/European Pressphoto Agency
----- -----
----- -----
Of the 32 fortified tunnels that the Israeli military has exposed so far, at least 11 run deep beneath the border into Israeli territory. Others are part of an underground labyrinth inside Gaza connecting buildings, weapons stores and concealed rocket launchers.
Israeli troops in Gaza described Hamas gunmen who vanished from one house, like magicians, and suddenly popped up to fire at them from another. And while Hamas fighters are able to use the tunnels to surprise the forces from behind and to attack those in the rear, Israeli soldiers find themselves having to improvise.
In the Gaza war that began in late 2008, 10 Israeli soldiers were killed, four of them from friendly fire. This time, 63 soldiers have been killed, mostly in combat, and one is now a prisoner.
“The military has been playing it by ear,” said Amos Harel, a military affairs analyst for the newspaper Haaretz, who added that despite the Israeli military’s knowledge of the tunnels, its planners did not draft a new doctrine for prosecuting a land invasion. “But it is pretty good at doing that, and has done it many times.”
In this latest asymmetrical war with Hamas, the third in five years, Israel thought it was prepared. It had built up an integrated communications systems able to transfer intelligence in real time to air and ground forces, an advancement that military officials called a “force multiplier.”
Precision-guided missiles have destroyed up to a third of Hamas’s rocket stocks, according to Israeli officials, as well as hundreds of houses or apartments that the military described as militant command-and-control centers and many other weapons production sites and stores. In 24 days of intense bombing, 4,300 targets have been hit.
Photo
Hamas still has up to 4,000 rockets, beyond the more than 3,000 that it has fired into Israel. More than 1,600 Palestinians have been killed, many of them civilians, according to Gaza officials, stirring international outrage and raising demands for a cease-fire.
And while Israel says it has killed hundreds of militants and arrested scores more, Hamas’s senior military command and political leadership remain intact.
“The leadership hides underground, like under Shifa Hospital,” said Eado Hecht, a military analyst who teaches at the Israeli military’s Command and General Staff College and at Bar-Ilan and Haifa Universities.
What Israel was apparently less ready for was Hamas fighters who are willing to engage and are trained to use tunnels, a tool of war whose roots go back to antiquity. During Israel’s last ground incursion in the winter of 2008-9, Hamas fighters largely avoided clashes, melting into the crowded urban landscape. This time, they were prepared for combat.
“What surprised me was the operational plans they built,” said Atai Shelach, a former commander of the military’s combat engineering unit.
The tunnels themselves, while well known, have also presented a challenge. After years of research there is still no technological solution for detecting and destroying them from afar, officials said.
The shafts leading to Hamas’s labyrinth are “inside houses, so we won’t see them from the air,” said Mr. Hecht, the military analyst.
“You have to go house to house and check,” he added.
On Thursday, the military distributed video footage of two tunnel shafts discovered under a prayer room in a mosque.
As Israel’s forces have slowly advanced, they have pummeled neighborhoods with heavy artillery, which analysts said was militarily necessary to safeguard soldiers. Those tactics have also drawn international condemnation for devastating civilian homes and infrastructure, and taking so many lives. “In a dense urban environment, you need to use aggressive force to save soldiers’ lives,” Mr. Harel, the military affairs analyst, said.
Special forces are equipped with portable Israeli-made Spike antitank guided missiles with ranges of 1.5 to 15 miles. Yiftah Shapir, a weapons expert at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, said they could be used for almost anything, and were so accurate that they could pinpoint a window on a building.
Hamas has also upgraded its weaponry. Aside from its rockets, some of which can reach almost to the northern Israeli port city of Haifa, its arsenal includes antiaircraft and antitank missiles.
The number of Palestinian casualties in Gaza is comparable to that in the 2008-9 conflict, when about 1,400 were killed, according to Palestinian figures. Israel put the figure at closer to 1,120.
Photo
Still, a decisive Israeli victory over Hamas remains elusive.
“The question is not military; the question is what does Israel want,” said Yaakov Amidror, a retired general who served as Israel’s national security adviser until November. To bring complete quiet to Gaza would require a takeover and occupation of the territory for six months to a year, he said. Israel, which unilaterally withdrew its forces and settlements from the Gaza Strip in 2005, has little appetite to return.
What is left, military officials say, is to create deterrence. In recent years, Israeli strategists have spoken of the “Dahiya doctrine,” referring to Israel’s flattening of the Dahiya district in Beirut, a Shiite neighborhood that housed the command-and-control headquarters of Hezbollah, during its 34-day war in Lebanon in the summer of 2006. The idea was to inflict such damage that the other side would decide confrontation was not worthwhile.
While many Israelis deemed that war a failure, it has restored quiet to Israel’s northern border for the last eight years.
But experts say the Dahiya doctrine does not apply to Gaza. The Hamas command is not concentrated in one area, and the leader of the movement, Khaled Meshal, lives in exile, “in a five-star hotel in Qatar,” as Mr. Amidror put it, where the impact of the destruction is less immediate.
Gabi Siboni, who runs the military and strategic affairs program at the Institute for National Security Studies, said another reason was that Hamas “is not accountable, not to the world and not to its citizens.” By embedding its forces and fighting from within the population centers, he said, Hamas has raised its willingness “to sacrifice” its civilians “to an art form.”
Hamas has said it is fighting to lift the economic blockade from Gaza and wants an opening of the passages controlled by Israel and Egypt, among other things — demands that would be addressed if substantive cease-fire talks were to take place in Cairo. Israel wants blocks on Hamas’s ability to rearm and, eventually, to see Gaza demilitarized.
----- ----- ----- ----- -----
.
Thursday, July 31, 2014
! Collective Punishment in Gaza - By Rashid Khalidi - The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/news/
July 29, 2014
Credit Photograph by Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum
Three days after the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched the current war in Gaza, he held a press conference in Tel Aviv during which he said, in Hebrew, according to the Times of Israel, “I think the Israeli people understand now what I always say: that there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan.”
It’s worth listening carefully when Netanyahu speaks to the Israeli people. What is going on in Palestine today is not really about Hamas. It is not about rockets. It is not about “human shields” or terrorism or tunnels. It is about Israel’s permanent control over Palestinian land and Palestinian lives. That is what Netanyahu is really saying, and that is what he now admits he has “always” talked about. It is about an unswerving, decades-long Israeli policy of denying Palestine self-determination, freedom, and sovereignty.
What Israel is doing in Gaza now is collective punishment. It is punishment for Gaza’s refusal to be a docile ghetto. It is punishment for the gall of Palestinians in unifying, and of Hamas and other factions in responding to Israel’s siege and its provocations with resistance, armed or otherwise, after Israel repeatedly reacted to unarmed protest with crushing force. Despite years of ceasefires and truces, the siege of Gaza has never been lifted.
As Netanyahu’s own words show, however, Israel will accept nothing short of the acquiescence of Palestinians to their own subordination. It will accept only a Palestinian “state” that is stripped of all the attributes of a real state: control over security, borders, airspace, maritime limits, contiguity, and, therefore, sovereignty. The twenty-three-year charade of the “peace process” has shown that this is all Israel is offering, with the full approval of Washington. Whenever the Palestinians have resisted that pathetic fate (as any nation would), Israel has punished them for their insolence. This is not new.
Punishing Palestinians for existing has a long history. It was Israel’s policy before Hamas and its rudimentary rockets were Israel’s boogeyman of the moment, and before Israel turned Gaza into an open-air prison, punching bag, and weapons laboratory. In 1948, Israel killed thousands of innocents, and terrorized and displaced hundreds of thousands more, in the name of creating a Jewish-majority state in a land that was then sixty-five per cent Arab. In 1967, it displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians again, occupying territory that it still largely controls, forty-seven years later.
In 1982, in a quest to expel the Palestine Liberation Organization and extinguish Palestinian nationalism, Israel invaded Lebanon, killing seventeen thousand people, mostly civilians. Since the late nineteen-eighties, when Palestinians under occupation rose up, mostly by throwing stones and staging general strikes, Israel has arrested tens of thousands of Palestinians: over seven hundred and fifty thousand people have spent time in Israeli prisons since 1967, a number that amounts to forty per cent of the adult male population today. They have emerged with accounts of torture, which are substantiated by human-rights groups like B’tselem. During the second intifada, which began in 2000, Israel reinvaded the West Bank (it had never fully left). The occupation and colonization of Palestinian land continued unabated throughout the “peace process” of the nineteen-nineties, and continues to this day. And yet, in America, the discussion ignores this crucial, constantly oppressive context, and is instead too often limited to Israeli “self-defense” and the Palestinians’ supposed responsibility for their own suffering.
In the past seven or more years, Israel has besieged, tormented, and regularly attacked the Gaza Strip. The pretexts change: they elected Hamas; they refused to be docile; they refused to recognize Israel; they fired rockets; they built tunnels to circumvent the siege; and on and on. But each pretext is a red herring, because the truth of ghettos—what happens when you imprison 1.8 million people in a hundred and forty square miles, about a third of the area of New York City, with no control of borders, almost no access to the sea for fishermen (three out of the twenty kilometres allowed by the Oslo accords), no real way in or out, and with drones buzzing overhead night and day—is that, eventually, the ghetto will fight back. It was true in Soweto and Belfast, and it is true in Gaza. We might not like Hamas or some of its methods, but that is not the same as accepting the proposition that Palestinians should supinely accept the denial of their right to exist as a free people in their ancestral homeland.
This is precisely why the United States’ support of current Israeli policy is folly. Peace was achieved in Northern Ireland and in South Africa because the United States and the world realized that they had to put pressure on the stronger party, holding it accountable and ending its impunity. Northern Ireland and South Africa are far from perfect examples, but it is worth remembering that, to achieve a just outcome, it was necessary for the United States to deal with groups like the Irish Republican Army and the African National Congress, which engaged in guerrilla war and even terrorism. That was the only way to embark on a road toward true peace and reconciliation. The case of Palestine is not fundamentally different.
Instead, the United States puts its thumb on the scales in favor of the stronger party. In this surreal, upside-down vision of the world, it almost seems as if it is the Israelis who are occupied by the Palestinians, and not the other way around. In this skewed universe, the inmates of an open-air prison are besieging a nuclear-armed power with one of the most sophisticated militaries in the world.
If we are to move away from this unreality, the U.S. must either reverse its policies or abandon its claim of being an “honest broker.” If the U.S. government wants to fund and arm Israel and parrot its talking points that fly in the face of reason and international law, so be it. But it should not claim the moral high ground and intone solemnly about peace. And it should certainly not insult Palestinians by saying that it cares about them or their children, who are dying in Gaza today.
Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University and the editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies, and was an adviser to the Palestinian delegation at the Madrid-Washington Palestinian-Israeli negotiations of 1991-93. His most recent book is “Brokers of Deceit.”
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July 29, 2014
Collective Punishment in Gaza
By Rashid Khalidi
Credit Photograph by Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum
Three days after the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched the current war in Gaza, he held a press conference in Tel Aviv during which he said, in Hebrew, according to the Times of Israel, “I think the Israeli people understand now what I always say: that there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan.”
It’s worth listening carefully when Netanyahu speaks to the Israeli people. What is going on in Palestine today is not really about Hamas. It is not about rockets. It is not about “human shields” or terrorism or tunnels. It is about Israel’s permanent control over Palestinian land and Palestinian lives. That is what Netanyahu is really saying, and that is what he now admits he has “always” talked about. It is about an unswerving, decades-long Israeli policy of denying Palestine self-determination, freedom, and sovereignty.
What Israel is doing in Gaza now is collective punishment. It is punishment for Gaza’s refusal to be a docile ghetto. It is punishment for the gall of Palestinians in unifying, and of Hamas and other factions in responding to Israel’s siege and its provocations with resistance, armed or otherwise, after Israel repeatedly reacted to unarmed protest with crushing force. Despite years of ceasefires and truces, the siege of Gaza has never been lifted.
As Netanyahu’s own words show, however, Israel will accept nothing short of the acquiescence of Palestinians to their own subordination. It will accept only a Palestinian “state” that is stripped of all the attributes of a real state: control over security, borders, airspace, maritime limits, contiguity, and, therefore, sovereignty. The twenty-three-year charade of the “peace process” has shown that this is all Israel is offering, with the full approval of Washington. Whenever the Palestinians have resisted that pathetic fate (as any nation would), Israel has punished them for their insolence. This is not new.
Punishing Palestinians for existing has a long history. It was Israel’s policy before Hamas and its rudimentary rockets were Israel’s boogeyman of the moment, and before Israel turned Gaza into an open-air prison, punching bag, and weapons laboratory. In 1948, Israel killed thousands of innocents, and terrorized and displaced hundreds of thousands more, in the name of creating a Jewish-majority state in a land that was then sixty-five per cent Arab. In 1967, it displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians again, occupying territory that it still largely controls, forty-seven years later.
In 1982, in a quest to expel the Palestine Liberation Organization and extinguish Palestinian nationalism, Israel invaded Lebanon, killing seventeen thousand people, mostly civilians. Since the late nineteen-eighties, when Palestinians under occupation rose up, mostly by throwing stones and staging general strikes, Israel has arrested tens of thousands of Palestinians: over seven hundred and fifty thousand people have spent time in Israeli prisons since 1967, a number that amounts to forty per cent of the adult male population today. They have emerged with accounts of torture, which are substantiated by human-rights groups like B’tselem. During the second intifada, which began in 2000, Israel reinvaded the West Bank (it had never fully left). The occupation and colonization of Palestinian land continued unabated throughout the “peace process” of the nineteen-nineties, and continues to this day. And yet, in America, the discussion ignores this crucial, constantly oppressive context, and is instead too often limited to Israeli “self-defense” and the Palestinians’ supposed responsibility for their own suffering.
In the past seven or more years, Israel has besieged, tormented, and regularly attacked the Gaza Strip. The pretexts change: they elected Hamas; they refused to be docile; they refused to recognize Israel; they fired rockets; they built tunnels to circumvent the siege; and on and on. But each pretext is a red herring, because the truth of ghettos—what happens when you imprison 1.8 million people in a hundred and forty square miles, about a third of the area of New York City, with no control of borders, almost no access to the sea for fishermen (three out of the twenty kilometres allowed by the Oslo accords), no real way in or out, and with drones buzzing overhead night and day—is that, eventually, the ghetto will fight back. It was true in Soweto and Belfast, and it is true in Gaza. We might not like Hamas or some of its methods, but that is not the same as accepting the proposition that Palestinians should supinely accept the denial of their right to exist as a free people in their ancestral homeland.
This is precisely why the United States’ support of current Israeli policy is folly. Peace was achieved in Northern Ireland and in South Africa because the United States and the world realized that they had to put pressure on the stronger party, holding it accountable and ending its impunity. Northern Ireland and South Africa are far from perfect examples, but it is worth remembering that, to achieve a just outcome, it was necessary for the United States to deal with groups like the Irish Republican Army and the African National Congress, which engaged in guerrilla war and even terrorism. That was the only way to embark on a road toward true peace and reconciliation. The case of Palestine is not fundamentally different.
Instead, the United States puts its thumb on the scales in favor of the stronger party. In this surreal, upside-down vision of the world, it almost seems as if it is the Israelis who are occupied by the Palestinians, and not the other way around. In this skewed universe, the inmates of an open-air prison are besieging a nuclear-armed power with one of the most sophisticated militaries in the world.
If we are to move away from this unreality, the U.S. must either reverse its policies or abandon its claim of being an “honest broker.” If the U.S. government wants to fund and arm Israel and parrot its talking points that fly in the face of reason and international law, so be it. But it should not claim the moral high ground and intone solemnly about peace. And it should certainly not insult Palestinians by saying that it cares about them or their children, who are dying in Gaza today.
Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University and the editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies, and was an adviser to the Palestinian delegation at the Madrid-Washington Palestinian-Israeli negotiations of 1991-93. His most recent book is “Brokers of Deceit.”
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Wednesday, July 30, 2014
Israel's continued massacre of innocent civilians in Gaza is not without cost to Jews around the world
Israel's continued massacre of innocent civilians in Gaza is not without cost to Jews around the world
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http://www.timesofisrael.com/
Full to capacity room at the Knesset's emergency meeting on rising anti-Semitism in Europe, July 28, 2014. (Israel Bardugo / The Israeli-Jewish Congress)
Amanda Borschel-Dan
Amanda Borschel-Dan is The Times of Israel's Jewish World editor.
The room was packed to capacity at the Knesset on Monday for an emergency meeting on the “rising wave of violent anti-Semitic and anti-Israel demonstrations sweeping Europe,” with MKs and Diaspora Jewish leaders offering testimony and issuing condemnations.
Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email
and never miss our top stories Free Sign up!
The meeting, chaired by MK Yoel Razvozov, saw representatives of Jewish communities and diplomats from countries including France, Greece, Hungary, Belgium, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Denmark, Austria, Germany and Italy speaking at a session which went well overtime but ended inconclusively.
The meeting was called by the Knesset’s Diaspora Affairs Committee with the cooperation of the Israeli-Jewish Congress.
Members of Knesset bemoaned the upswing in anti-Semitism since the start of Operation Protective Edge on July 8, and security and academic experts attempted to drive home the dire importance of concrete steps to counter and educate against the rising anti-Semitism throughout Europe.
Vladimir Sloutzker, head of the Israeli-Jewish Congress, said starkly, “Never before since the Holocaust have we seen such a situation as today. We are potentially looking at the beginning of another Holocaust now.”
“These events will only grow in scale across Europe,” he warned.
The Holocaust and the pre-war period were recurrent themes in several speakers’ statements.
Nathan Norman Gelbart, the head of Germany’s Keren Hayesod (United Jewish Appeal), reported that the German Jewish community is scared “because these are things that have not occurred since 1933.” He cited demonstrators shouting “death to the Jews” and other anti-Semitic slogans.
“These demonstrators are marching in the heart of Berlin shouting these slogans, in front of the police. Shouting ‘Jews are pigs’ is an incitement: Why isn’t the Germany police taking the details of these people shouting in an aggressive way ‘Death to the Jews’?” asked Gelbart.
Hebrew University Prof. Robert Wistrich, an expert on anti-Semitism, said, “We have entered a new, very difficult era in all of Europe.” He said there is “a bit” of awareness in some governments, noting France’s aggressive stance against anti-Semitism in any form, from top government officials on down, “but we see it doesn’t make much of a difference — though it is important.”
Wistrich noted that years of “one-sided” anti-Israel media reports have led to an image of the Jewish state that is far removed from reality. Additionally, the constellation of extremists on the political far right and far left, along with jihadist immigrants, have created a new anti-Semitic climate in Europe, he said.
There is no longer a facade of anti-Zionist expressions not being anti-Semitic, said Wistrich. “You just need to hear the rhetoric to believe. We need a much deeper discussion; we’re just at the outer layer of the problem.”
Various European embassy officials obligingly reiterated their countries’ severe condemnation of anti-Semitism, but attributed official inaction during the recent anti-Israel protests to citizens’ right of free expression against Operation Protective Edge.
Denmark’s Ambassador Jesper Vahr said, “Clearly some of the events we have seen recently are despicable and intolerable.” He added, however, that Denmark “as a society defends the right of people who have a critical position to the Gaza operation.”
Meeting chair Razvozov rebutted, saying that “there is a difference between free speech and incendiary speech.” MK Yoav Bentsur agreed, saying, “It is impossible that in 2014 a Jew needs to take off Jewish symbols before walking the streets of Europe… if you don’t take care of the problem now, it will soon be too late.”
The looming existential threat to the Jewish community was touched upon by Esther Voet, director of the Centre of Information and Documentation on Israel (CIDI) in the Netherlands. She said although she is seeing more balanced reporting in the press versus during 2009′s Operation Cast Lead, “in the Netherlands we are very aware that it’s not about if something will happen in our country, but when.”
Benjamin Albalas, president of the Jewish Community of Greece, raised a further warning.
“The attitude in Europe is promoting delegitimization of the State of Israel… and is a first step toward the intimidation of the Jews’ right to live in their own home countries,” said Albalas.
Several Israeli speakers warned that the discussion in the Knesset was only touching the tip of the iceberg of the pervasive anti-Semitism in Europe today.
Knesset diplomatic adviser Oded Ben-Hur said, “Unfortunately, the situation is much worse than what you are describing… One of the problems is not just in knowing who is anti-Semitic, but to know that there is a whole swath of people who don’t even know they’re anti-Semitic — but they are.”
One of the very few to offer concrete suggestions, Ben-Hur suggested an increase in interfaith education.
“Emissaries talk until they are blue in the face and there is no end to this discussion… In the name of religion, more people have been killed than in plagues or disasters. There is ignorance between religions: We are comfortable in our own boxes, but we need to show we are the sons of the same God, and not to murder in the name of the God who created us all,” said Ben-Hur.
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http://www.timesofisrael.com/
Talk of feared new Holocaust at Knesset meeting on European anti-Semitism
Incitement against Jews in Germany at levels not seen since 1933, says speaker at emergency session
By Amanda Borschel-Dan July 28, 2014, 8:00 pm 262Full to capacity room at the Knesset's emergency meeting on rising anti-Semitism in Europe, July 28, 2014. (Israel Bardugo / The Israeli-Jewish Congress)
Amanda Borschel-Dan
Amanda Borschel-Dan is The Times of Israel's Jewish World editor.
The room was packed to capacity at the Knesset on Monday for an emergency meeting on the “rising wave of violent anti-Semitic and anti-Israel demonstrations sweeping Europe,” with MKs and Diaspora Jewish leaders offering testimony and issuing condemnations.
Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email
and never miss our top stories Free Sign up!
The meeting, chaired by MK Yoel Razvozov, saw representatives of Jewish communities and diplomats from countries including France, Greece, Hungary, Belgium, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Denmark, Austria, Germany and Italy speaking at a session which went well overtime but ended inconclusively.
Members of Knesset bemoaned the upswing in anti-Semitism since the start of Operation Protective Edge on July 8, and security and academic experts attempted to drive home the dire importance of concrete steps to counter and educate against the rising anti-Semitism throughout Europe.
Vladimir Sloutzker, head of the Israeli-Jewish Congress, said starkly, “Never before since the Holocaust have we seen such a situation as today. We are potentially looking at the beginning of another Holocaust now.”
“These events will only grow in scale across Europe,” he warned.
The Holocaust and the pre-war period were recurrent themes in several speakers’ statements.
Nathan Norman Gelbart, the head of Germany’s Keren Hayesod (United Jewish Appeal), reported that the German Jewish community is scared “because these are things that have not occurred since 1933.” He cited demonstrators shouting “death to the Jews” and other anti-Semitic slogans.
“These demonstrators are marching in the heart of Berlin shouting these slogans, in front of the police. Shouting ‘Jews are pigs’ is an incitement: Why isn’t the Germany police taking the details of these people shouting in an aggressive way ‘Death to the Jews’?” asked Gelbart.
Hebrew University Prof. Robert Wistrich, an expert on anti-Semitism, said, “We have entered a new, very difficult era in all of Europe.” He said there is “a bit” of awareness in some governments, noting France’s aggressive stance against anti-Semitism in any form, from top government officials on down, “but we see it doesn’t make much of a difference — though it is important.”
Wistrich noted that years of “one-sided” anti-Israel media reports have led to an image of the Jewish state that is far removed from reality. Additionally, the constellation of extremists on the political far right and far left, along with jihadist immigrants, have created a new anti-Semitic climate in Europe, he said.
There is no longer a facade of anti-Zionist expressions not being anti-Semitic, said Wistrich. “You just need to hear the rhetoric to believe. We need a much deeper discussion; we’re just at the outer layer of the problem.”
Various European embassy officials obligingly reiterated their countries’ severe condemnation of anti-Semitism, but attributed official inaction during the recent anti-Israel protests to citizens’ right of free expression against Operation Protective Edge.
Denmark’s Ambassador Jesper Vahr said, “Clearly some of the events we have seen recently are despicable and intolerable.” He added, however, that Denmark “as a society defends the right of people who have a critical position to the Gaza operation.”
Meeting chair Razvozov rebutted, saying that “there is a difference between free speech and incendiary speech.” MK Yoav Bentsur agreed, saying, “It is impossible that in 2014 a Jew needs to take off Jewish symbols before walking the streets of Europe… if you don’t take care of the problem now, it will soon be too late.”
The looming existential threat to the Jewish community was touched upon by Esther Voet, director of the Centre of Information and Documentation on Israel (CIDI) in the Netherlands. She said although she is seeing more balanced reporting in the press versus during 2009′s Operation Cast Lead, “in the Netherlands we are very aware that it’s not about if something will happen in our country, but when.”
Benjamin Albalas, president of the Jewish Community of Greece, raised a further warning.
“The attitude in Europe is promoting delegitimization of the State of Israel… and is a first step toward the intimidation of the Jews’ right to live in their own home countries,” said Albalas.
Several Israeli speakers warned that the discussion in the Knesset was only touching the tip of the iceberg of the pervasive anti-Semitism in Europe today.
Knesset diplomatic adviser Oded Ben-Hur said, “Unfortunately, the situation is much worse than what you are describing… One of the problems is not just in knowing who is anti-Semitic, but to know that there is a whole swath of people who don’t even know they’re anti-Semitic — but they are.”
One of the very few to offer concrete suggestions, Ben-Hur suggested an increase in interfaith education.
“Emissaries talk until they are blue in the face and there is no end to this discussion… In the name of religion, more people have been killed than in plagues or disasters. There is ignorance between religions: We are comfortable in our own boxes, but we need to show we are the sons of the same God, and not to murder in the name of the God who created us all,” said Ben-Hur.
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