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Israel has a birthday tomorrow. Melanie Phillips does the honors.
What would Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion have said if, on the day that he declared the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, he had known that six decades thence Israel would be encircled by its enemies, hopelessly outnumbered and fighting for its existence? He would surely have said: so what’s new?
Tomorrow, on 8 May, Israel celebrates the 60th anniversary of that declaration. With every decade that it clocks up, people ask the same question: will Israel still be there for the next one? It is indeed astonishing that it has not only survived but is flourishing. Its situation as a permanently embattled nation is unique. On the day after Ben-Gurion declared its independence, six Arab armies invaded and tried to wipe it out. With the current exception of Egypt and Jordan, the Arab and Muslim world has been trying ever since.
Israel is the only country whose creation was approved by the UN; yet it is the only country whose legitimacy is called into question. It is the only country which the world requires to compromise with its Palestinian Arab attackers and accede to their demands, even while they are firing rockets at its schools and houses and blowing up its citizens. It is the only country which continues to provide electricity and basic services to those attackers and routinely treats thousands of Palestinians in its own hospitals, even those who have Israeli blood on their hands. And yet it is the only country which, in the court of public opinion, is condemned for behaving ‘disproportionately’ when it uses targeted military means to defend itself, and is accused of causing the very ‘Nazi’ or ‘apartheid’ atrocities of which it itself is the victim. …
Bret Stephens examines the enmity visited on Israel.
… For reasons both telling and mysterious, Israel has become unpopular among that segment of public opinion that calls itself progressive. This is the same progressive segment that believes in women’s rights, gay rights, the rights to a fair trial and to appeal, freedom of speech and conscience, judicial checks on parliamentary authority. These are rights that exist in Israel and nowhere else in the Middle East. So why is it that the country that is most sympathetic to progressive values gets the least of progressive sympathies?
The answer, it is said, is that as democratic as Israel may be in its domestic politics, it is nothing but bloody-minded as far as its foes are concerned. In May 2002, at the height of the so-called al-Aqsa Intifada, I reviewed Israeli and Palestinian casualty figures, sticking to Palestinian sources for Palestinian numbers and Israeli sources for Israeli ones. Much was then being made in the Western media of the fact that three times as many Palestinians as Israelis had been killed in the conflict – evidence, supposedly, that despite the suicide bombings, lynchings and roadside ambushes perpetrated daily against Israelis, Palestinians were the ones who really were getting it in the neck.
But drilling down into the data, something interesting turned up. At the time, 1,296 Palestinians had been killed by Israelis – of whom a grand total of 37, or 2.8%, were female. By contrast, of the 496 Israelis killed by Palestinians (including 138 soldiers and policemen), there were 126 female fatalities, or 25%.
To be female is a fairly reliable indicator of being a noncombatant. Females are also half the population. If Israel had been guilty of indiscriminate violence against Palestinians, the ratio of male-to-female fatalities would not have been 35-1.
These are not complicated facts. Yet the effort to think them through is rarely made. Is it laziness? I think not, because the image of demonic Israel, presented in copiously footnoted and ingeniously mendacious books like “The Israel Lobby,” is the product of a great deal of effort. …
Ever the combatant, Caroline Glick comments on two views of Israel at 60.
Israel’s 60th Independence Day is an excuse for the international media to weigh in on the state of the Jewish state. Given the anti-Israel bias of most of the international media, not surprisingly, most of the reports reveal less about Israel’s status at 60 than they reveal about how anti-Zionists perceive Israel at 60.
Two critiques – both cover stories of major magazines – stand out in this regard. In Canada, Maclean’s magazine’s May 5 cover pictures three Israeli soldiers struggling to raise the national flag. The headline reads, “Why Israel Can’t Survive.”
In the US, the cover of The Atlantic Magazine’s May edition sports a Star of David painted in Palestinian colors of red, black and green ensconced in a PLO flag. The headline asks, rhetorically, “Is Israel finished?”
The authors of the two articles – Michael Petrou in Maclean’s and Jeffery Goldberg in The Atlantic come to their subject from different angles. Petrou writes as an emotionally disengaged observer. Goldberg, who made aliya in the 1980s, writes as a disillusioned Zionist who abandoned Israel and moved back to America. Petrou writes of Israel’s certain demise with amoral detachment. Goldberg’s dispatch is a deeply emotional attempt to justify his decision to abandon Israel. …
Michael Oren, author of Power, Faith, and Fantasy: The United States in the Middle East, 1776 to 2006 reviews the relationship of Israel and the United States.
President George W. Bush will soon make his second visit to Israel in less than six months, this time to celebrate the country’s 60th anniversary. The candidates for the presidency, Republican and Democratic alike, have all traveled to Israel and affirmed their commitment to its security. So have hundreds of congressmen.
American engineers, meanwhile, are collaborating with their Israeli counterparts in developing advanced defense systems. American soldiers are learning antiterrorist techniques from the Israeli army.
Israel is the only Middle Eastern country where the American flag is rarely (if ever) burned in protest – indeed, some Israelis fly that flag on their own independence day. And avenues in major American cities are named for Yitzhak Rabin and Golda Meir. Arguably, there is no alliance in the world today more durable and multifaceted than that between the United States and Israel.
Yet the bonds between the two countries were not always so strong. For much of Israel’s history, America was a distant and not always friendly power. …
Thomas Sowell compares the preaching of Obama and his pastor.
… Like everyone else, I have also been hearing a lot lately about Jeremiah Wright, former pastor of the church that Barack Obama has belonged to for 20 years.
Both men, in their different ways, have for decades been promoting the far left vision of victimization and grievances– Wright from his pulpit and Obama in roles ranging from community organizer to the United States Senate, where he has had the farthest left voting record.
Later, when the ultimate political prize– the White House– loomed on the horizon, Obama did a complete makeover, now portraying himself as a healer of divisions.
The difference between Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright is that they are addressing different audiences, using different styles adapted to those audiences.
It is a difference between upscale demagoguery and ghetto demagoguery, playing the audience for suckers in both cases. …
Walter Williams has fun with predictions from environmentalists.
Now that another Earth Day has come and gone, let’s look at some environmentalist predictions that they would prefer we forget.
At the first Earth Day celebration, in 1969, environmentalist Nigel Calder warned, “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.” C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization said, “The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.” In 1968, Professor Paul Ehrlich, Vice President Gore’s hero and mentor, predicted there would be a major food shortage in the U.S. and “in the 1970s … hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” Ehrlich forecasted that 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989, and by 1999 the U.S. population would have declined to 22.6 million. Ehrlich’s predictions about England were gloomier: “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” …
John Stossel says the left is wrong. He interviews Arianna Huffington.
… Like most liberals, she believes America needs more regulation. OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) should be strengthened to protect workers.
I tried to acquaint her with the facts. While it’s true that since OSHA started, deadly job accidents have dropped, the truth is, deaths were dropping before OSHA. Between the late 1930s and 1971, job fatalities fell from more than 40 to fewer than 20 per 100,000 workers. After OSHA was passed, fatalities continued to fall, but no faster than before. It’s misleading to credit regulation for the improvement. Government gets in front of a parade and pretends to lead it.
Huffington’s reply: “If you were the husband of one of the women who died recently because OSHA regulations were not sufficiently implemented, you would not be so cavalier about the speed at which things get better.”
As if the government could guarantee zero job deaths. …
ChiTrib editors on the real economy.