Category Archives: Israel

Another Faded Pink Line

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“I think it’s fair to say the parties are planning to stay past the 30th to keep negotiating as we have always said we may have to,” the US State Department official said.

Who needs deadlines?

There’s this killer [sic], too:

The final nuclear agreement is meant to block any smooth Iranian path to nuclear weapons by committing to Tehran to tight inspections and concrete measures to wind back their nuclear program for 10 to 15 years.

Not block Iran from getting nuclear weapons, only to make it more “difficult.”

A UN Group May Have Committed War Crimes

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Joe Lauria’s article in Monday’s Wall Street Journal was headlined U.N.: Israel and Palestinian Groups May Have Committed War Crimes, but here’s the thing: the United Nations Human Rights Commission is accusing Israel of war crimes for defending itself against what its report is only willing to “strongly suggest” was the Palestinian Authority’s terrorist war against Israel.

Oh, wait: the UN doesn’t even address the Palestinian Authority in any serious sense—in only goes on about “Palestinian armed groups” as the ones committing the terrorism and the PA’s claimed inability to control its own territory. Never mind that the PA’s terror war was done explicitly under the auspices of the Hamas branch of the unity government that is the Palestinian Authority.

The UN did decry the toll,

In Gaza, the scale of the devastation was unprecedented. The death toll alone speaks volumes: 2,251 Palestinians were killed, including 1,462 Palestinian civilians with 299 women and 551 children.

Never mind that the vast majority of these civilian deaths were from Hamas shooting from residential buildings from which the civilian occupants were prevented from leaving—they were shields for the terrorists and bodies for the publicity.

The UN’s report also had this:

In the cases in which attacks were directed at military objectives located amidst or in close vicinity to civilians or civilian objects, mortars are not the most appropriate weapon. The imprecise nature of mortars makes it difficult for an attacking party using this weapon in an area in which there is a concentration of civilians to distinguish between civilians and civilian objects and the military objective of the attack, and to limit its effects as required by international humanitarian law. Therefore, the use of such weapons with wide area effects by Palestinian armed groups against targets located in Israeli towns and villages, and the possible indiscriminate effects, are likely to constitute a violation of the prohibition of indiscriminate attacks.

The UN, though, carefully omits the reason those military objectives were “located amidst or in close vicinity to civilians or civilian objects” in the first place. The PA were using those civilians as shields and as body count.

Even though the Israelis were at pains to warn the occupants of these putative “civilian objects” prior to a strike, the report’s “investigators” were careful to trot out their witnesses who said there were no warnings. Except for a slip of the tongue by a UNRWA “witness.”

The UN, in its report, also made light of its own UNHCR storing many of the PA’s weapons for it and that when caught the UNRWA turned those weapons over to the PA. The report does decry Israel, though, for warning the UNRWA (that tongue slip) of an impending strike against a PA (the report says “Hamas”) arsenal staged below a cluster of UNRWA buildings—and then carrying out the strike.

The UN’s report goes on in this vein.

The UNHRC is complicit after the fact in the Palestinian Authority’s terror war fought from Gaza last summer.

Iran and our State Department

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The guy who sits in the Secretary of State’s chair, John Kerry, had this to say regarding this administration’s “negotiations” about Iran’s nuclear weapons program. In particular, he was talking about this administration’s give a hoot attitude toward nearby history.

The possible military dimensions, frankly, gets distorted a little bit in some of the discussions in that we’re not fixated on Iran specifically accounting for what they did at one point in time or another.

We know what they did. We have no doubt. We have absolute knowledge with respect to certain military activities they were engaged in. What we’re concerned about is going forward. It’s critical to us to know that going forward, those activities have been stopped, and that we can account for that in a legitimate way.

But that’s how you know they might be telling the truth about “those activities” going forward. You match what you know with absolute knowledge (Kerry’s naïveté regarding the perfection of intelligence would be cute if it weren’t so dangerous) with what the Iranians tell you. Deviations between the two—since you already know these things without doubt—are demonstrations of Iran lying, and so you have no way of knowing that they’ve stopped “those activities.”

One more thing regarding “military dimensions…gets distorted a little bit:” for what do you think the Iranians are building their nuclear weapons except for those weapons’ military dimension?

It’s going to be a long and dangerous 18 months.

Some Thoughts on US-Israeli Relations and Iran

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An Israeli has some. Michael Oren, lately Israeli Ambassador to the US and current Member of Knesset had this, in part, from his op-ed in Monday’s Walls Street Journal.

The abandonment of the “no daylight” and “no surprises” principles climaxed over the Iranian nuclear program. Throughout my years in Washington, I participated in intimate and frank discussions with US officials on the Iranian program. But parallel to the talks came administration statements and leaks—for example, each time Israeli warplanes reportedly struck Hezbollah-bound arms convoys in Syria—intended to deter Israel from striking Iran pre-emptively.

Finally, in 2014, Israel discovered that its primary ally had for months been secretly negotiating with its deadliest enemy. The talks resulted in an interim agreement that the great majority of Israelis considered a “bad deal” with an irrational, genocidal regime. Mr Obama, though, insisted that Iran was a rational and potentially “very successful regional power.”

The daylight between Israel and the US could not have been more blinding. And for Israelis who repeatedly heard the president pledge that he “had their backs” and “was not bluffing” about the military option, only to watch him tell an Israeli interviewer that “a military solution cannot fix” the Iranian nuclear threat, the astonishment could not have been greater.

What he said.

Then he concluded:

Now, with the Middle East unraveling and dependable allies a rarity, the US and Israel must restore the “no daylight” and “no surprises” principles. Israel has no alternative to America as a source of security aid, diplomatic backing and overwhelming popular support. The US has no substitute for the state that, though small, remains democratic, militarily and technologically robust, strategically located and unreservedly pro-American.

The past six years have seen successive crises in US-Israeli relations, and there is a need to set the record straight. But the greater need is to ensure a future of minimal mistakes and prevent further erosion of our vital alliance.

That, Sir, must unfortunately await a change in the administration. I hope and pray that Israel can hang on that long.

A Fundamental Misunderstanding

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Jeffrey Goldberg drew it out of President Barack Obama in Goldberg’s interview with Obama for a piece in The Atlantic. Unfortunately, Goldberg didn’t pursue it, perhaps because he has the same misconceived notion. The misunderstanding is about Iran; here is the core of the exchange that demonstrates Obama’s error.

Goldberg: Stay with Iran for one more moment. I just want you to help me square something. So you’ve argued, quite eloquently in fact, that the Iranian regime has at its highest levels been infected by a kind of anti-Semitic worldview. …you’ve argued that people who subscribe to an anti-Semitic worldview, who explain the world through the prism of anti-Semitic ideology, are not rational, are not built for success, are not grounded in a reality that you and I might understand. And yet, you’ve also argued that the regime in Tehran—a regime you’ve described as anti-Semitic, among other problems that they have—is practical, and is responsive to incentive, and shows signs of rationality. So I don’t understand how these things fit together in your mind.

Obama: Well the fact that you are anti-Semitic, or racist, doesn’t preclude you from being interested in survival. It doesn’t preclude you from being rational about the need to keep your economy afloat; it doesn’t preclude you from making strategic decisions about how you stay in power; and so the fact that the supreme leader is anti-Semitic doesn’t mean that this overrides all of his other considerations.

There is Obama’s error in all its glory. The “you” here aren’t the Iranian people, they’re the Iranian government leadership, men such as Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani. The concerns of the Iranian people related to survival or keeping an economy afloat don’t matter. Nor does any concern for power on the part of the Iranian people.

What matters is what matters to those men of the Iranian government—Khamenei, Rouhani, et al. And those men don’t care about the Iranian economy beyond getting the wherewithal to build nuclear weapons. Those men don’t care particularly about their survival or staying in power beyond using those nuclear weapons. Those men have only one goal, and it’s been their goal and that of their predecessors for over 35 years: destroy Israel. And, hopefully, destroy us. It is the men of the Iranian government who say Israel must be wiped from the map; it is Khamenei who demands the destruction of Israel and chants, during negotiations over their nuclear weapons program, “Of course yes, death to America….”

It’s also these men who likely will die in a nuclear attack on Israel and the response to that mass murder, along with too many of the Iranian people. But that’s an outcome devoutly to be wished from Khamenei’s and Rouhani’s perspective: that’s martyrdom and the path to Heavenly glory. Yes, those men are entirely rational, and every move they’ve made has been consistent with attaining their primary goal. A goal and a cost of which Obama has not the first minim of a clue.

It’s going to be a long and dangerous year and a half. And the Democrats’ proposed replacement for after those 18 months has already failed to answer her own three am phone call.