RUTHFULLY YOURS

Generals renowned for strategy and bravery in war often make very poor national leaders. I speak here not of tin pot dictators and “generalisimos” whose chests are festooned with medals and ribbons, but of Israeli generals. As Martin Sherman, Israel’s superb commentator, wrote in The Jerusalem Post over a year ago in “Goofy Generals Galore”: “Virtually every time top military figures have departed from their field of expertise and ventured into one where they have none (politics), they have–almost invariably—been disastrously wrong.”

Moshe Dayan was commander of the Jerusalem front in Israel’s War of Independence and Chief of Staff during the 1956 Suez War. In 1967, while Minister of Defense, he became the symbol of the IDF. Probably the most famous photograph of the 1967 war, is that of Dayan praying at the just-liberated Western Wall. His downfall came when he was blamed for the intelligence failures prior to the 1973 war. Inexplicably in 1977 Menachem Begin restored him to public life by making him Foreign Minister. Dayan played a critical role in implementing the infamous Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt. As lead negotiator, he held secret meetings with officials in India, Iran, England and Morocco and prodded a reluctant Begin to accept all Sadat’s demands. The resulting peace agreement gave Israel nothing but promises, which were flouted by Egypt before the ink was dry. In return Israel surrendered the entire Sinai and agreed to give ‘autonomy” to the Arab residents of Judea and Samaria. As Henry Kissinger later commented, “autonomy” was the embryo of partition and independence.

Yigal Allon was a respected general who served as Prime Minister for three weeks in 1969 when Levi Eshkol died suddenly. Shortly after the 1967 war his Allon Plan proposed the first post war surrender: it proposed partitioning the West Bank between Israel and Jordan, creating a Druze state in the Golan Heights, and returning most of the Sinai to Arab control. It was immediately rejected by King Hussein and ridiculed by the other Arab states, but it laid bare Israel’s willingness to divide the area, laying the ground for successive American sponsored “peace processes.”

The next general to become Prime Minister was Yitzhak Rabin who served twice, from 1974 to 1955 and again from July 1992 to November 1995 when he was assassinated. While during his first tenure he oversaw the hugely successful Entebbe rescue, during his second term he signed off on the Oslo agreement which was followed by a large and bloody siege of terrorism and continues to have catastrophic consequences for Israel. He shared a Nobel peace prize with Yasser Arafat for his disastrous actions.

Lt. General Ehud Barak is the most highly decorated soldier in Israel’s history and was Chief of Staff from 1991 to 1995. In 1999 he won against Netanyahu and became Israel’s tenth Prime Minister. He promptly resumed negotiations with the PLO and stated: “Every attempt to keep hold of the West Bank and Gaza leads, necessarily, to either a nondemocratic or a non-Jewish state. Because if the Palestinians vote, then it is a binational state, and if they don’t vote it is an apartheid state.”

This was mild compared to his recent statements. As David Hornik one of Israel’s best commentators points out: “In a speech on June 16, 2016 Barak—who, as Netanyahu’s defense minister, had warned steadily that time was running out to stop Iran’s nuclear program—said that Israel faced “no existential threats.” He went on to accuse Netanyahu of “Hitlerizing” threats to Israel, declaring “Hitlerization by the prime minister cheapens the Holocaust…. Our situation is grave even without [comparisons to] Hitler….”

Barak went on to give his own outrageous mis-characterization of the current situation:

“Only a blind person or a sheep, an ignoramus or someone jaded, can’t see the erosion of democracy and the ‘budding fascism.…’ If it looks like budding fascism, walks like budding fascism and quacks like budding fascism, that’s the situation…. In capitals around the world—in London and Washington, in Berlin and Paris, in Moscow and Beijing—no leader believes a word coming out of Netanyahu’s mouth or his government’s.”

Mr. Green is a professor at Rutgers Law School and the author of “Thirteen Ways to Steal a Bicycle: Theft Law in the Information Age” (Harvard University Press, 2012).

For more than 20 years, I have taught college graduates, most in their mid-20s, the basics of criminal law and procedure. In all that time, at half a dozen law schools, I’ve had the daily opportunity to observe some of the miracles that modern technology has wrought in the legal academy: Computerized research. PowerPoint. No more handwritten blue books!

But now and then, carrying out my institutional duty to observe classes taught by younger colleagues, I move from the front of the classroom to the rear. What a revelation to see what the students are up to. While virtually all of them have open laptops and most are taking notes, many seem more intent on emailing and texting, posting on social media, reading news sites, shopping online, or looking at YouTube videos. I recently saw one student systematically checking out law-firm websites for summer-associate salaries. Another spent an entire class streaming an NHL hockey game.

If this is what the students are doing while I’m sitting behind them, observing the class, I can only imagine what they’re doing when I’m up front, lecturing.

Has the time come to ban laptops from my classes? The arguments for doing so seem pretty straightforward. As common sense suggests, and a March 2013 study by Faria Sana, Tina Weston and Nicholas J. Cepeda confirmed, students who are multitasking during class have less understanding and recall of what’s being discussed.

The study also found that “participants who were in direct view of a multitasking peer scored lower on a test compared with those who were not.” So the student with the game on his laptop is also making it harder for the student sitting behind him to focus.

My school has spent a fortune for classrooms with comfortable seating, quality lighting and good acoustics. Don’t we also owe students a physical environment in which they’re not bombarded with the laptop-generated equivalent of Times Square?

Even when multitasking is blocked, students who take notes on a computer tend to perform worse than students who take notes by hand, according to a 2014 study by Pam A. Mueller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer. They found that laptop users were basically creating a transcript of the lecture, while those taking notes by hand were synthesizing the information. This confirms my own experience when meeting with students who appear to have a nearly verbatim record of what I said in class but fail to grasp what I was trying to convey. It’s like making a cake recipe from scratch, measuring out all the ingredients perfectly, but forgetting to put the concoction in the oven. CONTINUE AT SITE

I have great respect for Fred Maroun, however, the UN Partition Plan of 1947 was the most egregious betrayal of the Jews. On 29 November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted 33 to 13 (with ten abstentions) to implement the new partition as Resolution 181. Absent in all the media hailing of the “compromise” was any mention that the Jews of Palestine had already relinquished 75 percent of the area promised in the Balfour Declaration. Media and diplomats alike would declare that the Jews were gaining 53% of “Palestine” when in fact they were left with roughly 12 percent. rsk
We Arabs managed our relationship with Israel atrociously, but the worst of all is the ongoing situation of the Palestinians. Our worst mistake was in not accepting the United Nations partition plan of 1947.

Perhaps one should not launch wars if one is not prepared for the results of possibly losing them.

The Jews are not keeping the Arabs in camps, we are.

Jordan integrated some refugees, but not all. We could have proven that we Arabs are a great and noble people, but instead we showed the world, as we continue to do, that our hatred towards each other and towards Jews is far greater than any concept of purported Arab solidarity.

This is part one of a two-part series. The second part will examine what we Arabs can do differently today.

In the current state of the relationship between the Arab world and Israel, we see a patchwork of hostility, tense peace, limited cooperation, calm, and violence. We Arabs managed our relationship with Israel atrociously, but the worst of all is the ongoing situation of the Palestinians.
The Original Mistake

Our first mistake lasted centuries, and occurred well before Israel’s declaration of independence in May 1948. It consisted of not recognizing Jews as equals.

As documented by a leading American scholar of Jewish history in the Muslim world, Mark R. Cohen, during that era, “Jews shared with other non-Muslims the status of dhimmis [non-Muslims who have to pay protection money and follow separate debasing laws to be tolerated in Muslim-controlled areas] … New houses of worship were not to be built and old ones could not be repaired. They were to act humbly in the presence of Muslims. In their liturgical practice they had to honor the preeminence of Islam. They were further required to differentiate themselves from Muslims by their clothing and by eschewing symbols of honor. Other restrictions excluded them from positions of authority in Muslim government”.

As demonstrators in the United States protest against recent incident in which police officers killed African American men, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) has found a way to blame Israel.

New York University’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine shared a post on its Facebook page claiming that “the same forces behind the genocide of black people in America are behind the genocide of Palestinians.”

Aside from the extreme hyperbole in describing growth from 1.3 million to 12.3 million over the past 70 years as “genocide,” the accusations bring to mind anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jews controlling the world.

SJP suggests that the Jewish State is responsible for all actions taken by police in the United States because some police officers spend a few days training in Israel.

Law enforcement agencies around the world frequently learn from each other, and officers from the US also regularly train with their foreign counterparts. Yet no other country is accused of being secretly responsible for the actions of each local station.

There is a widely held belief that in Spain, during the European Middle Ages, Islam, Christianity and Judaism co-existed peacefully and fruitfully under a tolerant and enlightened Islamic hegemony. Dario Fernandez-Morera, associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University in the US, with a PhD from Harvard, has written a stunning book that upends this myth.

The myth itself has been a comforting and even inspiring story that has underpinned the so-called Toledo Principles regarding religious tolerance in our time. It has buttressed the belief that Islam was a higher civilisation than that of medieval Europe in the eighth to 12th centuries and that the destruction of this enlightened and sophisticated Andalusia should be lamented.

The great Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, a century ago, saw it that way. US President Barack Obama and The Economist magazine have both very recently cited Muslim Andalusia as evidence that Islam has been a religion of peace and tolerance. In short, the myth of Andalusia has been a beacon of hope for working with Islam in today’s world with a common commitment to civilised norms.

This vision was spelled out in Maria Rosa Menocal’s The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (2002) and reinforced by David Levering Lewis’s God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 (2008). But it has deep roots. Edward Gibbon, in his famous 18th-century history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, wrote in glowing terms of the 10th-century Umayyad caliphate in Spain as a beacon of enlightenment, learning and urban living, at a time when Europe was plunged in bigotry, ignorance and poverty.

As someone who has long taken this vision for granted, it came as a considerable shock to me to discover that the conventional wisdom is quite unfounded. In The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise, Fernandez-Morera systematically refutes the beguiling fable. The picture he draws is starkly different from the conventional one, troubling in what it reveals and compelling in its arguments.

If we are to satisfactorily resolve current disputes about Islamophobia and the future of Islam as a world religion, this book is required reading. International reviewers have greeted it as a desperately needed corrective to delusion and propaganda. That will invite pushback from those who either remain committed to the myth or believe it is too important a beacon to allow it to be extinguished.

Israel has announced that it will be building 800 new housing units. Of these, 560 will be in Maale Adumim, a town of 40,000 located four miles east of Jerusalem, and 240 will be in three Jerusalem neighborhoods.

State Department spokesman John Kirby reacted with unusually strong language:

If it’s true, this … would be the latest step in what seems to be the systematic process of land seizures, settlement expansions, and legalization of outposts that is fundamentally undermining the prospects for a two-state solution. We oppose steps like these which we believe are counterproductive.

Kirby added that Washington was “deeply concerned”:

This action risks entrenching a one-state reality and raises serious questions about Israel’s intentions.

It should be added that Maale Adumim and the three “East Jerusalem” (actually eastern, northern, and southern Jerusalem) neighborhoods are located on land that was illegally occupied by Jordan from 1949 to 1967, and that Israel seized from Jordan in the 1967 Six Day War after Jordan attacked Israel.

It should not, though, have to be added.

The notion that Israel, by building homes in such places, jeopardizes chances of resolving the Palestinian issue is fundamentally flawed, and the State Department — if it were not wedded to that notion — would be able to find out why by doing a little fact-checking.

As Evelyn Gordon illuminates, since Benjamin Netanyahu was elected prime minister in 2009 (he has been reelected twice), Israel has not been engaging in a “systematic process of land seizures” or anything of the kind. Actually, construction in “settlements” — a term now used even for Jerusalem neighborhoods — has slowed to a crawl:

As data from Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics unambiguously shows, since taking office … Netanyahu has built far fewer units in the settlements than any of his predecessors. True, he periodically announces grandiose building plans, as he did this week. But most are quietly frozen again immediately afterward; very few ever get built.

Gordon also reports on an investigation by Shaul Arieli — a leftist Israel who opposes Israeli construction in land previously occupied by Jordan — that finds:

In 2015, as in the preceding five years, almost 90 percent [of population increase in the “settlements” was] a result of natural population growth.

In other words — scandalous as some may find it — Israelis living in these communities have babies.

The Obama administration has announced that it will not cut the U.S. troop deployment in Afghanistan to 5,000 as planned, but will leave 8,400 soldiers to support the Afghan government in its fight against the Taliban. President Obama said, “Compared to the 100,000 troops we once had there, today, fewer than 10,000 remain.”

That is true, but why 8,400? Why not 50,000? Why not zero?

In making his announcement, President Obama said, “Even as we remain relentless against those who threaten us, we are no longer engaged in a major ground war in Afghanistan.” That’s interesting, but exactly who in Afghanistan threatens the United States? And how relentless can we be with 8,400 soldiers?

In 2010, Dr. Steven Metz of the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College wrote that the Obama administration’s Afghan strategy (like that of the Bush administration before him) was based on three assumptions:

Al-Qaeda “needs state support or sanctuary.”
If the Taliban regains control of Afghanistan, “it will again provide bases and sanctuary to al Qaeda.”
If the Taliban “did, for some reason, provide support and sanctuary to al Qaeda, this would increase the threat to the United States and other NATO countries.”

Assuming that Metz is right about what the U.S. feared/fears emerging from Afghanistan, America clearly has not been successful in creating a secure Afghanistan able to defend itself from the Taliban and repel al-Qaeda. Broad Taliban military successes are the reason the president changed the number of troops he’s willing to leave there. Al-Qaeda remains a force, albeit less of one as ISIS has grown, but that may not be a permanent situation.

It’s not that we haven’t done things.

We tried ousting the Taliban ourselves and tried training Afghan forces to do it. We tried instituting Western-style elections and changing the role of women in society. We provided $110 billion in civilian and (mainly) military aid between 2002 and 2015. We tried more troops and fewer troops. We tried fighting on the ground and supporting Afghans from the air. We tried drones in Pakistan and supporting the Pakistani government to the tune of billions in military aid every year, including $25.91 billion between 2001 and 2013.

On Monday, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon predictably assailed
Israel’s announced decision to build 800 new apartments in Ma’aleh
Adumim and eastern Jerusalem. He noted that just four days earlier,
the Middle East Quartet (i.e. the U.S., EU, UN and Russia) had issued
a report deeming settlement construction an obstacle to peace. What
Ban didn’t mention is that just a few days before that report came
out, a leading Israeli leftist expert on the settlements published a
comprehensive rebuttal of this claim, providing facts and figures
showing that the settlements effectively aren’t growing at all.

This juxtaposition begs an obvious question: If the world is going to
accuse Israel of “massive settlement construction” that “threatens the
two-state solution” when even leading leftists admit this is a lie,
why should Israel continue to pay the very real price exacted by
freezing settlement construction?

Shaul Arieli, who published the rebuttal in Haaretz last week, is
hardly an apologist for the settlements. Since retiring from the army
as a colonel in 2001, he has become a prominent peace activist. He

helped produce the Geneva Initiative, a nongovernmental template for
an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. He’s on the board of the
Council for Peace and Security, a group of former security officials
that advocates for a peace deal. He has been involved in numerous
legal cases challenging the West Bank security fence. He gives
lectures and tours on the feasibility of a peace agreement, and he’s
considered a leading expert on demarcating a future
Israeli-Palestinian border.

The long-term trends of US-Israel relations do not hinge solely/mostly on US presidents, as has been documented since Israel’s establishment in 1948, and especially since the early 1980s, when – in spite of systematic presidential pressure on Israel – bilateral industrial, commercial, scientific, technological, agricultural, homeland security and defense cooperation have surged beyond expectations.

For instance, President Truman pressured Prime Minister Ben Gurion to end the “occupation” of West Jerusalem and parts of the Negev and Galilee; President Johnson pressured Prime Minister Eshkol to refrain from preempting the concerted Arab attack, reuniting Jerusalem and building in “occupied areas”; President Nixon pressured Prime Minister Golda Meir to end “occupation” and refrain from building in East Jerusalem; President Carter pressured Prime Minister Begin to focus on withdrawal from Judea & Samaria, rather than on peace with Egypt; President Reagan pressured Prime Minister Begin to rescind the application of Israeli law to the Golan Heights and end the hot-pursuit of the PLO in Lebanon; President Bush pressured Prime Minister Shamir to recognize the PLO and refrain from construction in Judea & Samaria.

But, notwithstanding presidential pressure – which entailed arms-embargos, suspended deliveries of advanced military systems, denial of loan guarantees and brutal condemnations – Israel’s role as America’s Major Non-NATO Ally and the most effective and unconditional geo-strategic ally has catapulted to unprecedented levels.

The assumption that US-Israel relations are shaped from the top down, and determined by US presidents and “elites,” constitutes a slap in the face of the US democracy, which highlights the American constituent as its chief axis, emitting the thundering battle cry, which no elected official can afford to ignore: “we shall remember in November!” According to the annual February Gallup poll of country-favorability – despite the tension between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu and the ongoing criticism by the Department of State (since 1948!) and the “elite” US media and academia – Israel ranks systematically among the most favorable countries, enjoying the support of 71% of the US constituency, compared with the Palestinian Authority’s 19%.

Muslims, we are told, are shocked and appalled by the Jihadist terror attacks during Ramadan. Ramadan, we are incessantly lectured, is a time of fasting and prayer. Not a time for murder.

Islamic violence during Ramadan is as shocking as rain falling on Seattle.

The Religion of Peace’s current Ramadan Bombathon score is up to 1723. Last year it approached 3,000. In 2014, it didn’t even hit 2,400. In 2013, it was a mere 1,651. So Islamic violence during Ramadan has clearly gotten worse, but when you’re massacring over a thousand people, doubling the total doesn’t count as shocking. It’s certainly appalling, but not to Muslims who worship Mohammed’s legacy.

And Mohammed slaughtered non-Muslims during Ramadan.

The practice to avoid fighting during Ramadan actually dates back to the pre-Islamic Arabs whom Mohammed either slaughtered or forced to convert. This practice may have been Christian in origin. Ramadan is often viewed as a Muslim appropriation of Lent. The Truce and Peace of God was meant to restrain fighting during the season of Lent. While they postdate Mohammed, so does Islamic scripture.

Whatever the origin however, it was Muslims who exploited the sacred months of other religions to make war upon them. That is still how Ramadan continues to be practiced by Muslims.

Mohammed had a shortage of new ideas, but a great appetite for slaughter. The Battle of Badr began when a group of Mohammed’s caravan robbers attacked a non-Muslim caravan during the “sacred months” that his Muslim followers had appropriated.

By the time it ended, Ramadan had been covered in blood as, in much the same style as ISIS, Mohammed’s gang of Jihadists butchered and beheaded the men who fell into their hands.

Like most illiterates, Mohammed harbored a special hatred for poets and had one prisoner who had written poetry mocking him, beheaded. Typical scenes from the aftermath of the battle were of the same character that we have seen in ISIS videos.

“Then I cut off his head and brought it to the apostle saying, ‘This is the head of the enemy of Allah, Abu Jahl.’… I threw his head before the apostle and he gave thanks to Allah.”

The bodies of the dead killed during this “sacred” time were piled into a well and mocked by Mohammed. If massacring non-Muslims during Ramadan is radical or extremist behavior, then the founder of Islam was a radical extremist.