Abrabanel: Musings on the Jewish condition

Livni on Thursday:

“My solution for maintaining a Jewish and democratic State of Israel is to have two nation-states with certain concessions and with clear red lines,” Livni told a group of students at a Tel Aviv high school. “And among other things, I will also be able to approach the Palestinian residents of Israel, those whom we call Israeli Arabs, and tell them, ‘your national solution lies elsewhere.’”

Abu Ala over the weekend:

There will be no room for Jews or settlements in the West Bank because their presence there will always be an obstacle to peace with Israel, Ahmed Qurei, head of the Palestinian Authority negotiating team, said at the weekend.

“All these attacks prove that the settlers are dangerous and that it’s impossible to live with them. If these settlers are allowed to stay, that would mean more friction and confrontation. Peace can be achieved only if Israel withdraws to the last centimeter of the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967,” Qurei said.

In a perfect world, nations would coexist and borders would be merely electoral districts. This is not a perfect world, and Palestinians and Jews in this land have bled in a zero-sum battle over land and the right to a national identity.

Those still calling for a polite democratic coexistence are dangerously disconnected from the sentiments of the people living in this land.

First, we split apart. Only then “reconciliation” – that is, accepting the other’s legitimate national identity – can begin. We’re not holding our breath here. It will take a lot of time for the Palestinians to recognize there is justice in Zionism.

At least the leadership on each side is talking sensibly about separation, not peace or love or some other unstable, doomed fantasy.

What to make of the media? How do you explain it when the media, or nearly all of it, get a story demonstrably wrong and don’t have the curiosity to second-guess themselves?

After Moshe Feiglin’s election to the 20th slot on the party list, the media narrative had it that Feiglin had successfully taken over the party.

“Likud eschews centrist candidates,” declared JTA, a news organization syndicated by over 100 Jewish newspapers worldwide.

The Jerusalem Post reported in similar vein:

Netanyahu’s associates expressed concern that the party would take a big hit in the polls after far-Right activist Moshe Feiglin won the realistic 20th spot on the list and Feiglin-endorsed candidates won 19 of the top 36 slots, defeating candidates supported by Netanyahu.

Feiglin-endorsed? You mean, for example, faction chairman and new #2 man Gideon Sa’ar, whose credentials include extremely popular legislation expanding women’s rights in the workplace? Yes, JPost means him. Or #3 Gilad Erdan, the man who used the Knesset as a bully pulpit to improve infrastructure and traffic enforcement nationwide, bringing the death toll on Israel’s roads down by double-digit percentages? Yes, Feiglin seems to have endorsed him as well. Of course, #4 Reuven Rivlin, the grizzled old lion of Likud politics who has already been speaker of the Knesset, was also on Feiglin’s list.

So how does a low-ranked Likud operative get to take credit for the entire top layer of his party’s leadership? Simple. He and the media have a shared agenda in embarrassing and weakening the Likud: Feiglin because he wants to make the West Bank part of Jewish Israel (the Likud is the center-Right party that could actually create a Palestinian state), and the media because much of it wants to bring Tzipi Livni to power.

It wasn’t Feiglin’s list that brought Erdan and Sa’ar to the top. It was their names who lent the list what small credence it had in the media’s imagination. In the end, the Likud chose the most productive and visible candidates for senior posts. After all, avowed centrist and Likud outsider Dan Meridor came in three spots ahead of Feiglin himself. Silvan Shalom, who supported the disengagement, did even better at #7. Ze’ev Elkin even took #21 against Feiglin’s candidate Asa Antov, despite coming in from Kadima 10 days before the primary.

The truth is that Feiglin lost rather badly. From legends that he controlled a disciplined army of 8,000 voting Likud members (about 49,000 voted in the primaries out of 99,000 members), making him the king-maker of Likud politics, we are left with the results of a relatively unpopular politician who won’t sit in the cabinet, won’t chair a committee, and likely won’t influence decision-making in the slightest. He is, if you like, what Yael Dayan was in the Labor Party shortly before leaving it for Meretz, and then leaving national politics altogether.

Rarely does the media notice its own bubbles, its gratuitous assumptions that lead it to consistently misreport even relatively simple realities.

Ha’aretz reflects for a microsecond on the gap between the media’s perception of the Likud and the very different perception among the public, but concludes that the people, not the media, are too stupid to understand what’s happening:

Previous polls ordered by Netanyahu showed that the list’s inclusion of Moshe Feiglin, the leader of a right-wing faction within Likud, was liable to cost the party four or five seats. But the Haaretz-Dialog poll does not back that up. Instead, it appears that what has come to be known as the Feiglin effect has yet to make its way into the voters’ consciousness, though that could change over the coming days.

Later in the article:

Tuesday night’s news broadcasts made it seem like Feiglin had been chosen to fill the No. 2 spot rather than No. 20 and that he would be replacing Netanyahu as chairman any minute. That’s not the situation, of course, but in the world of Israeli politics, it’s the image that counts.

And who, pray tell, sets the image?

In a memorial service yesterday for Golda Meir on Mt. Herzl, Olmert opined on the fates of misunderstood prime ministers:

“Today Golda is remembered by the public – unjustifiably – almost exclusively in the context of the Yom Kippur War. As she was prime minister at the time, she is perceived as carrying on her shoulders the responsibility for the tragic surprise that shook Israel…. [But] without any military experience, she decided wisely for the most part, with common sense and with a sense of perspective in the face of contradicting suggestions and recommendations by the security experts who surrounded her, including an authoritative Chief of Staff and a well-respected Minister of Defense.

As a rule hindsight is twenty-twenty. Only those who find themselves in charge of decision-making at the highest level in times of war, surrounded by suggestions, advisers and experts, know that there is really no one to ask. At the end of the day you find yourself alone with nothing but your judgment and your conscience.”

In other words, it’s unfair to criticize a sitting prime minister unless you yourself have been prime minister, or were in fact that prime minister you’re criticizing.

What makes this defense even more galling, and over the grave of poor Golda, is that Golda stepped down in response to public disapproval, even though a special state commission, Agranat, found that she had performed admirably during the war. Olmert, of course, did not step down despite much worse public excoriation and the finding by a state commission, Winograd, that he was among those personally responsible for many of the war’s failures.

What sort of narcissism allows a man to ignore that gargantuan difference and place himself alongside Golda in the pantheon of Israeli leadership?

It appears the Indian doctors are now saying the Mumbai victims were not tortured:

Dr. Gajanan Chawan, who saw the bodies, told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday he did not believe the wounds he observed suggested the hostages had been tortured prior to their deaths.

Asked if he saw any evidence of torture on the bodies, Chawan replied, “No, I don’t think so.” He added that the majority of the wounds he could identify had been caused by firearms.

On Monday, a morgue employee at the JJ hospital who had also seen the bodies told the Post by telephone that the bodies of the Jewish victims had a higher number of gunshot wounds than the bodies of other victims.

“On the Jewish bodies, there were more injuries in numbers, they were firearms injuries,” the morgue official said.

A strange sort of comfort, but comforting nonetheless.

Back in Tel Aviv, however, the incredible police mobilization earlier in the week produced results. According to a close friend in the Tel Aviv District Police, three terrorists were captured with explosives in a small apartment on Levinsky Street. Almost nothing was said on the news, so it may be the beginning of something big – a terror network we’ll hear about again when it is rolled up for good.

The Border Guard is out in force in the streets of Tel Aviv, checking cars one by one in some of the poshest parts of the city. We passed them on the way to work this morning and wondered.

It turns out there is some hard intelligence about an imminent terror threat in the city:

Tel Aviv police were on high alert Tuesday morning after receiving intelligence on plans to carry out a terror attack in the city.

In light of the alert, roadblocks were set up on roads leading in and out of the city, and policemen were deployed in large numbers on the streets. Police also sent a helicopter to aid it in its search for suspects.

The increased level of security led to heavy traffic in the Gush Dan area, and police were advising drivers to avoid the area at this time.

Obviously you noticed the Mumbai terror saga. But in all the noise and on-site reporting, I hope you didn’t miss this:

The doctors who conducted the autopsies on the victims say that many of the bodies showed signs of torture. One doctor explains that “of all the bodies, the Israeli victims bore the maximum torture marks. It was clear that they were killed on the 26th itself. It was obvious that they were tied up and tortured before they were killed. It was so bad that I do not want to go over the details even in my head again.”

As the intelligence services and Indian newspapers have reported, Ajmal Kamal, the terrorist arrested at the Jewish Nariman House, “said they were specifically asked to target the foreigners, especially the Israelis.”

We go, as always, into fire. We emerge, as always, the ones remembered for good.

Little Moshe will grow up a prince among his people. The nasty kind of Islam that sent those brutal men will be brutalized by its own creations.