Be careful before you rejoice over the Hollande victory. His magic wand politics is based on selling the idea of socialism in one Eurozone-- based on getting all the other EU countries' populations also to vote socialist so they can set up a superKeynsian programme where the whole of the EU happily prints money and hands it out for whatever benefits the good citizens have become accustomed to.
Thus, he promises an instant end to austerity, job creation a la carte, restoring cuts in pensions public spending etc.
This is very appealing to electorates feeling the pinch and hating the austerities of getting rid of deficits for years ahead.
Imagine if Hollande is able to sustain this illusion for 2-3 years as first the Eurocrats indulge him in order to ensure the Eurozone doesn't break up.Then a whole series of other EU states also vote in magic wand Eurozone keynsian socialist governments, Apparently even in Germany, the votes for the Social Democrats are soaring. So then what happens if these magic wand programmes are voted for across the EU (including in the next EU elections)?
Come 2015 we could be facing Ed Miliband offering a UK version of Hollande's magic wand programme, with crowds of happy deficit fuelled populations across the EU as examples of how well the magic wand works. It means signing up to the new socialist print-as-much-as-you-want Euro. So Ed Mili is right behind an EU referendum, only this time on a "free money, end to austerity, magic wand" embrace-the-Euro programme. The Lib Dems will be enthusiastic supporters
The Tories and UKIP would then be the only parties opposing this glorious magic wand socialist vision. They'd get their referendum. But guess what? They'd lose it hands down, because the euphoria of the free money vision would be far more appealing than the Sturm und Drang of leaving the EU and yet more austerity.
If you doubt this, remember that until Livingstone dreamed up his Fare Deal magic money offer, he was hopelessly behind Boris in the polls. Once that was offered, his popularity soared. Had Andrew Gilligan & Guido Fawkes not exposed his tax avoidance and matching hypocrisy, people would have accepted his promises as credible. Once the tax evidence was out (including Livingstone's failure to deliver on his promise of publishing his accountant-certified tax records) and widely exposed, people stopped believing in the magic beans fare reductions. Boris' popularity and credibility recovered, but the gap between him and Livingstone never went back to what it was before the launch of the Fare Deal promise.
Even so, over a million people voted for Livingstone's magic wand, magic beans, free money programme and for him, knowing that he was an habitual liar and serial promise breaker.
Botis and his reality programme only just --just-- won. And a major reason for that was the strength of Boris' personality and personal appeal compared with the very negative features and track record of Livingstone.
These are a relevant couple of Livingstone’s lies that most incensed me, not least because I heard him telling them in person at the London Jewish Forum meeting on 24th April:
Anti-semitic attacks
67. Claim: “In each year I was mayor, anti-semitic attacks [in London] declined” (Guardian, March 26; when pressed about his poor relationship with the Jewish community)
Reality: The London figures, from the Community Security Trust’s annual reports, are as follows (reports before 2003 are not readily available online):
2003: 215 2004: 311 2005: 213 2006: 300 2007: 247 2008: 236 As will be seen, the number of anti-semitic attacks in London rose substantially – by up to 45% – in two of these years.
Hosting extremist cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi
84. Claim: “All I knew about Qaradawi when he came was that the Sun had praised him as a true voice of Islam.” (Newsnight 4 April)
Reality: Livingstone had actually been furiously lobbied by liberal, Jewish and gay groups not to host Qaradawi. A Labour Home Office minister, Fiona McTaggart, pulled out of the City Hall event with the hate preacher, urging Ken not to meet him and saying that “a perfectly good cause had been hijacked” by Qaradawi and his supporters. The shadow home secretary, David Davis, asked Ken not to give Qaradawi “the oxygen of publicity.” When Qaradawi touched down in the UK, the Sun in fact proclaimed: “The evil has landed.”
The video clip I've included with this post shows that so many of Livingstone's present aims, especially that of establishing London as a city-state go back to the Trotskyist programme of the Socialist Action group coterie who were his highly paid enforcers when he was Mayor, and whose Simon Fletcher is the head of his campaign team today.
What a stain on the record and reputation of the Labour Party. I heard Miliband parroting Livingstone’s election promises to slash fares and restore the EMA on BBCR4 a few days ago, claiming he’d be the best Mayor for London. As they say, the fish stinks from the head.
Well, he's Leader of the Labour Party now. And here he is, setting out his new broom visions in his first speech as Labour leader. How's this for the voice of the "new generation"?
But Israel must accept and recognise in its actions the Palestinian right to statehood.
That is why the attack on the Gaza Flotilla was so wrong.
And that is why the Gaza blockade must be lifted and we must strain every sinew to work to make that happen.
And he thinks it’s an important enough point for him to make that he puts it into his “speech of a lifetime” inaugural speech as the new leader of the Labour Party.
Oh, yes, definitely a brilliant thinker. A man of the Centre, indeed. Red Ed? How could anyone possibly think that?
I've never been in the least tempted to vote for UKIP-- the one-issue political party whose sole raison d'etre is to campaign against membership of the European Union.
But I've been gobsmacked by the sight of this UKIP election poster plastered here and there in odd corners I've passed in my car driving across London.
So there's Churchill, proudly invoking victory in his Homburg (hello--a European hat style) as their poster boy.
Does UKIP not know one of Churchill's most famous post-war speeches was the one where he advocated not just a European common market (as was being discussed at that time)-- but a federal United States of Europe, way beyond anything the current EU has proposed?
Here's some extracts from what he was saying back in 1946:
If Europe were once united in the sharing of its common inheritance, there would be no limit to the happiness, to the prosperity and the glory which its three or four million people would enjoy.....
Yet all the while there is a remedy which, if it were generally and spontaneously adopted by the great majority of people in many lands, would as if by a miracle transform the whole scene, and would in a few years make all Europe, or the greater part of it, as free and as happy as Switzerland is to-day. What is this sovereign remedy? It is to re-create the European Family, or as much of it as we can, and to provide it with a structure under which it can dwell in peace, in safety and in freedom. We must build a kind of United States of Europe. In this way only will hundreds of millions of toilers be able to regain the simple joys and hopes which make life worth living. The process is simple. All that is needed is the resolve of hundreds of millions of men and women to do right instead of wrong and to gain as their reward blessing instead of cursing.....
Our constant aim must be to build and fortify the strength of the United Nations Organization. Under and within that world concept we must re-create the European Family in a regional structure called, it may be, the United States of Europe. And the first practical step would be to form a Council of Europe. If at first all the States of Europe are not willing or able to join the Union, we must nevertheless proceed to assemble and combine those who will and those who can.
Of course, at that time, Churchill spoke of Britain as if it was somehow not really part of Europe. But his vision was of Britain as head of the Commonwealth. That's pointed out by some of the defenders of this campaign in the comments here. However, a key feature of the Commonwealth he advocated was one in which all of its citizens had unlimited right of immigration to Britain. It was the Conservative governments of his time and subsequently which turned to mass immigration from Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent as the answer to Britain's postwar labour shortages. Churchill did express reservations about the policy in racist terms--but it can hardly be UKIP's case that they stand behind Churchill's suggestion, towards the end of the time when he was barely able to function as a politician, that a Conservative Party slogan should be "Keep Britain White"?
So, if UKIP is going to invoke Churchill, are they going to support substituting membership of the EU with that of a Commonwealth of unlimited rights of immigration? Or are they hinting at support for Churchill's sometimes-expressed white supremacist attitudes?
The UKIP grandees like Campbell Bannerman, who picked Churchill as their poster boy, seem to have arrested their awareness of his historical role at Dunkirk, the biggest military defeat in British history, in which his role was primarily to inspire and commit Britain to fighting Nazism and totalitarianism.
David Campbell Bannerman commenting on the launch said: "Sir Winston is an ideal icon for our campaign because it is high time that Britain found that old Dunkirk spirit again and learned to fight its corner in adversity. We've accepted far too much nonsense from Brussels over the years and it is time to say NO MORE! The only way to do that at this election is to vote UKIP, as none of the old parties have anything to offer other than more Europe.
UKIP's barely concealed agenda is a decidedly Little England one. No, they're not fascists in smart suits, like the BNP. But their view of politics is simplistic, ignorant and ultimately a prescription for economic dead-endery.
They would hardly stand a chance in next Thursday's election were it not for the disastrous failure of the UK's three main political parties to confront and put a rapid and decisive end to the cosy, all-in-it-together morass of self-serving corruption through our own Parliament's expenses rackets.
I'm probably going to vote for Libertas in the EU elections, because I think trans-EU parties with a focus on accountability and a combination of commitment and scepticism are the least worst choice.
The local UK elections are more problematic. Any temptation I was beginning to have to vote Tory in protest at Gordon Brown's handling of just about any policy or crisis you care to mention has been laid to rest by David Cameron's shying away from dealing with (and sometimes open support of) those expenses miscreants of his own party he happens to be most sympathetic to.
In the past, I've resorted to voting for the Green and Liberal parties when protesting against the worst excesses of the former ultra-left Hackney Labour Council in its heyday. Looking at the policies of the Green and Liberals today, their policies seem to me a lot more disastrous than those of Labour and their politicians no more trustworthy.
I'll be looking at the other minority parties over the next few days to see if there's one I can square my conscience on registering my vote with.
Into my mailbox pops a breathless little communication from Teachers' TV telling me it's Behaviour Management week. Well, so it is. I hope the voters get their sanctions and rewards right and our politicians decide to change their ways.
It's not often you see my favourite UK left of centre blog, Harry's Place, put up posts praising the Tories, but here's David T positively gushing over the newly established anti-BNP site established by Tim Montgomerie's ConservativeHome group and allies.
Much as I would love to see this campaign succeed, and much as I admire the fact that people like Tim Montgomerie have been able to galvanise Tories & others to support this campaign, I think the first video is pretty dismal.
It offers an image of a sweet-looking Afro-Caribbean boy to counter the BNP's propaganda that our troubles are caused by supposedly unlimited immigration and their taking of our resources by people who shouldn't have the right to them. Behind the BNP's racist message is also the conviction that shadowy and corrupt Hidden Hands (yes, that's Jews like me) are behind all of this.
I don't think this approach is going to persuade a single potential BNP voter to cast their vote differently.
For a start, it insults the intelligence of the target audience, something I'd have thought media-savvy people like Tim Montgomerie are intensely aware of.
Non racist potential BNP protest voters are perfectly aware that there are very likeable people amongst the ethnic groups that are its targets. Doesn't stop them from voting for the BNP as a protest against the perceived corruption of mainstream parliamentarians, or as a protest against particular forms of maximalist minority group critiques of mainstream society (as promoted by the Hizb and the Saviour Sect).
Back in the days preceding the Nazi success in the German elections, the angry non-fascists who voted for them in 1933 mostly knew quite a few cuddly Jewish children, or dedicated Jewish doctors and the like. Some of them had close Jewish friends. All this didn't prevent them from voting against the existing traditional parties, because they thought drastic action was needed, and they didn't see anything wrong with being against Jews as a whole whilst simultaneously being very fond of the odd Jew.
Many otherwise sane and reasonable Palestinians voted for the atrocious Hamas and their exterminationist propaganda as a protest against the corruption of Fatah. They were perfectly well aware of what Hamas stood for, and they supported the two state solution, but their anger with Fatah overcame their real political convictions, because they felt they had to "do something" and bring the corruption to an end.
Non-racists who consider voting for BNP as a protest also know that if they send a few BNP MEPs to the EU Parliament and elect a few BNP councils, they will never have the power to affect the actual lives and conditions of ethnic minorities in this country. So they feel they can safely use the BNP to register a protest, or, as with non-ideology driven Palestinian Hamas voters, to take action against corruption whilst forgetting all about the baggage that comes with the protest party.
So what sort of video message might help persuade decent, ordinary people not to cast a protest vote for the BNP? Maybe something that recognises the justice of widespread public anger-- and then puts across the message that the answer to corruption isn't to cast a vote for racism, anymore than a vote for out-and-out terrorism was the answer to Fatah's corruption.
Maybe it should be a "your vote matters" video. Maybe it should show what happens to countries and peoples who cast despair votes for totalitarian and racist parties, and then contrast that with countries where the electorate took some action that voted the corrupt out (Japan?).
A video which put across the message "when you want to stop corruption, don't vote for violent criminals" would enlighten the many potential voters who don't know about the BNP's track record of convictions for appalling offences.
Most of all, all of us who are committed to the mainstream left and right parties need to put all the pressure we can on our party leaderships to come to terms with what we the people feel, and make really radical moves now that will begin to shift the public's perceptions.
Sadly, there's too much evidence that Brown and his circle, even the ministers who despair of him, are virtually incapable of radically changing their direction and stopping the corruption--and its leaders in the form of the guardians of the parliamentary expenses system right now.
Cameron made something of a move, and it has had an impact, but it's nothing like enough. Listening to Hague on BBC R4 Today programme, it's clear that the Tory hierarchy still haven't got it. He's just pushing the latest Tory line of chipping away at the bits that suit them (like the communication allowance) whilst claiming the public don't really care about the Speaker and the corrupt Parliamentary apparatus that enabled the MPs and the Lords build up their sense of entitlement to be above the laws that the rest of us live by, and line their pockets accordingly, whilst chorusing "it's all within the rules".
If you don't want people to vote BNP:
Ensure that the Speaker of Parliament resigns immediately by organizing a whipped vote of no confidence.
Sack all the members of the Parliamentary Privileges Committee and the senior staff of the Fees Office.
Only MPs with impeccable expenses claims records to sit on the Committee in future.
All MPs to place itemised expenses claims on their web sites every three months.
All claims going back to 2005 to be scrutinised by senior HM Revenue & Customs to check that they meet the test of "wholly, necessarily and exclusively" for use in their job as MPs. Claims that don't meet the test to be paid back in full and with penalty fines and interest.
Commit to prosecuting all MPs who knowingly made false claims or submitted improper accounting.
Commit to reducing the number of MPs by half in time for the next election. If practically impossible for boundary commission reasons, commit to having a second election as soon as possible after 2010 to elect the lower number of MPs
All sitting MPs to face reselection meetings with their constituency parties within the next two weeks (ie ahead of the June elections)
Legislation to be passed immediately to enable peers who breach laws on corruption to be stripped of their titles and rights to sit in the House of Lords.
Any major party that committed to that could face down challenges from the BNP and other fringe parties.
Anything else is tokenism and papering over the cracks. And it won't wash with the electorate. Those who are minded to vote BNP will still do so.
My mother may have severe dementia, but she still knows who Diana was. And this bit of 1981 royal wedding kitsch sits by her bed
It's wonderful to be able to blog from my iphone while sitting in first a cab then a car repair centre in Willesden.
The downside is that the very pretty Typepad iPhone app doesn't seem to have a "save post" option.
It's publish or nothing.
So I'll have to publish as is when they bring my car round and demystify you as to what I'm on about later.
Clue: It's about an unexpected side of the normally ultra-rationalist male bloggers who include founders and leading signatories of the Euston Manifesto.
There are a lot of legends about encounters between Napoleon and the Jews, just as there are about encounters between Alexander the Great and Jews. In both cases, the Jews' ambivalent but ultimately admiring relationship with these world-changing rulers is reflected in the substance of the tales told. They usually show the great ruler learning to admire some aspect of Jewish tenacity in adversity.
One of the ones I always remember about Napoleon is where he's reputed to have passed by a synagogue where he could hear the congregation wailing the mourning chants of the Tisha B'Av service, Tisha B'Av being the saddest day in the Jewish calendar. It's a major fast commemorating the fall on that day of the First and Second temples of Jerusalem, during which Jeremiah's Book of Lamentations is read. When it's explained to him that the Jews he hears are weeping for a loss which took place 1,800 years earlier, he's said to have said:
I vow that this people is destined for a future in their own homeland. For is there any other people who have kept alive similar mourning and hope for so many years?"
Sunday was the 17th Tammuz. For observant orthodox Jews, that's a whole day fast which marks the start of a three week period of mourning, commemorating the beginning of the end of the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE. It culminated in the destruction on the 9th of Av of the Second Temple and the subsequent expulsion of the Jews from their homeland. Most mainstream Jews hardly know of this three week period, though all know of Tisha b'Av, but for those who do, it has some surprisingly effective ways of opening your heart to the sorrows it commemorates. You are not supposed to play or listen to music--and that makes a huge difference in my daily life. You are also supposed to refrain from buying new clothes and cutting your hair. Usually I remember to get mine cut just before the three week period starts. This year, I lost the plot and didn't get it done. So I'll look rather scruffier than I usually do for the next three weeks.
Unlike the major fasts of Tisha B'Av and Yom Kippur, the Fast of 17th Tammuz is one of those you usually observe individually rather than communally.
This year was different. The London Jewish community held a memorial service, arranged almost overnight, for the two returned soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, as well as for the other Israeli soldiers held captive, of whom only one, Gilad Shalit, is known to be still alive.
When I went to the synagogue, I heard the mother of one of the youth group organizers say that they hoped they might get perhaps twenty people attending. By the time the service started, it was packed--even more women than men, with some of them having to stand.
It was quite a low key event, but I was conscious from having spent so much time since the prisoner exchange following the reactions of the UK, Israeli and international media, as well as Israeli bloggers, of the collective sadness that for once united the secular and the religious Israeli public, all too often a non-dialogue of the deaf.
On the same day, Imshin, who, like so many secular Jews, tends to find her spiritual sustenance in Buddhism rather than Judaism, was visiting Jerusalem, and found herself walking up the steps of part of the destroyed Temple. That experience connected with her in a way that I wouldn't have expected:
Here I was standing at the foot of the actual steps that led up to the Second Temple all those years ago. It wasn’t just an old story. It wasn’t a myth. It really happened. And I am a descendant of these people who came to this place to worship....
I always get a bit teary at the Wall, and I’m never sure why. Friday was no exception, standing at the foot of those steps.
I always thought it was all this spirituality in the air that got to me. But perhaps it’s something deeper than that.
When we went over to see Robinson’s Arch , or what’s left of it, the enormity of the destruction really hit me and I was very sad. This has never happened to me before. I must have needed to be able to envision this as a real place, for me to begin to understand the terrible tragedy of what happened back then.
These are actual stones from the outer wall of Herod’s Temple, bearing the distinct features of Herodian masonry, excavated just as you see them, apparently toppled by the Romans when they destroyed the Temple.
And as these things always happen, today was the 17th of Tamouz, believed to be the day the Romans broke through the city walls (among other things), all those years ago (precisely 1938 years I think, if I’m not miscounting).
Then I checked out Karen's Tel-Aviv Diary, as I usually do. She's also a militantly secular Israeli, but being the daughter of Yiddish speaking Holocaust survivors and a fluent Yiddishist herself, she's closer to the traditions of the religion than you might imagine. She is bearing so much beyond the collective grief over the outcome of the prisoners' return-- a tragic family bereavement, the loss of a young nephew after a cruel illness, a husband undergoing chemotherapy, and more.
And in memory of the young man, but perhaps also all the public collective grief over the dead hostage soldiers, she put up on her diary blog a poignant, searing poem by Yehuda Amichai which she had long ago translated. Her translation appeared in the Tel-Aviv Review in 1998, which most English readers, including myself, have no knowledge of.
It commemorates the death--possibly also after a long period of struggle--of someone close to Amichai and yet it also commemorates the pain of some of the legacies that all Jews share.
In a time when it's possible to be silenced by the cynicism and hollow triumphalism emanating from Lebanon and beyond, Amichai's poem speaks into that silence and beyond it.
Last night I had a childish thought. It just flashed through my mind and was gone.
I thought that perhaps if we all prayed very hard, then tomorrow (today), when the time comes for Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev to be returned home, they will be alive.
No, Imshin, not childish. Compassionate, caring, optimistic--the very heart of the Jewish tradition. It was Hitler who said conscience was a Jewish invention. One of the very few things on which he was right. Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh. The Talmudic view: All Israel is responsible for one another.
And not only we Jews have this literally heartfelt commitment of identification with the plight of all political hostages and their families. When the Irish/British aid worker Margaret Hassan was kidnapped in Iraq and finally cynically videoed being murdered, I had so much hoped she would be safely released along with the others--and so did the overwhelming majority of the people of every ethnic group in Britain not marching under the deluded enrage banner of the SWP and the Islamists. And there is no shortage of cases of British and European governments making gruesome deals with kidnappers and murderers for the safe release of their kidnapped nationals.
Despite that, there's been widespread puzzlement and disbelief at the actions of the Israeli government amongst their sympathizers as well as a triumphalist reading by their enemies of the events of 16th July 2008 as a sign of Israel's defeat and weakness .
I mean, I’m all for concessions for peace: but what is the policy aim, here?
The comments on David T's post are interesting, but I thought almost all were too wrapped up in the current and recent history of Israel, and, unsurprisingly for a strongly secularist socialist blog, ignorant of the specifically religious tradition behind Israel's policies.
This is an edited version of the comment I posted in response:
It is a specific Torah commandment that the Jewish people must redeem their captives. This is something Jewish communities having been doing with a heavy heart since the days of Ancient Israel, and it is recalled in the daily prayer services. Joel Brand and his colleagues from the Jewish Agency tried to negotiate with Eichmann in 1944 for the release of the Hungarian Jews in return for arms but understandably the Allies refused. That huge community was then shipped off to Auschwitz and almost all murdered on arrival. This is why it is enshrined in secular Israeli policy and practice and continues to have such huge resonance with Israelis.
But there is another minority orthodox Jewish tradition on how to deal with tragic kidnap- communal ransom situations. Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg in Germany was imprisoned in the Middle Ages by the secular leader of the Christian West, the Holy Roman Emperor, for ransom, but the rabbi gave orders that he must not be ransomed lest others be kidnapped. He died in prison.
During the Holocaust, the rabbis and secular leadership of the Nazi-occupied communities of Eastern Europe sometimes faced equally impossible choices imposed by their captors, often demands to give up the names or the persons of Nazi targets in return for the release of innocent arrested rabbis or communal leaders otherwise condemned to execution. Their rulings sometimes reluctantly complied with the demands in the name of sacrificing the few for the many, but sometimes adopted positions from outright refusal to evasion, on the grounds of not assisting in the murder of fellow Jews even at the hands of a murderous coercive ruler. Few truly realized that all without exception were marked out for extermination by their captors. None did anything other than try their best for the sake of their people.
There is now in Israel a movement of soldiers who are organizing declarations that they do not want to be redeemed if captured. There is also the Torah law that you must not frame your arrangements in such ways that it needlessly leads to deaths.
I am no expert in Jewish law, but I believe that because of this deal and the declared commitment by the terror groups and supporting governments to kidnap more and more Israelis to force Israel to release its hundreds of convicted and unrepentant terrorist murderers of civilians, Israel should change the policy now. I’ll be interested to see how the most influential rabbis in Israel comment.
In the absence of any authoritative rabbinical commentary here's an extract from an outstanding discussion by Jewish legal experts who seem to be equally well informed about international and rabbinical law as applied to such kidnap situations.
Rabbi Meir’s approach has its source in the Mishnah which rules that one does not ransom captives for more than their value because of Tikkun Olam. The Talmud disputes the rationale for the Mishnah’s stipulation.One view is that it is intended to prevent the impoverishment of the Jewish community which would otherwise make extortionate ransom payments; the other is to avoid providing an incentive to the kidnappers to continue in their ways. Both Maimonides and the Shulchan Aruch adopt the second rationale. While both maintain that there is no greater mitzvah than the redemption of captives, ultimately, public security considerations take precedence when evaluating whether to pay a ransom. Interestingly, Tosafot maintain that where there is a danger to life, captives may be redeemed for more than their value, but this position has not been codified.
Application of Jewish law to contemporary prisoner exchanges is not straightforward. Two questions are particularly difficult to resolve. The first is how to establish the value of a captured soldier. The second, related question is how to apply Jewish law where the ransom payment consists of convicted terrorists instead of financial capital. In classical times, the question of value could readily be resolved by resort to the slave market or the market rate for the ransom of non-Jewish captives, but the question today is obviously far more complex. Moreover, as the payment consists of convicted terrorists, the state must engage in an unenviable balancing act, weighing the rights of the individual against the security needs of the country. What is clear, however, is that as a general rule, captives should not be redeemed for more than their value if it is reasonably believed that paying the ransom will increase kidnappings and thereby pose a threat to the public. In fact, former Israel Defense Forces Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren was opposed to lopsided prisoner exchanges, noting that the safety of one or a few Jews in captivity does not take precedence over the safety of the entire public.
A growing number of senior defense and security experts, including the heads of the Mossad and the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet), believe that the “more than fair value” test has once again proven relevant.
As Israelis lacking any family or other connection to the Goldwasser/Regev families, we are convinced that the current skewed deal threatens the public interest, undermines Israel’s ability to defend its legal rights and carry out its legal duties, and could threaten Israel’s strategic objectives. The optimal position, of course, is to rely on military action to free captured soldiers and/or civilians as in the famous Entebbe rescue. If such a rescue is not a viable option, any negotiations should be conducted within the context of national security objectives.
When Israel makes exchanges that are unequal, it is only natural for Israel’s enemies to view the illegal kidnapping of Israeli civilians and soldiers, and the violation of their legal rights in captivity, as an extremely profitable activity. These exchanges present Israel as willing to concede all its legal rights and to accommodate any and all demands of terrorist organizations. Additionally, by bestowing undeserved largesse upon terrorist groups like Hizbullah, these exchanges strengthen that group’s leverage as a political actor in the Arab and Muslim worlds, and enhance its support on the Arab street. Hizbullah has been able to successfully negotiate the release of a celebrated Lebanese terrorist, extract information on four missing Iranian diplomats, and secure the release of an unspecified number of Palestinian prisoners.
The Goldwasser/Regev deal – as a deviation from the Geneva Conventions model – discourages compliance with international humanitarian law, harms Israeli deterrence, encourages future kidnappings, and endangers the lives of those who may be taken hostage by Hizbullah or another terrorist group. The value Israel places on a single life is laudable, but its translation into a policy of capitulation to terrorist kidnappers’ demands magnifies the already grossly inflated price of prisoner exchanges. For terrorist organizations, kidnapped Israeli soldiers and civilians are valuable and relatively cheaply-acquired bargaining chips to bring home their terrorists imprisoned in Israeli jails. As Yoram Shachar, the brother of policeman Eliahu Shachar who was murdered in a terrorist attack involving Kuntar, said: “The release today is the kidnapping of tomorrow.”
As if in response to this article, one of the press reports on the day of the exchange included this policy commitment to the future use of kidnapping as leverage on the Israeli government by a spokesman of one of the terrorist groups, together with the most enthusiastic support for Hezbollah's "achievements" by Mahmoud Abbas, the supposedly moderate PA president and Ismail Haniyeh, Prime Minister of the Hamas regime in Gaza:
Abu Mujahed, a spokesman for the Popular Resistance Committees, told Ynet that the completion of the deal "even after the images of the Israeli soldiers' coffins, proves that kidnapping soldiers will continue to be the most efficient, favored and ideal way to release Palestinian prisoners, particularly those defined by the enemy as having blood on their hands."
According to Abu Mujehad, the Lebanese and Palestinian resistance will continue to work to kidnap soldiers in order to release prisoners "and in order to retrieve our rights, after it has been proved beyond any doubt that no diplomatic negotiations can release prisoners or return rights."
My belief is that where it is an unambiguously declared policy of Israel's enemies, both state and non-state actors, to use kidnap as a major weapon in their struggle to destroy Israel, then Israel's present policy forces it into a position where it effectively concedes in advance all the demands that its enemies care to make. Why should Hamas agree to the release of Gilad Shalit for less than the release of every last convicted terrorist prisoner in Israeli jails? What if required the concession is agreeing to the demand for the Palestinian "right of return"? Or the concession of Israeli territory demanded by Syria or Hezbollah? Indeed some of the most fulsome adulation of Nasrallah you can read in is in praise of the successful outcome of his declared strategy in 2006 of kidnapping soldiers to release prisoners, which he then put into practice with the kidnap of Goldwasser and Regev from Israeli territory in the first place.
Norm's post today takes to task the latest Guardian editorial on the subject for what he reads as its celebration of an Israeli "moral defeat". I don't read the Guardian editorial quite that way. It's interesting that its analysis of the outcome of the Israeli agreement is not that different from that of the impeccably zionist lawyers who wrote the article I've cited at length above.
Both the leader and the article point out that in dealing with Hezbollah as the equivalent of a state actor, Israel has conceded a level of recognition and validation it previously lacked. However, that was already conceded by the results of Hezbollah's successful assault on the Lebanese political settlement earlier this summer, allied with the fresh consolidation of Syria's nominees into the Presidency and Prime Ministership in Beirut.
Yael's blog yesterday had a reference to a Facebook group of Lebanese who deplored the release of the most notorious terrorist murderer, Samir Kuntar, who has been ecstatically celebratedin Lebanon, Gaza and by the Palestinian Authority as a supreme hero, despite the fact that his "heroism" was based on breaking into a flat, shooting a father in front of his four year old daughter and then repeatedly bludgeoning and smashing the skull of the child to death. Lisa's post on Pajamas Media offers further evidence that not every Lebanese was celebrating, despite the shameful participation of the leader of every single Lebanese political party in the rally celebrating Kuntar on his release, including the leaders of those who had fought against Hezbollah. Now Lebanon has a very significant reckoning of the appalling cost to the Lebanese people of Nasrallah's "triumph", quoted by Lisa; Neil D on Harry's Place reports the Lebanese Political Journal's sardonic condemnation of those "achievements:
While that's heartening, it's unfortunately not significant where the compassionate of heart are in a tiny and politically insignificant minority. Sophie Scholl and her tiny band of active German oppositionists to the wartime Nazi regime are now revered; at the time, their protests were isolated and futile. I remember with appreciation the gesture of the gentile warden of my grandfather's Berlin synagogue who brought round his rescued top hat from the flames the day after the Nazi mobs had burned it down. But it did not alter the fate of my grandfather and uncle, deported in chains to the Polish border, or hold back the enthusiastically supported rush of the Nazi regime to the subsequent invasion of Poland with all that followed.
And this compassion and grief which is being tutted over in the world's press is what continues to unite Israel. My hope is that the tradition of Jewish law and the wisdom of the rabbis and communal leaders of the past will open the way to finding a not-so-new path of facing down and overcoming the challenge of Islamist and radical marxist terrorism and hostage-taking.
Am Yisroel Chai-- The people of Israel lives, which today tends to be a triumphalist slogan of the Israeli right. But I mean by invoking it a salute to the future of Israel, for it lives in the sense of being on the side of life.
The table was beautiful. The burnt egg was sooty black. The zeroa, the shank bone, was charred through. Everything else shone and glittered and gleamed.
There were eleven of us on the second night seder I was at.
It is a specific Torah commandment that the Jewish people must redeem their captives. This is something Jewish communities having been doing with a heavy heart since the days of Ancient Israel, and it is recalled in the daily prayer services. Joel Brand and his colleagues from the Jewish Agency tried to negotiate with Eichmann in 1944 for the release of the Hungarian Jews in return for arms but understandably the Allies refused. That huge community was then shipped off to Auschwitz and almost all murdered on arrival. This is why it is enshrined in secular Israeli policy and practice and continues to have such huge resonance with Israelis.
But there is another minority orthodox Jewish tradition on how to deal with tragic kidnap- communal ransom situations. Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg in Germany was imprisoned in the Middle Ages by the secular leader of the Christian West, the Holy Roman Emperor, for ransom, but the rabbi gave orders that he must not be ransomed lest others be kidnapped. He died in prison.
During the Holocaust, the rabbis and secular leadership of the Nazi-occupied communities of Eastern Europe sometimes faced equally impossible choices imposed by their captors, often demands to give up the names or the persons of Nazi targets in return for the release of innocent arrested rabbis or communal leaders otherwise condemned to execution. Their rulings sometimes reluctantly complied with the demands in the name of sacrificing the few for the many, but sometimes adopted positions from outright refusal to evasion, on the grounds of not assisting in the murder of fellow Jews even at the hands of a murderous coercive ruler. Few truly realized that all without exception were marked out for extermination by their captors. None did anything other than try their best for the sake of their people.
There is now in Israel a movement of soldiers who are organizing declarations that they do not want to be redeemed if captured. There is also the Torah law that you must not frame your arrangements in such ways that it needlessly leads to deaths.
I am no expert in Jewish law, but I believe that because of this deal and the declared commitment by the terror groups and supporting governments to kidnap more and more Israelis to force Israel to release its hundreds of convicted and unrepentant terrorist murderers of civilians, Israel should change the policy now. I’ll be interested to see how the most influential rabbis in Israel comment.