Israel Palestine Blogs

Rabbi Ronitsky’s “greatest hits” of hatemongering

New political powerhouse, Religious Affairs Minister Naftali Bennett, a “moderate” settler leader, has appointed former IDF Chief Rabbi Avichai Ronsky to be chief of a little outfit he’s calling the Jewish Identity Administration. Currently, the rabbi is rosh yeshiva in the Itamar settlement.  It is one of the most virulent and violent of all the settlements in promoting  mayhem against Palestinians.  A number of local villagers have been murdered by Itamar residents.  So much so that it was the target of a heinous terror attack a year ago in which the Fogel family was murdered.

Though Bennett’s goal is to strengthen Jewish identity, I can’t help thinking it’s an Israeli political-religious correctness regime. Ostensibly, the minister says the new body’s goal is to model and promote Jewish values.  But I can’t help thinking of previous regimes in world history who promoted their own vision of national purity.

I believe strongly in Jewish values. They are what led me to create this blog. My Jewish values are compassion for the sick and downtrodden; justice for the weak and oppressed; making the world a better place. And not just for Jews, but for everyone. Including Israel’s ostensible enemies, the Arabs. Naftali Bennett’s version of Jewish values is something altogether different. This Jewish Identity Administration isn’t that far removed from the vision of racial purity offered by both the Nazis and Meir Kahane.

Here are a few of the “greatest hits” that Amir Schiby has dug up from the sainted rabbi’s “vaults” which he features under the heading “Jewish Strength:”

“I hate the State of Tel Aviv.”

“Rabbi Ronitsky: Collective punishment against residents of Awarta in revenge for Itamar terror attack”

Former IDF Chief Rabbi: Fire on terror suspects in their beds.”

“IDF military rabbinate against the homo-lesbo community”

These are Naftali Bennet’s “Jewish values.”  Not mine.  These are values of hate and racism.  These are values of racial supremacy and purity.

It appears Ronsky bestows his blessings and beatings liberally on his own ideological camp as well.  When a young man whom the Shabak had forbidden from entering the West Bank under administrative order told Ronsky he would disrupt a memorial service for the Fogel family murdered at Itamar because an IDF commander would be speaking, Ronsky threatened that he would have the boy’s “arms and legs broken” if he showed up.

This is definitely the sort of saintly figure I want teaching Jews how to be better Jews.

I just wrote something for the NYTimes' Latitude blog about the Tamarrud ("Rebel") campaign -- a petition calling for early presidential elections, which according to the youth groups behind it has gained 3 million signatures.

In my piece I noted that the petition has no legal power to end Morsi's term. I consider it part of the ongoing tug of war between revolutionary and conventional politics, and evidence of how dissatisfying and alienating the political process of the last 2 years as been for so many. I did note how extraordinary it is that "Egyptians today can organize a street campaign to dismiss the president — a president they freely elected last year."

I may have spoken too soon, however. This morning there are reports that Rebel campaigners were shot at in Beni Suef (several others have already been detained and attacked) and that Morsi's prosecutor general has opened an investigation into whether the organizers are  "inciting and mobilising people to overthrow an elected government, inciting hatred against the regime, and promoting a group suspected of violating the law." 

Few names are more revered in the early history of botany than Linnaeus, whose taxonomic system systematized the effective ordering of plants and animals according to sexual reproduction. Although he himself did not doubt that certain genera were created by the God of Genesis, his system could easily be adapted after Darwin introduced a mechanism that challenged the previous dogma of “fixity of species” since Eden. There were numerous artists who contributed to drawing the vast amount of new plants and animals that Linnaeus began to classify. One of my favorite works is by the physician Robert John Thornton, a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, who in 1807 published his New Illustration of the Sexual System of Carolus von Linnaeus.

Robert John Thornton

Thanks to archive.org, this beautiful volume can be read online. This is a delightful read, when it is not possible to visit a real garden. The volume is dedicated to the British queen, and begins with the following metaphor:

In Eastern Language high and mighty Potentates are compared to lofty Trees which afford Food and Shade to the sun-burnt Traveller. In the more temperate Regions of the Earth, Kings and Princes are contemplated as the Sun, which sheds his benign Radiance everywhere, inspiring each Object with new Life and Refreshment: by the Concurrence, therefore, of all Nations, the great Attribute of Sovereignty is Protection-, from conferring of which by Your Most Gracious Majesty, the Science of Botany in Great Britain chiefly owes its present Advancement…

The text consists of charts explaining botanical terms and a series of illustrations and basic descriptions of flowers. I present here the pages dealing with the blue Egyptian water-lily (Nymphaea coreulia), with the exquisite image of the plant.

(more…)

Our occasional contributor Paul Mutter has a piece on the Mobily hacking scandal with tons of links and analysis over at Tech President. We rarely get so much detail about Middle Eastern net censorship.

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Are you a liberal imperialist? Liberal imperialists are like kinder, gentler neoconservatives: Like neocons, they believe it's America's responsibility to right political and humanitarian wrongs around the world, and they're comfortable with the idea of the United States deciding who will run countries such as Libya, Syria, or Afghanistan. Unlike neocons, liberal imperialists embrace and support international institutions (like the United Nations), and they are driven more by concern for human rights than they are by blind nationalism or protecting the U.S.-Israel special relationship. Still, like the neocons, liberal imperialists are eager proponents for using American hard power, even in situations where it might easily do more harm than good. The odd-bedfellow combination of their idealism with neocons' ideology has given us a lot of bad foreign policy over the past decade, especially the decisions to intervene militarily in Iraq or nation-build in Afghanistan, and today's drumbeat to do the same in Syria.

It's not that the United States should never intervene in other countries or that its military should not undertake humanitarian missions (as it did in Indonesia following the Asian tsunami and in Haiti after a damaging earthquake). It should do so, however, only when there are vital national interests at stake or when sending U.S. troops or American arms is overwhelmingly likely to make things better. In short, decisions to intervene need to clear a very high bar and survive hardheaded questioning about what the use of force will actually accomplish.

So while I often sympathize with their intentions, I'm tempted to send all liberal imperialists a sampler cross-stitched with: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." At a minimum, that warning might help them be just a bit more skeptical about the wisdom of their advice. But I'm lousy at needlepoint, so instead today I offer my "10 Warning Signs that You Are a Liberal Imperialist."

#1: You frequently find yourself advocating that the United States send troops, drones, weapons, Special Forces, or combat air patrols to some country that you have never visited, whose language(s) you don't speak, and that you never paid much attention to until bad things started happening there.

#2: You tend to argue that the United States is morally obligated to "do something" rather than just stay out of nasty internecine quarrels in faraway lands. In the global classroom that is our digitized current world, you believe that being a bystander -- even thousands of miles away -- is as bad as being the bully. So you hardly ever find yourself saying that "we should sit this one out."

#3: You think globally and speak, um, globally. You are quick to condemn human rights violations by other governments, but American abuses (e.g., torture, rendition, targeted assassinations, Guantánamo, etc.) and those of America's allies get a pass. You worry privately (and correctly) that aiming your critique homeward might get in the way of a future job.

#4: You are a strong proponent of international law, except when it gets in the way of Doing the Right Thing. Then you emphasize its limitations and explain why the United States doesn't need to be bound by it in this case.

#5: You belong to the respectful chorus of those who publicly praise the service of anyone in the U.S. military, but you would probably discourage your own progeny from pursuing a military career.

#6. Even if you don't know very much about military history, logistics, or modern military operations, you are still convinced that military power can achieve complex political objectives at relatively low cost.

#7: To your credit, you have powerful sympathies for anyone opposing a tyrant. Unfortunately, you tend not to ask whether rebels, exiles, and other anti-regime forces are trying to enlist your support by telling you what they think you want to hear. (Two words: Ahmed Chalabi.)

#8. You are convinced that the desire for freedom is hard-wired into human DNA and that Western-style liberal democracy is the only legitimate form of government. Accordingly, you believe that democracy can triumph anywhere -- even in deeply divided societies that have never been democratic before -- if outsiders provide enough help.

#9. You respect the arguments of those who are skeptical about intervening, but you secretly believe that they don't really care about saving human lives.

#10. You believe that if the United States does not try to stop a humanitarian outrage, its credibility as an ally will collapse and its moral authority as a defender of human rights will be tarnished, even if there are no vital strategic interests at stake.

If you are exhibiting some or all of these warning signs, you have two choices. Option #1: You can stick to your guns (literally) and proudly own up to your interventionist proclivities. Option #2: You can admit that you've been swept along by the interventionist tide and seek help. If you choose the latter course, I recommend that you start by reading Alexander Downes and Jonathan Monten's "Forced to Be Free?: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Rarely Leads to Democratization" (International Security, 2013), along with Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan and Peter Van Buren's We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People.

And if that doesn't work, maybe we need some sort of 12-step program…

From an FT editorial:

However, the Qataris’ intervention in Syria, while boosting the revolt against Assad, has also created confusion. The Saudis support the handful of secular rebel factions and Salafi groups fighting the Syrian regime. The Qataris, by contrast, are less discriminating over who they support, and work through the Muslim Brotherhood, which is anathema to Riyadh. As a result the Qataris and Saudis last year created separate and competing military alliances, a rivalry that has undermined the rebellion against Assad – and may have led to weapons ending up in the hands of jihadi militants.

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