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April 22, 2011
A Middle East analysis
Hundreds attend Caroline Glick’s lecture.
CYNTHIA RAMSAY
Israel, Iran and the Arab Revolution was the daunting topic that Israeli journalist Caroline Glick expertly distilled for a capacity crowd at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver on April 10.
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Caroline Glick signs copies of her book, Shackled Warrior: Israel and the Global Jihad, after her April 10 lecture in Vancouver. |
The senior columnist and editor for the Jerusalem Post, who also is the senior fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Centre for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., was the guest of Vancouver Hebrew Academy and the Faigen Charitable Foundation. David Emanuel and Rabbi Don Pacht of VHA, Gina Faigen of the foundation and Mark Gurvis of Jewish Federation of Jewish Vancouver all said a few words before Glick spoke, Faigen noting that the lecture was the first of what will be an annual talk on topics of interest to the Jewish community. At the end of the evening, Emanuel’s daughter, Meg, thanked Glick, and Pacht thanked Dr. Morris Faigen for his friendship to Israel, the Torah and the Jewish people.
In her opening remarks, Glick, who was “one of the only female journalists on the front lines with the U.S. forces and the first Israeli journalist to report from liberated Baghdad,” said, “It struck me very clearly in Iraq why it was that the Children of Israel had to wander in the desert for 40 years before we could come to the Promised Land of Israel – because an understanding of freedom is something that takes a long time for people to be able to embrace. When you’re moving from a situation of slavery into a situation of liberty, the mentality and the habits of free men and women is not something that is born overnight because a dictator falls or because people are led out of slavery by Moses.... It’s something that has to be inculcated, which is one of the reasons that I think it is so important that we tell the story of the Exodus from Egypt to our children at the Pesach seder.”
She said, in the world of 24-hour news cycles, we expect everything to be packaged for us perfectly, “but when we look at what’s happening in the Arab world, we have to understand that freedom is messy and it’s a long haul and, until people assume the habits of liberty, you often undergo a very bloody period between slavery and freedom, and so ... it’s not something that you can feel euphoric about at the beginning. On the other hand, it’s also a necessary precondition for developing the habits of freedom.”
To understand where we are now, Glick said, “it is important to understand where we were four months ago before a young man named Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia set himself on fire, reportedly out of frustration that he simply wasn’t able to make a living under the tyranny of the Tunisian president for life.
“Before that happened and set off a chain of events that we’re seeing still unfolding throughout the Arab world,” she explained, “we had a situation where the Middle East was seen as something with, sort of, three poles”: Iran, “the major sponsor of terrorism” and “active jihad,” on one side and Israel, “which Iran seeks to annihilate through genocide as part of its plan for a world order led by, in their case, Shiite Islam and the Shiite messiah, the 12th imam,” on the other side. “In the middle, you have the Sunni Arab states of the Middle East, the most important of which are ... from a political perspective, it was Egypt under Hosni Mubarak and, from an economic perspective, it’s Saudi Arabia under the House of Saud.”
Glick noted that “the Sunni Arab world is no less genocidally antisemitic than the mullahs are in Iran” because tyrannies need an external enemy on which to project the ire of their people, away from the tyrants and towards something outside, and that target is Israel and the Jewish people. She explained, “The reason it has so much resonance is because ... the post-World War II traditions of the Arab world, the Bathists in places like Iraq and Syria, and the Nasarists in places like Egypt, the pan-Arabists in Egypt and in Jordan and other places, were largely inspired by Nazism.... Then, of course, that is layered on top of political Islam, which is also deeply, deeply antisemitic.
“So, you have two very thick layers, of social antisemitism or political antisemitism, of religious antisemitism, that then has been exploited by the tyrannies of the Sunni Arab world in order to deflect popular outrage.... On the other hand, the Sunnis are looking at Shiite Iran,” said Glick, noting that King Abdullah of Jordan, in 2004, during the Iraq War, referred to the insurgency against American forces as a “Shiite axis that extended from Iran through Iraq into Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority.” As a consequence, she explained, the Sunni dictators have shared a common concern with Israel and the United States about Iran, Hamas, Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood and others, because they all pose a threat to their dictatorships.
This uneasy balance has been unsettled with the recent rebellions, said Glick. On the face of it, they “look like the awakening of liberal forces inside of Arab societies and it’s a cause for excitement among many people in the West who are just seeing the world as it’s being transmitted back to them by their television commentators ... and they really don’t have a clear idea of what’s going on inside of Egypt, or behind the scenes.”
She explained that, for example, Tunisia has always been seen as basically a secular and pro-Western state, but the regime that was just overthrown had been fighting the Muslim Brotherhood inside of Tunisia for more than 20 years. Since the overthrow, the leader of the Brotherhood’s Tunisian branch has been welcomed back from exile with a parade and there were riots outside of the main synagogue, where the rioters called out threats against Jews.
“So, you have an immediate awakening of forces of jihad inside of Tunisia as a consequence. Will these forces end up ruling Tunisia? Maybe yes, maybe no, but what is very clear is that they have been strengthened as a result of the overthrow of the regime because the views of the Muslim Brotherhood in supposedly secular Tunisia are very resonant, are very popular.”
The result in Egypt was similar, she added, where Mubarak had been fighting against the Muslim Brotherhood for some 30 years.
“Western observers who were looking at the Arab world assumed that Egypt and Mubarak were one and that there was no distinction between the two, and so on, in everywhere from Syria to Saudi Arabia to Kuwait to Tunisia ... to Libya. Nobody was paying attention to what was actually happening inside of these societies, and everybody ignored the basic rule that tyrannies, like all other human societies, are themselves dynamic and that the change, when it occurs, is going to generally be explosive, violent and not necessarily in a direction that we would want them to be moving from a perspective of somebody living in a democracy that has certain interests, forgetting for a second Israel in all of this.”
From an Iranian perspective, continued Glick, “the loss of Mubarak has been a massive strategic victory.” She posited that, within a couple of months, “Iran and Egypt will establish diplomatic relations for the first since 1979.” The increased power of the Muslim Brotherhood is also good for Iran, she said, but added that not everything has benefited Iran.
“Change is happening everywhere,” she noted. “So, it’s also happening in Syria.” There, massive violence is being used to quell popular uprisings that have spread to everywhere but Aleppo, she said. “Nobody thought that it was going to happen in Syria because Bashar al-Assad and the Bathist regime there, with their allies in Iran and Hezbollah Lebanon, would never allow this to happen and they would be so quickly repressed, as the Muslim Brotherhood uprising was in Hama” in 1982, when some 20,000 protesters were murdered by al-Assad’s father.
For Glick, the fundamental instability that is spreading throughout the Arab world has its origins in the Iraqis’ tumbling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad in 2003.
“This has been going on for at least the last eight years and it’s not going to stop. That means that, if Mubarak leaving is a massive strategic loss for the West, for Israel, because it’s empowering the worst actors in Egyptian society to take over ... you may have a counter loss to that side of the ledger if the Syrian government is overthrown and, of course, if the Iranian mullahs are overthrown finally by the extraordinarily brave Iranian people who have been seeking to overthrow the regime since the regime stole the presidential elections in June of 2009.”
About the lessons to be learned from what is going on, Glick said, “We really have to pay attention to what people believe, not just what regimes believe.” As well, the new situation opens up a lot of questions for Israel. “One of the things it ... shows is that the notion that the Palestinian conflict with Israel is the core of instability and violence in the Middle East has been rent asunder ... because what we see in fact is that antisemitism is a very major factor in the social fabric of the Arab world, however, what is happening in the Arab world today has nothing to do with antisemitism” and “there is nothing that Israel can do, given also the levels of antisemitism in these countries [i.e. the belief that Israel should not exist], to placate the peoples of these countries.”
Glick contends, therefore, that “the whole basis of the two-state paradigm is founded on a misperception of the nature of the societies of the Middle East.... Naturally, that raises the question, Seeing that this is the case, can we expect then for the Europeans and the Obama administration, and so on and so forth, to finally quit with this obsessive demand for Israeli land giveaways to the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization]? Unfortunately, the answer to that is, no.”
There are a number of reasons for this response, said Glick, highlighting one: that the demand for Israeli concessions is not based on a rational assessment of reality in the Middle East, but rather on the “ideology of the people who are pushing this drive [for concessions], whether it’s antisemitism as an ideology, Islam as an ideology, and also due to the political realities of the domestic politics of Europe and of the international left, which are, in Europe, you have very large, burgeoning and empowered Muslim minorities that are pushing politicians to abandon Israel ... and the international left has quite clearly sided with that move against Israel. To the extent that people are motivated by ties to ... civil movements that are affiliated with the international left, they are going to adopt anti-Israel politics regardless of its logic and rationality and connection to interests of Western nations in the Middle East such as they are.”
The question as to whether Israel will be left alone with the Arab world in turmoil has been answered, said Glick, by the murder of the Fogel family in Itamar, the intentional shelling of the school bus in southern Israel, the bombing in Jerusalem, the escalation of Hamas’ missile-and-mortar campaign from Gaza, as well as other events. She believes that Israel must not only expand significantly the size of the IDF, but be willing to defend itself.
“We see that Israeli appeasement has not brought anything to Israel other than invitation for more attacks because, if we’re already saying that it’s not our land, then certainly we shouldn’t be defending it because it’s not ours, we’re sitting on somebody else’s property. So, we have to stop that. We have to stop apologizing and we have to stop conceding our rights. In fact, I think it’s important at this time for the discourse that Israelis are engaging in to be a discourse about our rights; not our security needs, but about our rights, because if only one side is talking about their rights and, in fact, their rights are imagined, then they’re still going to win, regardless of how false their claims are, so I think it’s very important for Israel to move our own rhetoric from a discussion of our security needs to a discussion of our rights.”
She expanded on this point in the question-and-answer period, explaining that the San Remo Conference, which was held after the First World War by the Allied powers that would form the League of Nations and whose decisions would be transferred to the United Nations in 1946, determined the new territories to be formed out of the former Ottoman-ruled lands of the Middle East. “And they came to the conclusion that the land of Israel should be administered by Great Britain for the purpose of Jewish settlement towards the reestablishment of the Jewish Commonwealth in the land of Israel ... and that decision of the San Remo Conference was adopted by the League of Nations, and that is the only time that sovereignty over the land of Israel was determined in a legally binding document from the perspective of the law of nations.
“So, the only people who ever have been recognized by international law as the sovereigns over Israel, including the West Bank and actually the East Bank of the Jordan River, are the Jewish people,” she continued. “And we don’t remember that. It was never given to Jordan; Jordan annexed the West Bank of the Jordan River in 1950 and that annexation was only recognized by Jordan and Pakistan. There’s never been a state of Palestine. It was never given to a people called the Palestinians.... And so, when we’re talking about rights, we have to recognize that the entire discourse about legal rights in the land of Israel, including Judea and Samaria, is false. It is based upon a false narrative that has nothing to do with international law.” She noted that Jordan was redistributed by Great Britain to the Hashemites in 1922, thereby ending the Jewish people’s legal right to the East Bank of the Jordan River. “However, the legal claim of the Jewish people to all of Israel from 1949, as well as Jerusalem, as well as the West Bank of the Jordan River, is enshrined in the law of nations and has not been superceded and has not been canceled.”
She stressed the need to have the conversation about international law “if only to educate ourselves about the nature of things because people get flummoxed when they’re told by everybody that it is illegally occupied territory, Palestinian territory, when it isn’t occupied, it isn’t illegal and it never belonged to the Palestinians.”
Also in the Q&A, Glick said that Israel is perceived as vulnerable to attack because it is seen as being politically weak, with unreliable friends internationally. But, she said, that doesn’t mean Israel should “lead with its chin.” There are many other approaches, she said, one of which is for Israel to recognize that it’s in a game of power politics.
“Europe has never been won over to support Israel as a result of Israeli concessions to the Arabs and they never will be,” she said. “They are moved by power politics ... and Israel should engage with them to wit. For instance, yes, we have a lot of trade with Europe, but Europe has a lot of trade with Israel.... Europe has not been able to do very much, in particular, with regard to technological development and Israel is a super power in it. Israel should simply be making clear to the Europeans that, if they want to start enacting serious economic sanctions against Israel, that we will not share our technologies with them.... The other thing we have to do is we simply have to start going on offence and chafing these people, because they don’t have to like Israel, they just have to stop voicing their hatred for Israel so comfortably. We have to start exacting social costs for people for doing so and we have to start exacting economic costs for people for doing so.”
She gave the example of Judge Richard Goldstone, whose UN mission, in her view, “was to publish a blood libel against Israel and he did it, he fulfilled it. Goldstone was looking at the situation and, seeing that this sort of thing goes on against Israel on a daily basis and Israel doesn’t do anything, he figured, rationally from his perspective, that he ... would have a last hurrah in front of the microphones ... and he would be able to attack Israel ... and get away with it and, lo and behold, he did.” But, she said, he was then “met by irate Jews, who said, ‘You liar!’ ‘You traitor!’ ‘Be ashamed of yourself!’ ‘We don’t want anything to do with you!’... and he didn’t like it, it stressed him, and he paid a price that he didn’t think that he was going to pay and, lo and behold, yes it took time, yes it was mealy mouthed and all the rest of it, but he recanted. He recanted. If you make people pay a price for bad behavior, they may continue to behave badly, it’s possible, but they won’t do it as enthusiastically and as happily, and they won’t think that they’ll get away with it, and we have to stop giving people carte blanche to libel us.”
On a more positive note, Glick highlighted in her remarks the strength of Israeli society. She said, “We’re looking out our window and we’re seeing revolutions going off in every single country that surrounds us, but there’s no chance that it’s going to happen in Israel, because when we’re angry at our prime minister, we throw him out of office and we elect a different one and when our politicians commit crimes, we put them on trial and we send them to jail. Because we are a democracy and because we are a capitalist, free-market economy, everybody in Israel, essentially, has the wherewithal to make the most of his or her life, and that is the basic building block of a strong, vibrant and prosperous and patriotic society, and that is what Israel is. We had our 40 years in the desert, we know what it means to be free. We’ve developed over our long history the habits of free people and we know why we are where we are, in general. We have some leaders who are confused, but, in general, the people of Israel are not.”
She described Israel as “standing in the eye of the storm in many ways,” but added that “we have to recognize that the clock has started ticking on the Arabs’ 40 years and, the fact of the matter is that, no, it won’t be in our generation, it may not be in the generation that our children take over from us, but perhaps in the generation of our grandchildren, they will have a chance for peace with the Arab world, because, as the Arabs who are now overthrowing their tyrants ... if they have the real opportunity to begin to develop and form the habits of freedom, then that is the only chance that we will have for real peace ever, ever, becoming a reality in the Middle East.
“It’s not with dictators that you make peace – we see what happened, that the peace with Egypt, for which we sacrificed the Sinai Peninsula, is going up in smoke with the loss of Mubarak’s regime, because, since he represented nobody but himself, now that he is gone, his commitments bind nobody. So, we understand that real peace between the people of Israel and the neighbors in the Arab world will only come when the Arabs join the Jews as free people and, the only way that’s going to happen, is by them developing the habits of freedom now that they’ve overthrown the tyrants.”
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