It was an Arab hotel that reminded me of the one in the movie, “The Shining” (yes, the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park). It was a huge hotel with almost no other guests, absolutely no one around until I found someone behind the main desk. It was very dilapidated and every single plant life around the exterior building was dead or dying, like in a Western. The lone desk clerk was friendly, but some among the few personnel serving breakfast in the nearly empty restaurant stared menacingly at us. Or so it seemed. By that time we had learned that the hotel was built by the Jordanians on top of Jewish graves situated in the Mount of Olives for many hundreds of years when they had control of the eastern half of Jerusalem, which they divided off beginning from the 1948 Israeli War of Independence. They would not let Jews have access to it, nor to the Old City which included the Wailing Wall (Western Wall, or Kotel). Their snipers, I understand, used to fire on Jerusalemites in the Western half of the city. They used the Mount of Olives Cemetary headstones as paving stones for streets. Anyway, we had unknowingly booked rooms in a hotel that desecrated our Jewish ancestors on purpose and without purpose. We were ashamed and left right after breakfast, not having been able to sleep most of the night.

We met friendly and welcoming Arabs and seemingly hostile Arabs on the Mount of Olives, and we felt horribly for the plight of the hotel, situated in Israel, without much business, but we could not abide by the misuse of the Mount of Olives Cemetary.

Any hostility between Arabs and Jews, between Muslims and Jews, is disheartening to me, and fills me with pain. But any idea that Jews are to blame for such a situation is just not allowable either and anyone who says differently is just not knowledgeable about the Palestinian and Arab failings, or not willing to acknowledge such failings. That is bad enough. Does one call their child to task for being the object of hate and scorn and threats of death? No, and we shouldn’t be doing so either. But Peter Beinart does for he calls for an economic boycott of the Settlers. Does this include East Jerusalem? What about Maale Adumim? Does not such a call give Jewish sustenance to the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) Movement against all of Israel anyway?

But such a boycott is even worse. For it fails to acknowledge that Israel is under siege, and for that matter so is world Jewry (think of the Jewish children murdered recently in Toulouse, France) and that this siege is orchestrated and funded by Arabs and Muslim radicals who are predominant in these communities and national states. And it fails to acknowledge the anti-Semitism of the hate-mongers on the Left, who in groups such as Media Matters, J-Street and the Occupy Movement, submerge their Leftist values to anti-Semitism too.

The article about the recent Mount Olive attack, accessible below, shows that Jew-hatred, the very essence of the Holocaust, is capable of existing even in Israel because the Jews are either unable or unwilling to fight it. Why? Because it is overwhelming and they are under siege. Yet some among us want to objectively hold back the struggle to fight against Jew-hatred. I do not believe such people anymore when they say they act to oppose Israel in order to save it, to wipe Israel of its sins. I believe they act, wittingly or unwittingly, to oppose Israel for other reasons.

I have heard that a Rabbi in our community retorted, when asked if they supported Israel, that they “support Israel from the Left.” Do you support your children, under siege, from the Left? But maybe this explains this curious sentiment and therefore behavior, the behavior of Jews wanting to support Peter Beinart or to seek to undermine those who want to support Israel.

The fact is, what Israel does, and I believe it tries mightily for peace, it does as a process of self-protection and self-preservation. What the Palestinians do, and the Arabs do, to Israel, is driven by their desire to destroy Israel and kill or subdue Jews. The Muslim Brotherhood has the same goals as Al Qaeda, just a different way of achieving them. The actions of the oppressed are not equal to the actions of the oppressor. Israel and the Jews are the oppressed and the Arabs and the Palestinians are the oppressors. This is true, despite the fact that there exist many peaceable and friendly Arabs and Muslims who oppose their leadership and their brothers against Jew-hatred. Instead, these people need to actively support Jews and Israel against the siege and work against their own leadership. Some indeed do that, showing much bravery, but not enough to rely on.

I am sorry for cutting short my stay at the hotel on the Mount of Olives; there were many good people in the Arab community and I do not want to withdraw my economic support as a tourist, but still, I cannot sleep on the graves of Jews purposely destroyed because of Jew-hatred in the Arab and Muslim world. My boycott of them is not the same as their boycott of Israel; nor is my boycott the same as the boycott Peter Beinart proposes against the Settlers.

href=”http://www.israelunitycoalition.org/news/?p=7955″ title=”Protect The Mount of Olives, from a Jerusalem Post Editorial”>

He was referring to President Barack Obama and the conversation took place at the AIPAC 2012 Policy Conference at the end of a breakout session titled, “African-Americans and Israel.” That particular session was not about President Obama nor his policy speech before AIPAC. Nonetheless, the jousting about by attendees for a level-headed understanding between the US President, the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Iran on nuclear threats had already become a hallmark of AIPAC’s annual Policy Conference (from 10,000 people last year to over 13,000 this  year and an expected 20,000 next year) held in Washington D.C.from March 3-6.

I had just explained to the Chairman that on multiple occasions in history – the 1956 Suez War, the 1967 Six Day War, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, for starters – the United States had not acted in the interests of Israel’s defense and had obliged Israel to act against the wishes of the United States. Supporters of Obama had to understand that there is ample reason for Israel NOT to put its fate in the hands of other powers, even superpowers. Keeping fate in her own hands had already proven Israel correct and her detractors wrong.

My answer to the Chairman’s question was this: we can’t know all that either President Obama knows or Netanyahu knows with regard to dealing with Iranian nuclear bomb-making, but Obama only needed to satisfy Netanyahu and not me. If Netanyahu was satisfied, I trusted him enough to decide if President Obama’s deeds would match his words. I would trust Obama if Netanyahu trusted Obama, or not.

More precisely, it is in practice hard for me to know if Bibi Netanyahu is satisfied with Obama or not. Even one year ago he was not, but now the answer is not so clear. President Obama’s speech did not say anything new, and I had expected new ideas. He did not define any red lines on keeping Iranian nuclear enrichment to under 20%, for Iranian cooperation with IAEA demands and inspectors (such as access to high-level Iranian  physicists), for explanations of Iranian facilities that cross the line from medical research or electrical power to bomb-making, He assured Israel  that he has her back, that he does not intend to let Iran get a nuclear capability, and therefore containment of a post-nuclear Iran is not his policy. Moreover, he noted sanctions were working and would work to stop Iran. Netanyahu reiterated Israel’s sovereignty and the need for Jews not to
relinquish their right to answer threats of liquidation on their own terms. He said there exists a very short window for deciding on the value of sanctions vs military attacks. In another interview later with Greta Van Susteren of Fox News, he added that the paradox is that a real, credible and believable threat to the Iranian leadership could cause them to freeze their nuclear program. In that interview, he pointed out that Iran already stopped their program once in 2004 not long after President Bush’s Operation Iraqi Freedom took down Saddam Hussein and proved a credible threat to the Iranian regime as well.

Throughout the conference there was the call for bi-partisanship, and the acknowledgement that on Israel, the spectrum of political opinion was fairly well united in her defense, but the undertone of my observations was an acknowledgement that partisanship was still very strong.  Commentator Liz Cheney and ex-Democrat Representative Jane Harman had a public spat on a panel during one of the plenaries over Obama’s policy on Israel. There was a spirited sort of one-up-man-ship between Republicans and Democrats whose pavilions existed side by side in the Washington Convention Center’s huge basement layout called AIPAC Village. People commented frustratingly about the partisanship, but I found it nothing out of the ordinary and a healthy dose of debate anyway. I found very little support for J-Street, but much concern for the campus cultural wars evolving into anti-Semitism.

There was a huge number of those who are non-Jewish, but who actively participated, including minorities and Christians. Questions regarding
the participation of Muslims seemed to acknowledge their general lack of support for Israel.

Last year I spoke with numerous people from the Chicago contingent to AIPAC, some 800 as I recall, who had voted for President Obama in 2008
but were at the time very disappointed with his Administration’s treatment of Israel since his coming to the White House. I noted this because I reasoned that they knew him best. Although all attendees to this year’s Conference were asked in an email to treat all speakers as guests into your house, the AIPAC house, I think the 2012 Conference tilted strongly toward Netanyahu and was a little cool toward President Obama. There is great concern, even among liberals, that Obama may not have Israel’s back, as he has famously said.

Mitchell Bard, the famous Middle East scholar and author, most recently of “The Arab Lobby,” had put it best in his talk recently at the Boulder JCC. Obama’s 2011 actions vis-a-vis Israel were much more positive than those of his first two years. The question one has to answer, as he put it, is did President Obama see the light or did he see the polls?

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The gathering will be 13,000 strong (10,000 last year) and will probably be a much larger number for the Monday night Gala Event that hosts the biggest gathering of our US Congressmen and Congresswomen outside of the actual Congress. That, folks, is a measure of the bi-partisan support for Israel in the country and an indication of the importance the subject of Israel has on the minds of America’s leaders, as well as the minds of the American people.

That was not always the case. For instance, the relationship between Israel and US President Lyndon B. Johnson was so rocky that he threatened Israel that “they would be on their own” if they attacked pre-emptively against Arab threats toward the Jewish State in May of 1967. Egypt, under the pan-Arabist Gamal Abdul Nasser, illegally kicked out the peacekeeping UN Emergency Force (UNEF) from the Sinai, moved in troops and tanks and munitions there, closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping traffic, and threatened to annihilate Israeli sovereignty  at the hand of joint Arab League attacks. Nasser said, “Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel.” The world knows well the resulting story whereby Israel on June 5, 1967 pre-empted a possible Egyptian attack, took air superiority and went on to defeat the combined Arab armies in the famously titled “Six Day War.” It was only after that war that US leaders went from visualizing Israel as a liability to Israel as a strategic asset. The American people, on the other hand, have always, by majorities, supported the Israeli State. Support today is stronger than ever.

Since then, an alliance has grown by leaps and bounds in fields as diverse as financial, technology, military, cultural, religious, medical, security and intelligence. AIPAC is partly a gathering of Israeli experts and American experts in many fields, but related to the growing relationship between them; particularly on questions related to the Middle East. This year, that would put the AIPAC Policy Conference on a path to considering the questions of Iranian nuclear development and the upcoming November, 2012 elections. Thus the acute interest in the Washington’s political class to come and speak at the convention.

It is well known that Obama and Netanyahu have had a rocky relationship together, but many have also pointed out, including the Israelis, that President Obama has been a great friend to Israel in the last year. It is apparent that they do not, at least by publicly gleaned information, see eye to eye on the question of whether to use military force against Iran in the near future. Israel today has said it will not give the US government an advance heads up on its decision to attack Iran if and when they come to that line. Also, Netanyahu’s ex-Chief of Staff has said an Israeli attack is imminent. The fear in certain quarters is that the US will allow Iran to get a nuclear bomb and will not take strong enough action to stop it, either in a sanctions regime against Iran or a military strike at Iranian nuclear assets. Iran has already reached uranium enrichment of 20% and is starting to put its nuclear material-producing centrifuges deep underground. The window of opportunity for a military strike is publicly acknowledged by Israel as closing fast.

Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman and 31 other Senators introduced legislation intended to show bi-partisan support for even stronger sanctions against Iran, and specific triggers (dependent on Iranian intentions) that would call for the US to respond with a military strike on Iran. The legislation, called a Sense of the Senate, specifically calls on the President to make it the official policy of the United States NOT to adhere to a policy of containment of Iran. The Policy Conference leaders hope to lobby our Congressional legislators in some 500 meetings on Capitol HIll on Tuesday with Conference attendees, immediately after the end of the Policy Conference itself.

Notable speakers already confirmed for this year’s conference include:

• President Barack Obama
• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
• Israeli President Shimon Peres
• Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta
• Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY)
• House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)
• Senator Carl Levin (D-MI)
• Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT)
• Senator Johnny Isakson (R-GA)
• Republican Candidate for President and Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney
• Republican Candidate for President and Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich
• President of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and Former Member of Congress Jane Harman
• CNN Contributor Paul Begala
• Democratic Strategist Donna Brazile
• Fox News Contributor Liz Cheney
• Editor of The Weekly Standard William Kristol
• Political Analyst for NBC News Mike Murph

Bennett calls the strike imminent. I do not believe a person in his position would say so unless it was a real possibility. He says the Iranians will be beyond attack within 12 months and that they are “an octopus of terror” around the world. He says Israel is not sure America will back them and that they are being told “do not attack.” But he pleads for Americans to allow Israel to carry out this mission if the Americans won’t do it themselves.

Interview with Naftali Bennett on Glenn Beck.com

Norman Finkelstein

This video has to be seen to be believed. Longtime pro-Palestinian apologist Norman Finkelstein seems to have had it with the “cult” of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and the Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. This is great news in itself, but it gets even better. Although clearly still no friend of Israel, Finkelstein does make the crux of the case for Israel, conceding that the BDS Movement and similar organizations really just want to wipe out Israel.

He cautions that some of the BDS activists are merely deluded about the true nature of the movement’s aims, but states that the vast majority of the activists just want to do away with Israel, period. And while this majority thinks they are right to make the case for the Palestinians and not a case for Israel as well, they are instead just building a cult among themselves because they will get no traction in the public with this strategy. If they are serious, and want to win in the court of public opinion, he says, then they have to be serious about the rights of Israel and the Jews as well.

Finkelstein emphatically points out that they are not serious about Israel’s existential rights, and he, having already followed the ineffectual cult of Maoism as a youth, is not about to follow a cult again. He says that as it stands the BDS Movement and all the seemingly high-minded organizations like it are a cult that has few successes and mostly talks to itself. The Movement thinks success will come through time and hard work, but the public will never accept a political formulation that does not accept the State of Israel as legitimate. He thinks there is an historic opportunity to actually resolve the question of the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians, with both sides making undesired concessions, but this goal can never be achieved through the Movement’s current line of argument.

What an admission! Someone important within their own movement has made it clear that the BDS Movement and its like-minded sister organizations are not about helping the Palestinians so much as they are bent on destroying Israel. In this recent interview, Finkelstein makes the arguments noted above, but there are also interesting counter-arguments made by a BDS leader against Finkelstein’s points. His critics are clearly not qualified to answer Finkelstein and their arguments are contorted. Finkelstein has plainly just had enough of their sophisms and cult operations.

Stepping back a bit, this is also a good look at J-Street and organizations such as B’tselem and even Peace Now. Include here intellectuals such as Peter Beinart and Tony Judt and author Tony Kushner. The issue is not their opposition to the Israeli government, the issue is their tacit support for such organizations as the International Solidarity Movement. By not criticizing these entities, openly and publicly, by only directing their “fire” at Israel, they too bring themselves under suspicion of being part of the cult Finkelstein criticizes.

Here is the New Israel Fund’s (NIF) contorted explanation of its approach to the BDS Movement in 2010:

NIF supports an end to the occupation of Palestinian territories as a central tenet of the strategic framework in which we operate. The tactics known as ‘boycott, divestment and sanctions’ (BDS) are designed to pressure Israel to end the occupation, but NIF believes these tactics to be unproductive, inflammatory and ineffective because of the difficulties in defining an approach that is not overly broad, does not delegitimize Israel and will achieve the long-term goal.

Although we will continue to communicate publicly and privately to our allies and grantees that NIF does not support BDS as a strategy or tactic, we will not reduce or eliminate our funding for grantees that differ with us on a tactical matter. NIF will not fund BDS activities nor support organizations for which BDS is a substantial element (JSJ emphasis) of their activities, but will support organizations that conform to our grant requirements if their support for BDS is incidental or subsidiary to their significant programs.”

Here is its 2012 position now on its website regarding any boycott of Settlement goods and services:

NIF opposes the occupation and subsequent settlement activities. NIF will not exclude support for organizations that discourage the purchase of goods or use of services from settlements.”

Finkelstein knows that the BDS Movement is a “wink-wink” for the destruction of Israel, and even though the New Israel Fund over the years has changed and moderated its position and become less formally supportive of BDS, it refuses to break with it.

OK folks, I think we have our smoking gun.

Click here to view the interview.

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All the historical forces that exist today in the Arab-Israeli conflict are just rebirths of old forces we tend to think of as new. What is new is simply each generation’s discovery of these forces. It proves the old maxim that history does not repeat, but it certainly rhymes.

And so it is with Mitchell Bard’s new book, “The Arab Lobby.” You may think AIPAC is devising the Mideast policies of the US government. You might think that Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s 2007 book, “The Israel Lobby,” accurately portrays the new state of the US-Israeli relationship whereby the Israeli tail wags the US dog; that the US State Dept. and our military bend to Israeli concerns over American self-interest; that Arabs and Arab states have become more reasonable and Palestinians are now the underdogs; and that Israel is an imperialist and even apartheid state. And finally, you might believe that it is new to say that it is in Israel’s self-interest for the USA to take a more aggressive approach to some presumed Israeli intransigence, for their own good (tough love?).

Bard makes the case that there exists an Arab Lobby, that this Lobby has existed formally since the 1948 Israeli War of Independence and informally through various Arab political formations after the fall of the Ottoman Empire near the end of World War I. The House of Saud, for instance, is one example. More importantly, the same political forces pulling on the US government, the White House, the Arabs, the Palestinians, the Islamists, the Pentagon, and all the parallel institutions of the Israelis has not fundamentally changed over all these years. The one thing that has changed though is that the Arabs are better at lobbying in the USA and have more influence than ever. But not near enough to change their relative strength in our political arena.

One important thing that is true now and was true way back when is that the Arab Lobby does not have a popular base among the US people while the Israel Lobby does.

The Arabs do not seek to call attention to or debate Israel head on because their attempts to do so have always been failures, as Bard points out. They’ve tried this. Their heavy-handed narratives only alienate them from the American people. So they prefer to insinuate themselves in more subdued ways, such as funding and therefore biasing Middle East scholarship departments at important American universities by endowing chairs. Or influencing the placement of their insufficiently critical narratives in our grade school and high school textbooks. Or establishing their extremist Wahhabi schools and mosques in urban and suburban America.

The fact that American support for Israel has not changed since the formation of Israel in 1948 drives the Arabs just plain crazy. But it drives the Arab’s American supporters even crazier. These Americans are an important contingent of so-called Arabists who populate and dominate our own Departments of State and even the Pentagon, some Christian denominations, the old oil industry, universities and intelligentsia, media and philo-Arabists who for various reasons (up to and including hatred of Jews) think Israel’s formation was an historical tragedy. Bard thinks this combination of forces is larger and more powerful than the Israel Lobby, but less politically agile because it fundamentally has to go against American sympathy for Israel and the Jews.

Moreover, Bard says, the Arabists have been consistently wrong in their arguments against Israel and in favor of the Arabs. These historic arguments include that Israel’s formation would be a danger to the Jews, that arming Israel would lead to Israeli over-reaction and war, that Israel would go communist, that the Arab nations would break with the United States and deny us oil, etc. Still, the Arabists manage to continuously dredge up these same arguments in new forms.

From this understanding Bard then makes a new and interesting point: The Arab Lobby morphed from its nascent Jew-hatred, oil-based threats and denial of Israel’s self-determination to support for a narrative of an underdog, oppressed and repressed Palestinian nationhood. Bard makes a case that this new narrative never really accorded with the reality of Israeli-Palestinian politics. In 2002 NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman reported to much excitement that Saudi ruler Crown Prince Abdullah announced at a dinner to which he was invited in Riyadh that the Arabs would bury the hatchet (normalize relations) with Israel if Israel made a complete withdrawal from the disputed territories. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Ohlmert famously made the requisite Israeli-side offer to negotiate on this basis, but the Saudis never responded positively to his entreaties, even changing the terms. Meanwhile, Friedman’s hechsher helped them garner much undeserved goodwill just after the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center.

To continue, the Arabs also succeeded in turning the struggle of narratives from one of an embattled David (Israel) against the Arab Goliath to a religious war in which the Arab and Muslim diaspora could pit a Jewish/Nazi/imperialist state against Islam. Otherwise, why would Muslims in Asia care about the Palestinian problem when they have many others closer to their home? Yet none of this has empirically increased their support among the American people.

Yet the Arabs and Muslims have built many American-based Islamic and Arab organizations precisely to push the religious line: devout and peaceful Muslims against Islamophobia. These organizations get ample funding and backing from Arab sources. The Congress of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is one of these. It bills itself as a Muslim version of the NAACP. But it was founded by elements of the Muslim Brotherhood, it refuses to back Israel against Hamas, and it’s leaders have been put on record in closed meetings as calling itself pro-Hamas and pro-Hezbollah. They have lost support from a high of 29,000 members after the 9/11 attack to around 1,700 in 2006, according to a report in the Washington Times. Meanwhile, they have been feted by high-level administration operatives and used as counsel on such things as police training against a supposed Islamophobia.

Bard details the more contemporaneous cast of characters: Christian anti-Zionists such as the Presbyterian Church, diplomatic alumni seeking careers as Arab and Muslim favorites, academics who couch the Arab and Muslim narrative in biased terms in the classrooms of our youth and in our universities.

None of these new initiatives has paid off so far in turning America against Israel. Meanwhile the Israeli narrative has grown stronger in America. But can this working relationship be undone? The Arab Lobby would like to do just that.

Come and learn more about this important work by Mitchell Bard and deepen your understanding of this subject. Mitchell Bard will make an appearance at the Boulder Jewish Community Center on Sunday, February 12 at 7:00 pm to talk about his new book, “The Arab Lobby.”

David Harris

December 19, 2011

Tom Friedman, the New York Times columnist, crossed a line in his recent op-ed, “Newt, Mitt, Bibi and Vladimir.”

Shockingly, he wrote: “I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”

We submitted a letter-to-the-editor to the Times the very same day.

The good news is the paper published an AJC letter, the only one about Friedman’s column, as it surprisingly turned out.

The bad news is they cut out the heart of it.”>People reveal themselves over time. That was the sage advice I got from an old mentor.

NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman just revealed himself in spades. Actually, I’ve been “on” to Friedman for a long time, going back to the 1980s. Journalism is assumed to be about truth and being a watchdog on untruth, but narcissism constantly gets in the way. I think he just got so cockily resilient from criticism, he pulled the curtain in a revealing way he did not mean to trigger.

But there is a bigger issue. The “truthiness” of the NY Times itself. This is not a recent problem. The Times, which prides itself as the newspaper of record, the Old Grey Lady, the newspaper whose mast said, “all the news that’s fit to print,” the newspaper that prides itself as setting the bar for all the rest of the media, that NY Times, has always had a problem with the truth. It reported, beside knowing better, that starvation of the Ukrainians in the 1930s was much less than actual and that the little that they counted occurred without any deliberate attempt at a purposeful policy by Stalin and his administration. We’re talking here about the deaths of upwards of 7.5 million Ukrainians. The well-named Ukrainian breadbasket was fleeced by food exports out of the Ukraine under Soviet control, resulting in the starvation of this cradle of food. Yet the Times did not paint this picture, despite their castigation on this point by other news outlets. The Times’ Walter Duranty even won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting, a prize the Times after the war played down because of the shame of NOT reporting the facts straight. There was a serious but failed attempt to take that Pulitzer away, and the Times did not object, nor defend Duranty. There are many instances where we can see the “truthiness” issue of the Times years after it’s own reporting.

The current problem is more immediate. Friedman castigated Israel’s PM Netanyahu for being resoundingly welcome in the US Congress because they were bought and paid for by the Israel Lobby. He’s made many “unhelpful” statements, but this latest one jumps the shark.

Worse still, when the American Jewish Committee’s David Harris revolted with a scathing critique of Friedman, the Times published an edited, toned down version meant, obviously, to blunt the growing chorus of criticism aimed at one of its star columnists. You can read David Harris’ note on the incident below.

Has the Times no shame? No, apparently not. They have also jumped the shark.

Read the dust-up below:

New York Times Columnist Tom Friedman Crossed a Line

David Harris

December 19, 2011

Tom Friedman, the New York Times columnist, crossed a line in his recent op-ed, “Newt, Mitt, Bibi and Vladimir.”

Shockingly, he wrote: “I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”

We submitted a letter-to-the-editor to the Times the very same day.

The good news is the paper published an AJC letter, the only one about Friedman’s column, as it surprisingly turned out.

The bad news is they cut out the heart of it.

Read the rest of David Harris’ piece here, at AJC’s blog.

Although the Palestinians spread the lie to the world media that Israel committed a massacre against the Palestinian civilian population (the UN subsequently verified that no such massacre occurred), and the level of destruction was limited rather than widespread as also depicted in the media, an important and telling incident during that battle showed the difference in the mentality between the warring sides.

An IDF unit chose to do an on-the-ground house-by-house search for terrorist combatants rather than call for F-16 strikes which might kill innocent civilians as collateral damage. One should understand that Palestinian civilians often offered themselves as human shields, knowing that Israelis will avoid harming them while in pursuit of their compatriots, and that the Palestinian side booby-trapped the houses and streets with explosives. Knowing this, the IDF still decided to choose “boots on the ground” rather than air power.

A Palestinian commander during the battle, Tabaat Mardawi, told CNN from prison in Israel, that after learning the IDF was going to use troops, and not planes, “It was like hunting … like being given a prize… The Israelis knew that any soldier who went into the camp like that was going to get killed… I’ve been waiting for a moment like that for years”. [CNN.com, August 23, 2003, "Palestinian fighter describes 'hard fight' in Jenin"]

The result of this “boots on the ground” decision was the deaths of thirteen Israeli soldiers in one incident, all killed by the explosion of a booby-trapped home and the subsequent ambush by Palestinian militias in what became known as “the bathtub.”

Such decisions are not unique and the IDF soldiers are constantly and in numerous incidents called on to choose life over death. In fact, the entire Israeli operation in Jenin was deliberately slowed down just in consideration of possible civilian casualties.

Why? And does the answer matter?

The answer demonstrates the difference in mentality between the warring sides. The Palestinian side makes it honorable to lie, to encourage death, to slaughter its enemies. Let me be clear, I am not saying this is the mentality of the Palestinian population; I am saying this is the attitude of the Palestinian militants and a large segment of the Palestinian population. This is different with the Israelis. Armies kill and wars are brutal, but the difference in attitudes is none the less telling and distinctive.

It is not that Israeli soldiers harbor no hate or desire to kill, it is that they are educated differently in handling their response and the rules under which they can engage Palestinians.

And one can see this by observing the difference in their training from the primary, secondary and university educational institutions in distinction to the culture of radical Islamism. All that even before we get to that which comes from soldiering.

But soldiering, the training of a soldier, is telling too.

For that reason four local, pro-Israel organizations (Stand By Israel, Stand With Us, Americans Against Terrorism and Action Israel) are sponsoring a visit to the Denver-Boulder area of Sergeant (Res.) Nadav Weinberg, who served in the Special Forces Counter-Terrorism Unit of the IDF.  Having recently finished his service in the IDF, Weinberg is touring outside Israel and addressing the whole issue by describing the training of the Israeli soldier in his and her ethical duties.

The title of his talk is,“Ethics and Israel: Gilad Shalit and the Israel Defense Forces.” Weinberg will be speaking on successive days in Boulder on November 30th and at Colorado Christian University on December 1st . The Boulder event begins at 7:00 pm at the CU Boulder  Chabad House, 909 14th St.; CCU talk begins at 6:30 pm at the CCU School of Music, 9200 West Ellsworth Ave., Lakewood.