Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a speech before the Knesset on Tuesday commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration.
Netanyahu hailed the document for laying “the international foundation and the support for Zionism and Europe and America and in other parts of the world,” which “contributed greatly to the resurrection enterprise of our People.”
The problem that Netanyahu sees with the Balfour Declaration was “that it took 30 years to implement” due to Britain backing away from it, preventing a place of refuge from being established for the Jews who died during the Holocaust.
Netanyahu pointed out that many in the Arab world were actually initially warm toward the Balfour Declaration, but it was the Arab nationalist spearheaded by Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, who provided “grounds for incitement and violence” and was allied with Nazi Commander Heinrich Himmler.
“Himmler is now gone, the Mufti is now gone, and Zionism has triumphed,” declared Netanyahu. “Those who seek the roots of the intra-Islamic struggle that we have been witnessing in recent years will find them there.”
Netanyahu added that Israel has been establishing alliances with moderate Arabs in the region in order to eradicate radical Islam.
“We are acting to achieve peace with other Arab countries who stand with us in the face of radical Islam,” said Netanyahu. “I can only hope that the Palestinians finally adopt this approach and turn to peace.”
Netanyahu proceeded to denounce officials in the Palestinian Authority for their recent criticism of the Balfour Declaration, which included them calling for the British government to apologize for it.
“They are not moving forward, they are going 100 years backwards,” said Netanyahu. “This is the root of the conflict, the 100-year-old refusal to recognize Zionism and the State of Israel within any borders.”
Netanyahu traveled to Britain last week to honor the declaration, where British Prime Minister Theresa May and other British officials defended their country for establishing the document.
For more on the Balfour Declaration, read Judea Pearl’s column here.
The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) on the border between North and South Korea is often described as the most dangerous place in the world. It’s a no man’s land 160 miles long and 2 1/2-miles wide, wrapped with electrical fencing and laced with antipersonnel mines.
At the so-called Joint Security Area, North and South Korean soldiers stare holes through each other, with the South Koreans behind reflective sunglasses. Almost 30,000 American troops are stationed there as a tripwire. If the North invades the South — as it has in the past and for more than five decades has sworn to do again — its soldiers will have to go through ours. You can go there today as a tourist from the South Korean side, a mere 35 miles from the capital Seoul, and nothing is likely to happen to you; but if war breaks out, this place will explode so catastrophically it will make the Iraq War look and feel like a lazy afternoon nap.
In mountainsides just north of the DMZ, the North has buried thousands of artillery pieces that can pound Seoul’s urban area, home to more than 25 million people, with as many as half a million shells in an hour. More than a million people could be killed, practically in an instant, even if nobody on either side uses nuclear weapons.
We haven’t been this close to total war with North Korea since the 1950s.
The North’s tyrant leader, Kim Jong Un, has dozens of atomic bombs (no one is entirely sure of how many) and claims he’s ready to test an exponentially more destructive hydrogen bomb. And for the first time ever, his intercontinental ballistic missiles may be capable of striking mainland United States.
The North Korean missile crisis, which these days feels like the Cuban missile crisis in slow motion, already has taken us well beyond the most dangerous threshold. North Korea isn’t an aspiring nuclear power. It already has arrived. Kim can kill as many American civilians in cities from Seattle to Chicago as he can in Seoul. It is too late to stop him. During a panel discussion at the University of Pennsylvania in late September, retired Navy Admiral James Stavridis, NATO’s former supreme allied commander in Europe, said he believes there is a 10 percent chance of a nuclear war breaking out between the United States and North Korea, and a 20-30 percent chance of them engaging in a conventional war.
Kim also has a massive stockpile of chemical weapons and has proven that he’s willing to use them. In February, two young women — one from Vietnam, the other from Indonesia — assassinated his half-brother, Kim Jong Nam, in the international airport in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, with the ultratoxic VX nerve agent.
South Korea and Malaysia have accused North Korea of being behind the killing. If that was the case, Kim removed a potential rival, reminded the entire world that he has chemical as well as nuclear weapons, and demonstrated to all that he’s willing to use them. And if he’s willing to use them against his own family, what’s stopping him from using them to kill complete strangers in the United States, Japan and South Korea?
In 1994, North Korea committed itself on paper to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the so-called Agreed Framework between Pyongyang and Washington, agreeing to replace its nuclear power infrastructure with light-water reactors that couldn’t be used to produce nuclear weapons. In exchange, President Bill Clinton’s administration agreed to deliver half a million tons of heavy oil each year. The purpose was to prevent North Korea from building nuclear weapons without going to war. It failed.
A Gallup poll released in September found that 58 percent of Americans favor military action against North Korea if diplomatic options continue to fail, including 37 percent of Democrats. The United States absolutely could mount a preventive war against North Korea and would certainly win. Let there be no doubt about that. Let there be no doubt also that the cost would amount to a textbook example of a Pyrrhic victory, where the price of victory would be so high that it would be indistinguishable from outright losing.
Millions could die in South Korea alone, mostly in and around Seoul. Hundreds of thousands could die in Japan, too, if Kim, in a fit of malicious pique, nuked the Japanese. There’s no telling how many would die on the northern side of the Korean border. That would depend, in part, on whether the United States used nuclear weapons. And we might as well write off most of the 30,000 American troops stationed near the DMZ as potentially lost right at the outset.
North Korea’s conventional military power is no match for that of the United States and South Korea, but the early hours of a war would be so spectacularly destructive that using nuclear weapons might be on the table. President Donald Trump has made serious threats twice already.
“North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States,” the president said in August in front of the news cameras. “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”
He did it again in September. “The United States has great strength and patience,” he said in a prepared speech at the United Nations, “but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.”
Kim, for his part, called Trump a mentally deranged “dotard,” said the Korean War was back on, and was moving military assets into place to shoot down American planes over the Korean Peninsula — even if they don’t fly over his airspace.
We haven’t been this close to total war with North Korea since the 1950s. Blame President Trump’s bellicosity if you want, or blame Trump and Kim equally, but the truth is that we’d be in crisis mode now even if Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders had won the election last year. Between 1984 and 2014, North Korea tested 53 missiles. Since 2014, it has tested more than 100 more, an increase from an average of two per year to more than 30 per year since Kim Jong Un assumed power from his late father, Kim Jong Il.
It’s not America’s fault that we are where we are. It is, however, up to Americans to decide what to do about it.
But what to do? None other than Trump’s hyperbelligerent former chief strategist Steve Bannon seemed to take the nuclear option off the table earlier this year. “There is no military option,” he said to Robert Kuttner of the American Prospect magazine shortly before the president fired him. “Forget it. Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that 10 million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here. … They got us.”
Indeed, they “got” us. But we’ve also “got” them. The United States can’t possibly lose a war with North Korea — not today, and not in the future, not even if we get nuked, and not even if we get nuked first. North Korea can wreak an unspeakable amount of havoc, but only at the price of total annihilation. We can choose Pyrrhic victory. Kim can only choose suicide.
Blame Trump and Kim equally, but the truth is we’d be in crisis mode now even if Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders had won the election.
He doesn’t want to kill himself and his country. He is not a suicide bomber. ISIS “caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in all likelihood would ignite an apocalyptic war if he could, but Kim just wants to survive and lord it over his totalitarian prison-state until he dies in his bed at the age of 90. And therein lies the least terrible option in a range of terrible options.
There is only one thing in the entire world that the North Korean and American peoples and governments agree on. We all want to survive, and to do so without perpetual angst.
Contrary to what most Americans believe, the Korean War never officially ended. It merely paused in 1953 with an armistice agreement. From the American point of view, the war has been over since before most of us were born. From the Korean point of view, though, it always has been a pyre doused with gasoline, awaiting a match.
North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un visits the Mangyongdae Revolutionary Academy on its 70th anniversary, in this undated photo released by North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) in Pyongyang October 13, 2017.
The Korean War was fought far from our shores, but it was fought inside Korea, often in the backyards of those old enough to remember it. Most citizens of the North have been living with a feeling of existential dread that Americans could surge over the horizon at any moment and resume the bombing and killing. They have been brainwashed to believe this. The regime has spent decades unifying its people with a diet of deranged anti-American, anti-Japanese and anti-Seoul propaganda. It’s not just a big put-on, however. The Kim family watched as Americans demolished the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein’s Arab Socialist Baath Party in Iraq, and Muammar Gaddafi’s lunacracy in Libya. North Korea’s people feel, deep in their bones, that they might be “next,” just as Syria’s Bashar al-Assad did before the Russians flew in to save him.
They are almost certainly wrong about this. A war with North Korea would be so utterly devastating that there’s virtually no chance any American president would mount an Iraq-style regime-change operation in Pyongyang, even if Kim had no nuclear or chemical weapons, unless he invaded South Korea or hit us with missiles. The United States and its allies in Asia already are completely deterred by the thousands of artillery pieces pointed at Seoul.
Kim doesn’t need nukes. He just doesn’t know it or doesn’t believe it. The Mexican standoff between him and Donald Trump isn’t doing anything to settle his nerves.
Kim has erected a doomsday machine, and there’s no way we can destroy it without setting it off. Washington needs to think and behave like a hostage negotiator, which starts by managing and calming the emotional state of the hostage-taker.
The least terrible choice out of a range of terrible choices isn’t regime-change, which would set off Kim’s doomsday device; nor is it brinkmanship and gunboat diplomacy, which could inadvertently convince him that we’re coming for him and frighten him into setting it off prematurely. The least terrible choice is negotiating an end to the Korean War once and for all and guaranteeing the survival of his regime in perpetuity. Nobody who cares a whit about human rights wants to underwrite the indefinite existence of a totalitarian gulag state, but we’re not going to shoot Kim out of his palace anyway unless he starts a war. So, at the end of the day, what difference does it make?
Don’t count on the Chinese to save us. Yes, they can pressure Kim to the negotiating table, but the notion that Beijing can convince him to give up the nuclear weapons and missiles he already has is a fantasy. North Korea won’t give up its nukes for the exact same reason the United States won’t — there is no better deterrent on Earth. Even if Kim were to hand over or destroy the weapons he already has, his regime already has acquired the knowledge to build them and can always build more at any time. There is no rewind button, and toothpaste doesn’t go back in the tube.
Pressuring Pyongyang with threats of war and economic sanctions always had to be part of the picture. Kim would have far less incentive to negotiate if he did not feel compelled. But cooler heads need to prevail here, and sooner rather than later. The odds that Kim and his circle will be the first to act like the adults in the room are vanishingly close to zero. That’s our job, and Washington needs to snap to it.
Michael J. Totten is a contributing editor at World Affairs and City Journal, a Middle East Forum writing fellow, and the author of eight books, including “Tower of the Sun” and “Where the West Ends.”
Israel Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely was able to speak at Princeton University on Monday even though the campus Hillel canceled the speech in face of pressure.
Hotovely was initially scheduled to speak at Princeton Hillel’s Center for Jewish Life (CJL), but Hillel canceled the event after the Alliance of Jewish Progressives (AJP) lobbied for the cancellation.
“Hotovely’s work causes irreparable damage to the prospects of a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” AJP wrote in a letter published in The Daily Princetonian. “She has stated her opposition to a Palestinian state and has made it her mission to expand settlement construction in the West Bank.”
The letter added that the CJL was hosting “a racist speaker” and silencing “progressive voices” in doing so.
Rabbi Julie Roth, executive director of the CJL, explained in a letter to the Israeli consulate in New York their decision to cancel Hotovely.
“This program will be reviewed by our Israel Advisory Committee and we will refine our procedures to learn from this experience,” wrote Roth. “We look forward to continued robust and healthy debate around Israel in our community.”
Hotovely criticized the CJL’s decision in a letter to Roth.
“By canceling this lecture, you are infringing on the fundamental academic freedom of the students,” wrote Hotovely. “You are denying the basic freedom of students to hear different points of views, to question, challenge and think for themselves.”
Hotovely added later on in the letter that Roth was “silencing the voice of Israeli democracy” and stated that “a liberal dictatorship is ruling here.”
Fortunately for Hotovely, Princeton Chabad’s agreed to host her instead and she ended up speaking after all.
The head of Princeton’s Chabad, Rabbi Eitan Webb, introduced Hotovely and said, “We bend over backwards to give free speech to all.”
“Asking difficult questions is a part of listening,” said Webb.
David Hirshis a senior lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London and the founder of Engage, a campaign against academic boycotts of Israel. Hirsh is a graduate of City University, London. He holds an M.A. in Philosophy and Social Theory and a PhD from the University of Warwick. Hirsh won the Philip Abrams Prize for the best first book in sociology from the British Sociological Association in 2004 for his book Law Against Genocide: Cosmopolitan trials.
In your book, you present quite a frustrating description of the impregnable defense that antisemites on the left seem to have:
This antisemitism is insulated by a layer of discourse that casts suspicion against anybody who experiences it, analyses it or opposes it; it casts them out of the community of the oppressed and of the progressive. In this way the Jewish community as a whole, when it raises the issue of this type of antisemitism, is cast out of the community of the oppressed and of the progressive.
My question: If merely raising the issue of left-wing antisemitism disqualifies one from the progressive conversation, what course of action do anti-antisemitism activists have at their disposal in this era of polarized press, politics and cultural conversations? Do you have any insights regarding how these people can be reached, or do you believe that direct engagement with antisemitic left-wing dogmatists is already a lost cause at this point in time?
Yours,
Shmuel
***
Dear Shmuel,
Contemporary antisemitism, in particular those forms of antisemitism which have the possibility of becoming significant in mainstream culture and politics, is not explicitly antisemitic. Indeed, it is carried by people and it is tolerated within spaces which think of themselves as being intolerant of antisemitism. It isn’t that antisemites hide their real intentions under democratic rhetoric, there is no hiding going on; they truly feel themselves to be opponents of antisemitism. Their self-understanding is different, however, to the understandings that others have of them and of what they do and say. Some opponents of antisemitism fight for antisemitic ways of thinking and they angrily reject any suggestion that they are doing so. They cannot see it and they do not believe it.
There is general agreement that racism is something much more significant than discriminatory or demonizing ideas that people have in their heads. Racism is also an objective and external social phenomenon, it is about shared meanings, commonplace norms and accepted practices; racism is about power relations across society, it is not simply an individual moral failing.
But when ‘antiracist’ carriers of antisemitism are challenged, they revert to the model of individual moral failing and they look inside their own souls to see if they are guilty. They find themselves not guilty. They then typically respond with angry denials and with counter-accusations. Given that the accusation is so completely false, they cry, there must be some hidden explanation for why it was made which is independent of the issue itself. It has become a standard response that accusations of antisemitism are made in bad faith by people who believe them to be baseless in order to try to silence criticism of Israel. This is a charge of conspiracy to mobilize Jewish victim-power against those who criticize Israel. And this charge of conspiracy resonates.
This is why it is difficult to have a rational discussion about contemporary antisemitism. The person who says they detect antisemitism is not told that they have made a mistake or that they have assessed the evidence incorrectly; they are told that they know full well that they are wrong and that they don’t care. The relentless charge of bad faith against those who raise the issue of antisemitism is the standard form of bullying which drives Jews out of progressive politics and movements.
Homelessness is deep within the Jewish unconscious and being made politically homeless is therefore profound and traumatic. Jews respond to it a number of ways, one of which is denial. If it is denied that there is any antisemitism then we are able to maintain our feeling of being at home, of being an acceptable part of our political or intellectual community. Alternatively, if it is no longer possible to deny, then it can be claimed that antisemitism is caused by the bad behaviour of Jews. Of course, it is the ABC of the understanding of racism that bad things people do can only feed into racism via a racist mystification of what actually happens. The antisemite transforms Jewish bad behaviour, real or imagined, into antisemitic tropes. Some Jewish victims of antisemitism prefer to believe that those responsible for the threat of homelessness are other Jews than to believe that Jews are in fact powerless in the face of the irrationality of antisemitism. This is why it is tempting for antizionist Jews to blame their fellow Jews, rather than to blame antisemitism. And the power of a few marginal Jews bearing witness against the consensus in the Jewish community as a whole is significant and damaging. It encourages and licenses those non-Jewish publics who are tempted by the pleasures of antisemitism to discount the warnings, the knowledge and the perception of the overwhelming majority of Jews.
In order to understand movements to boycott Israel and in order to understand the power and irrationality of antizionist politics it is necessary to see the connections between these movements and earlier antisemitic movements. But it is often judged counterproductive to raise the issue of antisemitism explicitly in public debates about academic boycotts, divestments and singling out Israel for particular and symbolic denunciation. People don’t like to be told that they are being seduced by antisemitic discourse. They often respond with angry denial and counter-accusations.
So this is the bind: to understand the situation we are in, it is necessary to understand its relationship to antisemitism; but saying that hostility to Israel and boycott relates to antisemitism makes it more difficult to get a hearing.
The fear of uncertainty or sometimes the statistic that four out of every five businesses fail in five years is what holds many back from starting their own business. It is not the thought of not being intelligent or competent enough. As with all human endeavors, learning how to manage a business successfully happens as you practice over time.
That’s why what you need to do first is to be sufficiently motivated to start and that is what will be shared here. The reasons for starting a new business are virtually the same whether you live in the America, Europe, Asia or Africa. Thereafter, you need to learn the basics of running and managing a business each day.
1. You can succeed in business because others are succeeding
It is quite easy to think that the developed nations have businesses run by executives who have masters in business administration. But nothing could be farther from the truth. In actual fact, about 99% of businesses in U.S. are small businesses with few employees and they provide employment for over 80 percent of the workforce. So you won’t need “special business” training to succeed in business. You need to have an idea of how to meet a need in a unique way. Then you back that up with a desire to learn quickly, take action and adapt to changes in the marketplace.
2. You can succeed in business when you do what you are passionate about
Starting a business is as simple as laying out your business idea, writing a good business plan and getting your startup capital. With the increasing number of funding sources available, you will find it easier to get a lender that offers small business loans. Just make sure you start with a lean business model that does not require you to buy up large inventory or acquire very expensive machines and office space at the beginning.
3. You can succeed even if you start the business from home
The data from the Small Business Administration (SBA) reveals that 52% of the small businesses in the U.S. are home-based. Also, 22 million of the 28 million small businesses in the country are run by people who see themselves as self-employed. They don’t have any employees and so they don’t need to pay anyone on their payroll.
4. Running a business offers you tax benefits
Whether you have a business with a few employees or you are a freelancer, you can stillbusibn enjoy tax benefits. Based on the kind of business you register, you can write off some of your expenses including telephone bills, food, travel and some parts of your car loan repayments. Depending on the kind of business you are running, you may even enjoy different kinds of government incentives. If you are not sure about the kind of business you should register, you need to speak to your accountant about the type of tax benefits you are qualified for.
5. You are free to use your time the way you want
Running your own business allows you to do what you like, how you like it and when you like it. You will have a chance to give yourself to the things that have to mean and add value to things that matter to you. As a small business owner, you have the liberty to use some of your profit to promote a noble course in your community. Also, when you need to relax, you can take a trip to any part of the world you want.
Those are some of the reasons why you can start a new business and succeed. Instead of hesitating, why don’t you take steps toward becoming a business owner today?
By now I’m guessing much of the US Jewish population has a strong opinion about #LarryDavid’s opening monologue on SNL. I’m also guessing very few actually watched the skit. I did, and it made me squirm. Then I started reading the pushback from the community which I found to be just as offensive. “David’s a self-hating Jew”. “He’s an idiot”, “He should be boycotted” “Send him to a concentration camp” – which led me to watch his piece once again.
“It’s not just supposed to make you laugh,
good comedy challenges, makes you think”
This time I found his piece to be equally offensive, AND I had a new found respect for the power of comedy – it’s not just supposed to make you laugh, good comedy challenges, makes you think. And Larry David, has done just that. His joke wasn’t about the Holocaust; it was about objectifying women. His joke was not about Jews being evil, it was about Jews being human. “I don’t like when Jews are in the headlines for notorious reasons. I want ‘Einstein discovers the theory of relativity,’ ‘Salk cures polio.”
That’s not self-loathing, that’s raw honesty. How many Jews are talking about their Judaism on TV? Could he have been more nuanced? Maybe, or maybe Erma Bombeck said it best, “there’s a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt”.
Did Larry cross the line? It seems for many Jews, yes! For this Jew, I’d rather he keep his right to push buttons and boundaries, and I keep my right to laugh or dismiss him. And if you don’t agree with me, that too is ok.
That’s the power of the arts. That’s the beauty of America.
