Israel's flailing democracy - Caroline Glick -
For many Israelis, the impeachment investigation against Trump parallels efforts to fast-track probes against Netanyahu. But the U.S. impeachment bid is a sign that America's democracy is far healthier than Israel's.
U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's announcement on Tuesday that she is opening an official impeachment inquiry against U.S. President Donald Trump struck many Israelis as yet another sign that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump are in the same boat. Both are being hounded by legal elites who will stop at nothing to oust them from office.
There are parallels between the two leaders.
Pelosi's move followed the leak of a whistleblower complaint to the U.S. intelligence community's inspector general. The complainant alleged that during a telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in July, Trump sought the Ukrainian leader's assistance in advancing his 2020 re-election prospects. This is arguable.
During the call, Trump asked Zelensky to speak with U.S. Attorney General William Barr about the private cybersecurity company Crowdstrike. Crowdstrike is the private contractor that was hired by the Democratic National Committee in the spring of 2016 to investigate the hack of the DNC's computer server.
Crowdstrike concluded that the DNC's server was hacked by entities related to the Russian government. The DNC never permitted federal investigators to take possession of the breached server or receive Crowdstrike's full report. Despite the fact that they were never given the opportunity to verify Crowdstrike's claims, those claims were the basis of the U.S. intelligence community's assertion in December 2016 that the Russian government hacked the DNC server to interfere in the 2016 election. It was also a foundation of the claim that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia against the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016.
In his conversation with Zelensky, Trump said, "Our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike ... the [DNC] server, they say Ukraine has it. ... I would like to have the attorney general call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it."
Trump also talked with Zelensky about former Vice President Joe Biden, now a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate.
During his tenure in office, Biden was responsible for U.S. ties with Ukraine. As investigative journalist Peter Schweitzer reported, in April 2014, Biden's son Hunter was appointed to the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company. Over the next 16 months, Burisma paid Hunter Biden $3.1 million. Biden joined the company while Burisma was under criminal probe by British and Ukrainian investigators.
In a post-vice presidency appearance before the Council on Foreign Relations, Biden bragged that he had conditioned the provision of $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to the Ukrainian government-loan guarantees that had already been approved by President Barack Obama-on the firing of the Ukrainian prosecutor carrying out the investigation against Burisma. Given the stakes, the Ukrainian government bowed to his demand. The prosecutor was fired, and the loan guarantees were extended.
Speaking of Biden's admitted intervention with the Ukrainian prosecution, Trump said, "There's a lot of talk about Biden's son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that, so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it ... It sounds horrible to me."
Democrats claim that Trump's discussion with Zelensky constitutes an illegal solicitation of foreign assistance for his 2020 reelection campaign. Republicans counter that Trump was reasonably trying to understand what happened to the DNC server in 2016. The story has served as a basis for claims that his presidency is illegitimate, and continuous investigations of his campaign.
Leaving aside the weight of the opposing claims, the fact is that there is nothing unique about Trump's actions. As Mark Thiessen noted in The Washington Post, in 2018, three Democratic senators urged the Ukrainian government to continue investigations into Trump's alleged collusion with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign.
National Review noted that during the 2016 campaign, the Obama administration asked the Ukrainian government to open a criminal probe against Trump's campaign chairman Paul Manafort. So, too, revelations regarding the origins of the Trump-Russia probe that fomented the nearly two-year special counsel investigation showed that the Obama Justice Department based wiretap requests against Trump campaign officials on a dossier paid for by the Clinton campaign and the DNC, and compiled by a former British spy on the basis of contacts with Russian operatives.
Democrats calling for impeachment have never shown the slightest interest in investigating the Obama administration's actions. No Democratic lawmakers called to impeach Obama or members of his administration.
The criminal probes against Netanyahu relate to actions he took to secure positive media coverage that are similar, if not identical, to routine political behavior. The two major probes against Netanyahu-dubbed Case 2000 and Case 4000-allege that Netanyahu acted criminally when he met with media owners in bids to secure more positive coverage.
In Case 2000, Netanyahu is accused of having breached the public faith when he met with Yediot Achronot publisher Arnon Mozes in an effort to secure positive media coverage. Yediot's coverage of Netanyahu has been unstintingly negative. In Case 4000, prosecutors allege Netanyahu accepted a bribe in the form of positive media coverage on the Walla news portal from Walla owner Shaul Elovich. As with Yediot Achronot, Walla coverage of Netanyahu has been almost uniformly hostile.
Leading jurists from emeritus professor Alan Dershowitz of Harvard University to professor Avi Bell from Bar-Ilan University agree that the legal proceedings against Netanyahu are political and based on prejudicial and selective enforcement of statutes which prosecutors are interpreting inventively.
As is the case with the allegations related to Trump's dealings with Zelensky, the first problem with the probes against Netanyahu is that his actions were far from unique-although less successful than similar actions by other politicians.
In just one striking example of the inherent bias of the charges against Netanyahu, consider the behavior of the prosecutors in relation to Blue and White Party co-chairman and Yesh Atid Party leader Yair Lapid, and his relations with Mozes and Elovich.
Today, post-election wranglings in Israel over governing coalitions are guided by varied assessments of the likelihood that Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit will indict Netanyahu. During the campaign leading up to the April elections, Mandelblit cast legal norms distinguishing politics from law to the seven winds. He took the unprecedented step of announcing that pending the outcome of Netanyahu's pre-indictment hearing, which is scheduled for this week, he intends to indict the premier on bribery and breach of trust charges over his dealings with Mozes and Elovich.
Now, as Netanyahu prepares for his pre-indictment hearing, the prosecution has leaked its intent to indict Netanyahu by mid-November. In other words, they have no intention to consider Netanyahu's defense claims. The outcome is preordained.
For many Israelis, Pelosi's decision to begin an impeachment investigation parallels moves by Mandelblit and State Attorney Shai Nitzan to fast-track the probes against Netanyahu. But the opposite is the case.
Pelosi's impeachment bid is a sign that America's legal system and indeed its democracy is far healthier than Israel's.
For nearly two years, Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his partisan investigators spent millions of dollars on a massive and barely veiled bid to find a legal excuse to oust Trump. But in the end, they failed. The evidence of collusion between Trump and his campaign and Russia simply wasn't to be found.
Mueller could have kept going. The media wanted him to. The Democrats wanted him to. But after feeding the media prejudicial leaks against Trump and aggressively prosecuting Manafort and other Trump officials on unrelated issues, Mueller ran out of steam. Although in his final report Mueller tried to provide Democrats with the means to continue the Russia probe on the political level, he closed down his investigation and went home. U.S. practice doesn't permit the indictment of a sitting president. But even if it allowed for indictments, the materials he had assembled were too weak to justify an indictment.
In other words, Mueller walked his prosecutors to the brink of political interference and then he walked them back. He did not replace politicians with prosecutors.
Until Mueller submitted his report, Pelosi used his ongoing probe to fend off pressure from the increasingly powerful radical members of her Democratic caucus to initiate impeachment proceedings against Trump. Since then, Pelosi argued, rightly, that impeachment proceedings require a huge political investment and hold little chance for success. Most Americans oppose impeaching Trump. The Republicans control the Senate. If the House votes to impeach Trump, chances of getting the two-thirds majority of senators required to convict an impeached president and remove him from office are effectively nonexistent.
Unfortunately for Pelosi, the Democratic base-including the media and the empowered radical faction of her Democratic caucus-have become deaf to reason. According to a Politico poll, whereas 70 percent of Democrats support impeachment, only 37 percent of the public does. The likes of Reps. Anastasia Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), like The New York Times and The Washington Post, live in an echo chamber. Members of the echo chamber are so cut off from those outside it that just as they cannot fathom anyone objecting to socialism, so they cannot imagine that anyone supports Trump or accepts the validity of the 2016 election results.
It is hard to know how the impeachment proceedings will play out, but a likely scenario is that the proceedings will damage Democrats more than they will damage Trump.
This then brings us back to Israel.
Like Pelosi and her colleagues, Blue and White leaders Benny Gantz, and Lapid and their colleagues on the left, claim that the very fact that Netanyahu is under investigation renders him illegitimate. They refuse to form a unity government with Likud unless Netanyahu is first ousted as Likud leader.
But unlike Pelosi, Gantz and Lapid don't need to make their claims themselves. Lapid, whose ministers gave preferential treatment to Yediot through government advertising contracts and received glowing coverage in the paper, does not have to argue the case for impeaching Netanyahu. He stands behind the ostensibly objective state prosecutions.
Pelosi's decision to open impeachment proceedings against Trump despite the great political risk involved going into an election year indicates that the radical faction has swallowed the Democratic Party. But more importantly, her move is a testament to the abiding power and fortitude of American democracy. The difference between the situation in Israel, where prosecutors happily abuse their legal power for transparently political aims, and the United States, where politically motivated prosecutors backed away from the brink and compelled politicians to take over their political investigations, is the difference between a flailing democracy and a resilient one.
Should Israel invade Gaza? - By Daniel Pipes -
As Israeli frustration mounts about violence coming out of Gaza, the idea of a ground invasion, and once and for all to finish with Hamas aggression, becomes more appealing. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has endorsed this approach, saying, "There probably won't be a choice but to topple the Hamas regime." While sympathetic to this impulse, I worry that too much attention is paid to tactics and not enough to goals. The result could be harmful to Israel.
Attitudes toward Gaza are in flux. Efraim Inbar, the strategist who heads the Jerusalem Institute for Security Studies, for years advocated "mowing the grass" as "Israel's strategy for protracted intractable conflict." By this, he advocated an occasional reminder to Hamas' rulers and other Gazans of Israel's overwhelming power.
Implicit in this approach is an Israeli acceptance, most of the time, of aggression from Gaza, with its attendant damage to property and life. As recently as May 2019, he dismissed the Palestinian threat to Israel as a "strategic nuisance."
But Inbar recently recognized the high costs of this passivity and now calls for a "restricted ground invasion" of the territory. Why? Because "a short-term ground operation will bring better results than Israel's activity thus far [i.e., mowing the grass]. We need to maneuver inside enemy territory, locate them, and destroy them, or tie the hands of its members."
Others agree. For example, Ayelet Shaked, leader of the Yamina Party, calls for a wide-scale military operation in Gaza: "We must choose the time that is best for us, evacuate the Israeli citizens who live in towns along the Gaza envelope in order to give us maximum flexibility, and we must uproot the terror from within Gaza."
To these analyses, I respond with Carl von Clausewitz's simple but profound counsel: First, decide on your policy, then your strategy, then your tactics. Or, in plain English: Start by figuring out what you wish to achieve through the use of force, then decide the broad outlines of your approach, then the specific means.
Seen in this light, debating whether to engage in a ground invasion and to overthrow Hamas is debating a tactic; this should not be the topic of conversation until the goal and the means to achieve it have been decided upon. To start by focusing on tactics risks losing sight of the purpose.
So, what should Israel's goal in Gaza be?
The occasional show of force against Hamas interests has failed, as has destroying Gaza's infrastructure; so, too, the opposite policy of goodwill and the prospect of economic prosperity. It's time for something altogether different, a goal that transcends sending signals and punishing misdeeds, something far more ambitious.
Victory is such a goal. That is, aim to impose a sense of defeat on Gazans, from the head of Hamas to the lowliest street sweeper.
Aiming for an Israel victory is entirely in keeping with historical war aims but it is out of step with our times when even the words "victory" and "defeat" have dropped from the Western war lexicon. The Israeli security establishment seeks just peace and quiet vis-�-vis the Palestinians; Inbar speaks for them in dismissing the goal of victory over Hamas as "naive."
Negotiations, mediation, compromise, concessions and other gentle means have replaced victory. These sound good but they have failed in the Palestinian-Israeli arena since 1993 and blindly persisting with them guarantees more destruction and death.
With imposing a sense of defeat on Gazans the goal, what are the strategy and tactics? These cannot be decided on in advance. They require a contemporaneous and detailed study of the Gazan population's psychology. Questions to be answered might include:
Does the deprivation of food, water, fuel and medicine in retaliation for attacks on Israel inspire a sense of resistance (muqawama) and steadfastness (sumud) among Gazans, or does it break their will?
Same question about the destruction of homes, buildings and infrastructure
Would knocking out the Hamas leadership paralyze the population or prompt an insurrection?
Israel's security establishment needs to explore these and related issues to map out a sound strategy and to offer reliable counsel to the political leadership. That done, with victory as the goal, Israel finally can address the hitherto insoluble problem of Gaza.
"Anti-Normalization" With Israel: The True Goal - by Bassam Tawil - https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14943/anti-normalization-israel
Arabs who dare to greet Jews in public on the Jewish New Year are being denounced by their fellow Arabs as traitors. Arabs who dare to engage in sports activities with Jews are also being condemned by their fellow Arabs as traitors.
In the past week, many Arabs have taken to social media to express outrage over a Jewish New Year greeting by Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
On September 29, the minister posted on his Twitter account "Shana Tova" ("Good Year" in Hebrew). His greeting to Jews celebrating the Jewish New Year has triggered a wave of condemnations from many Arabs, including Palestinians, who accused the minister of promoting normalization with Israel.
The vicious ad hominem attacks on the UAE foreign minister included prayers that God allow him to burn in hell and several posters comparing him to a monkey. Because of the greeting, the minister is also being denounced as a "Zionist," "war criminal," "dog," "traitor" and "pig."
Some Arabs expressed hope that the UAE will vanish "just like Israel will cease to exist."
Others seized the opportunity to remind the "shameless" minister of the Qur'an verse (Al-Ma'idah, 51) that says:
"O you who believe, do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies. They are allies of one to another (when against you), and whoso from amongst you takes them for allies, is indeed one of them."
The attacks on the UAE foreign minister came as many Arab social media users strongly condemned Qatar for allowing Israeli athletes to participate in the 2019 World Athletics Championship, held at the Khalifa International Stadium in Doha from September 27- October 6.
The presence of the Israeli athletes in Qatar drew sharp criticism from many Arabs, who expressed outrage on social media through a hashtag titled, "Normalization is Treason."
Qatar has been accused by its Arab neighbors, including Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies, of sponsoring and funding the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and extremist groups such as Hamas, the Palestinian terror group ruling the Gaza Strip.
Qatar's alleged support and financing of extremist groups, however, has not spared it criticism from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the second-largest terror group in the Gaza Strip. In recent months, Qatar has been playing a role in preventing all-out war in the Gaza Strip between Israel and Hamas. The Qataris have also been delivering millions of dollars in cash to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as part of an effort to boost the Palestinian economy there and help poor and unemployed Palestinians.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad now seem to be spearheading the campaign of incitement against Qatar for its decision to allow Israeli athletes to participate in the World Championships in Doha.
Hamas expressed "regret" over Qatar's decision and said it considers the hosting of the Israeli athletes as "a form of normalization that will be used [by Israel] to whitewash its image in front of the world." This is the same Hamas that has been begging Qatar for cash in the past few months.
Similarly, Islamic Jihad issued a statement strongly condemning Qatar and repeating its call for Arabs and Muslims to boycott Israel. The terror group also took Qatar to task for allowing the athletes to raise the Israeli flag in Doha.
Many Arab social media users claimed that the Israeli athletes were "soldiers" serving in the Israel Defense Forces.
Mohammed al-Madhoun, a Palestinian media personality and political activist from the Gaza Strip, commented:
"The presence of an Israeli athletic team in Qatar is a stain of disgrace on the forehead of those who hosted them and allowed to participate. Does the host [Qatar] know that the members of the team are soldiers in the occupation army? I wish you would ask them: Did they participate in the Gaza massacres? How many Palestinians did they kill during their military service? How many times did they storm the Al-Aqsa Mosque [in Jerusalem]?"
Some Arabs posted photos of Israeli runner Adva Cohen, who participated in the World Championships in Qatar, and falsely accused her of "slaughtering" Palestinians. The incitement is directed not only against Qatar, but also against the Israeli athletes who are now being forced to see their photos taken from their own social media accounts in the context of the "Normalization is Treason" online campaign.
Some Palestinians went as far as inciting Arabs to revolt against their leaders for reportedly engaging in normalization with Israel.
The "anti-normalization" campaign is even targeting Jordanian divers who teamed up with Israeli colleagues to clean the beach in the Jordanian Gulf of Aqaba and the Israeli city of Eilat. The divers were participating in the first-ever ecological festival during International Beach Clean-Up Day and the United Nations International Day of Peace.
An anti-Israel group called the Association for Supporting Resistance and Confronting Normalization claimed that Jordanians who work in Eilat and other Israeli cities are often recruited as informants by the Israeli security services. The group accused the Jordanian government of "complying with all the demands of the Zionists on the pretext of cooperation for the sake of peace." The claim that Jordanians who go to work in Israel or help clean the beach are recruited as spies is aimed at painting them as traitors, a charge that is likely to put their lives at risk.
Instead of thanking Israel for allowing Jordanians to come and work in Eilat, the "anti-normalization" activists are inciting the workers to boycott Israel. These activists, of course, are not offering the Jordanian workers jobs and salaries.
In March 2019, Israel agreed to increase by 33% the number of Jordanian day laborers employed at hotels in Eilat from 1,500 to 2,000. The permits for the Jordanians are designed to allow them to work in the hotel industry of Eilat, close to the border with Jordan. The move is part of an agreement signed between Israel and Jordan to advance ties between the two countries through economic and social cooperation initiatives.
As far as the "anti-normalization" activists are concerned, inciting their people against Israel and the Jordanian workers is more important than any economic and social initiatives. These activists hate Israel to a point where they prefer to see 2,000 workers lose their jobs than continue working and earning good salaries in Eilat.
If greeting a Jew on his or her holiday, cleaning the beach with an Israeli, or working in Israel are considered by many Arabs a "crime," what will be the fate of any Arab who makes peace with Israel?
Those who are calling for boycotts of Israel -- and are threatening and inciting their people against any Arab who dares to host a Jew or send him or her greetings -- are also emphatically opposed to peace with Israel. For them, making peace with the "Zionist entity" is considered an act of treason. They are worried that an Arab who greets a Jew may one day make peace with Israel. They are worried that an Arab state that hosts Israeli athletes may one day make peace with Israel. They are worried that Arabs who go to work in Israel may fall in love with Israelis and stop thinking of ways to kill them or destroy Israel.
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