They Just Have The Wrong Enemy

Back in 1918, the Great Powers, victors over Germany, Austria, and the Ottoman Empire did a bit of practical work, redrawing the maps of Europe and the Mideast.  Supposedly high on the list of priorities for this exercise in practical cartography was the uniquely American proposition called, "self-determination of peoples."  This noble bit of High Mindedness was honored more or less with respect to the splitting up of the old Hapsburg domains, but was it observed only in the breech when it came to dismembering the Ottoman lands.

When the hyper-idealistic Woodrow Wilson confronted the real world of secret deals and the fruits of wartime exigencies, he discovered that his notions of self-determination had been preempted by an assortment of understandings both formal and otherwise between Great Britain and France.  One of these rather under the table deals dealt with the area called Palestine.  This area along with the coterminous Trans-Jordan had been divided according to two contradictory undertakings.  One, the Balfour Declaration, promised Jews a "national homeland."  The other, an agreement between two bureaucrats, Sykes and Picot, created two protectorates, one under British rule and the other under French.

This exercise in international can kicking is still with us today in the form of the seemingly endless conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.  (By the way a body of American experts on the region advised President Wilson to fight this one to the death as the result would be a century of bloodshed.  Rarely have experts been so right.)

Almost overlooked was the simultaneous division of Iraq and Syria into British (Iraq) and French (Syria along with its appendage, Lebanon) protectorates.  Embedded in both Iraq and Syria as well as in the rump state of Turkey and the country then called Persia was a people long separated from their neighbors by language, customs, and culture but not religion.  This nation now split among four states was the Kurds.

The Kurds were not at all happy with this division.  Nor should they have been.  According to the principle of self-determination, the Kurds merited their own state, the state of Kurdistan.  But, these unfortunate folk lacked any representative in Versailles.  Unlike the Arabs way down south, the Kurds had provided no service to the Allied cause.  Unlike the Arabs, the Kurds had no access to powerful British political figures.  Neither did they gain the attention of imperial minded bureaucrats.  As a result, they were casually and cruelly consigned to minority status within four states.

Almost immediately, the Kurds commenced a defensive insurgency in each and every of the four countries to which they had been so cavalierly assigned.  The insurgency has not ended to this day.  Like the conflict between Arab Palestinian and Israeli Jew, the conflict gives no hint of ending soon, or ever.

The Kurdish people are an ancient hill folk.  Like hill dwellers almost everywhere, they are excellent warriors.  It deserves mention that the great Muslim fighter who kicked Crusader butt with great effect, Saladin, was a Kurd.  While today's Kurdish fighters may not have either the military genius or bent to chivalry which marked the legendary Saladin, they are not slouches in the craft of guerrilla war as may be attested to by the marked lack of success enjoyed to date by Turks and Iranians alike.

Other than in Iraq where the Kurds have a semi-autonomous province under sole Kurdish control, it is accurate to say the Kurds live under occupation by a foreign force.  In Turkey, in Syria, and in Iran, the majority Kurdish areas are under direct military control.  Indeed, in at least two of these countries, the degree of military control equals or exceeds that exercised by Israel over the Palestinians of the West Bank and far outstrips that of Gaza.

The Kurds are denied equal treatment in all three states to a degree never reached in the West Bank or Gaza.  They are denied the use of their own language.  They are not allowed to conduct their own education.  They are not provided with the same level of governmental services including access to economic development as the majority populations in all three states.  In short, the Kurds in Turkey, Syria and Iran have been pushed to the margins, had their culture and language robustly attacked as a matter of policy, and are subject to an array of legal disabilities as well as informal discrimination.

From any perspective, the Kurds have suffered far more deprivation of status, rights, and opportunities at the hands of the governments and majority populations of Turkey, Syria, and Iran than the Palestinians ever were during the years since June 1967.  At the same time, the Kurds have a claim on statehood which equals or exceeds that made by the Palestinians.

In sharp contrast with the Palestinians, the Kurds have waged their multi-generation insurgency with remarkable humanity.  Unlike the Palestinians down to the present day, the Kurdish fighters sharply limit their attacks to military and constabulary targets.  The intentional attack of civilians is almost unheard of.  Compared to the Palestinian way of war, the Kurds take care to reduce collateral damage to a minimum.  In the usually dirty business of insurgent warfare, the Kurds are relative good guys.  The Palestinians are very much of the opposite hue.

These ground truths demand a question or two.  Where are the liberal groups in the West?  Where are the groups espousing boycotts, divestiture, or deligitimatization of Iran, Syria, and Turkey?  Where are the UN resolutions condemning the suppression of the legitimate rights of the Kurds by Ankara, Damascus, Tehran?  Where is the UN Human Rights Council with resolutions, special rapporteurs, and other displays of condemnation or concern?

In the last few years, advocates of Palestinian statehood have proliferated with a speed which boggles the imagination.  Campaigns of boycotts, divestiture, and sanctions have spilled forth in mighty torrents.  The UN and its lesser creatures have shown a tender concern for the Palestinians without precedent.  The High Minded and Lofty Thinking of the West have taken the Palestinians--rockets, suicide vests, and AK-47s  included--into a warm embrace.

All blame for whatever happens in the Mideast between Israel and the Palestinians is quickly, automatically, ascribed to the evil doing, racist, Zionist occupiers.  Even when a Jewish infant dies, throat slit as it slept near the dead parents and elder siblings, it is seen as the direct result of the Zionist occupier.

Meanwhile, the Turkish air force bombs civilians in Iraqi Kurdistan while Iranian artillery does the same without even the mildest whimper coming from the assorted advocates of self-determination around the world who are so quick to condemn the Zionist occupiers.  Even Syria is exempt from criticism as it denies the most basic rights to Kurds resident in its borders.

Why?

Why two "victims" (one, the Kurds, arguably more deserving of the term) with two such wildly disparate responses from the "international community," the human rights congeries, and politicians around the world?

The answer is as simple as it is ugly.  The Kurds are predominantly Muslim.  So also are the oppressive majority populations in each and every of the four states.  The Palestinians are mainly Muslim.  Their putative oppressors are Jewish.

And, now the really nasty part, antisemitism is as rife in the West as it is endemic to the Muslim states.  In the West, this ancient, evil mindset hides behind the currently respectable facade of being "anti-Zionist" or, even better, as a euphemism, "opposition to aspects of Israeli policy."

It is OK in the West to look at Muslim oppression of Muslims with total indifference.  In the Muslim majority states, the same is true to an even greater extent because to condemn the Muslim majority for oppressing a Muslim minority is to commit that great Islamic sin of fitna, of introducing fission in the great Islamic ummah.  The single towering fiction in Islam is that of holding the community of believers to be one huge, happy family.  So, no hand is raised, no voice either, to stop the oppression of Kurds by Muslim Turks, Muslim Iranians, or Muslim Arabs.

The fiction of Islamic unity is nothing compared to the larger concoction in the West.  The concealing of antisemitism behind the thin and torn scrim of "anti-Zionism" or "opposition to aspects of Israeli policy" is not simply hypocritical, it is a moral delict of the highest order.

Any way you cut it, the groups and individuals in the West who brandish the cudgels on behalf of the Palestinians while maintaining a discrete silence with respect to the Kurds are examples of moral decay without equal.  It is a very severe indictment of the High Minded in the West who by their careful selection of who deserves support show themselves to be both dishonest and antisemitic to the core.

The people and groups so staunchly supporting the Palestinians (including the UN, the UN Human Rights Council, the assorted NGOs, and the individuals who espouse sanctions, boycotts, and divestiture) will deserve respectful attention when and only when they exhibit the same level of concern for the Kurds as they do the Palestinians.  Unless and until these worthies are as willing to condemn and seek to delegitimatize the Turks, the Iranians, and the Syrians, they merit no hearing.

Rather, these groups and individuals should themselves be blackguarded as the antisemites they are.  Any less is to endorse their wicked position.

Peres Spoke The Unspeakable--Or He Told It True

Israeli president Shimon Peres initiated a diplomatic and political controversy in an interview with a Jewish website. He made very specific reference to the long standing pro-Arab tilt in British foreign policy--and in the larger life of the UK. Then he went further, too far in the estimate of many in Britain, when he characterized the public as being anti-Semitic.

Not too many who are familiar with British policy during the years of the Mandate would dispute Peres' assertion of a pro-Arab tilt. Whitehall was quite pro-Arab; it was even filled with people who were antisemitic in a genteel sort of way. British diplomats in a manner identical with the British elite of the day were not boorishly antisemitic, but nonetheless did, as Peres noted "hated the Jews rather more than was necessary."

At the same time, in the late 1940s, before the full horrors of the Nazi genocide had become widely known and assimilated, the British attitude was not dissimilar from the views held by many, perhaps most, Americans. Both were a comfortable sort of antisemitism, the sort which took a measure of pride in being able to look down on Jews as different, lacking a certain polish, a bit of upmarket politesse, as being, "you know, not quite like us."

The British view of Jews, the condescension, the relative admiration of the presumably romantic Arabs, persisted long after the days the "gentlemen's agreements" vanished from all respectable circles in the US. In some semi-mystical way, the educational system of the UK, the interlocking web of public schools and old line universities, continued to implant the romantic view of the Arabs which had emerged a century and more earlier from the pens of the first British travelers and explorers in the region.

The attitudes and perceptions which might have been marginally justified regarding the "noble lords of the desert" in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire soldiered on in a completely inappropriate way in the years after World War II. Peres was absolutely correct, even understated, in his description of HMG attitudes and behaviors from 1947 on through the Fifties and Sixties. Save when it met the needs of the British government as in the days of the Suez crisis and subsequent British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt, London was quite willing to favor Arab states at the expense of Israel.

Arguably, the attitude at the center of the British "establishment" continued decade in and decade out right on to the present day. It is difficult to the point of near impossibility to find a good example of the British acting in a way which favors Israeli interests at the expense of Arabs. It is an equally arguable proposition that the tilting toward Arabs specifically and Muslims more generally has not only increased in recent years but has done so with the support of the majority of the British electorate--or their well timed indifference.

This dynamic raises the question of at what point does reputable criticism of Israeli policy become the more general proposition of "anti-Zionism," and, more centrally, when does it merit elevation to the status of antisemitism? It is both easy and attractive for the government of Israel and its supporters at home and abroad to claim that any criticism of Israeli policy is either motivated by antisemitism or equivalent to antisemitism.

Of course, such a broad gauge approach to any who dissent from Israeli policy is both unjustifiable and cowardly. So also is the counter of hiding ones antisemitism behind the cloak of being an honest critic.

Peres' statement is a challenge to all. He has slapped the face not only of the UK but all in the West to properly distinguish between the criticism and opposition to which Israel like any sovereign state is legitimately heir to and antisemitism in disguise. There have been (and are) any number of public figures in the UK who have hidden profound antisemitism behind the far more respectable appearances of anti-Zionism or the totally unobjectionable stance of criticism.

The same may be written of public figures, of politicians, pundits, public intellectuals, academics and so on throughout the West who have painted over their antisemitism with the varnish of anti-Zionism or the lacquer of legitimate criticism. It is not a new phenomenon nor is it limited to the UK.

The howls of protest, the screams of outrage which have greeted Peres' remarks in the UK constitute an inappropriate response. A far more positive response, one which would have benefited both the UK and Israel, would have been one which examined the degree to which Peres expressed views which are both well based and accurate.

Of course that would be an impossible response no matter how beneficial might have been the outcome. This sort of creative, forward looking answer to a (possibly) sound critique is as unthinkable as would have been a balanced appraisal by David Cameron as to just why life in the Gaza Strip was life in a "prison camp" for the vast majority of the population.

Mr Peres has offered an apology--or at least an explanation--for his remark. He has denied calling the British antisemitic regardless of what the record of his remarks shows to have been the case. This automatic rush to the politician's default position of apology is regrettable.

It would have been better for Israel, for the UK, and the West generally had Mr Peres stood by his original remarks, perhaps even amplifying on them. The challenge he inadvertently presented to us throughout the West deserves better of the man who made it. We deserve, for our own better interests, to meet the challenge by properly separating criticism of Israel from both anti-Zionism and its most evil parent, anti-Semitism.

A Goy And Yom Hashoah

When the Geek was born, while he suckled, learned to walk, felt the pleasures of beach and water for the first time, snuggled deeply in the warmth of love and security, millions of humans, many no older than himself were systematically, mechanically murdered as the direct result of hatred given power by state policy, conscious decision, and methodical execution. At least half of those who rode the cattle cars to the ovens and foul pits of destruction did so simply because they were Jews and there was no one, certainly no state, ready to protect them.

The Geek was touched deeply but indirectly by war's devastation through the death of his father in early combat, but he came of age a close friend of people whose lives had been blighted by the hideously effective machinery of death assembled by the Nazis. They had sat safe in the far away land of safety, the US, as brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, and grandparents were forced onto the thousands of Murder Expresses and ended "up the chimney" in the camps of Germany, Poland, and other places under the swastika. He came to know and understand deeply the power held by the creation and survival of Israel for these people.

The Geek also came to know and believe that the existence of Israel held profound significance for non-Jews, the goyim. Israel is not only a symbol of Jewish survival against the implacable forces of hatred, dehumanization, and the constant need for an "other" on whom all ills and misfortunes can be blamed. Beyond that potent reality, Israel is a symbol to all humans that places of refuge and sources of protection must exist as any of us can become the dreaded "other," the next target of hate and dehumanization.

Israel also exists to remind us that a good can result from the most repulsive evil. Israel was founded in the ancient land of the Hebrews in large part due to the recognition on the part of peoples and leaders that they shared a degree of culpability for the Slaughter of the Innocents perpetrated by the Nazis with the eager assistance of many who were not Nazis, whose land was occupied by Nazis, who labored under the whips and guns of the Nazis but sympathized not with those marched into the gas chambers, but rather with their fellow haters of all things Jewish and all Jews.

It was an act of penance for the moral sins of the Nazi period when Western nations generally, including the US ignored the many warning signs of what was happening under the Hitlerites. Shamefully, the governments and many people throughout Europe and North America had refused to hear the cries of warning and shrieks of anguish alike until it was far too late.

Only after the evidence of the Slaughter, the Holocaust, the Shoah, was shown around the world, time after nauseating time, did the West, the US, act. The act was the creation of the state of Israel.

The act of Israel's birth was accompanied by blood, pain, and a degree of injustice to be sure, but that is often the case with birth, of individuals and nations alike. Perhaps the most important thing to recall about the birth of Israel is not the ministrations of the West, of the US, or even the Soviet Union in bringing the birth to pass but the utter, complete, total, and quite unjustifiable efforts by the governments of the surrounding Arab Muslim states to kill the infant before it had fully emerged from the womb.

Arguably, the actions of the Arab governments constituted an attempt to finish the job started by the Nazis or, failing that, to assure that Jews in the Mideast and elsewhere would be left without a refuge or protector. While any number of exculpatory glosses have been and continue to be placed upon the Arab attack on Israel-the-borning, the underlying fact is that the movement of tanks and troops was motivated by hatred, dehumanization, and a view of Jews as the ever-evil "Other."

As the years have rolled by since Israel was created from the ashes of the Holocaust nothing has shifted the hostility, the hatred felt and constantly expressed by various and sundry Arab and Muslim states. If anything the hatred has grown, the hostility increased, and the potential for war both conventional and otherwise has increased in capitals across the Mideast and throughout Northwest Asia.

The reason for this escalation in hate, threat, and menace usually invoked is the bad treatment of the "Palestinians" by the Israelis. End the "occupation," restore the "borders" extant before June 1967, compensate or allow the return of any and all Arabs (or their descendants) "forced out" of their homes way back at the beginning and all will be peace, harmony and goodwill. Or so runs the Arab-Muslim narrative.

Right. All the problems diplomatic, political, and military, all the rebirths of ancient blood libels, emerge from the sincere concern on the part of the assorted Arab and Muslim leaders for the fate of their "Palestinian brothers."

That constant theme, that undying plaint is a crock. Pure and simple, none of the many advocates on behalf of the "Palestinians" gives a tinker's dam about the "Palestinian people" now or in the past. Arab and Muslim regimes, dictators, kings, and elected presidents alike have used the "plight of the Palestinians" time and time again for their own subjectively defined self-interest. The "Palestinians" have been pawns or less in the Mideast Game of Nations. They have been expendable assets used for purposes of state. They have been pliable and easily exploited puppets dancing on strings controlled by distant and quite indifferent political and military figures.

Behind the screen of a nonexistent Israeli threat, the mullahs of Tehran pursue a nuclear capability with zealous determination not to protect the "Palestinians" but to enhance the power held by Iran in and beyond the region. The Turkish government has turned on their one time ally, Israel, not because the Islamist leaning government is worried over the repression of the residents of Gaza but because of desire bordering on need to diminish Israel.

The real deal behind all of the recent expressions of antipathy directed toward Israel and solidarity with the "Palestinian people" is based on a very mundane consideration. The assorted regimes are scared to death of the Islamist jihadists in their own populations.

The ever hardening line espoused by Arab and Muslim states most recently aimed at the Israeli nuclear arsenal is based on the palpable fear that appearing to give in in the slightest would be to excite the Islamist jihadi to strap on their suicide vests and "bring the war home." Given the deeply rooted antisemitism in Islam per se, stoked year after year by clerics and others and considering the explosive growth of Islamist based and directed violence, the anxiety permeating the governments of Arab and Muslim states is understandable.

Equally understandable is the Israeli reaction of hardening intransigence. Without excusing the land grab nature of the Six Day War, the current view of the Israeli government and people is well founded. The only wall around Israel, the only way of assuring that Jews not only in that country but around the world have a refuge and protector is the strength of the Israeli military. That strength includes the nuclear weapons resident in assorted bunkers.

It is quite true that Israel faces both external and internal problems, even large problems such as demographic, economic, and educational trends. Yet a more fundamental truth is that Israel must survive as a viable state if those are to be solved.

Survival relies in very large measure on the capabilities of the Israeli clandestine services as well as its defense forces. It relies at least to an important degree on those warheads presumed to exist on Israeli bases.

Israeli survival also rests in part upon the understanding and support of us who are non-Jews, the goyim of the US and Europe. Our predecessors not only did the wrong thing in the long dark years from 1933 to 1945, they did the right thing three years later when they midwifed the birth of Israel.

We do not need to support Israel without question. Not every decision or action by the government of Israel is correct, nor does it merit agreement simply by virtue of having been made in Israel.

However, without Israel as both a reality and a symbol, it will be only a matter of time before the Extermination Expresses take to the rails again. The next time those on board may be Jews.

Then, again, those who ride the next trains may be some other "Other." They could be any of us.

Israelis Have Cause To Be Very, Very Nervous

Israelis have more reasons today to be reaching for the bottle of tranquilizers than ever before in the history of their country. The reasons are all good. And, all emerge from what old Soviet terminology called, "the correlation of forces."

Today, as for several years now, the correlation of political, diplomatic, military and global opinion forces are oriented against Israel's national and security interests. The revision of the previously pro-Israel correlation has been accelerating. This political delta V shows no sign of slackening.

To put it bluntly but accurately: The continued existence of Israel as currently constituted is not a priority--or even a significant consideration--for most of the world's politically articulate elite. Even in the US which has been Israel's more-or-less voluntary champion since the state's foundation, there are clear signs that the tide of elite opinion no longer runs fast and hard in Israel's favor.

In 1967 American applause for Israel's highly effective war of preemption and territorial expansion was instant, loud and long sustained. The Egyptian attack of Yom Kippur 1973 assured there would be no diminishing of American support for Israel, even if there was more than a little irritation in the higher echelons of the US Government over Israel's intransigence at relinquishing the Occupied Territories.

The Arab/Palestinian reliance upon terror tactics directed against Israel and (to some limited extent) its supporters may have been justified from the perspective of its employers (and the employers of terror's employers,) but it was counterproductive in that it both increased Israeli political will as well as that of the US to continue its support. Not until the First and Second Intifadas allowed, even encouraged the media of the US and much of the world to portray the Israelis as a species of terrorist employing overwhelming violence against children, youth and women did the correlation of forces start to shift away from Israel and in favor of that hazy group, the Palestinians.

For fifteen or so years now Israel has been losing the battle for the support of the politically articulate elite of Western countries generally. In so far as the Israelis have lost, the Palestinians have won. It has been and continues to be a zero-sum game.

The West--particularly members of its chattering class with their new found love affair with multi-culturalism and "diversity" (whatever that may mean) has been bombarded with images which at least purport to show the Israeli Goliath trampling the Palestinian David into a bloody mudhole. The venality, incompetence and ideological blinders of "Palestinian" leadership have gone by, if not unnoticed, then, at least, without comment.

The greed, corruption and utterly incompetent negotiating skills of Yassir Arafat and the posse of "Abu's" who surrounded him that are in largest single measure responsible for the current morass in which the "Palestinian" population tries to survive has not been appreciated by many, even most of the public opinion molders of the West including the US. These unphotogenic realities have been plastered over by images of IDF soldiers firing "non-lethal" rounds at Arab teenagers, videos of IDF bulldozers levelling Arab homes and IAF fired missiles hitting what seem to be civilian structures in Gaza.

When faced with the power of emotion invoking images, words of reason have no defense. And so the correlation of forces shifts tectonically in ways that cannot be countered even by the power of the Israel Lobby or the patently bloodthirsty policies of the ideologues running Gaza, and, to a lesser but still critical extent, the Palestinian Authority of the West Bank.

The Israelis should have seen it coming. They and their government well know the power of pure emotion to drive opinion and policy in democratic governments. After all, it was the power of emotion which assured support, particularly that of the US, for the creation of Israel.

It was the power of emotion and the historical facts upon which that emotion was both based and exploited by the founders of Israel which gives the words of Iranian president Ahmedinejad their force of authority both in the Muslim countries and, unfortunately, in much of the West. In the midst of the nest of hate and loathing Ahmedinejad's venomous spewing creates, there is an egg of truth.

The egg of truth is simply this. Without the slaughter of the innocents performed by Nazi Germany and its eager helpers elsewhere in Europe during World War II, there would have been no Israel. The lives of the six or so million Jews snuffed out by the Nazis and their supporters from France to the Ukraine bought the sympathies and understanding of post-War western governments--particularly the US--for the establishment of the State of Israel.

Yesterday Ahmedinejad made that accusation before a deeply divided audience in Geneva. The Iranian Orator-in-Chief was wrong in branding Israel a racist country headed by a racist government. He was all-too-correct in claiming that Europe and the US paid their debt to the dead of world Jewry by facilitating the creation of Israel.

Rightly or wrongly the emotional torrent of disgust and guilt which greeted the belated public revelation of the Nazi extermination of the Jews of Europe gave force to the Zionist goal of assuring Jews had a state, a state which would provide both refuge and protection to a dispersed and persecuted people. Moral revulsion would not have been enough. The task demanded the full enlistment of powerful emotion. The pictures and survivors' stories of the Nazi inferno enlisted and focused emotion such that even the still more than a little antisemitic American public approved of Truman's recognition of the new Jewish state.

Emotion, periodically restoked both by dramatic resurrection of the Holocaust and well guided fondness and admiration for the heroic Israelis and their state blooming in the desert went a long, long way to assuring continued, virtually unquestioned support for Israel and its government. The negative emotion of fear--fear of being branded "antisemitic" by the Israel Lobby or some other group of Israel supporters has also gone a long, long way to assuring that it is impossible for the US to treat Israel as though it were a standard issue nation-state with self-defined national and strategic interests.

Ahmedinejad is not engaging in hate-mongering when he challenges the West, including the US, to examine the degree to which emotion drove the process of off-loading a long festering and finally very, very bloodily expressed antisemitism upon the Mideast. History is not that simple, that lacking in irony.

In token of that irony and complexity, an American diplomat, Loy Henderson, as well as that towering figure, George C. Marshall, warned President Truman that the emotion of the moment, understandable and justifiable as it might be, would eventually evoke a countering emotional climate in the Mideast which would vex the US for generations yet to come. Both men (as well as others occupying positions of grave responsibility in those years of transition) warned of unending Arab hatred being the inevitable price to be paid for what Arabs and their governments would necessarily see as a foreign body inserted by outsiders in the Arab flesh.

Ahmedinejad is doing just what Henderson, Marshall and the others warned would be the case. It is true that other, many other Mideast voices over the past sixty years have made the same charges and spouted the same hate. Ahmedinejad not only has a propensity for very blunt and infuriating statements, he is adept at capturing the attention of the media and has the good fortune of riding a rising tide.

The tide is rising in Israel's disfavor in large measure to the success of the Iranian Revolution and its ongoing campaign of getting away with flipping the bird at the US, the West and standards of international deportment generally. The success, defiance and over-the-edge rhetoric assure that no Arab leader--including those of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, can afford to be seen as any less resolute, any less absolutist in their opposition to Israel and its supporters--the US in particular.

A second reason for the tide to have turned against Israel is the behavior of the government of Israel and its military forces. Both have been widely portrayed as militaristic and militarily ineffective. The net result of both the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the recently concluded incursion into the Gaza strip has been to elevate the perception of Israel as a bully and its military as being a weapon both blunt and ineffective.

The unveiled threats by Israel to singlehandedly abate the latent Iranian nuclear program in a manner akin to their 1981 air strike on the Osiris reactor in Iraq has done nothing to dispel the widespread view that Israel is an out-of-control aggressor willing to place the peace of the world as well as the global petro-economy at risk. At the same time there is little or no belief that Israel could undertake such an attack with the slightest chance of even partial success without the full cooperation of the US.

The effect of Israeli posturing and tough talk coupled with the rather non-credible nature of the threats has been counterproductive to both Israeli interests and the chance for success in the pursuit of the "Two State Solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian dilemma.

The latest roadblock to the "peace process" (The Geek feels intestinal revulsion for that buzz phrase as it is inherently meaningless.) is the refusal by the Palestinian Authority to recognise Israel as a Jewish state prior to two-state oriented negotiations. On the surface the PA's refusal to do so is irrational. After all any number of states dub themselves "Islamic republics." And, Israel was diplomatically recognised by the US and other countries as a Jewish state.

However, the PA position is anything but irrational. Faced with the Iranian paradigm of total rejectionism and Iran's support of Hamas, no PA official with hopes of continuing in office (or even staying alive) can do less. The intransigence of Iran has meshed perfectly with that of Israel to block meaningful progress in the search for a solution to the Palestinian affair.

The falling stock of Israel in the eyes of many in the Western politically articulate elite limits severely the pressure which can be brought to bear on the PA, let alone Hamas. Given the existential threat which Israelis perceive to exist in the Iranian nuclear project, there is little or no political inducement for any Israeli politician with a hope for his or her political future to be seen as backing down.

Unless and until the Israeli government can take effective action to recover its previous glory in the eyes of European and American opinion molders, it must rely on the formidable capacities of the Israel Lobby to keep US politicians on the reservation.

The limits of the Lobby may be in sight as the American public becomes increasingly weary of war and rumors of war, as it seeks, perhaps, to return to the presumed innocent and glorious days of isolationism. Certainly, there is little or no reason to believe that the American public would support an attack by one nuclear power (Israel) against a wannabe owner of nukes (Iran) which resulted in a worsening of our current economic disaster zone.

Equally there is no reason to believe that the Obama administration, which is facing new and growing problems in Pakistan and the Gulf of Aden while trying to solve the old ones in Iraq and Afghanistan, wants to add an Israeli strike on Iran to the mix. (And, one has to wonder if any perception of American support, even that of the tacit sort, would simplify our challenging dealings with China, Russia and LatAm.)

The incoming Israeli Prime Minister has made his career from tough talk and tougher action. It has been just that sort of robust rhetoric and fierce action which has produced the radical change in the correlation of forces. The challenge for him is not figuring out the weapons mix which will best delay Iranian nuclear ambitions or how to play Hamas against the PA. The challenge for Bibi is that of reconstructing the old correlation of forces.

Good luck, Bibi.

The challenge for the US is to retrieve the long abandoned reputation for even-handedness with which we were once seen in the Mideast.

Good luck, Barack.