DESCRIPTION

In this book, Elan Journo explains the essential nature of the conflict, and what has fueled it for so long. What justice demands, he shows, is that we evaluate both adversaries—and America’s approach to the conflict—according to a universal moral ideal: individual liberty. From that secular moral framework, the book analyzes the conflict, examines major Palestinian grievances and Israel’s character as a nation, and explains what’s at stake for everyone who values human life, freedom, and progress. What Justice Demands shows us why America should be strongly supportive of freedom and freedom-seekers—but, in this conflict and across the Middle East, it hasn’t been, much to our detriment.

My Summary

Main Ideas, Takeaways & Similarities

Questions

I. What is the problem?
A. How is this problem formulated?
B. Why is this problem important?
C. What is the history of this problem?
D. Which prominent personalities have been interested in this problem?

II. What solutions to the problem are there?
A. What are the conclusions reached?
B. By what argument(s) is the conclusion reached?
C. What facts or assumptions serve as premises?
D. When a prominent personality offers a solution, does he also argue for or against other prominent personalities? Does he raise objections to alternative solutions? Does he consider objections to his own solutions?

III. Evaluation
A. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the alternative formulations to the problem?
B. Has the importance or history of the problem ever been misrepresented?
C. Are the solutions logically related to the premises?
D. Are the facts true? Are the assumptions acceptable? Are the objections answerable?

AI Summary

Highlights

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• The actual injustice is that America has sold out the region’s only free society, Israel—along with freedom-seeking people across the Middle East and among the Palestinian community—while empowering jihadist forces. And it is this injustice that hurts us. The book’s theme is that America should be strongly supportive of freedom and freedom-seekers—but hasn’t been, much to our detriment.
• What’s missing is a frank moral evaluation of both adversaries and of America’s role in the conflict. That moral assessment is what this book offers. (Location 141)

Part 1: Where would you rather live?

Chapter 1: That “Shitty Little Country”

• United Nations Human Rights Council has passed more resolutions targeting Israel than it has against any other member state. Ever. More than the rest of the world combined. To put that into perspective, North Korea, Syria, Iran, Libya, China—none of these notorious authoritarian regimes has been subject to as many official rebukes as Israel.5 (Location 286)
• To take justice seriously, we have to look at who the adversaries are, what goals they seek, what they say, what claims they make, what they do. (Location 333)

It’s your life. Where would you rather live it?

• Where would I stand the best chance of defining my own path, achieving my own goals, and of thriving?
• UN Human Right Council
  • Passed more resolutions targeting Israel than any other nation
• Underdog Theory vs. Taking Justice Seriously

Thought Control

• Just bringing it up, inviting people to contemplate the possibility of secular government, will cost you dearly. (Location 361)
• Morality Police
• Saudi Arabia
  • Sharia Law
  • Controlling speech
  • Apostasy—death penalty
  • Lashes
• Iran
  • Sharia
  • Insulting government
  • Blasphemy
  • Lack of speech
• Jordan
  • Offending King serious crime—3 years
• Kuwait
• Bahrain
• Qatar
• UAE
• Egypt
• Using your Neighbors to spy—fermenting paranoia and self-censorship
• Censorship is the norm in the Middle East
• Fundamental effect is to negate your independent judgement

Intellectual Freedom

• By contrast, what to Israel
• Unpopular and controversial views allowed
• Freedom of speech
• Freedom of religion
• Freedom of the press
  • Example of movie Jenin, Jenin
  • Israel’s Film Censorship Board banned the film
  • Israel’s Supreme Court struck down ban

Poisoning Human Relationships

Gender Apartheid

• “Gender apartheid” is institutionalized, legally mandated gender discrimination against women. Most women in today’s Middle East are subordinated to men; they are legally subjugated; their lives are treated as dispensable.
• Female Genital Mutiliation/Cutting
• Clearly, a significant part of the problem is rooted in a culture that devalues women and condones their exploitation.
• rapist can get a lesser punishment if he agrees to marry the woman he violated. For the woman, however, that simply compounds her suffering and prolongs it with a life sentence.
• If he then decides, in the name of protecting family “honor,” to slaughter the woman, what kind of punishment do you think the murderer will face? The maximum penalty in Kuwait is three years in jail and a fine of seven hundred and fifty dollars.
• Such dehumanization of women is the norm throughout the Middle East. Not so in Israel. Quite the contrary.
• Israel
  • Golda Meir, was one of the first women to lead a modern, Western country. She preceded Margaret Thatcher, who served as prime minister of Britain, by a decade, and Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, by thirty-six years.
  • women number roughly half of all judges and lawyers in the country. Four women are justices of the Supreme Court; one of these, Miriam Naor, serves as the Court’s chief justice.
  • 50% Judges
  • 4 Justices on Supreme Court are women, 1 Chief Justice
  • 90% of positions in IDF are open to women
• Saudi Arabia
  • Whereas women in Saudi Arabia have long been forbidden from driving a car or leaving home unchaperoned, in Israel women pilot fighter jets.
• Egypt
  • Sexual Harassment
    • 83-98%
    • “Bringing it on” themselves 53% of men
    • 62% admitted to it
• Jordan / Lebanon
  • Rapists get lesser punishments if he agrees to marry the woman he violates
  • Continues the trauma for life
• Kuwait / Bahrain
  • 3years for Honor Killing

Dehumanizing Gays

• Iran
  • Mahmoud Ahmedinijad, was asked about the regime’s persecution of gays. He flatly denied that there were any gays in Iran.
• Lebanon.
  • It’s one of the region’s more secular and religiously diverse countries. And yet the regime—like its Egyptian counterpart—avidly persecutes gays.
• To be gay in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Iran, Egypt, Lebanon, and elsewhere in the region is to face brutal persecution.
• Gay = Crime
  • UAE: Crime
  • Kuwait: 7 years
  • Qatar: 7 years
  • Iran: Death
  • Egypt: Drives gays underground
  • Lebanon: Jail

Prosperity and Progress

• Israeli
  • start-up ethos, though, long predates the digital age, and it’s deep-seated. The story of one classic, decidedly old-school industrial start-up illustrates what entrepreneurs, left free to operate, can achieve.78 (Location 759)
  • 3rd most companies listed on NASDAQ
  • High-tech, life sciences
  • Scientific, Technical Journal Articles
    • 2013 (per capita)
      • Israel: 1402 per million
      • US: 1305
      • UK: 1518
      • Saudi Arabia: 225
      • Iran: 426
      • Egypt: 102
    • 8 Israeli Nobel Prices (except peace/literature)
      • None in Middle East
  • people in Israel enjoy a decidedly First World standard of living, the benefits of technological progress, and the freedom to thrive. (Location 810)
• Giant lack of books translated into Arabic
• The report, published in 2003, was subtitled “Building a Knowledge Society.” But a “knowledge society,” predicated on the idea that science, technology, and innovation fuel progress, has yet to be embraced in the Middle East—with one exception, Israel. (Location 791)
• Infant Mortality
  • The good news is that globally, the rate of infant mortality has been falling, though the pace varies by country. The freer nations—where individuals are able to develop and implement superior medical expertise—have seen the mortality rate (per thousand births) decline to single digits. (Location 794)
  • U.S.: 5.6 - Israel: 2.9 - UK: 3.7
  • Saudi: 11.1 - Iran: 13 - Egypt: 19.4 - Libya: 11
• When assessing Israel’s economic advances and its scientific and technological ferment, recall that Israel lacked the enormous oil revenues that buoyed neighboring economies like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf monarchies. (Location 807)
• Life Expectancy at Birth
  • Israel: 82.1 - US: 78.7 - France: 82.7
  • Saudi: 74.6 - Egypt: 71.3 - Iran: 75.7

Chapter 2: What Explains the Outlier?

Monarchy

• Saudi Arabia
  • Must be Muslim to be citizen
  • Arbitrary Power
• Jordan
• Gulf States
• Jordan

Rule of Religious Law Even in Monarches

Arbitrary Power

Dictatorship

Egypt

Lebanon

• Law is politicized. Judges heed to the wishes of the King.

Turkey

• Rely on fear and brutality.

Theocracy

• Iran
  • The Tehran regime adopted a tactic called “human wave” attacks, which cost thousands of lives. Some of these human waves, it appears, were children and youth sent to clear the battlefields of landmines. (Location 1066)
  • Afghanistan
• Torture is routine in Middle East, not because of National Security

A Common Theme: Religious Subjugation of the Individual

The Exception, Israel

• In 2005, 9+ political parties ran for seats

• Nationwide proportional representation

• Since 1948; every single transfer or power from incumbent to the next winning party or coalition has been orderly and peaceful.

• Coups & Revolutions in the Middle East

  • Egypt: 1952, 2011, 2013
  • Iran: 1953, 1979
  • Iraq: 1956, 1969
  • Libya: 1968, 2011
  • Syria: 1949

Israel’s Rule of Law

• Borrows heavily from English common law
• Innocent until proven guilty
• Political parties
• Arab village, Biet Sourik, due to barriers erected due to the Second Intifada, petitioned and challenged since it intersected their village. Supreme Court ordered to reroute the barrier.

Punishing Corruption

• Example: Olmert

Judicial Self-Criticism: The Legality of Torture

• Protections for prisoners
• “A democracy must sometimes fight with one hand tied behind its back.” -Israeli Supreme Court Decision prohibiting torture

Religion and Israel’s Political System

Religious Minorities in Israel

• Christians are heading towards extinction in the Middle East

Israel’s Religious-State Tension

• The founders of Israel were divided on the issue of religion’s role in government. The most notable secularists among Israel’s founders were Theodore Herzl and David Ben-Gurion. Herzl was the intellectual credited with galvanizing the Zionist movement, which sought to create the state of Israel. Ben-Gurion was a leading political figure at the time of Israel’s founding. (Location 1255)
• Herzl’s advocacy and writings inspired many, but some objected to his lack of emphasis even on Jewish culture, let alone religion.59 Indeed, whereas Herzl himself was a secularist who admired science and commerce, the Zionist movement was ideologically variegated. Along with thinkers who put emphasis on Jewish cultural traditions, there were also religionists, and quite a few varieties of socialists. (Location 1267)
• David Ben-Gurion, who became Israel’s first prime minister, was a dyed-in-the-wool secular socialist. (Location 1271)
• But at the formation of the state in the late 1940s, with threats of an Arab invasion looming (more on that in the next chapter), the secularists believed they had to reach a compromise with religionist political groups, if the new state was to be born. Under that fateful compromise, known as the “status quo agreement,” the state ended up granting the Jewish religion privileges and subsidies that no private, voluntary association (whether a club, a business, or a spiritual group) should possess. (Location 1275)
• Ever since this compromise, secularists and religionists have clashed over Judaism’s role in society. (Location 1284)
• beyond the city of Jerusalem the no-work-on-Saturday rule is widely flouted; the music at Tel Aviv nightclubs keeps pumping. (Location 1288)
• Many Israeli religionists are bent on imposing their dogma on other people. (Location 1289)
• Another source of friction are the wholesale military exemptions afforded to religionists, so they can avoid compulsory military service. Tens of thousands of them every year are let off the hook.64 Seeing that, some Israelis have demanded what they regard as “equality in sharing the burden” of defending the country. (Location 1294)
  • (It’s worth adding that a military draft is profoundly at odds with the principles of a free society. For many Israelis, however, completing their military duty is a source of pride.) (Location 1298)
• And here are two more absurd consequences of religion’s continued influence that impact almost every Israeli. To get married or divorced, you have to go through the Rabbinate, an officially sanctioned religious institution. You can still get a civil wedding, if you go overseas. Thousands of couples circumvent the Rabbinate by traveling to neighboring Cyprus for a civil wedding that Israeli authorities recognize as legal. (Location 1299)
• The Rabbinate also has a legal monopoly over divorce, and in keeping with religious precepts, it’s biased in favor of husbands and against wives seeking to end a marriage. (Location 1302)
• fully 95 percent of secular Israelis are dissatisfied with the government’s policy toward matters of religion, and 64 percent of the population endorse the idea of same-sex marriage.66 (Location 1304)

Religion-State Tension in Comparison

• Israel’s religion-state tension is a serious matter. (Location 1309)

Why Israel Stands Out

• Far from being a “shitty little country,” Israel stands out for a political-legal system that aims not at subjugation, but at enabling individuals to live, think, produce, thrive. It enables individuals to shape their own society. It is predicated on the rule of law, with independent courts, and a supreme court that has distinguished itself for overruling government policies. It protects the freedom of individuals. (Location 1353)

• Israel’s political system and institutions are crucial factors in explaining why life in Israel is far superior to the rest of the Middle East. The country’s political system and institutions make it equal to the best among free societies—notably the United Kingdom, France, the United States—and, for the same reason, vastly superior to the Middle East’s monarchies, dictatorships, theocracies. It is with this moral context firmly in mind that we must approach the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (Location 1356)

• Israel Founders:

  • Secularists
    • Theodore Herzl
    • David Ben-Gurion
  • “Status-quo agreement” - Grants Jewish religion privileges and subsidies
    • Made to appease more religious in late-1940s

Part II: Wrongs, Past and Present

Chapter 3: Palestinian Grievances

A Tale of Victims Lashing Out

• Idea that ‘Palestinians are victims lashing out in desperation’
• Two intertwined threads:
  1. Fundamentally wronged
     1. Dispossession
     2. Expulsion
     3. Occupation
     4. Denial of Rights
  2. Nature & Goals

Who Are the Victims?

• According to the Palestinian National Charter of 1968, a seminal document of the movement, the “Palestinians are those Arab nationals who, until 1947, normally resided in Palestine” whether or not they stayed there subsequently, and so is anyone born “after that date, of a Palestinian father,” regardless of where that person is born. This identity—notably featuring “membership in the Palestinian community”—cannot be lost, nor negated. The Palestinian identity, the Charter states, “is a genuine, essential, and inherent characteristic; it is transmitted from parents to children.”[Emphasis added.]
  • Collectivist outlook—This outlook that Palestinians movement adopts and fosters gravely distorts our thinking about the conflict and grievances in particular.

1. Stolen Land: “Dispossession.”

• And the fact of the matter is that the incoming Jews acquired land by purchasing it.
  • Jews prioritized land that had few or no tenant farmers on it.
  • Buying opportunities abundant—far in excess of what Jewish ability to purchase
  • Jewish National Fund was offered, even during extreme tension, more offers than it could fund
  • Prominent Arab families—eager to sell at skyrocket prices while in public objecting about Jewish immigration
  • 25% of the 89 members of the Arab Executive in 1920-28, sold land to Jews.
• Dispossession means it was stolen
• Was friction between landlords and tenants
  • Idea of having your cattle graze on a neighbors land
  • That many people under the Ottomon Empire didn’t register their land, or the undervalued it, due to taxes and military conscription

2. Kicked Out, Kept Out: Expulsion, Refugees, and the “Right of Return”

The Run-Up to the War

• between 1930–39, the Muslim and Christian population of the port city of Haifa increased by eighty-seven percent.
• Over all, the Muslim and Christian population, according to a British government report, saw massive growth (a “growth of over fifty percent in seventeen years”).
• What were key factors behind that population spike? The newly available health services, the combatting of malaria, the reduction in the infant death-rate, the improvement of the water-supply and public sanitation—all carried out by the incoming Zionists.
• The stroking of anti-Western sentiments, primarily Haj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.
  • Railed against “invasion of liberal ideas.”
  • Against Islam morals
  • “Jewish girls, who run around in shorts, demoralize our your by their mere presence.”

A Scrimmage for Conquest

• The Arab League threatened war. Its Secretary General, Abdul Rahman Azzam Pasha, explained that “this will be a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Tartar massacre or the Crusader wars.”
• Arab League and the countries wanted the land for themselves, not “Palestinians”

What Triggered the Refugee Problem

• Haifa—telling people to leave
• Arab propaganda
• The “deliberate depopulation of Arab villages and their transformation into military strongholds,” observes Karsh, “were marked corollaries of the Arab campaign from the onset of hostilities.”

What to Make of the Refugee Grievance

1. To reclaim land
2. Homes left behind

• Many in WWII had the a similar fate
• If the person lost their home simply because of fear, they are right to feel a grievance. Yet that doesn’t rest solely or even majorly on the Zionists, it rests on the instigators of the 1948 war.
• The U.N. agency defines Palestinian refugees as “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict”—but the descendants of male Palestinian refugees, including adopted children, are also eligible for registration as “refugees.”
• You can see why a bureaucracy such as United Nations Relief Works Agency would engage in dodgy accounting to ensure a growing number of needy Palestinian refugees, thus justifying its own reason for existing.
• Tell these refugees, instead of looking into the future, to instead to stare at the past and focus all their energy into a war that cannot be reversed, is harmful to society and to that refugee personally and psychologically.

3. “Occupation”

How Egypt’s Climactic Battle Led to the Occupation

• Nassar
  • “Arab unity means the liquidation of Israel.”
  • Vision of “Arab unity”— Arab political dominion throughout the Middle East
  • “The Arab people will pronounce the death sentence against criminal Israel, namely disappearance. Israel is the cancer, the malignant wound, in the body of Arabism, for which there is no cure but eradication.”

Nature of the Occupation

• Standard of living rise
• Economic opportunity’s multiply
• Issues:
  • Was viewed as a temporary solution
  • Unclear and conflicting aims
  • Convoluted legal and administrative arrangements
• Comparison to Japan after WWII and American’s occupation
  • Removal of military
  • Removal of previous held beliefs and identity
• Israel attempted to do a “non-presence” approach to the occupied territories after 1967, letting Arabs live their life, unable to due to terrorist attacks.
• Integration of the economies of the occupied territories had a tremendously positive result.
• Freedom of movement
• During 1970s, the West Bank & Gaza constituted the fourth fastest-growing economy in the world.

Consequences of the Occupation

• But for anyone who seeks freedom and a better life, living under Israeli rule was objectively superior to what came before, under Egyptian or Jordanian authority—and superior to whatever degree of Palestinian self-rule was permitted to take hold later (as we’ll see in the next chapter). Who bears the responsibility for the economic hardships, political constraints, and tightened security—the lineups at checkpoints, the security barrier, the curfews, the travel permits—under the occupation and since its partial dissolution? Fundamentally, the Palestinian movement and its state sponsors, who have backed guerrilla forces, and who have encouraged, fomented, and funded terrorist attacks. They, not Israel, are the ones who have made life worse for every individual in the occupied territories who truly seeks peace and a better life for himself and his loved ones.

The “Settlements”

• Complex as it cutrs across Israeli law, domestic policy and international diplomacy.
• Suburban “settlements” began after the 1967 war.
• Significant impetus was national security, along areas of vulnerability.
• The lesson is that even laws—and certainly conventional “international laws”—must be subject to moral judgment.
• Arguments about International Law
  • 4th Geneva Convention / Hague Convention
  • Gaza & West Bank weren’t internationally recognized as Egyptian and Jordanian prior to 1967 war.
  • International law is not like regular law, it’s just based on the consent of sovereign nations that sign on to it. It’s at most customary. To call it “law” is an overstatement.
• Complications:
  1. Israeli land-use policy
  2. Taking of private lands
  3. Campaign of certain religionists to establish unauthorized settlements.
  • Unjust practice of the Jewish National Fund to sell land exclusively to “Jewish” people.
    • Supreme Court in 2000 invoked principle of equality
  • The religious Jews that are attempting to expropriate Palestinian land are immoral, as it’s a clear violation of property rights.
• Between 1967 - 1990s, residents of occupied territories in general saw their standard of living greatly improve.

4. Minority Rights: “Second-Class Citizens”?

Who are Israel’s Arab Citizens?

• Collectivized perspective

What Life is Like for “Arab” Citizens

• life expectancy for Arab women increased from an average of 71.9 years in the period 1970–1974 to 77.4 years in the period 1994–1998;
• and for Arab men from an average of 68.5 years in the period 1970–1974 to 74.2 years in the period 1994–1998.
• Infant Mortality:
  • “24.2 deaths per 1,000 births in 1980 to 8.2 deaths per 1,000 in 2003.”

Government Neglect and Discriminatory Policy

• Favor majority “Jewish” population: schools & municipal budgets

Social and Economic Factors

• Over half of Arab families in Israel are classified as poor, compared to 1/5th among all families in Israel
• Fall short proportionally in government and service jobs

Primacy of An Individual’s Choice and Beliefs

• More children
• Mothers not entering the workforce
• Education and its importance

What the Grievances Cannot Explain

• Dispossession. Expulsion and Refugees. Occupation. Minority Rights. When you consider these foundational Palestinian grievances as a whole, something just does not add up.
• The grievances cannot justify the vociferous condemnations of Israel. None comes remotely close to the actual “gender apartheid,” nor the incontestable violations of individual freedoms, nor the daily atrocities that are the norm throughout the Middle East. None of the grievances comes remotely close to warranting the conclusion that Israel per se is an illegitimate state.
• And once you winnow down to grievances implicating the rights of individuals and actual injustices, one conclusion is unavoidable. For anyone who seeks freedom and justice, it is under Israel’s protection of freedom of speech that you can advocate politically and culturally to have your grievances heard and taken seriously. And it is under Israel’s political system, its rule-of-law institutions, its independent courts, that you would stand the best chance of having wrongs righted.

Chapter 4: The Palestinian Cause

The Movement’s Origin

• Nassar
• Arab nationalism
• PLO
  • Pulled all the gangs together into one umbrella
  • Founded with Nassau’s instigation in 1964 with funding
  • Benefits
    • Egypt gained a mercenary force
    • The state-sponsors could exert some control over the guerilla groups
    • The trauma of defeat in 1967 opened the way for a distinctly Palestinian movement (richly funded by state-sponsors) to succeed where its forerunners had failed.

The Palestinian Movement: Ends and Means

• Mao Zedong, Che Guevara inspiration
• Soviet Union funding and arms
• PLO’s charter emphasizes the need for thought control. It is a “national duty to bring up individual Palestinians in an Arab revolutionary manner. All means of information and education must be adopted in order to acquaint the Palestinian with his country in the most profound manner, both spiritual and material, that is possible.”

Before Al Qaeda and ISIS, the PLO Blazed the Trail of International Terrorism

• 1972 Munich Olympic Games
• 1970 Four flights hijacked
• 1973 Two American diplomats in Sudan
• 1985 Leon Klinghoffer, American, vacationing on a cruise ship

What Palestinian Statehood Actually Looks Like

• The Palestinian movement is a roving dictatorship in search of territory to dominate.

Jordan, 1968-1970

• The Palestinian factions ran their own “police” forces and courts of law. They arrested people and punished them at will. They imposed taxes, erected their own roadblocks, and swaggered through Jordan’s capital city Amman, flouting the regime’s authority. Some guerrillas began extorting “donations” at gunpoint. One faction sought to build local “soviets” (revolutionary councils) of workers and peasants. Invoking an analogy with the Vietnam war, Fatah called for turning Amman, the capital of Jordan, into the Palestinian “Hanoi” to be used as a base for attacking Tel Aviv, the Israeli “Saigon.”
• The monarchy feared that the Palestinian forces were poised to launch a coup d’état (something that certain factions had tried to do in the past). So, in September 1970 the Jordanian regime ordered its military to liquidate the nascent Palestinian mini-state. “Full warfare ensued; using heavy armor, artillery, and air attacks, the Jordanians inflicted a shattering defeat.” By the end, around three thousand Palestinians had been killed.

Lebanon, 1970-1982

• What deserves special emphasis here is the Palestinian movement’s fundamental, wanton contempt for the lives, property, and freedom of individuals—for Palestinians, Israelis, Lebanese: for all individuals. Lebanese citizens were understandably frightened by what one scholar (in a highly euphemistic phrase) characterizes as “the guerillas’ tendency to showmanship and weak discipline.”39 What that meant: The PLO factions took part in looting, extortion rackets, and smuggling (activities central to many Lebanese militias).
• Story of how PLO setup rockets and took over a man’s farming fields and his own home to attack Israel

The Palestinian Authority, 1994-Present

Dictator of Palestine

• Arafat
• Signing of death warrants
• Hit squads would file paperwork for their fees and costs
• Pensions for martyrs

The Law of the Courts

• Travesty
• Sham trials—if lucky enough to even get one
• Killing collaborators or naming anyone you don’t like as one
• Practice of summary execution

Economic Exploitation

• Vast racketeering and extortion networks
• Nearly half of budget is squandered due to corruption and mismanagement
• Diverted $900 million to personal bank accounts, may be low-ball
• Stole a bank from a Qatari ($105 million)

Censorship

• Ordered newspapers closed, Al-Nahar—open only once it ran the official party line
• Summoned to meeting if you reported the exact size of a rally held by Arafat opponents
• Only report texts and statistics from state news service
• Beat up journalists, burnt down offices
• Routinely arrest, interrogated and jailed journalists
• In 2013, journalist Mamdouh Hamamreh sent to 1 year in prison for “insulting” Abbas on Facebook.

Manufacturing New Generations of Martyrs

• Palestinian media unending stream of content about eliminating Israel
• Schools, streets, parks etc.. are named after terrorists
  • For example, in 1978 Dalal Mughrabi led an attack involving a hijacked bus near Tel Aviv. In one of the most deadly attacks in Israel’s history, Mughrabi and her team killed thirty-seven civilians (twelve of them children). She has had “summer camps, schools, graduation ceremonies and sporting events named for her, as well as many TV documentaries honoring her.”
• Textbooks that deny Israel’s legitimacy, maps that deny its present physical existence.
• Summer camps that instill the virtues of martyrdom and impact military training

War Machine

The Palestinian Movement Goes Jihadist

• The Islamists came to fill the void left by the fading, bankrupt ideology

Aftershocks of Iran’s Islamic Revolution

• Palestinian Islamic Jihad
• Hamas
• Hamas children’s magazine Al-Fateh

Triumph of the Pious and Steadfast

• The narrative that Islamists peddle goes like this: we Muslims deserve to dominate, but we’re poor and weak—precisely because of the impiety that runs through our land. The solution? Restoring piety through a totalitarian society defined in every last particular by Islamic law, sharia. Viewed from this framework, the leading quasi-secular factions of the Palestinian cause must be judged as abject failures.

More Militant Than Thou

Gaza: An Islamist Palestinian Mini-State, 2007-Present

Islamization of Gaza

Waging Jihad on Israel

• One Hamas spokesman, in an interview on Al Aqsa TV during the war, had called on the inhabitants of Gaza to climb to their roofs to serve as human shields against Israeli bombardment. Some Gazans were doing precisely that.108 This captures the essence of the Hamas regime, now at the vanguard of the Palestinian cause.
• Story of Israeli’s busting into a home, wife fainted, medic went to help, but it was a trap and they died from an explosion.

A Contempt for Human Life

• Mia Bloom, the terrorism scholar, offered this disturbing account of Palestinian attitudes toward suicide bombings in the early 2000s (the Sbarro attack happened in 2001). “Violence has become the source of all honor among Palestinians,” and esteem for an individual “is bound to group status, physically and symbolically.” The “martyrs” are lionized.

What Animates the Palestinian Cause

• Instead of seeking justice, the movement inflicts injustice. There is no genuine Palestinian grievance, no past or present wrong, that it has worked to right. There is no genuine grievance, moreover, that can be righted by the creation of a nationalist dictatorship or an Islamic theocracy. Instead of seeking a better life for Palestinians, the Palestinian movement exhibits an utter contempt for human life.

Part III: The Way Forward

Chapter 5: What Justice Demands

On Principle

• What justice demands of us in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a principled stand in support of Israel—along with everyone else in the region who seeks genuine freedom, including among the Palestinian population—and a stand against the Palestinian movement and its cause.

A Stand for Freedom—and Everyone Who Seeks It

A Commitment to the Facts, Not Dogmatism

Money and Military Aid

• It’s a misunderstanding of justice to think that support for Israel (or any free nation) is essentially material. In fact, America’s moral support for freedom (and all who seek it) is far more consequential than people imagine, and it’s greatly under-appreciated by our own policymakers.

Freedom vs. “Democracy”

• Many people conflate these two ideas, and George W. Bush greatly helped to amplify that confusion. The Bush administration waged a campaign to bring democracy—essentially, majority rule—to the Middle East and called that policy a “Forward Strategy for Freedom.” It’s crucial that we untangle this conceptual mess.
• Ideally uphold individual freedom, not democracy

Why “Privilege” Freedom? Who Are We to Judge Other Cultures and Political Systems?

• My answer is that the ideal of freedom is an objective moral standard. It is true for all people, in all places, at all times. Because of that, we should apply it as our standard for judging any political cause and any government, anywhere. Yes, these are strong claims.

An Objective Standard

• Essentially, what the facts show us is that in order to thrive, you need to live free. Glance at history, and you can observe a causal relationship between liberty and human flourishing.

Chapter 6: How Our Approach Must Change

Episode One. The Post-Cold War Era

• America should of seen how the PLO embraced Saddam Hussein and the Soviet Union and supported Israel in totality

Embracing the PLO

• George H.W. Bush
  • Idea you could negotiate with anyone; giving the PLO diplomatic legitimacy
• Whitewashing of the PLO during. The Oslo Peace Process
  • The entire peace process made a mockery of justice. The Palestinians were asked to fulfill certain preconditions: they had to renounce terrorism, recognize Israel’s sovereignty as a state, and cancel the clauses in the PLO’s charter that call for the destruction of Israel. Presto: The Palestinian leadership, having put out a statement vaguely on that theme, were duly invited to pull up a seat at the table and begin laying out their demands.
  • The same day that Arafat stood on the White House lawn, he had a pre-recorded speech, in Arabic, broadcast on Jordanian radio. In that speech he explained how the peace deal fit within the Palestinian movement’s “phased strategy.” That strategy, adopted in 1974, called for adding a diplomatic track to the Palestinian war against Israel. Along with shootings, bombings, and other forms of violent attack, the Palestinians were open to advancing their war of conquest in installments (or, phases) by accepting diplomatic concessions of land, little by little, rather than all at once. Once they gained some land, it would serve as a kind of Trojan Horse for destroying Israel. Nor was that speech the only time Arafat, or his lieutenants, articulated the movement’s true agenda.

Creating Another Mideast Dictatorship

• Palestinian Authority
• Enabled and armed the PA, a dictatorial quasi-state with a torrent of international aid.
• First five years, one of the highest per-capita recipients of aid in the world (2.4 billion)—U.S. major donor, committing $5 billion, averaging $400 million a year between 2008-16
• Put simply, the Oslo peace process afforded the Palestinian movement an urgently needed financial lifeline, an internationally endorsed quasi-state, and, most important of all, moral legitimacy. Essentially and perversely, this was a case of free nations—the United States, Israel, and the freer nations of the United Nations at their forefront—actually creating a new militant dictatorship.

Episode Two. The Post-9/11 Era

Evading the Nature of the Palestinian Cause

• Bush refrained from condemning Arafat’s tyrannical regime and the evil it was inflicting. And just sixty days after the 9/11 attacks, from which Americans were still reeling, Bush made history by pledging his administration’s commitment to the two-state solution. The United States had for years given de facto backing to the idea of a sovereign Palestinian state, but Bush was the first formally to go on the record in support of that goal.16

Empowering the Jihadists

• For many in Gaza, the withdrawal strengthened their resolve to destroy Israel. At a press conference, one Hamas gunman extolled “the choice of jihad, which caused Israel’s security theory to fail.” “We’re going to keep our weapons,” he added, “because the battle with the enemy is a long one.”
• Elections
  • When practiced faithfully, Bush’s democracy crusade sowed chaos across the Middle East by empowering Islamists.
  • That’s what happened in Lebanon. Through democratic elections, Hezbollah joined the country’s cabinet for the first time and gained control of two ministries.
  • That’s what happened in Egypt. Through democratic elections, the Muslim Brotherhood won eighty-eight seats (almost twenty percent of the total) in the country’s assembly, and likely it could have even won more, had it fielded more candidates.
  • That’s what happened in Iraq. Through democratic elections, Iraqis brought to power a government intimately tied to the Islamist regime in Iran, which now exerts enormous power over the country.
  • That’s what happened in the Palestinian territories, too.

Episode Three. How We Got to Today

Fundamental Misconceptions

• Like Bush, Obama held the premise that the Islamist movement was fundamentally driven by something other than its religious ideology. Of course the Islamists talked about religion, but that was a veneer for underlying, political and/or economic, motivations. This idea is reflected, for example, in the Obama administration’s favored term to describe jihadists: “violent extremists”—a hopelessly broad term that bleached out the distinctive substance, the specific ideas, that animate the Islamist movement.

Seeking “Balance” in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

• “Balance,” then, translates into evading the militant nature of the Palestinian cause and of Israel’s character as a free society. The two sides, in other words, must be viewed as essentially morally equal. This pursuit of “balance” called for rebooting the peace process. The inbuilt logic of that policy, as we’ve seen, asks both sides to make concessions, but by the nature of the adversaries and their goals, any deal between them really amounts to Israeli appeasement of a hostile movement.
• Even if you came to the view that some, or even most, “settlements” are wrong, there’s something deeply warped about giving such prominence to this aspect of the conflict. It implies that the chief problem is the building of apartment buildings, houses, factories, schools—and not the unrelenting, decades-long campaign led by Arab states and then by the Palestinian movement to liquidate a free society through conventional war, subversion, shootings, bombings, suicide attacks, rockets.

“Linkage” and Another Blind Spot of Islamists

• Obama apparently subscribed to the view that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is causally linked to the region’s endless turmoil.37 Solve this festering conflict, so the logic goes, and the Middle East’s upheavals and strife will wind down, along with hostility toward the United States. This view, sometimes called “linkage,” has been put forward in various forms by prominent figures in the diplomatic, military, and political communities.

“Street Anger” and Anti-American Hostility?

• Uprising didn’t mention Israel as the source of anger
  • Egypt
  • Tunisia
  • Syria
  • Libya
  • The point, however, is that such enmity is commonly manufactured and sustained for ulterior purposes, irrespective of the truth and justice of the matter. Certainly such animosity matters, but what matters more are the dishonest, dictatorial regimes that peddle it. They also incite hatred of neighboring regimes on sectarian and political grounds (for example, Iran and Saudi Arabia constantly denounce each other as heretical).

Islamist Recruitment?

• The common factor here is the specifically Islamist narrative that frames the worldview of recruits, manipulating their emotions. They are primed to feel a powerful solidarity with co-religionists throughout the world and to regard anything short of an all-encompassing Islamist regime as a metaphysical injustice that they must fight to rectify.
• In the case of the “Palestine” issue, the basic concern of Islamists is not any political grievance about Israeli borders, land-use policy, or alleged oppression of particular individuals. They demand not freedom and prosperity for Palestinians (or anyone else), but submission: Islamists seek to enslave the world under Allah’s laws. Their doctrine is specifically hostile to individual rights. There’s no policy that Israel can change that would make the “Palestine” issue unattractive to jihadist recruits. Only conquering Israel and raising the flag of Islamic totalitarianism over Palestine and Jerusalem could satisfy them, temporarily.

Enabling the Standard Bearer of the Jihad

• Obama not providing moral support to the Iran protestors in 2009
  • What did Obama do? Muttered a few words, belatedly, about being “appalled and outraged.” Then we flouted even that perfunctory rhetoric. By reaffirming that “the United States respects the sovereignty” of Iran, we endorsed the regime.47 We then continued our diplomatic outreach to coax Tehran, stained with fresh blood, to enter into talks over its nuclear program.

A Wider Pattern: Selling Out Good People, Encouraging Monsters

• They fail properly to recognize Israel’s virtue, its singular character as a free society amid a hellscape of dictatorships, theocracies and rampaging jihadists. Clinton, Bush, Obama, and now Trump all treat Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, the Gulf Monarchies, and Saudi Arabia as genuine allies.

What’s Needed to Resolve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict?

1. Recognize the conflict’s ideological nature.
   1. The common theme here is a clash between a free society and regimes and ideological movements that are hostile to freedom and contemptuous of human life.
   2. Palestinians need to uproot the perverse values and ideas that, like virulent weeds, strangle their culture. They ought to adopt and nurture the universal values that enable human flourishing. Indeed, the entire region needs precisely that kind of cultural change.
2. Step away from the two-state solution and the diplomatic initiative designed to reach that outcome.
   1. Because the conflict is fundamentally ideological, and because the region’s political-institutional climate is geared toward domination and conquest, it is a fatal mistake to expect that the remedy lies simply in establishing a Palestinian state (nor can such a polity’s failures be fixed through further elections).
   2. No one who understands the nature and aims of the Palestinian movement can take seriously the idea of rebooting the peace talks. No individual, no group of individuals, no self-identified national community has the moral right to create a tyrannical regime, whether dictatorial or theocratic. Yet that is the kind of state that the leaders of the Palestinian movement would create. And, fundamentally, there are no genuine Palestinian grievances—those involving the infringement of individual rights—that are even partly remedied by the wholesale violation of rights under a Palestinian tyranny.
3. Judge according to the objective moral standard of freedom.
4. Stand alongside Israel and against our common enemies.

[M]oral neutrality necessitates a progressive sympathy for vice and a progressive antagonism to virtue. A man who struggles not to acknowledge that evil is evil, finds it increasingly dangerous to acknowledge that the good is the good. To him, a person of virtue is a threat that can topple all of his evasions—particularly when an issue of justice is involved, which demands that he take sides. It is then that such formulas as “Nobody is ever fully right or fully wrong” and “Who am I to judge?” take their lethal effect. The man who begins by saying: “There is some good in the worst of us,” goes on to say: “There is some bad in the best of us”—then: “There’s got to be some bad in the best of us”—and then: “It’s the best of us who make life difficult—why don’t they keep silent?”—who are they to judge.” -Ayn Rand