Author: A.T.

> Jews have never wanted to kill Arabs; Hamas has Israeli genocide as its stated goal.

> Jews have never celebrated the death of Palestinian civilians (indeed, Israel treats Palestinians in its hospitals and trains Palestinian doctors); Palestinians behead Jewish babies, then dance in the streets.

You’ve probably already read Tom Friedman: Please, Israel, Don’t Get Lost in Hamas’s Tunnels.

Equally worth your time is Joseph Cox: Getting to a Free Palestine!

Have a good week.

Watch this Pakistani Brit, Kasim Hafeez.

Or read the transcript:

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I was born to hate Jews

It was part of my life. I never questioned that. I was not born in Iran or Syria. I was born in England. My parents moved there from Pakistan. Theirs was the typical immigrant story: Move to the West hoping to create a better life for themselves and their children.

We were a devoted Muslim family, but not extremists or radicals in any way. We only wanted the best for everyone – everyone except the Jews. The Jews, we thought, were aliens living in stolen Muslim land, occupiers involved in a genocide against the Palestinian people. Our hatred was therefore justified and just. And it left me and my friends vulnerable to radical extremist arguments. If the Jews were as evil as we’ve always believed, shouldn’t those who support them – Christians, Americans and others in the West – be just as evil?

Starting from the 90s, speakers and teachers in mosques and schools began repeating this theme endlessly: We were not western. We were not British. We were Muslims, first and foremost. Our allegiance was to our religion and to our fellow Muslims. We owe nothing to western nations who welcomed us. As westerners, they were our enemies.

All of this had its desired effect. At least it did on me. It changed the way I looked at the world. I began to look at the suffering of Muslims, including in Britain, as the fault of Western imperialism. The west was at war with us, and the Jews controlled the west. My experience at the university in the UK only reinforced my increasingly radical conviction. Hating Israel was a badge of honor. Set up an anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian rally, and you were sure to attract a huge, approver

While in uni, I decided that the protests and propaganda against Israel were not enough. Real jihad requires violence. So I made plans to join the real fight.  I wanted to drop out of college and join terrorist training camp in Pakistan. But, fortunately for me, fate intervened — in a bookstore.

I came across a book called The Case for Israel by Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz. The case for Israel? Which case could that be? The title itself infuriated me, and I started reading the pages almost like a travesty. How ill-informed, how stupid, can this guy be to defend the defenseless? Well, he was a Jew. That must have been the answer

Still I am reading. And what I read challenged all my dogmas about Israel and the Jews: I read that it was not Israel who created the Palestinian refugee crisis, it was the Arab countries, the UN and the corrupt Palestinian leadership. I read that Jews did not exploit the Holocaust to create the state of Israel; the movement to create a modern Jewish state dating back to the 19th. century, and eventually to the beginning of the Jewish people almost 4000 years ago. And I read that Israel is not engaged in genocide against the Palestinians. On the contrary, the Palestinian population has actually doubled in just twenty years.

All of this just pissed me off. I had to prove Dershowitz wrong to see with my own eyes how racist and oppressive Israel really was. Then I bought a plane ticket. I would go to Israel, the home of my enemy. And that’s when everything changed.

What I saw with my own eyes was even more challenging than what Dershowitz had written. Instead of apartheid I saw Muslims, Christians and Jews coexisting. Instead of hate, I saw acceptance, even compassion. I saw a violent, modern, liberal democracy, full of flaws, for sure, but fundamentally decent. I saw a country that wanted nothing but to live in peace with its neighbors. I watched my hate melt before my eyes. I knew just then what I had to do.

Too many people on this planet are consumed by the same hate that consumed me. They have been taught to despise the Jewish state – many Muslims through their religion, many others by their university professors or student groups.

So here’s my challenge to anyone who feels this way: do what I did – seek the truth for yourself. If the truth can change me, it can change anyone.

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Another book to read — highly and quite properly sympathetic to the Palestinian people: Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth.

Bill Maher on Israel (a couple of years ago) — under two minutes.

Tom Friedman on what needs to happen — long but worth it.

And Steven Erlanger — also long but worth it, concluding:

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Only Washington, which now has unprecedented moral prestige in Israel, is capable of assembling the pieces from this war, said Bernard Avishai, an American-Israeli who has taught at both Dartmouth College and Hebrew University.

“Only the United States can provide some degree of hope,” he said, that a new paradigm will be established “in which Palestinian self-determination will finally be addressed.” American statements on a two-state solution and the settlements “have been seen as platitudes,” he added. “But to do something concrete now, it’s not too late.”

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This clip is worth your time:  former Republican strategist Stuart Stevens on The Conspiracy to End America: Five Ways My Old Party is Driving Our Democracy to Autocracy.

Near the end, Claire McCaskill makes the point that all 8 of yesterday’s Republican candidates for Speaker were white males who had voted against re-authorizing the Violence Against Women Act, against women’s right to birth control, and against codifying equal pay for equal work.

Stevens thinks this is one of the reasons the Republican Party is drawn to Putin – “How many women in power do you see in Russia?”

But watch the whole thing.

And surely you’ve seen some version of Trump’s favorite chief of staff flipping on him.

I’m guessing Trump will no longer be calling Meadows his “great chief of staff — as good as it gets.”

Could sanity be on the edge of the verge of beginning to return?

Now that Tucker Carlson is known to hate Trump?

To have called him “the world champion of destroying things“?

That may be too much to hope for — cults are not called cults for nothing — but if any of our Trumpist friends or relatives show signs of wavering, I hope we can find ways to show that we share their concerns — the border crisis is serious; the price of gas and groceries does sting; crime (though higher in many “red” states than blue and lower than it was in many decades past) is a very real concern — but then make the case that, all things considered, it may make sense to give the Biden team four more years to address these problems and to build on their very real successes. 

And to preserve the dignity of the office. 

And a calm, steady, pro-democratic approach to governing.  

My two cents.

But first . . .

> I repeat: The “Speaker Problem” — Solved.  (Robert Reich reached the same conclusion a few days later.)  Who knows?  Maybe this week it will happen.

> Dept of Hope: Scientists Used Cement to Make a Supercapacitor.

> Whoever’s really president, he’s doing a great job: Viral Tweets Baselessly Claim Biden Is A Body Double Wearing A Mask.

Posted before last night’s Oval Office address:

Robert Reich on POTUS.

(But why is the line drawing of the late George H.W. Bush???)

Have a great weekend.

You know what’s so interesting about this quote?

Read it first and then I’ll tell you:

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The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.

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It was written 11 years ago!

Even before Trump and his alternative facts.  Even before the burn-the-House-down election deniers.  By Norm Ornstein, et al, in their book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism, condensed here in the Washington Post.

Wish we had a leader who did not want to burn the House down?  Whose goal were not “retribution?”

Who, in his quiet dignity, wanted to get things done to move our country forward — with low unemployment and higher wages, with better health care and cheaper drugs, with revitalized infrastructure and cleaner energy, with domestic manufacture of critical computer chips?

With respect for women and minorities and straight white Christian males like himself?

With a preference for compromise and bipartisanship?

With deep domestic and international experience?

With empathy and humility — and an effective team of 4,000 competent experienced appointees who, like him, respect the rule of law?

A leader who stands up for democracy against authoritarians?

Oh, wait.  We do.

If you have time, watch this interview from a couple of weeks ago, before Kevin McCarthy was ousted for failing to shut down the government.

And then watch his Oval Office address scheduled for 8pm Eastern tonight.

Conservative columnist Bret Stephens in the indispensable New York Times:

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This column doesn’t always abound with praise for President Biden and his administration. This week’s is an exception.

On Oct. 8, the day after the greatest atrocity in Jewish history since Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, Jews in Israel and the diaspora woke up without a leader. The prime minister of Israel has never been, in a formal sense, the leader of the Jews — even when the office was held by people far worthier than Benjamin Netanyahu.

But the prime minister does have the most important job in the Jewish world, which is to ensure that Israel be a safe haven for Jewish life. The Jewish people have long memories; whatever happens next, Netanyahu will be remembered, irrevocably, as the man who failed — not tragically, much less heroically, but selfishly, arrogantly, despicably. He maintains political authority but is devoid of moral authority. I cannot imagine a future for him or his cabinet of blowhards and toadies except in exile, walled compounds or prison cells.

Biden stepped into the vacuum. I have read, probably a half-dozen times now, his Oct. 10 speech about the massacres. For its moral clarity, emotional force and political directness it deserves a place in any anthology of great American rhetoric. Without equivocation, without the mealy-mouthed clichés and evasions that typified so many institutional statements about the assault, the president said what Jews desperately needed to hear.

That the massacres were “pure, unadulterated evil.” That there is “no excuse” for what Hamas did. That Israel has an affirmative “duty” to defend itself, not simply a passive “right.” That the United States will make good on its commitment to a Jewish state not with feeble statements of solidarity but with the surge of military force. A few days later, in an interview with “60 Minutes,” he called the assault “barbarism that is as consequential as the Holocaust.”

We need political leaders who maintain the capacity to call out barbarism by name and who commit themselves to its defeat. We need it especially on the political left, certain corners of which waited only a few days before returning to their usual program of denouncing Israel for its alleged or anticipated war crimes. These are the same people who sometimes pretend to believe in Israel’s right to self-defense but offer no plausible strategy for how Israel can exercise it against a terrorist enemy that hides behind civilians.

We also need Biden’s leadership given the moral void on the right. I spent the years of Donald Trump’s presidency being hectored by a certain type of Jewish conservative who insisted that Israel had never had a better friend in the White House. Today, Trump takes a dimmer view of Netanyahu — less because of his failed performance than because he can’t forgive the prime minister for calling Biden in 2020 to congratulate him on his victory. Four days after the Hamas attacks, Trump also called Hezbollah, without reprobation, “very smart.” About Vladimir Putin, he said, “I got along with him very good.”

Very good. Very smart. The Republican front-runner.

Now Biden is going to Israel. It’s a brave trip, even for a president with his vast security apparatus, given that Hamas’s rockets continue to fall indiscriminately on Israel and a second front with Hezbollah could open at any time. He is going, almost surely, to do what he does best: console the bereaved and bereft, give courage to those in fear. This is statesmanship in the teeth of far-left opposition and incessant right-wing criticism. It’s the president’s finest hour.

I have seen some criticism that the hidden purpose of the trip is for Biden to hug Israel close so that he can stay its hand, or at least slow it. I doubt it, since he could hardly have been clearer in his “60 Minutes” interview that Hamas would have to be eliminated entirely, even as there needed to be a path to a Palestinian state. That path is a long one, but Biden gets the big thing right — the former is the basic precondition for the latter. No Israeli leader can ever allow a Palestinian state to exist if a group like Hamas has even the whisper of a chance of gaining power.

I expect Biden to caution Israel’s war cabinet that a military campaign that concludes with a long-term Israeli occupation of Gaza would be a Pyrrhic victory. I expect the Israelis to reply that they cannot be asked to eliminate Hamas as Gaza’s dominant military and political actor without the cooperation of the United States and moderate Arab regimes, particularly Egypt. This is not a confrontation; it’s a potentially fruitful dialogue that will work much better once Netanyahu is out of office and cannot put his personal needs ahead of the national interest.

I also hope that Biden’s leadership can remind the decent left — and what’s left of a decent right — of what American moral leadership looks like. To stand with our allies and hold our friends. To see our enemies for what they are and treat them accordingly. To remind ourselves that as others see us, so should we see ourselves: as the last best hope of earth.

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WHO BOMBED THAT HOSPITAL?

It appears to have been Islamic Jihad, not Israel.  A horrible, horrible tragedy, but an important distinction.

MAHER / MUSS / KIRCHICK ON GAZA

Ten minutes.

Spot on.

(Well, maybe not the part about defunding Harvard, but that was a joke . . . directed not at President Gay’s statement, but at some egregiously-misled students, all of whom must read Noa Tishby’s Israel: A Simple Guide To The Most Misunderstood Country On Earth forthwith.)

WHAT’S GOING ON WITH SQNS?

Suggested here in July at $2.37 it hit $2..80 two weeks later on news it would be acquired for $3.03.  With that expected pay-out imminent, it reached $2.90 last week — but closed at $2.74 last night.

The company announced last week that few of its shares had been tendered, far short of the 90% required.  The offer is being extended, but it sure seems to me as though its largest shareholders think the price is too low (or else why not tender?) . . . which may not be a bad thing for us small fry.  One can imagine their working something out to accept a higher price.  Good!  Or one can imagine the deal falling through altogether — which could mean anything from a disaster someplace down the road (“Why didn’t we tender?” those large and presumably knowledgeable shareholders might ultimately moan) to a triumph in a year or three (“victory!” they might ultimately cry).

I have no clue.  But because the friend who brought this to my attention said he had been hoping for $6 or more, and the largest holders seem to think $3.03 is inadequate, I’m going to wait to see what happens. Famous last words?

Many say yes, reports the Washington Post.

As they should, argues a professor at Williams.

I agree.

Your thoughts?

BUT THE MAIN THING IS:

Read or listen to Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism, just out today.

We were here 80 years ago — and won.

Will we win again this time?

AND THE OTHER MAIN THINGS, OBVIOUSLY:

Israel-Hamas; Ukraine-Putin — the ongoing nightmares.  I’ll resume linking to the thoughts of smarter people than me, like Tom Friedman and Fareed Zakaria, soon.

Jesse Kornbluth: “Of the million words already written, I find the thoughts of Yale professor Timothy Snyder to be the most acute — and most worthy of your reflection.”

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TIMOTHY SNYDER ON THE HAMAS ATTACKS, IN THE CONTEXT OF LARGER EVENTS

I want to share a thought about terror and counter-terror, prompted by the Hamas attacks and the dilemmas Israel faces.  It is not based on regional knowledge but does draw from scholarly work on the politics of terror and insurgency.  It is not so much a take on specific events as a general reminder of the larger shape such events can take.

For the victim, terror is about what it is. For the terrorist, it is about what happens next.

Terror can be a weapon of the weak, designed to get the strong to use their strength against themselves.  Terrorists know what they are going to do, and have an idea what will follow. They mean to create an emotional situation where self-destructive action seems like the urgent and only choice.

When you have been terrorized, the argument that I am making seems absurd; the terrorists can seem to you to be raving beasts who just need punishment. Yet however horrible the crime, it usually does not bespeak a lack of planning. Usually part of the plan is to enrage.

Americans have fallen for this. 9/11 was a successful terrorist attack because we made it so.  Regardless of whether or not its planners and perpetrators lived to see this, it achieved its main goal: to weaken the United States.  Without 9/11, the United States presumably would not have invaded Iraq, a decision which led to the death of tens of thousands of people, helped fund the rise of China, weakened international law, and undid American credibility. 9/11 was a contributing cause to American decisions that caused far more death than 9/11 itself did. But the point here is that 9/11 facilitated American decisions that hurt America far more than 9/11 itself did.

(On 9/13/2001, I dropped my planned lecture on east European history and spoke entirely about terror and counter-terror, along these lines. I was worried, but did not imagine then just how well the provocation would work. The invasion of Iraq was a disaster that arose from many sources; but one of them was the logic of terror — and indeed its exploitation by people who wanted a war in Iraq anyway.)

In evaluating what Hamas has done, it is important to remember that the atrocious crimes are not (or are not only) ends in themselves.  They are utterly horrible and deserving of every condemnation, but they are not mindless. Unlike Israelis, who are shocked and feel they must urgently act, Hamas has been working out this scenario for years. The people carrying out the bestial crimes follow a plan that anticipates an Israeli reaction.

Classically, a terrorist provokes a state in order to generate so much suffering among his own people that they will take the terrorist’s side indefinitely.

I won’t claim to know what Hamas expects from Israel, nor what Israel should do.  That would be a matter for people with the languages and expertise to read and analyze the documents and the data. My point is that it is always worth asking, in such situations, whether you are following the terrorist’s script. If what you want to do is what your enemy wants you to do, someone is mistaken.  It might be your enemy.  But it also might be you.

PS: I am conscious that the cool tone of this thread might seem jarring in the context of human suffering.  I regret this.

PPS. I anticipate the objection that Israeli state policy has been designed to provoke Palestinians. I agree that the strong can also terrorize the weak.

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Tom Friedman elaborates in this must-watch CNBC clip.

And in the New York Times:

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Israel Has Never Needed to Be Smarter Than in This Moment

I have covered this conflict for almost 50 years, and I’ve seen Israelis and Palestinians do a lot of awful things to one another: Palestinian suicide bombers blowing up Israeli discos and buses; Israeli fighter jets hitting neighborhoods in Gaza that house Hamas fighters but also causing massive civilian casualties. But I’ve not seen something like what happened last weekend: individual Hamas fighters rounding up Israeli men, women and children, looking them in the eyes, gunning them down and, in one case, parading a naked woman around Gaza to shouts of “Allahu akbar.”

The last time I witnessed that level of face-to-face barbarism was the massacre of Palestinian men, women and children by Christian militiamen in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut in 1982, where the first victim I encountered was an older man with a white beard and a bullet hole in his temple.

While I have no illusions about Hamas’s long-established commitment to the destruction of the Jewish state, I am nonetheless asking myself today: Where did this ISIS-like impulse for mass murder as the primary goal come from? Not the seizing of territory, but plain murder? There is something new here that is important to understand.

Since I can’t interview the Hamas leadership, I’m drawing on my experience in the region, and here’s how I see it.

While this operation was surely planned by Hamas leaders months ago, I think its emotional origins can be explained in part by a photograph that appeared in the Israeli press on Oct. 3. A few Israeli government ministers had gone to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for their first official visit ever, to attend international conferences in late September and early October, and it got a lot of coverage in the Israeli press.

But having lived in both Beirut and Jerusalem, I was struck most by that unusual photo — an image that I knew would trigger completely different emotional reactions in both worlds.

It was taken by the team of Israel’s communications minister, Shlomo Karhi, who was attending a U.N. postal conference in Riyadh, as they were conducting a prayer service in their hotel room for the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. One of them took a picture of a colleague wearing a traditional Jewish prayer shawl and yarmulke while holding up a Torah scroll with the Riyadh skyline in the window beyond.

For Israeli Jews, that picture is a dream come true — the ultimate expression of finally being accepted in the Middle East, more than a century after the start of the Zionist movement to build a modern democratic state in the biblical homeland of the Jewish people. To be able to pray with a Torah in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam and the home of its two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, is a level of acceptance that touches the soul of every Israeli Jew.

But that same photo ignites a powerful and emotional rage in many Palestinians, particularly those affiliated with the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. For them, that picture is the full expression of the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s supreme goal: to prove to all naysayers, indeed to rub their noses in the fact, that he can make peace with all the Arab states — even Saudi Arabia — and not have to give the Palestinians a single inch.

As far as diplomacy goes, that has been Netanyahu’s life’s mission: to prove to everyone that Israel can have its cake — acceptance by all the surrounding Arab states — and eat the Palestinians’ territory, too.

I have no idea whether the Hamas leadership saw that particular picture, but they have been fully aware of the ongoing evolution it reflects. I believe one reason Hamas not only launched this assault now — but also seemingly ordered it to be as murderous as possible — was to trigger an Israeli overreaction, like an invasion of the Gaza Strip, that would lead to massive Palestinian civilian casualties and in that way force Saudi Arabia to back away from the U.S.-brokered deal now in discussion to promote normalization between Riyadh and the Jewish state. As well as to force the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco, which were part of the Abraham Accords produced by the Trump administration, to take a step back from Israel.

The essence of Hamas’s message to Netanyahu and his far-right ruling coalition of Jewish supremacists and ultra-Orthodox is this: You will never be at home here — no matter how much of our land our gulf Arab brothers sell you. We will force you to lose your minds and do crazy things to Gaza that force the Arab states to shun you.

Pay attention: Hamas did not send operatives to the Israeli-occupied West Bank (and it has plenty there) to attack Jewish settlements. It focused its onslaught on Israeli villages and kibbutz farms that were not part of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

“These were the homes of the people of pre-1967 Israel, democratic Israel, liberal Israel — living in peaceful kibbutzim or going to a life-loving disco party,” the Israeli writer Ari Shavit remarked to me. For Hamas, “Israel’s mere existence is a provocation,” he said. In one kibbutz alone, Be’eri, at least 108 people, including children, were just gunned down.

So how can America best help Israel now, besides standing behind its right to protect itself, as President Biden so forcefully did in his speech today? I think the U.S. needs to do three things.

First, I hope the president is asking Israel to ask itself this question as it considers what to do next in Gaza: What do my worst enemies want me to do — and how can I do just the opposite?

What Israel’s worst enemies — Hamas and Iran — want is for Israel to invade Gaza and get enmeshed in a strategic overreach there that would make America’s entanglement in Falluja look like a children’s birthday party. We are talking house-to-house fighting that would undermine whatever sympathy Israel has garnered on the world stage, deflect world attention from the murderous regime in Tehran and force Israel to stretch its forces to permanently occupy Gaza and the West Bank.

Hamas and Iran absolutely do not want Israel to refrain from going into Gaza very deep or long.

Nor does Hamas want the U.S. and Israel to proceed instead as fast as possible with negotiations to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia as part of a deal that would also require Israel to make real concessions to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which has accepted Israel as part of the Oslo peace accords.

But for Israel to do what is most in its interests, not those of Hamas and Iran, will likely require some very tough love between Biden and Netanyahu. One must never forget that Netanyahu always seemed to prefer to deal with a Hamas that was unremittingly hostile to Israel than with its rival, the more moderate Palestinian Authority — which Netanyahu did everything he could to discredit, even though the Palestinian Authority has long worked closely with Israeli security services to keep the West Bank quiet, and Netanyahu knows it.

Netanyahu has never wanted the world to believe that there are “good Palestinians” ready to live side by side with Israel in peace and try to nurture them. For years now he’s always wanted to tell U.S. presidents: What do you want from me? I have no one to talk to on the Palestinian side.

That’s how Israel reached a stage where the increasingly costly — morally and financially — Israeli occupation of the West Bank has not even been an issue in the last five Israeli elections.

Or as Chuck Freilich, a former deputy Israeli national security adviser, wrote in an essay in Haaretz on Sunday: “For a decade and a half Prime Minister Netanyahu has sought to institutionalize the divide between the West Bank and Gaza, undermine the Palestinian Authority, the P.A., and conduct de facto cooperation with Hamas, all designed to demonstrate the absence of a Palestinian partner and to ensure that there could be no peace process that might have required territorial compromise in the West Bank.”

Lastly, I hope Biden is telling Netanyahu that America will do everything it can to help democratic Israel defend itself from the theocratic fascists of Hamas — and their soul brothers of Hezbollah in Lebanon, should they enter the fight.

But Netanyahu’s side of the bargain is that he has to reconnect himself with liberal democratic Israel, so the world and the region sees this not as a religious war but as a war between the frontline of democracy and the frontline of theocracy. That means Netanyahu has to change his cabinet, expel the religious zealots and create a national unity government with Benny Gantz* and Yair Lapid.

Unfortunately, Netanyahu is still prioritizing his coalition of zealots, whom he needs to protect him from his corruption trial and to complete his judicial coup that would neuter the Supreme Court of Israel. That’s really messed up.

And it is a very important reason Israel was caught off guard in the first place. Netanyahu was so wedded to this personal agenda that he was ready to divide Israeli society like never before — and splinter his own army and air force in the process — to get control of the courts.

I promise you that if and when there’s an inquiry into how the Israeli Army could have so missed this Hamas buildup, investigators will discover that the Israeli Army leadership had to spend so much time just keeping its air force pilots and reserve officers from boycotting their service to protest Netanyahu’s judicial coup — not to mention the time, attention and resources they had to devote to preventing extremist settlers and religious zealots from doing crazy things in Jerusalem and the West Bank — that they took their eyes off the ball.

America cannot protect Israel in the long run from the very real threats it faces unless Israel has a government that reflects the best, not the worst, of its society, and unless that government is ready to try to forge compromises with the best, not the worst, of Palestinian society.

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*After this piece ran, Benny Gantz joined the cabinet.

In 1988, Rabbi Meir Kahane wrote this “open letter to the world.”

(A convicted terrorist, he was later assassinated. Religion is a brutal business.)

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Dear World,

I understand that you are upset by us, here in Israel.

Indeed, it appears that you are quite upset, even angry.

Indeed, every few years you seem to become upset by us. Today, it is the “brutal repression of the Palestinians”; yesterday it was Lebanon; before that it was the bombing of the nuclear reactor in Baghdad and the Yom Kippur War and the Sinai campaign. It appears that Jews who triumph and who, therefore, live, upset you most extraordinarily.

Of course, dear world, long before there was an Israel, we – the Jewish people – upset you.

We upset a German people who elected Hitler and upset an Austrian people who cheered his entry into Vienna and we upset a whole slew of Slavic nations – Poles, Slovaks, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Russians, Hungarians and Romanians. And we go back a long, long way in the history of world upset.

We upset the Cossacks of Chmielnicki who massacred tens of thousands of us in 1648-49; we upset the Crusaders who, on their way to liberate the Holy Land, were so upset at Jews that they slaughtered untold numbers of us.

For centuries, we upset a Roman Catholic Church that did its best to define our relationship through inquisitions, and we upset the arch-enemy of the church, Martin Luther, who, in his call to burn the synagogues and the Jews within them, showed an admirable Christian ecumenical spirit.

And it is because we became so upset over upsetting you, dear world, that we decided to leave you – in a manner of speaking – and establish a Jewish state. The reasoning was that living in close contact with you, as resident-strangers in the various countries that comprise you, we upset you, irritate you and disturb you. What better notion, then, than to leave you (and thus love you)- and have you love us and so, we decided to come home – home to the same land we were driven out 1,900 years earlier by a Roman world that, apparently, we also upset.

Alas, dear world, it appears that you are hard to please.

Having left you and your pogroms and inquisitions and crusades and holocausts, having taken our leave of the general world to live alone in our own little state, we continue to upset you. You are upset that we repress the poor Palestinians. You are deeply angered over the fact that we do not give up the lands of 1967, which are clearly the obstacle to peace in the Middle East.

Moscow is upset and Washington is upset. The “radical” Arabs are upset and the gentle Egyptian moderates are upset.

Well, dear world, consider the reaction of a normal Jew from Israel.

In 1920 and 1921 and 1929, there were no territories of 1967 to impede peace between Jews and Arabs. Indeed, there was no Jewish State to upset anybody. Nevertheless, the same oppressed and repressed Palestinians slaughtered tens of Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Safed and Hebron. Indeed, 67 Jews were slaughtered one day in Hebron in 1929.

Dear world, why did the Arabs – the Palestinians – massacre 67 Jews in one day in 1929? Could it have been their anger over Israeli aggression in 1967? And why were 510 Jewish men, women and children slaughtered in Arab riots between 1936-39? Was it because Arabs were upset over 1967?

And when you, dear world, proposed a UN Partition Plan in 1947 that would have created a “Palestinian State” alongside a tiny Israel and the Arabs cried “no” and went to war and killed 6,000 Jews – was that “upset” caused by the aggression of 1967? And, by the way, dear world, why did we not hear your cry of “upset” then?

The poor Palestinians who today kill Jews with explosives and firebombs and stones are part of the same people who when they had all the territories they now demand be given to them for their state -attempted to drive the Jewish state into the sea. The same twisted faces, the same hate, the same cry of “itbach-al-yahud” (Massacre the Jew!) that we hear and see today, were seen and heard then. The same people, the same dream – destroy Israel. What they failed to do yesterday, they dream of today, but we should not “repress” them.

Dear world, you stood by during the holocaust and you stood by in 1948 as seven states launched a war that the Arab League proudly compared to the Mongol massacres.

You stood by in 1967 as Nasser, wildly cheered by wild mobs in every Arab capital in the world, vowed to drive the Jews into the sea. And you would stand by tomorrow if Israel were facing extinction. And since we know that the Arabs-Palestinians dream daily of that extinction, we will do everything possible to remain alive in our own land. If that bothers you, dear world, well think of how many times in the past you bothered us.

In any event, dear world, if you are bothered by us, here is one Jew in Israel who could not care less.

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Finally, because some of you wrote to applaud the piece by Joseph Cox yesterday, here is another.  The Real Arab Nakba.

You will be relieved to know I’m taking tomorrow off.

Have a great weekend.