Shooting the Messenger

On a day when the Loonies of the Right (David Bernstein, Mark Regev, AIPAC) went after Human Rights Watch (for good rebuttals, see here and here), some of the same Loonies and others (like the NGOMonitor) went after Breaking the Silence for releasing the Soldier Testimonies from Gaza.

What were some of the criticisms? That the testimonies were not representative, that they were made anonymously, that some of the accusations were based on hearsay, and, finally, that if BtS had wanted to stop the practices, then it would have simply given the names, rank and serial numbers of each interviewee (including the ones who broke IDF policy by talking to BtS), to the IDF. And the most moral army in the world would have investigated each story.

All the above misses the point. BtS did not issue a human rights report. It issued a collection of testimonies. Are they representative? How the hell does anybody know? BtS certainly did not make that claim in the booklet. Did the interviewees include hearsay evidence? Of course, they did; they spoke honestly about what they knew, what they didn't knew, and what they heard. Clearly any intelligent reader will treat each claim with the respect and skepticism it deserves.

What the IDF apologists are doing is deliberately looking through the booklet and saying, "Ha! This is something that was not directly witnessed." They carefully omit anything that doesn't serve their cause.

That is the difference between them and BtS. I read the interviews, and the thing that struck me the most was – these were real soldiers talking about their experiences. Some of them defend what they did, and some of what they did was defensible. It's all in the booklet.

One of the testimonies, as I reported here yesterday, was about the use of white phosphorus. Remember, the IDF initially denied all use of white phosphorus. Then it retreated, when clear evidence was provided, to making two claims: a) all white phosphorus use was legal; b) any use that may not have been legal would be investigated.

Now, here is one testimony that nobody claims is "representative." We are not talking about defecating in the living room of Gazan houses. All you need is one soldier witnessing one use of white phosphorus in a inhabited area, and you have prima facie evidence of a serious war crime.

And this brings me to my final point. The little big brouhaha in Israel (actually, the big big brouhaha today was the haredim demonstrating in Jerusalem) was over BtS's going to the goyim outside Israel with its reports. If the ex-soldiers who head BtS were really interested in reforming the IDF, they would have gone to the IDF. Hence, all that interested them was blackening IDF's name.

Well, I am not a member of BtS, and I DO NOT SPEAK for the organization. But I do know something about its history.

BtS was founded about five years ago, during the Second Intifada. It started with a photo exhibition of IDF soldiers in Hebron. That exhibition made front page headlines. At one point, the IDF seized the pictures and said it would try the soldiers who had participated in illegal activities against the Hebronites. After the pictures were returned to the group by an embarrassed IDF, the group was invited to the Knesset to present the exhibition. They were invited to military preparatory programs to talk about their work. They were almost national heroes. And the group thought, naively, that things would change.

They didn't. The IDF's conduct only worsened.

I don't think that the IDF, under the present circumstances, can be seriously reformed. The problem is not with the IDF; it is with Israeli society that tolerates the IDF's "secrets and lies". The IDF will always find a way to make its war crimes kosher. They even have Asa Kasher as their in-house ethicist. Only when they are caught on tape do they change their story. On the other hand, I don't view the IDF folks as inherently evil. I think that they just don't get what it means for an army to act morally. As I said earlier today, if they simply dropped the "most moral army" claim, if they recognized the failings, that would be a first step. But they are in deep denial.

BtS's audience is the public and not even the entire public, but the moral public. Their real audience are the moral people, on the left and on the right, inside and outside Israel, who will begin the discussion about how to bring about change to Israeli society. That will not be easy.

Still, consider the following: the group collected more testimonies this time around than ever before. They may not have credibility with the Hasbarah types and the apologists for "the most moral army in the world."

But they clearly have credibility with a growing number of soldiers who were deeply troubled by what they witnessed and what they heard, including the IDF spokesperson's lies. (See Testimony 1). And these soldiers know that BtS will let them tell their story, in their words, and will present that story to Israel and to the world.

 

 

The Breaking the Silence Gaza Testimonies: The Use of “Johnnies” as Human Shields

Dear Readers:

In the Jewish calendar, we have entered a semi-mourning period known as the Three Weeks, between the 17^th of Tammuz, when the wall of Jerusalem was breached the armies of Nebuchadnezzar, until the 9^th of Av, the day of the destruction of the First Temple. I think it appropriate that during this period, I shall bring one testimony of the IDF soldiers a day.

The reaction of the IDF has been confused and angry to Breaking the Silence's booklet. Of course, they have attacked the messenger, rather than the message. But they have not spoken with one voice. For example, in Amos Harel's article in Haaretz this morning here, the reactions to the prohibited use of Palestinians as human shields by the Golani brigade were as follows:

    There were no human shields in Golani (I just heard this on the radio.)

    There may have been, but they actually volunteered so that their houses would not be destroyed.

    The officers were acting in what they thought were according to the spirit of the law.

    Some officers don't yet get the meaning of the prohibition of human shields.

In the case of the Palestinians who were given sledgehammers to break down the walls (see below), the IDF again said that the Palestinians volunteered to do it themselves, so as to minimize the damage.

Haaretz published a long artice in Hebrew with a video of the testimony here. Even if you don't know Hebrew, it is worth watching – and it sounds very authentic. (Note what follows is not a direct translation of what is on Haaretz)

TESTIMONY 1 - HUMAN SHIELD

It was the first week of the war, fighting was intense, there were explosive charges to expose, tunnels in open spaces and armed men inside houses. Combat was slow and basically a very small area was occupied. Every unit, every force had a small designated area of responsibility several dozen houses only, which they had to take over, and that took a whole week. That is combat and it took a whole week. They really moved slowly. Close in on each house. The method used has a new name now — no longer 'neighbor procedure.' Now people are called 'Johnnie.' They're Palestinian civilians, and they're called Johnnies and there were civilians there who stayed in spite of the flyers the army distributed before it went in. Most people did leave, but some civilians stayed to watch over the houses. Perhaps they had nowhere else to go. Later we saw people there who could not walk, some simply stayed to keep watch. To every house we close in on, we send the neighbor in, 'the Johnnie,' and if there are armed men inside, we start, like working the 'pressure cooker' in the West Bank.

Every unit is familiar with a different kind of 'pressure cooker' practice. What do you mean by it?

I'm not sure either about the 'pressure cooker' procedures there, they could be different. Essentially the point was to get them out alive, go in, to catch the armed men. There weren't many encounters. Just a few. In one case, our men tried to get them to come out, then they opened fire, fired some anti-tank missiles at the house and at some point brought in a D-9, bulldozer, and combat helicopters. There were three armed men inside. The helicopters fired anti-tank missiles and again the neighbor was sent in. At first he told them that nothing had happened to them yet, they were still in there. Again helicopters were summoned and fired, I don't know at what stage of escalation (in the use of force). The neighbor was sent in once again. He said that two were dead and one was still alive, so a D-9 was brought in and started demolishing the house over him until the neighbor went in, the last armed man came out and was caught and passed on to the Shabak... The commanders tell what they saw and make sure we know how things work on the inside. They also talked about things that bothered them. They said that civilians were used to a greater extent than just sending them into houses. For example, some of them were made to smash walls with 5 kilo sledgehammers. There was a wall around a yard where the force didn't want to use the gate, it needed an alternative opening for fear of booby-traps or any other device. So the "Johnnies" themselves were required to bang open another hole with a sledgehammer. Talking of such things, by the way, there was a story published by Amira Hass in Haaretz daily newspaper, about Jebalya where a guy tells exactly the same thing. It's the guy who was sent. I saw him afterwards, the guy who was made to go into that house three times. He also told us about being given sledgehammers to break walls.

So you say that, from your own experience, there's truth in these publications.

Yes. It was ludicrous to read it and then hear the response of the army spokesperson that the matter was investigated and there are no testimonies on the ground and that the Israeli army is a moral army. It raises doubts about the army spokesperson's responses in general when you know for a fact that these things actually did take place... Sometimes the force would enter while placing rifle barrels on a civilian's shoulder, advancing into a house and using him as a human shield. Commanders said these were the instructions and we had to do it... Anyway, at the concluding debriefing, he (the unit commander) said he didn't know about these things, and the guys, commanders who had been there the first week, said they saw civilians being assigned to break walls and enter with rifle barrels on their shoulders. He said he didn't know this and would look into it. I think nothing substantial had been done about it, I'm also in touch with one of the officers there at present and I don't know if an investigation was made and nothing was found or that nothing was cleared up. Several weeks later, the story came out in the paper about these exact incidents, where they were given sledgehammers to break walls, in our area, this I can say with certainty.

IDF Veterans Group Publishes Soldiers' Testimonies of Israeli War Crimes From Gaza Operation (Part I)

I have just finished reading "Soldiers' Testimonies from Operation Cast Lead," Gaza 2009, a 110- page booklet that will be making news today and in the days to come. It is a remarkable, devastating document. Not because of any gruesome descriptions of atrocities. The testimonies are, thank God, relatively tame in that regard. And everything was reported in real time.

What makes the material so chilling is the dry and almost mundane description of the killing of innocents and destruction of property by Israeli soldiers who could be my sons and sons-in-law.

I will try to make the booklet available on this site as soon as I able.(There are certain copyright issues.) Videos of the testimonies will be posted on Youtube later in the week. Look for the article by Amos Harel in Haaretz here . The story has been picked up by BBC News, Reuters, Miami Herald, Financial Times, ABC Online. It should hit other US papers soon.

And the conclusions after a first reading?

1. Operation Cast Lead was a "war" in which only one side actually fought and fought with little restraint. From Day One IDF troops met with little or no resistance. The Kassam rocket fire continued, of course .But there was no engagement, so what do you about rules of engagement.

So here we come to the first conclusion: According to these testimonies the IDF soldiers did not generally adhere even to the IDF Rules of Engagement. When the IDF spokespeople say that they did, they are simply lying.

In testimony after testimony, we learn that in a situation where there are frequent (false) alarms about suicide bombers, and constant fear that a civilian can be wearing a bomb strapped to her waist (which has indeed happened in the past), and where no risk to our troops is tolerated, the policy was to shoot first and not ask questions later.

So in Testimonies 13 and 14, we learn of an old man who was wandering toward a house at night with a flashlight (torch). He was in clear view of many soldiers. Nobody called out to him to stop. Permission was requested from the commanding office to open "deterrent fire," i.e., to shoot around him, and permission denied by the commander. When already the old man was close, the snipers shot him down.

"Suddenly a burst of fire is heard from upstairs, making us all jump. The old man gave such a scream as I'll never forget as long as I Iive. The commander comes downstairs, glowing, "Here's an opener for tonight." He was asked why he wouldn't confirm deterrent fire. He said, "It's nighttime, and this is a terrorist."When we said we knew the guy had nothing on him and only holding a torch, he said, "That doesn't matter. It's nighttime," etc., etc. Later someone brought it up again with the company commander when we got out, and asked him again why he didn't approve of opening deterrent fire. After all, it had been a man walking on the road…I felt uneasy about the whole thing, but knew that it wouldn't do any good to bring it up right there and confront the company commander in the middle of Gaza. Guys told him that the man was an innocent and the we must remember that there are civilian population in there as well, not just terrorists…He didn't agree and couldn't give a damn, and finally the guys felt that even if they would take this up with higher echelons, it would be ineffective. So this is where matters stayed."

Next Conclusion:

2. White phosphorus was used against international conventions.

"We walked along the sand and saw all the white phosphorus bombs I've told you about, we saw glazing on the sand. In training you learn that white phosphorus is not used, and you're taught that it's not humane. You watch films and see what it does to people who are hit, and you say, "There, we're doing it too." That's not what I expected to see. Until that moment I had thought that I had belonged to the most humane army in the world. I knew that even in the West Bank, when we go into a neighborhood, we do it quietly so that people won't see us but also in order not to disturb them, no less. And IDF soldier does not shoot for the sake of shooting nor does he apply excessive force beyond the call of the mission he is to perform. We saw the planes flying out and you see from which building the rocket is launched against Israel and you see the four houses surrounding that building collapsing as soon as the air force bombs. I don't know if it was white phosphorus or not, and I don't really care that much, but whole neighborhoods were simply razed because four houses in the area served to launch Qassam rockets….."

"What the phosphorus does is to let out an umbrella of fire over the target and naturally that ignites the whole house. Finally we saw all kinds of secondary blasts going, and two Qassam rockets flew out of there towards Israel, probably aimed and charged…. "

Third Conclusion:

3. The devastation was enormous, on an unprecedented scale in the Israeli warfare.

This was fire-power such as I had never known [The soldier had served in Gaza for years-- JH]. I can't say that when I had been in Gaza the air force wasn't used. But…there were blasts all the time. Whether distant or near, that's already semantics. But our basic feeling was that the earth was constantly shaking…Look, when we were fired as, we did not actually see the enemy with our own eyes. On the other hand, we fired back towards suspect spots. What is a suspect spot? It means you decided that it was suspect and could take out all your rage on it.

Fourth Conclusion:

4. Vandalism was unreported

Leaving this house clean was just not the first thing on my mind. This was simply this atmosphere. But about stealing: the company commander, apparently under orders of the battalion commander, held a shame parade to check if stuff was stolen. How did he do it? He didn't tell the commanders to check each individual soldier. He said "You (soldiers) pair up, everyone checks his mate for stuff taken"… Obviously either this company commander is a total idiot of he just didn't want much stuff to be found out…It was bullshit. And I'm sure there was looting. I can't tell you anything more specific.

You go in with live fire after breaking in the door, the soldiers are looking to smash television and computer screens, looking for interesting stuff in drawers, Hamas shawls and flags, knives, looking for loot. After a while we realized that there was nothing to loot, as people knew we were coming and took their stuff away with them…Even if a soldier was found out to have taken something, what could be done with him, would he be charged? At the end of the day, I realized, when you go into battle, the only thing that keeps soldiers together is trust. You have to choose your battles. If you 'rat' on someone, you'll lose their trust. Sometimes it's just not worth it…The guys would simply break stuff. Some were out to destroy and trash the whole time. They drew a disgusting drawing on the wall. They threw out sofas. They took down a picture from the wall just to shatter it. They really couldn't see why they shouldn't.

5. Gazans were used as human shields, despite being outlawed by the Israel High Court

The method used has a new name – no longer 'neighbor procedure'. Now people are called 'Johnnie' They're Palestinian civilians, and they're called Johnnies and there were civilians there who stayed in spite of the flyers the army distributed before it went in. To every house we close in on, we send the neighbor in, 'the Johnnie,' and if there are armed men inside, we start working lik the 'pressure cooker' in the West Bank.

As I write these lines, I hear the following news on Israeli Radio. "The IDF claims that Breaking the Silence is publishing anonymous testimonies whose purpose is to defame Israel in the world. The IDF doesn't respond to anonymous testimonies." Of course, they realize that they aren't going to get soldiers to use their names, because they say that they will then prosecute them.

The purpose of the booklet is first and foremost for the IDF to stop the lies.

Some of my rightwing readers will say, "Jerry, come on. It's a war, and in war you do what you have to do." Fine – but let the IDF say that. Let them say, "Look, the hell with morality; our goal was to increase deterrence, to scare the hell out of them, to punish them for what they had done, and damn the rules of war." But they want it both ways – to act ruthless and to claim that they acted as the most moral army in the world

If this publication stops the ridiculous line that the IDF is the most humane army in the world, dayyenu/it is sufficient.

For starters, let it be the most honest army in the world – if not to others, than at least to itself.

On Exploding The Myth that the Israeli "Security Barrier" Prevents Terrorism

Ask any Israeli why there have been no suicide bombings in the last few years, and the answer will be clear – the "security barrier". When there wasn't a barrier, there were suicide bombings. Now there is a barrier, and they aren't.

That reasoning is a classic example of the "post hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy. If A comes after B, then A is a result of B.

But are they right? And how can one tell? Well, if there were no other explanations for the drop in suicide bombing, then it would stand to reason that the barrier explains the drop.

But there are other explanations: increased and better military intelligence, a strategic decision of Hamas to enter the political arena, the crackdown by Fatah in the West Bank, etc., and the gradual dying down of the Second Intifada

So…how can one begin to assess the relative weight of the "security barrier" as a factor?

Let's look at one of the main centers of killings from 1995-2005: Jerusalem.

Since 2005, when the Israeli government approved most of the current security barrier route, there have been only two major incidents in Jerusalem with fatalities, neither of them suicide bombings. The first was the killing of the eight students of Mercaz Harav Yeshiva (March 6, 2008), and the second was the bulldozer killing on July 2, 2008. Eleven people killed. (The source of all statistic here is the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs website here)

From 1995 to 2005, by contrast, over 250 people died in Jerusalem in over forty incidents with fatalities.

So there you have it…the "security barrier" works, right?

The only problem with the explanation is that there is no "security barrier" surrounding Jerusalem. The entire southern flank of the city is exposed. The whole "security barrier" project has been stuck for close to two years. South Jerusalem (where I live) and Gush Ezion are not protected by a "security barrier." And yet there have been no suicide bombings there.

Amos Harel has an important piece in today's Haaretz on the unfinished security barrier. (Read it here.) How unfinished? According to the article around 40%. The fence is bogged down because of legal difficulties, Israel's unwillingness to move the route to the Green Line except when forced by the High Court, and American's displeasure.

Of course, the original route of the "security barrier" was to have annexed effectively 20% of the West Bank to Harel. That was the beginning of the "Land Grab Wall," which the High Court struck down. Harel writes:

In practice, however, the route encompasses only 4.5 percent of West Bank land. The four "fingers" in the last map (and which Israel presented at Annapolis in November 2007) were never built, not at Ariel and Kedumim (where a "fingernail" was built, a short stretch of fence east of the homes of Ariel); not at Karnei Shomron and Immanuel; not at Beit Arieh, nor south of that, at Ma'aleh Adumim. Instead, with little publicity, fences were put up to close the gaps closer to the Green Line, at Alfei Menashe instead of at Kedumim, at Elkana instead of Ariel and in the Rantis area instead of at Beit Arieh.

About 50,000 people in these settlements remain beyond the fence. West of Ma'aleh Adumim the wall built along Highway 1 blocks the gap in the barrier and leaves the city's 35,000 residents outside of the barrier, forcing them to pass through a Border Police checkpoint in order to reach Jerusalem. The fact that the "fingers" were never built also damages these people's security because the state refuses to build periphery fences around them and declare their proximity to a "special military area."

In some cases, such as the roads built around the original barrier route at the Beit Arieh enclave, hundreds of millions of shekels were wasted on unused roads that may never be completed.

Large gaps remain in the southern West Bank. Between Gilo in south Jerusalem and Gush Etzion are tens of kilometers of barrier, work on which was suspended due to two High Court petitions - one filed by residents of Beit Jala, the other by villagers from Batir, Husan and Nahalin. As a result access to Jerusalem from the direction of Bethlehem is relatively easy - for commuters and terrorists both.

So where are all the suicide terrorists coming from the South? Are we supposed to believe that they get stopped on the way? By what? By the internal checkpoints that have been removed?

Israeli rightwing sources like to point to the statements of the Palestinian militant leadership that attribute the drop in suicide bombing to the security fence. You can read one such website here. Pardon me if I don't think that this is just self-serving bullshit by the Palestinian militants, who would like to pin the blame not on Israel's intelligence successes, and their difficulty to get volunteers, but on the "security barrier." It makes life easier for them and saves their credibility.

The "security barrier" makes suicide bombing difficult for them?

Don't they have a map of where the barrier hasn't been built, and probably won't be built?

Mourning Amos Elon, Z”l

Last Shabbat I went to a memorial event for the journalist Amos Elon that was announced for Saturday Night, but began at 5 pm. In fact, the event ended almost an hour before Shabbat ended. The emcee began the program with "Good evening," although it was only 5, and the sun shone bright. Religious Jews add a "Shabbat addition" to their day of rest. Secular Jews – and I was one of two religious Jews out of 150 – start Saturday night early, apparently.

Perhaps the real reason why the program was announced as being held on Saturday night was so as not to get the host – the Mishkenot Sha'anim Conference Center – in trouble with the rabbinate, if they have a restaurant that has a kashrut certificate. Who knows?

Ten speakers, many of whom are heroes of the Zionist left, spoke. They included Amos Schocken, Publisher of Haaretz, the historian Idit Zertal, Shulamit Aloni (who, as his her wont, gave a long devar Torah, showing that there are still secularists who have heard of the book), Gideon Levy, B. Michael (the only speaker with a kippah, who had the crowd rolling in the aisles with an anecdote brilliantly told about Elon), Avishai Margalit, and others.

Most of the speakers, and most of the crowd, were over 65. The pain in their room was palpable – not so much over Elon's death, as over the death of an Israel that they had loved and fought for. Perhaps it never existed. They sang about peace, they marched for peace, and they saw their country sink into a perpetual moral morass that it will probably not emerge from, certainly in their lifetime. How many conflicts were resolved in the last fifty years? Perhaps Elon's choice, to live out his remaining years in a villa in Tuscany, was the only one left for these people of the old Zionist left. Their political party has crashed; The discourse in Israel is now not between left and right, but between right and righter.

Still, this was a convocation that remembered an extraordinary writer, perhaps the most famous explainer of Israel to the intelligentsia of the outside world. The mob had Abba Eban; the intellectuals had Amos Elon, whose Israelis, Founders and Sons is still worth reading.

Elon was a yekke, a German Jew. According to Margalit, he "hated" Eastern European Jews, old people, and the Orthodox. He belonged to that strand of German Jewry that produced Zionists like Buber, Simon, Weltsch; of course, he wrote the brilliant A German Requiem that chronicled the end of the German-Jewish culture. He also a generous patron of writers and authors that he admired.

Gideon Levy published his tribute from last Shabbat in Haaretz today. Read it here. He went to the Haaretz archives and read from some of his reportage. Here is one citation from Elon's pen, written in 1967, at a time when the country was gripped with nationalist hysteria:

"The political leadership continues to behave in the West Bank like someone who received a live crocodile for his birthday. It doesn't know where to put it - in the bathtub or the living room .... The time is coming when we will have to at least tell ourselves what we want and what we don't want: peace or new territories? The time has also come to make clear to ourselves what we expect from the defeated population, which will soon awaken from the psychological shock. What do we want, blind obeisance of hostile prisoners without choice, or sympathetic cooperation between free, war-weary people? They say that within six months there will be peace between the peoples of Palestine for the first time since 1918; or there could be a Vietcong movement in the large area between Jenin and Hebron. We stand now at a turning point. Temporary frameworks are giving way to permanent arrangements ... Israel has yet to clarify for itself what it wants. We have no plan. We're like a person who doesn't know where he wants to go on vacation but has already bought the plane tickets."

Does anybody even remember the Vietcong today? But here we are, forty-plus years later, and our nightmare continues. Elon predicted that at a time when the Chief Rabbi, Shlomo Goren, was asking the military brass to blow up the Mosque of Omar.

I never knew Elon, but I read with avidity his pieces in the New York Review of Books. May his memory be for a blessing -- but also,

May we learn from his and his generation's mistakes

Reading for the “Three Weeks” – How the Settlements Destroy the Soul of Israel

Veteran Haaretz reporter Amos Harel had a long article today about the settlements and their outposts. How appropriate that in this period of Jewish national mourning over the destruction of the Jerusalem and the Temple, we have articles like this one that chronicle the moral rot at the heart of Israel's settlement enterprise – an enterprise that manages to connect robbery, theft, and the destruction of lives under the name of ge'ulat karka, redeeming the land.

This is how Harel finishes the piece:

One of the most obvious things learned from every visit [to the Territories] is the extent to which things are done in a planned way, to this day. It is hard to miss the destroyed terraces in the settlement of Adam or the sight of the sewage flowing from Psagot, not far from the Binyamin regional council building, straight into the wadi that runs to the adjacent Palestinian town of El Bireh. But in those very same settlements live upstanding citizens, who would not cheat the grocer of 10 agorot and who would go out in the middle of the night to help a neighbor stuck on a dark road. In the outposts live scores of officers in the career army and the reserves, who serve in elite units and win citations for their courage. At the same time, according to the official state data, many of them have built their dream homes, a modest mobile home or a more luxurious villa, on land that has been stolen from someone else by force.

Much of Harel's piece is all-too familiar territory, but that does not make it less powerful. If you are a reader of this blog who cares about Israel and wants to see the settlement abomination stopped – do me a favor, and send this link, Harel's article, to members of your family.

If you care about Israel, Jews, or humanity, you will do all you can to stop the madness.

Here are some excerpts:

The outposts are a continuation of the settlements by other means. The sharp distinction Israel makes between them is artificial. Every outpost is established with a direct connection to a mother settlement, with the clear aim of expanding the takeover of the territory and ensuring an Israeli hold on a wider tract of land. Construction in the outposts is integrated into the overall plan of the settlement project and is carried out in parallel to the seizure of lands within and close to the settlements.

The outpost Migron is surrounded by a fence, guarded and connected to the necessary water and electricity infrastructures. Its "ascent to the land," even though it was done on private Palestinian property, and despite the fact that it was undertaken in a deceptive manner, has received backing and practical support from the state. The security establishment's declaration to the High Court of Justice this week that it would take more than a year to implement the compromise agreement, whereby the inhabitants of Migron would be moved to the adjacent settlement of Adam, shows that this backing is still in place.

The settler establishment's efforts are now aimed in other directions - building in the settlements and veteran outposts (often involving the smuggling in of parts of mobile homes, because the Civil Administration is now preventing the transport of such homes in their entirety) and taking over agricultural lands, some of which are privately owned by Palestinians. The advantage of the latter tactic is that maximum area is obtained with a tolerable monetary investment and a low profile is maintained. Dirt roads are being blazed, vineyards are being planted and the actual area of the settlements is growing, dunam by dunam.

Behind every settlement action there is a planning and thinking mind that has access to the state's database and maps, and help from sympathetic officers serving in key positions in the IDF and the Civil Administration. The story is not in the settlers' uncontrolled behavior, though there is evidence of this on some of the hilltops, but rather in conscious choices by the state to enforce very little of the law.

Palestinian lands have been swallowed up inside settlement fences, and their legal owners are being denied access to them. When the Civil Administration data on land ownership is superimposed by computer imaging onto aerial photographs of the settlements, a surprising picture emerges. Often, there are large enclaves. It is not at all difficult to identify them on the ground because in most cases private homes are not built on them. An inhabitant of a settlement is not going to want to risk having his home be on privately owned Palestinian land.

At the same time, veteran and well-established settlements are annexing, de facto, lands outside the fence. Thus, for example, vineyards have miraculously sprung up on lands owned by Palestinians around the settlement of Psagot.

Taking over the private property of someone who belongs to the neighboring people is a common phenomenon in the West Bank, even in recent years. We aren't talking here about things that happened back in 1948. It is possible, of course, to describe these moves as a necessary part of the life-and-death struggle between the two peoples, in the name of which nearly all means are justified.

It is also possible to call them old crimes that need to be dealt with, and the sooner the better. But the fact that Israel committed war crimes in 1948 and since, does not justify continuing the same crimes today. When a criminal is caught stealing a car, he can't reply that he has been stealing them for years and nobody called him on it. Is it wrong to steal somebody's land or not? That is the fundamental question. And if it is wrong, why are we still doing it?

Come On, Bibi: David Axelrod and Rahm Emmanuel Are “Self-Hating Jews”?

Has this story been denied yet? Here I am, sitting in the National Library, waiting for the 17^th of Tammuz Fast to end, and this is what I read in Haaretz:

Netanyahu appears to be suffering from confusion and paranoia. He is convinced that the media are after him, that his aides are leaking information against him and that the American administration wants him out of office. Two months after his visit to Washington, he is still finding it difficult to communication normally with the White House. To appreciate the depth of his paranoia, it is enough to hear how he refers to Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, Obama's senior aides: as "self-hating Jews."

"He thought that his speech at Bar-Ilan would become mandatory reading at schools in the United States, and when he realized that Obama gave no such order, he went back to being frustrated," one of his associates said.

"One of his associates"? With "associates" like that, who needs Haaretz?

The story, about Bibi's paranoia can be read here. It's by Barak Ravid, the guy I always pillory because he acts as a shofar for unnamed government sources, usually in the Foreign Ministry.

"It's not about you, Abba," as my kids say, but would it be churlish of me to remind my readers that I endorsed Bibi for Prime Minister way back in November? I knew that I would be reading stories like this one. I cannot think of a better political constellation for US-Israel relations than Obama in the White House and Bibi in the Dog House. (Well, maybe Jimmy Carter in the White House.)

As for Axelrod and Emmanuel, stick with it guys. Let's hope that years of "palling around" with Chicago terrorists and PLO apologists have done the trick. In the meantime, you have a long way to go before you get to the Self-Hating-Jew club. I'll let you know when you qualify.

(Must be the fast getting to me…. )