Samson BlindedSamson BlindedRational perspective on the Middle East conflict, peace process, and antiterrorist efforts. By anonymous Israeli politician. Articles
Some lies do not benefit
2010-12-17 16:12:00 It is commonly accepted that governments at war can lie to their people to sustain their spirit. Besides directly lying, the governments can censor the media, which produces the same effect by twisting the facts. If monarchy and autocracy are theoretically acceptable, then temporary lying in extreme circumstances should be acceptable too, as a form of authoritarian decision-making. By this perverse logic, Israeli prime ministers are entitled to lie about the peace process and their electoral promises. Possibly the difference is that lies are only acceptable on a tactical level, and must not falsify national goals. Leaders change history for the short term only, but that might suffice to inflict unbearable damage on Israel—or on the world, given the existence of nuclear weapons. Assassinating Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Nasser, as well as Assad and Rafsanjani, would have been cheap and efficient, and would have change the immediate history. For years, German generals planned to...
Empires not gone
2010-12-14 16:01:00 Speaking of Germany, it has always raised my hairs how close Germany came to conquering the world. Hitler’s highly unusual procrastination in continuing the attack on Dunkirk left Britain with a semblance of army as it was able to evacuate from the continent. His unfounded hope to sign a treaty with Britain delayed the planned invasion of British Islands and allowed them to prepare a sham of a defense. Further delays of the invasion allowed the RAF to deplete the German fleet. Overall, Germany could credibly have defeated Britain. Had that happened, pro-German American isolationists would have overwhelming arguments against joining the war, and interventionists would have been able to provide no reason to join it. With unhindered freedom in the Mediterranean, Germany would have been able to ward off any American attempt at landing in Africa, leaving the United States with no beachhead for invading Europe. Within a few years, a strong Germany would have landed in Latin America and ...
On for-profit colleges
2010-10-26 22:32:00 The invisible hand of the free market tends to correct not just economic problems, but political problems too. In Israel, as throughout the West, academia mostly adopt ultra-left views. This tradition has held since Plato, and for a reason: social sciences need social experiments, the quintessence of leftism. Since Rousseau, academic social theories have become increasingly actionable. Never before have states had the power to rule people’s minds. Bodies, yes, but minds have only become governable with the advent of ideologies, propaganda, and especially mass media. Since the demise of aristocracy in the nineteenth century, merit is largely based on education. A person with no university degree has very little chance to become a prominent politician. Academia has thus replaced aristocratic background. Politicians are brainwashed in leftist academic theories before they reach office. Politics, therefore, has become predominantly leftist, and remains so even when nominally conser... More About: Profit , Colleges
Dubious ethics of healthcare
2010-10-22 09:55:00 A free-market economy tends to correct itself, while government regulations usually accumulate and increase deviations. Medicare is a perfect example of an anti-market policy. Liberal theory seeks to correct marginal injustices, where the cost of correction is small compared to benefits. In liberal terms, medical care could properly be extended to those who absolutely cannot buy it for themselves, and the care would be kept to a basic minimum. Instead, medicare long ago evolved from insurance into redistribution: providing for patients with existing conditions is not insurance. Medicare artificially increases the number of retirees and thus the ratio of retirees to working-age people. Just as working adults struggle to support the retirees, better healthcare continuously increases their age and further tilts the ratio. The older the retirees, the more expensive healthcare they need. Accordingly, they consume even more medical resources than their already high ratio of the populatio... More About: Healthcare , Ethics
Jewish eminent domain
2010-10-19 09:50:00 The doctrine of eminent domain creates not a few controversies. The government’s share of GDP has greatly expanded since the doctrine was introduced two centuries ago, and the number of public projects has surged. On other hand, they are rarely public in the strict sense, as they are both outsourced to private companies and benefit them after completion. Democratic states have no right to expropriate private real estate because states must act as people’s attorneys rather than sovereigns. They represent private landowners rather than benevolently concede the right of ownership to public, to be rescinded when necessary. Societies, however, cannot operate with unhindered right of private property. Most countries do not accept an owner’s right to destroy a valuable painting or historically significant building. Sometimes the prohibition is implicit: the owner must have a new building approved rather than being barred from destroying the old one. The assumption is that a ratio... More About: Jewish , Domain
Jews and Israelis
2010-10-15 17:17:00 According to the rabbis we didn’t accept converts at the time of King Solomon. The reasoning is straightforward: Jews were so rich and powerful that the multitudes flocked to us for that very reason rather than because of our high-minded religious goals. Whether or not it is true, the story is instructive. It does have a certain tanakhic background: Joshua did not make peace with natives, even those who would otherwise accept harsh tribute and servitude. The Gibeonites, the only exception, fooled Joshua by pretending to be from afar. The logic, presumably, is that local tribes feared our power and thus were ready to convert. The rabbis further mused that we won’t accept converts in messianic times because nations will see the power of the God of Israel and convert for practical reasons rather than faith. Note that faith only exists when definite proof is lacking. Classical commentators would have definitely categorized our time as messianic fulfillment of the return to ...
Israel’s real founding myths
2010-10-12 09:46:00 Am I the only one sick of being lied to constantly, of living in a forest of myths? Moshe Dayan, a legendary warrior, was a simple defense minister in 1967, which is largely an administrative role. Far from saving Israel , he stopped the Arabs fleeing from the West Bank and gave the Temple Mount and the Cave of the Patriarchs to our Muslim enemies. If not for him, we could have had a depopulated West Bank and full control over our holiest places. Golda Meir, a grandmother of all Jews, is singularly responsible for thousands of Jewish deaths in the Yom Kippur War because she procrastinated and postponed the preemptive strike until after the holiday. Yitzhak Rabin, a paragon of honesty, campaigned on promises of tough measures against Arabs. At the same time, Beilin negotiated on his behalf with the PLO in Cairo. Arik Sharon, the king of Israel, won elections by ridiculing the leftists’ plan to disengage from Gaza—only to carry it out himself with unprecedented brutality. Li... More About: Myths , Real
Golan Heights and Umm al Fahm
2010-10-08 09:43:00 Israeli negotiations with Syria pose an interesting legal question: can a state legitimately cede a part of its territory? Minor border adjustments are common worldwide, but the question of the Golan Heights is different with respect to size and unilateralism. Israel receives no land from Syria in return. Thus, ceding the Golan Heights amounts, from the Israeli perspective, to taking land by force. Since Syria only agrees to cease belligerence with Israel in exchange for the Golans, Israel effectively gives in to a threat of force. Such an agreement would be illegitimate according to the UN charter. There is a concomitant problem with the Israeli penal code, which proclaims it a high crime to negotiate the surrender of any part of Israel to an enemy. The Knesset will circumvent the problem by annulling the law on annexing the Golan Heights. Voting on the annulment would still be treason, but the MPs need not fear the ultra-left Supreme Court, which will support any defeatist bill....
Palestinians threaten Israeli economy
2010-10-05 11:38:00 Jewish lamentations over Palestinian statehood usually center around security issues. As with most things, dishonesty is counterproductive. No sane Westerner can be convinced that a bunch of bearded Islamists and other Palestinian terrorists present an existential threat to a country with the world’s fourth-strongest army. Jewish claims that Palestine would become a base for Iran are similarly off the mark: Gaza and Lebanon are Iranian bases, and Israel coexists with them. IDF has no operational freedom in Gaza, but was able to pound Hamas into a ceasefire; this model is applicable to the West Bank. Israel asks rhetorically why Palestine needs tanks and aircraft. Why does any country need them, including those not threatened or unable to defend themselves, such as Switzerland? In the mad world of nation-states and conscript armies, tanks are a part of national masculine pride, on par with flags. Israel has no right to demand that her neighbor be demilitarized. Indeed, it is not u... More About: Economy , Palestinians
Social side of jails
2010-10-01 09:20:00 Thousands of Jews sit in Israeli jails, some of them on false convictions, and the public does not care. The same public goes berserk when foreigners keep Jews prisoners; Shalit and Col. Klein are two examples. Arabs have not the slightest problem with mass casualties in internecine conflicts. Egypt shelled Gaza in the 1950s, Syria murdered some 20,000 Muslim Brotherhood adherents in Hama, Iraq and Iran killed upward of a million Arabs in their war, and Syrians, Lebanese, and Jordanians continue to kill Palestinians. And yet they beat their collective chest over the ridiculously low death toll Israel inflicted on Gaza in the 2009 war. This is not hypocrisy, but an evolutionarily justified attitude. When one’s own society prosecutes outcasts, it is about keeping oneself safe. When foreigners repress one’s brethren, it endangers his society: war might be the next step. Many Arabs were drawn into the ranks of terrorists by unpleasant stories from Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and Bagr... More About: Social , Side
Britain and Israel
2010-09-28 09:08:00 Britain is curiously similar to Israel in foreign relations. A small country which used to be strong, proud, and expansionist, a viable ally deteriorated into a barking dog, prone to rhetoric and mini-actions, unwilling to use whatever military power it still possesses, clinging to useless pieces of foreign land instead of respectable large-scale colonialism. Like Israel, Britain has become a burden to the US, where the supposed cultural affinity substitutes for strategic value. Britain is especially prone to lambasting Israel in order to dissociate itself from us, and to look different from Israel in the eyes of Americans. The British promised the Jews a state in return for the Jewish lobby dragging America into WWI. Britain changed its mind when it was granted the Mandate: the status quo was too good to abandon. When the Jews and Arabs of Palestine began to drive them out, the British found an ally in a powerless puppet to whom they subsequently allotted Jordan, a territory three... More About: Britain
Purim in the 21 century
2010-09-24 17:22:00 The Esther Scroll is, in a sense, the most relevant biblical book today. It is about assimilated Jews and written for them. The Greek version of the Esther contains profuse prayers, but the Jewish canonical version lacks any reference to God. It is as secular as Woody Allen’s movies. Perhaps for that reason Esther is the only canonical book absent from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Religious people simply were not interested in secular romance. The Esther was written for intelligent people. Judean peasants could believe that Joshua parted the River Jordan and the flowing water kept forming a wall into the skies; Rambam warned that these miracles were not to be taken literally. Educated Babylonian Jews wouldn’t buy that. In the Esther, miracles are of a different order: they represent improbable rather than physically impossible events. To educated Jews, God performs miracles by adjusting probabilities rather than by violating the laws of nature. Mordechai Bilshan was a typical assimi...
The peace to end all Jews
2009-12-17 08:50:00 Britain only allowed about 35,000 Jews to legally enter Palestine during the Holocaust. When Revisionist Jews smuggled small numbers of Jewish refugees into Palestine, the British threatened to offset the aliyah by cutting the legal immigration quota. Britain and the US rejected the German offer to exchange a million Jewish lives for 10,000 trucks as blackmail. ... More About: Peace
Tomorrow is gone
2009-12-14 19:36:00 In 1978, Shimon Peres wrote in his book, Tomorrow is Now, “If a Palestinian state is established, it will be armed to the teeth. Within it there will be bases of the most extreme terrorist forces, who will be equipped with anti-tank and anti-aircraft shoulder-launched rockets, which will endanger not only random passers-by, but also ...
Whose eye was first?
2009-12-10 08:49:00 The Germans initially had no intention of exterminating Jews. They heavily cooperated with the Zionists, including the right-wing Revisionists, in transferring German Jews to Palestine. The cooperation included agricultural and paramilitary training?clearly, not a prelude to elimination. That?s why Goebbels’ propaganda regarding the Allies? carpet bombings was not ...
Partition of Palestine
2009-12-07 10:37:00 Palestinian Arabs achieved the 1947 UN partition through revolt. Together with Jewish fighters, they expelled the British. Israel talks to the Palestinians and accedes to their demands of statehood only because of the Arab terrorists. The 1947 partition was generous to the Palestinian Arabs: they lost to Jews only a tiny strip near the Golan Heights, ... More About: Palestine , Partition
Peace is now
2009-12-05 15:34:00 Ending the Gaza terrorism is relatively simple: every time a rocket or a shell is fired on Israel, she must launch a rocket against Gaza?s population centers. The cause and effect will soon be clear, as every Kassam launch results in dozens of deaths in Gaza. The immediate and unforgiving retaliation would likely stop the ... More About: Peace
Israeli goodwill provokes Arabs
2009-12-03 08:24:00 Israel avoids repeating historical errors by refraining from conscripting the Arabs and turning a blind eye to them not paying taxes. The Qasim clan revolted against the invading Egyptian army in the nineteenth century after the Egyptians demanded Palestinian conscripts and attempted to tax the villages. Palestinian Arabs, then as now, care little who rules ...
Palestinians not ready for statehood
2009-11-30 08:52:00 People have to grow used to statehood. It is one thing to submit to the violent threats of an occupier or warlord, and another to willingly accept the societal contract which underpins statehood. Tribes submitted to colonizers, but tribes cannot organize themselves into the intricate framework of a state. Democracy, liberalism, free-market capitalism, and statehood?among ... More About: Palestinians
Social being determines consciousness
2009-11-28 09:31:00 The economic crisis underscored Israel?s only problem: the economic one. The shift of public opinion to the right is not a political platform?rather, it is a call on the government to stop bothering people with irrelevant issues. Few Israelis believed that Lieberman could follow through on his promise to refuse citizenship to disloyal Arabs. Nor ... More About: Social , Consciousness
Ahmadinejad cannot last
2009-11-26 07:49:00 Rabbah Bar Hanah told in the name of Rabbi Yohanan in the name of Rabbi Yehuda ben Rabbi Yillai, ?In future, Rome will fall to Persia?? Rav said, ?In future, Persia will fall to Romans.? Don?t take me wrong, I?m all for bombing Iran , nuking its underground and mountain labs, and slapping the mullahs. That is ...
Israel, the last chance of Jews
2009-09-21 09:58:00 Jews have known many exterminations. Eight out of the twelve tribes perished, and the two Samaritan tribes are almost extinguished. European Jews were almost annihilated during the crusades, the black plague, and on, and on. If the divine logic exists, we fail to understand it: the observant, religiously zealous Jewish communities were murdered for ... More About: Israel , Chance , Jews
Goldstone report: the rebuttal
2009-09-18 15:29:00 The Goldstone report?s title, Human rights in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories, reveals its leanings. Since Gaza is also a part of Palestine, ?other occupied Arab territories? can only refer to Israel proper. The UN commission was composed of professional human rights advocates, none of whom were experienced in military or anti-terrorism realities. To cover ... More About: Report , Rebuttal
Learn to hate
2009-09-17 09:19:00 We were afraid to hate in the Exile; Christianity, and later leftism, made hate unfashionable. Read Byalik on the Kishinev massacre, and learn to hate. Jews have a penchant for analyzing their enemies and trying to find a good reason for the enmity. Instead, do like all normal people do: hate those who hate you. Do ... More About: Hate , Learn
Affluence is not panacea
2009-09-14 09:25:00 Several groups recently voiced an interest in developing Palestine economically. Jewish right-wingers imagine they can hold onto the territories by postponing the solution, and talk about the Palestinian economy rather than the state. Jewish centrists of Netanyahu?s ilk feel American pressure and know they must do something about the Palestinians, yet they are unable to ... More About: Gaza , Judea , Samaria
Affluence is not panacea
2009-09-14 09:25:00 Several groups recently voiced an interest in developing Palestine economically. Jewish right-wingers imagine they can hold onto the territories by postponing the solution, and talk about the Palestinian economy rather than the state. Jewish centrists of Netanyahu?s ilk feel American pressure and know they must do something about the Palestinians, yet they are unable to ... More About: Gaza , Judea , Samaria
On Muslims and dinosaurs
2009-09-10 12:23:00 Recent centuries have amounted to evolutionary flux. Humans have grown sufficiently strong to fully control the planet’s life and extinguish entire species, from buffalo to mosquitoes. Both harmful and valuable animals are being exterminated, though for opposite reasons. Within decades, tigers, elephants, and monkeys might only be seen in zoos. The destruction of old forests ... More About: Islam , Muslims , Dinosaurs
On Muslims and dinosaurs
2009-09-10 12:23:00 Recent centuries have amounted to evolutionary flux. Humans have grown sufficiently strong to fully control the planet’s life and extinguish entire species, from buffalo to mosquitoes. Both harmful and valuable animals are being exterminated, though for opposite reasons. Within decades, tigers, elephants, and monkeys might only be seen in zoos. The destruction of old forests ... More About: Islam , Muslims , Dinosaurs
Dead end may be pleasant
2009-09-07 09:17:00 ?Every place that the sole of your foot shall tread upon, to you have I given it? -Joshua 1:3 Abbas’ cannot push his Arabs to any concessions required for the peace deal, and so he makes unrealistic demands on Israel to make her responsible for failure of the talks. He cannot even sell the Arabs the best ... More About: Dead , Dead End
Dead end may be pleasant
More articles from this author:2009-09-07 09:17:00 ?Every place that the sole of your foot shall tread upon, to you have I given it? -Joshua 1:3 Abbas’ cannot push his Arabs to any concessions required for the peace deal, and so he makes unrealistic demands on Israel to make her responsible for failure of the talks. He cannot even sell the Arabs the best ... More About: Dead , Dead End 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 |
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