Honest Jews have two options: create a Judean state or change Israel. To change Israel, diagnose her illness: fearful indifference. Most Jews hate living with Arabs and hate giving away Jewish land. Faced with an immensely powerful government, they don’t hope to prevail. It’s hard to live with loss, so Israelis convince themselves that since the government is wiser than they are, living with the Arabs and giving away land is counter-intuitively fine. If only we show the Israeli masses a solution, a way of reaching our common ideals despite the workings of a treacherous elite, the masses would join our quest for a Jewish Israel. The policemen are also Jewish and detest the anti-Jewish Israeli government. They respect strength and lean toward the government but would join the people if the people were winning.

The solution is well known: non-violent (albeit not exactly peaceful) protest. Persistence is the key. A thousand people can be sent to jail for incitement and violation of public order. Fifty thousands cannot. The question is, are there a fifty thousand Jews ready to go to jail to keep our state Jewish?

People used to repression obey all the way to death. diaspora Jews and long-suffering Russians obediently lined up for Nazi massacres. Students of the Holocaust are shocked by images of people lined up single file so several could be shot with one bullet. What made them do that? We’re not used to repression and cannot comprehend why the people of Babi Yar waited three days while the Nazis took them by tens to shoot them - and did not rebel and at least die decently without being raped and mutilated by the Germans and their Ukrainian coadjutors. Because we’re not used to repression. Or are we?

Israel is a totalitarian state by every measure. Specifically, it is a smart totalitarian state. Not like the stupid Soviets who prohibited all but one party but closer to the German Democratic Republic which retained the façade of pluralism. Major Israeli parties, whether masquerading left or right, seek to create an atheist, ethnic-blind, ghetto-sized state. In fact, the so-called rightist governments ceded most of Israel: Sinai and then Gaza. The Left and the Right accept huge numbers of Arabs into the Israeli core, certain to become the majority. All major parties accept a second Palestinian state (beside Jordan) in the Jewish lands of Judea and Samaria. Alternative views are thoroughly suppressed: the legislature bans discussion of non-violent (at any rate, not murderous) transfer of Arabs; the government ostracizes entrepreneurs who sponsor honest grassroots movements; the government-controlled media and the police all cooperate.

Israel is the only civilized country that censors political opinions of her citizens, including any discussion of the ethnic roots of terrorism, the demographic problem of Arabs in Israel, and removing Arabs to a Palestinian state. In the USSR, newspapers were fairly free: they could express opinions about books or theater; so can the Israeli press. The test is media freedom to express political views, which in Israel is practically prohibited. No major media outlet can run an article on whether a Jewish state can include an Arab majority.

Israel has developed an immensely powerful police apparatus. Its original goal was to fight terror, and it did very well. No one cared about the hordes of informants, detention without charge, or torture in jails to fight terror. The Israeli police have long operated outside that mandate to infiltrate and disrupt Jewish political organizations. Terrorists work by violence; political parties may advocate violent goals but they work through democratic process. Kahane and Feiglin created political parties not to kill Arabs but to win elections. They posed no immediate danger which is a usual prerequisite for abrogating political freedoms. Yet the police devastated those and many other purely political movements.

Secular Baathists desperately needed a charismatic leader or idea, and the US provided both by allowing the execution of Saddam. Beside not invading Iraq in the first place, the US had several options. One, bring Saddam to the US as a POW and detain him for years, questioning him on many interesting issues. To fear retaliation for holding Saddam is ridiculous because his execution would give Baathists an equally good reason to inflict damage on American citizens worldwide. America could hold Saddam at Guantanamo. Two, jail him in Iraq and keep him in such conditions that he died soon or became disabled. Three, let the Iranians catch him. Four, give him to the Kuwaitis; let the cowards handle their enemy. Five, poison or otherwise kill him inconspicuously. Six, let him disappear or keep him secretly, possibly in Israel.

Instead, the US let the secular scoundrel Saddam, despised by Muslims everywhere, become a religious martyr. His farewell letter to the Iraqi people will make it into history: a call for humility and an unrelenting struggle against heretic invaders.

Saddam’s trial was predictably a sham. Genocide? America had already caused more civilian deaths in Iraq by ruining the police state. The American-sponsored civil war in Afghanistan killed many more people than did Saddam. Gassing the Kurds? That was Iran’s doing; Iraq had no cyanogen chloride. The massacre of the shiites at Dujail? Here is the true story.

Dujail was a hotbed of shiite insurgence in Iraq. During the war with Iran, the shiites in Dujail and elsewhere supported Iran - an act of state treason. Still, Saddam came to Dujail in 1982 to win its inhabitants peacefully. He was fired upon. The would-be assassin was not a lone gun: the ensuing fight between Saddam’s guards and the inhabitants lasted hours. The population was heavily armed. In reprisal, Saddam’s forces killed only about 150 men, a low number by any wartime norms and insignificant by Muslim standards. Some of the victims were thirteen, boys by Western notions but grown-up soldiers in Iraq. Iran, too, conscripted teenagers extensively during the war. The people of Dujail - wartime enemy collaborators - were interned in camps. Some were arrested. That is not a crime against humanity. The time would come when the US would see Saddam’s killing of shiites as a favor. Now the sunnis will correctly see that the Iraqi shiite courts were biased against Saddam, and the Americans oddly cooperated with the pro-Iranian shiites.

It is hard to enforce justice in a place where you can’t tell right from left.

So far, Ethiopia has been remarkably successful in defeating Islamic troops in Somalia. Ethiopian boots on the ground, tolerant of losses and ready to injure hostile civilians, achieve more than the hi-tech US army fighting the warlords. Whether the Muslims will succeed in launching a guerrilla war remains to be seen. The US ally Qatar, a minor Arab state long implicated in supporting Islamic terrorists worldwide, vehemently supports the Somalian Islamists.

Interestingly, the US supported the Ethiopian preemption of the Somalian guerrillas. Technically, Ethiopia cooperated with the Somalian government to provide a shred of legitimacy to the invasion, but in reality Somalia is governed by Islamists. Israel, in a similar situation, continuously worries about US reaction to its invasions of Lebanon and Gaza. The lesson is there: America, a country of reasonable people and a not stupid government, supports necessary defensive measures so long as they are effective, not widely seen as atrocities, and kept short.

The conflict in Somalia came from the colonial powers drawing arbitrary borders (ethnic Somalians live also in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Djibouti). Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq also have arbitrary, unsustainable borders.

The UN endorsed Israel in 1947 for the same reasons it supports the Palestinians now: basic human decency and containment of the spiraling conflict (in 1947, of Israel with Britain). A body so unnatural and so impractical as the UN can legitimize itself only by moralistic notions. The UN could not explicitly disregard the Jews after the Holocaust and the Palestinians after decades of ostensible dispossession. Jewish fighters in 1930-40s and Palestinian fighters now make the status quo untenable for regional arbiters.

America could not treat the Jews worse than did the Soviet Union. Since the USSR accepted the establishment of Israel, the US could not refuse.

The American support for establishing Israel was rational, not in the narrow sense of serving immediate US interests but in the wider sense of conforming to the ideology which underpins America’s international position. America props its global role with credible claims of idealism, freedom, and national self-determination, and could not vote against establishing Israel. The US voted for the sovereignty of scores of other countries, even tribal entities, and its vote for Israel in 1947 proves no special relationship with Israel.

The US did not help Israel in the exhausting Independence War but rather embargoed arms shipments to Israel. When Israeli militia pushed the Arab troops out of Israel, the US forced a ceasefire which left Israel with indefensible borders. America wasn’t alone: Great Britain offered to “defend” Egypt against the newborn Israel.

In 1956, Israel moved against Egypt to halt incessant border provocations and a discriminatory ban on Israeli shipping through the Suez Canal and the Straits of Tiran. The US stopped Israel even though she acted in compliance with international practice. American support for Egypt was unrelated to colonialist issues: America supported colonialist France against nationalist Vietnam. Egypt, moreover, was a communist country. America had no interests in Egypt.

One reason for the US action in 1956 was insult: Israel, France and Britain moved without consulting the world’s hegemon. The other, fundamental in relations with Israel, is built-in anti-semitism. Jews must be content with a ghetto-sized country and ghetto “security.” To drive the lesson home, the US sent a warship with nuclear missiles to the Mediterranean. Truman balked at using nuclear weapons in Korea; to nuke Israeli troops in the Sinai was okay.

In 1967, America twisted Israel’s arms to keep her from preemption. And why not? Had the Muslims backed away, US restraint would be vindicated. Had they not, the mistake would affect only Jews.

After Israel proved herself strong in 1967, the US used her to counter Soviet expansion in the Middle East. The rapprochement was not exceptional. America supported scores of countries in peripheral wars against the Soviets. US support of Israel wasn’t significant. America guaranteed Japanese security, spent a fortune to protect Western Europe against the Soviet threat, fought a meaningless war in Vietnam, and liberated monarchist Kuwait. The Soviet Union provided its vassals with more funding, weapons, and political support than Israel received from the US.

Radical Americans decry the Jewish lobby which promotes American interests in Israel. We do not need the US aid-for-sovereignty program, and we do not need the lobby.

“The Arabs of western Palestine were thieves by instinct, and those who dwelt close to the Jewish settlements were especially practiced and daring. Throughout the campaign the British policy was to treat these debased people west of the Jordan as devout Moslems. . . . And the Arabs, a crafty race, quick to discern British unwillingness to punish their misdeeds, exploited their license to extreme limits.” The Official History of Australia in WWI, ed. by C.E.W.Bean, p.787.

Do we really believe that national mentality changes in decades? Do you call the Germans to witness? What changed about them after WWII? Sam Huntington in his Clash of Civilizations mentions a NY Times poll conducted in the 1990s: a full quarter of Germans believed there were too many Jews (0.15%) around. Germans are still educated, hard working, diligent, disciplined. They seek political and economic rather than military dominance, but they were similarly peaceful for long periods throughout their history. Dominance is important, and the means of achieving it is a technicality; war is the continuation of politics by other means.

The Holocaust and statehood did not change the Jews. We are still educated, diligent, non-disciplined, enduring. Just why do we think the Arabs will change?

Israel befriends the Druzes, odd pagans masquerading as Muslims. They want our protection but won’t come to our aid.

Israelis who have seen Bedouins only in tourist villages feel sentimental about them and appreciate their loyalty to Israel. The day Saudi Arabia offers them more money, they will switch loyalty. Bedouin Arabs betray their kin by cooperating with Israel; traitors do not make reliable friends. Meet the real Bedouins, and see why other Arabs hate them. The Bedouin mentality resemble the hyena’s: tame when he fears you, ruthlessly murderous when he has the advantage.

Arabs killed Jews in pogroms before 1948 and ambushes after the state was established. They are waiting to kill us again. That was the original goal of the PLO and the Arab armies, postponed while Israel is strong. The Edenic conditions Israel offers Arabs do not help. A zero tax rate, practical freedom from licenses and permits, total security and absence of conscription are nothing compared to ideology.

Imagine that a Muslim Palestinian state takes Israel over. They introduce sharia but give dzimmi Jews administrative independence and parliamentary representation. The Arabs pay Jewish teachers to teach Jewish children tolerate the Arab authorities. Saudi Arabia finances Jewish hospitals and municipal projects in Jewish cities. Everything is cool.

We will fight.

The Arabs will fight, too.

Jewish organizations trumpeted larger-than-expected Jewish population figures in the US, 6.4mln. Researchers twisted the data to show that there are more Jews in America than in Israel; that strengthened the political posture of the American Jewish leaders.

RDD (random-digit dialing) phone surveys produce upward bias when applied to a wealthy population. Affluent Jews have more cellular phones than the average population, and random dialing reaches them relatively more often. Jews usually have smaller households than poor ethnic groups, therefore more phones per capita.

Another survey method, amalgamating mailing lists of synagogues and community centers, produces plenty of duplicates and includes many Gentile spouses and deceased people.

Most importantly, the population figure is thoroughly misleading. Most American Jews have already assimilated and married Gentiles. After the 1970s, assimilation went from common to nearly absolute. When the generation of Jews born in the past thirty years dies out in 2070s, there will be almost no Jews left in America.

In the “Jewish state” of Israel, there is one hostile non-Jew for every three Jews. That is twice the proportion of anti-semites in America.

Olmert symbolically met Abbas on Shabbat, an act of political collaborationism meant as a slap in the face of religious Jews.

Olmert’s concessions will strengthen Hamas, not Fatah (as if supporting a PLO outfit were reasonable). Palestinians will see that though Hamas retains power and forms a government, Israel released the funds and freed the terrorist prisoners. The Palestinians will connect Israeli concessions with Hamas’ courageous struggle, not Abbas’ moderation.

Olmert consciously endangered Jewish settlers in Judea and Samaria by offering to remove the IDF checkpoints. Now Muslim terrorists can attack the settlements easier. Jewish deaths? Olmert welcomes them. His enemy is the Jewish religious and nationalist movement, not Fatah. To drive the lesson home, Olmert cut government financing of Jewish religious and Zionist schools in half, a deduction unthinkable in civilized societies and intended as blackmail to keep the Jewish activists quiet about concessions to the Palestinians.

Bush’s bill to aid the Palestinian Authority prohibits aid to Hamas but gives it to PLO-Fatah. Unless Fatah fully expropriates the aid, the money will end up among the very Palestinians who voted overwhelmingly for Hamas. Is US aid intended to fill Abbas’ coffers? Fatah’s? To buy more weapons for the Fatah militia to drive the civil war in Palestine? Otherwise, there is no practical difference between aid to Hamas and to Fatah.

To be normal, a person must be like others. When Jews lived isolated in their own communities, they were normal: each Jew was culturally like the rest. In the nineteenth century, superficial liberalism opened the outside world to Jews. The Gentiles still despised the Jews but called us their equals. Jews saw the world and its opportunities, and realized that they were not normal,not like others. The nineteenth-century German discussion of Jews is instructive: liberals countered anti-semites by asserting that Jews could eventually become like other Germans. They did not imagine that Jews were decent people in their own right. German Jews accepted that attitude and rushed to assimilate.

It’s hard, very hard to be different. The Jews wanted to be normal. Israel offers us a chance to normalize without Gentile-izing, to be like our neighbors, yet unlike the world that eats dogs and pigs, practices incest and homosexuality, and dislikes us at best.

It’s hard, very hard to believe you are right when the world is against you. And so the Jews suppose Gentiles are right, their customs better, that anti-semites have a point. And the Jews hate their Jewishness and see it as a stain and erase it. Deep in their minds they know their betrayal is bad, that they betray generations of Jews who went up on stakes and died in pogroms to pass on the spark of Judaism. The Jews hate the bug that makes them uneasy. They hate their Jewishness. They hate other Jews because they implicitly remind them that they are not Americans, leftists, or whatever other group they want to belong to, but Jews. Religious and nationalist Jews who wear their Jewishness proudly are a constant reminder to assimilationist Jews of their moral bankruptcy, of their betrayal. And gentilized Jews hate religion and take pleasure in suppressing it. They brainwash Israeli schoolchildren with stories of Judaism’s borrowing from neighboring religions; children don’t understand the qualitative differences of superficially similar rites. They ridicule religious people, their habits and their wardrobe, without telling the children that those funny-looking religious guys stood tall in the face of persecutions, tortures, and murder for centuries. They discriminate against Jewish religious schools in the diaspora and ostracize their sponsors.

Gentiles have religion, culture, empires. Gentilized Jews reject Judaism, Jewishness, and Eretz Israel, though they concede to ghetto-sized Israel. Gentilized, rootless Jews realize their inferiority to Gentiles with roots. Jews used to be proud of themselves, and inferiority ruins their mental health. Rootless Jews hate their parents and their compatriots who deceived them about Jewish pride; as they see it now, Jews have nothing to be proud of. Rootless Jewish leaders hatefully oppress common Jews, choose policies detrimental to them, and divert their money to irrelevant and even anti-Jewish causes. Many Jewish families forego having more children because they cannot pay the skyrocketing cost of education, but fat American Jewish organizations refuse to finance Jewish schools to make education free.

The rush of the Jews to strip themselves of Jewishness confirms Gentiles in their contempt for the Jews. “Even the Jews realize that their ways are wrong,” think the hereditary anti-semites, “and we’re right to dislike them. Let them become like us, if they could.” Educated, wealthy modern Gentiles are no less anti-semites than their poor and ignorant ancestors. The difference is, they don’t want violence. The Germans detested the unorganized violence of pogroms; the Nazis listened and switched to planned extermination in death camps.

[Ethiopia formally resumed war with Islamic Somalia.]

In 1993, Clinton refused to retaliate for the Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia. Since, in his opinion, the world knows that the US could flatten Mogadishu, there was no need to enact the already credible threat. Events proved him wrong.

The First Battle of Mogadishu was a great encouragement for Muslims worldwide; it also changed the regional balance of power.

Ethiopia, a country friendly to Israel, was locked in a struggle with Somalian Islamic militants. Given money and weapons, Ethiopia could have dealt them a lasting blow. When the US decided to run from Somalia, it covered the evacuation with the UN-sponsored “peace process” (America similarly pushes Israel to acquiesce to the hostile Palestinian state to divert attention from the Iraqi fiasco). The peace saved the core of the Islamic militia which mushroomed in the extensive system of Islamic courts. Eventually, Somalia became a fundamentalist Islamic state and stepped up the subversion of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Djibouti, its neighbors. For a decade, Ethiopia tolerated Somalia according to UN policies instead of thrashing the Islamic state.

Somalia is less dangerous than Afghanistan, and many Arab mujahedeen choose it for jihad (against Christian Ethiopia). Eritrea, a long-time rival of Ethiopia, provides the Islamic guerrillas with funds, plenty of light weapons, and logistical support. Tribal war in Somalia, which America chose to overlook rather than brutally extinguish with Ethiopian help, grew into a full-blown jihad. Some problems go away when forgotten; radical Islam doesn’t.

The Battle of Mogadishu was not even a setback but an overwhelming success with a kill-to-loss ratio of more than 100. Whatever minor losses the US troops suffered could have been avoided by involving Pakistanis and Ethiopians.