Israel, Dirty Harry and Bob Dylan

Internet surfers of the Op-Ed postings this morning (January 8) hit anti-Israel shoals in the New York Times and Washington Post. Three Op-Ed writers – Jimmy Carter, Roger Cohen and Nicholas Kristof – paid perfunctory lip service to Israel’s right to defend its citizens, but then they trivialized Israel’s casualties and complained that the rockets didn’t warrant Israel’s tough response.

Carter: “Although [Israeli] casualties were rare (three deaths in seven years) Sderot was traumatized by the unpredictable explosions… We knew that the 1.5 million inhabitants of Gaza were being starved.”

Cohen: “But what of the intolerable Hamas rockets on Sderot, the 20 Israelis killed by those rockets since 2005 (four of them in the current violence)? … Yes, there has to be a response to Hamas, but this is the wrong one…. I have never previously felt so despondent about Israel, so shamed by its actions.”

Kristof: “Israel’s right to do something doesn’t mean it has the right to do anything. Since the shelling from Gaza started in 2001, 20 Israeli civilians have been killed by rockets or mortars, according to a tabulation by Israeli human rights groups. That doesn’t justify an all-out ground invasion that has killed more than 660 people.”

Kristof has the chutzpah to tell Israel what it should have done instead. Bomb the tunnels, he suggests, or even better “would have been to ease the siege in Gaza, perhaps creating an environment in which Hamas would have extended the cease-fire.”

In other words, the war was Israel’s fault. Kristof’s call to “create an environment” for Hamas is usually called appeasement.

Herschel Cohen and Robert Zimmerman

My mind whirled: where did I hear such a spineless argument before? Where had I witnessed such a bunch of unprincipled namby-pambies? Then I remembered a frustrated Californian cop I met 25 years ago. I’m sure he was an Israeli named Herschel Cohen who had changed his name to Harry Callahan. He hated departmental paperwork and procedure. On the force he was nicknamed “Dirty Harry” because, as his partner explained, “They call him ‘Dirty’ Harry [because] he gets the shit end of the stick every time.” Isn’t that enough proof that Harry was an Israeli?

When Herschel/Harry beat to a pulp a serial rapist-murderer who was released on a technicality, he was admonished by the District Attorney:

Where the hell does it say you've got a right to kick down doors, torture suspects, deny medical attention and legal counsel. Where have you been? Does Escobedo ring a bell? Miranda? I mean, you must have heard of the Fourth Amendment. What I'm saying is, that man had rights.
Callahan: Well, I'm all "broken up" about that man's rights.
District Attorney: You should be. I've got news for you, Callahan. As soon as he's well enough to leave the hospital, he walks. ...
Callahan: And who says that?
District Attorney: It's the law.
Callahan: Well then, the law is crazy!

Today, Herschel’s bosses would probably demand that he use a Taser to subdue a perp on angel dust, and if he had to shoot he had to use a small caliber gun and shoot to wound.

But Harry would never follow those orders. He would use his .44 Magnum, “the most powerful handgun in the world, [that could] blow your head clean off.”

Dirty Harry was certainly not loved, but he was respected in his neighborhood. Yes, he got shot and beaten up, but he survived.

Respect for the Bully

Harry Callahan probably had one atypical eight-track cassette in his car– a Bob Dylan album, Infidel. And Harry would listen to only one song on that cassette: Neighborhood Bully. It was – and is – a strong, defiant defense of Israel. Here are two stanzas:

Well, the neighborhood bully, he's just one man,
His enemies say he's on their land.
They got him outnumbered about a million to one,
He got no place to escape to, no place to run.
He's the neighborhood bully.

The neighborhood bully just lives to survive,
He's criticized and condemned for being alive.
He's not supposed to fight back,
he's supposed to have thick skin,
He's supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in.
He's the neighborhood bully.

Click to hear Neighborhood Bully. Click here to read the lyrics.

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Responses to The New York Times' Nicolas Kristof on Water, Hebron and Jewish Land

Blogs serve an important purpose: Bloggers can blow off steam, particularly when it's so hard to get any column inches in the mainstream press. Another pressure valve is the "talkback" feature that follows many online newspaper items. Frankly, they're a waste of time and effort, but sometimes it's the only way to get something off your chest. Such is the case this week with many angry readers of The New York Times' Nicolas Kristof's column this week on the "Israeli colony" in Hebron.

I'm not the only one to use the blog and the "talk-back" feature to respond to Kristof. Read Prof. Gerald Steinberg's response on the NGO Monitor site. A particularly poignant response was written by Stephen Flatow, father of 20-year-old Alisa who was killed by a Palestinian bus bomb in 1995. There's also an important response by David Wilder, spokesman for the Jewish community in Hebron. Wilder revealed that while Kristof toured Hebron with B'Tzelem, one of the most vociferous and tendentious pro-Palestinian organizations in Israel, the columnist satisfied his "journalistic objectivity" by merely giving Wilder a phone call.

Below are excerpts from my own response to Kristof.

Mr. Kristof -- The Israelis you cite are either from the extreme left who deny any Jewish right to the Jewish historical sites in Judea/Samaria (the West Bank) or those on the right in Hebron who find themselves on the front lines. Their views are molded by the intense pressure of their lives.

Most Israelis, however, are anchored in the center, and that is certainly the case for the hundreds of thousands who, like myself, live in the post-1967 areas and for their extended families and friends in pre-67 Israel.

You find the idea of Jews living in their second holiest city, Hebron, illegal or “utterly impractical.” Sorry, Mr. Kristof, many Jews want the right to visit the Tomb of the Patriarchs, something denied to Jews after the 1929 massacre of Hebron’s Jews. Many of those closed shops you referred to were once Jewish properties.

Don’t apply the “utterly impractical” standard to Israel. The state never would have been founded in 1948 according to your standards.

You claim one-third of settlement land is privately owned by Palestinians. Not according to the Israeli Supreme Court — the paragon of justice, decency, fairness loved by Israel’s left — that allowed the construction of settlements on “state land.” When a settlement was built on private land, the court ordered it removed immediately. (The Elon Moreh case.)

The delay of sick Palestinians in ambulances at checkpoints is tragic, but the use of those ambulances to ferry explosives used by suicide bombers is lethal and criminal. I’m not surprised they get delayed at checkpoints.

Mr. Kristof, unless you parachuted into Hebron, you drove on Route 60 from Jerusalem. I use the road every day, and I share it with hundreds of Palestinian trucks, taxis and private cars. Many of them enter Route 60 from Bethlehem. At that intersection 10 years ago a Palestinian terrorist, driving a large stolen Israeli truck, rammed my son’s compact car with his four passengers. Miraculously they survived. The intersection was closed during the intifada, but it’s been open for a year. And my son drives past that spot every day on his way to a Jerusalem hospital where he treats Arabs and Jews. For better or for worse, most roads are open and most Palestinians can travel in the West Bank.

Water Usage in Israel and around the world

Your portrait of evil Israelis just can’t be complete without the canard of Israelis using five times more water than Palestinians. Sorry, it doesn’t wash, so to speak. A study produced by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences along with their Jordanian, Palestinian and Israeli counterparts ten years ago, found little difference between water consumption in Israeli and Palestinian urban areas. “Per capita water use for urban Palestinians reaches a maximum of 100 cubic meters a year, similar to Israeli use.” The study suggests that low figures for rural Palestinians “is likely to increase with improvement in the level of living.” More telling, however, is the report’s finding that “water losses unaccounted for [theft or leaks] in the [Palestinian] distribution network” reach 55 percent[!]

Lastly, all modern, developed 21st century societies use much more water than developing societies. “The United States and Canada are the highest per capita water users in the world,” according to the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, “…per person usage is more than 2.5 times that in Asia or Europe, and over six times that in Africa.” Cross the border into Mexico and per capita water usage drops by two-thirds.

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