Howard Epstein – PADDED CELL OR PRISON CELL FOR THE BEAST OF B’TSELEM?
Do you think that you would have to be mad to go to the United Nations Security Council, to a Palestinian-sponsored event, and provide support – not to say ammunition – to your country’s enemies at a most critical time? Or just plain criminal? Let us consider the case of Mr Hagai El-Ad of B’Tselem, for then we shall know which sort of cell would be appropriate for him.
B’Tselem, Hebrew for the Image of God and, in essence, “human dignity”, describes itself as “The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories”. It was established in February 1989 by a group of prominent academics, attorneys, journalists and Knesset members, and endeavors to document and educate the Israeli public and policymakers about human rights violations in the Occupied Territories (ie under “The Occupation”), combat the phenomenon of denial prevalent among the Israeli public, and help create a human rights culture in Israel. Their words not mine.
The website of B’Tselem appears at first glance to be even-handed, carrying, as it does, reports of atrocities allegedly committed by Palestinian on Palestinian, but its emphasis is on alleged abuses of Palestinians by members of the Israeli security agencies.
B’Tselem was (in)famously responsible for the video-recording of the shooting by a young Israeli soldier outside Hebron earlier this year of a prone Palestinian who had 
allegedly carried out a terrorist attack a little earlier. I wrote at the time, that all comment about the incident should have been deferred until the completion of the criminal proceedings – but the failure to respect the sub judice rule was not the fault of B’Tselem. They merely provided the unwelcome evidence, as they have done before, with a frequency that has no equal on the part of our enemies. (Can you imagine an Egyptian, a Lebanese or a Jordanian not only video-recording an equivalent incident but also disseminating it – and surviving more than a few hours? Yet Israel tolerates this.)
B’tselem claims to seek to improve the moral standards of Israel, State and people, which is most noble of them, but it is hard to discern a similar exercise being carried out in any of the states, or failed and former states (most notably Syria) or states within a state (ie Hezbollah in Lebanon) that oppose us and who wish to harm us in every situation from the chillingly cold peace with Egypt to the feverish Iranian desire to annihilate us in an atomic flash.
Do you think this is all beginning to look a little one-sided?
So little financial support does B’Tselem enjoy within Israel for its high-minded endeavors that, were it not for the funding it receives from beyond, notably from the UN, Europe and the USA, it would have folded long ago.
Last July, after much dithering, the Knesset passed into law a bill (similar to one that the Americans enjoy for the protection of their interests) that requires transparency on foreign funding: where a group receives more than half its income from outside the State, it must now make appropriate disclosures in its accounts and reports. (Does that appear to you to dilute Israeli democracy? Some say so, but maybe they too are funded by our detractors – or are simply the misguided.)
Does B’Tselem’s lack of adequate home-funding indicate that Israelis do not wish to be saved from their darker side, or do Israelis perceive a darker side to B’Tselem? We shall see why the majority might be perceived to incline to the latter.
“The Occupation” is the term used by Israel’s enemies to describe the burden thrust on Israel when, in June 1967, it had the temerity, against all expectations, to survive and prevail in the war designed by Egypt, Syria and Jordan to eliminate it and all Israelis. Along with that result came dominion over the Palestinian territories of Judea and Samaria (and Gaza), which Israel has tried many times and in many ways to give up in exchange for peace. From the Three Nos of Khartoum in September 1967 to the 
pernicious distortions of what had been agreed in Oslo, Israel’s enemies have ensured that the Yoke of the Palestinians has weighed down on the neck of Israel – and Israeli soldiers most directly – for almost fifty years. Given the implacability of successive enemies of Israel, it is fair to say that there has never been a time in its seventy years of existence, as it will be by May 2018, when it has not been in a state of war and facing annihilation. Facing annihilation was the condition that confronted Great Britain in 1939. War with Nazi Germany was declared on September 3 that year.
UK Defence Regulation 18b, full title: Regulation 18B of the Defence (General) Regulations 1939, was passed into law by the British government in anticipation of a state of war existing between Britain and Nazi Germany. It provided for the internment of those suspected of being Nazi sympathisers. Its effect was to suspend habeas corpus for affected individuals. It was thought, not unnaturally you may consider, that to have, out and about in the country, people whose sympathies were plainly aligned with Britain’s enemies was not conducive to the public good.
Within a fortnight of the outbreak of WWII, some fourteen people had been detained pursuant to 18B (as it became unaffectionately known by those against whom it was directed), but within a further fifteen months around a thousand had been interned. Initially, the winter quarters of a travelling circus provided one camp, and uncompleted municipal housing near Liverpool was used from March 1941. Soon afterwards, special camps were set up on the Isle of Man and that is where the internees, those perceived to be straining at the leash to give succour to Britain’s enemies in time of war, sat out WWII.
Some of the more illustrious amongst the internees were Sir Oswald Mosley, who had led the British Union of Fascists, and who was as well-connected as any other member of the British establishment, and Admiral Sir Barry Edward Domvile KBE CB CMG, Director of Naval Intelligence, 1927-1930, commander of the Royal Navy’s Third Cruiser Squadron, 1931-1932, and President of the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, 1932-1934. A not inconsiderable character, Sir Barry, and a shining career in the service of King and country, you might think; but, as a Nazi sympathiser, he spent WWII in a prison camp, as that was deemed more favorable conducive to the welfare of the country than leaving him at large.
Perhaps the most illustrious Nazi sympathiser who put himself, as it were, beyond the Pale, was the erstwhile King Edward VIII, he of the abdication crisis stimulated by 
his intended marriage. Whether it was the fact that his wife-to-be was American or a divorcee that made her objectionable as Queen of England is unclear. It may simply be that it was the combination of the two, but it turned out that there was a further reason why the abdication turned out to be the best for all concerned. In October 1937, the former King and his consort, contrary to the advice of the British government, visited Germany and met Adolf Hitler at one of his country retreats. Without too much difficulty after his weekender awaybreak, the former King of England was perceived as a Nazi sympathiser and it was to the more exotic islands of the Bahamas that he and his wife were sent for the Duration.
Let us be clear. I do not equate B’Tselem with the Nazi party of Hitler’s Germany; but, given the diet of anti-Semitic propaganda that is fed to Palestinian children, the unending bloodthirsty calls for Jewish blood, coupled with the encouragement that the Palestinian leadership gives to its people to go out and kill Israelis – as Jews – and given the hot wars, the Intifadas and the constant attempts to delegitimize Israel that emanate from the Palestinian leadership (the BDS movement is a construct of theirs), I do assert that it would be hard to insert a wafer between the Nazis on the one hand and Hamas, the PLO and the PLA on the other.
The Germans are superb engineers, of course, and in their Nazi personae they were able to industrialize death, and to make the railways run not only on time but also in time 
– in time, that is, to finish off the Jews of Budapest and Rhodes, for example, even as the Red Army was feeling the Nazi collar. Make no mistake about it, however, given half a chance the Palestinian people would replicate 1994 Rwanda, when and where in 100 days up to a million Tutsis were slaughtered by their Hutu neighbours with machetes and knives. The world, at first transfixed by the horror, finally swung into action – and, as the killing continued, wrung its hands in (vicarious) grief.
Let no-one doubt it, every day this country records the myriad ways in which it is subjected to attempted annihilation. It has always been, and is still today, at war.
And so to Hagai El-Ad. Born in Haifa and a graduate of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and educated well beyond that in Israel and the USA, he is an Israeli human 
rights activist and the executive director of B’Tselem. His most immediate claim to fame – or notoriety, depending on one’s viewpoint, and sense of loyalty to the land of one’s birth, the country in which you were raised and that protected you – is by now well-known: it was he, an Israeli, who urged the UN Security Council last week to take immediate action against Israeli in respect of “The Settlements” at a special session on that subject.
Where does that place Mr Hagai El-Ad? Just plain beastly, mad or bad? Well, to me he is clearly in the same category as those who were interned by the British pursuant to 18B. The UK considered itself to be a lot better off if those who sympathised with its enemies had only each other to talk to, rather than allow them to disseminate their disloyal messages at home and abroad. Why would Israel, still, after almost seventy years fighting for its survival, perceive itself as being able to afford greater luxuries to its home-grown detractors than Britain between 1939 and 1945? Why, in the name of reason, or merely the fundamental desire for survival, should Israel allow indigenous Israelis, whose depredations of the country that nurtured them carry an exponential amount of weight in the UN and elsewhere that our enemies plot and conspire against us, to give aid and comfort to those enemies?
Of course, 18B was a derogation from British democracy but there was little if any protest against it. It amounted to what the Brits now call “a no-brainer”. War is war and survival is survival. What was there to think about?
And what is there to think about? At a time when the greatest fear here is that Obama will, in an effort to create some sort of legacy (that will be remembered by some – notably our detractors), finally throw us under the train in his last weeks in power by joining in anti-Israeli condemnation at the UN Security Council, we allow an Israeli – a highly-educated and high profile Israeli at that – to go to that very forum to do down his country in advance. This strikes me as nothing less than self-defeating complacency.
We should be prepared to allow our Hagai El-Ads the freedom to operate in as noxious a manner as they choose when either:-
- the state of war that Israel has to endure is finally over; or
- our detractor-nations allow their Hagai El-Ad counterparts to operate in the same way – and some actually then do so; or
- hell freezes over;
whichever occurs first. (My money is on its being number 3.)
In wrapping up his address Hagai El-Ad declared:
Palestinians have the right to life and dignity, the right to determine their own future. These have all been delayed for far too long – and justice delayed is justice denied.
No mention of the same expectations for Israelis who have been under attack for seventy years and up. Nor was there any mention of the virulent anti-Semitism that drives Jew-hatred in the Territories (and Gaza) such that infants imbibe it, as it were, in their mothers’ milk, no mention of the peace offers spurned by Arafat and the opportunities for negotiations spurned by Abu Mazen and, most damningly, no mention of the Palestinian on Palestinian human rights abuses actually documented by B’Tselem – see:-
Severe Human Rights Violations In Inter-Palestinian Clashes
http://www.btselem.org/inter_palestinian_violations
and
Attacks on Israeli civilians by Palestinians
http://www.btselem.org/topic/israeli_civilians
Cyclops could not have done a better job. The professional human rights activist, Hagai El–Ad, could only have enhanced his career prospects but, by his one-sided campaign against his own country, he has shown his lack of loyalty to a depth to which even the most uncouth hooligan football club supporter would never sink. I assume that he is proud of his work in the UN but by rights he should be locked up for treason at a time of war – an, by rights, we should blame successive Israeli governments for allowing it all to happen.
People like Hagai El–Ad, and our “friends” such as Obama and Kerry who urge on us that we should conduct ourselves to a higher standard than the Palestinians, mean us only harm; yet their moral relativism is racist as against the Palestinians. Expecting less of them than of us debases them and elevates us – but only as a ploy to bring about our downfall. We should not dance to their tune. Playing out the post-colonial wars is all well and good on university campuses from Johannesburg via Oxford to Princeton, but there it is the statues that get destroyed whilst here it can be our lives.
Should we outlaw whatever a civilized country like Britain outlawed in time of war? More to the point, we should enforce the laws that already exist, thus:-
- Israel’s Penal Law on treason includes giving “assistance to an ‘enemy’ in war against Israel”, which specifically includes a terrorist organization. When was this country not at war? When were Fatah and Hamas not terrorist organizations? How would Hagai El–Ad’s words at the UN not give assistance to our enemies?
- The Defence (Emergency) Regulations, an extensive set of regulations, first promulgated by the British authorities in mandatory Palestine in 1945, were incorporated into Israeli law by the country’s Provisional State Council’s very first legislative act in 1948; and the Supreme Court long ago accepted them as part of Israeli law. They allow for the establishment of military tribunals to try civilians, indefinite administrative detention, prohibitions on the publication of books and newspapers, house demolitions, extensive powers of search and seizure.
When are we going to enforce the law on administrative detentions? When shall we be less complacent about the dangers that threaten us than were the British? When shall we cease to give freedom and houseroom to those (including movie producers and directors) whose careers are enhanced by one-sided Israel-bashing? We need to have the courage to say: we try harder than almost any other country to seek peace against massive opposition, including two thousand years of Christian and Moslem vilification, and we are going to punish as severely as would other democratic nations in time of war those Israelis whose actions and speeches mean us harm and give succour and support, not to mention ammunition, to our enemies.
Equally importantly, we should drop the “no preconditions” policy with regard to the resumption of “Peace Talks” and declare that we do have a pre-condition of the Palestinians, as follows:-
Drop the anti-Semitism; make your school books humane and free from Jew-hatred; tell your children, and us, us that you accept our existence – not for our sakes (we have no doubt about it and its durability) but for yours – and declare that you want to work with us to make an Eldorado – a land of promise, a land truly flowing with milk and honey – out of all the land from Mediterranean Sea to Jordan River, from the Gulf of Eilat to Mount Hermon, to include Gaza and Judea and Samaria. Do this for half a generation and then enjoy the cornucopia of blessings that we shall bestow on you.
Finally, neither the Palestinians nor any-one else should be deluded by egoistic Israelis who promote their careers, egos or personal predilections above their duty of loyalty to their country, nor by the nonsense declarations of UNESCO that seek to rewrite ancient Jewish and Christian history and to supplant us with those (Muslims) who did not exist as such for centuries after the authentic events.
In short, they should get real and we should get real. But the first show of resolve needs to come from us, so that no-one has any doubt: this is a country where the rule of law is fundamental, and our citizens should respect their duty not to prejudice their homeland in the forums that wish us harm.
© Howard Epstein – October 2016
Howard Epstein is a political commentator and the author of Guns, Traumas and Exceptionalism: America in the Twenty-First Century, recently published by Amazon and on Kindle. He writes:-
There is no need for me to tell you that the scourge of gun crime is perhaps the most pressing issue in the USA. My book takes a new approach – support failing gun control by approaching gun crime through the prism of gun culture.
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