Dan Schueftan, Director of the National Security Studies Program at Haifa University, spoke at Netanya AACI on the subject “How strong is Israel?” It was a most entertaining and enlightening presentation. Self-Portrait.
Jack Cohen – How Strong is Israel & Comparative Casualties
This is my feeble attempt to reproduce the thread of his argument. He started out by saying that he refuses to allow his students to use the term “solution,” all really significant problems have no clear solutions.
In essence, he answered the question posed in the title by saying at the outset that Israel is both extremely strong and at the same time extremely weak or more appropriately vulnerable. Israel is the only country that is accused of being both a Nazi State and that has failed in nearly 150 years of conflict with the Arabs to kill a significant number of its enemies. The conclusion would be that the Jews are incompetent Nazis. After all the Nazis killed 6 million Jews in 5 years, but the Jews have been unable to kill 4 million Palestinians in 150 years. In fact the Jews are not incompetent, but it is this failure that typifies Israel’s inner strength, we are a truly open society that cannot act as our enemies act.
Scheuftan gave examples that typify Israeli strength. When he was on the Suez Canal during the War of Attrition, instead of building thick conrete bunkers for the troops, they built bunkers with rocks and wire. Concrete bunkers look stronger, but after thousands of rounds of shells hitting them they would eventually collapse, while the rock and wire bunkers gave way, but did not collapse, and afterwards you could simply rearrange the rocks and the wire and they would withstand another battering. Israeli society is like that, strong and adaptable and able to withstand the attacks. From a purely military point of view Israel is extremely strong and capable. Yet we cannot stop our people being stabbed and rammed by cars, because we refuse to do what most other states would do in the circumstances.
There is no chance that the Arabs will in the foreseeable future make peace with Israel. Anyone who thinks the opposite is deluding himself. You have only to look at the butchery with which they treat each other. After the Six Day War of 1967 a majority of Israelis believed that peace with the Arabs was inevitable, after all hadn’t Israel shown them that they could defeat, and worse, humiliate them. But, no, they turned the defeat into a victory and then refused to make peace. The strength of Israeli society is that Israelis have gradually turned away from this delusion and have accepted that the conflict with the Arabs is a permanent feature of living in the Middle East. He gave the example that after the victory of the Six Day War Israelis hoped that their sons would not have to serve in the military, but today Israelis have accepted that their sons and grandsons will have to serve.
Some will claim that Egypt made peace with Israel, but that is not really true. Pres. Mubarak and his military elite made peace with Israel, but the vast majority of his countrymen did not do so. This is borne out by the extreme hostility shown during the brief period of true democracy when Pres. Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood was elected by a large majority of Egyptians. Only the military-supported Government of Pres. al Sisi can keep the Egyptian-Israel peace treaty. Incidentally this was one of the worst failures of the Obama Administration, that has shown a level of incompetence never before seen in the USA, that he supported Morsi against al Sisi.
Europe is a lost cause, the European intellectual elite is deeply self-destructive, having turned human rights on its head and now accept the narrative and “suffering” of the violent enemies of Western civilization, the Muslims. Political correctness is the greatest enemy of democracy. That does not mean that all European Governments are anti-Israel, on the contrary, the British Govt. of David Cameron is very pro-Israel. But, during the last Gaza War he had to throw a sop to the elite by declaring an arms embargo against selling weapons to Israel, although these were insignificant, while at the same time very sophisticated weapons were still being imported by the UK from Israel. The problem with Obama is that he thinks like the European elite and as such is a great danger to the future of the West. For example, while Russia was invading Ukraine, US Secty. of State Kerry made 33 trips to solve the Israel-Palestine dispute.
Instead of focusing on National Security and external threats, Schueftan said that Israel is strong enough to defeat Daesh (IS) and Iran if necessary, but what would be the greatest threat to Israel would be a breakdown in the cohesion of Israeli society. One of Israel’s greatest accomplishments is that we have made a strong vibrant and innovative society out of the dregs of Jewish humanity that came from Eastern Europe, the Holocaust and the the Arab countries. We have melded together into a unique, non-conformist Jewish society that is our greatest strength. As long as this remains true we can survive the constant external battering.
Jack Cohen – How Strong is Israel & Comparative Casualties
Comparative Casualties:
We know precisely how many Jews/Israelis have been killed by Arabs in the Israel-Arab conflict since 1920, namely 24,969 and this is until the end of 2014. Of these 3,791 were killed by Arab terrorists from 1948-2014. During the same period 1920-2014, 91,105 Arabs/Palestinians have been killed. Note that many of these Arab deaths are actually combatants who wear civilian clothes because they are “irregulars” or terrorists. For example, the total Palestinian deaths in Operation Protective Edge (2014) were ca. 2,100, but according to IDF estimates of these at least 40% were killed in combat, so that in fact the estimate of actual civilian deaths is ca. 1,260, regrettable, but small. Also note that Palestinian on Palestinian deaths (such as Hamas-Fatah conflict) are included in these statistics, and these amount to ca. 2,014 over the period 1987-2014 (how many people demonstrate against this). These figures are from the Jewish Virtual Library a valuable resource of information (http://www.
By comparison, let’s see how many civilians were killed by US forces in Iraq, since 2003 the minimum estimate is 151,000 Iraqi civilian deaths, the medium estimate is 500,000 and the high estimate is one million. The deaths of Palestinians caused by Israel since 1920 and certainly those in recent Gaza conflicts pale by comparison. In Afghanistan from 2001 to 2014, ca. 26,000 civilian deaths have been attributed to US military actions. Of course, these numbers do not include casualties from Taliban actions. The casualties attributed to UK and other allied forces are very difficult to obtain, and they may be a small portion of those detailed in Iraq and Afghanistan for US forces. Civilian casualties from ongoing US and allied and Russian airstrikes in Syria are not yet available.
There are currently violent conflicts going on in Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and elsewhere. Who knows (or cares) how many civilian deaths there have been in each case. But, concerned leftists can recite precisely how many Palestinians have been killed by Israel (of course an exaggerated number). The civil war in Sri Lanka (Ceylon) between Tamil separatists and Government forces up to 2009 caused ca. 80,000-100,000 civilian deaths. How many human rights activists in the West demonstrated against such excesses. Of course, all these casualty figures pale in comparison to the massacres and killings carried out by various Communist regimes in the 20th century, including the excesses of Stalin in the Soviet Union (est. 70 million murdered in 70 years), Cambodia (ca. 1 million deaths), China (including repression in Tibet) and North Korea (this number is not yet known, but is certainly greater than 1 million). When was the last time you saw a liberal-leftist demonstration in a great western city against North Korea or the uniquely repressive fanatical regime in Iran? Hypocrisy knows no bounds.
Jack Cohen – How Strong is Israel & Comparative Casualties
Jack Cohen was born in London, England, and studied art at high school. He chose a career in science and only returned to art many years later when he settled in the Washington DC area. He took courses at the Corcoran Gallery, Washington DC, the Jewish Community Center, Rockville MD and Montgomery College. On moving to Netanya in 1995 he studied at the Art Institute with Alex Umanski.
Many of the oil paintings of Jack Cohen contain geometric elements intermixed with other more abstract components. This has been described as his scientific/analytical side in tension with his creative/artistic side. Some of the early works are brightly colored, while the later works tend to be more subdued. A prominent theme of his latest works is shadows and the abstract nature of some aspects of reality. He has also had solo shows in 2001, 2004, 2006, 2008, and 2014 (see list on left).
Jack has been writing in his spare time for many years and recently gathered together his works and published them. They are available on-line, including his auto-biographical novel “Amanuensis,” (2009) his collections of short stories “Discovering America” and “Trove,” (2009), his memoir “Confessions of a Jewish Activist” (2010) and his most recent publication “Antisense” (2014). For further details click on the item on the left-hand list.
*Why “the bourgeois artist”? Because when I was a teenager I was advised that artists starve and so I pursued a career in science. Only when I retired did I return seriously to painting.
Jack Cohen – How Strong is Israel & Comparative Casualties
