American policymakers “fail properly to recognize Israel’s virtue, its singular character as a free society amid a hellscape of dictatorships, theocracies and rampaging jihadists,” writes Ayn Rand Institute scholar Elan Journo in his new book. What Justice Demands: America and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict provides a crystal-clear case for why right justifies might in supporting Israel’s developed democracy in its longstanding fight for survival against freedom’s foes.
Journo’s survey of Israel’s historic conflict with its Arab neighbors, including those now called Palestinians, and Israel’s Middle East surroundings, documents his decisive thesis that:
justice demands…a principled stand in support of Israel—along with everyone else in the region who seeks genuine freedom, including among the Palestinian population—and a stand against the Palestinian movement and its cause.
Journo comprehensively debunks the oft-propagated distortions that slander Israel’s Jewish state, truly a lone “light to the nations” in a depressingly dark Middle East, as a “shitty little country.” Indicative of the Middle East is “Third World…dead-end poverty, ignorance, stagnation,” he explains, while particularly noting the region’s various repressive Islamic societies. “Religious subjugation of the individual is a salient political norm in the Middle East,” and “not only of the region’s outright theocracies and medievalist monarchies, but also of the nominally secular regimes.”
“Whereas women in Saudi Arabia have long been forbidden from driving a car or leaving home unchaperoned, in Israel women pilot fighter jets,” Journo writes, in a stunning contrast of Israel with Middle Eastern illiberalism. “Throughout the region, only Israel exhibits a commitment to the principle of the rule of law,” as exemplified by former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s corruption conviction. “Only in Israel can you breathe in fresh air” via a free media, and not the “region-wide smog of government thought control,” while against the Middle East’s “tumultuous political backdrop, people in Israel enjoy a decidedly First World standard of living.”
Symbolic of Israel’s religious freedom and treatment of non-Jewish minorities, Journo notes, is the fact that the “Baha’i temple in the northern Israeli city of Haifa, flanked by lavish gardens, is a tourist landmark.” He also reviews how the “characterization of Israel’s ‘Arab’ citizens as ‘second-class’ citizens is an overstatement.” To counter any public or private discrimination and neglect they face, “Israel’s political system, its rule-of-law institutions, its independent courts” offers the “best chance of having wrongs righted.”
Journo refutes common myths about Arab grievances throughout the history of Zionism and Israel. He notes that during the Palestine Mandate’s Zionist settlement, “incoming Jews acquired land by purchasing it,” often from Arab landlords eager to sell. To the extent that these landlords shortchanged their tenant farmers’ interests, Zionists are not the culprits.
Journo also exposes the fraudulent “right of return” demand regarding those Arabs who lost their homes in what became Israel during its 1948 independence war, largely through flight. The farcical definition of this “refugee” population encompasses not just those few still living from among some 600-700,000 Arabs who fled this war, but also their descendants, for a total population of over five million. Thus this “is a demand for the return of a population more than six times larger than the one that fled, seventy years ago,” and that is “replete with individuals deeply hostile to Israel’s continued existence. That cannot end well.”
Journo likewise refutes the ubiquitous tropes of a brutal Israeli “occupation” in the Palestine Mandate territories that Egypt and Jordan seized during 1948’s Arab state “scrimmage for conquest,” and that Israel later won during the 1967 Six Day War. Following 1967, the “residents of the occupied territories actually saw their standard of living rise” enormously under Israeli administration. “Israeli rule was objectively superior to what came before, under Egyptian or Jordanian authority—and superior to whatever degree of Palestinian self-rule was permitted to take hold later.”
Contrary to such falsifications by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) that emerged in the 1960s to lead a Palestinian national movement, “[t]here is no genuine Palestinian grievance, no past or present wrong, that it has worked to right.” Either “aging PLO peddlers of Marxist-Leninism, Arab nationalism, Palestinian nationalism” or in more recent years jihadists such as Hamas have characterized an unsavory Palestinian leadership. These leaders have “indoctrinated their avid followers—along with innocent children and unwilling adults—in the nobility of slaughter and destruction and martyrdom,” now a “distinctive feature of Palestinian society.”
Such Palestinian pathologies made stillborn the 1990s Oslo Accords peace process and its precursor at the 1991 Madrid Conference, Journo says. Here the “premise animating George H.W. Bush’s administration was that the moral character of the adversaries was really beside the point; you could bargain with anyone.” Thus PLO leader Yasser “Arafat—a man with the blood of thousands on his hands, the leader of an officially designated terrorist organization—had his sins washed away. Instantly, he was anointed a partner for peace, a statesman.” “The price of this grotesque fiction, to which Israel and the United States were active parties, would be the lives of numerous individuals” due to subsequent Palestinian violence under a “phased strategy” of seeking Israel’s destruction.
This phony peace process helped demonstrate that Israel today is “tightly enmeshed in a wider clash between free societies and Islamic totalitarianism,” Journo notes. Yet repeatedly, “America has sold out the region’s only free society—Israel—along with freedom-seeking people across the Middle East and among the Palestinian community.” For example, President George W. Bush’s democracy agenda “sowed chaos across the Middle East by empowering Islamists” in places such as Iraq and Gaza’s “Hamas-stan.” “Essential to the democracy crusade was an evasion of the prevailing ideas in the Middle East, chiefly the embrace of Islamic totalitarian ideas,” Journo somberly evaluates.
Such ideas mean that the Oslo peace process “was, and remains, premature—by several generations,” Journo concludes, as “no genuine grievance…can be righted by the creation of a nationalist dictatorship or an Islamic theocracy.” “No one who understands the nature and aims of the Palestinian movement can take seriously the idea of rebooting the peace talks.” Any possible Palestinian state is “reasonable only in a future where the Palestinian community has re-oriented itself toward rational ideals.”
Accordingly, Journo endorses the “compelling case” for Daniel Pipes’s Israel Victory Project, for which this author has written. Journo closes with a quotation from his libertarian inspiration Ayn Rand denouncing “moral neutrality,” and thereby recalls her stark past statements on Israel’s defense against Arab neighbors. As Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer’s American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) in an advertisement campaign quoted Rand: “in any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man.”
Mac-101 says
I support Israel 100%. However, the USA needs to stop supporting Israel financially, the entire ME and the whole world. We are BROKE. Let the Oil Ticks support their Muslim Brothers and the numerous Multi Billionaires support their cousins!
carpediadem says
Oh you can rest easy, brother, the US does NOT support Israel, it pays them money to use American weapons and it is an EXCHANGE not a support system. They are allies after all, if you even know what that means.
I agree with you re supporting the Muslims or rather paying them jizya – every democracy is in that hell stupid position.
Mac-101 says
I believe if you add up the multi-Billion dollar people in front of the curtain, let alone the Trillion dollar people behind the curtain, THEY can fund Israel quite nicely using THEIR money!
.
Once again we are way past BROKE!
elee says
(1) For future recommendations, please provide publisher name and ISBN for ordering copies;
(2) Hey folks ask your local library to buy this book.
Andrew Harrod says
The book website is linked.
FYI says
Here’s some validation for you..
Observant Jews {and christians who know Biblical prophecy)will understand this:moslems won’t.
The Book Of Joel Chapter 3
Who is the owner of the Land of Israel?
Actually it belongs to the God of Moses.
The God of Moses gave Israel(“My Land”)to the Jews.
Did He give it to the “palestinians”?Nope
That there should be a Jewish State,which the True God of Moses promised would be re-established(as it was in 1948)is 100% in line with official prophecy.
muslims don’t get it because “allah”{ the god of islam who CURSES the Jews koran 2 v65,koran 9:30)is NOT the Biblical God of moses.Also.due to an epic theology fail in koran 4:171{which christians will understand..}….allah rejects that aspect of God through which Biblical prophecy comes.Ludicrous!
Secular Jews may or may not get this but religious Jews most certainly will:the Re-establishment of Israel was not actually down to Zionists but it was due to the God of Israel.
The land was set aside for this purpose;Israel was ALWAYS going to be re-established with the full permission of God.
Have no doubt about that if you are a Jew/living in Israel!
Philip Sommer says
Utter rubbish. No land is “God’s” land to parcel out to any tribe.
Ibrahim itace muhammed says
Andrew Harrod, the book is just a covered rubbish. Fascist evil Zionist State of Israel has no cause, but carrying out act of brigandage occupying palestinian land and carrying out mass killings of Palestinians. Is that your sense of upholding Human Rights?
SAE says
Rather than spewing your hatred and making false accusations Ibrahim, why don’t you cite specific arguments in the book. Perhaps if you’d actually read it, you might learn the truth. While you’re at it, read Robert Spencer’s book, The Truth about Muhammad, as well.
Guy Forester says
Unless he is on a terrorist watch list, perhaps he should go there and see how life really works there. However, that might result in cognitive dissonance and lead to unimaginable consequences. 🙂
Ibrahim itace muhammed says
SAE, neither this book trying to validate fascist evil Zionist State of Israel’s iellgal occupation and annexation of Palestinian portion of the land given to them under UN Resolution No 181 or Mr Spence’s book “Truth about Muhammad “is an authoritative work on the issues they have expounded. This book is based on the concocted lies by evil Jews to justify their expansionist ambition contained in “protocol of Zion “,while that of Mr spencer is nothing more than collection of lies concocted by orientalists and mithraist christian evangelist liars of old.
Carol the 1st says
Ibby, you have such a gloomy view of Jews. Perhaps you missed this video on JW lately, if you watch it now it should lift your spirits:
Glazov Gang: Avi Jorisch on “Thou Shalt Innovate”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlDuoPyIp_w
gravenimage says
Of course the foul Ibrahim itace muhammed doesn’t think that Jews should be allowed to live freely.
He has openly said here that he seeks the destruction of Israel and the genocide of the Jews.
gravenimage says
New Book Validates Israel’s Just Cause
……………………
I’ve seen Elan Journo’s work before–excellent stuff.
Here are some of his articles at Capitalism Magazine:
http://capitalismmagazine.com/author/ElanJourno/
UNCLE VLADDI says
Here’s what’s (always!) really going on, at any and all levels of human interactions, be they individual, familial, clannish, tribal, national, state, empire and even at the global level:
Criminality comprises and contains these 4 intertwined habitual choices aka “mental illness syndromes:”
Psychopathy – Literally really only the Greek words for “thought killing:” planning one’s responses due to
Paranoia – The idea that everyone’s out to get one – makes one give in to being outnumbered as inevitable;
Masochism – The cowardly cancellation of half the threatened pain, known as fear, by Submitting to it via
Hypocrisy – The attempt to pre-empt danger by pretending to instantly SUBMIT to all criminal extortions.
And all of these are really only pretend aspects of the same thing: slanderously extortive “Paranoia!” but while most people have sussed out that life is full of pain-causing damage, the remembered fear of those pains (which is also another form of pain) and the sneaky and ultimately useless greed for less and hope of no pain, followed by the ultimate destruction of death – at least a third of people aren’t so stupid as to pretend to imagine that they can escape from this insulting attack on them by attacking other people who may be just as equally victimized by it as they are. Only evil people pretend that, as the whole of conscious existence or “God” has already attacked them first and will always continue to do so, they are entitled to randomly counter-attack any and all of its individual component parts (people) in response!
Naturally, their excuse on an individual basis is to conflate such ultimately only pretended division with the whole: “So what? My crimes aren’t crimes because we (i.e: You) all do it, too!”
What the criminal spychopath really hates, is the trick God plays on them by pretending to be divided!
See also: Muhammad’s islam!
😉