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Author: David Gerstman

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David Gerstman

David Gerstman blogged as Soccer Dad from 2003 to 2010. Formerly a computer programmer, he is now a blogger for The Israel Project's The Tower blog.

Posted by David Gerstman on January 15, 2014 10 Comments
The columnist Michael Kinsley is reputed to have said that "a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth." Earlier this week  an Israeli newspaper leaked private comments that Israel's Defense Minister, Moshe (Bogie) Ya'alon made critical of Secretary of State John Kerry and expressing skepticism towards security guarantees proposed by Kerry:
"The American security plan presented to us is not worth the paper it's written on," Ya'alon said. "It contains no peace and no security. Only our continued presence in Judea and Samaria and the River Jordan will endure that Ben-Gurion Airport and Netanya don't become targets for rockets from every direction."
The description of Kerry by Ya'alon as "... determined and acting out of misplaced obsession and messianic fervor..." has caused a diplomatic row, even though the comments were made privately. The State Department expressed offense at Ya'alon's reputed remarks:
The remarks of the Defense Minister if accurate are offensive and inappropriate especially given all that the United States is doing to support Israel's security needs," State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in a statement.
Given the heat he was taking, Ya'alon issued an apology asserting that he intended no offense. (My Right Word reminds us that President Obama, a few years ago, affirmed an ad hominem attack on Prime Minister Netanyahu made by then French-President Nicholas Sarkozy.)

Posted by David Gerstman on January 12, 2014 16 Comments

Exhibit A:

In June, 1999, shortly after Ehud Barak had defeated Benjamin Netanyahu to become Israel's new prime minister, Charles Krauthammer wrote a column title, Clinton Should Have Targeted Arafat Instead. Krauthammer noted that Arafat was going around the world to lobby support for accepting UN General Assembly resolution 181 as a basis for any peace deal.
What is that? An obsolete, defunct resolution passed by the General Assembly (unlike 242 and 338, not by the Security Council, and thus not even binding) . . . in 1947! It partitioned British Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. At the time, every single Arab state and the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee totally rejected 181. In fact, they invaded the area given to the Jews with the express purpose of wiping it off the map. They failed. And now 50 years later, the Palestinians are converts to 181. What's wrong with that?

Posted by David Gerstman on January 08, 2014 12 Comments
At the end of October the New York Times hailed President Obama's foreign policy as "pragmatic," while largely ignoring the consequences. The two month old article was written by the White House reporter, but a recent article written from Beirut, Power Vacuum in Middle East Lifts Militants paints a somewhat less flattering picture of the administration's foreign policy.
For the first time since the American troop withdrawal of 2011, fighters from a Qaeda affiliate have recaptured Iraqi territory. In the past few days they have seized parts of the two biggest cities in Anbar Province, where the government, which the fighters revile as a tool of Shiite Iran, struggles to maintain a semblance of authority. Lebanon has seen two deadly car bombs, including one that killed a senior political figure and American ally.

Posted by David Gerstman on January 05, 2014 22 Comments

The spread of the quenelle - an antisemitic salute - is a testament to growing anti-Semitism tied to hatred of Israel, particularly in Europe.....

Posted by David Gerstman on January 03, 2014 3 Comments
When I was almost fifty four, it was a very good year It was a very good year for kindly faced clerics Whose Justice Minister was an executioner And Defense Minister waged an anti-American war When I was almost fifty four.
Nearly two years ago Jeffrey Goldberg interviewed President Obama about how he would deal with the threat from Iran. Given Goldberg's support for Israel, the interview was part of an administration campaign to tell Israel and Israel's supporters in the United States that "we've got Israel's back." It's unsettling now, that Goldberg has declared that For Iran, 2013 Was a Very Good Year.
Remember that interim Iranian nuclear agreement forged in Geneva on Nov. 24, the one accompanied by blaring trumpets and soaring doves? Would it surprise you to know that the agreement -- a deal that doesn’t, by the way, neutralize the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program, just freezes the program, more or less, in place -- has not yet been implemented? Would it surprise you to learn that this deal might not be implemented for another month, or more? Or that in this long period of non-implementation, Iran is free to do with its nuclear program whatever it wishes? And that one of the things it is doing is building and testing new generations of centrifuges? Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency, recently said , “We have two types of second-generation centrifuges. We also have future generations which are going through their tests.” Happy New Year, everyone.

Posted by David Gerstman on January 02, 2014 6 Comments
John Kerry is returning to the Middle East to present his peace plan. Two recent articles show the way the peace process is misrepresented in the media. The AP reports Israel, Palestinians Face Hard Choices.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would likely have to recognize Israel's pre-1967 war frontier as the starting point for border talks with the Palestinians, an ideological reversal that would put him on a collision course with his hardline base. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas fears he'll be pressured to recognize Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people, a step he believes would abrogate the rights of Palestinian refugees and their descendants.
The parallelism here is bogus. In the first place the idea that having the "pre-1967 war frontier" (more correctly they should be called "the 1949 armistice lines") as a basis for any peace deal is a departure from the original intent of Resolution 242. After the 1967, Six Day War, there was an international consensus that an Israeli return to its pre-war borders was a "prescription for renewed hostilities."

Posted by David Gerstman on December 31, 2013 24 Comments
Professor Jacobson has already offered a critique of the investigative story by  the New York Times regarding the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. Other critiques have rolled in as well:
Fifteen months after the Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi which killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, the narrative of the attack continues to be shaped, and reshaped, by politicians and the press. But a New York Times report published over the weekend has angered sources who were on the ground that night. Those sources, who continue to face threats of losing their jobs, sharply challenged the Times’ findings that there was no involvement from Al Qaeda or any other international terror group and that an anti-Islam film played a role in inciting the initial wave of attacks. “It was a coordinated attack. It is completely false to say anything else. … It is completely a lie,” one witness to the attack told Fox News.
Since then, The Times has doubled down in support of its investigation and its conclusions with an editorial and an editor's note written by the paper's editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal. I'd like to add three more general observations:

Posted by David Gerstman on December 18, 2013 1 Comment
Eugene Kontorovich wrote an important essay for Commentary, Israel, Palestine, and Democracy. Here are three critical paragraphs from the middle of the essay:
The Palestinians have developed an independent, self-regulating government that controls their lives as well as their foreign policy. Indeed, they have accumulated all the trappings of independence and have recently been recognized as an independent state by the United Nations. They have diplomatic relations with almost as many nations as Israel does. They have their own security forces, central bank, top-level Internet domain name, and a foreign policy entirely uncontrolled by Israel. The Palestinians govern themselves. To anticipate the inevitable comparison, this is not an Israeli-puppet “Bantustan.” From their educational curriculum to their television content to their terrorist pensions, they implement their own policies by their own lights without any subservience to Israel. They pass their own legislation, such as the measure prohibiting real estate transactions with Jews on pain of death. If Israel truly “ruled over” the Palestinians, all these features of their lives would be quite different. Indeed, the Bantustans never won international recognition because they were puppets. “The State of Palestine” just got a nod from the General Assembly because it is not.

Posted by David Gerstman on December 16, 2013 5 Comments
I was right. I wrote that the previous agreement between the West and Iran should be used as a model for predicting how the ongoing P5 + 1 negotiations will go. Specifically, I wrote:
In the coming months when Iran and the West have a dispute over the meaning of terms of the Geneva deal or the discovery of something suspicious in Iran, Iran knows that it can bluff its way out of suffering any consequences for its bad faith.
Last week the Treasury Department designated a number of companies and individuals for their illegal trade with Iran.
“The Joint Plan of Action reached in Geneva does not, and will not, interfere with our continued efforts to expose and disrupt those supporting Iran’s nuclear program or seeking to evade our sanctions. These sanctions have isolated Iran from the international financial system, imposed enormous pressure on the Iranian economy, and motivated the Iranian leadership to make the first meaningful concessions on its nuclear program in over a decade,” said Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David S. Cohen. “Today’s actions should be a stark reminder to businesses, banks, and brokers everywhere that we will continue relentlessly to enforce our sanctions, even as we explore the possibility of a long-term, comprehensive resolution of our concerns with Iran’s nuclear program.”
The Iranian reaction was predictable.
Iranian negotiators in Vienna halted nuclear talks with major powers to return to Tehran for consultations Thursday after Washington blacklisted a dozen companies and individuals for evading US sanctions, Islamic Republic state media reported.
Iran's deputy nuclear negotiator Abbas Araqchi added:

Posted by David Gerstman on December 15, 2013 7 Comments
Shortly after the P5+1 nuclear deal with Iran was announced, Max Fisher of the Washington Post trumpeted Americans support an Iran nuclear deal 2 to 1. That’s a big deal.
But those polls dealt in generalities. It's easy to support negotiations in principle; it's much harder to support a specific deal, which would necessarily require U.S. concessions as well as placing a degree of trust in the Iranian government, which is not exactly popular here in the United States. The reason this latest poll merits special attention is that it asked Americans whether they would support the deal currently under discussion between Iran and the major world powers at Geneva.
But in subsequent weeks, a funny thing has happened, support the deal has eroded as Shmuel Rosner shows in a recent column tracking polls on the topic.
While the first polls following the the recent interim agreement with Iran all showed that the deal was met with a generally positive reaction by the American public, the latest Pew survey puts this view in question (according to Pew, there are more Americans who disapprove of the deal than Americans who support it). Is this a result of some of the public criticism the deal has received- or is it a matter of phrasing the question and of methodology?
Even a Reuters poll from the end of November that shows support for the deal by a ratio of two to one (44 percent to 22 percent) found 34 percent had no opinion on the deal. (Rosner supplied the "no opinion" number.)

Posted by David Gerstman on December 12, 2013 4 Comments
One of President Obama's pitches for re-election was "Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive." Or as the President said, slightly more elaborately, in a speech shortly before his re-election:
Remember, in 2008, we were in the middle of two wars and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Today, our businesses have created nearly 5.5 million new jobs. (Applause.) The auto industry is back on top. (Applause.) Home values are on the rise. (Applause.) We’re less dependent on foreign oil than any time in the last 20 years. (Applause.) Because of the service and the sacrifice of our brave men and women in uniform, the war in Iraq is over. The war in Afghanistan is winding down. Al Qaeda is on the run, and Osama bin Laden is dead. (Applause.) So we’ve made real progress these past four years.
Yes, Al Qaeda is on the run.

To Yemen:

Yemen which has been in a state of political turmoil since the ouster of its long time dictator, Ali Abdullah Saleh, is facing two insurgencies in the north: one are the Iran backed Houthi separatists and the other are Salafists. Both groups are fighting each other as well as Yemen's central government.

Posted by David Gerstman on December 11, 2013 13 Comments

Seen in a Giant parking lot in Pikesville, Maryland....

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