TDDPirate’s Ideas

One of the constants in Israeli history is that Israel wins wars but loses in the post-war diplomatic front, so Israel doesn’t succeed in converting its war victories into everlasting peace with its neighbors.

Why is this so? Is it because the Israeli leaders are so preoccupied with the daily tasks of managing Israel, that they have no time to plan ahead? Is it because no one thought about the future?

About the value of planning ahead, Eliot A. Cohen wrote that two great war statesmen planned ahead and defined what are their war goals. They knew what kind of peace they want to have. One of them (Abraham Lincoln) achieved it, and the other’s (Winston Churchill) opinions stood the test of time.

Two other war statesmen won wars but did not win everlasting peace. One of them was David Ben-Gurion, who failed to define what he wants to accomplish in the 1948 War of Independence, and toward what kind of peace to strive. One of the consequences is that Israel did not have peace with any of its neighbors until the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty.

This pattern, of fighting and winning but without planning ahead the kind of desirable victory, continued in the Arab-Israeli wars since 1948, in spite of journalists having spent lots of ink writing about it and heavily criticizing the leaders for this shortcoming. The only exception, of which I am aware, is the 1982 Lebanon War (now known as the First Lebanon War), whose goals were defined. However, this exception proves the rule, because those goals were not consistently pursued due to political pressure from various leaders and other reasons.

Now I suspect that the consistent failure to define war goals was not an oversight by overwhelmed Israeli leaders, but part of a systematic problem. To define war goals and to get most of the Israelis to agree with them, one needs first to define what kind of Israel one wants and get this vision accepted by the overwhelming majority of the Israelis. If we want to emphasize territory annexion, we need one set of war goals. If we want to emphasize human rights, we need another set of war goals.

The systematic problem is that Israelis cannot agree what kind of Israel they want. There is a conflict between the secular (who want a state of the Jews) and the religious (who want a Jewish state). There is also a conflict between the Settlers (who want to annex as much land as the world will let them) and the Leftists, who care about the human rights of Palestinians living in land currently controlled by Israel.

A consequence of the internal conflicts is that it is impossible for any Israeli leader to define, articulate and consistently pursue any coherent set of war goals. At least if he does not want to commit political suicide (Ariel Sharon at 1982, anyone?) or reap lots of poisonous criticism from people who don’t agree with his vision of Israel and the war goals to be pursued.

Today I decided at last to have a look at Bibi Netanyahu’s blog, whose existence I know about for a while.
The blog is written in Hebrew.
He considers the problems of the Israeli educational system, which has been deteriorating for several years by now.
His suggestion - apply the same basic approach, which he successfully applied when he was Minister of Finance and got the Israeli economy to improve in a big way.
What basic approach?
Find which countries have the most successful policies (then - economics, now - educational). Then learn from their experience.
All the rest are mere details.

This approach is also politically feasible:

• It is easier to sell a new policy to other politicians and to the constituency if you show that it worked beautifully in country A and country B.
• In the specific case of the educational system, the solution is to get better people in, less suitable people out. Fortunately, it is not so difficult to do so in time scale of 10 years, thanks to the big employee turnover in the system.

In the wake of Sarkozy’s words of support of Israel against Iran, I have some questions.

• Did France officially end the weapons embargo against Israel, which Charles de Gaulle imposed upon Israel at the start of the Six-Day War at 1967?
• Did France officially apologize to Israel for excluding Iraq from the above embargo, which ostensibly applied to all sides in the Mideast conflict?  During the years after the Six-Day War, France sold weapons to Iraq, even though Iraq has always been in official state of war with Israel, having no ceasefire or armistice agreements with it.
• Was Israel reimbursed the price it paid for the 50 fighter airplanes, which were ordered and paid for, but not delivered to Israel due to the embargo?

And since Iraq has been mentioned, I have an unrelated question:

• Is Iraq, as an USA-controlled territory, now in official state of war against Israel?

During the Second Lebanese War, more than a year ago, I discovered the world of Arab bloggers - from Lebanon, Egypt and other countries.  After the war ended, I continued to follow the Rantings of a Sandmonkey, a blog very critical of the Arabs, Islam and Arab politics.

I followed this blog until May 2007, when he stopped blogging due to some problems he was having and whose nature was not precisely disclosed.

Today I was happy to find that he resumed blogging at August 2007.  I was amused by his rant about the political antics of misguided do-gooders messing around with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Background Information

The Israeli Ministry of Interior is planning to computerize the process of elections in Israel, using electronic voting machines. They are planning to start by running a pilot in ten settlements during the upcoming Nov. 27, 2007 council elections.
Sources:

• Computerized Elections: a year from now (in Hebrew)
• Forget paper ballots: switching to computerized voting (in Hebrew)

This is a Bad Idea

The following reasons are given for the move to computerized elections:

1. Reduction and even elimination of rigging votes and multiple voting.
2. Election results availability few minutes after end of elections.
3. Budgetary savings.
4. Ability to vote from anywhere without special procedures.

Unfortunately, the first three reasons are either untrue or are insufficient justification for switching to computerized elections.

1. The worldwide experience with election machines is that they are not secure, not well-designed, violate anonymity of votes, and facilitate rigging of votes even more than paper based ballots.
   Sources:
   • http://www.votersunite.org/ - a Web site promoting fair and accurate elections.
   • Myth Breakers - Facts About Electronic Elections
   • The globalization of electronic election theft
   • Electronic Elections in Belgium: auditing the Digivote sourcecode
2. Election results are not available if the voting machines develop technical problems, as they did in several elections in the world. A more fundamental point is that the integrity of the election process is worth the wait until the next morning. Confronted by the choice between rigged elections with speedy results and clean elections with results available only after 10 hours or so, every sane citizen would choose the second alternative without thinking twice.
3. Any budgetary savings from using election machines are wiped by bad policies adopted by corrupt politicians, who got elected to office thanks to corrupt elections process. This is one place where one could be penny wise and Pound foolish (or one million wise and ten billion foolish).
4. The fourth goal of computerized elections can be accomplished by alternative means - for example, by using computers only to verify that a voter did not already vote elsewhere. Paper ballots can still be used for the actual votes.

See also:

• electronic voting and Democracy
• Paper Makes a Comeback as Electronic Elections Spur Opposition
• Voting category in Freedom to Tinker blog
• More California E-Voting Reports Released; More Bad News

It is to be noted that the talkbacks to the news items about the Israeli Ministry of Interior plans demonstrate that Israelis are clueful about the dangers of electronic elections.

What Can be Done About This?

• Find which voting machines will be used in the pilot and publicize audit results and cracking tips available from other countries where they were already used.
• Refuse to vote in the voting machines during the pilot.
• In the pilot, the results from the electronic voting machines will not have official use, so it may not be unlawful to actually crack into them. DISCLAIMER: IANAL. CONSULT WITH YOUR LAWYER BEFORE DOING ANYTHING ABOUT THIS SUGGESTION.

It is now fashionable to promote various worthy causes, like environmental preservation, by posing in the nude. Plans to make a nude photo of both sides in a conflict are under way for the fans of two Scottish football teams, who rioted at 1980 in an Old Firm Game at Hampden^*.

So this is the right time to air the outlandish, unrealizable and crazy idea of taking a photo of a group of nude Israelis and Palestinians^** - both men and women.

^* Background information about the Rangers vs. Celtic conflict:

• A rivalry tied up in religion
• Old Firm

^** Yes, I know about the Arab (including Palestinian) tendency to kill women, who violate “family honor” by “inappropriate sexual behavior”.

The 2000 Al Aqsa Intifada erupted in Arab cities and villages in both Israel and the occupied areas. The theme was that the Jews want to destroy the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem - the third most sacred site to the Muslims.

Jews did not understand from where did this claim come. If any mosque were at risk due to conflicting religious demands, it would have been the Dome of the Rock, which stands at the location of the Temples of old times.

Bob Wallace’s How Propaganda Works is the best explanation to this phenomenon, which I read. The life of the Israeli Arabs has been relatively peaceful. Very few Israeli Arabs indulged in terrorism without first leaving Israel. Some sick leaders want to get them to fight the Jews, to make life in Israel more difficult than it is. To accomplish this goal, the Israeli Arabs need to be persuaded that the Jews are after something sacred to them.

To point out the inequality in standards of life, level of education in schools, electricity supply, disposal of sewage - is not enough - because those are problems which can be solved in few years once the will and pressure are there. Therefore, some grievance, which cannot be resolved because it was not based upon fact in the first place, had to be invented. Hence, the accusations that Jews want to destroy the Al Aqsa Mosque.

See Preservation of Al Aqsa Mosque and other Muslim holy sites about sites important to the Muslim world, which are under Muslim control, and which are not preserved by the Muslims, to say the least.

Top 25 Censored Stories of 2007
Some of the stories are startling. For example:
#2 Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran
#11 Dangers of Genetically Modified Food Confirmed

The information is slanted against Israel - see:
#9 The World Bank Funds Israel-Palestine Wall
On the other hand, the story of Palestinian terror acts, before the Wall’s construction was started, is not widely known outside of Israel and is not in the list.

In addition to few massive lawsuits, there is also a petition to add captions to all Hebrew language TV broadcasts in Israel, for the benefit of the hearing impaired. You can find it in http://www.azuma.co.il/show_petition.pl?id=889.

• I saw nowhere any mention of the fact that when the Neturei Karta accuse the Zionists of causing the Holocaust, they imply that the Holocaust did happen.
• The story about Iranian attitudes during the Holocaust is not given wide publicity either. Those were different times altogether.
• Nor are the stories of the “Tehran Children” being publicized. They were Jewish children, who were sent to Tehran to be rescued from the Nazis. They lived there during the World War II and eventually immigrating to Israel.

Addendum from December 15, 2006:
It seems that Yasser Arafat financed the Neturei Karta and bought their support.