Eric the Blue

I suppose that, for Kool-aid drinkers, the Trump administration suspending for 30 days sanctions on Iranian oil sales is another example of Our Dear Leader “playing chess, not checkers.” To me, it looks like desperation as the midterms loom and the price of crude rises. We might be a week away from offering Iran some anti-aircraft missiles in exchange for reopening the Strait.

I saw recently that some MAGA nut in a high office said, in response to the charge that the U.S. was “going it alone” against Iran, that actually we have in Israel the best possible ally. Stories such as this one make me think that we may indeed have the ally we deserve. I think most of the article is behind a paywall, but, briefly, Alon Harel, an Israeli law professor, was sued for defamation by a Jewish settler in the Occupied Territories. The settler had published a screed in which he referred to Palestinians as “human animals” and called for their collective punishment, with no distinction made between terrorists and civilians. His article was titled “The Law of Jit is the Law of Rafah”–significant, because it was published a day after some settlers entered the Palestinian village of Jit, on the West Bank, where they killed a Palestinian man and set fire to some homes and cars. In a social media post Harel, in the course of harshly criticizing the article, called the author a member of “the Jewish Hamas.”

The Israeli court held in favor of the plaintiff and ordered Harel to pay the equivalent of $6,500 to the settler in compensation. Harel describes his reaction to the judgment in a subsequent social media post:

In my view, the doctrinal details of the case, and even the judgment itself, pale in comparison to one fact that powerfully exposes the moral decline of Israeli society and of its legal system. Most astonishingly, the judgment manages to proceed from beginning to end without referring –even once and not even in a single word–to the content of the article that prompted my response. Not a single word is devoted to describing, acknowledging, or engaging with its content. To the credit of the judge, she is not in favor of murder, of course–but also not in favor of condemning it either. It is as if the commitment to legal neutrality had been carried to an absurd extreme. This is precisely what makes this judgment so exceptionally morally depraved and deeply grotesque.

How can this be? How can a judge fail to express some resentment to an article which is calling for the mass murder of Palestinians? After all, such murder is not only morally depraved; it is also a crime under Israeli and international law. As a matter of fact, the article [by the settler] is defined as a crime under Israeli law (section 144 D2 of the criminal code–incitement to violence).

In Israel, a criminal wins a judgment against a law professor guilty of criticizing his criminal acts. The U.S. lifts sanctions against Iran while simultaneously trying to bomb Iran into submission. The only thing about any of this that makes much sense is that Israel and the U.S. should be allies.