One of the consistent themes sounded by Palestinian political leaders and their official media is their contention that Jewish roots in Jerusalem and throughout the historic land of Israel is a myth. They think denying the reality of Jewish history authenticates their efforts to undermine the legitimacy of the modern-day state of Israel.

It is this disturbing trend that gives any new archeological finds in Jerusalem a political angle that is in many respects unfortunate. It is for that reason the solid scholarly work of archeologists in the city have often been attacked by Arabs and anti-Israel activists elsewhere. These activists care little about the truth but are primarily motivated by a desire to weave a fictitious historical narrative in which the Jewish presence in the country and Jerusalem is minimized if not altogether expunged.

It is in this light the unveiling of a new site showcasing the most complete excavations from the First Temple Period in Jerusalem ought to be celebrated. The site, which was inaugurated today in the Walls Around Jerusalem National Park, includes the area thought to be the “Water Gate” mentioned in the Bible. The site includes a watchtower, royal buildings and multiple mikvot, or ritual baths. It was discovered by the brilliant Israeli archeologist Dr. Eilat Mazar, who also has had significant finds in the City of David. It was announced the site will soon be open to the public as part of the Davidson Center Archeological Garden.

The significance of these finds ought not to be underestimated. If this is, as Mazar believes, the area of the Water Gate mentioned in the Book of Nehemiah, then what she has found are the remnants of the walls built by King Solomon. Indeed, some of the large clay pots that were unearthed were still blackened by the fires started by the Babylonians when they destroyed the Temple.

The excavations were made possible by a gift by New York philanthropists Daniel Mintz and Meredith Berkman, who have also supported Mazar’s excavations in the City of David, where she uncovered other amazing sites such as what may have been a royal palace dating to the era of David and Solomon.

All of this undermines the argument made not only by the Palestinians but also by some left-wing scholars that the Davidic monarchy never existed. While these findings have inestimable scholarly worth, they are also a standing rebuke to those who refer to parts of Israel’s capital as “traditionally Palestinian” or “Arab East Jerusalem.” And that is precisely why supporters of the Palestinians have attacked Mazar’s work.

Those who seek to destroy Israel understand denying the historic legacy of the Jewish presence in Jerusalem is integral to their efforts. But as Mazar has again proved, all you need to confirm Jerusalem’s Jewish roots is to start digging.

During his much-commented interview with Fox’s Chris Wallace, Jon Stewart asked Wallace, “Who are the most consistently misinformed media viewers? The most consistently misinformed? Fox, Fox viewers, consistently, every poll.”

As someone who occasionally appears on Fox, I was interested to learn Politifact.com decided to look into this claim. The result? “The way Stewart phrased the comment, it’s not enough to show a sliver of evidence that Fox News’ audience is ill-informed. The evidence needs to support the view that the data shows they are ‘consistently’ misinformed — a term he used not once but three times. It’s simply not true that ‘every poll’ shows that result. So we rate his claim False.”

I happen to think Stewart, who is quite liberal, is a fantastic comedian. He’s also quite an able advocate for his views and usually well-informed. But in this case, he was simply wrong. It would be impressive, and I think surprising, if he admitted it.

Having arrived at the half-way point of President Obama’s third year in office, things are continuing to look quite bad for his presidency and for the country.

For example, the Associated Press  is reporting fewer people bought previously occupied homes in May, lowering sales to their weakest point of the year. Home sales decreased 3.8 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.81 million homes, the National Association of Realtors said today — far below the roughly 6 million annual sales rate typical in healthy housing markets. Last year, home sales reached only 4.91 million, the worst showing in 13 years.

According to Gallup, the president’s approval rating dropped four points in a single day while his disapproval ratings increased five points (the split is now 45 percent approve v. 48 percent disapprove).

And to add insult to injury, in a speech before a DNC audience last night, those in attendance laughed at Obama’s claim that “over the last 15 months we’ve created over 2.1 million private sector jobs.”

In his remarks, Obama went on to say, “I’m extraordinarily proud of the economic record that we were able to produce over the first two and a half years.”

I wonder why. The president has presided over an economy that has lost 2.5 million jobs since he was sworn in and has created only 600,000 jobs during the two years since the recovery began (the summer of 2009). The unemployment rate is up 25 percent since Obama took office and has been above 8 percent for almost 30 months (after the Obama administration promised it would not exceed 8 percent if his stimulus package was passed in early 2009). The debt has increased 35 percent during the Obama presidency. Gas prices have more than doubled. The housing crisis has recently entered a double dip and is now worse than the Great Depression. For the nine economic quarters Obama has been in office, real annual growth in GDP has been just 1.5 percent, just barely above  what it was during the decade of the Great Depression (1.3 percent). And chronic unemployment is worse than the Great Depression.

If Obama is extraordinarily proud of his economic record, he may be the only one.

Journalists from a variety of news outlets – including the New York Times and full camera crews from CNN, CBS – will be covering the anti-Israel flotilla from aboard one of the ships, according to The Nation correspondent Joseph Dana (who will also report from the flotilla).

While it’s hard to blame reporters for seeking out a colorful story, they should realize by joining the activists on the boat they are actually making themselves a part of the story. They will be with the flotilla when it attempts to violate international law by trying to break Israel’s legally-established naval blockade. And they could potentially interfere with the Israeli military’s ability to do its job if IDF soldiers are forced to board the ships.

The one upside of this development is at least now flotilla activists will have a more difficult time attacking IDF soldiers with knives once the network news cameras are rolling. But the unfortunate downside is these reporters are giving the flotilla activists exactly what they’re aiming for – media attention. Seeing as there’s no humanitarian reason for the flotilla (which is even more obvious now that the Egyptian border with Gaza has been opened), its only point is to generate publicity. The activists are sure to receive a lot of media coverage this time around – and they won’t even have to resort to stabbing soldiers to get it.

Is it me or is this presidency beginning to feel like one of those preposterously beset undertakings destined to live on in popular culture as a legendary illustration of Murphy’s Law? Here’s the AP with the latest mishap:

President Barack Obama’s health care law would let several million middle-class people get nearly free insurance meant for the poor, a twist government number crunchers say they discovered only after the complex bill was signed…. Medicare chief actuary Richard Foster says the situation keeps him up at night.. “I don’t generally comment on the pros or cons of policy, but that just doesn’t make sense,” Foster said during a question-and-answer session at a recent professional society meeting. It’s almost like allowing middle-class people to qualify for food stamps, he suggested.

Spiderman on Broadway can always cut its losses, close up shop, and leave the world no worse off. The same cannot be said of a continuously bedeviled presidential administration.

The White House is attacking a survey that shows nearly a third of all employers may drop their company’s health care coverage after Obamacare takes effect in 2014.  The McKinsey & Company study of employer attitudes shows 30 percent of all companies will “definitely” or “probably” drop their coverage in response to the implementation of the president’s signature government health care program.

That’s consistent with the opinions of many small business owners who believe the impact of the law will drive up their costs and force employees into the state-sponsored insurance exchanges that will be created by the legislation. But it’s not what the White House and Democrats want to hear, so they are doing their best to discredit the survey that disagrees with other studies which have produced different results. Read More

Jon Huntsman’s launch of his presidential campaign in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty was supposed to be a not-so-subtle attempt to invoke the legacy of Ronald Reagan. He sees himself as following in the Gipper’s footsteps in that he believes he can rescue the country in much the same manner and style as Reagan did in 1980. But any connection between Huntsman’s shallow ambition and the career of the great communicator is purely coincidental.

The link between Huntsman’s candidacy and Reagan rests on two points.

One is the sunny optimism emanating from Huntsman’s campaign. All of Huntsman’s pre-announcement speeches centered on his love of country and his happy vision of its future rather than on a critique of the Obama administration. Indeed, he has refused to even criticize the president by name.

Huntsman may be as optimistic in his view of the world as Reagan was, but the analogy here is forced. For all of his belief in America as the last best hope of mankind on earth and a city on the hill, Reagan was a stern and consistent critic of liberalism. His legendary standard stump speech wasn’t all Mom and apple pie, as Huntsman’s appears to be. It was also a scathing evisceration of what liberalism had done to America at home and how it had disarmed us abroad. Huntsman may have the same temperament as Reagan had and that’s good thing since, as we have seen with conservatives who adopt the surly, snide Richard Nixon approach to dealing with the press (we’re talking about you, Sarah Palin) the results aren’t pretty. But that didn’t stop Reagan from taking on liberals in a way the mild-mannered and non-ideological Huntsman seems incapable of doing. Read More

In his appearance on “This Week,” while arguing that it is “folly” to prolong our mistake in Libya, George Will used a historical comparison. “When Ronald Reagan, the much-quoted saint of the Republican Party, made a mistake, as he did in Lebanon, he quickly liquidated it,” according to Will.

It’s actually a bit more complicated than Will suggests, something Will himself understood at the time. (In his December 31, 1984 column, in a paragraph critical of Reagan’s weakness on national security, Will wrote, “Under Carter one embassy was seized. Under Reagan embassies are blown to smithereens and Americans are methodically beaten and shot in televised terrorism…. Reagan said the United States is back and standing tall. The United States was driven out of Lebanon by the Druse and Shiites.”)

The American withdrawal from Lebanon, in the aftermath of the October 23, 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks by Iranian-trained Hezbollah terrorists, was cited by Osama bin Laden in his 1996 fatwa against the United States as a sign of weakness. “Where was this false courage of yours when the explosion in Beirut took place on 1983 AD (1403 A.H),” bin Laden wrote. “You were turned into scattered bits and pieces at that time; 241 mainly Marine soldiers were killed… It was a pleasure for the ‘heart’ of every Muslim and a remedy to the ‘chests’ of believing nations to see you defeated in the three Islamic cities of Beirut , Aden and Mogadishu.” Read More

Daniel Byman, author of a fine new history of Israeli counterterrorism (“A High Price: The Triumphs and Failures of Israeli Counterterrorism”), has an oped in the Financial Times today warning of the perils facing post-Qaddafi Libya:

The country has strong tribal identities and no tradition of democracy. Col Qaddafi’s divide-and-rule policies further set Libyans against one another. Institutions such as the judiciary, media and civil society are weak or non-existent. Libya’s oil wealth is an invitation to corruption. All of this is a recipe for conflict or government collapse, not for a transition to democracy.

All true, which is why I find Byman’s proposed solutions so inadequate. He writes:

We badly need to learn more about the key players. We can provide political and financial support to democratic forces there only if we know who they are. Military training is important, too, not only to help the rebels win but to create a more unified, professional structure, which will help maintain stability once Col. Qaddafi has gone. …. Western powers control billions in Libyan assets held outside the country, which can be channelled to the opposition in exchange for its developing democratic institutions.

Nothing wrong with any of this. I support doing exactly what he says. But I am puzzled by the omission of a stabilization force. Given the risks of chaos, it makes sense for NATO, along with the UN, the African Union, and the Arab League, to plan to deploy a substantial peacekeeping force to Libya after Qaddafi’s fall to prevent violence and give the transitional government a chance to assert its authority. This should not require a large commitment of U.S. troops, but some may be needed along with forces from our allies.

We need to make plans for such a stabilization force now–not when it’s already needed. We have to be ready to go at a moment’s notice. I am concerned this is not the case today. Which is all the more reason to worry about what happens after Qaddafi is gone.

There are those who claim there is virtually nothing a Democratic president can do to Israel to cause liberal Jews to abandon his cause. But that is an exaggeration. Were a Democratic president to dramatically shift U.S. Middle East policy to Israel’s disadvantage without at the same time paying lip service to the concept of the U.S.-Israel alliance, there would probably be drastic consequences in terms of liberal Jewish support for that president. But even a president who made it clear from the first day of his administration he would distance the United States from Israel could retain the backing of liberal Jewish activists so long as he still claimed to be the friend of the Jewish state.

That is the only way to explain the willingness of so many Jewish Democrats who profess to be backers of Israel to line up in support of President Barack Obama’s re-election. As accounts of last night’s Barack Obama fundraiser for Jewish donors show, it doesn’t take much for a Democratic leader to seduce the Jewish faithful. As far as Israel is concerned, Barack Obama may be the least friendly resident of the White House since the first president George Bush or even Dwight Eisenhower, but that has not prevented him from raising large amounts of cash in the Jewish community. Nor will it prevent him from winning the majority of Jewish votes next year.

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Lt. Gen. Patrick O’Reilly, head of the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency, announced yesterday Israeli missile defense systems will be integrated into a planned U.S. regional defense array, where they will help protect U.S. forces in the Middle East and, perhaps, also Arab allies of America that don’t even have diplomatic relations with Israel. These systems – the Arrow for defense against ballistic missiles, Iron Dome and Magic Wand for shorter-range rockets – are a product of the close American-Israeli alliance: They were developed with generous American funding and in cooperation with American companies, but the technology is primarily Israeli. Now, that technology will be used to save American lives.

Last week, Col. Richard Kemp of the British army related that Israeli know-how is also saving British lives. In 2003, Kemp commanded the British forces in Afghanistan, which were confronting a weapon they had never faced before: suicide bombers. So he called Israel for help. Two days later, an Israeli brigadier general was in London giving him a four-hour briefing on everything Israel had learned from its years of dealing with suicide bombers. “It was from that meeting that my policy for countering suicide bombers in Afghanistan was devised – a policy that was subsequently adopted by all British forces, and has saved lives,” Kemp concluded.

 There are, of course, dozens of similar examples. Israeli technologies helped protect  U.S. forces in Iraq against Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). An Israel Defense Forces laboratory for analyzing IEDs has shared  its expertise with numerous countries fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, including the U.S., Britain, Germany and Italy. Nor, of course, is Israel’s benefit to the West limited to military issues: Israeli technology is found in most computers and cell phones, for instance, while Israeli companies have created tens of thousands of jobs in America.

All this should not even need to be said: After all, that’s how allies are supposed to act. But at a time when most of Europe openly views Israel as a principal obstacle to world peace, and even respected voices in America’s foreign policy establishment (mainly of the “realist” school) assert  the alliance with Israel provides few strategic benefits compared to its costs, it’s worth recalling the truth: Israel and the West are fighting a common enemy – radical Islam. But due to its location, Israel has been on the front lines of this battle for longer than other Western countries, and thus has painfully acquired expertise from which its allies derive enormous benefit every day.

If you believe Islamist terror would magically disappear if Israel did – that the London Underground, Indonesian nightclubs, Pakistani  hospitals  and American naval ships would never again be bombed if it weren’t for Israel – then of course, Israel’s contribution to this war is meaningless. But anyone who grasps the ludicrousness of that belief ought to recognize Israel’s vital role in helping the West minimize its casualties in what seems likely to be a long war.

We have to go over this theme now and again because analysts and diplomats charged with evaluating Palestinian progress tend to make things up a lot. Contrary to UN Special Coordinator Robert Serry, the Palestinians do not have functioning political institutions. Contrary to Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Store, the Palestinians can’t exert sovereignty over their territory. Contrary to Washington Institute analyst David Makovsky, the Palestinian government is structurally unable to embrace living side by side with Israel. There’s a pattern here.

Now it turns out, per the pro-Palestinian shills at  UNRWA, the Palestinian economy is still totally reliant on foreign funding. The government and the economy would collapse without a constant stream of donations. That wouldn’t be a huge problem except, per the soon-to-be-unemployed Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, it’s also the case Western and Arab countries have been routinely failing to provide promised funds. The shortfalls are preventing the Palestinian Authority from meeting the basic obligations governments are often expected to meet, like “paying for stuff.”

The international community is neglecting its commitments even while its cherubic Palestinian wards remain the global cause celebre. Should they ever fall off the radar they would receive even less attention, with a potential collapse of the Palestinian government becoming a real possibility. Read More

Continuing his Day 1 policy of putting “daylight” between the United States and Israel, the President yesterday warned his Middle East diplomacy would soon heighten “‘tactical’ disagreements” between the United States and Israel. He did this at a dinner where Democratic Jewish donors, the cheapest dates in American politics, paid between $25,000 and $35,800 for the privilege of having the President pat them on the head and tell them everything is OK:

Marilyn Victor, a supporter at the fundraiser, characterized the attitude of Jewish donors thusly: “We support you, but we’re a little insecure, so make us secure.” “We were very reassured,” said Randi Levine, who attended with her husband, Jeffrey, a real estate developer in New York City.

At  first you might be inclined to cringe at how pathetic Obama’s Jewish supporters sound, or to get outraged about their self-willed naivete. But at some point you really have to acknowledge the social scientific evidence  they just can’t help it. You can’t reason someone out of what they haven’t been reasoned into, and you especially can’t do it when they’re literally begging for soothing words so they don’t have to reason at all.

Also, dwelling on Jewish politics might distract from the sheer geopolitical incoherence of Obama’s continued efforts to detonate the U.S.-Israeli alliance.

Now it’s worth noting the President did promise never to fully break the alliance, limiting himself to predicting there would be tension if the Israelis didn’t accept the parameters of his goalpost-moving, agreement-abrogating, security-undermining Winds of Change speech. So everybody keep that in mind. No breaking. Just weakening. Weakening with absolutely no hope of a payoff when we’re down to one stable ally in the Middle East – but just weakening. Read More