In the aftermath of last month’s diplomatic ruckus—Israeli bureaucrats referred, with Vice-President Biden in town, to building apartments for Jews in East Jerusalem; the Obama administration took severe umbrage; the Palestinians pulled out of the nascent proximity talks—things, at this moment, remain stuck. Does that mean no progress toward the administration’s cherished goal of a Palestinian state, and frustration all around?

Not necessarily. Moshe Elad, a columnist for Israel’s largest daily Yediot Aharonot, notes that the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, and prime minister, Salaam Fayyad, have been talking about unilaterally declaring such a state in 2011—and that while “in the past, such statements would anger the Americans…this time around, even if we heard a response from the White House or the State Department, it was rather meek.”

Palestinians, Elad reports, have been setting aside their traditional anti-Americanism and “taking pleasure in feeling that ‘America is with us’”; and are “coordinating with the Americans the building of infrastructure across the West Bank as preparation for economic independence and detachment from Israel’s hold.” Elad goes on to ask “What will Israel’s position be in respect to the long list of guests invited to the ceremony that will seek to land in Ben-Gurion Airport?”—that is, if and when the Palestinians declare their state next year and invite many of the world’s dignitaries to honor the event.

Yaakov Katz, military correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, describes Israel as “extremely worried” about the prospect “because it may lead to a third intifada, during which Israel would be fighting a 20,000-strong militia”—much of which would be American-trained. As Katz explains,

Five battalions of 500 soldiers each and trained by US security coordinator Lt.-Gen. Keith Dayton in Jordan have already deployed throughout the West Bank alongside seven regional battalions.

By 2011, another five battalions will have undergone training. Fayyad’s plan is to then dismantle the regional battalions and expand the Dayton-trained battalions to close to 1,000 soldiers each, bringing the total number to around 10,000. Add the police and the presidential guard and the number of armed PA security officers comes out to around 20,000.

The Palestinians would still then have to face the fact that about 300,000 Israelis live in settlements in the West Bank. “The solution—an official PA decision to launch a violent terror campaign branded around the world as a war for freedom.”

Or, in another scenario, Fayyad goes to the UN Security Council to get his state recognized; with the Europeans, Russians, and Chinese likely to assent, the question mark is the United States.

Traditionally the U.S. has vetoed anti-Israeli resolutions in the Security Council, and also has upheld the principle of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations as the way to resolve the dispute. But given what is now known about President Obama’s identification with Palestinian goals, delegitimization of any Israeli presence in the West Bank and even East Jerusalem, contemptuous treatment of Israel’s prime minister, and hurried timetable for Palestinian statehood—augmented by General Dayton’s activities that started under President Bush—Israelis can no longer be confident of U.S. backing in such a situation.

Some say these fears are exaggerated because Abbas and Fayyad lack sufficient Palestinian support. While Abbas’s Fatah movement (with which Fayyad, while not a member, is effectively aligned) is thought likely to defeat Hamas in this summer’s municipal elections, Fatah is itself deeply divided with its young guard scorning Abbas and Fayyad as weaklings—to the point that even a civil war is not ruled out.

Israel, though—as if not already pressured enough by the Hamas, Hezbollah and, ultimately, Iranian threats—has to take all scenarios into account, and now would be the time to start emphasizing to friends in the U.S. the dangers posed by a Palestinian state. True, in his speech at Bar-Ilan University last June, Prime Minister Netanyahu said he could accept such a state as the outcome of negotiations if it, in turn, was genuinely accepting of Israel and effectively demilitarized.

Clearly, a unilaterally declared Palestinian state would be neither. It would be bristling with hatred instilled by the seventeen years of hate-education enabled by the “peace process,” and with largely American-provided forces that would only grow as further weapons, trainers, and fighters flowed in from the Arab and Muslim world.

As hands are wrung in the aftermath of the near-tragedy on a Northwest Airlines flight approaching Detroit, a conversation from London’s Heathrow airport in 1986 comes to mind.

Nizar al-Hindawi and Ann-Marie Murphy.

It consisted of an El Al security agent quizzing one Ann-Marie Doreen Murphy, a 32-year-old recent arrival in London from Sallynoggin, Ireland. While working as a chambermaid at the Hilton Hotel on Park Lane Murphy met Nizar al-Hindawi, a far-leftist Palestinian who impregnated her. After instructing her to “get rid of the thing,” he abruptly changed his tune and insisted on immediate marriage in “the Holy Land.” He also insisted on their traveling separately.

Murphy, later described by the prosecutor as a “simple, unsophisticated Irish lass and a Catholic,” accepted unquestioningly Hindawi’s arrangements for her to fly to Israel on El Al on April 17. She also accepted a wheeled suitcase with a false bottom containing nearly 2 kilograms of Semtex, a powerful plastic explosive, and she agreed to be coached by him to answer questions posed by airport security.

Murphy successfully passed through the standard Heathrow security inspection and reached the gate with her bag, where an El Al agent questioned her. As reconstructed by Neil C. Livingstone and David Halevy in Washingtonian magazine, he started by asking whether she had packed her bags herself. She replied in the negative. Then:

“What is the purpose of your trip to Israel?” Recalling Hindawi’s instructions, Murphy answered, “For a vacation.”

“Are you married, Miss Murphy?” “No.”

“Traveling alone?” “Yes.”

“Is this your first trip abroad?” “Yes.”

“Do you have relatives in Israel?” “No.”

“Are you going to meet someone in Israel?” “No.

“Has your vacation been planned for a long time?” “No.”

“Where will you stay while you’re in Israel?” “The Tel Aviv Hilton.”

“How much money do you have with you?” “Fifty pounds.” The Hilton at that time costing at least £70 a night, he asked:

“Do you have a credit card?” “Oh, yes,” she replied, showing him an i.d. for cashing checks.

That did it, and the agent sent her bag for additional inspection, where the bombing apparatus was discovered.

Had El Al followed the usual Western security procedures, 375 lives would surely have been lost somewhere over Austria. The bombing plot came to light, in other words, through a non-technical intervention, relying on conversation, perception, common sense, and (yes) profiling. The agent focused on the passenger, not the weaponry. Israeli counterterrorism takes passengers’ identities into account; accordingly, Arabs endure an especially tough inspection. “In Israel, security comes first,” David Harris of the American Jewish Committee explains.

Obvious as this sounds, overconfidence, political correctness, and legal liability render such an approach impossible anywhere else in the West. In the United States, for example, one month after 9/11, the Department of Transportation issued guidelines forbidding its personnel from generalizing “about the propensity of members of any racial, ethnic, religious, or national origin group to engage in unlawful activity.” (Wear a hijab, I semi-jokingly advise women wanting to avoid secondary screening at airport security.)

Worse yet, consider the panicky Mickey-Mouse, and embarrassing steps the U.S. Transportation Security Administration implemented hours after the Detroit bombing attempt: no crew announcements “concerning flight path or position over cities or landmarks,” and disabling all passenger communications services. During a flight’s final hour, passengers may not stand up, access carry-on baggage, nor “have any blankets, pillows, or personal belongings on the lap.”

Some crews went yet further, keeping cabin lights on throughout the night while turning off the in-flight entertainment, prohibiting all electronic devices, and, during the final hour, requiring passengers to keep hands visible and neither eat nor drink. Things got so bad, the Associated Press reports, “A demand by one attendant that no one could read anything … elicited gasps of disbelief and howls of laughter.”

Widely criticized for these Clouseau-like measures, TSA eventually decided to add “enhanced screening” for travelers passing through or originating from fourteen “countries of interest” – as though one’s choice of departure airport indicates a propensity for suicide bombing.

The TSA engages in “security theater” – bumbling pretend-steps that treat all passengers equally rather than risk offending anyone by focusing, say, on religion. The alternative approach is Israelification, defined by Toronto’s Star newspaper as “a system that protects life and limb without annoying you to death.”

Which do we want – theatrics or safety?

Being a leftist Anti-Zionist means not only never having to say you are sorry, such as when you get your facts all wrong.  It also means that you have an obligation to represent yourself as a victim of harassment.   Armchair martyrdom is as fundamental a part of leftist ideology as anti-Americanism and hatred of Israel.

In his now-famous essay from July, 1976, “The Intelligent Co-ed’s Guide to America,” Thomas Wolfe wrote about how desperately American academics wish to feel persecuted.  A pretense of being persecuted today seems to do wonders both for their ego and for their web traffic.  The entire “Zionist Lobby” is largely an invention by these same people, anxious to show that they are being oppressed by an evil nefarious conspiracy.  You just need to wave your stigmata and denounce the “Neo-Conservatives,” the “Rightwing McCarthyists,” and – of course the Jews.  Whining about being persecuted seems to be the leading participation sport of today’s far Leftists and the radical armchair postureurs.

As documented recently on this web site, Joel Beinin, the Israel-hating pro-Hamas sometimes-Maoist professor of Middle East Studies at Stanford University is just such a persecution whiner.  Here is what we wrote:

‘“McCarthyism” seems to be Beinin’s third favorite “m” word, after Marxism and Mao, and he applies it liberally to anyone who dares to criticize him. Beinin wrote a 2004 article called “The New McCarthyism: Policing Thought about the Middle East.” In it, Beinin denounced the Ford Foundation’s decision to withdraw funding from any university grantee that finances the promotion of “violence, terrorism, or bigotry or the destruction of any state.” What worried Beinin was that such restrictions could potentially hurt a “Palestinian student group [that] called for the replacement of the state of Israel with a secular, democratic state,” meaning one seeking the extermination of Israel.’

Beinin went on to declare that Bay Area Zionists silenced him and prevented him from giving a talk to a school in San Jose.  The San Francisco Chronicle checked and reported that no one at all from the local Jewish Community had even spoken with anyone at that school.

Well, the good professor is back.  Over the Thanksgiving weekend he widely circulated the following epistle, which we reprint for you here in full, spelling errors and all:

26 November 2009

I arrived in Israel at about 15:00 on Wednesday, 25 November afternoon to visit my mother, brother, and sister who are Israeli (and US) citizens resident in Israel since 1973.  My mother has been ill, and this visit was prompted primarily for that reason. I have visited Israel dozens of times before – most recently December 2008 – and resided in the country for extended periods on several different occasions.  Yesterday, for the first time since my first visit to Israel in 1965, I was detained without explanation at Ben-Gurion airport for nearly two hours and ultimately interrogated.  The questioners asked questions that they surely already knew the answers to.  The asked, for example, my profession and my email.  My position as Donald J. McLaughlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History at Stanford University and my email are a matter of public record, easily obtainable from the website of Stanford’s Department of History.  The questioners also asked whether I had travelled (sic) to “other countries in the region” which, since they had my passport in their hands for the better part of two hours with all the relevant visa stamps, was also not obscure information.  My luggage was not searched nor was I asked any question remotely related to the security of Israel except whether I had traveled (sic) to Iran (I was there once, for two weeks, in 1970 when Israel had warm relations with the Shah’s regime).

It therefore appears that this “investigation” had no purpose other than to harass and intimidate me.

Upon leaving I was told that I would be contacted further by one “Amos” from the Ministry of Defense.  For my convenience, I was given his phone number: 054-*******.

Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History
Professor of Middle East History
Joel Beinin
Contact in Israel: 054-565-2320

The main reports about the horrific suffering by Beinin at the hands of the security personnel at Israel’s airport have been on web sites run by Israel’s own predominantly-Arab Stalinist communist party and on one of its front groups named “The Left Bank.”

Now the above Beinin hysterics about being “intimidated” need a dose of deconstruction.  Beinin routinely travels to countries that happen to be at war with Israel, and has visited Iran, which happens to be officially on record as calling for the annihilation of Israel and its population.  By his own admission, Beinin’s passport is bristling with visas from such countries.  One would expect even the sleepiest airport passport inspector at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport to sit up and take notice of someone coming into the country with such visas.  Most passport inspectors at Tel Aviv airport, by the way, are teenage girls.  So you can imagine the terror and intimation experienced there by the poor professor.

Now Beinin’s insistence that the airport security staff must have known who he is rings a bit curious.  I did a search of the Hebrew web, and – sure enough – there are some internet mentions of him in Hebrew, but almost all of those are on the web sites of communist party and its fronts, which the airport inspectors may not visit on a regular basis.  There are two mentions of Beinin’s getting sued by Los Angeles journalist Rachel Neuwirth for his posting false smears about her.

What about Beinin’s claim that being questioned about his travels in belligerent countries constitutes “harassment” and “intimidation?”   (We have only his word that the questioning took two hours, and no mention at all of his being offered cookies and tea; I have waited in that airport for longer just to get a guitar case out of the belly of a plane!)   Well, an acquaintance of mine named Julia is an Israeli Jew born in Libya, a fact noted on her Israeli passport, and you would not believe the hassle she goes through every time she wants to come to the United States for a visit!  My wife was questioned at length and searched at Tokyo airport after 9-11 because her passport says she was born in the Middle East.

More to the point, Joel Beinin is an anti-Israel hate propagandist, someone who has made a career out of rationalizing anti-Jewish terrorism and endorsing Arab demands for Israel’s annihilation.  Other countries routinely bar hostile propagandists for far less provocation.  Canada banned ultra-leftist and Saddam’s agent George Galloway from entering, and also banned some other radicals.  Canada also banned a controversial rap group from entering.  The US banned Tariq Ramadan due to his terrorist connections.  It has banned others for security reasons, including Cat Stevens, the British author Sebastian Horsley, a pro-LSD Canadian psychologist, and at least one Israeli.  The UK banned radio host Michael Savage (along with 15 other people) for being insensitive to Moslems, and tried to ban Dutch politician Geert Wilders.  Egypt has barred Hamas members from entering.  The Ukraine banned the mayor of Moscow from entering the country because of things he said.

Now as it turns out, Israel almost never prevents anti-Israel propagandists and anti-Semitic hate-mongers from entering the country.  For example, it rather stupidly allows lots of “anarchists” from the “International Solidarity Movement” and similar pro-terror groups to enter the country and then to attack its policemen and soldiers as their attempt to help Palestinian terrorists.  The only two anti-Israel propagandists of note who have been barred from entering Israel in recent years were: 1.  Norman Finkelstein, a Neo-Nazi who was fired by DePaul University and who was barred from entering Israel due to his intimate ties with the Hezb’Allah, and 2. Richard Falk, the anti-Semitic retired professor from Princeton who was barred from entering Israel as head of an anti-Israel UN propaganda “commission.”  (When Falk arrived earlier as a private person to give university lectures, he was admitted.)

Anti-Israel fanatics, like Noam Chomsky and the Swedish journalist who recently invented a medieval blood libel about Jews stealing the body parts of Palestinians, have been admitted to Israel freely, although they never would be if I had anything to say about it.  Even Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, whose nasty diatribe, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, has become the Koran for Israel-bashers and Jew-haters around the world, were welcomed in Israel for a speaking tour.

It goes without saying that Beinin has never expressed any criticism of the fact that Israelis are prohibited altogether from entering Iran and most Arab countries.  Some of those countries prohibit entry to Jews from anywhere.  In Saudi Arabia you will get expelled and beaten to a pulp if you have a Hanukka Menorah or a Christmas tree.

Of course the greatest irony in all of this is that Beinin was not banned from Israel at all, in spite of being a fanatical pro-terror anti-Israel propagandist.   He was simply interviewed by an alert young passport inspector, suspicious of all those visas in Beinin’s passport from countries seeking Israel’s annihilation.  For Beinin, however, the incident was a priceless opportunity to wave his stigmata and show the world what a persecuted martyr and victim he is.  His questioning in the airport proves he is being intimidated and harassed by them damned Zionists!