No doubt these prohibitions will make prostitution in Israel as unknown as it already is in Las Vegas.
The Knesset recently gave its final approval to one of the stupidest pieces of legislation in recent years. It is ostensively a law against "human trafficking". In fact, it is a legislative excursion into the trafficking of political correctness that will produce considerable harm. The new law's damages go well beyond the scope of trying to legislate away "trafficking" of prostitutes.

First, I guess I must have been out of the room when prostitution morphed into "human trafficking". But prostitution is prostitution, not human trafficking, and calling it "human trafficking" is highly misleading. Prostitutes may be a lot of things, but they are generally not slaves, media mythology notwithstanding. Certainly today in industrialized countries, most of them (of both genders) ply their trade by choice, pathetic as that fact may be.  And in Israel, any "working girl" seeking to leave the profession need only walk into any shelter, police station, or dial 100 (Israel's 911).

Israel, like every single other society in history, has plenty of hookers. Prostitution is largely out in the open, with the daily newspapers, tourist magazines, and sometimes billboards filled with ads for "escort services" and "massages". The Caring Classes have never had much to say against those.  Leftist journalists and professors regularly call for recognizing the "sex industry" as a productive sector contributing to the gross national product, and oppose massive roundups of prostitutes.

Some of the hookers in Israel are recruits from overseas, mainly from the poorer parts of Eastern Europe. These are sometimes smuggled into Israel by pimps or "brokers" of sorts, while in other cases they enter as tourists.  These are the "trafficked humans" for whom the Caring Classes are suddenly concerned. The press likes to carry lurid stories about prostitutes being "enslaved" by their pimps and beaten, abused, etc. It is especially fond of stories about nice innocent Ukrainian girls having been tricked off their farms into entering Israel, thinking they would work as cashiers or models, and then being leased out to pimps.

Yeah, sure. 

I do not believe there is a single prostitute in Israel who came to the country as part of being "deceived" into thinking she would get work as a stenographer. And if there WERE such a person, she could go to any cop, any lawyer, or any women's shelter to get a combative feminist attorney to set things right and sue the pants off any pimps or "traffickers" involved.

Previous Israeli laws already granted free public legal representation to women claiming they had been defrauded as part of "human trafficking" and also set up taxpayer-financed shelters for them. And since most of the prostitutes evidently speak Russian, along with a million ordinary Israelis, they have no problems communicating nor getting all the information they need about their rights.

The new law passed a few weeks ago again makes "human trafficking" illegal (but not prostitution itself). It makes beating up prostitutes illegal, but only by "traffickers", apparently not by customers. The new law was the initiative of the far-leftist Meretz party, along with some other individual Knesset members and leftist NGOs.

Before the new law, "human trafficking" was already illegal in Israel, including when it involves any fraudulent acts to get someone to leave her own country to come to work in Israel in prostitution. The new law prohibits pimps from "buying" and "selling" street walkers among themselves, which was already illegal in any case. No doubt these prohibitions will make prostitution in Israel as unknown as it already is in Las Vegas. In any case, all a "trafficker" now need do to get around the law is to sign the Moldava working girl on a notarized affidavit that says she knows what kind of work awaits her in the Land of Milk and Honey.

The new law simply makes the punishments for pimps stronger, with imprisonment up to 20 years (for trafficking in a minor) and in other cases 16 years, plus forfeit of all property of the "trafficker". By making it harder for the prosecution to strike plea bargains with pimps, the law actually guarantees that few will do real jail time.

There are other "feel-good" laws on the books in Israel, but in the case of this new law, the damages go well beyond those already noted. There are several reasons for this.

First, the definition of "human trafficking" and "enslavement" in the law is so loose that it can be applied to any foreign worker who is employed in Israel in legitimate, legal jobs, anything from home-care work to construction. Anytime one of these workers now wishes to breach a labor contract, or anytime some liberal lawyer or other bleeding heart decides that such workers are "underpaid" (for example when they are paid less than Israeli citizens), the floodgates of litigation will open. The bleeding hearts have long sought to price all such foreign workers out of the Israeli labor market altogether, by requiring artificially high wages and benefits for them. Should they suceed in eliminating the employment of "guest workers," they will damage the Israeli economy enormously, while forcing those same workers to return home to jobs that offer them wages at a fifth or less of what they get "underpaid" in Israel. It remains to be seen whether all ordinary Israeli labor contracts will become breachable by people claiming they also have been "enslaved" through them.

Second, the law contains several "add-ons" that have nothing to do with prostitution but nevertheless could be enormously harmful. The law prohibits "trafficking in human organs" and also "trafficking in children or minors", which could make some international adoptions problematic.

The prohibition on "trafficking in human organs" makes it illegal to buy or sell body parts, such as organ donations from living or from dead donors. The prohibition is general and even applies to voluntary donors. Now, it may well be that it is more dignified and ethical when organ donations are made by donors (or their immediate family members when the donor has died) with no monetary remuneration. But it is also true that the quantity of such donations is only a tiny fraction of the need for organs. It is a fact of life that allowing people to pay for and receive payment for organ donations makes the supply of donor organs increase significantly. Prohibition of such payment arrangements amounts to a death sentence for many of those awaiting organs. It is true that sometimes the sources for these organs may be poorer countries, where people (and surviving family members) are willing to sell them. But the squeamishness we all feel about such commerce ends the moment someone we knows really needs such an organ.

There are also potential problems in the blanket prohibition on transporting minors from outside Israel into Israel. As long as the prohibition refers to transport for purposes of employment in prostitution, all such laws are welcome. But the language of the new law's prohibition might make it difficult for infertile Israeli families to adopt children from overseas. For many years, such families have adopted children from other countries, in many cases making large payments for the children, and in some cases using "gray" and "informal" channels for the adoptions. (There are very few children inside Israel available for adoption, in part thanks to Israel's abortion-on-demand rules.) Could such families now face prosecution for "human trafficking" in minors?

Since the time of Genesis, no one has known how to eliminate prostitution as a social ill. My personal preference is to use zoning to confine it to special geographic areas, well away from residential neighborhoods and minors and economists. In the case of Israel, Nablus, Kalkiliya and Khan Yunis strike me as promising potential locations. But the new Knesset initiative is not at all designed to end this scourge. It is a "feel-good" law whose ability to end mistreatment of prostitutes by their "traffickers" is dubious, while at the same time it creates quite a few other unintended damages.

(Text of draft of new law in Hebrew here.)

Turning Israel Around

By Yitzhak Klein

Even bad situations have opportunities. In order to identify and exploit them one needs a little toughness of mind and spirit.

The editors of Israel National News have kindly invited me to blog for you. My object in this venture is to share with you my sense of Israeli society “from the inside”—domestic politics, culture, morals and morale, where the country is going and what its chances are of surviving the trip, and most important—What Is To Be Done.

I’ve had many conversations with dedicated people in Israel and abroad who fear for Israel after disengagement and a lost war in Lebanon. I’ve heard a lot of fatalism, a lot of quiet despair: “Nothing we try is going to work, they’ll never let us change anything.”

Things are indeed pretty bad, and most Israelis realize it, including the people who get their opinions from Ha’aretz. But neither fatalism nor despair are warranted. Any objective survey of matters is bound to be less black than the counsels of despair. Even bad situations have opportunities. In order to identify and exploit them one needs a little toughness of mind and spirit.                                                                      

So let’s take a survey. Israel has dedicated terrorist groups on its borders in Gaza and Lebanon, against whom, for various insufficient reasons, its government is afraid to fight. Behind the terrorists is Syria, which is trying to rebuild an army worthy of the name. Behind them are the Iranians, who are building a bomb and will acquire one unless someone stops them. Beyond them are the growing numbers of antisemites worldwide who think the Jews have another holocaust coming. None of that constitutes an unmanageable threat to Israel’s survival, not even the bomb.

The real threat to Israel, the only thing that can permit any of those external threats to succeed, is—Israel. The country’s political institutions don’t work. Its statesmen and opinion leaders are demoralized; they harbor wild and unfounded hopes that Israel’s enemies will someday decide they really like her, which they make the basis of their policy, coupled with profound fear of acknowledging and countering what those enemies are actually doing, which is plotting to destroy her. They hate, fear and discriminate against those of their countrymen who think differently, and fear and hatred have driven them to do things that undermine the very legitimacy of Israel’s regime. Many of the leaders are corrupt. The country seems to have come to a dead end, ethically, ideologically, institutionally, politically. This moral and spiritual dead end, which threatens to stymie anything constructive Israel might do on its own behalf, is the real threat to the country’s survival.

And it’s also an opportunity, actually, the biggest we’ve had so far.            

This moral and spiritual dead end, which threatens to stymie anything constructive Israel might do on its own behalf, is the real threat to the country’s survival.

And it’s also an opportunity, actually, the biggest we’ve had so far.

The people who have brought Israel to this pass, the politicians, petty manipulators, and opinion leaders, the “they” who control (for now) the levers of power in the country, used to be sure they knew what was best. Anyone who thought differently was smothered in a wave of ridicule laced with acid. A lot of that self-confidence has evaporated. Many of these people are acutely aware that ordinary Israelis have lost confidence in them. Israelis know they’re at a dead end, which is an improvement on the past, when they didn’t even know it. Now they need someone to show them how to turn around.

There are two main challenges. The first is to show ordinary Israelis and people in the Jewish communities abroad just what the institutions currently leading Israel and the ideas that animate the people who occupy them are worth. We should encourage them to compare where their leaders promised to take them with where Israel’s actually ended up.

The second is to articulate an alternative vision of how Israel should act, in foreign and domestic policy both, and indeed of what kind of society Israel should be: A society committed to the values and the interests of the Jewish people, just, fair and honest within, offering no harm to those abroad willing to keep the peace, decisive and unforgiving toward those who won’t. In fact, a Jewish society, since all those things are founded in Jewish ethics.

“The rest is interpretation, go and learn,” said Rabbi Akiva to the fellow who wanted to learn the entire Torah on one foot. I cannot pretend I know more about this vast subject than the next guy, though I may be advantageously placed to pick some pertinent information. Join me in the weeks ahead in following how these two challenges fare in Israeli society today. Your comments are welcome, though I can’t promise to respond to every one, or to respond onsite.

Dr Yitzhak Klein is Director of the Israel Policy Center, a public-policy institute in Jerusalem. He can be reached at yklein@merkazmedini.org .

Malcolm X Lax for Geriatric Marxists
It has occurred to me that many of the members of the editorial board of Tikkun magazine, not to mention most of their readership, must be pushing 70 years old.

Think about that!

Well I have, and I think that there are a number of fine business opportunities, selling products to the geriatric hippies and menopausal Marxists of this fine magazine.

I am now looking for some partners to go in with me in these ventures, developing products to sell to the Tikkun readership, advertising in the magazine.

Anyone with some idle capital, give me a buzz.

Here are the projects I have thought of so far:
1. A book of recipes for preparing hashish brownies laced with Metamucil, just the thing to keep you a regular revolutionary. They will also be sold at the new progressive bistro we will open, to be called Chez Che.
2. Bob Dylan bunion cream, so that you will not need a weatherman to know which way the wind breaks or blows.
3. Macrobiotic Grey Poupon, to be passed back and forth from designer VW vans of psychedelic yuppies, and - Oh, The Colors, The Colors.
4. Jerry Garcia Geratol Tablets.
5. Ho Che Minh Hernia Halters.
6. Huey Newton Shuffleboard Set.
7. Jimi Hendrix Hearing Aid, with special microcassette that plays The Wind Cries Dentures.
8. Special Revolutionary Remake VCR tape of Leave it To Beaver, with a progressive Cleaver family. In this special tape, Ward and June drop out, turn on, and then go to Cuba to cut cane in the Venceremos Brigade with their boys, Beaver, Wally, and Eldridge.
9. Malcolm X Lax.
10. Preparation Ho. (Short for Preparation Ho Chi Minh)  This is the perfect treatment for progressives and hippies at the ends of their trails, who need to reduce painful swelling and itching at the ends of their trails. For those whose Mekong Delta is backed up, see previous product.
11. Bumper stickers and progressive lapel buttons that say: "Flower and Flatulence Power" !!

In the 1940s Uri Avnery ran his own one-man pro-nazi party, whose official salute was a Nazi raised hand.
Writing on the Counterpunch neo-Stalinist pro-jihad web site, the Hamas' favorite Israeli journalist Uri Avnery announces that he has identified an "Israeli fascist". It is none other than poor Esterina Tartman!

The fact that he chooses to make this scoop on Counterpunch speaks volumes. Counterpunch is little more than a front for al-Qaeda.  It regularly calls openly for Israel's destruction and insists Israel has no right to exist.  Its editor, Alexander Cockroach er I mean Cockburn, is a notorious Stalinist anti-Semite who claims the Jews spread anthrax in the US and that Israel was really behind the 911 attacks on the US. 

Counterpunch is best described as a leftwing Neo-Nazi web site.  It likes to publish Israel-hating Jews like Norman Finkelstein, Ilan Pappe, Uri Avnery and Neve Gordon.  Just a few days ago it ran a neo-nazi conspiracist piece claiming Israel was behind the 911 attacks on the US and also ran its new banner heading  to denounce Israel:

Exclusive to CounterPunch Newsletter Subscribers!

WHAT DID ISRAEL KNOW IN ADVANCE OF THE SEPTEMBER 11 ATTACKS?*

Those Celebrating "Movers" and Art Student Spies*

Who were the Israelis living next to Mohammed Atta?*

What was in that Moving Van on the New Jersey shore?*

Was the Mossad Tracking the 9/11 Hijackers in the US?*

How did two hijackers end up on the Watch List weeks before 9/11?

At last, the answers. Read Christopher Ketcham's exclusive expose in CounterPunch special double-issue February newsletter. Plus, Cockburn and St. Clair on how this story was suppressed and ultimately found its home in CounterPunch. Get your copy today by subscribing online or calling1-800-840-3683  Remember contributions to CounterPunch are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe NowGet CounterPunch By Email for Only $35 a Year  (Neo-Nazis have been claiming for years that the arrest of some Israeli moving men under suspicion of visa violations on Sept 11, 2001 proves that Israel and not al-Qaeda was behind the 9-11 attacks on the US.  I suspect that Counterpunch writers were actually involved in teh 911 attacks on the US--SP)

Uri Avnery was disowned by his own mother, who regarded him as a traitor.

Well, recently some interesting new material was published about Uri Avnery, the grand fascist identifier and Cockburn's favorite Israeli anti-Semite.  It was published Dec 13, 06 here by Alon Dahan, a graduate student at the Hebrew University in "Jewish Thought" (not to be confused with a B-film actor in Israel with the same name).

Against the outrage everyone is feeling about the Iranian Holocaust Denial and the growth of neo-nazism around the world, Dahan writes, one must be aware of the nazi roots of Post-Zionism and Israeli leftist anti-Semitism. Such roots go back as far as the 1940s, and the "Canaanite" movement in Israel in the 1950s. The Canaanite movement was a movement of "Post-Judaism" that argued that the new emerging "Israeli" would be a new nationality altogether, composed of ex-Jews and ex-Arabs, with no ties to the Jewish Diaspora, practicing no religion, Hebrew-speaking gentiles of pure Semitic "blood". The movement was popular in the 50s among many clueless Israeli "intellectuals." It never managed to recruit any Arab members.

The leading survivor of the early "Canaanite" movement today is Uri Avnery, a fanatic anti-Zionist and anti-Semite, whose Bash-Israel pro-Hamas articles appear everywhere one can find anti-Semitism, on the Right and the Left.

What is not well known is that:
Uri Avnery's original name was Helmut Osterman (Dahan at first writes Joseph Osterman but then corrects himself in the talkbacks), born in Germany, and among the two leading figures in the "Canaanites"; and Avnery/Osterman was an admirer of Nazism.

In 1941, Avnery wrote a pro-Nazi article in the Paris journal "Shem", whose contents were later revealed by the Hebrew University Orientalist Prof. Yehoshua Porat in his book "Shelach V'At B'yado", page 182.  Herr Avnery was also fond of using the concept of "Hebrew Blood" in a racial sense, in the same way as Hitler spoke of German Aryan Blood. In those days he was anti-Marxist, although today has no problem with associating himself with Stalinists. Back then he repeatedly expressed admiration for the great job Hitler was doing in remolding and renewing the German nation. Avnery was an open admirer of Nazi propagandist Alfred Rosenberg, adopted the latter's rhetoric, and repeatedly declared that he saw himself as the Hebrew Alfred Rosenberg (which, in a sense, he is). Avnery ran a tiny "journal" called The Struggle, an obvious imitation of the name "Mein Kampf". He ran his own one-man party, whose official salute was a Nazi raised hand.

Avnery in those days advocated creation of a Semitic "race" that would lead the Middle East to greatness when combined with a new Hebraic non-Jewish culture. As such, he advocated the end of the Jewish people as a national entity and expansion of the new race into its "Semitic Lebensraum" (yes, he used that Nazi concept!). He later wrote of his dream for a new and better Hitler emerging, an anti-Nazi Hitler who will lead the struggle for peace and will promote the Palestinian cause (well, at least he got THAT part right!).

Avnery then left for Israel/Palestine. In the 60s he ran a semi-pornographic magazine called "Haolam Hazeh," as the Israeli Larry Flynt. The magazine also did some scandal mongering. Avnery later ran for parliament and got elected by a sort of protest vote, the same sorts of people who otherwise might vote for Homer Simpson or Cher.

[In the 1960s Avnery wrote "Israel without Zionists", the Bible of Israeli self-hating leftism. Ever since, he has been the Reverend Moon of Israel's far-leftist "Post-Zionists" and he runs the small and violently anti-Israel "Gush Shalom" organization. He is friends with Mikey Lerner and appears in Tikkun.

Dahan then goes on and discusses how Avnerism has become entrenched among the Hate-Israel far Leftists in Israeli academia, among the "New Historians." Among those he specifically names are Ilan Pappe (Haifa U), Moshe Zimmerman (Hebrew U, and Uri Ram (Ben Gurion U).  He cites Prof. Shlomo Aharonson in describing the anti-Semitic ideological foundations of these pseudo-scholars and their need to trivialize and erase all memory of the Holocaust. He describes Ilan Pappe as a Jewish Holocaust Denier (his words), as are, by implication, all those with similar points of view.