Wednesday, September 28, 2011

On Teshuva, Self-Reflection and an Honest Rendering of our Accounts, Spiritual & Worldly

At this holy time of Teshuvah, reflection, and self-examination, an honest rendering of accounts shouldn't be confused with unjustified self-recrimination. Self-reflection asks us to make amends where necessary, but not to assume guilt for that which we are blameless.
To a Prosperous, Healthy and Fruitful Year to All
david in Seattle

"This convergence of blame comes at a time of spiritual vulnerability for Jews. This is, after all, our season of contrition. As we approach Rosh Hashanah, the process of self-examination intensifies. And as Jewish tradition emphasizes, the basis for penitence is apology. Before seeking forgiveness from God, we are to seek forgiveness from those we have hurt, even inadvertently.

But in the present atmosphere Jews should resist the temptation for self-blame. Apology is intended to heal. Yet those demanding apologies of Israel aren’t seeking reconciliation, but the opposite—to criminalize the Jewish state and rescind its right to defend itself."
YK Halevi


No Apologies: Israel Isn’t to Blame for Its Growing Isolation
Yossi Klein Halevi

Jerusalem—As the U.N. votes on Palestinian statehood, and former regional allies of the Jewish state like Turkey and Egypt turn openly hostile, much of the international community is blaming Israel for its own isolation.

If only Israel had apologized to Turkey for killing nine of its nationals on last year’s Gaza flotilla, so the argument goes, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erodgan would not be threatening now to send warships against the Israeli coast. If only Israel had apologized to Egypt for the accidental killing of six of their soldiers when Israeli helicopters entered Egyptian territory in pursuit of terrorists last August, an Egyptian mob wouldn’t have ransacked the Israeli embassy in Cairo, as Egyptian leaders refused to take calls from desperate Israeli leaders. And if only Israel had stopped building in settlements and offered the Palestinians a fair solution, they would not now be turning to the U.N. to substitute an imposed solution for the negotiating process.

This convergence of blame comes at a time of spiritual vulnerability for Jews. This is, after all, our season of contrition. As we approach Rosh Hashanah, the process of self-examination intensifies. And as Jewish tradition emphasizes, the basis for penitence is apology. Before seeking forgiveness from God, we are to seek forgiveness from those we have hurt, even inadvertently.

But in the present atmosphere Jews should resist the temptation for self-blame. Apology is intended to heal. Yet those demanding apologies of Israel aren’t seeking reconciliation, but the opposite—to criminalize the Jewish state and rescind its right to defend itself.

If any apologies are forthcoming, they must be on the basis of facts. Erdogan began dismantling the Israeli-Turkish alliance well before the flotilla incident, which he then seized as a pretext to sever ties with Israel: his goal is not to restore Israeli-Turkish relations but to bolster his image in the Muslim world as the leader who humiliated Israel. Still, in the spirit of this season of penitence, Israel could offer Erdogan the following solution: We apologize for the loss of life, and you apologize for encouraging Turkish jihadists to violate Israel’s legal and moral siege against the terrorist regime in Gaza.

So too with Egypt: Israel will apologize for the accidental killing of Egyptian soldiers—even though it’s not clear whether they were killed by Israeli fire or by a Palestinian suicide bomber—while Egypt apologizes for the atmosphere of government-instigated hatred against Israel, like the recent cover of one of Egypt’s leading magazines, October, which portrayed Netanyahu as Hitler.

The Palestinian issue, of course, is far more complicated. Israel, the Arab world and Palestinian leaders themselves all share blame for the Palestinian tragedy. Under the right circumstances—in an atmosphere of mutual penitence—Israel would apologize for its role in the displacement and occupation of the Palestinians. And the Palestinians would apologize for their role in encouraging the Arab world’s rejection of the Jewish people’s return home and encouraging too the renewal of anti-semtism on a global scale. And then each side would forgive the other for having been so caught in its own trauma that it failed to recognize the trauma of the other.

But Israel is not to blame for the absence of peace.

I want to see my government declare an open-ended settlement freeze, convey the message to the Palestinians and to the Arab world that it has no interest in maintaining the occupation aside from security needs, that the Jewish people didn’t return home to deny another people its sense of home.

But a settlement freeze, however essential for our own integrity, will not bring the Palestinians back to the negotiating table. Netanyahu’s ten-month settlement freeze was unprecedented—that was the word used by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Yet the Palestinian Authority continued to boycott talks.

Would Netanyahu offer the Palestinians a state along the equivalent of the 1967 lines? In exchange for Palestinian acceptance of a Jewish state and abandonment of the demand for refugee return to Israel: My sense is yes. I wish he would explicitly say so, even if that meant risking his coalition.

But in truth the question of what Netanyahu would concede is irrelevant. The Palestinians were offered the equivalent of the 1967 borders by former Israeli prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert. Yet Palestinian leaders rejected the offers because they refused to concede the “sacred” right of return, as P.A. head Mahmoud Abbas calls it—that is, the sacred right to destroy the Jewish state through demographic subversion. The Netanyahu government isn’t the cause of the breakdown of the peace process but its result.

The temptation for Jewish self-recrimination is deeply rooted in Zionist psychology. Zionism, after all, was a revolt against Jewish fatalism. If the Jewish situation is untenable, then clearly the fault lies with a lack of Jewish initiative. If you will it, said Zionist founder Theodore Herzl, it is no dream.

Israeli rightists and leftists agree, in effect, that Israel can unilaterally determine its own reality, regardless of outside circumstances. If Israel lacks security, insists the right, that’s because we haven’t projected enough power and deterrence. And if Israel lacks peace, insists the left, that’s because we haven’t been sufficiently forthcoming in offering concessions.

Both right and left, then, implicitly dismiss the Arabs as an independent factor, with their own wills and agendas. But what if the Arab world doesn’t accept Israel’s legitimacy? What if the Middle East is undergoing transformations that have little if anything to do with what Israel wills?

This Rosh Hashanah I will ask forgiveness for my own sins and for the collective sins of Israel, as the liturgy insists. But I will withhold my political apologies for a time when those confessions won’t be manipulated against me. There is no religious obligation to collaborate in my own demonization. I will not be seeking forgiveness from those who deny my right to be.

Yossi Klein Halevi is a contributing editor to The New Republic and a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.

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Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Yossi Klein Halevi's Spot-on Analysis of the Very Real Dangers Posed by the Palestinians' U.N. Thrust

Statehood is a responsibility to be earned. And so far the Palestinian national movement has hardly proved its willingness to live in peace beside Israel. Palestinian schools and media — those of Fatah as well as of Hamas — routinely portray Israel as an artificial and temporary creation, without any rootedness in the land. All of Jewish history — from the ancient temple in Jerusalem to the Holocaust — is dismissed as a lie. No Palestinian leader has told his people — as Israeli prime ministers since Yitzhak Rabin have told their people — that the land must be shared by two nations. Instead, Palestinian leaders have consistently told their people that the goal is a state on all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and they encourage their people to dream of a Middle East without Israel. --YK Halevi

Halevi deconstructs the prevailing myths and 'conventional wisdom' about Israel's increasing isolation and demonstrates with great clarity the context within which current Middle Eastern events need to be understood.
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The coming U.N. debacle
A General Assembly vote that seeks to bypass negotiations and impose a Palestinian state on Israel will only undermine a two-state solution.
By Yossi Klein Halevi

September 20, 2011

After decades of failed negotiations over a Palestinian state, it is tempting to imagine that the potential vote in the U.N. General Assembly on Palestinian statehood might help finally resolve one of the most vexing problems that the world has inherited from the previous century. And after all, that's just how a Jewish state was born — by a U.N. General Assembly vote in 1947.

But a U.N. vote that seeks to bypass negotiations and impose a fait accompli on Israel will only undermine a two-state solution. By deepening Israel's isolation, the vote will reinforce the sense among Israelis that this is not a time for concessions but for resolve.

As polls in recent years show, a majority of Israelis supports a two-state solution. And for good pragmatic reason: Israelis see a Palestinian state as an existential necessity for Israel itself, a means of preserving their country's Jewish majority and democratic identity.

But that same majority also perceives a Palestinian state as a potential existential threat. Even primitive missiles launched from the West Bank hills against greater Tel Aviv would end normal life here. And should Israel then be forced to send its soldiers back into the West Bank, it would likely find itself judged — perhaps literally — in the court of world opinion.

That, after all, is what happened when Israel invaded the Gaza Strip in 2009, even though Israel had withdrawn from Gaza four years earlier, only to be hit by thousands of rockets over its international border.

A Palestinian state, then, could create an untenable choice for Israel: learn to live with terror as a daily reality, or defend yourself and become a pariah.

In endorsing an imposed solution, the General Assembly would be telling Israelis that their security concerns are irrelevant. It is, in other words, far more important to the U.N. to create Arab state No. 22 than it is to ensure the safety of the lone Jewish state.

With its disdain for Israel, the U.N. has invalidated itself as a forum in which to try to heal the Arab-Israeli conflict. Israel isn't just condemned by the world body more than any other country; the Jewish state is condemned more often than all other countries combined. According to U.N. Watch in Geneva, the U.N.'s Human Rights Council has adopted, since its founding in 2006, about 70 resolutions condemning specific countries, 40 of which have been against Israel. In the General Assembly, about 20 anti-Israel resolutions are adopted each year, as opposed to five or six against other countries. That is not mere hostility but pathological obsession.

The vote to recognize Palestine will almost certainly increase anti-Israel violence in the region. It will also likely encourage the international boycott-Israel movement, which uniquely ostracizes the Jewish state. Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas has said that upgraded Palestinian status at the U.N. would "pave the way" to press for legal sanctions against Israel. The likely result would be to turn any Israeli act of war, even in self-defense, into a war crime.

Statehood is a responsibility to be earned. And so far the Palestinian national movement has hardly proved its willingness to live in peace beside Israel. Palestinian schools and media — those of Fatah as well as of Hamas — routinely portray Israel as an artificial and temporary creation, without any rootedness in the land. All of Jewish history — from the ancient temple in Jerusalem to the Holocaust — is dismissed as a lie. No Palestinian leader has told his people — as Israeli prime ministers since Yitzhak Rabin have told their people — that the land must be shared by two nations. Instead, Palestinian leaders have consistently told their people that the goal is a state on all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and they encourage their people to dream of a Middle East without Israel.

The U.N. vote comes at a time when Israelis are feeling increasingly besieged. In the last year, Israel's closest regional ally, Turkey, has turned outright hostile; Turkey's Islamist prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, last week threatened to dispatch warships against Israel. The peace with Egypt is unraveling: Two weeks ago, as a mob ransacked Israel's embassy in Cairo, Egyptian leaders refused to take desperate calls from their Israeli counterparts and dispatched commandos to rescue Israeli personnel only after American intervention. Israel evacuated its embassy in Amman, Jordan, over the weekend to avert a similar situation.

Meanwhile, terrorist enclaves on Israel's borders — Hezbollah in the north, Hamas in the south — aim tens of thousands of missiles at Israeli cities. And the Iranian regime, whose declared goal is the destruction of Israel, is moving ever closer to nuclear capability.

For many Israelis the sense of threat recalls May 1967, when Arab leaders vowing to destroy the Jewish state massed their armies on its borders. And while the international community remembers Israel's stunning victory against those forces in June 1967, Israelis recall the terrible isolation of the weeks before, when even Israel's friends offered little assistance.

Israel tends to take risks for peace when it believes the chance for peace is credible and when it senses a fair international climate.
Israel withdrew from the Sinai desert — which is three times the size of Israel and which provided it with strategic protection — because Egyptian President Anwar Sadat convinced the Israeli public he was serious about peace. And when Eastern European and many Third World countries established diplomatic relations with Israel following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Israel responded with an overture to the Palestine Liberation Organization that became the Oslo process.

But when the international community treats the Jewish state with contempt, Israelis tend to reciprocate. The result is a stiffening of hard-line attitudes.

In large measure, then, the future of a Palestinian state will be determined by whether Israelis perceive it more as existential necessity or as existential threat, and whether they feel the international community is receptive to their security concerns.

In one sense the U.N. vote is a useful reminder of the origins of the conflict. In 1947 the General Assembly voted for partition; it didn't call for creating only a Jewish state but a Palestinian state as well. The Arab world rejected partition and tried to destroy Israel.

That rejection remains the core of the conflict. However problematic, settlements are not the main obstacle to an agreement. Both former Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert offered to uproot dozens of settlements and concentrate the rest in "blocs" along the border to enable Palestinian territorial contiguity. Palestinian leaders dismissed those offers.

In endorsing a diplomatic process that ignores Israel, the U.N. would, in effect, affirm the Arab world's attempt to erase Israel's legitimacy. And by encouraging Israeli despair, it could help turn Palestine into a permanent virtual state.

Yossi Klein Halevi is a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and a contributing editor at the New Republic.

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Thursday, September 15, 2011

On the Urgency of Standing With Israel Today: 3 Voices of Reason: David Harris, Prof Edward Alexander, & Daniel Gordis

Three different voices, across the continents and political spectrum, echoing a common theme. When our fellow Jews are embattled, we are all threatened. Moreover, we are all brethren and responsible for one another.



‘Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Gen. 4:9). “And Moses said unto the children of Gad and the children of Reuben: ‘Shall your brethren go to the war, and shall ye sit here?’” (Numbers 32:6).



Marginalized as never before, Israel is now witness to Iran’s continuing nuclear aspirations, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s cozying up to Iran by threatening Israel and Egyptian masses who despise Israel simply for existing. Iran, Turkey and Egypt have assumed their positions because of radicalization in the Arab world, not because of anything to do with the Palestinians.

Capitalizing on this trend, the Palestinians are explicitly transforming the vote into a referendum on Israel. Just days ago, Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority claimed that the Palestinians' land had been occupied for 63 years. The “occupation” to which he refers is thus not the result of Israel’s victory in 1967, but rather, Israel’s very creation in 1948. If the U.N. votes to recognize Palestinian statehood in light of this attitude, it will simply be tightening the noose further.

Because such hatred of the Jewish state cannot be appeased, Israel has no good options at the moment. It will thus hunker down and hold on, hoping that the international community that voted to create the Jewish state just decades ago might soon return to its senses.
excerpt from Gordis' A Referendum on Israel--see below

The challenges Israel currently face transcend party lines, politics and whether or not American Jews like Bibi or not. Israel is besieged on a multitude of fronts, and it behooves us to use our seichel, pick our battles judiciously, and stand with Israel today, more than ever. In this season of reflection and Teshuvah, let us return to the ethical mandate of "Ahavot Yisrael," and love and support our fellow Jews in Israel in their time of need.


david in Seattle



Hineni! Here I Am!


David Harris




Every day brings new strategic challenges for Israel.
Those of us who live outside Israel have a choice. We can help, or we can stand on the sidelines.
The battle didn’t begin yesterday. And alas, it’s hardly likely to end tomorrow.
Strikingly, there are many disengaged from the battle, at least for now. I see them every day.
They’re the ones I seek to reach.
I’m not talking about the “ABJ” crowd – the “Anyone But Jews” Jews, who are inclined to help just about everyone in the world except fellow Jews.
Nor am I talking about the “IOI” crowd – those convinced that “If Only Israel” did this or that, all would be solved, as if the problems and the solutions were solely in Jerusalem’s hands.
No, I’m talking about those who understand that Israel has no easy answers in dealing with its regional challenges, recognize the immense burden Israelis shoulder to build and secure their democratic and Jewish state, believe that Israel eagerly seeks peace but needs trustworthy partners, and know that Israel isn’t being treated fairly in the international community.
Until now, for whatever reasons, they haven’t been active.
But, as Rabbi Hillel famously said, “If not now, when?”
Look at what Israel faces today.
Iran is hell-bent on acquiring nuclear-weapons capability.
Turkey has undergone a political earthquake.
Once a close friend of Israel, over the past nine years, it has reversed course. It has now vowed, while seeking regional ascendancy, to isolate Israel.
Hezbollah has become Lebanon’s power broker.
The terror group has amassed more than 40,000 missiles and rockets, courtesy of Iran and Syria. It proclaims its arsenal can reach anywhere in Israel.
Then there’s Syria.
It should be pretty clear by now that, whatever the eventual outcome of the present turmoil, those in charge aren’t going to be batting their eyelashes at Israel anytime soon.
To the contrary, in societies that have been fed a steady anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-Semitic diet, the best way to whip up political support is to fan the flames of those hatreds.
How about Gaza?
If I could, I’d make the Hamas Charter required reading. It’s all spelled out there, just a click away on the Internet. The determination to obliterate Israel. The vision of a Shari’a-based state. Bone-chilling, classic anti-Semitism.
Then there are developments in Egypt.
Again, it shows that when Israel is demonized over decades in schools, the media, the mosques, and the street, given half a chance, the power of those accumulated feelings explodes, making a vital Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty extremely tenuous.
Precisely such a critical time in Israel’s life is the moment to stand up and be counted.
Israelis, whatever their own political affiliations might be, are shouldering more than outsiders can possibly imagine.
They do so day in and day out, without fanfare or self-congratulations. They’ve defied all the odds and achieved miracles.
They must never feel alone. It is not their exclusive battle. It is also ours.
Our faith speaks of Zion and Jerusalem. That is where they are.
Our tradition teaches us collective responsibility. Nearly half the world’s Jews live in Israel.
Our value system is rooted in the defense of democracy. Israel is such a democracy.
And, on a practical level, the battle against Israel is going on in our universities, our political process, even our retail stores. If that’s not a frontline battle, what is?
There are those who say they’d get involved if only there were a different government in Jerusalem. They forget one basic fact: the battle is bigger than the government du jour; it’s really about Israel, no matter who is in power.

In 2000, an unprecedented wave of terror against Israel broke out with a left-of-center coalition in power and a sweeping two-state proposal on the table.

What to do?

Look at yourself in the mirror and ask whether this battle really is about someone else, or whether it’s also about you.
Now is precisely the time to visit Israel... to buy Israeli products... to express support for the vital U.S.-Israel relationship to elected officials... to vacation in friendly countries and avoid unfriendly ones... to get involved with pro-Israel organizations... to help those around you understand what’s going on and why it’s so important to friends of Israel and, more generally, to democratic nations.
The battle is here. The need is urgent. The time is now.
At this time of reflection and renewal in the Jewish calendar, won’t you please say “Hineni!”



Here I am!”?

New York Jewish intellectuals: Another moral debacle?
By EDWARD ALEXANDER
click above to read the article in its entirety


As the international noose grows ever tighter about Israel’s throat, the learned classes of Diaspora Jewry are not asking themselves the right questions.




‘Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Gen. 4:9). “And Moses said unto the children of Gad and the children of Reuben: ‘Shall your brethren go to the war, and shall ye sit here?’” (Numbers 32:6). These should have been the besetting questions for American- Jewish intellectuals during Hitler’s twelve-year war against European Jewry; but generally they were not.
They should be the pressing ones for the learned classes of Diaspora Jewry today, as the international noose grows ever tighter about Israel’s throat; but they are not.

Long after World War II had ended, William Phillips, co-founder of Partisan Review, recalled that Irving Howe, the most astute political mind among the Jewish intellectuals, “was haunted by the question of why our [Jewish] intellectual community ... had paid so little attention to the Holocaust in the early 1940s.... He asked me why we had written and talked so little about the Holocaust at the time it was taking place.”
One may, for example, search the pages of Partisan Review from 1937 through summer 1939 without finding mention of Hitler or Nazism. When Howe was working on his autobiography, he looked through the old issues of his own journal Labor Action to see how, or indeed whether, he and his socialist comrades had responded to the Holocaust. But he found the experience painful, and concluded that the Trotskyists, including himself, were only the best of a bad lot of leftist sects. He told Phillips that this inattention to the destruction of European Jewry was “a serious instance of moral failure on our part.”

The leading New York intellectuals had shown appalling indifference not only to what had been endured by their European brethren, but to what had been achieved by the Jews of Palestine. Events of biblical magnitude had occurred within a single decade. A few years after the destruction of European Jewry, the Jewish people had created the state of Israel. Of this achievement, Winston Churchill, addressing Parliament in 1949, said: “The coming into being of a Jewish state in Palestine is an event in world history to be viewed in the perspective, not of a generation or a century, but in the perspective of a thousand, two thousand or even three thousand years. This is an event in world history.”



The moral failure of ignoring the Holocaust was now compounded by a related failure: having averted their eyes from the destruction of European Jewry, the Jewish intellectuals now looked away from one of the most impressive assertions of the will to live that a martyred people has ever made. The writers had been immersed in the twists and turns of literary modernism, in the fate of socialism in the USSR and the US, and most of all in themselves, especially their “alienation” not only from America but from Judaism, Jewishness, and Jews. Indeed they defined themselves Jewishly through their alienation from their Jewishness.
IN ONE sense, (Irving) Howe and (Saul) Bellow were the (embarrassed) prototypes, if not exactly the progenitors, of today’s bumper crop of “anti-Zionist” Jewish deep thinkers.



Howe, even more contrite than Bellow about his “moral failure,” was among the first to see what was coming, and by 1970 found the treachery of the younger generation of Jewish intellectuals literally unspeakable: “Jewish boys and girls, children of the generation that saw Auschwitz, hate democratic Israel and celebrate as ‘revolutionary’ the Egyptian dictatorship; ... a few go so far as to collect money for Al Fatah, which pledges to take Tel Aviv. About this, I cannot say more; it is simply too painful.”



Many of these “Jewish boys and girls” are by now well-established figures in journalism and academia, tenured and heavily-petted, warming themselves in endowed university chairs, or editorializing from The New York Times or New York Review of Books. But the “alienation” of which the older New York Jewish intellectuals belatedly grew ashamed became the boast of the Judts, Kushners, Butlers, Chomskys, and their acolytes.




These are people who do not merely “sit here” while their brothers go to war. They take the side of their brothers’ enemies and call their cowardice courage. Others, more cautious, discover that the Jewish state, which most Europeans now blame for all the world’s miseries (with the possible exception of global warming,) should never have come into existence in the first place, and that “the [non-Zionist] roads not taken” would have brought (and may yet bring) a “new” Diaspora Golden Age. They are forever organizing kangaroo courts (called “academic conferences”) to put Israel in the dock; or else they are churning out articles or monographs or novels celebrating those roads not taken; or they are performing as “public intellectuals,” breathlessly recommending a one-state solution or a no-state solution or (this from the tone-deaf George Steiner) “a final solution.”

In 1942 a character named Yudka (“little Jew”) in Haim Hazaz’s famous Hebrew short story The Sermon says that “when a man can no longer be a Jew, he becomes a Zionist.” But the unnatural progeny of the New York Intellectuals embody a new, darker reality: when a man can no longer be a Jew, he becomes an anti- Zionist, building an “identity” on the very thing he would destroy. They have turned on its head the old slogan of assimilationism, which was “Be a Jew at home, but a man in the street.” Their slogan is: “Be a man at home, but a Jew in public.” By the time Howe and Bellow came to recognize that their lack of brotherly concern with Jewish survival had indeed been a “moral failure,” a new generation of Jewish intellectuals was already proclaiming it as a virtue entitling them to put on the long robes and long faces of biblical prophets.

Their prodigious work in painting Israel’s decent society black as Gehenna and the pit of hell has forced a small yet crucial revision of Orwell’s famous pronouncement about moral obtuseness and the ignorance of the learned: “Some ideas are so stupid that only [Jewish] intellectuals could believe them.”
The writer is the author of numerous books, including Irving Howe: Socialist, Critic, Jew, and (with Paul Bogdanor) The Jewish divide over Israel: Accusers and Defenders.



A Referendum on Israel--Daniel Gordis
September 14, 2011

Daniel Gordis is president of the Shalem Foundation and a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. He is the author, most recently, of “Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War That May Never End.”

Not long ago, one could have imagined Israel voting for Palestinian statehood at the United Nations. While some Israelis are merely resigned to Palestinian independence, others actually believe that Palestinian statehood is the only way to resolve this interminable conflict.

If the U.N. votes to recognize Palestinian statehood, Israel will hunker down and hold on, hoping the international community will come to its senses..



Furthermore, Israelis understand that what ignited Palestinian nationalism was, ironically, Palestinians’ witnessing the rebirth of a newly sovereign Jewish people. Independence has enabled Jews to return to their ancestral homeland, revitalize their ancient language, gather their exiles from a far-flung Diaspora and engage in a public debate about what should constitute Jewishness in the 21st century. All of these are hallmarks of a flourishing people, and one can well understand why Palestinians would seek the same.

Nonetheless, Israel will not vote for Palestinian statehood, because the U.N. vote is more a referendum on Israel than it is on Palestine. Marginalized as never before, Israel is now witness to Iran’s continuing nuclear aspirations, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s cozying up to Iran by threatening Israel and Egyptian masses who despise Israel simply for existing. Iran, Turkey and Egypt have assumed their positions because of radicalization in the Arab world, not because of anything to do with the Palestinians.

Capitalizing on this trend, the Palestinians are explicitly transforming the vote into a referendum on Israel. Just days ago, Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority claimed that the Palestinians' land had been occupied for 63 years. The “occupation” to which he refers is thus not the result of Israel’s victory in 1967, but rather, Israel’s very creation in 1948. If the U.N. votes to recognize Palestinian statehood in light of this attitude, it will simply be tightening the noose further.

Because such hatred of the Jewish state cannot be appeased, Israel has no good options at the moment. It will thus hunker down and hold on, hoping that the international community that voted to create the Jewish state just decades ago might soon return to its senses.

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Saturday, September 10, 2011

A Broader View of History: The Deeper Implications of 9/11 for America and the West

Trenchant, insightful piece by Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the UK.
An essay with broad historical sweep and well worth reading in its entirety on this, the 10th Anniversary of 9/11
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How to Reverse the West's Decline - Jonathan Sacks
1989 was the year of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War. One narrative was that the West had won. Communism had imploded. The other narrative was quite different. The key precipitating event of the fall of Communism, the withdrawal, in 1989, of the Soviet army from Afghanistan, set in motion the rapid collapse of one of the world's two superpowers. It was achieved not by the United States and its military might, but by a small group of religiously inspired fighters, the mujahideen and their helpers. If that is what a small group of highly motivated religious fighters could do to one superpower, why not the other, America and the West? That is when 9/11 was born.
The question is not radical Islam but, does the West believe in itself any more? Is it capable of renewing itself as it did two centuries ago? Or will it crumble as did the Soviet Union from internal decay. The writer is Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of Great Britain and the Commonwealth. (Standpoint-UK)

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