BRUMSPEAK

An Eloquent Answer to the Obtuseness of Those Who Feign Incomprehension at Israeli Concern Over Iran's Nuclear Ambitions

2012-01-16T20:24:00.000-08:00

Jeffrey Goldberg, in his Goldblog piece a couple of days ago

What Could Possibly Motivate Israel to Kill Iranian Nuclear Scientists?'

A Goldblog reader writes:

You have to explain to me why the Zionists are so committed to picking a fight with Iran? What could possibly motivate Israel to kill Iranian nuclear scientists? It makes no sense, unless Israel is looking to start a war to extend its military domination of the Middle East (everyone knows Israel has the strongest military in the Middle East). So you'll have to explain this to me, please.

There seems to be an epidemic of thickness on this question. Let me be clear: Just because I think an attack on Iran's nuclear complex is a bad idea doesn't mean I think Iran poses no threat to Israel. Do you want to know why Israel is taking the actions it may be taking against Iran? Because Iran has been engaged in full-blown but subterranean war against Israel for almost three decades. The Iranian regime is committed to the physical elimination of Israel. That's right -- a member-state of the U.N. is advocating the complete destruction of another member-state. The Iranian leadership regularly uses Nazi-style rhetoric against Israel and Jews, frequently resorting to epidemiological metaphors -- Israel is a cancer, Israel is a tumor, language that smacks of Mein Kampf.

But more important than Iran's eliminationist rhetoric is Iran's actions: Iran is the prime sponsor of Hezbollah, an avowedly-antisemitic terrorist organization that seeks to kill Israeli civilians. Iran is also a prime supporter of Hamas, which also seeks out Israeli civilians to kill (and it even brags about the number of Israeli civilians it has murdered). Hezbollah and Hamas, just like Iran, seek the physical elimination of Israel. Their agenda isn't to create a Palestinian state in Gaza and on the West Bank; their agenda is to replace a Jewish state with an Arab-Muslim state. If you were an Israeli leader, and you understood that Iran works assiduously to murder your civilians, and to bring about an end to your people's collective existence, and then you learned that Iran may be trying to build a nuclear weapon, well, is it so unreasonable to think that Israel might choose to fight back?

Which brings me to another letter just received in the Goldblog inbox:

Why shouldn't Iran have a nuclear weapon? Israel has it. Why does Israel think it needs a nuclear weapon and Iran doesn't. Why should Israel have nukes in the first place?

This letter-writer, it seems to me, lacks imagination. Why shouldn't Iran have a nuclear weapon? Well, because it's an anti-democratic theocracy that menaces its neighbors, oppresses its own people, and calls for the destruction of another Middle Eastern state. It is profoundly anti-American, anti-Israel, and anti-Sunni. It is in the American national interest to see Iran denied nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are dangerous. They are especially dangerous in the hands of totalitarian regimes, and so these regimes should be discouraged from acquiring them.

And why does Israel think it needs nuclear weapons in the first place? Well, Israel was founded shortly after one-third of the world's Jews were murdered in the Shoah. The Shoah, if nothing else, was an object lesson on the perils of defenselessness. Israel was, at independence, set upon by its neighbors. It continues to battle countries and organizations that seek its destruction. Here is a real failure of imagination: I'm not arguing that you have to endorse Israel's nuclearization, but if you can't understand this from Israel's perspective, then you're just not trying. By the way, I understand why Iran's unelected supreme leader might believe that nuclear weapons are in his country's best interests. I don't agree that he should have them, but I understand why he would want them.

Well said. Thanks to Goldberg for this public service! The fact that this question still even looms in the thinking of intelligent people boggles the mind
brumsky

Thomas Friedman: Wrong Again: Misreading the Egyptian Elections & Failing to Heed the Lessons of Turkey, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and the Politics of Islamism

2012-01-12T17:30:00.000-08:00

Also see my earlier post on Friedman and the Times here

Friedman Cheers as Egyptians Are Enslaved

By Barry Rubin

Professor: [As the Martian ambassador starts disintegrating congressmen with his ray gun]: “Mr. Ambassador, please! What are you doing? This doesn’t make sense! It’s not logical! It’s not !” – Mars Attacks

It is distasteful when Western intellectuals, politicians, and journalists who pride themselves on their enlightened, humanitarian views watch people abroad fall subject to ruthless forces of dictatorship and dogma. When these same people actually cheer the new tyrannies, put their arms around the shoulders of those who despise them, and tell everyone else that there’s nothing to worry about, that’s actively disgusting.
Many in the West have so acted toward Egypt during the last year. They have previously done so toward the Gaza Strip, Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, and Turkey. Perhaps no one has touted these ideas and policies more loudly and enthusiastically than Thomas Friedman has been one of them but In doing so, of course, he has echoed U.S. government policy.
Now, Friedman goes all-out to explain that the Muslim Brotherhood isn’t radical, isn’t a threat, in fact is a good thing, and will only become even more moderate once it is in power.
In a column called “Watching Elephants Fly” — obviously a reference to seeing something impossible happen — Friedman writes,

Here is what was so striking: virtually all the women we interviewed after the voting — all of whom were veiled, some with only slits for their eyes — said that they had voted for either the Muslim Brotherhood or the Salafists. But almost none said they had voted that way for religious reasons.
Many said they voted for Islamists because they were neighbors, people they knew, while secular liberal candidates had never once visited. Some illiterate elderly women confided that they could not read the ballot and just voted where their kids told them to. But practically all of them said they had voted for the Muslim Brotherhood or Salafist candidates because they expected them to deliver better, more honest government — not more mosques or liquor bans.

My reaction is, “So what?” They voted for an authoritarian, Sharia regime (and let’s remember a hardline interpretation of Sharia, not the interpretation of Sharia offered by New York Timesreporters). That’s what’s important. People also had diverse reasons for supporting Communism, Fascism, and Nazism. Indeed, they always voted for such regimes because “they expected them to deliver better, more honest government.” Hasn’t Friedman ever heard that Mussolini made the trains run on time, Hitler built the autobahns, and the Communists promised to give land to the peasants?

But there’s even more irony here. These women are already living lives governed by Sharia and, as traditionalists, are happy (and told to be happy) with that situation. Thus, they have ample reason for supporting Islamists. There is nothing surprising in their political behavior, except to people like Friedman who predicted last year they would back liberal, Westernized Facebook kids.

Once again, Friedman shows a striking inability to think logically. If women were voting on the basis of family orders — I’d bet on the husbands and fathers rather than the children so instructing them — how can he then say that they voted because of specific personal motives or (after reporting they were told what to do!) claim that their vote is a sign of freedom?

Why are all their neighbors Islamists? Because there are so few secular liberals they’ve never actually met one. A large portion of the voters for non-Islamist parties were Christians, who they’d never socialize with. And their Brotherhood and Salafist neighbors want an Islamist dictator?
As for “more mosques” being the supposed Islamist demand that they “reject” it shows ignorance on the author’s part. Egypt has plenty of mosques and the Brotherhood and Salafists don’t make mosque-building a top priority. The question is what will be taught in those mosques and how it will direct society.

Why is Friedman dishonest? Because if he claimed that these women weren’t interested in enforcing an “Islamic” lifestyle or destroying Israel or spreading Islamism elsewhere or enforcing on all Egyptian women the dress code they follow, then readers would see through such an argument and view it as ridiculous. So he must create silly demands for the Islamists so he can claim that the people don’t want those things.

The same point applies on the supposed disinterest in bans on liquor sales. How many of these people have ever seen a liquor store? There are already proportionately few in Egypt and they cater overwhelmingly to Christians and tourists. Such a ban would not affect their lives but would make them feel that Egypt was a moral, Islamically correct county.

Again, these are trivial issues. We can all think of far more serious ones that the Islamists and their supporters do focus on.

An aspect of Friedman’s work that makes it so popular is that he constantly invents simple new theories and catch phrases to explain Middle East politics. After reading his column it is possible to believe that one has easily achieved understanding of the region. Of course, the reason that he must come up with so many theories is that they almost always fail.
Now he has a new, materialistic explanation for why Islamists will become moderate: they need the money. He cites how Egyptian Islamists have issued conflicting statements about allowing tourists to have alcohol and bikinis as proving that they must make lots of accommodations with reality. No oil money, you see.

But I heard similar things about Iran in the late 1970s — they’ll have to be moderate because they need to sell the oil — and about Yasir Arafat at the start of the peace process in the early 1980s — he’ll have to be moderate because the Palestinians he rules will demand garbage collection and decent schools. One might just as well have posited that the Turkish government would never turn against Israel because Israeli tourists brought in so much money.

Read the continuation here

Balancing Very Real External Threats with the Equally Real--and Destructive--Internal Threats: Daniel Gordis and the JPost on 'Gender Insanity' & Haredi Fanaticism

2011-12-25T14:56:00.000-08:00

It's been said that the parts of the Arab/Persian world that wish for our destruction might do better to sip their tea and let us do the heavy lifting. Below, two pieces that point that to our own overly developed internecine tendencies.
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Gender insanity

By JPOST EDITORIAL
25/12/2011

Discrimination and violence against women – purportedly motivated by religious sensibilities – have spiraled out of control.

In recent weeks, we have been witness to women attacked for refusing to move to the back of the bus to uphold a policy of gender segregation; women forced out of a venue where elections in a Jerusalem neighborhood were being held; women denied the right to come on stage to receive an official Health Ministry prize for research into the relationship between Halacha and medicine; women banned from a Jerusalem ad campaign to encourage organ donations; and women prevented from serving in key IDF positions due to the opposition of a growing, increasingly vocal group of religious male soldiers and officers. And this list is by no means exhaustive.

These incidents have generated a debate over what has been euphemistically referred to as the “banishing” of women from the public sphere. But chauvinism, discrimination or downright violence would more accurately describe this behavior.

On Saturday night, a young haredi man was arrested on suspicion of spitting at a woman helping girls onto a school bus at a religious-Zionist elementary school in Beit Shemesh.

The recent spate of incidents is so severe that it brought the issue of gender discrimination to the center of public discourse. Significantly, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who opened Sunday’s cabinet meeting by denouncing discrimination against women, has called on haredi legislators to speak out publicly against the phenomenon and ask their spiritual leaders to do so as well.

In recent years, a rapidly growing ultra-Orthodox community has adopted more extremist positions, especially with regard to questions of female modesty, known as tzniut in Hebrew. Women’s physical proximity, no matter how perfunctory, has been transformed by radical haredi men into an insurmountable hurdle.

The inner dynamics of the ultra-Orthodox community allow these men to leverage their influence. Moderation is viewed with disdain as a weakness. The result has been an unrivaled push for the radical revamping of the public domain.

Much has changed since Rabbi Moshe Feinstein (1895- 1986), the most important halachic authority in America, permitted men to commute to work on subways and buses because “unavoidable and unintentional physical contact is devoid of sexual connotations.”

Today, in contrast, where the zealots have a say, women simply do not exist. You can search in vain for a female presence in the ultra-Orthodox press. Pictures of women are taboo, even when the subject is an infant. If there is a doubt regarding the gender of a baby – say in a diaper ad – sidelocks or a kippa are added. Female names are even abbreviated.

This hyper-puritanical world view is, furthermore, being accommodated outside strictly ultra-Orthodox circles. As The Jerusalem Post’s health reporter Judy Siegel reports in today’s paper, at least two state-funded health funds – Clalit and Meuhedet – have published special brochures in deference to ultra-Orthodox sensitivities.

Neither “breast” nor “cancer” is mentioned in these brochures. Instead, code words are used. And even the most innocent photos of women or young girls are vigilantly removed. Faced with the prospect that segments of the ultra-Orthodox community would refuse to read these “sexy” brochures – and thus endanger women’s lives by failing to detect breast cancer early – the heads of the health funds apparently felt compelled to make these modifications.

Similarly, public bus companies, apparently motivated by economic considerations, have allowed haredi activists to enforce gender segregation. By caving in to these unreasonable demands, the bus companies and health funds are giving them legitimacy. And the inevitable side effect is a feeling of entitlement and self-righteousness that emboldens some particularly extreme haredi men to aggressively confront women – whether on the bus, in the streets of Beit Shemesh or elsewhere.

According to a recently released CBS report, by the year 2059, haredim – who currently make up 10 percent of the population – will grow by 580% and represent a third of Israelis. As it grows, the need for haredim to integrate into mainstream Israeli society and transform themselves from a parochial enclave to a full-fledged partner in the flourishing of a healthy Jewish state will grow as well.

What is desperately needed today in the ultra-Orthodox community is the sort of reasonable, pragmatic spiritual leadership personified by Rabbi Moshe Feinstein that would enable such integration. Otherwise, coexistence will inevitably become more and more difficult.

Before we preach to Israelis living abroad

By DANIEL GORDIS

Are we so desperately afraid of our external enemies that we’ll support at all costs a government that just watches as the country rots from within?

Kamal Subhi, formerly on the faculty of Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd University, recently joined other clerics in warning that if the Saudi ban on women driving is lifted, mixing of genders will increase and that, in turn, will encourage premarital relations. If women are allowed to drive, he said, in 10 years’ time the kingdom will have no virgins left. “The virgin dearth,” I guess we could call it. In Europe – and I’m not making this up – a Muslim cleric ruled that women should not touch or be proximate to bananas and cucumbers, in order to avoid “sexual thoughts.” Their fathers or husbands should chop them before they eat them, he suggested. Ouch.

It’s tempting to laugh, of course, to point to the absurdity that can result when a religious tradition develops thoroughly unfettered by any contact with or influence from the outside world, guided by clerics with the narrowest intellectual training imaginable. But before we point with derision to Saudi Arabia and some dark corners of Europe, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to look around and remind ourselves of what’s unfolding right here at home.

Israel, our perky start-up nation, now has another credit of which to boast. We have our very own Rosa Parks. Her name is Tania Rosenblit; she’s the young woman who refused to move to the back of the bus when instructed to do so by haredi passengers on a bus from Ashdod to Jerusalem. It’s almost 2012 – practically 99 years since Rosa Parks was born. But parts of the Jewish state are still struggling to enter the 20th century, which, of course, ended over a decade ago.

Thankfully, and none too soon, Israel’s Ashkenazi chief rabbi, Yona Metzger, rushed to condemn the segregation of men and women on public buses. “We [the ultra-Orthodox] don’t have the authority to force our ideas on others,” he asserted. “This state does not belong to the haredi community.”

Ah, so there’s the problem. The issue is not that it’s wrong to relegate women to the back of the bus (why don’t the men go to the back of the bus and let the women sit up front if they’re so worried?) or that the segregation of men and women on buses is absurd (does insurmountable temptation really lurk at every stop?) but simply because the haredim don’t (yet?) have the political power they need to enforce this. Metzger’s concern was only tactical – the haredim were over-reaching. Not a word about the shamefulness of a society in which men and women cannot respectfully and properly occupy the same public space or how similar to Saudi Arabia we seem intent on becoming. Will there be a separate section on the bus for women carrying uncut fruit?

Buses are far from the full extent of it, of course. Now we learn that the Karmiel Employment Bureau has assigned different days for men and women seeking unemployment compensation. But lest we worry that this is fundamentalism-creep, rest assured, it’s only an administrative nicety. It is “more convenient” for men and women to use the office’s services on different days, the office explained to Ynet. “It prevents stress and chaos in the waiting room and is more aesthetic.” Aesthetic? How’s that, exactly?

And let’s not forget the still-simmering controversy over women singing at army ceremonies. Since halachic rulings are apparently immutable, Israel’s noble political leaders are resorting to – what else? – technology. That, after all, is where we Israelis shine. Sephardi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar has a brilliant solution: he simply puts his fingers in his ears when women sing at army events. (I would pay for a photograph of that.)

Not to be outdone, and perhaps in order not to offend those singing young women (who are actually in the army serving their country – yes, some people still do that, apparently) who might find the sight of the state’s chief rabbi with his fingers stuck in his ears somewhat disconcerting or even offensive, Shas MK Nissim Ze’ev has a much better idea: religious men should simply use earplugs when women sing. Brilliant. One only hopes that they remember to remove them before heading into battle. I’m told that being able to hear your commander can increase effectiveness in combat. Unless you had no intention of obeying his orders in the first place, I guess.

And we have, infinitely worse, the burning of mosques, vicious and violent attacks on Israeli soldiers by radicalized settlers and an emerging national debate as to whether (or when) the army is going to have to start shooting them. And our government? It’s tiptoeing around, doing nothing and saying little, its only genuine concern that the coalition not be weakened.

AH, the joys of Jewish sovereignty, the nobility of Jewish independence. A.D. Gordon, Ahad Ha’am, Ze’ev Jabotinsky and David Ben-Gurion may have all disagreed in life, but now they have one thing in common – they are undoubtedly turning in their graves. That, by the way, was the real absurdity of those much-discussed ads begging Israelis abroad to come home. Those pot-shots at Jewish life in America (gratuitous and simplistic, a bit offensive and not entirely wrong) utterly missed the point – maybe those Israelis live in America because what’s unfolding in Israel is so thoroughly unappealing to them. Maybe they’ve noticed that back “home” in Israel the pockets of outrage against all of this violence and medievalism are tiny, virtually muted.

It’s Hanukka, our collective reminder that in an era of darkness, Jews struggle to create more light. Do those of us unafraid of cucumbers or mixed buses, those of us who believe that women serving their country ought to be able to sing, those of us who are ashamed of a country that takes only the feeblest action against Jews who do to mosques what anti- Semites did to our synagogues not that long ago, possess the courage of which this holiday is a reminder? Will we, like the Maccabees, take our country back before it’s too late?
It’s hard to know. So far, it seems we are so desperately afraid of our external enemies that we’ll support at all costs a government that just watches as the country rots from within.

At moments like this, it’s hard not to think about the Altalena affair. Tragic though it was, it was the defining moment at which Ben-Gurion made it clear to all that there would be one central authority in the Jewish state. Those who sought to subvert it would be treated in accordance with what they were – threats to the state’s very existence. One prays that some progress can be made here without the use of force. But if it cannot, it’s worth remembering that we once had a prime minister who knew what had to be done.

But then, of course, it’s been a very long time since we’ve had a leader with that character, that confidence, those deeply held commitments. These days, with Hanukka reminding us of the enormous power of convictions, it would be nice to have some leadership with any principles at all.

Daniel Gordis is president of the Shalem Foundation and senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. His latest book, Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War that May Never End (Wiley), won the 2009 National Jewish Book Award. His next book, The Promise of Israel: Why Its Seemingly Greatest Weakness is Actually Its Greatest Strength, will be published this August.

The New York Times: All the News That's "Unfit" to Print about Israel: Why Bibi Declines to Pen an Op-Ed & Why Tom Friedman is Wrong: Again & Again & Again

2011-12-16T12:00:00.000-08:00

A common refrain amongst New York Times cognoscenti (including a healthy smattering of liberal American Jewry): "Have you read Friedman's piece today in the Times?" The knowing smiles, cooing and then the tsk, tsking about how Israel is falling into the abyss of fascism, theocracy and how the settlements are the root of all evil. Followed by the obligatory Bibi-bashing. Except it turns out that Friedman is wrong in his presumptions, misreads Israel and the Middle East time and again, yet never tires of smugly "informing" Israelis about what's really best for them, and what they should do to achieve peace and save their soul. Because that's what friends do for each other.
He's been writing virtually the same article for several years now. Never mind that realities in the Middle East change on a dime. But for Friedman, time stands still. It's the settlements, Israeli intransigence, and of course, Bibi that is to blame for the ongoing impasse.
But Friedman reached a new low this week when he averred:

I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.

This now puts him somewhere between Patrick Buchanan:

"Capitol Hill is Israeli occupied territory." 1990

and Walt and Mearsheimer: The Israel Lobby 2006

The plainer, more mundane truth is that the U.S. Congress and the American people, support Israel by overwhelming majorities because of shared values like democracy and religious sensibilities and shared experiences like victimization by jihadist movements, including terrorism. See Walter Russell Mead: Why AIPAC Is Good For The Jews — and For Everyone Else & The Israel Lobby and Gentile Power

I’ve shared my opinion that AIPAC is powerful less because of the money and energy that its (mostly Jewish) members bring to the table than because of the widespread sense in Washington that being pro-Israel is the popular position in the United States, and that if AIPAC blasts you as anti-Israel, the charge tends to stick. If you think US Middle Eastern policy should be less pro-Israel, attacking and bemoaning AIPAC won’t get you anywhere. There’s not even much point in trying to persuade the Jews; American Jews tend to be more liberal on US-Israel policy than most gentiles already. It’s the 98 percent of Americans who aren’t Jewish that you need to persuade; if the broad American majority ever decides that backing Israel as much as we do is a bad thing, then policy will gradually but decisively change — no matter what AIPAC does or how much money it works.

Of course, Friedman isn't the only Times journalist with a major ax to grind when it comes to Israel. Roger Cohen continues to pen articles lambasting the Jewish state: Israel Isolates Itself

Nicholas Kristof keeps blaming Israel for its predicament: Is Israel Its Own Worst Enemy?

and the editorial board has turned Bibi-bashing into a spectator sport, making it unsurprising that

Benjamin Netanyahu Rejects New York Times

Also, see Herb Keinon's piece below

david in Seattle

Friedman is wrong

His misunderstanding of Israel is evident in his underlying assumption that appears in his columns repeatedly: that were Israel to just leave the settlements, peace would flow like a river.

For the past several years, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, that guru for American Jewish liberals, has shown that he doesn’t really understand Israel or the region.
His misunderstanding of Israel is evident in his underlying assumption that appears in his columns repeatedly: that were Israel to just leave the settlements, peace would flow like a river.

Well, Israel uprooted all 21 settlements from Gaza in 2005, but instead of peace, received an unending barrage of missiles in return.
The settlements are a consequence of the conflict, not its cause. The PLO, if anyone has forgotten, was established in 1964, three years before the Six Day War and any thought of a West Bank settlement.

As for Friedman’s failure to understand the region, readers need look no further than his breathless “Postcard from Cairo” columns at the outset of the Arab Spring last February. To have read Friedman then was to believe this was 1989 all over again, and that Hosni Mubarak would be deposed and replaced by the Egyptian version of Vaclav Havel.

In one piece, he castigated Israel for not being more supportive of the protesters in Tahrir Square. “The children of Egypt were having their liberation moment,” he wrote, “and the children of Israel decided to side with Pharaoh – right to the very end.”

Wrong. Israel wasn’t supporting Pharaoh, but rather deeply concerned that following the Egyptian revolution, Sinai would turn into a terrorist base, the Egypt-Israel gas pipeline would be a constant target of attack, the Israeli Embassy in Cairo would be ransacked, and the Muslim Brotherhood – and Salafists to their right – would win the country’s parliamentary election.

Now, in his latest piece on Israel that appeared Wednesday entitled “Newt, Mitt, Bibi and Vladimir,” Friedman demonstrated that he also doesn’t know America.

In a line that could have come straight from the pens of AIPAC-bashers Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, Friedman wrote that he hoped Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, whom he loathes, understood that the standing ovation he got in Congress earlier this year was not for his politics, but rather one that was “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”

That’s right – that wicked, despicable Israel lobby.

According to Friedman, anybody who supports Israel must be on the nefarious Jewish lobby’s payroll. Otherwise, how could they dare? Maybe Friedman should consider the possibility that the ovation was the result of America’s elected officials – in tune with the feelings of their constituents – seeing in Israel a plucky little country that shares their own basic values and is trying to survive in an awfully bad neighborhood.

Maybe Friedman should consider that the ovation was the result of politicians understanding that this conflict is not about one settlement, or one Jerusalem neighborhood, but rather over the Jewish people’s right to a homeland.

No, that can’t be. In fact, writes Friedman – always concerned about Israel’s soul – were Netanyahu to go to the University of Wisconsin, many students, including Jews, would stay away because they are confused by Israeli policies: the current spate of right-wing Knesset legislation, the segregation of women on buses, the settlements.

And then came the kicker. Friedman’s proof that Israel is merrily heading down the path toward the abyss is that radical left-wing Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy says so.
Dubbing Levy a “powerful liberal voice, writing in Haaretz,” Friedman quotes from a recent Levy column: “What we are witnessing is w-a-r. This fall a culture war, no less, broke out in Israel, and it is being waged on many more, and deeper, fronts than are apparent. It is not only the government, as important as that is, that hangs in the balance, but also the very character of the state.”

Friedman’s use of an extremist such as Levy to prove his point is akin to taking the writings of America-bashing left-wing linguist Noam Chomsky as proof that America is bad.

The problem with Friedman and those sharing his sentiments about Israel is that they take an exception and make it the rule.

This school of thought takes a sex-segregated bus in Mea She’arim and turns the whole country into Iran; takes rocks thrown by bad, misguided youth at an IDF base and turns Israel into a country on the brink of civil war; and takes the government’s refusal to bail out a failing commercial television station as putting Israel on the fast track to Soviet Russia.

What is needed is some proportion. The burning of mosques by Jewish hooligans is deplorable, but it is no more representative of the country – or the direction it is going – than Florida Pastor Terry Jones’ burning of a Koran in May was a reflection of America. Friedman should know this.

Netanyahu to ‘New York Times’: Take a hike
By HERB KEINON

Prime minister "respectfully declines" to pen an op-ed piece for 'NYT' citing newspapers negative spin on Netanyahu government.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is refusing to pen an op-ed piece for The New York Times, signaling the degree to which he is fed up with the influential newspaper’s editorial policy on Israel.

In a letter to the Times obtained by The Jerusalem Post on Thursday, Netanyahu’s senior adviser Ron Dermer – in response to the paper’s request that Netanyahu write an op-ed – wrote that the prime minister would “respectfully decline.”

Dermer made clear that this had much to do with the fact that 19 of the paper’s 20 op-ed pieces on Israel since September were negative.
Ironically, the one positive piece was written by Richard Goldstone – chairman of the UN’s Goldstone Commission Report – defending Israel against charges of apartheid.

“We wouldn’t want to be seen as ‘Bibiwashing’ the op-ed page of The New York Times,” Dermer said, in reference to a piece called “Israel and Pinkwashing” from November. In that piece, a City University of New York humanities professor lambasted Israel for, as Dermer wrote, “having the temerity to champion its record on gay rights.”

That piece, he wrote, “set a new bar that will be hard for you to lower in the future.”

Dermer’s letter came a day after NYT columnist Thomas Friedman wrote that the resounding ovation Netanyahu received in Congress when he spoke there in May had been “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”

With Friedman clearly – but not solely – among those in mind, Dermer wrote that “the opinions of some of your regular columnists regarding Israel are well known. They constantly distort the positions of our government and ignore the steps it has taken to advance peace. They cavalierly defame our country by suggesting that marginal phenomena condemned by Prime Minister Netanyahu, and virtually every Israeli official, somehow reflect government policy or Israeli society as a whole.”

Dermer also took the paper to task for running an op-ed piece by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in May that asserted that shortly after the UN voted for the partition of Palestine in November 1947, “Zionist forces expelled Palestinian Arabs to ensure a decisive Jewish majority in the future state of Israel, and Arab armies intervened. War and further expulsions ensued.”
Those lines, Dermer wrote, “effectively turn on its head an event within living memory in which the Palestinians rejected the UN partition plan accepted by the Jews, and then joined five Arab states in launching a war to annihilate the embryonic Jewish state. It should not have made it past the most rudimentary fact-checking.”

That it did find its way into the op-ed pages of the “paper of record,” he wrote, showed the degree to which the paper had not internalized former senator Daniel Moynihan’s admonition that “everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but... no one is entitled to their own facts.”

Furthermore, Dermer wrote, the paper’s sole positive piece about Israel since September – the Goldstone piece rejecting the apartheid charges – “came a few months after your paper reportedly rejected Goldstone’s previous submission. In that earlier piece, which was ultimately published in The Washington Post, the man who was quoted the world over for alleging that Israel had committed war crimes in Gaza fundamentally changed his position. According to The New York Times op-ed page, that was apparently news unfit to print.”

Dermer wrote that the paper’s refusal to run positive pieces about Israel was not because they were in short supply. In fact, he said he understood that in September the paper had turned down a piece cowritten by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Virginia) and Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland), expressing bipartisan support for direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and opposition to the PA’s statehood gambit at the UN.

“In an age of intense partisanship, one would have thought that strong bipartisan support for Israel on such a timely issue would have made your cut,” he wrote.

Meanwhile, Rep. Steve Rothman (D-New Jersey) called on Friedman to apologize for saying the congressional ovation Netanyahu received in May was “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”
Rothman said he gave Netanyahu a standing ovation not because of “any nefarious lobby,” but because it is in the US’s vital strategic interest to support Israel.

“Thomas Friedman’s defamation against the vast majority of Americans who support the Jewish state of Israel is scurrilous, destructive and harmful to Israel and her advocates in the US,” Rothman said. “Friedman is not only wrong, but he’s aiding and abetting a dangerous narrative about the US-Israel relationship and its American supporters.”

Robert Satloff's Astute Observations on the Implications of the Arab "Intifadat" (the more apt term than either 'Arab Spring' or 'Arab Awakening')

2011-12-15T12:27:00.000-08:00

The Arab uprisings, one year on

By ROBERT SATLOFF
Several dictators deposed in 2011, but much remains the same in the Arab world.

It is now commonplace to note that, like 1948, 1967 and 1979, the year that was – 2011 – will go down as a year of seismic change in the Middle East. But what sort of change will it leave in its wake?

The term most often associated with the events of the last year – the “Arab Spring” – provides virtually no clue. That phrase, borrowed from a hopeful moment in Prague that was crushed by Soviet tanks more than a generation ago, was first used in the Middle East context in 2005. That was when the assassination of Rafik Hariri triggered an outpouring of Lebanese “people power” that drove Syrian troops out of that country and raised hopes of a truly new dawn in Lebanon after its bloody 30-year war.

In retrospect, its usage was tragically apt, in that Hezbollah – like the Soviets – eventually triumphed, putting off until another day the potential for truly positive change. One doubts that the Facebookers and Twitterati who celebrate the Arab Spring of 2011 recall this unhappy history.

“Arab Awakening” is the second term whose use is increasing – not least because commentators have been told that many Middle Eastern countries, especially Egypt, have only two real seasons, neither of which is spring. News outlets as disparate as The Economist and Al Jazeera have begun to use “Arab Awakening” to describe the volcanic eruptions across the region sparked by the iconic selfimmolation of a Tunisian street vendor last December.

This term, too, has an historical antecedent, one that is actually rooted in the Middle East, which is a plus. It harkens back to the landmark 1938 book of the same title by George Antonius, a Greek Orthodox Lebanese and onetime British mandatory official in Palestine who extolled the rising of a renewed pan-Arab political and cultural consciousness after decades of European, principally British, machination and domination. But setting aside the ahistorical elements of Antonius’ original work, “Arab awakening” conjures up precisely the wrong imagery for what has been happening in Arab countries over the past year.
First, Antonius’ book was designed, in large part, to rally Arabs to the Palestine cause. In contrast, the changes of 2011 were, at their core, a sharp riposte to ideologues who contend that Arabs only, principally or even mostly care about Palestine. And second, while Antonius’ Arab Awakening was a clarion call for pan-Arab nationalism – the idea that Arabs from the Atlantic to the Gulf share a linguistic, cultural, social and even political patrimony – the events of 2011 have been national, not pan-Arab, phenomena, with Egyptians, Libyans, Yemenis, Syrians and others celebrating their specific local nationalisms, not some abstract trans-regional ideology. So, like the romantic term “Arab Spring,” the equally romantic term “Arab Awakening” obscures more than it explains.

There is, in my view, a widely used Arabic term of recent vintage that comes closer than either of these more popular phrases to capturing the explosiveness, the challenge and the uncertainty of what has occurred across the region over the past year. While this term is most closely associated with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the fact that it is linked in political consciousness to a single national experience makes it appropriate to use, in its plural form, to apply to the variety of national experiences witnessed in 2011.

The word is “intifada,” whose Arabic original meaning is “shaking off” and has come to be used as the Arabic translation of “uprising.” What the world has seen over the past year is a series of “Arab uprisings,” i.e., popular efforts – some more peaceful than others – to shake off traditional authority. Like their Palestinian namesakes, these uprising reminded the world that mass action can sometimes play as important a role in Arab politics as elite behavior. And like those earlier “intifadat” – plural of intifada – the outcome of these uprisings is decidedly uncertain.

HAVING DECIDED the “what” (what to call the events of the past year) the next task is to determine the “so what” (what do these events really mean). This is even trickier. Identifying winners (Sunni Islamists) and losers (Israel and Iran) of these uprisings has become a favorite parlor game, but after just one year, it is far too early to judge if the events of 2011 will have truly lasting impact, where that lasting impact will be felt most, and how will it affect issues of strategic import, such as whether Iran will persist with slow-motion development of a nuclear weapon capability or jump to a breakout strategy.

Indeed, while leaders have been driven from power in four Arab countries – Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya – only in one of these (Libya) can one say conclusively that the regimes they led have been driven from power, too. In Tunisia and Egypt, the key institution that facilitated the original transfer of power – the army – remains intact; in Yemen, the deposed leader has not really even gone away.

One additional Arab republic, Syria, teeters on the brink of all-out civil war; while four-and-a-half others – Sudan, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority – have barely been touched by the “uprising” tsunami. Elsewhere, one monarchy fought back against its uprising and appears to have triumphed (Bahrain) while other monarchies employed a rope-adope strategy of reform to absorb the challenge of uprising and have, so far, avoided any significant unrest. The variety of national experience is itself the dominant motif.

Despite all this, the events of the past year – no matter how they ultimately turn out – have already had a profound impact, not so much in shaping a new Middle East but in demolishing several long-held assumptions about the old Middle East. Here are five.

• FIRST, NO longer valid is the idea that competition among elites, rather than the influence of popular will, determines the rise and fall of Arab regimes. For four decades – from the mass outpouring of Egyptians who rejected Gamal Abdel Nasser’s resignation in the wake of the catastrophic 1967 war to the mass outpouring of Egyptians who demanded Mubarak’s resignation after 30 years of peace with Israel – the Arab street was largely irrelevant to assessments of the region’s politics. Tahrir Square brought that chapter to a close. This does not mean the mob will always determine the fate of Arab nations but it is an actor on the Arab stage once again.

• SECOND, NO longer valid is the idea that authoritarian regimes can and will use the full power of the state to retain their control. For two generations, the spectre of the omnipotent state cast a dark shadow across the region’s politics, stifling the development of any real opposition worthy of the name. The might and power of these regimes grew meteorically in recent decades, as many leaders looked at the frightening collapse of the Shah of Iran and decided to pour every marginal dollar (or pound, lira or riyal) into their manifold security and intelligence apparatuses.
Over time, however, the rot of corruption and a preening sense of invincibility ate away at these regimes from within. The result was that the former commander of the Egyptian Air Force, a hero of the Suez crossing against mighty Israel, was forced to dispatch machete-armed camel riders in a last-ditch effort to salvage his rule. This decrepitude has not been the case everywhere, of course, as the brutality of the Libyan and Syrian sagas shows, but the rapid demise of authoritarianism in Tunisia and Egypt underscores the limits of presumed omnipotence.

• THIRD, NO longer valid is the idea that the main threat to moderate, pro- West regimes across the Levant emanates from the emergence of an Iran-dominated “Shi’ite crescent.” In its place is the potentially greater fear that a “Sunni crescent” of regimes led or influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood – regimes that espouse Osama bin Ladin’s anti-American, anti-Western and anti-Israel objectives without his radically violent and urgent means – will stretch from Morocco to the Gulf.
Already, Ikhwan-related prime ministers are or are poised to be in office from Rabat to Gaza, with the exception of Algiers, and they are likely to be joined by colleagues in Damascus and perhaps Amman before 2012 is over.
Some will see in this an antidote to the destructive message of al-Qaida and welcome this as a more evolutionary and authentic trend, but their optimism is almost surely misplaced. (The canary in the Islamist coalmine will be the local Christian communities. The pace of Christian, especially Coptic, emigration, will be an especially useful bellwether. After two millennia, predictions that half of the current Arab Christian population will be gone within the next decade are not fantastical.)

• FOURTH, NO longer valid is the idea that the Saudi gerontocracy lacks the energy and vision to do anything but pay off enemies or count on America for its preservation. To the contrary, the year of “Arab uprisings” – which has paralleled a year of unusual travails for the Saudi royal family – has witnessed an unusually bold and assertive Saudi penchant for self-preservation, exemplified by the deployment of Saudi and other Gulf forces in Bahrain. This even led to the enunciation of Riyadh’s version of the Monroe Doctrine, i.e., that no neighboring monarchy should be permitted to experiment with, let alone succumb to the allures of, liberal democracy. The Wahhabis of the Nejd, it seems, aren’t going down without a fight – and aren’t about to let their royalist neighbors go down either.

• FIFTH, NO longer valid is the idea that the United States will always prioritize preservation of “the devil we know” over the uncertainty and inherent instability of “the devil we don’t.” To be sure, official Washington believed that the intercession of the Egyptian army to ease transition to a post-Mubarak future was a way to safeguard its diminishing equities, not a way to throw its lot in with the throngs of street protestors.

But in less than a year, an administration consumed with domestic woes and eager to shed foreign entanglements has already begun to reconcile itself to a new, Islamist-dominated Middle East. While neither unchangeable nor irretrievable, the speed with which America made a strategic pivot in the Middle East, in the process making peace with the idea that elections, not institutions, build democracy, is nothing short of astounding.

It is too early to define a new set of assumptions that will explain the ways of the Middle East in the next few decades with as much acuity and precision as the old assumptions helpfully guided us through the last half century. But we begin 2012 much as Middle Easterners began 1949, 1968 and 1980 – confident only that uncertainty is the new norm.

The writer is the executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Two Perspectives on the West's Myopia when it Comes to All Things Israel: Gil Troy on Hilary's 'Iraneous/Erroneous POV and Mamet on Israel as the West's Modern Sacrifice

2011-12-13T08:47:00.000-08:00

You'd think that the worldly, sophisticated U.S. Secretary of State would know better than to compare democratic Israel, for all its imperfections, to theocratic Iran. Apparently, you'd be wrong. Of course, you'd also expect that a Pulitzer Prize winning (twice) journalist for the Times, Nicholas Kristof, would dig a little deeper than sipping tea with some apparently moderate spokespeople for the Muslim Brotherhood before he blithely gives the Islamist group his hopeful seal of approval.
When it comes to the Middle East in general and Israel in particular, it seems all bets are off. The only surety is that when it comes to Israel, the West is ready to sacrifice Israel, under the illusion that if you feed the beast what it wants, you'll be spared. Of course, it only means you'll be eaten last.
david in Seattle

Hillary’s Iraneous/Erroneous View of Israel: Undiplomatic and Offensive

Last week, rather than mounting some constructive diplomatic offensive, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton simply was undiplomatic and offensive. In the Obama Administration’s latest insult to the Jewish State, Clinton compared democratic Israel to theocratic Iran and the segregated South. Secretary Clinton claimed the walkout of some Israeli male soldiers when some female soldiers started singing paralleled life in Iran. She also claimed the informal, illegal, gender segregation on some Jerusalem buses evoked Rosa Parks, who refused to sit in the back of the bus. Beyond confusing individual lapses with state practices, Clinton demonstrated Middle East discourse’s broken barometer. Somehow, when talking about Israel, too many people exaggerate wildly, caricaturing Israel crudely – and delighting the delegitimizers.

Even sophisticated players like Hillary Clinton only see Israel through hysterical headlines; they have no clue what really happens. When she visits, Clinton and other dignitaries should go beyond the usual Y2K package – Yad Vashem, the Knesset, and the Kotel, the Western Wall -- to experience the real Israel, a dynamic, chaotic, pluralistic, modern democracy which is no Iran.

Had Clinton visited Israel last week, she would have witnessed the intense debate surrounding the latest round of proposed Knesset laws. She would have heard Attorney General Yehudah Weinstein vow that, even if it passed, he would never defend the law limiting foreign government donations to NGOs before the Supreme Court. Golda Meir’s spirit lives: Israel’s incredibly activist Supreme Court is headed by a woman, as are the Kadima and Labor opposition parties. Hearing the din, Clinton could give Israeli democracy the highest grade in Natan Sharansky’s public square test – Israelis denounce the government publicly, shrilly, very regularly, without suffering government harassment.

Last week, Clinton also would have read about Israel’s former President Moshe Katsav going to jail. Beyond learning that in this democracy no one is above the law, she could compare the punishment Israel’s president received for imposing himself criminally on women, with the way a recent American president she knows well dodged punishment for similar crimes – although I doubt she would “go there,” as they say in shrink-speak. As a social reformer before she became an undiplomatic diplomat, she would be more likely to take interest in the “Torani” block where Israel’s most famous new convict now lives. Inmates wake up at 4:30 AM to study Jewish texts all day. These Jewish jailbirds are participating in a fascinating experiment to fight recidivism with Judaism. This is the kind of old-new, Jewish-modern synergy that characterizes life in the Jewish state.

Two nights later, Hillary Clinton could have heard the Israeli pop icon David Broza in concert. Even a casual listener could discern the symphony of sounds and influences – the echoes of bluegrass and salsa, of rock and folk – blended into his uniquely Israeli beat. Broza – who days later was in Dohar attending a UN Alliance of Civilizations Forum with 2500 other civil society activists – told me from Qatar that this Jewish cosmopolitan mix is what makes Israel so artistically exciting for him. “It’s like eating kabob with ketchup,” Broza exclaimed, “Israel is the most cosmopolitan young, vibrant, and open-minded society I have ever seen. We can dance the debka while [the American blues legend] John Lee Hooker is playing in the background.”

Broza believes that “because it’s bizarre it’s often misunderstood.” Israelis are “somebody.” They instinctively understand that “without an identity they are lost. Historically, in the Diaspora, we Jews always maintained our identity, our rituals, our tradition, our learning – that was our strength.” And now, “When you reinvent yourself you put all the elements in the pot and what you get is a new persona.”

“I don’t think Hillary Clinton sees this Israel,” Broza speculated. “All she meets is the political box, and the rhetoric. She misses the light side of people.”

The week ended with an Israeli scientist Daniel Shechtman collecting his Nobel Prize for Chemistry in Stockholm. When Shechtman discovered quasicrystals in 1982, the famous scientist Linus Pauling scoffed: “There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists.” Those of us who know the rich, complex truth about Israel are equally isolated, often similarly mocked. We may not get Nobel Prizes for sticking to the truth, but we will enjoy other, sublime awards: the ability to delight in Israel’s cultural cosmopolitanism, as David Broza does; the opportunity to pioneer old-new expressions of Judaism, Zionism, democracy, as the Schechterites do, and the satisfaction of being right, even if it makes us unpopular.

The writer is professor of history at McGill University and a Shalom Hartman Research Fellow in Jerusalem. He is the author of Why I Am A Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today and The History of American Presidential Elections. giltroy@gmail.com

Israel, Isaac and the Return of Human Sacrifice

Why have liberal Westerners turned their backs on the Jewish state?.
By DAVID MAMET

As Iran races toward the bomb, many observers seem to think the greater threat is the possibility that Israel might act against its nuclear program. Which raises the question: What should it mean if, God forbid, militant Islam through force of arms, and with the supine permission of the West, succeeds in the destruction of the Jewish State?

1) That the Jewish People would no longer have their ancestral home;
2) That they should have no home.

At the Versailles Peace Conference, Woodrow Wilson stated as an evident moral proposition that each people should have the right to national self-determination. The West, thereafter, fought not for empire, nor national expansion, but in self-defense, or in defense of this proposition. But, for the Jewish State, the Liberal West puts the proposition aside.

Since its foundation Israel has turned the other cheek. Eric Hoffer wrote that Israel is the only country the world expects to act like Christians. Some Jews say that the Arabs have a better public relations apparatus. They do not need one. For the Liberal West does not need convincing. It is thrilled merely to accept an excuse to rescind what it regards as a colossal error.

The Liberal West has, for decades, indulged itself in an orgy of self-flagellation. We have enjoyed comfort and security, but these, in the absence of gratitude and patriotism, cause insecurity. This attempted cure for insecurity can be seen in protestations of our worthlessness, and the indictment of private property.

But no one in the affluent West and no one among the various protesters of various supposed injustices is prepared to act in accordance with his protestations. The opponent of "The Corporation" is still going to use the iPhone which permits him to mass with his like. The celebrities acting out at Occupy meetings will still invest their surplus capital, and the supposed champion of the dispossessed in the Levant will not only scoff at American Indian claims to land he has come to understand as his—he will lobby the City Council to have the homeless shelter built anywhere but on his block.
The brave preceptors who would like to end Poverty, War, Exploitation, Colonialism, Inequality and so on, stop at the proclamation. How may they synchronize their wise fervor with their inaction?

How may they still the resultant anxiety? The Left's answer is the oldest in the world: by appeal to The Gods. But how may The Gods be appeased? The immemorial answer is: By human sacrifice.

What is the essence of the Torah? It is not the Ten Commandments, these were known, and the practice of most aspired to by every civilization. Rabbi Lawrence Kushner teaches they are merely a Calling Card; to wit: "remember me . . . ?"

The essence of the Torah is the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac. The God of Hosts spoke to Abraham, as the various desert gods had spoken to the nomads for thousands of years: "If you wish me to relieve your anxiety, give me the most precious thing you have."

So God's call to Abraham was neither unusual nor, perhaps, unexpected. God had told Abraham to leave his people and his home, and go to the place which God would point out to him. And God told Abraham to take his son up the mountain and kill him, as humans had done for tens of thousands of years.

Now, however, for the first time in history, the narrative changed. The sacrifice, Isaac, spoke back. He asked his father, "Where is the Goat we are to sacrifice?" This was the voice of conscience, and Abraham's hand, as it descended with the knife, was stayed. This was the Birth of the West, and the birth of the West's burden, which is conscience.

Previously the anxiety and fear attendant upon all human life was understood as Fear of the Gods, and dealt with by propitiation, which is to say by sacrifice. Now, however, the human burden was not to give The Gods what one imagined, in one's fear, that they might want, but do, in conscience, those things one understood God to require.

In abandonment of the state of Israel, the West reverts to pagan sacrifice, once again, making a burnt offering not of that which one possesses, but of that which is another's. As Realpolitik, the Liberal West's anti-Semitism can be understood as like Chamberlain's offering of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, a sop thrown to terrorism. On the level of conscience, it is a renewal of the debate on human sacrifice.
Mr. Mamet is a playwright and screenwriter.

Yossi Klein Halevi on the Challenge of Delegitimization & Tal Becker on Rabin's Legacy and the Trouble with "Peace"

2011-11-10T12:38:00.000-08:00

Halevi gives a stirring talk at the David Project, tackling the existential challenges of delegitimization, articulating our right to Defend and Define ourselves, the importance of strengthening Israeli institutions of democracy as a powerful weapon against delegitimizers, refreshes our memories about the collective "amnesia" surrounding the 2nd Intifada (more aptly understood as The Terror War), challenges the NIF to better define and enforce red lines against delegitimizers, and identifies our strengths and why we will ultimately prevail.
Most worthy of listening to the full 50 minutes...

And Tal Becker offers a thoughtful analysis of the lack of present prospects for an authentic peace, but makes the case for accepting current limitations as what sovereign states do to shape their destinies, rather than living in the exilic language of Messianic pretension. By invoking the pragmatic, yet visionary approach of Rabin, z"l, Becker offers a window into the possible. To see how "the perfect can be the enemy of the good, but also because the good can be the enemy of the simply preferable," read his insightful essay below.
david in Seattle

The Delegitimization Challenge
Yossi Klein Halevi at the David Project

Rabin’s Legacy and the Trouble with “Peace”
By TAL BECKER

Yitzhak Rabin, z”l, whose assassination we commemorate this week, was a reluctant peacemaker. The image of his grudging, almost pained, handshake with Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn in 1993 said much about the man. Many attribute to him larger than life qualities, and are convinced that but for his death we would now be living in a new, peaceful Middle East. But I am not sure Rabin would have shared that conviction.

What was apparent, to me at least, about Rabin as a man was precisely his rootedness in Middle East reality, and his suspicion for that brand of breathless optimism that imagines that the region can be transformed instantly. What was most striking about Rabin as a leader was that his realism and hard experience as a military man was not a barrier to diplomatic action and decision; it was almost an impetus for it. For him, the determined pursuit of negotiated agreements seemed to have more to do with better positioning Israel for the rise of Iran and extremism, than with a deeply held belief in the prospect of coexistence.

I connect with this side of Rabin because - though this is one of the less popular things for an Israeli to admit - I sometimes find the word “peace” quite irritating. It seems to conjure up a vision in people’s minds of a reality that for the foreseeable future may just not be within reach. As much as we may wish it to be different, it is difficult to read the headlines about Iran and terrorism, the empowerment of extremists and zero-sum diplomacy, and sustain the belief that true peace will break out any time soon. And this idea that a document on paper, however well-crafted, will usher in some utopian era in practice seems fanciful.

We live in a region with powerful militant actors, dysfunctional governments, and deep, systemic problems. To speak of a “peace agreement” as a kind of cure-all is to create expectations that cannot be met. If there is a case to be made for agreements with our neighbors - and there is - it is unfortunately not because it will produce the kind of peace enjoyed on the U.S.-Canadian border. It can only be because - assuming the right agreement can be reached - it offers a chance for a reality, and a future, better than the one we know.

In fact, most “peace agreements” do not really presume to establish peace in its broader sense. They do not try to reconcile grand historical narratives or produce deep bonds of friendship and cooperation between erstwhile warring peoples. Generally, they are technical documents. They focus on things like the military redeployment of troops, the composition of constituent assemblies, or the demarcation of a border. Even when done right, they tend to be less like exhilarating marriage ceremonies than unsatisfying divorce agreements, where bitter and scarred parents try, against odds, to make things less painful for their children.

We place too much weight on these negotiated agreements, and on the shoulders of the negotiators themselves, if we expect some form of words on paper to deliver salvation. Even at best, an agreement does not create peace; it creates the space for peace to grow. It creates a framework for the real potential engineers of peace - the teachers, the parents, the spiritual leaders, the children - to fashion a new reality and mindset over time; and for the extremists to gradually become unappealing and marginalized.

This is, of course, not the way leaders generally talk about negotiated settlements. More often than not, we are promised the dawn of some new age. The disillusionment associated with what can actually be reached and the rejection of what is on offer often follows.

Rabin’s legacy suggests that we may do well to shed this Messianic pretension. This language belongs to the age of Exile. When shaping your destiny is out of your hands, you can allow for the comfort of grand, unreachable visions to ease the long dull ache of your current predicament. But the real work of a sovereign State has more to do with improving the lot of its people than with revolutionizing it. And an imagination that is not grounded in reality can act as an obstacle to quality decisions, not just because the perfect can be the enemy of the good, but also because the good can be the enemy of the simply preferable.

This is not to say that agreements we reach with our neighbors should not bring real dividends. These agreements must produce, and must be seen to produce, a net advance in our interests and values (relative to the status quo). They must link somehow to our higher aspirations and our long-term prayers for a true peace. But they need not be all things to all people. They need not live up to some Romantic ideal that dreams can become realities overnight. They can and will be messy and sub-optimal even when they are the best alternative available.

It is said that at the conclusion of the Dayton Accords that brought an end to the war in Yugoslavia, the Bosnian leader, Alija Izetbegović, gave a speech in which he sought to justify the agreement to his people. But he did not try to convince them that some epic peace had been achieved. “This may not be a just peace”, he conceded, “but it is more just than the continuation of war.” In this same spirit, Rabin’s legacy suggests both that we must believe in the promise of peace, but also that we must make that promise believable. In honoring his memory, and advancing Israel’s interests, we could do worse than give more space for this kind of sentiment in our discourse and our decisions.

A Rediscovered Abundance of Goodness & Living with Missiles: The Complexities & Challenges of Aspirational Zionism

2011-10-30T11:13:00.000-07:00

Two powerful articles by two leading rabbis and important voices in modern Israel.
Daniel Gordis exhorts the Prime Minister to seize the moment and exploit Gilad Schalit's release to unleash all the good (and stamp out much of the evil) bubbling under the surface of a hardened Israeli society.
Donniel Hartman encourages us to meet the challenges of living in an abnormal world (and neighborhood) by aspiring to the best of Jewish values, Jewish intelligence, and Jewish humanity.

"We defeat terror when we continue to build a society of values, when we not only worry about whether we will be, but about who we will be. When issues of social justice, loyalty, and kindness, democracy, and Jewish identity reverberate throughout our public conversation and policies we are building foundations of strength which no terrorist can destroy."
Donniel Hartman

A rediscovered abundance of goodness
DANIEL GORDIS

A letter to the Prime Minister regarding Schalit's release.

Mr. Prime Minister, Before the Schalit deal fades entirely from view, many of us are hoping that you have noticed what you unwittingly unleashed. I don’t mean the next wave of terror or the terrible decisions that Israel must make before the next kidnapping. We knew about those even before last week. But last Tuesday, all of us – those opposed as well as those in favor (and there were persuasive arguments on both sides) – rediscovered something magnificent about this country.

It would be tragic if we returned to business as usual without pausing to take note.

In addition to Gilad Schalit, we received one more thing that few of us could have expected; we got a reminder of the abundant goodness that still resides at the very core of this society. It could be seen everywhere.

Compare the speeches on our side, celebrating life and freedom, to the bloodthirsty Palestinian harangues calling for renewed terror and additional kidnappings.

Compare the respectful restraint of our press to newscaster Shahira Amin’s immoral and abusive interview in Egypt. But more than anything, we saw this reservoir of goodness in the streets – in the people so moved that they could hide neither the tears in their eyes nor the lumps in their throats. We saw it in the throngs in the streets, people who wanted Schalit to know that they, too, celebrated his long overdue freedom. And we saw it in the hundreds of people in his hometown of Mitzpe Hila who continued dancing long after he’d entered his house and closed the door.

We all felt it. It was innocent, pure and thoroughly decent. We were witness that day to an entire country believing in something again. Those young people outside the Schalit home were singing not only about Schalit, but about this land, this people and about a future in which they still believe. Did you see them? Women and men, religious and secular dancing with abandon in celebration of freedom? Did you hear them singing “Anahnu Ma’aminim Bnei Ma’aminim…” “We are believers, the children of believers, and we have no one on whom to depend other than our Father in heaven”? You didn’t miss it, did you? Hundreds of people from all walks of Israeli life, proclaiming without hesitation their belief in something bigger than themselves? The reason that the prisoner trade was so wildly popular, Mr. Prime Minister, wasn’t ultimately about Gilad Schalit. It was about Israel. About a country desperate to transcend the cynicism, that still wants to believe that it’s worth believing. Shouldn’t we – and you – therefore ask ourselves what can we do next to justify people’s belief in this place? What will it take to make this a country that its citizens can love even when we’re not freeing a captive?

How about if we start by eradicating evil? Take but one example and deal with it.

There’s a small but vicious group of kids living over the Green Line who bring inestimable shame on the Jewish people. They burn mosques, tear down olive trees and sow fear everywhere – all with the implicit support of their rabbis. And they make many young Israelis deeply ashamed of this entire enterprise. Last week you showed us that you know how to take decisive action. So do it again. Rein them in. Arrest them. Cut off funding to their yeshivot. If you show this generation of Israelis that your government stands for goodness even when that means making tough domestic decisions, you’ll unleash a wave of Zionist passion like we haven’t felt here for a generation. It wouldn’t be any harder to do than what you just did, and it would do even more good for Israel than getting one soldier back.

And beyond goodness, there’s also Jewishness. No, we shouldn’t make too much of that “Anahnu Ma’aminim Bnei Ma’aminim” song, but admit – it’s not what you expect to see lots of secular people singing. Yet they did. Because this is a strange and wondrous country; not so deep down, even “non-religious” people aren’t “non-religious.” Just like their observant counterparts, they’re searching, struggling, yearning – and at moments like that, they know that the well from which they hope to draw their nourishment is a Jewish well.

That’s why it was wonderful that you quoted from Isaiah in your speech. It was your suggestion, I hope, that at its core, this society must be decent, but it must also be Jewish. You know what the main problem with the summer’s social justice protests was? It wasn’t the naïve embrace of high school socialism or the utter incoherence of the demands. It was the fact that there was simply nothing Jewish about their vision for Israel. Daphni Leef and her comrades could have given the same vacuous speeches at Occupy Wall Street. Or in Sweden, for that matter. Those inane speeches were testimony to the failure of our educational system and of Israel’s religious leadership.

The Yoram Kaniuk affair and the court’s willingness to let him declare himself “without religion” is a reflection not on him, but on the appallingly uninteresting variety of Judaism that the state has come to represent. Can you – or anyone else – name even one single powerful idea that’s come from any of Israel’s chief rabbis in the past decade or two? Me neither.

But lo and behold, it turns out that Israel’s young people still want to believe in something. We haven’t given them the tools to articulate it, but they still intuit that whatever we become, it’s got to be Jewish. So ride that wave, too, Mr. Prime Minister.

What would it take to shape a country where the profundity at the core of Jewish tradition became once again the subject of discourse in our public square? Does Judaism in the 21st century suddenly have to become dull and backward, or can we restore the intellectual and moral excellence that once characterized it? Can you take this on, too? Appoint the right people? Build the right schools? Can you help make this a country that encourages those young people now searching for Jewish moral moorings? For or against the swap, hardly a single one of us is not thrilled that Gilad Schalit is home. He deserved his life back. But so, too, does this country. Schalit, hopefully, will now get better and stronger with each passing day. Israel must do the same. It needs to get better – we need to be honest about the evils lurking in our midst and we must exorcise them. And we must become stronger, which we can do only by engaging with the roots that brought us back home in the first place.

Can you do this? Many of us hope so. Because if this fails, it will in the long run have made no difference that Gilad Schalit came home. But if it succeeds, we might just come to see his liberation as the turning point in our collective return to believing in ourselves.

The writer is president of the Shalem Foundation and senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. His latest book, Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War that May Never End (Wiley), won the 2009 National Jewish Book Award. He is now writing a book on the defense of Israel and the nation-state, and blogs at http://danielgordis.org/

Living with Miissiles
DONNIEL HARTMAN

It’s a strange thing, having to live with missiles. Even though it has happened so often, it just doesn’t feel normal. One would not expect that the citizens of a normal country would be subjected from time to time to a barrage of missiles which terrorize, maim, and sometimes kill. One would not expect that a country with Israel’s power would find its hands tied and unable to provide for its citizens the security that is their inalienable right.

Terror has become “normal,” and when kept to a certain degree, tolerable, in modern society. We have come to learn that there are evil and deranged people and groups walking in our midst for whom the language of ethics and sanctity of life are meaningless. But we tolerate them mostly because we don’t know where they are. They emerge and inflict their harm, and what we tolerate is not so much them, but the price they extract from us.

The case of the missiles being fired at Israel from the Gaza Strip has a bizarre twist, for the terrorists are neither hidden nor unknown. They hide in plain sight in the midst of a civilian population and cloak their evil under the mantle of the generic Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the ongoing “cycle of violence.” They roam free, openly declare their intent, and from time to time, on the basis of a schedule known only to them, decide to spend a few hours terrorizing southern Israel.

It’s not normal, and the situation is profoundly intolerable. How should we - the sovereign Jewish State of Israel - respond to this abnormality? On the one hand, sovereignty entails the acquiring of power and both the ability and right to exercise it in self-defense. Sovereignty provides us with a military option. The challenge of a sovereign people, however, is to distinguish between the right to use this option and when it is right to do so.

The nature of asymmetrical war and a conflict not merely with a terrorist organization but also with a population which embraces terrorism is that one’s options are profoundly limited. Neither political overtures nor concessions, or conversely, sanctions will transform the population of Gaza from foe to friend. They have fed themselves a steady diet of evil ideology from which only they can free themselves. At the same time, a reoccupation of Gaza will not alter the reality on the ground but at best merely freeze it for a short time. When one has the power and confronts a situation in which one has the right to use it, it takes great strength to avoid the temptation of succumbing to the short-term comfort associated with using it and the just feeling of revenge which it provides. We come from a tradition which has taught that true strength is sometimes to be found in self-control.

So, where does that leave us, we the sovereign Jewish State, with our powerful army and a just cause?

I don’t know. But what I do know is that when one doesn’t know, it’s best not to pretend that one does. This has been the policy of the Israeli government over the last number of years, and despite my frustration, I commend it for having the ongoing wisdom that it has exhibited in not pretending that it possesses a magic bullet.

While I don’t know, I wonder whether a policy of targeted assassinations of leadership would not move the status quo slightly in our favor. I mention this consideration only because it is self-evident that neither Hamas nor Islamic Jihad, nor other rogue terrorist groups that call Gaza their home, are potential peace partners. The same logic, which guides the United States policy against al-Qaeda, should be assessed as to whether it would be constructive here.

Israeli society must double and triple its efforts to ensure that those in harm’s way feel that their danger and pain is shared by us all. The citizens of the south do not need empty gestures of solidarity but the real allocation of all the resources necessary in order to ensure their safety to the best of our ability and significant financial compensation to offset the hazard under which they find themselves on an ongoing basis. If life in the south is precarious, then those living in the south must be treated as the pioneers and heroes that they are.

If we cannot destroy our enemy, let’s isolate them. An Israel which initiates peace discussions with those Palestinians who can be peace partners strengthens them, marginalizes the terrorists, and creates a political environment in which Israel has more resources at its disposal to protect itself. Allowing the terrorist reality which is Gaza to define our perspective on our neighborhood is to give them a victory they neither deserve nor warrant.

We need to learn to live in an abnormal world. Our people’s embracing of sovereignty entails a willingness to live within the realities of realpolitik and alas, terror is a part of this reality. To be either passive on the one hand, or to succumb to the fantasy that for every problem there is a military solution, is to perpetuate the childlike naivete of our pre-sovereign existence. Sovereignty has its gifts and its challenges, and as a mature people we have to embrace both.

We need to learn to live in the Middle East. By live, I mean that we cannot allow our neighborhood to define or control our world. While we must learn to respond to their dictates, our priorities and values cannot be exhausted by them. We prevent terror every time our technology knocks one of the missiles out of the sky. We defeat terror when we continue to build a society of values, when we not only worry about whether we will be, but about who we will be. When issues of social justice, loyalty, and kindness, democracy, and Jewish identity reverberate throughout our public conversation and policies we are building foundations of strength which no terrorist can destroy.

It’s a strange thing, having to live with missiles, but live we will.

The Gilad Shalit Dilemma: Two Moving Pieces that Epitomize the Ambivalent Sentiments of Israelis, and Why We Should be Proud

2011-10-14T11:23:00.000-07:00

This will be a glorious holiday for the Shalit family, and for all of us, all around the world, who have worked so hard with this family on behalf of their son.Let us rejoice in his return, and let us pray with all our hearts that this glorious day not be spoiled by future heartaches. Let us be proud of Israel for having gambled on the side of compassion this time. Let us be proud of Israel which values every human life so much, as it has demonstrated this week. And let us hope and pray that the gamble does not turn out--- God forbid, God forbid, God forbid---to be wrong. --Rabbi Jack Riemer

Two moving, thoughtful pieces that express the profundity of the dilemma Israel faced regarding Gilad Shalit, and why, despite any well-founded misgivings we may have about the decision, we can and should all be immensely proud and grateful to be part of a people that places such a premium on the ultimate sanctity of life!

Chag Sameach

david in Seattle

Everyone’s Son
In opposing the mass release of terrorists in exchange for Gilad Shalit’s freedom, I felt as if I was betraying my own son

By Yossi Klein Halevi

For the last five years I have tried not to think of Gilad Shalit. I avoided the newspaper photographs of his first months as an Israel Defense Forces draftee, a boy playing soldier in an ill-fitting uniform. Sometimes, despite myself, I’d imagine him in a Gaza cellar, bound, perhaps wired with explosives to thwart a rescue attempt. And then I would force myself to turn away.

I tried not to think of Gilad because I felt guilty. Not only was I doing nothing to help the campaign to free him, I opposed its implicit demand that the Israeli government release as many terrorists as it takes to bring him home. Israel has no death penalty, and now we would lose the deterrence of prison: If the deal went through, any potential terrorist would know it was just a matter of time before he’d be freed in the next deal for the next kidnapped Israeli.

But the argument could never be so neatly resolved. Each side was affirming a profound Jewish value: ransom the kidnapped, resist blackmail. And so any position one took was undermined by angst. What would you do, campaign activists challenged opponents, if he were your son? “He’s everyone’s son,” sang rocker Aviv Gefen.

One day I passed a rally for Gilad in a park in downtown Jerusalem. Several counter-demonstrators were holding signs opposing surrender to terrorism. “I happen to agree with you,” I said to one of them. “But don’t you feel uneasy protesting against the Shalit family?”

“We’re not protesting against the Shalit family,” he replied. “We’re protesting to save future victims of freed terrorists. Those victims don’t have names yet. But they could be my son or your son.”

Every debate over Gilad ended at the same point: your son.

We never referred to him as “Shalit,” always “Gilad.” The Gilad dilemma set our parental responsibilities against our responsibilities as Israelis—one protective instinct against another. The prime minister’s job is to resist emotional pressure and ensure the nation’s security; a father’s job is to try to save his son, regardless of the consequences.

And so I tried, too, not to think of Gilad’s extraordinary parents, Noam and Aviva. Even when denouncing the government they spoke quietly, incapable of indignity. The best of Israel, as we say here, reminding ourselves that the best of Israel is the best of anywhere.

For more than a year the Shalits have lived in a tent near the prime minister’s office. When I walked nearby I would avoid the protest encampment, ashamed to be opposing the campaign. This past Israeli Independence Day, though, I saw a crowd gathered around the tent, and wandered over. “GILAD IS STILL ALIVE,” banners reminded: It’s not too late to save him. Inside the tent, Noam and Aviva were sitting with family and friends, singing the old Zionist songs. I wanted to shake Noam’s hand, tell him to be strong, but I resisted the urge. I didn’t deserve the privilege of comforting him.

I wanted to tell Noam what we shared. As it happens, my son served in the same tank unit as Gilad, two years after he was kidnapped. I wanted to tell Noam that that was the real reason I couldn’t bear thinking about his family. That in opposing the mass release of terrorists for Gilad, it was my son I was betraying.

Now, inevitably, the government has given in to the emotional pressure. Inevitably, because we all knew it would—must—end this way. A few months ago, as part of its psychological war against the Israeli public, Hamas released an animated film depicting Gilad as an elderly gray-haired man, still a prisoner in Gaza. No image tormented us more.

Still, there are few celebrations here today. Even those who supported the campaign to free Gilad must be sobered by the erosion of Israeli deterrence. And those who opposed the campaign are grieving for Gilad’s lost years. All of us share the same unspoken fear: In what condition will he be returned to us? What have these years done to him?

Hamas leaders are boasting of victory. If so, it is a victory of shame. Hamas is celebrating the release of symbols of “resistance,” not of human beings. Hamas’ victory is an expression of the Arab crisis. The Arab world’s challenge is to shift from a culture that sanctifies honor to a culture that sanctifies dignity. Honor is about pride; dignity is about human value. Hamas may have upheld its honor; but Israel affirmed the dignity of a solitary human life.

In recent months the campaign to free Gilad demanded that the government worsen conditions for convicted terrorists in Israeli jails, to psychologically pressure the Palestinian public. So long as Gilad was being held incommunicado, activists argued, Palestinian families should be barred from visiting their imprisoned sons. While Gilad’s youth was wasting away, terrorists shouldn’t be allowed to study for college degrees.

The government promised to oblige. But as it turned out, there were legal complications. A newspaper article the other day noted the results of the government’s get-tough policy: Imprisoned terrorists would no longer be provided with the Middle Eastern delicacy of stuffed vegetables.

How is it possible, Israelis ask themselves, that so-called progressives around the world champion Hamas and Hezbollah against the Jewish state? Perhaps it’s because we’re too complicated, too messy: a democracy that is also an occupier, a consumerist society living under a permanent death sentence. Perhaps those pure progressives fear a contagion of Israeli ambivalence.

For all my anxieties about the deal, I feel no ambivalence at this moment, only gratitude and relief. Gratitude that I live in a country whose hard leaders cannot resist the emotional pressure of a soldier’s parents. And relief that I no longer have to choose between the well-being of my country and the well-being of my son.

WERE THE ISRAELIS RIGHT OR NOT IN WHAT THEY DID?

Some Reflections as we await the return of Gilad Shalit and As We Celebrate the Holiday of Our Joy

Rabbi Jack Riemer

There is a strange mood in our hearts and in the hearts of the people of Israel today. On the one hand, we are ecstatic at the news that Gilad Shalit is coming home at last. For more than five and a half long years, this brave young man has rotted somewhere in Gaza. His parents have moved heaven and earth in an effort to bring him home. They set up a tent at the entrance to the Prime Ministers home in Jerusalem so that anyone and everyone who entered that home would be reminded at his coming in and at his going out that their child was a prisoner in Gaza.

They went to Europe and knocked on the doors of every head of state there, begging them to intercede on behalf of their child. They went to America; they went to the United Nations; they went anywhere and everywhere they could in the hope of arousing world public opinion on behalf of their son. And all of us who watched them work so passionately and so patiently had to be moved by their determination and their devotion. How could you not feel for these parents?

And yet, happy as we are to see him coming home at last, part of us worries that the price that Israel has had to pay for rescuing him may be too high. The details of the agreement have not yet been released. They may never be released in their entirety. But preliminary reports indicate that approximately a thousand terrorists, killers who have the blood of innocent people on their hands, are being released by Israel in exchange for Gilad Shalit.

I believe that one of them is the terrorist who entered the home of an Israeli family in the middle of the night, and killed the father, and then the mother, and then took his rifle and smashed it over the head of their young, innocent child, and killed her too. Israelis shiver to think that this person was first on the list of those that Hamas demanded be released, and that, the Israeli government evidentially agreed to let him go, in order to get Gilad Shalit back.

Israelis worry---and understandably so---about what these thousand murderers will do when they get back to Gaza. They will be given a heros welcome, and they will be praised for the acts of brutality that they committed. And then what? Will they go back to killing innocent Jews once again? And if they do, then will the price that Israel has paid for getting Gilad Shalit back end up being too high?

Prime Minister Netanyahu put it very simply in the announcement that he made on television this week. He told the people of Israel that the price that the government of Israel has agreed to pay in exchange for the release of Gilad Shalit was a high one, a very high one. But he said it was the best deal we could get, and that, if we did not agree to it, if we let the deal fall through, there was no way of knowing whether the opportunity to save Gilad Shalit would ever come back again.

I ask you: What would you have done if you were in Prime Minister Netanyahus shoes this week?

I can only say that I am glad that I was not him, for how do you make such an awfully difficult decision? How do you decide to save one lifewhen Judaism teaches that he who saves one life, it is as if you have saved a whole world---How do you save one life at the cost of risking many, many lives? How would you feel if you were him and you refused to accept these terms, and you went to sleep each night, knowing that, by your decision, you had condemned Gilat Shalit to another night in Hell? And how would you feel if you were him, and you accepted these terms in order to win his freedom, and you went to sleep each night knowing that by your decision, you had endangered every other Jewish soldier who may now become a tempting target for kidnapping, and that, by your decision, you had endangered every single Israeli who may now become the target of these murderers?

I dont envy the prime minister who had to make this decision, and I am glad that I was not him, for pick a side, and I can give you the arguments for the other side.

I can tell you, for example, about the long and the sacred Jewish tradition of Pidyon Shvuim, of rescuing hostages. I think that you know how precious and how sacred the Torah Scroll is to Jews, and yet the law provides that, if you need money with which to rescue a hostage, you are permitted---no, I said that wrong---you are REQUIRED to sell a Sefer Torah in order to raise the money with which to rescue a hostage.

And therefore, judging by this law, you could say that Judaism teaches that whatever the cost, whatever the price that must be paid, no matter what, the government of Israel did right in rescuing Gilad Shalit. They carried out the mitzvah of Pidyon Shvuim, which is one of the most important mitsvot in our religion. They demonstrated the core Jewish value of compassion. They sent a message to their soldiers that, if they are ever captured, they will not be forgotten or abandoned, but that their government will do whatever it has to do to bring them back.

But that is only part of the Jewish tradition. If I am to be honest with you, I must also tell you the story of Rabbi Meir of Rothenerg. Rabbi Meir of Rothenberg was one of the great scholars and teachers and leaders of the Jewish community in the Middle Ages. And therefore, the duke of the area in which he lived arrested him and put him into a dungeon. He did so, because he figured that the Jewish people would pay any price he demanded in order to rescue their teacher. And they would have---had Rabbi Meir not sent them a message from prison, FORBIDDING them to rescue him. He told them that if they paid an exorbitant figure to save him, then no rabbi and no leader and no teacher in the land would ever be safe. Whenever a cruel monarch needed funds, he would simply kidnap a Jewish leader and the Jews would pay any price to get him back.

Rabbi Meir of Rothenberg was imprisoned for many years. The only humane condition that he was given was that once a month he was allowed a visitor. And so Jews would turn to him and ask him questions of Jewish Law while he was in prison, as they had done before. They gave their questions to the appointed visitor, who delivered them, and then a month later, when the visitor returned, Rabbi Meir would give him his decisions on these questions of Jewish Law. Working from his cell, and without the help of his books, Rabbi Meir answered complex questions of Jewish Law that came to him from many corners of the Jewish world during those years of his imprisonment.

And during those years, he also wrote poems and prayers of great beauty, some of which are included in the High Holy Day Prayerbook, and which are recited to this day.

When Rabbi Meir of Rothenberg died, the Jewish people of his community finally broke with his decision and they paid money so they could redeem his body and give it a proper burial.

I ask you: Who was right---those like the Sages of the Talmud who taught us the importance of Pidyon Shvuim, or those like Rabbi Meir of Rothenberg who insisted that you do not do business with monsters or with greedy thugs, because if you do, you only encourage them to continue kidnapping and holding innocent people for hostage?

Who was right---the Sages of the Talmud or Rabbi Meir?

And who is right today---those who fought to rescue Gilad Shalit at any cost, or those who held to the belief that you dare not encourage murderers by giving in to their demands, and that, if you do, you encourage them to continue doing horriblel things?

Let me give you my answer in three simple words: I DONT KNOW.

I really dont. You are playing God either way. You are either endangering the life of one Jewish soldier if you decide one way or you are endangering the lives of who-knows-how-many Jews if you decide the other way. So how can any mortal, how can any human being, take the responsibility of making such an awesome decision?

My friend and colleague, Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, is a person whom I turn to for advice and counsel many times during the year, for he is a very wise man. He is a person who is totally devoted to the welfare of Israel and of the Jewish people. And he is also a person who has enormous compassion and kindness for individual human beings who are in trouble. And so, I thought he would be a good one to ask for advice on this question. And so I called him and asked him where he stood on this question---were the rescuers right or were those who did not want to trade murderers in order to rescue Gilad Shalit right---he answered me in a very surprising and unexpected way.

He said to me: The holiday of Sukkot is coming in just a day or two. And on this holiday, what do we do? We take the Lulav, this tall, straight plant, and we take the etrog, this round yellow plant, and we hold them together as we recite a bracha. The Lulav represents strength; it is shaped like a backbone. And the Etrog represents compassion. It is shaped like a heart.

Most years we hold the two of them, the Lulav and the Etrog, together; we hold them side by side as we make the blessing, as if to say that we hope to be able to live our lives with courage and with compassion, with justice and with mercy. And very often, we can. The Israeli army has fought its wars with an incredible combination of these two values. It has shown strength, and, at the same time, it has shown compassion. That is our glory.

But what do you do---Rabbi Potasnik said to me---on those rare occasions when you cannot hold the two together? What do you do on those rare occasions in your life as an individual or in the life of your people when you must choose between the Etrog and the Lulav, between strength and compassion? This, he said to me, is such a moment.

Strength says that making this trade is sentimental foolishness. Are you really willing to let a thousand killers go free, are you really willing to endanger every single person in Israel by letting these murderers loose so that they can kill and rape and pillage again?

Strength says that this is a foolish and a dangerous trade, and that it should not be done.

And can you fault its logic? I cant.

But compassion makes a good case too. Are you really going to let a good young man stay in the hands of his captors forever? Is not the more than five years that he has already endured not enough? Are you really going to let his parents suffer forever, waiting and worrying and working to gain his release in vain? It seems to me that compassion makes a good case, a case as cogent as strength does.

So what do you do when strength and compassion conflict, what do you do when the Lulav and the Etrog that usually stand together are unable to stand together?

When that happens, you learn the hard and painful truth that there are some situations in life when there simply is no right answer. There are some hard and painful moments in life in which you simply must make a decision, knowing as you do that there is no decision available that can be upheld as clear and right.

Who knows? Perhaps if the nations of the world had spoken up and said to the Palestinian Authority or to Hamas that this kind of kidnapping is simply intolerable in the civilized world, that, if you want to be heard at the United Nations, and if you want to be considered for membership in the United Nations, you must first remove the evil from your hands, and you must release this innocent young man at once. Who can say for sure? Perhaps if the nations of the world had spoken up that way, if they had spoken up with one voice, and said this, we might not be in the difficult situation we are in today. But they didnt. And so we must make a decision---an impossible decision---a decision between strength and compassiona decision between what the Lulav stands for and what the Etrog stands for---and that is what the government of Israel has done.

And we can only pray that the decision that they have made, the decision to save the life of Gilad Shalit with all the risks that that entails will turn out to be a blessing for him, for his family, for all the soldiers who serve with the faith that their government will never abandon them, and for the people of the State of Israel. God, we await the arrival of Gilad Shalit back to his home. If he comes home during Sukkot, we will sing the words of the Hallel, the Psalms of Thanksgiving and Rejoicing, with great fervor and with great joy in our hearts. And God, we pray: May this Hallel never have to be followed by a Kaddish, and may no one else in Israel ever be endangered because of this decision. Please God, may this not be!

When the service is over, we will go out into the Sukkah to make Kiddush. Look around at this Sukkah when you go in. It is such a frail building. It barely has three walls. It has flowers and pictures in it which will probably not last the week, which will fall down and be spoiled by the first rain we get. Look at the Sukkah and you will learn a fundamental law of life---which is that some things in this world are frail and fragile, and that there is nothing we can do about that, except learn to live with that fact. The Sukkah teaches us that some lives are frail and fragile structures, and that we cannot count on them lasting forever. That is just the way it is. That is the human situation.

There are questions that have no answers. There are situations that have no solutions. There are structures that are frail and fragile and liable to the howling wind. And it is our task, not to trade these huts in for sturdier buildings, but to learn how to live inside them, and to do the best we can within them.

This will be a glorious holiday for the Shalit family, and for all of us, all around the world, who have worked so hard with this family on behalf of their son.Let us rejoice in his return, and let us pray with all our hearts that this glorious day not be spoiled by future heartaches. Let us be proud of Israel for having gambled on the side of compassion this time. Let us be proud of Israel which values every human life so much, as it has demonstrated this week. And let us hope and pray that the gamble does not turn out--- God forbid, God forbid, God forbid---to be wrong.

And to this, let us all say---perhaps with a divided heart---but nevertheless, with as much hope and trust as we can muster---to this, let us all say: amen.

A Liberal's Take on the Need for Pulpit Rabbis to Give Sermons on Israel

2011-10-04T09:27:00.000-07:00

Gil Troy eloquently demonstrates the importance of reminding us of Israel's centrality to the Jewish experience; during the High Holy Days and throughout the year. Israel is so much more than HaMatzav or The Situation; our history and the miracle of our re-emergence in our historical homeland, the heart of Zionism, transcends the politics of the day. We must reject being defined by the conflict with the Palestinians and instead give voice to Aspirational Zionism; redefining the ever evolving, organic nature of Zionism and how that dynamic manifests itself through the creativity, innovation, hope and optimism of our People, both within Israel and in the Diaspora. And let us remember the importance of Ahavot Yisrael during this sacred time of the Days of Awe.
G'mar Chatimah Tovah
david in Seattle

This Year, Any Rabbis Afraid to Talk About Israel to their Congregations – Should Quit
Gil Troy

Word on the American Jewish street is that Israel has become such a divisive topic that some rabbis stopped giving sermons about Israel. A rabbi who avoids talking about Israel is like a presidential candidate who ignores the economy; dodging such a central issue eventually drains credibility regarding all subjects. Any rabbis afraid to talk about Israel to their congregations should quit – and retreat to the university which appreciates tunnel vision.

When a rabbi avoids “Israel” as a topic, the delegitimizing forces who oppose the Jewish state’s existence win. Israel – they rarely say “Israeli politics” – is divisive when it becomes compulsively politicized. Reducing every conversation about Israel to the Palestinian issue is not just a distortion but a perversion. It internalizes the systematic campaign to delegitimize Israel, ignoring the many spiritual, ethical, ideological, intellectual, philosophical, and personal dimensions one can bring to a discussion about Israel without mentioning Bibi Netanyahu or the Palestinians.

The politicization of Israel has become so obsessive, so ubiquitous, that many dismiss conversations about these other dimensions or about Identity Zionism as attempts to evade the “real” issues. Left and right are equally guilty of overly politicizing the Israel conversation. Too many of the Israel-right-or-wrong, love-it-or-leave it crowd seem addicted to crisis, unable to talk about Israel without clamoring about the latest threat to Israel, the Jewish people, and Western civilization itself – we being, of course, the canaries in the coal mine. On the left, too many of the Israel’s-right-is-all-wrong crowd seem equally addicted to crisis, unable to talk about Israel without bemoaning Israel’s latest misstep – and Israel’s alleged original sin in being born. Viewing Israel through a radical Palestinian lens is like only seeing the US in black and white, as one big racial injustice. Decades of disproportionate attacks against Israel and Zionism have caused this damage, as the unreasonable, one-sided charges eclipse everything else.

Rabbis are teachers. They should educate their congregations about the Land of Israel’s centrality in traditional Judaism as well as the State of Israel’s centrality in Jewish life today. This mission does not require stump speeches for Likud or J Street. As one who opposed “Rabbis for Obama” for unnecessarily politicizing their pulpits, I want rabbis who engage Israel, talking knowledgeably and passionately about the Jewish state and its potential without dictating their particular peace plan from their plush suburban podiums.

Rabbis are also leaders. Too many complacent, careerist CEO rabbis forget to lead, fearing – as I heard one rabbi admit at a rabbinic convention – that every interaction they have with a congregant might be that Jew’s last interaction with a rabbi. You cannot lead if you constantly seek applause or fear being fired. The great Mussar moralist, Rabbi Israel Salanter taught: A rabbi who they don’t want to drive out of town deserves no respect; and a rabbi who lets himself be driven out has no self-respect.

Rabbis today must push their congregations toward civility, carving out safe space for fellow Jews to discuss controversial matters, including Israeli politics. The first step toward civility is fostering humility – especially regarding Israel. So many Diaspora Jews are so sure they know what Israel should do. Admitting uncertainty, acknowledging complexity, approaching Israeli politics modestly while being more open to learning other ideas from Israel could cool tempers, nurture civility and educate effectively.

This new year, as Jews gather in synagogues and look to their rabbis for guidance, I hope the rabbis lead, reframing the conversation about Israel. Rabbis should champion Identity Zionism, explaining that Zionism is Jewish nationalism, a unifying peoplehood platform that can serve as a touchstone for a scattered people with diverse beliefs who remain bonded by a common heritage, homeland, and high ideals. They should learn from a recent Wesleyan graduate, Zoe Jick, that “pro-Israel” is a political term more emphasizing Israel’s actions, while “Zionism” – a term many Americans Jews dislike because it has been delegitimized – is the broader term denoting “belief in the Jewish national movement.”

We need a Zionist conversation, unafraid of the topic – or the label – exploring the meaning of our dual religious-national base, appreciating the opportunity Jewish sovereignty gives us to live our ideals and build what we at Hartman’s Engaging Israel project call “Values Nation,” pondering the delights and challenges of living 24/7 Judaism in our old-new land. Let’s discuss the social protests –to learn how Judaism balances communal needs with individual prerogative, then apply that knowledge to every Western country’s socioeconomic dilemmas. Let’s analyze the Jewishness of the Jewish state, asking how we moderns express communal values and find meaning in a soul-crushing age. And let’s articulate that sense of familiarity and family many of us feel when wandering around Jerusalem, asking what existential need that satisfies.

I recently asked some fellow Zionists what Zionist message they wish rabbis would give their congregants this Rosh Hashanah. Yoav Schaefer, an American-born former-IDF soldier studying at Harvard, suggested: “Zionism is not a noun. It is a verb—a living ideal constantly being redefined and re-imagined, an ever-evolving pursuit toward perfection. It symbolizes optimism and potential, a hope for a better and more just society, the dream of a country that exemplifies the values and aspirations of the Jewish people. “ Iri Kassel, an Israeli who directs the Ben Gurion Heritage Institute, emphasized the inspiring Zionist story of rebuilding the land which instills basic values of belonging, mutual responsibility and activism. (For more see www.zionistsforzionism [2]).

Zionism has always been a movement of bold moves and high aspirations. How tragic that Israel, Zionism’s creation, would turn some rabbis into meek Galut Jews, cowering from conflict. This year, let us hope for more daring vision and bolder challenges from our rabbis – on Israel and other important issues.

Gil Troy is Professor of History at McGill University and a Shalom Hartman Research Fellow in Jerusalem. The author of “Why I Am A Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today,” his latest book is “The Reagan Revolution: A Very Short Introduction

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

2011-09-28T08:26:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2011-09-20T09:22:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2011-09-15T08:38:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2011-09-10T08:53:00.000-07:00

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)

Two Interesting Takes on the Social Protests in Israel: Shlomo Avineri & Ari Shavit

2011-08-11T15:33:00.000-07:00

Social protesters represent real Zionism
Shlomo Avineri

Theodor Herzl was not a socialist but he understood well that a revolutionary enterprise like Zionism could not succeed if it was to be solely based on the capitalist market model.

In his book "Altneuland," he therefore describes the Land of Israel of the future as a social welfare society, a third way that would position itself between capitalism and socialism.

It would be a society in which natural resources - land, water, mineral wealth - are to be held by the public at large, where industry for the most part is organized through cooperatives, as is agriculture. Retail trade, however, would be in private hands. The society would provide its citizens with education and health and welfare. To staff social welfare institutions, everyone, both men and women, would be required to do two years of national service.

Herzl called this middle approach "mutualism," and it was based on the European social and economic experience. The future Jewish society would take the principles of liberty and competition from capitalism, and the principles of equality and justice from socialism.

These ideas are correct today, just as they were correct, and revolutionary, when they were written in 1902. The Zionist movement followed this path, as did the Jewish community in the pre-state period and in Israel's infancy, reflecting a deep awareness of the need to establish social solidarity as a necessary condition for the success of the Zionist enterprise.

It is no coincidence that Israel was the subject of admiration and emulation by so many people and movements in the West, because it managed, under difficult circumstances, to combine democracy and liberty with a strong foundation of social solidarity.

It would have been hard to call the young Israel a model society, and there is no point in engaging in excessive idealizing about it, but the ability to maintain social cohesion and a relatively large degree of equality were among its most impressive achievements.

This combination gave the Labor movement an edge over the Revisionist movement, which grew focused solely on national and diplomatic goals. The welfare state that was established here made it possible to absorb millions of immigrants from countries in distress in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, an amazing undertaking that, despite all its flaws, is without historical parallel in its scope. And this occurred not in some wealthy Scandinavian country or Switzerland, but in a poor society of limited means that was subject to diplomatic and economic siege. We underestimate this accomplishment too readily.

A lot has changed in the world and the historic failure of Labor was that it didn't manage to cope with these changes in a systematic manner. It was replaced by a simplistic model of privatization that espoused the neo-capitalist economics of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Israel's Likud governments led these steps, but one cannot deny that Labor also lost faith in the justice of its own approach.

The currently unfolding social protests are a product of distortions that this unrestrained market economy created. This was accompanied, due to political and coalition considerations, by a comprehensive system of government housing subsidies, public sector employment and extravagant tax benefits for Jewish settlements in the territories and for the ultra-Orthodox.

These two sectors are carried by the taxes, military service and economic accomplishments of those same young men and women who are demonstrating now.
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Israel's revolution must not become a missed opportunity
Ari Shavit
The power of the concept 'the nation' lies in the fact that it can be read both from the left and the right.
Three concepts burst from the belly of the earth in the summer of 2011: nation, state and social justice.

The power of the concept "the nation" lies in the fact that it can be read both from the left and the right. From the left, it's the storming of the Bastille, the red revolution, the organization of the working class. The nation is the rebellion of the oppressed against tyrants and dictators. From the right, the nation is the Jewish nation. The nation is the coming into being of a national entity.

That's why what happened here in the past month is unprecedented. Suddenly Israelis arose in the morning and felt they were a nation and began to walk. Suddenly a political power appeared that is not a party, ethnic group or sector. No longer a cold, sterile and socio-academic Israeli society, but a warm, concrete and smart Israeli nation. A nation that is broad, focused and potent. A nation that is both all of Israel and every individual in Israel. A nation that is all the Israelis, who are embarking on a battle against their exploiters.

The power of the concept "the state" lies in the fact that it offers a new state. Not a state from the top down, but a state from the bottom up. Not a state of foreign policy, defense and bureaucracy, but a state of citizens and human beings. Not a Jewish state against Palestinians, Arabs and gentiles, but an Israeli state against oligarchs, robber barons and centralized tycoons.

The demand for a welfare state now is only part of the story. The heart of the matter is the profound yearning for an ethical state that will restrain the market, block exploitation and reduce injustice. A just and insightful state that will express the desires of the Israeli community and organize Israeli life fairly. A state that will no longer serve selected minorities, but all Israelis. The people's state.

The beauty of the concept "social justice" lies in the fact that it is totally retro. There's nothing more fifties than social justice. There's nothing more Hashomer Hatzair than social justice. But suddenly, via Facebook, the fifties are making a comeback, the spirit of Hashomer Hatzair is making a comeback. And the battle cry of the comeback is not an advertising slogan, but the heartfelt cry of a nation that is demanding the most basic thing: justice. Justice, not charity. Justice for the individual and justice for society. Jewish justice, Israeli justice, universal justice. Social justice.

The 300,000 who demonstrated Saturday night have dispersed. Maybe they'll return another Saturday night, maybe not. But the three concepts of the 300,000 won't be erased. They have been engraved. Even before a political or economic revolution has taken place here, these three concepts have brought about a conceptual revolution. A revolution that says we will no longer allow reckless capitalism to tyrannize us via reckless privatization. We will no longer allow the unrestricted connections between big business and government. We will not accept Darwinist social gaps. The nations demand the reestablishment of a state that will guarantee social justice.
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Towards a Values Based Discourse on Aspirational Zionism: Tal Becker

2011-06-08T21:26:00.000-07:00

Insightful piece by Tal Becker on creating a 'Values Based' discourse on Israel; moving away from the crisis mode of survival towards a meaningful dialogue on how to create the kind of society we wish to build and inhabit. Worth reading in its entirety.
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The Place of Values

Even if necessary or unavoidable, the crisis model is inadequate. It is not just that many Jews – especially younger ones - cannot reconcile this model with the success they see, or the comfort and safety they feel. It is that this model fails to provide a compelling narrative as to why Israel can, or ought to be, both central and meaningful for contemporary Jewish life.

Especially for those Jews indifferent to, or disillusioned with, Israel, the conventional narrative is both narrow and shallow. Narrow, in that its focus is on the physical existence of the Jewish people in their homeland, not on the breadth of what this sovereign project might offer for the collective Jewish experience. Shallow, in that it pursues Jewish survival for its own sake but tells no deeper story as to why that survival is important and worth fighting for. This may be self-evident for some, but an increasing number of young Jews seem to have little stake in Israel's quest for survival, and a conversation centered around the threats Israel faces creates little incentive for them to care.

Beyond Survival

By TAL BECKER

For many years now, the conversation about Israel in the Jewish world has taken a familiar form. With rare exceptions, our sovereign project is spoken of in Jewish communities across the globe with pride about the past and anxiety about the future.

At formal gatherings, visiting Israeli speakers are invariably introduced with some reference to the fact that “Israel faces grave new dangers” or the “greatest challenges in its history.” They are expected to address the threats confronting the Jewish state and respond to audience questions that spread across a familiar spectrum ranging from concern with Israel's policies to concern with its public relations.

As one of those speakers, I am often struck by how a discussion about Israel can draw Jews together in so many different and distant communities around the globe. There is something inspiring in knowing that Israel is not alone in facing adversity and that Israel’s fate still stirs deep emotions in Jewish hearts.

And yet, there is also something deeply disappointing about a conversation that is so crisis-centered, something disquieting about the extensive focus on how to protect and defend Jewish survival, rather than on how to imagine and advance a sovereign Jewish society.

This crisis-based mode of talking about Israel retains pride of place among the many Jews deeply attached to Israel's future as a sovereign Jewish State but worried about the trajectory the country is on. These Jews may differ greatly, and argue vociferously, about how to respond to Israel's crises, but it is the sense of peril that animates their passions.

Nowhere is this kind of discourse more evident than on issues of peace and security. Territorial compromise with the Palestinians, for example, is for some Jews a national imperative and for others national suicide, but each position is invariably cast in terms of the threats we face. We are warned of “demographic threats” and international isolation if we do not withdraw from the territories, of security threats and a violent rupture of Israeli society if we do. In either case, it is the threat to Jewish survival that is summoned as the decisive argument and that plays into the wellworn patterns of our national discourse.

The Roots of Anxiety

The roots of this threat-based conversation about Israel are deep and multifaceted. The first, and perhaps most important, is that the crises facing Israel – from a nuclear Iran, to terrorism, to delegitimization (the list continues) - are real. Though sometimes exaggerated, they are not imagined. It is irresponsible to belittle them, and entirely legitimate to pay serious attention to how to confront them.

It is understandable that many Jews – certainly in Israel - feel we are still at the stage of protecting what we have and cannot yet indulge in the "luxury" of thinking beyond the dangers we face. Survival is our first responsibility. And so, we continue living on a knife’s edge, ever alert to existential threats, and pushing off questions of national identity and purpose to quieter and less dangerous times.

A second, deeper, undercurrent of the crisis narrative is found in Jewish tradition and experience. Our history as a people is so riddled with persecution and existential anxiety that the relative success and safety we enjoy today does not easily displace it – at least among older generations. Israel remains for many of us the “Jew among the nations”: isolated, wary and vulnerable. Israel may be the “beginning of the redemption,” but until that redemption comes in full and prophetic form, every achievement is seen through the lens of Jewish history as fragile and reversible.

In this respect, as much as some of the earlier Zionists imagined the emergence of the “new Jew,” the discourse about Israel remains dominated by the old one. We have soldiers to be proud of, and a society that is innovative and vibrant, but we carry the anxiety about our place in the world and our survival not unlike the archetypal Jews of Exile.

Yes, we have power now, when in the past we were powerless. We can take pride in our capacity to defend ourselves. But in our national consciousness, the sense that we are a fortress under siege remains palpable, and even the way we use our power, and speak about its use, seems to reflect this self-perception. We do not tend to broadcast confidence in our future or control over our destiny and even the vocabulary of our leaders is filled with talk of existential threats and impending peril. Israel may have cured the Jewish people of its statelessness, but not yet of the state of mind with which it is associated.

This is all to say that in many ways we are still a traumatized people and this does much to explain why the politics and language of fear resonates in Israeli and Jewish society. The scars of the Holocaust remain deep and will take generations to heal. Even if Israel’s enemies were not providing present threats, the ghosts of past ones would – at least for many of us – be enough to shape much of our mindset and preoccupation with potential danger.

This sense of national vulnerability influences the third factor that seems to drive the focus on crisis: the model of Zionism that underpinned Israel’s establishment and continues to shape the national psyche. The political Zionism of Pinsker and Herzl, of Nordau and Ben Gurion (among many others) was richer and more nuanced than is often appreciated, but its primary goal was to establish Israel as a place of refuge for the Jewish people.

Unable to live "normal lives" in the Diaspora, the political Zionists’ core aspiration was to form a sovereign Jewish state in which it would be finally possible for the Jewish people to be free to live as all other nations. As Leo Pinsker put it in his early Zionist work of 1882, "Auto-Emancipation":

The essence of the problem, as we see it, lies in the fact that, in the midst of the nations among whom the Jews reside, they form a distinctive element which cannot be assimilated, which cannot be readily digested by any nation. Hence the problem is to find means of so adjusting the relations of this exclusive element to the whole body of nations that there shall never be any further basis for the Jewish question.

This yearning for a "normal," accepted, sovereign existence naturally places attention on the obstacles to its attainment. If this is Israel's aspiration, then it is the specter of the "nation that dwells alone," of a state in perpetual conflict, that must be overcome. In his first address to the Knesset as Prime Minister in 1992, Yitzhak Rabin articulated this as the wish of many Israelis:

No longer are we necessarily "a people that dwells alone," and no longer is it true that "the whole world is against us." We must overcome the sense of isolation that has held us in its thrall for almost half a century. We must join the international movement toward peace, reconciliation and cooperation that is spreading over the entire globe these days - lest we be the last to remain, all alone, in the station.

Political Zionism's pioneering moment may have passed. After all, it succeeded, against incredible odds, in establishing the Jewish State. But its hold on the national discourse is maintained by the sense that that success is tenuous and must be constantly defended from external and internal assault.

To all this may be added another layer, which is perhaps more disconcerting. As a people, we have become so used to crisis that we may worry (subconsciously) whether we can maintain our unity and collective purpose without it. Crisis is a powerful rallying cry and useful political tool. It generates commitment, sacrifice, mutual responsibility and philanthropy. It can help smooth over fundamental differences and defer divisive issues. What would the Jewish people look like in the absence of some defining emergency as its focal point? How would collective activism be maintained? Would there be a core narrative or set of values that would keep us united?

Given our enemies, our history and the enduring spirit of the political Zionist ethos, the Jewish people can be forgiven for worrying so insistently over the last decades about the threats to their sovereign State. But even if we understand the origins and the attraction of this narrative, we need not embrace its hegemony over the discourse. It is perhaps time to consider the fallout of this preoccupation. What has the national conversation missed by being so focused on crisis? Who have we alienated? What have we lost?

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Dr. Tal Becker is a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, an International Associate at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a member of the Hartman Institute's Engaging Israel Project.

Daniel Gordis on the Imperatives of Particularism; Plus Jewish Particularism's Greatest Hits: Wolpe & Jaffee

2011-06-03T11:14:00.000-07:00

Loving the other and Universal Love are wonderful values. But unless they are steeped in an understanding of loving (and protecting) our own first, and that this is a fundamental law of nature, we risk losing not just our identity, but as Jews, our very being.
Rabbis Gordis & Wolpe and Martin Jaffee on the perils of 'Kumbaya Multiculturalism
david in Seattle

How to Be Human

Rabbi David Wolpe:
Rabbi Shlomo Carelbach used to say that if he met a person who said "I'm a Catholic" he knew he was a Catholic. If he met a person who said "I'm a Protestant" he knew he was a Protestant. If he met a person who said "I'm a human being" he knew he was a Jew.
Jews have led some of the great universalist movements of the world. They did so under the illusion that if all people were just alike, the thorny problem of being different would disappear. It never did. It never should. Being a Jew is not a problem but a blessing and a destiny.
There is no such thing as a person in general. Each individual grows up with a certain family, land, heritage, language and culture. To deny it is to cast off a piece of oneself. Jewish is not opposed to being human; rather it is an ancient and beautiful way to be human.
In every age there are those who dream of homogenizing the world. It is an ignoble dream. When we honor difference we honor the One who created this diverse, multicolored pageant of a world.

Living Ahavas Yisroel
Martin Jaffee • JTNews Columnist

The k’lal (the universal) was always known only through the prat (the particular). The road to universal human fellow-feeling first wound its circuitous route through the tangled pathways of intense Jewish communal solidarity.Which may have something to do with my dad’s response when, years ago, I came home from college touting the prophecies of Rosa Luxemburg, about whom I’d learned in a political science course. Jews, I proclaimed (over a plate of borscht with sour cream), should lead humanity out of the darkness of its particularistic atavisms into the clear light of “world citizenship.” This time, Dad knew better than to argue. He just looked up to the Heavens, spread out his hands in the classic Zero Mostel-Tevye pose and mocked: “I love humanity; it’s the people I can’t stand!”It took me years to understand the depth of his insight and satire. How easy it is to love a concept, and how difficult to love reality in all its particular messiness! How easy to forget that, if humanity is a family, it begins with a real mother, a real father, real brothers and real sisters — those who speak your language, know the smells of your kitchen, share your nightmares, and, it must be said, hate your enemies and love your friends, because, after all is said and done, “you are our flesh and blood.”

Just this, I suppose, is what irritates so many “universalists” (Jewish and otherwise) about the centrality of the concept of ahavas Yisroel (“Jewish love for Jews”) in Jewish ethical thought. Why shouldn’t Jews love all humanity equally? Why focus on the insular, bounded “tribe” at the expense of the whole? Isn’t “tribalism” the root of all social evil? The simple answer is: You can’t love “humanity” unless you see in it some familiar faces. It’s through the love called forth by those faces that we learn to see in them something larger — “humanity” as a potential community — something that never really exists, although we strive to reach it. While love of the “tribe” can certainly descend to “tribalism,” it is also true that “humanity” is revealed most richly through the “tribe.” When we lose our “tribe,” we lose the very thing that enables us to find a wider place in the universally “human.”

Are Young Rabbis Turning on Israel?
Daniel Gordis — June 2011 PrintPDFNo day of the year in Israel is more agonizing than Yom Ha-Zikaron—the Remembrance Day for the Fallen of Israel’s Wars. For 24 hours, the country’s unceasing sniping gives way to a pervasive sense of national unity not apparent at any other moment; honor and sanctity can be felt everywhere.

Israel’s many military cemeteries are filled to capacity with anguished families visiting the graves of loved ones. Restaurants are shuttered. One of the country’s television stations does nothing but list the names of the 23,000 men and women who gave their lives to defend the Jewish state, some of them killed even before independence was declared and the last of whom typically died only days or weeks prior to the commemoration.

Twice on Yom Ha-Zikaron, once in the evening and once again in the morning, the country’s air raid sirens sound. On sidewalks, pedestrians come to a halt and stand at attention, and even on highways, cars slow and stop; drivers and passengers alike step out of their vehicles and stand in silence until the wail of the siren abates. For two minutes each time, the state of Israel surrenders itself to the grip of utter silence and immobility. During that quiet, one feels a sense of belonging, a palpable sense of gratitude and unstated loyalty that simply defies description.

I mused on this fact as I read a recent message sent to students at the interdenominational rabbinical school at Boston’s Hebrew College, asking them to prepare themselves for Yom Ha-Zikaron by musing on the following paragraph: “For Yom Ha-Zikaron, our kavanah [intention] is to open up our communal remembrance to include losses on all sides of the conflict in Israel/Palestine. In this spirit, our framing question for Yom Ha-Zikaron is this: On this day, what do you remember and for whom do you grieve?”

It is the rare e-mail that leaves me speechless. Here, at a reputable institution training future rabbis who will shape a generation of American Jews and their attitudes to Israel, the parties were treated with equal weight and honor in the run-up to Yom Ha-Zikaron. What the students were essentially being asked was whether the losses on Israel’s side touched them any more deeply than the losses on the side of Israel’s enemies.

Much Ado About Something; What Obama Got Right (& Wrong); Where it Matters, and Where Not

2011-05-22T08:49:00.000-07:00

Several different takes on the implications of what Obama said--and didn't say--in his Middle East Speech this past Thursday. I'm of two minds: on one level, Obama conceded much to the Israeli position:
No to negotiating with a Palestinian polity that includes the unrepentant terrorist group Hamas;
A non-militarized Palestinian State;
Israel as a Jewish State and homeland of the Jewish people

Yes, Bibi could have been more diplomatic and statesmanlike in his rebuke of the President--which he clearly was when he met with the President in person, here (and below)
And yes, Abe Foxman thinks that Obama gave a pro-Israel speech on Thursday, and Jeffrey Goldberg makes a point (or two) in his Please Don't Speak to My President like That

I'm less concerned about the President's faux pas on the '67 lines (truth be told, he could have echoed President Bush's assurances that realities on the ground make the "Armistice Lines of 1949" no longer workable in his letter to then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on April 14th, 2004).
But the greater omission was the President's failure to reiterate that the Palestinian 'Right of Return' to Israel proper is a non-starter. As Sari Nusseibeh famously said in 2002; there can't be a two state solution with one state being for the Palestinians and the other also being for the Palestinians.
The Palestinian refugee issue cannot be left for future negotiations. It must be clear from the outset of any new talks--and agreements--that there can be no more than a small, symbolic return of Palestinians into Israel, and only in the context of acceptance and recognition of the 800,000 plus Jewish refugees from Arab lands that also resulted from the 1948 War.
A fuller accounting below from David Horovitz and Ari Shavit
david in Seattle

Bibi's more nuanced critique of the President, to the President

Obama’s failure to internalize Palestinian intolerance
By DAVID HOROVITZ

The president’s new parameters show him blind to the significance of the demand for a "right of return."

Last Sunday, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Palestinian Arabs who had left Israel while the Arab world tried to murder our state at birth, attempted a symbolic “return,” with varying degrees of success, across the Syrian, Lebanese, Jordanian and Egyptian borders, and from the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

They were warmly praised in this effort by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, the ostensibly moderate successor to Yasser Arafat with whom Israel has been trying for almost eight years to make peace. Abbas -- who later in the week, in a New York Times op-ed, rewrote the history of Israel’s reestablishment to air-brush out the Arabs’ rejection of what would have been their independent state alongside ours -- movingly praised those who had died in Sunday’s “Nakba Day” assault on Israel’s borders (most of them killed by Lebanese Army forces) as the latest “martyrs” to the Palestinian cause.

Sunday’s Nakba onslaught against sovereign Israel, and its moving endorsement by Israel’s putative Palestinian partner, was the latest bleak demonstration of the Palestinians’ insistent refusal, for close to two-thirds of a century, to internalize the fact that the Jews have a historic claim to this sliver of land, and that their demands for statehood cannot be realized at the cost of ours.

Amid all the “differences” that Binyamin Netanyahu and Barack Obama on Friday acknowledged in their visions for the way forward to Israeli-Palestinian peace, it is the president’s evident incapacity to appreciate the uncompromising Palestinian refusal to countenance Israel’s legitimacy that is most damaging the vital American-Israeli relationship and most dooming his approach to peacemaking.

An indication of his failure to internalize that Israel, in any borders, is regarded as fundamentally illegitimate by much of the Palestinian leadership and public was evident in Obama’s 2009 Muslim world outreach speech in Cairo. He failed, before that most vital of audiences, to mention Israel’s historic tie to this land – the fact that this is the only place where the Jews have ever been sovereign, the only place where the Jews have ever sought sovereignty, a place we never willingly left and one to which we always prayed to return.

It is immensely troubling for many Israelis to recognize that our most important strategic partner is now publicly advocating, before any significant sign of Palestinian compromise on final status issues has been detected, that we withdraw, more or less, to the pre-1967 lines – the so-called “Auschwitz borders” -- from which we were relentlessly attacked in our first two fragile decades of statehood. But only a president who ignores or underestimates Palestinian hostility to Israel could propose a formula for reviving negotiations in which he set out those parameters for high-risk territorial compromise without simultaneously making crystal clear that there will be no “right of return” for Palestinian refugees.

Obama is urging Israel – several of whose leaders have offered dramatic territorial concessions in the cause of peace, and proven their honest intentions by leaving southern Lebanon, Gaza and major West Bank cities, only to be rewarded with new bouts of violence – to give up its key disputed asset, the biblically resonant territory of Judea and Samaria, as stage one of a “peace” process. But he is not demanding that the Palestinians – whose leaders have consistently failed to embrace far-reaching peace offers, most notably Ehud Olmert’s 2008 offer of a withdrawal to adjusted ’67 lines and the dividing of Jerusalem – give up their key disputed asset, the unconscionable demand for a Jewish-state-destroying “right of return” for millions, until some vague subsequent stage, if at all. He merely suggests that the refugee issue, along with Jerusalem, be addressed later on.

Yet the president’s new formula for Israeli-Palestinian peace is so unworkable and so counter-productive as to indicate a complete breakdown in such communication. No international player, and certainly no Palestinian negotiator, is now going to defy the Obama framework and declare that the Israelis cannot possibly be required to sanction a dangerous pullback toward the ’67 lines unless or until the Palestinians formally relinquish the demand for a “right of return.” And so we can look ahead to another period of diplomatic deadlock, of an Israel appearing recalcitrant in not meeting the publicly stated expectations of its key ally, of the Palestinians garnering ever-greater international legitimacy even as they are freed of the requirement to acknowledge the legitimacy of Israel by withdrawing their demand to destroy it by weight of refugee numbers.

Most gallingly, as on Thursday and now again at this most obvious of opportunities, he chose not to state clearly and firmly – as there can be no doubt predecessors like George W Bush and Bill Clinton would have done in such a context – that the Palestinian refugee problem will have to be solved independently of Israel. He did not make clear that just as Israel built a vibrant state absorbing the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from the Middle East and North Africa six decades ago, a new “Palestine” would finally have to resolve its assiduously perpetuated refugee crisis and abandon the dream of a “return.” The repeated omission will have delighted all of Israel’s uncompromising enemies. The dream lives on.

Netanyahu, of course, filled the breach. Netanyahu spoke about the impossibility of a “right of return.” “It’s not going to happen,” he said, as the president sat impassive alongside him. “Everybody knows it’s not going to happen. And I think it’s time to tell the Palestinians forthrightly it’s not going to happen.”

But Obama did no such thing. For the second day in succession the president, in the same week as the Nakba assault on Israel’s borders, when it came to this central demand by the Palestinians that simply cannot be accepted because it would spell the demographic demise of our state, was dismayingly, insistently, resonantly silent.

Obama's speech was bad for Middle East peace
Instead of presenting the 1967 borders as the end of the process, Obama made them its start. Instead of tying them to the end of demands and the end of the conflict, they were tied to greater demands and continued conflict.
By Ari Shavit

On a fundamental level, Obama's speech was good for Israel. He blocked the Palestinian initiative to unilaterally establish a Palestinian state. He condemned the Palestinian effort to delegitimize Israel. He came out against Hamas. He did not demand a total and immediate freeze on settlement construction. He did not embrace the Arab peace initiative. He showed that he has internalized Israel's security problems and defense concerns. Above all, he adopted the two main principles of Israel's peace doctrine: Israel as a Jewish state and Palestine as a demilitarized state.

But in one important respect, Obama's speech was very bad for Israel. And very bad for the United States. And very bad for peace. The U.S. president made an egregious error in the way he introduced the principle of 1967 into his vision of peace. Instead of presenting the 1967 borders as the end of the process, Obama made them its start. Instead of tying them to the end of demands and the end of the conflict, they were tied to greater demands and continued conflict.

Without intending any harm, Obama presented Israel with a suicidal proposition: an interim agreement based on the 1967 borders. It's a proposal that runs along the same lines as the Hamas offer of a hudna - a long-term cease-fire. It's a proposal that will result in certain conflict in Jerusalem and in the inundation of Israel with refugees. It's a proposition that spells an end to peace, an end to stability and an end to the State of Israel.

The good news is that it is not too late. The mistake can be easily corrected, the day can be saved. Obama and Netanyahu need not confront each other before the cameras, as they did on Friday. They must show maturity and wisdom and face the crisis as if it were an opportunity. They must find a way of restoring the principle of 1967 to its correct place and enable Netanyahu to accept it. If they do this, the light in Obama's speech will once again shine brightly. And it will provide Israelis, Palestinians and Americans with a genuine ray of hope.

YK Halevi: Bibi, The Surprising Uniter

2011-05-19T16:55:00.000-07:00

Halevi makes some important points in this WSJ piece, perhaps most intriguing, his suggestion that the long conceded territories should be redefined again as part of Israel's patrimony. The psychology here is compelling: why are we giving up something without even an acknowledgement of our competing, and arguably stronger claim?
david in seattle

The ability to achieve a credible agreement with the Palestinians depends on Israel asserting—and only then reluctantly ceding—its historic claim to the whole land of Israel, including Judea and Samaria. That's because even moderate Palestinians insist on their historic claim to the whole land of Palestine, including what is today the state of Israel. The moral logic of partition depends on each side sacrificing a precious part of its patrimony. That logic works only if Hebron and Jericho belong to the Jews—just as Palestinians say that Haifa and Jaffa belong to them.

Netanyahu the Surprising Uniter
The prime minister has pretty much ended serious debate over whether a Palestinian state should be created. Israelis now await a credible peace partner.

BY YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI
Jerusalem
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a remarkable speech to the Knesset on Monday outlining future Israeli concessions to a Palestinian state. In doing so, he essentially ended the ideological debate within mainstream Israeli politics over the so-called two-state solution.

Mr. Netanyahu's historic achievement has been to position his Likud Party within the centrist majority that seeks to end the occupation of the Palestinians but is wary of the security consequences. There is no longer any major Israeli party that rejects a West Bank withdrawal on ideological grounds. Instead, the debate is now focused where most Israelis want it to be: on how to ensure that a Palestinian state won't pose an existential threat to their country.

Mr. Netanyahu began this process two years ago when he accepted the principle of a two-state solution. That was followed by a nine-month freeze in housing starts in West Bank settlements—an unprecedented concession that was spurned by the Palestinian leadership and squandered by the Obama administration.

In Mr. Netanyahu's latest speech, the implicit was no less important than the explicit. Israel, he said, would insist on retaining the large settlement blocs near the 1967 border—and not, therefore, the smaller, isolated settlements outside the blocs. Israel, he added, would also insist on a military presence in the Jordan Valley—and not, therefore, on retaining settlements there.

None of this is likely to happen anytime soon. Mr. Netanyahu's concessions aren't enough to meet minimal Palestinian demands—and for now at least that hardly matters. Conditions for a resumption of negotiations, let alone for an agreement, couldn't be worse. With the genocidal Hamas now aligned with the Palestinian Authority, and with PA head Mahmoud Abbas insisting on some form of return of Palestinian refugees to Israel, not even Israel's opposition party, Kadima, would be able to reach a deal.

Israelis are willing to take risks for peace when they feel safe and accepted. Israel's secret peace initiative to the Palestinian Liberation Organization in the early 1990s that became known as the Oslo Accords was preceded by an unprecedented rise in the number of countries establishing diplomatic relations with the Jewish state, a result of the fall of the Soviet Union.

The situation today is exactly the opposite. In the past year Israel lost its closest regional ally, Turkey, and there are growing doubts about its peace agreement with Egypt. Not since May 1967, when Arab armies pressed against its borders, has Israel felt more threatened and alone. This past Sunday's breaching of Israel's northern border, when hundreds of Palestinians crossed into Israeli territory, only intensified the sense of siege.

And yet if conditions change within the Palestinian national movement and in the region generally, the Likud could be positioned to negotiate an agreement. Given the transformation of the Israeli electorate—like the rise of the hawkish Russian immigrant community—the right is likely to remain in power for a long time to come.

Israeli voters will only trust territorial concessions offered by a government that shares their fear of and anguish toward withdrawal. Not only will tens of thousands of Israeli citizens be displaced, but Israel will be ceding territory that is the heart of the Jewish nation—territory legitimately won, moreover, in a war of defense against the Arab attempt to destroy Israel in 1967.

The Israeli left is incapable of conveying those national sentiments. Its historic mistake was to emotionally withdraw from Judea and Samaria—the biblical West Bank—ceding any claim to the disputed territories.

The ability to achieve a credible agreement with the Palestinians depends on Israel asserting—and only then reluctantly ceding—its historic claim to the whole land of Israel, including Judea and Samaria. That's because even moderate Palestinians insist on their historic claim to the whole land of Palestine, including what is today the state of Israel. The moral logic of partition depends on each side sacrificing a precious part of its patrimony. That logic works only if Hebron and Jericho belong to the Jews—just as Palestinians say that Haifa and Jaffa belong to them.

Palestinian moderates never shared the enthusiasm of the Israeli left for partition. For Palestinians, partition is at best an historic tragedy that will extricate them from an even greater tragedy. Their counterparts within the Israeli debate aren't left-wing dreamers like President Shimon Peres, but right-wing pragmatists like Mr. Netanyahu.

Under Mr. Netanyahu, then, the Likud's commitment to the Jewish people's right to the whole land of Israel has shifted from being an obstacle to an agreement to an asset. That agreement would be based on this trade-off: ceding the Jewish right of return to greater Israel for the Palestinian right of return to greater Palestine.

Mr. Netanyahu has drawn a clear line between the security-minded right led by the Likud and the religious right of the settlement movement, which rejects territorial compromise under any circumstances.

The mistrust between the religious right and the security right dates back to 1982, when Menachem Begin, the first Likud leader to become prime minister, became the first Israeli leader to dismantle settlements (in Sinai, as part of the Egyptian-Israeli peace accord). One of the unsurprising ironies of Israeli politics is that the only prime ministers who have managed to uproot settlements—Begin and then Ariel Sharon, who dismantled 21 settlements in 2005—were both pragmatic hawks.

The hope for a future land-for-peace agreement will not come from the shattered Israeli left, which is not trusted by the electorate to ensure the nation's security and to uphold the integrity of its history. Instead, it will be the Likud that may once again, on its own terms, fulfill the vision of the left.

That depends on deepening the rift between the pragmatic and the theological right—precisely the process that Mr. Netanyahu, who meets with President Obama on Friday, has set in motion. The more the Obama administration embraces Mr. Netanyahu, the more the rift within the Israeli right is likely to grow.

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

Noah Pollak on the Shonda of B'Tselem

2011-05-07T18:38:00.000-07:00

The B'Tselem Witch Trials

Israel's Left, having won the argument on forfeiting visions of Greater Israel in service to an authentic and durable two-state solution, saw the land for peace bargain crumble in the dust and human carnage of the Second Intifada, the Lebanon withdrawal of 2000 and the subsequent wars against Hezbollah and Hamas in 2006 and 2008-9, not to mention the barrage of over 10,000 rocket attacks from Judenrein Gaza into Israel proper. Israel's mainstream left was decimated in subsequent electoral results, verdicts rendered by a sobered Israeli society that saw its genuine efforts for peace met with terror, ideological and psychological warfare.
Noah Pollak demonstrates convincingly how organizations like B'Tselem have co-opted the politically untenable stances of the mainstream left by recreating themselves as "apolitical" NGO's with human rights and international law norms as their weapons of choice.
It is a tactic as transparent as it is disingenous. Sadly, western media and intellecutals fail to see through the ploy.
Below, a short excerpt. The essay deserves a full reading.
db in seattle

The story of those Israeli Jews who have made careers out of attacking Israel’s right to exist, such as Biletzky and Yiftachel, illustrates the degradation of the once mighty Israeli peace movement. Originally, the movement sought legitimacy and prominence in Israeli politics, and received it for a time—and because it was part of the political process, it was constrained by the need for electoral support and popular legitimacy. Yet the collapse of the Oslo Accords in 2000 and the Palestinian terror war that followed presented the peace movement with an existential crisis: With whom, exactly, were Israelis supposed to make peace? The withdrawals from Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza five years later, and the entrenchment in the vacated territory of Iranian-backed terrorist groups, further disillusioned Israelis and called into question the central proposition of the peace movement: if Israel makes the right concessions, peace will follow. And so, over the past 15 years, the peace movement has fallen from a position of influence in Israeli politics to one, today, of irrelevance, an anachronism that no longer has realistic answers to Israel’s problems.

What remains of the peace movement is a white-hot core of activists who refuse to acknowledge their failure and yet cannot gracefully recede from the political stage. They have discovered an innovative formula for rebuilding their political relevance completely outside the democratic political arena: reconstitute themselves as NGOs and conceal their political agenda in the apolitical rhetoric of human rights and international law. In this guise, the peace movement no longer has any need to win elections or offer a serious platform for governance. The NGOs instead position themselves as a blunt opposition force working against mainstream Israeli society, which is viewed as unsophisticated, provincial, racist, and stricken with “security hysteria.” This “human-rights community” has thus not only opposed every consensus Israeli security measure—Operation Defensive Shield during the
intifada, the security fence to stop suicide bombers, the targeted killings of terror-group leaders, the Lebanon War, and the Gaza War—but has branded them war crimes and human-rights violations for which Israel should be punished.In these circumstances, where there is no point in trying to succeed at the ballot box, leftist Israeli activism now directs itself internationally in the hopes that fomenting a narrative of Israeli criminality will invite enough sanction and condemnation from Europe, the United Nations, and America to force Israel to accede to the demands of these otherwise powerless radicals.

The policies they support would constitute nothing less than Zionism’s destruction. And they apparently have no compunction about seeking its destruction from without, since they have learned to their disappointment and rage that Israel is too strong a nation to allow itself to be destroyed from within.

Importance of Breaking this Silence: How the IDF Remains Probably the Most Moral Army in the World

2011-04-24T03:49:00.000-07:00

I say probably because as Tel Aviv University philosophy professor Asa Kasher explains, it's hard to quantify these things. What is clear though is the extraordinary lengths the IDF goes to in order to ensure that its soldiers conduct themselves in as ethical a fashion as possible. He points out that where failures do occur, it's more often a result of a lack of proper training and professionalism. Yes, the IDF could do even better and the good news is they're working at it.
A fascinating interview with the man who helps set the IDF's ethical parameters.
Asa Kasher co-authored the first IDF Code of Ethics and continues to work on the moral doctrines that shape the parameters of the IDF's actions.
I've included some excerpts. The interview is well worth reading in its entirety.
db

The Moralist
David Horovitz

Tel Aviv University philosophy professor Asa Kasher co-authored the first IDF Code of Ethics and continues to work on the moral doctrines that shape the parameters of our army’s actions.

He has taught at the IDF colleges since the late 1970s and for a long time was the only professor talking to officers about military ethics. When the IDF decided to try writing a Code of Ethics, he was approached and appointed head of a team of generals that wrote a draft and then the final version of the 1994 code, which was approved by chief of staff Ehud Barak and prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.

In the wake of Richard Goldstone’s belated withdrawal of the accusation that Israel deliberately targeted civilians in Operation Cast Lead, and the fresh round of moral argument the judge’s climbdown has provoked, I contacted Kasher to discuss the IDF’s ethics. I wanted to understand the thinking that underpins IDF dos and don’ts, the problematics of grappling with enemies that do not follow any such rules, and the gaping discrepancy, Goldstone’s reversal notwithstanding, between most Israelis’ certainty of the IDF’s morality and the international diplomatic, media and legal community’s relentless opprobrium.

Kasher said much that I might have anticipated, but a great deal more, too, that placed Israel’s recent wars in a context that I had not fully drawn before. I was particularly struck by his explanation for the change in IDF approach over recent years to the endangering of its soldiers – the altered balance it has drawn, prompted by Kasher, when it comes to the safety of its personnel, on the one hand, and the “non-dangerous neighbors” of terrorists, on the other.

People think, he said, “that soldiers are there to be put into danger, that soldiers are there to take risks, that this is their world, this is their profession. But that is so far from the reality in Israel, where most of the soldiers are in the IDF because service is mandatory.” When it comes to Israeli soldiers, “I, the state, took them out of their homes. Instead of him going to university or going to work, I put a uniform on him, I trained him, and I dispatched him. If I am going to endanger him, I owe him a very, very good answer as to why. After all, this is a democratic state that is obligated to protect its citizens. How dare I endanger him?”

Horovitz: Our responsibility is to maintain our moral standards. That’s a very important starting point because in matters of war it can sometimes get blurred. People are always talking about factors like international law, public opinion, the Western world – that is, outside factors that we’re supposed to match up to. No, I say we have to uphold our own standards.

What are those standards?

Kasher: We take decisions that reflect our acceptance of some aspects of international law; other parts, we have not accepted. The prime question, in these fields of morals and ethics, is what I see when I look in the mirror – not when I watch the BBC.

When the enemy becomes more ruthless and harsher than it was in the past, then we have to protect ourselves in smarter and different ways, but still according to the standards that we have set for ourselves.

If our enemy would fight on the battlefield, on open ground, in uniform, carrying his weapons openly, then it would be a case of an army facing off against a force that behaved like an army, and children and other non-dangerous people would not get hurt. But the enemy has changed the way it fights. So we have no choice. We have to protect ourselves as necessary.

Now there’s a basis to what we have to do: We are a democratic state. And that means two things. One, we are obligated to effectively protect our citizens from all danger. So we have a police force, to protect against crime. A Health Ministry, to protect against medical dangers. A Transportation Ministry, against the dangers on the roads. And we have a Defense Ministry, to protect us against the dangers our enemies represent.

The state cannot evade this obligation. It can’t say, “I am busy, I have more important things to do.” There is nothing more important than protecting citizens’ lives. Nothing.

At the same time, the moral foundation of a democratic state is respect for human dignity. Human dignity must be respected in all circumstances. And to respect human dignity in all circumstances means, among other things, to be sensitive to human life in all circumstances. Not just the lives of the citizens of your state. Everybody.

This applies even in our interactions with terrorists. I am respecting the terrorist’s dignity when I ask myself, “Do I have to kill him or can I stop him without killing him?”

And I certainly have to respect the human dignity of the terrorists’ nondangerous neighbors – who are not a threat. We always talk about “innocents,” but “innocence” is not the issue here. The issue here is whether they are dangerous. So the correct translation is “non-dangerous.”

Fine. We have to protect our citizens and we have to respect human dignity. But when it comes to a war like Operation Cast Lead, those two imperatives are likely to clash. I am obligated to protect my citizens, but I have no way to protect them without the non-dangerous neighbors of the terrorists becoming caught up in the conflict. What am I to do?

Two things: First, you decide what is more important in the given situation. And second, you do whatever you can so that the damage to the other side is as small as possible: Maximizing effective defense of the citizens; minimizing collateral damage.

How do I decide which of the conflicting imperatives is more important? People don’t like this idea, because they don’t understand it: They think it is immoral to give priority to the defense of the citizens of your state over the protection of the lives of the neighbors of the terrorists. They don’t understand that the world is built in such a way that responsibility is divided.

H: Please elaborate.

K: We are responsible for the residents of the State of Israel. Canada is responsible for the residents of Canada. Australia, for Australia. And that’s just fine. We are not responsible for the lives of Canadians in the same way as we are for the lives of Israelis and vice versa. This is completely accepted and completely moral and no one questions this. We don’t have one world government that is responsible for everything. We have states with their own responsibilities.

Now from this stems the fact that when you have clash of imperatives, this responsibility for one’s own citizens takes precedence over the other responsibility to the non-dangerous neighbors. This isn’t anything to do with us being Israel, or Jews. The same applies to the United States or to Canada or to any other country.

I cannot evade my prime responsibility to protect the well-being of the citizens of my country. Now, among all the means I could use to protect them, I will choose those that are better morally – better from the point of view of the effectiveness of the protection and the minimalization of the damage to the neighbors of the terrorists.

H: And what do we do to minimize the harm done to the neighbors of the terrorists?

K: So Israel, the IDF, carries out very intensive warning operations. Unprecedented. There are those who don’t like the term, “the most moral army in the world.” I think it’s a very complex phrase, and one has to make all kinds of professional diagnoses. You can’t just blithely invoke it. But let’s look at that claim in this particular context.

Who tries harder than we do to warn the neighbors [to leave a conflict zone]? Who does it better than we do? I don’t know if the public realizes this, but we recently carried out precisely such an act of warning – by publishing a map of Hezbollah positions in south Lebanon. Israel released details of hundreds of villages where Hezbollah has a position deep inside the village. From there, they’ll fire on us if and when they want to, and we will have to protect ourselves. That means we’ll have to fire into the village.

The publication of this map is a warning: We know, it says, that Hezbollah is intertwining its terrorists with non-dangerous neighbors. Understand that to protect ourselves in this situation will mean endangering the populace. The populace has to know that it is in a dangerous situation.

What to do in this dangerous situation? We don’t know. We’re telling those non-dangerous neighbors to give it some thought. Try to kick out Hezbollah? That is apparently very difficult. Move away from the Hezbollah position? Perhaps that is possible. Get away when the time comes? That may sound theoretical at present, but when the time comes, who knows? The fact is, this is an advance warning.

Now let’s come to Operation Cast Lead in this context. We distributed leaflets [to Gaza civilians, telling them that they should leave a potential conflict zone]. It may be that we can do that better – distribute better leaflets, more detailed, with more precise guidance on how to get away. We broke into their radio and TV broadcasts to give them announcements, to warn them. That can be done still more effectively.

We made phone calls to 160,000 phone numbers. No one in the world has ever done anything like that, ever. And it’s clear why that is effective. It’s not a piece of paper that was dropped in my neighborhood. The phone rang in my own pocket! Yes, it was a recorded message, because it’s impossible to make personal calls on that scale. But still, this was my number they dialed. It was a warning directed personally to me, not some kind of general warning.

And finally, we had the “tap on the roof” approach. The IDF used nonlethal weaponry, fired onto the roofs [of buildings being used by terrorists]. That weaponry makes a lot of noise. It constituted a very strong, noisy hint: We’re close, but you still have the chance to get out.

We issue warnings in an unprecedented way – not one warning, but many. We make enormous efforts to get the neighbors away from the terrorists.

H: So there’s a difference between what we did in Jenin [during Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, where 13 soldiers were killed in an ambush] and what we did in Gaza?

K: Yes, we changed our approach. The approach is more appropriate now. I think what we did in Jenin was a mistake. There was a primitive conception that “it’s all right to endanger soldiers.” Every time there was a dilemma like this – soldiers here and non-soldiers on the other side – the soldiers were endangered.

H: Why was that wrong?

K: You need, to a certain limit, to warn the people to get out. At a certain point, the warnings are over and there are two possibilities. That people have stayed because they don’t want to leave or because they can’t leave. If they can’t leave, despite all the warnings, despite the possibilities to get them out, even to send ambulances to get them out, that’s interesting to me, and we’ll come back to that.

But if a neighbor doesn’t want to leave, he turns himself into the human shield of the terrorist. He has become part of the war. And I’m sorry, but I may have to harm him when I try to stop the terrorist. I’ll do my best not to. But it may be that in the absence of all other alternatives, I may hurt him. I certainly don’t see a good reason to endanger the lives of soldiers in a case like that.

H: And what, now, of the issue of civilians who are prevented by the terrorists from leaving a conflict zone?

K: This has to be handled in a graduated fashion. I’ll explain. Let’s imagine a fictitious situation, whereby the terrorists have forced 20 children onto the roofs of every single building in Gaza that has been marked as a target because it has terrorists in it. That’s what I see in my reconnaissance photographs. Every single roof is covered with children.

That means that I can’t fire on those buildings. But they’re firing at me from those buildings. There are 20 children on the roof, and from the house the terrorists are firing. It’s the same in every house. If I can’t fire on any house because there are children on the roof, I have lost my capacity to protect myself. There is nothing I can do.

Always in those circumstances, people say, “Well, make peace.” Fine. Great. I want peace. We have to seek peace. But right now I’m facing these houses and they’re firing at me. Talking about a peace conference now is not really the point. Or people say, as with the cop facing the murderous bank robber, “Don’t shoot him. We need to clean up the neighborhood so that the people have jobs and don’t turn to crime.” Again, great, yes, that’s true. We have to create a situation where there aren’t criminals in that neighborhood, but right now I’ve got an armed robber in the bank and he’s threatening to kill his hostages. So, right now I have to protect the citizens of my state, and if I don’t fire at any of the houses that have children on the roof, then I won’t be able to protect my civilians. And that’s unthinkable, out of the question.

So, what I have to do, and it’s tragic however you look at it, is fire at one of those houses. The first place that they fire at me from, even though there are children on the roof, I will immediately fire on it, and some of those children will be killed – because I have no choice, because I have no other means to protect myself. The terrorists took away from me the normal means of self-defense. It’s out of the question that I not protect myself, so I hope the terrorists will take the children off the roofs, and I will wait for them to take the children off the roofs in order to defend myself against the terrorists, but if they don’t take the children off the roofs, I will continue. I have no choice. A state cannot say “I will allow my citizens to be killed because the enemy has placed children on all the roofs and I will not kill children.”

K: I was born here and my parents came here long before World War II. I didn’t go through the Holocaust. My wife did. My wife is a survivor. What lesson do I learn from World War II? That we cannot rely on anybody else. That when it’s time to protect ourselves, there’s no one else we can rely on. And we have no exemption, ever, from thinking about how best to protect ourselves. And if the enemy puts children on all the roofs of the buildings from which it fires on us, we will not capitulate to them. It’s a tragic situation, but we won’t capitulate.

This also requires leadership that is capable of explaining to the soldiers why they have to do this – why they have to do something totally counter-intuitive.

These Palestinians and Hezbollah, they’re playing this win-win game and it’s depressing to see. If Israel doesn’t fire at them, they’re very happy, and I can understand that. But if Israel does fire on them, and children are hurt, they’re also happy. They celebrate. I believe that these losses destroy the mothers and the fathers. But the community is ostensibly happy: “Great, we’ve got something nasty to say against Israel. Israel kills children.”

And you have this whole community, including parts of the international media and some Israelis, who look at these episodes with one eye. This community sees only the poor children who have been killed. And they really are pitiful children. What’s the emerging narrative? That Israel kills children and doesn’t care about it. Such aggressors. Such barbarians. And all the thousand things we do precisely to avoid such situations are ignored.

This community and various international political bodies tell us, “Yes, you’re entitled to defend yourselves. We can’t take that away from you. The right to self-defense is in the charter of the United Nations. So yes, you have to protect yourselves. But you mustn’t harm anybody who isn’t dangerous.” There is no such reality. Not in Iraq, not in Afghanistan.

H: Well, they ask that Israel not be disproportionate, that it not be too heavy-handed.

K: It’s good that you mentioned that. The world in general doesn’t have a clue what proportionality is. Proportionality, first of all, is not about numbers. The question of proportionality, according to international law, is whether the military benefit justifies the collateral damage. And secondly, also according to international law, it is a consideration for the commander in the field, because only the commander in the field can make the judgment: What does he gain from what he’s about to do and what is the collateral damage he is likely to cause? With Israel, we fire and two minutes later, the UN secretary- general is already accusing us of using disproportionate force. On what basis does he make that assumption? How can he possibly know?

And, finally, this whole concept of proportionality exists in international law only in situations where you know that you’re going to harm non-dangerous people. It’s not relevant in other circumstances. This is designed for situations where noncombatants will be hurt and in those circumstances the commander in the field must weigh the benefits and the damage. The questions of proportionality are clear only at the extremes. Between those extremes, only the commander in the field can weigh the balance. It’s very hard to give him a formula.

H: I want to put to you some of the criticisms that have been raised about why and how the IDF conducted Operation Cast Lead, including objections raised by columnists in this newspaper. It’s been asserted that we, Israel, invaded their territory, and they were defending themselves against us. The kill ratio, of approximately 100 to 1, has been highlighted as ostensible evidence of the IDF’s disproportionate use of force. It’s been argued that, of course Hamas didn’t engage in open, conventional conflict with us – army to army, in uniform – because they would have lost. Their only chance was to fight from within residential areas. And it’s been asserted, again as evidence of an ostensible Israeli overreaction, that while Israel sustained a little over two dozen fatalities from their attacks on us between 2005 and 2008, their losses in that period totaled 1,250.

K: First of all, it’s absolutely ridiculous, and I have no other word, to say that we invaded their territory and therefore they were defending themselves from us, as though we stormed in out of the clear blue sky and they were protecting themselves. The true picture is that they attacked Israel non-stop and Israel was defending itself from their relentless attacks. If they had not relentlessly attacked us, the IDF would not have gone in.

Look at the Second Lebanon War. It began with the kidnapping of soldiers and the killing of soldiers. Does that mean that I am allowed only to kidnap or kill a few Hezbollah soldiers? No. I have to ensure that Hezbollah is not able now or in the near future to carry out a similar action. Self-defense extends to attacking the source of the attack he has just carried out and from which he would be able to attack me again in a moment. If I don’t take action, he will presumably attack me again. He always wants to attack me. I have no reason to think that there will only be one Kassam or Katyusha. He’ll fire another.

So, coming back to Cast Lead, this was certainly not our invasion and their defense. When facing the armies of the United States and the Soviet Union in World War II, did the Germans have the moral right to self-defense because those armies invaded their country? The entire invasion of the allies into Germany was self-defense against Nazi Germany. To claim that, in Gaza, they are defending themselves against our invasion is really a not-serious objection.

Now, as to the matter of kill ratio. That’s not the point. It’s not a sporting contest. You ask yourself, “What is he doing to me?” – not in terms of the damage but in terms of the danger.

Look at what happened with the recent attack on the school bus. Only one child was killed. “Only one.” One too many. But if the terrorist had fired five minutes earlier, there would have been dozens of children killed. The fact is that there’s a danger to the lives of children traveling in a school bus on the roads of Israel. That [most of the children] were lucky this time, that one child was killed and the rest not, does not enter the equation.

As for the numbers of those killed on the other side, that needs to be examined without any connection to how many were killed on our side. Hamas today admits to having lost very high numbers of people who were directly connected to Hamas. All those “policemen” [killed in IAF attacks at the start of Cast Lead] were not policemen in the Western sense of the word. Those weren’t people employed to give speeding tickets. Information published soon after Cast Lead detailed their combat deployment, the role each of them was to play when the IDF came in. This was a support force for the Hamas army. We hit them legitimately.

Now, there were 200 people who were not dangerous who were killed.

H: Just 200?

K: Yes, 200 who had no link to Hamas. All the rest had a clear tie to Hamas. And each of the cases in which those 200 were killed must be checked. Those 200 are, of course, 200 too many. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have carried out the operations of Cast Lead as we did. But it does mean that if there’s a Cast Lead II, we’ll have to use approaches that mean there won’t be the 200 – that there’ll be the fewer the better.

We can learn from each of the circumstances in which the 200 were killed. On the margins, some of those deaths stemmed from a lack of professionalism, where a soldier didn’t do what he should have done. Obviously there are things to correct.

But I would stress that to have the military police question hundreds of soldiers after an operation like this, while I understand the political effect, is not good for the army. It won’t save lives. You have to rely on the probes that the army itself carries out.

Internal army investigations are the correct forum for addressing this, initially at least. If it turns out to be necessary, you have a military prosecutor and it becomes a legal matter.

H: I want to return to those Hamas policemen who were killed on day one of Cast Lead. On that day they weren’t engaging in terrorism. They were at a graduation ceremony. And yet you say it was morally acceptable to kill them?

K: When you enter a place, you have to think about not only who is firing on you, but on who will be firing on you. That’s the rationale behind the laws of war. In this case, those forces certainly had the potential to hurt the IDF. Gaza is a very small place. This is Hamas. These were the forces that were helping Hamas. And therefore it was clear that tomorrow they would be joining up with the forces trying to hurt the IDF.

H: What about the argument that Hamas would obviously be defeated by the IDF in a conventional war and therefore its only chance is to fight from within residential areas?

K: Listen, we’re not living in the Middle Ages. These are not wars between knights, where it’s not fair if one has a big spear and the other has a little dagger. This is about the obligation to provide effective protection for my citizens. The fact that you are weak militarily does not exempt you from the measures I have to take to protect my citizens.

Israel will protect itself in the light of the way that it is attacked. If the enemy doesn’t have tanks, then it won’t be a battle of armored forces against armored forces. But it will be a battle, and I will protect myself against whatever you use to attack me. The fact that you don’t have tanks and planes does not justify terrorism. That’s no moral justification. Moral justification is not a function of the means you have. It relates to the limitations on the means that you use.

H: Yet international public opinion is hostile, and that influences political opinion, which impacts the international climate, which ultimately can limit Israel’s capacity to protect itself...

K: Let’s dissect that concept of public opinion and governments and the international climate. Governments follow their own interests. When they have an interest in criticizing us, they criticize us. When they have an interest in defending us, they defend us.

When the Goldstone Report was published, I immediately said that we had nothing to fear from the point of view of implementing international law – because we are more moderate than the rest of the world, and if those were the standards, we would not be able to do anything to protect ourselves, but neither would the US or NATO or anyone else in Iraq or Afghanistan. And therefore the US and NATO could not allow that report to have a practical impact. Now that Goldstone’s written his article, shifting a little, that’s even more the case.

H: Would Israel have carried out all these investigations without Goldstone?

K: Yes. And look how few indictments were served in the end. It would have been the same without Goldstone.

So you have these governments whose actions are a function of their interests. You have the Human Rights Council of the United Nations – excuse me, but if people don’t think this is all about politics, just look at this body, which was chaired by Libya and 80 percent of whose decisions are against us. Everyone’s talking differently about Libya today, but this Libya they’re all attacking now is the same Libya that acted against us all the time.

H: But the fact is that Israel feels itself increasingly isolated, and there are potential practical implications.

K: Really? What potential for practical consequences? We as Jews – and I understand this, but we have to stop it – are acutely sensitive to every attack on us. Not only when it’s anti-Semitism or anti-Israel. Even when someone attacks us for this or that government’s politics. The lights go on. “They’re attacking us.” It seems to us to be absolutely terrible. I understand that feeling. We don’t have a history of being loved by everyone. Quite the reverse. But some perspective is required. Obviously we have to be active on all fronts. The international media is a front. So you have the IDF Spokesman. You have the Ministry of Public Diplomacy. Everyone must do what they can to improve this situation. But it’s not that important.

K: I don’t need to wait for a Bar-Ilan speech by Prime Minister Netanyahu, and for all kinds of interesting observations from prime minister Sharon, to recognize that it is essential that there be a Palestinian state. The State of Israel, in its Proclamation of Independence, recognized the Palestinian state. It declared that “the right of the Jewish people to establish their state is irrevocable. This right is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign state.” Like all other nations! The Zionist mainstream supported the Partition decision, which provided for a state for the Jews and a state for the Palestinians. We recognized a Palestinian state from the very start.

That’s nothing new. That’s not doing a favor to anyone. The question is under what circumstances will a Palestinian state be established. I don’t have to help in the establishment of something that wants to wipe me out. But that the Palestinians have the right to be a people in their own state, in their territory somewhere between the river and the sea, goes without saying.

H: I want to come back to the objections to what the IDF did in Gaza. You note that we pulled out all our people, but the objection is that we didn’t free Gaza. We still prevent products going in. We still control the borders. We haven’t given them full control.

K: Since they are arming themselves relentlessly, via weapons-laden ships, via the tunnels, my self-defense requires those controls. I don’t want to have to depend on Iron Dome to shoot down the missile. I want the missile not to reach Gaza from Iran in the first place. So I maintain the sea blockade, which is unquestionably legitimate according to all the laws of war at sea, to prevent them from bringing in the weaponry. And the same goes for the land crossings. We don’t allow free access, because it is likely to endanger us.

We have “effective control” at the borders – on what goes in and out. But we don’t have effective control inside. Hamas is the de facto government of Gaza; Hamas has effective control there. And therefore Hamas is responsible for the fact that there are terrorists mixed in with their non-dangerous neighbors. They carry the responsibility for that.

Apart from that, we take care that there not be a humanitarian disaster in Gaza from the point of view of food and medicines and needs.

K: But now, when we are in a war with organizations, not states, all the assumptions collapse. Why are states signed up to international treaties? For reasons of political prudence, not high morality: If I don’t harm his civilians, he won’t harm my civilians, and we’ll both benefit. If I won’t kill his prisoners, he won’t kill my prisoners; I won’t fire chemical weapons at him, and he won’t fire chemical weapons at me. It’s all reciprocity.

But now, in our situations, there is no reciprocity. Israel is always trying to minimize the collateral damage it causes its enemies, and its enemies are always trying to maximize the damage – not collateral; they are really aiming for the citizens.

This takes us back to where this interview started: It doesn’t mean Israel will now act in the way its enemies do. But you see now that Israel has to act according to its interests and its standards, and not according to some kind of picture that is common to Israeli and its enemies. This whole notion of reciprocity has disappeared.

I’m not saying we need to change the rules of war. But we need to widen them. Don’t cancel anything, but understand that in these new wars, you need something else. Something else that rests on the same moral basis: to “alleviate the calamities of war,” as someone put it in an international document two hundred years ago.

In the first years of the 2000s, we fought against a civilian organization that dispatched suicide bombers from a political entity – the Palestinian Authority – but not from a state.

Then we had the Second Lebanon War, with Hezbollah, a semi-military organization, supported by the Iranian and Syrian armies, sitting on the territory of the state of Lebanon, and some of its activities were terrorism, and some were guerrilla activities against soldiers.

Then came Operation Cast Lead. Again, not against a state – the PA is in charge, but it’s not a state – but against a semi-military organization, getting support from the same places, from Iran and from Syria, and it is the de facto government. Which was not the case in the two previous cases.

And now, if there’s a Third Lebanon War, Hezbollah sits in the Lebanese government. It is no longer a militia sitting in south Lebanon. It is a party in the Lebanese government. So if it fires on us, we’ll need a different doctrine covering what to do. The Lebanese government includes a party that has a militia that is firing on you. It’s not the Lebanese Army that is attacking you, but you are being attacked by a force that is in the government.

These appropriate doctrines must be informed by the same spirit: we are a democratic state, we must protect our citizens, we respect human dignity, we must minimize collateral damage in every effective means...

K: I hear the same thing everywhere in democratic states. I’ve been to something like 15 of them, from India to Canada. There is no one who will say I don’t have to protect my civilians and to minimize the damage [to the other side]. There is no one who will say I must not harm the other side and minimize the damage to my civilians. No one will say that. No one. Nowhere.

H: Have there been things that Israel has done, that the IDF has done, that do trouble you?

K: We do need to greatly improve our professionalism – not only in terms of operating weaponry, but in terms of better understanding the principles I’ve set here.

I’ll give you an example: I heard a certain person say, during Operation Cast Lead, that we have to cause the other side to understand that ba’al habayit hishtagea – that Israel has “gone crazy.” That’s absolutely unacceptable. In fact, we have to cause them to appreciate the very opposite: that Israel is anything but crazy. That Israel acts aggressively only because it has no chance. It hits people only because it has to. It hits non-dangerous people only in a case of collateral damage, while making immense efforts not to harm them.

H: What do you think of the Israeli media’s coverage of Operation Cast Lead and of the local NGOs, including the rush to highlight the subsequently discredited Rabin military academy allegations in March 2009 that soldiers had deliberately targeted civilians?

K: Local media is guilty of sensationalism and a lack of responsibility. Haaretz has an agenda and skews everything in the service of that agenda. And others, like Yediot and Ma’ariv, are just sensationalist. There is no connection even between their headlines and the content.

I read the protocol of that discussion in the Rabin academy. I also read everything that the Breaking the Silence soldiers said. I read the full document. That full document emerged only after the international media came to me for a response to the alleged summary that had come out a few days earlier. From that summary, you might have thought they had exposed a huge wave, a tsunami, of war crimes, which it was very hard to believe could be possible. And in fact, it wasn’t possible. Everything was skewed in that report. This is a political body with a political agenda which is legitimate, but it uses methods in my opinion that are not legitimate in terms of media ethics and NGO ethics.

As for B’Tselem, and international NGOs like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty, they all have double standards. For them, there is the poor, pitiful side and the strong side. Testimony that comes from the pitiful side is taken at face value. Whatever comes from the strong side is tainted – “it’s a spokesman, it’s a whitewash.” Radical suspicion for one side and virtually an unlimited readiness to accept everything that comes from the other. That’s a double standard and it creates an utterly skewed picture. I don’t rely on them.

On the other hand, it doesn’t matter where an accusation comes from, the IDF must take a look at it. The IDF must look into every story from B’Tselem, every story from Machsom Watch, every story from Amnesty International. Not because I rely on them. I don’t. But you don’t have to rely on them to do your work properly. Look into every story. There’s a tiny, microscopic proportion that has some basis, so look, check, find out..

The Duality of Pesach: Remembering that we were 'Strangers in a Strange Land' yet that 'in Every Generation there are those who Rise Up to Destroy Us'

2011-04-19T17:00:00.000-07:00

First Day of Pesach D'var: Congregation Beth Shalom, Seattle, WA
April 19th, 2011
david brumer
The Duality of Pesach: Remembering that we were once 'Strangers in a Strange Land' yet that 'in Every Generation there are those who rise up to Destroy Us'

Passover commemorates our journey from slavery to redemption as a people.
Over thirty-three hundred years ago, we as a people rose up, and with the help of the Almighty, orchestrated history's first emancipation movement, challenging the status quo and insisting that the values of freedom, justice and peoplehood were both sacrosanct and achievable. A remarkable accomplishment. The Jews of Egypt left the sweaty swamps of the Nile for the arid deserts of Sinai, and ultimately Israel.

And today, over 33 centuries later, we still retell this miraculous story of our exodus and redemption as a free people as we sit around Seder tables all over the world. More than Yom Kippur or the Sabbath, the first night of Pesach remains the most observed holiday in the Jewish calendar. In Israel, even the most secular of Israelis find meaning and value in the Seder ritual.

It is said that we are a people of the book, but before we had "the book" we had stories; and a powerful oral tradition that transmitted those narratives. We remain profoundly connected to our past, as we give new meaning each year to the injunction "to remember the exodus as if we ourselves were enslaved, and we went out to freedom and were redeemed."

Our tradition is richly imbued. We are asked to remember the Exodus each year, and at least 36 other times during the year we are enjoined to remember that we were "once strangers in a stranger land" and to treat the 'stranger' among us with that consciousness. In Leviticus Chapter 19, Verse 34, we are told:

"When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not wrong him. The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt."

And yet, we begin our Seders with the memory of:

Ayleh shebechol dor va'dor, Omdeem Aleinu L'Chaloteinu!
In Every Generation there are those who Rise Up Against Us and Seek to Destroy Us.

It is the greatness of our tradition that reminds us that even in the face of those threats, we must find ways to reassert our humanity and never lose sight of this central tenet of our faith: To act morally towards the 'Other.'

A formidable challenge which I'll return to later.

But first, let's go back to this "In Every Generation there are those who Rise Up Against Us and Seek to Destroy Us" business.
What's amazing is this was written long before the Crusades, the pogroms, or the Holocaust: Likely sometime between 200 BCE and 200 CE. It's amazingly clairvoyant in its prognostication that one of the world's oldest sicknesses, anti-Semitism, will continue to afflict. From the Pharaohs to the Philistines, Nebuchadnezzar to Haman, the Greek-Assyrians to Titus and the Romans, the Crusaders, Torquemada and the Inquisition, the Cossacks, Hitler and all the way up to Ahmadinejad, Hamas & Hezbollah, people have sought to destroy us because we are Jews.

Yet we have persevered, survived, empowered ourselves and prospered. We as a people have maintained a continuity to our ancestors in Egypt, in part by retelling the story of the Exodus every year at our Seder tables. We have fortified ourselves with the promise, unrequited for almost 2 millennia, L'Shana Ha'ba-ah B'Yerushalayim!

And for the past 63 years that promise has been realized. The miracle of our people's return to Zion has occurred. We are indeed a "stiff-necked" people; a people of resolve, with profound reservoirs of memory.

So why are we also so prone to forget? We forget the miracle of our redemption, both in ancient times as well as modern. The recreation of the modern state of Israel is perhaps the greatest miracle yet, and equally miraculous is the fact that in the face of unmitigated attacks, 63 years of wars and terror, surrounded by many hostile states and non-state actors dedicated to our destruction, we have not only survived but thrived. Israel remains a beehive of creativity, innovation, invention, and cultural renaissance. World class writers like Amos Oz, Alef Bet Yehoshua, and David Grossman continue to produce inspired literature. In science, cutting edge technologies garner Israel more nobel laureates per capita than anywhere in the world. Israel continues to send humanitarian relief teams to disaster sites like Haiti, Japan, and the Muslim world, when permitted. And Israel remains the safe haven it was created to be for Jews the world over. The in-gathering now includes tens of thousands of Ethiopian Jews and over a million from the former Soviet Union.

It's so easy to see all the ills that plague modern Israel and forget the miracle of what's been created in such a short historical time. The nay-sayers tell us that the sky is falling on Israeli democracy, that fascism is slowly taking over, that civil rights are fatally endangered and that the country is headed for disaster.

To be sure, problems abound, and Israel has made many mistakes (as I might add, have all democracies). Helping create Hamas was certainly a doozy. Israel's parliamentary system breeds the worst in coalition governing, where horse trading is the coin of the realm. But let's remember, Israel moved to a center-right government not because Israelis are inherently xenophobic, racist or paranoid, but because the Left in Israel was decimated (and devastated) by the failures of the peace process and the last ten years of terror and asymmetric wars launched even after more territory was relinquished, in Lebanon, the northern West Bank and all of Gaza.

And yes, the Occupation is untenable, it's morally destructive to the Israeli soul, and as bad as it is for the Palestinians, it's also corrosive to the basic tenets of Zionism. All of us agree that a two state solution is what we are striving for. The conundrum is how to achieve it and maintain Israel's security, while keeping Hamas from turning a Palestinian state into an Islamist launching pad in range of Ben Gurion Airport, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv.
So, what's all this have to do with Passover, you ask? Well, let's go back to the challenge of remembering: Remembering we were strangers in a strange land, to treat the 'other' accordingly, and at the same time, Remember that "In Every Generation there are those who Rise Up Against Us and Seek to Destroy Us."

Israel has enemies today, and they are formidable. There is of course, Hezbollah and Hamas, who openly acknowledge that they are dedicated to Israel's destruction, and their state sponsor, Iran, who is doggedly pursuing a nuclear option to realize their leadership's dream of unleashing a second Holocaust, even as they deny that a first one ever took place. Still, militarily, Israel does not face anything close to an existential threat today, although a nuclear Iran would change that. But our enemies are nothing if not resourceful and adaptable. Much of the war against the Jewish State has shifted tactically from the military realm into the ideological and psychological.
Our enemies wage asymmetric wars, blurring the lines between combatants and civilians, cynically hiding amongst their own populations even as they are deliberately firing on Israeli civilians. They then use international NGO's, UN committees, and the court of world opinion to try Israel as the aggressor and war criminal. A new term has been coined to describe this: Lawfare.

And even though Judge Goldstone, who headed the UN Human Rights panel commissioned to investigate alleged Israeli war crimes during the Gaza War, retracted his major accusations earlier this month, the damage the Goldstone report caused over the past two years cannot be so readily undone. As Jeffrey Goldberg commented, "it's not so easy to retract a blood libel." The "Goldstone Report" has had the ironic effect of lessening Israel's willingness to make compromises for peace and withdraw from further territories, for fear that if attacked from those territories and it legitimately defends itself, it will again be accused of 'war crimes.'

BDS, or the Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanctions movement is another insidious effort to undermine the very legitimacy of the Jewish State. Last week, President Obama's Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, Hannah Rosenthal was in town. At an AJC breakfast I asked her if her office was taking a public stand against BDS. She said it wasn't because they saw the movement as largely ineffective. That the BDS movement was having a negligible economic impact. I suggested to her that she was missing the ideological and psychological success it was having, helping to isolate and alienate Israel, adding fuel to international efforts to delegitimize Israel and make her a pariah state.

In the Haftorah today, Joshua approaches a man who holds a drawn sword in hand and asks him, "Halanu Atah eem L'tzareinu? Are you one of us or one of our enemies?"
To the modern ear, this may sound like simplistic reductionism that no longer bears relevance to today's complex realities and shifting paradigms. To the ancient ear, this was a natural inquiry. I would argue that regardless of today's complexities, on certain questions, we as a people have a right to know if you're with us or against us, are you friend or foe, a supporter of Delegitimation and Demonization efforts, a supporter of Standards and Expectations applied to Israel but to no other country on the face of the earth?
Are you an apologist for enemies of our people who shoot anti-tank missiles at a school bus or butcher a family of five in their home on Shabbat?

Or do you believe, as believe it or not, I have heard from members of Seattle's Jewish community, that "There are no enemies out there; only Friends we haven't yet made."
We as a people can't afford the luxury of that kind of naivete.
We have to have more seichel because for a smart people we can sometimes act pretty dumb.

We need to acknowledge that we have enemies. Organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas, who are dedicated to our destruction and are happy to say so, are our enemies. There is no place for moral equivalency when people fire missiles at a school bus or butcher to death the Fogel family, or those who then celebrate such heinous acts. A jihadist organization like Hamas who kidnaps Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit and then holds him in captivity for almost five years, completely isolated from his family, without benefit of a visit by the Red Cross, is an enemy, and they are evil, and we shouldn't be afraid to say so.
But lest I be seen as being some kind of paranoid, fear-mongering Islamophobe, let me clarify. Many, many in the Arab world and Palestinian society are not our enemies. We should be--and are--relentlessly searching for ways to live in harmony with our neighbors. And, I would even go so far as to say we may even have to talk to and negotiate with enemies like Hamas, but let's not delude ourselves that everyone in this world is interested in pluralism. Or that all groups and ideologies are redeemable.

Today's reality is that while Israel may not face an immediate existential threat militarily, the threats from Demonization and Delegitimation do pose an existential urgency. And we need to stand together, Left & Right, Religious and Secular, Orthodox & Reform and assert unequivocally that Israel's right to exist as a Jewish State is not only non-negotiable, but that it is a primary responsibility. This is not to say that we don't need to work harder to create a more civil, just and decent society in Israel. We do; and it is all Jews' responsibility. But we must acknowledge that if we don't collectively battle the forces dedicated to our demise, we will not survive to create a better society that we can all be proud of. All else pales when compared to this challenge.

Just last month, Reform Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch addressed the Central Conference of American Rabbis in New Orleans
He asserted what he deems to be Red Lines for our community, lines that go way beyond disagreements over a particular government or that government's policies. I think they're important enough to repeat
He said:
-- If Jews in the name of Judaism and the Jewish community advocate boycotting Israel
--If Jewish organizations lobby for UN and international sanctions against Israel
--Promote divestments
--or Pressure Congress to reduce foreign aid to Israel

If Jews support and promote such actions,
Then the organized Jewish community must oppose these forces with everything we've got.
First: b/c these views are marginal in the Jewish community.

Second: b/c these views threaten the very existence of Israel. I draw the line at restricting Israel's right or capacity to defend itself.

Third: These views are morally outrageous, especially if you express them in the name of the Jewish people.

Not in my name.

Anti-democratic regimes are boycotted; not democracies. Libya should be sanctioned, not Israel. Myanmar should be boycotted, not Israel. Divest from China if you care about human rights, not Israel.

By joining those who speak only of Israel's faults and not the enormous contributions that Israel has made to the welfare of Jews and the world; by allowing unimpeded Israel-bashing masquerading as justice, human rights and international law, we distort reality.
And it is our role to put the discussion about Israel in proper and more balanced context.
Life is about context. Truth is about context. In Israel, this context is already taken into account when people protest and assert rights. But abroad the context is often dominated by Israel's enemies.

There is a campaign [in the world] to delegitimate Israel. To deny this is to deny reality. There is a campaign to portray Israel in the most negative light possible. This is an existential threat to Israel--a far greater threat than apartment complexes in Efrat, which in any case, will remain in Israel in any permanent solution.

We rabbis, the Jewish establishment, and all others who define themselves as pro-Israel--cannot place ourselves in circumstances where we actually give aid and comfort to those who seek Israel's destruction, or weaken Israel in any way, especially in its capacity to defend itself.

So, back to the challenge of maintaining our values, teaching our children derech eretz, fostering pride in our heritage and literacy in our history, and remembering we were strangers in a strange land...

To paraphrase Rabbi Hirsch; context is everything.
Israel was severely tested from 2000-2004 when the terror war launched by Arafat and his minions turned the schoolyards, buses, cinemas, malls, restaurants, discotheques and ordinary city streets of Israel proper into a battlefield. Under the circumstances of this unprecedented existential attack against their nation, the Israeli people handled themselves with exceptional restraint and great dignity. No modern democracy has sustained that kind of unabated barrage of terrorist attacks, day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year. It is only in that context that Israel's defensive measures to protect her citizenry should be scrutinized.

And the same goes for the restraint Israel demonstrated over 3 years following its complete withdrawal from Gaza, only to see literally thousands of rockets and mortars fired into civilian areas in southern Israel. One has only to conduct a simple thought experiment and ask, what would America's response be if Mexico was launching rockets into San Diego and even further up the California coast? What would France do if irredentist Germans in Alsace-Lorraine decided to lob bombs into Burgundy and Paris?
Rather than judge Israel by an unrealistic standard of perfection, we must ask ourselves how well other democracies would have stood up to such assaults.

It's easy to act kindly when you're Switzerland. But the true test of a decent and moral society is how it conducts itself when it finds itself under siege. I respectfully suggest that this Passover we ask ourselves the hard questions of how a society ensures the safety of its own citizenry and respects the human and civil rights of all, starting with the most basic of human rights, the right to life and the right to exist.

I have a confession to make, even though it's the wrong holiday.
Much of my born-again Zionism is an organic result of my work over the past 15 years with our Jewish elders. And today's parsha begins with Moses summoning all the elders
together. Elders are venerated in our tradition, even when they become weak, frail and less than whole. In the Babylonian Talmud, it is said that Moses shattered the first set of stone tablets with the 10 Commandments, in his ire at seeing the sinning Israelites. Yet the shards of those shattered tablets were placed in the Holy Ark in the Tabernacle alongside the second, whole set of tablets. The broken tablets are esteemed the same honor and value as the whole ones. And so it is with our elders...

I’d be remiss if I didn’t take a final moment to mention the advent of Jewish Hospice in Seattle. I’m proud to be leading this program under the auspices of the Kline Galland. We’re the first Jewish Hospice in the Pacific Northwest. Our spiritual and philosophical underpinnings emanate from Jewish practices around death and dying. In a word, our motto is “Honoring Life.” Rather than focus on death, we put our energies into helping individuals live fully and meaningful until their last breath. We embrace hope even as we acknowledge the impinging realities of life-limiting illnesses.

As Jews, we're comfortable with paradox and balancing sometimes competing realities. Despite those who may rise up in every generation and try to destroy us, we affirm life, we counter anti-Semitic hate with love; we choose building and creating when others strive to destroy us; Our way, the Jewish way, is to defeat evil and ignorance and hatred with constructive acts of tikkun olam.
I’ll end with a passage from Psalms
Teach us to use all of our Days, that we may Attain a Heart of Wisdom…

Chag Sameach

The Vanguard Leadership Group: Black Student Leaders Slam 'Apartheid' Characterization

2011-04-12T17:30:00.000-07:00

Speaking truth to serial propagandists, who wear the false mantle of 'defenders of the oppressed' --very refreshing to see; and hopeful
http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=215811

Black student leaders slam 'apartheid' characterization

By JORDANA HORN, JPOST CORRESPONDENT

Letter says "decency, justice and hope compel us to demand immediate cessation to deliberate misappropriation of words."

NEW YORK – African-American student leaders from a variety of historically black colleges and universities took out full page ads in numerous American college newspapers Thursday, displaying an “Open Letter to Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP),” to convey that they were offended by SJP’s use of the term “apartheid” at recent Israel Apartheid Week events at campuses across the country. The 16 signatories to the letter are students and alumni from historically black colleges and universities who are members of the Vanguard Leadership Group, a leadership development academy and honor society for top students. The letter ran or is slated to run in student newspapers at Brown University, University of California- Los Angeles, University of Maryland and Columbia University over the next few days. "The Students for Justice in Palestine’s labeling of Israel, an extremely diverse and vibrant country, as an apartheid state is not only false, but offensive,” Vanguard President Michael Hayes told The Jerusalem Post. “Additionally, this rhetoric does absolutely nothing to help Israel-Palestine negotiations or relations. We feel this type of action serves to hinder the peace process domestically and abroad, and have made it our priority to take a stand to shift the tide of understanding.” In a statement released by the Vanguard Leadership Group as to why they authored the open letter to SJP, Vanguard described itself as “proudly involved in the pro-Israel movement in America. “The use of the word ‘apartheid’ by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) in its characterization of Israel is patently false and deeply offensive to all who feel a connection to the state of Israel,” the letter reads. “Your organization’s campaign against Israel is spreading misinformation about its policies, fostering bias in the media and jeopardizing prospects for a timely resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Such irresponsibility is a blemish on your efforts.” The letter continues to state that “[p]laying the ‘apartheid card’ is a calculated attempt to conjure up images associated with the racist South African regimes of the 20th century,” and calls the strategy “as transparent as it is base.” “Beyond that, it is highly objectionable to those who know the truth about the Israelis’ record on human rights and how it so clearly contrasts with South Africa’s,” the letter reads, noting that under apartheid, black South Africans had no rights in a country in which they were the majority of the population. Saying that the analogy manipulates rather than informs, the letter requests SJP to “immediately stop referring to Israel as an apartheid society and to acknowledge that the Arab minority in Israel enjoys full citizenship with voting rights and representation in the government.” “Decency, justice, and the hope of peace and reconciliation in the Middle East compel us to demand an immediate cessation to the deliberate misappropriation of words and of the flagrant mischaracterizations of Israel,” the letter concludes. “Your compliance with this request will be viewed as a responsible and appropriate first step toward raising the level of discourse.”

Notes from my talk tonight at B'nai Torah: The Goldstone Report & the Gaza Flotilla

2011-04-06T22:48:00.000-07:00

Thank you Rabbi.
Well, the timing certainly couldn't be better for this talk. Glad I picked April, since April Fools Day was the date Judge Goldstone picked for his mea culpa in the Washington Post.
So, a little background before we plunge into the Report itself and its pernicious ramifications.
As many of you probably remember, Israel withdrew completely from the Gaza Strip in August of 2005. More on that later. Hamas won the Palestinian elections in January of 2006. On June 25th of 2006, Gilad Shalit was kidnapped by Hamas and has languished in captivity to this day. In June of 2007, Hamas staged a bloody coup in Gaza, driving out all remnants of Fatah leadership. Kassam rockets were being launched from Gaza into Israel at an ever increasing pace, culminating with the breaking of a temporary calm or tahidye, on Dec 19th, 2008. Upwards of 70-80 rockets a day were falling into civilian areas in southern Israel in an ever widening radius. On December 28th, the IDF launches Operation Cast Lead.
I want to read a few passages from two articles I wrote for the Seattle PI, now of course defunct, which make for bookends to the Gaza withdrawal and the subsequent consequences of that withdrawal.
July, 2005 Seattle Post Intelligencer
In less than one month, Israel will take a bold and historic action. Disengaging from all of Gaza and part of Samaria, commonly referred to as the West Bank, will forever alter Israel's posture toward the territory it acquired in the Six Day War in 1967.
It is important to understand the lengths that Sharon and the Israeli people are willingly to go to in order to move in the direction of a two-state solution and lasting peace. Israeli society is deeply divided over the wisdom of disengagement, as can be readily observed from last week's mass protests against the government's planned withdrawal. Even those who support the dramatic gesture recognize that in many ways it could prove counter-productive and send a very dangerous message to the Palestinians (and the world at large) that terror works, and that, if one is patient enough, ultimately terrorism is rewarded.
As the disengagement draws closer, public support has dwindled from a high of more than 70 percent to where it now hovers at just over 50 percent, according to the most reliable recent Israeli polls. Israelis are increasingly skeptical because they have not seen their willingness to make excruciatingly painful sacrifices reciprocated on the other side.
So what exactly are ordinary Israelis sacrificing? For starters, all claims to land in Gaza and the four settlements in the northern West Bank, totaling 440 square miles. The 25 settlements that will be uprooted are comprised of 1,700 families. Those families will witness the closing of 42 daycare centers, 36 kindergartens, 7 elementary schools and the dismantling of 38 synagogues. The approximate cost to the Israeli government (and by extension to the Israeli taxpayer) for the withdrawal initiative is 7.5 billion shekels, or more than $1.5 billion. Thriving agricultural communities with state-of-the-art technologies will be uprooted. These communities produce 60 percent of Israel's cherry tomato exports, 70 percent of all of Israel's organic produce, 60 percent of the herbs exported from Israel. All totaled, 15 percent of Israel's agricultural exports originate in Gaza, exports that will be lost following Israel's withdrawal.
Perhaps most painful will be the 48 graves that must be disinterred. The families of many of those buried in the cemetery of Gaza have already suffered tragedy from terrorist violence; six graves contain area residents murdered by terrorists. The land in which one's ancestors are buried is considered sacred under Jewish law, and rarely, if ever, are bodies exhumed. It is considered disturbing the dead. The fact that Israel is moving the graves of terrorists' victims is a powerful symbol of how much Israel's disengagement initiative is a permanent sacrifice in the quest for peace.
It is in this light that the world should carefully consider Israel's earnestness to create a new Middle East where all peoples can live together in peace. Israel was severely tested over the past five years when the terror war launched by Arafat turned the schoolyards, buses, cinemas, malls, restaurants, discotheques and ordinary city streets into a battlefield. Under the circumstances of this unprecedented existential attack against their nation, the Israeli people handled themselves with exceptional restraint and great dignity. No modern democracy has sustained that kind of unmitigated barrage of terrorist attacks, day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year. It is only in that context that Israel's defensive measures to protect her citizenry should be scrutinized. And it is in that context that the disengagement should also be viewed.
Israel is again proving her resolve to do whatever it takes to move towards peace, even at the cost of the rending of much of Israeli society over this issue. Disengagement, anticipated for two years now, is rapidly approaching and promises to permanently change the landscape of Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab relations.
Whether this opportunity can be translated into the beginning of a new era, or is only seen as a retreat and capitulation by Israel, remains to be seen. Whatever the results, it should be noted that ordinary Israelis are willing to sacrifice a great deal and put everything on the line.
My nephew Amir, the son of my wife's brother who is in his second year of conscription in the Israel Defense Forces, will be putting his life on the line, along with thousands of other Israeli soldiers and police, and this for the glimmer of hope that their children can grow up in a more peaceful, secure state

December 30th, 2008
Israel's Moral War Against Hamas: Op-ed in Seattle Post Intelligencer

Once again, tens of thousands of Israelis are forced to spend days and nights in bomb shelters, victims of ongoing missile assaults in towns and cities within a 35 km radius from Gaza. While much of the news focuses on Israeli air attacks against Hamas' military outposts and installations, Iranian backed Hamas killed three Israelis in separate rocket attacks on Israeli cities on Monday, December 29th. An Israeli-Arab construction worker was killed in Ashkelon, a woman was killed in Ashdod, and scores of Israelis were wounded.
Tragically, Palestinian civilians have also been killed in the fighting, victims too of Hamas' refusal to renew an already tenuous six-month 'calm,' or tahidya, which ended on December 19th.
Palestinian Authority President and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas said that Hamas could have prevented the "massacre" in the Gaza Strip. In Cairo on Sunday, he said, "We spoke to them and told them, 'Please, we ask you not to end the ceasefire."
The Egyptian Foreign Minister, condemned Hamas, saying they prevented those wounded in the Israeli offensive from passing into Egypt to receive medical attention. When asked who was to blame for the dire situation in Gaza, he replied, "ask the party that controls Gaza."

During the past year alone, Iranian backed terror groups in Gaza have launched over 3,000 rockets, missiles and mortars, deliberately targeting Israeli civilians in southern Israel (over 6,300 since Israel relinquished all of Gaza to the Palestinians in 2005). The only Israeli left in Gaza is Gilad Shalit, the soldier abducted by Hamas in June of 2006 in a cross-border raid. To this day, his whereabouts are unknown, and not even the International Red Cross is permitted to see him or report on his condition.
This is the backdrop to Israel's recent air attacks on Hamas military installations, command centers, training facilities, tunnels for weapons smuggling, and bomb factories. Hamas deliberately insinuates itself in civilian areas, holding fellow Palestinians hostage as human shields.

During the current hostilities, criticisms abound concerning Israel's obligation to uphold international humanitarian and human rights law. Ironically, the most basic of human rights, the right to life itself, is often ignored when it comes to Israelis who have endured an unceasing barrage of missile attacks from Gaza over the past three years. Instead, Israel is condemned for using 'disproportionate force,' a term referring to very specific wartime rules of engagement, grossly misunderstood and misapplied. In short, proportionality is defined by reference to the threat proposed by an enemy and not by the harm it has actually produced. Surely, the loss of any civilian life in war is regrettable and tragic. However, as political philosopher Michael Walzer noted in 2006: "When Palestinian militants launch rocket attacks from civilian areas, they are themselves responsible - and no one else is - for the civilian deaths caused by Israeli counterfire."

Currently, the objective of the Israeli military operation is to cripple the terrorist infrastructure in Gaza, and prevent Hamas from launching further attacks against Israeli citizens. Since it is the primary responsibility of any sovereign state to protect its citizenry, the Israeli government should be expected to do nothing less. In fact, many irate Israelis, especially those in missile distance from Gaza, believe that the enactment of this fundamental governmental responsibility has been long overdue.

President-elect Obama, during a visit to Sderot last summer, unequivocally defended Israel's right to protect its citizens from such attacks: "If somebody was sending rockets into my home where my two daughters sleep at night, I would do everything to stop that, and would expect Israel to do the same thing."
Rather than assail Israel for overreacting, the world should instead be in awe of its restraint. Israel's uniquely high standard of morality and respect for human life accounts for its remarkable restraint in the face of Hamas' unbridled provocations.

The actions of the Israeli Defense Forces would have been unnecessary had Hamas forsook terror and agreed to renew the tahidye. Israel is engaged in self-defense and it must be reiterated that Israel takes great pains to direct its military actions exclusively against terrorist targets, while Hamas deliberately positions its forces inside the most vulnerable of civilian areas; schools, religious institutions, residential areas and the like. Furthermore, Hamas launches its attacks from crowded civilian areas. Israel is dealing with a foe that sees Israeli deaths as very good, but deems Palestinian deaths as even more valuable.
Hard as it is to fathom from our perspective, Hamas callously calculates that if enough Palestinian civilians are inadvertently killed, the international court of opinion will view Israel as the guilty party, regardless of Hamas' cynical manipulation of the media with gruesome pictures of self-inflicted carnage against their own people. And despite protestations to the contrary, Israel has done everything possible to avert any humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Again, it is Hamas that has subverted and sabotaged the entry of supplies and international aid into areas under its jurisdiction.

Those of us who still work and hope for a two-state solution for the two peoples, understand that Hamas stands in the way of progress towards that goal. Hamas is an anti-nationalist party, more interested in destroying Israel than in creating true Palestinian independence. It remains the fervent hope of the vast majority of Israelis that Hamas will be defeated, breathing renewed hope that the Palestinians can reclaim their right to responsible leadership. Only then can an authentic peace process be renewed and the hope rekindled that Palestinians can achieve independence and live in harmony with their Israeli neighbors.
Okay. Now let's cut to the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead
Mary Robinson, Former President of Ireland and United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, from 1997 to 2002 (not exactly an uber-Zionist herself) turned down the offer by the UN Human Rights Council to head the mission to investigate alleged Israeli war crimes
So too did former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari
Here’s what Robinson said on March 9, 2009, about the resolution that created the mission ultimately headed by Judge Goldstone:
[U]nfortunately, the Human Rights Council passed a resolution seeking a fact-finding mission to only look at what Israel had done, and I don’t think that’s a human rights approach.
One has to ask: since the January resolution opens with a Paragraph 1 that “strongly condemns” Israel as guilty of “massive violations,” what is it exactly that the Goldstone mission is investigating?
And what countries were represented on the UN's Human Rights Council at the time?
Such bastions of human rights like Pakistan, China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, and of course Libya
But Judge Goldstone accepted the mantle, from a UN organ renowned for its virulent anti-Israel bias. In the last five years, the council has issued 51 human rights condemnations against countries, of which 35 were against Israel.

Now, of course, two years later, Judge Goldstone offers his mea culpa, with this astonishing admission:

“In the end, asking Hamas to investigate [its own crimes] may have been a mistaken enterprise.”

It took Judge Goldstone two years to come to the conclusion that asking a terrorist organization to impartially report its own atrocities was maybe not the smartest idea.

Goldstone wrote that the UN Humans Rights Council, which commissioned his report, has a “history of bias against Israel [that] cannot be doubted.”

(So he admits that Israel was being asked to cooperate with an investigation commissioned by an authority inherently prejudiced against it, which, of course, explains why it rightly refused to participate).

So what's the significance of all this?
It's precisely because of Judge Goldstone's stature, as a world renowned Jurist, and a Jew, and a self-professed Zionist, that he has contributed probably more than any other single individual to the Demonization and Delegitimization of Israel
And its precisely because he's a South African Jew, well versed in the crimes of Apartheid, that his judgement stung so deeply
Increasing worldwide mov't of BDS--Boycotts, Divestment, & Sanctions against Israel
Goldstone Report gave fantastic momentum to this insidious mov't
By casting Israel as a country guilty of war crimes, deliberate targeting of civilians (the most devastating accusation--of course, turns reality on its head--Hamas guilty of this while Israel makes extraordinary efforts to safeguard and protect enemy civilians), gave enormous ammunition to anti-Semites and well-meaning Westerners who were easily swayed into believing that Israel committed war crimes against defenseless Palestinians
In Israel, the Goldstone Report became known as the Goldstone Effect, rendering Israelis all the more isolated and distrustful of the world's support in their efforts to forge an authentic peace
Michael Oren, Israel's Ambassador to America had this to say:
Ironically, the greatest victim of the UN report is not Israel's ability to wage a moral war but its willingness to make an historic peace. If asked to take immense risks for peace, Israelis must be convinced of their internationally recognized right to self-defense should that peace be broken. Deprived of that right, even after being subjected to years of murderous rocket attacks, an Israeli electorate will understandably recoil from such risks.

Delivered by Colonel Richard Kemp
UN Human Rights Council
12th Special Session, 16 October 2009
Debate on Goldstone Report

Thank you, Mr. President.

I am the former commander of the British forces in Afghanistan. I served with NATO and the United Nations; commanded troops in Northern Ireland, Bosnia and Macedonia; and participated in the Gulf War. I spent considerable time in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, and worked on international terrorism for the UK Government’s Joint Intelligence Committee.

Mr. President, based on my knowledge and experience, I can say this: During Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli Defence Forces did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.

Israel did so while facing an enemy that deliberately positioned its military capability behind the human shield of the civilian population.
Hamas, like Hizballah, are expert at driving the media agenda. Both will always have people ready to give interviews condemning Israeli forces for war crimes. They are adept at staging and distorting incidents.

The IDF faces a challenge that we British do not have to face to the same extent. It is the automatic, Pavlovian presumption by many in the international media, and international human rights groups, that the IDF are in the wrong, that they are abusing human rights.

The truth is that the IDF took extraordinary measures to give Gaza civilians notice of targeted areas, dropping over 2 million leaflets, and making over 100,000 phone calls. Many missions that could have taken out Hamas military capability were aborted to prevent civilian casualties. During the conflict, the IDF allowed huge amounts of humanitarian aid into Gaza. To deliver aid virtually into your enemy's hands is, to the military tactician, normally quite unthinkable. But the IDF took on those risks.

Despite all of this, of course innocent civilians were killed. War is chaos and full of mistakes. There have been mistakes by the British, American and other forces in Afghanistan and in Iraq, many of which can be put down to human error. But mistakes are not war crimes.

More than anything, the civilian casualties were a consequence of Hamas’ way of fighting. Hamas deliberately tried to sacrifice their own civilians.

Mr. President, Israel had no choice apart from defending its people, to stop Hamas from attacking them with rockets.

And I say this again: the IDF did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.

Thank you, Mr. President.

I'm going to move on now to the Gaza Flotilla, but spend less time on that incident, to allow for more Q & A
A few major points:
• The Naval Blockade of Gaza was legal according to int'l law
• The Turkel Commission, an independent investigative panel, cleared Israel of wrongdoing
• The panel was comprised of a former Israeli Supreme Court Justice, Brigadier General Ken Watkin of Canada, Judge Advocate General for the Canadian Forces, and Nobel Laureate, Lord David Trimble of Northern Ireland, among other international notables
• There was not a crate of humanitarian goods aboard the Mavi Marmara
• The ship was initially portrayed as a boat of "peace activists"
• Little by little, the truth came out; about 40 of the crew were members of the IHH, (Insani Yardim Vakfi) a Turkish aid foundation with radical Islamist ties
• The flotilla was a fleet of six ships with ties to extremist and Islamist Jihad groups
• Weapons and ammunition were found aboard the Mavi Marmara
• Israel made repeated requests for the ship to stop at the port of Ashdod to ensure no weapons were being transported to Hamas
• The Israeli soldiers came on board with paint guns to mark "rioters" because that's what they thought they were dealing with
• The Israeli soldiers were attacked with iron bars, axes, clubs, slingshots, and knives
• It was only after their lives were at risk did they resort to fully justified self-defense, resulting in the deaths of nine crew members
• More than one million tons of humanitarian supplies have entered Gaza from Israel, equaling over a ton of aid for every individual there, including food, first aid, fuel, and construction material.

IHH (The Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief

In July 2009, the Israeli foreign ministry published and posted online an analysis of the Gaza operation that was designed to rebut in advance the Goldstone Report’s main charges, which would not be released until mid-September of that year. Prepared while Israel was still conducting preliminary field investigations into allegations of unlawful conduct by the idf, “The Operation in Gaza: Factual and Legal Aspects” covered numerous issues. The 159-page document emphasized Israel’s right and obligation under international law to use military force to stop Hamas’s bombardment of civilian targets in southern Israel with rockets and mortar shells — approximately 12,000 since 2000 and 3,000 in 2008 alone. It reported that by late 2008 Hamas had put one million Israeli civilians in range of its weapons and had assembled armed forces of more than 20,000. It described the considerable efforts Israel undertook, in accordance with the UN Charter, to bring international pressure to bear on Hamas, “including urgent appeals to the UN Secretary General and successive Presidents of the Security Council to take determined action, and diplomatic overtures, directly and through intermediaries, to stop the violence.” It reaffirmed Israel’s adherence to the law of armed conflict and human rights law and explained that, under a proper understanding of both as well as of Hamas’s systematic use of human shields and relentless blurring of the distinction between civilians and combatants, Israel’s military operation in Gaza was a proportionate response. It provided clear evidence, including photographs and video, that, in flagrant violation of international law, Hamas deliberately engaged in “the launching of rocket attacks from within densely populated areas near schools and protected un facilities, the commandeering of hospitals as bases of operations and ambulances for transport, the storage of weapons in mosques, and the booby-trapping of entire civilian neighbourhoods so that an attack on one structure would devastate many others.” It reviewed the extensive and unprecedented precautions the idf took to minimize noncombatant casualties — including making hundreds of thousands of phone calls to Gaza residents to warn of impending air strikes — against an adversary that placed civilians in the line of fire as part of a coldly calculated military strategy. It summarized the steps the idf took during the three-week conflict to ensure the daily delivery of humanitarian supplies to the civilian population. It acknowledged that “the Gaza Operation resulted in many civilian deaths and injuries and significant damage to public and private property in Gaza.” And it reported that the idf was conducting field investigations into accusations of unlawful conduct; detailed Israel’s extensive and well-established system of military justice of which those investigations were the first stage; and reaffirmed Israel’s right and responsibility under international law to investigate accusations that its military had acted unlawfully and, where appropriate, prosecute and punish.

PROPORTIONALITY
The principle of distinction requires parties to a conflict to distinguish between civilian populations and combatants. The principle of proportionality restricts the use of force in armed conflict to the achievement of legitimate military objectives and requires that the force used be reasonably expected not to cause injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects that would be clearly excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage. What constitutes a legitimate military objective, what constitutes reasonable expectations, and what constitutes clearly excessive injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects in relation to anticipated military advantage — indeed, what constitutes a civilian or civilian object in an age of asymmetric warfare — are intensely context-sensitive questions

Israelis are Mindfully Watchful of Upheavals in the Arab World: Time for a Unity Gov't Reflecting the "Resolve & Sobriety of Israeli Public?"

2011-03-30T17:33:00.000-07:00

Halevi's astute analysis of the current situation and how Israel can take the initiative and endorse freedom in the Arab world, with sobriety and resiliency. Israel Is Resilient but Watchful Amid the return of Palestinian violence and upheaval in the Arab world, there is broad consensus on issues such as land for peace. By YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI Jerusalem The ambulance sirens began sounding and didn't seem to end. The terrorist attack on March 23 that killed one person and wounded 30 was the first bus bombing in Jerusalem since 2005. And it happened just as missiles from Gaza began falling on Israeli cities and towns for the first time since the Gaza War of 2009. Suddenly it was as if the normal life we'd since managed to re-inhabit was an illusion. But the despair passed quickly. Two days after the bombing, 10,000 people—from as far away as Kenya, Ethiopia and Poland—jogged through Jerusalem in the city's first-ever international marathon. Residents lined the streets, cheering on the runners. Not one participant dropped out as a result of the bombing. After a brutal decade that began with the collapse of the peace process in September 2000, and which brought four years of suicide bombings, eight years of missile attacks, two wars, and at least two failed attempts at peacemaking, the Israeli public is resilient and sober. As terrorism and rocket attacks return to Israeli cities, and the Arab world reels, those are precisely the qualities Israelis need to cope. The precondition for containing terrorism is national unity, and on security matters at least, the nation is cohesive. In responding to attacks on civilian Israel, the government has the support of nearly every party. Knesset members of the opposition Kadima party are demanding that the government respond even more firmly—the left pressing the right to be resolute. Yet so far the government's response has been restrained—and rightly so. Another Israeli-Hamas confrontation is perhaps inevitable, but not now. As the Arab world finally begins to face itself, Israel must avoid focusing the region's attention on the Palestinian conflict. The upheavals have proven that what preoccupies the Arab peoples aren't Israel's actions but Arab failures. The dictators want to deflect their people's rage back onto Israel. Moammar Gadhafi, for instance, has urged Palestinians to board ships and descend on Israel's coast. This is also not the time for far-reaching political initiatives. With the open question of whether Israel's peace with Egypt will survive the fall of Hosni Mubarak, Israelis are reassessing the wisdom of land-for-peace agreements with dictators. What is the point, many here wonder, of exchanging the Golan Heights for a dubious peace with a Baathist regime run by the hated Allawite minority? Israelis are asking a similar question about Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, who is widely resented by Palestinians as corrupt and represents at best only part of his people. Why negotiate a land for peace agreement with an unelected, one-party government? Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad is the first Palestinian leader to place economic growth before ideology, but he lacks a political base. In a time of regional change, Israelis are even more reluctant to risk irreversible strategic concessions for a deal that may well lack popular legitimacy. There is no basis now for an agreement. Claims in the media that Mr. Abbas and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert were close to a deal are merely another example of the wishful thinking that once turned the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat into a partner for peace. Recently leaked documents from the Palestinian Authority reveal that Palestinian leaders continue to anticipate the "return" of hundreds of thousands of refugee descendants to Israel. No Israeli government will concede on what is, for the Jewish state, an existential issue. In the coming months, pressure to implement an immediate two-state solution will increase—from the United Nations, the European Union, and the Obama administration. Israel must resist that pressure. The premature creation of a Palestinian state—more precisely two states, ruled by the competing autocracies of Hamas and Fatah—will not bring peace but greater instability. Still, Israel must do more than passively await regional change. As the Arab world confronts its options of Islamism, democratization or military dictatorship, Israel needs to endorse freedom. Israel's contribution to the new democratic spirit should be sending an unequivocal message to the Arab world that it has no intention of continuing the occupation for ideological motives, and that the only impediment to Palestinian independence is Palestinian intransigence, especially on the issue of refugees. The least dangerous way for Israel to communicate that message is by declaring an open-ended building freeze in the settlements. That freeze would not include Jerusalem. No government—left, right or center—would stop building in East Jerusalem's existing Jewish neighborhoods. But a freeze should be unilateral—without expectation of reciprocity from the Palestinians. At the same time Israel should transfer control to the Palestinian Authority of more of the West Bank, and continue encouraging economic growth there. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's reluctance to impose another settlement freeze is understandable. His previous 10-month freeze—the first by any Israeli prime minister—was greeted with skepticism and brought only increased pressure from Washington to freeze building in Jerusalem. But regional conditions have since changed dramatically, and Israel needs to respond. Mr. Netanyahu cannot impose another freeze while maintaining his present coalition. So he should seriously examine the new offer of opposition leader Tzipi Livni to form a unity government between the prime minister's Likud party and Kadima. A combination of policies—military restraint, an unconditional settlement freeze, realism regarding a Palestinian state—will express the resolve and sobriety of the Israeli public. Israelis these days are preparing for Passover. The Passover seder is called a night of watching, in remembrance of the Israelites who were prepared at a moment's notice to flee Egypt and enter the unknown. This year Passover has particular resonance. For Israelis, living in a Middle East veering between freedom and even greater repression, it is a time of active watching. Mr. Halevi is a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and a contributing editor at the New Republic.

Israel's Perpetual State of 'Shigrat Herum' or "Routine Emergency" & Michael Oren on Bill Maher Show

2011-03-27T10:36:00.000-07:00

Liat Collins writes compellingly on her propulsion to Zion--and Zionism;

and Michael Oren with his usual eloquence, charm, and class: Timeshare with the Palestinians?

My Word: A routine emergency

By LIAT COLLINS

Instead of running away from terror, we might as well send Hamas and its allies a message of our own: We’re here to stay. Can you talk about why you chose to leave England for Jerusalem, a radio show host asked me recently. I thought it would be easy. But the simple question got me thinking. I briefly considered the flippant answer that the weather’s better. The daughter of a neighbor who immigrated from New Caledonia a year ago jokes she moved to Israel because it was “too boring.” When pushed, however, she admits that anti-Semitism played a role. How much anti-Semitism can there be in a country with hardly any Jews? “Well, it’s more an anti-Israel sentiment,” she explains. It made me think of another reason to make aliya: Israel is probably the only place in the world where, when someone calls you a “Zionist” it’s a compliment and not an insult. What really brought me here, strangely enough, was terror. It’s a story I’ve told before. The first time I shared it was in 1996, following the double bombing of the No. 18 bus – a bus on which I still regularly travel. Then, too, it was close to Purim. Instead of mishloah manot (gifts of food for the holiday), people walked down the narrow streets of my neighborhood carrying meals to the mourners. On the morning of February 25, 1996, a suicide bomber blew himself up on a No. 18 traveling down Jaffa Road near the Jerusalem Central Bus Station. Twenty-six people were killed and 48 injured. A week later, on March 3, a bomber detonated an explosive belt on another No. 18 on Jaffa Road, killing 19 and wounding seven. The following week, when I boarded the bus, a passenger asked the driver: “Does this go as far as the Central Bus Station?” eliciting the response: “With God’s help.” It was the time the joke began to circulate among those waiting for the already notoriously unreliable line: “Why do the buses always come in pairs? Because they’re afraid to travel alone.” You might have to be a Jerusalemite to appreciate it. It might not be funny. The lethal attack on March 23 certainly raises questions about how the new light rail, when it finally starts operating, will handle security issues. ULTIMATELY THE answer to what brought me from a comfortable London suburb to a place where pioneering spirit was an asset lies in Germany – no, not what you think: the Munich massacre at the 1972 Olympic Games. I was 11, a competitive swimmer and in love with Mark Spitz. That was when I first understood one could die simply for being Jewish. Anywhere. “Don’t worry,” my mother had tried to reassure me as I watched events unfold on TV. “Mark Spitz is safe.” What about the British competitor from my own swimming club? She had not been in danger, my mother explained; she wasn’t a Jew. My young mind grappled to work out why an American super swimmer was at risk when the medal-winning member of my own team was not. Why just Israelis and Jews? And then suddenly I understood the connection. Israel wasn’t just an abstract name in my prayer book. It really existed – and more than anything else, I wanted to go there. Arab terror turned me into a Zionist – a peculiar victory, indeed. There is nothing rational behind my decision to move to Israel; it was an emotional pull. My Zionism was strengthened by every subsequent pointless death, and unfortunately, there were many: the massacre of children during a school trip in Ma’alot; the murders in Kiryat Shmona; the Yom Kippur War. Each one contributed to my desire to come to the Promised Land. The blast of terror blew me across the sea, carrying me home. For where else could I go? There’s no other country with which I have that blood bond. Ironically, during a recent trip to London I felt far less safe than in Jerusalem. Perhaps it’s always like that when you’re away from home, and London is definitely not my home any more. I found it unnerving to travel on trains and enter a shopping mall with my suitcase on wheelswithout a single security check. If nobody had looked to see what was inside my case, then no one had examined what anyone else was carrying either. It was only slightly more comforting to have my luggage pulled to pieces by security at Heathrow airport where I’d forgotten to declare a plastic bottle of moisturizing lotion. I can’t vouch for the overall security at the terminal, but I can testify that no one is going to get the chance to blow up a plane with 150 ml. of Boots moisturizer. It’s more politically correct than profiling, of course; I just hope it’s as effective. THE BOMBING in Jerusalem was loud. It brought back all sorts of memories and instincts that I’d prefer to forget – the “turn on the radio and call the family” standard operating procedure that was second nature during the years of terror. There was the sound of sirens, ongoing news reports, and finally that utterly Israeli response when a certain kind of song is played on the radio. Whenever you hear Chava Alberstein singing “we’re all a part of the living human tapestry,” it’s worth checking whether there’s been a tragedy. You might have thought that 50 mortar shells and rockets make a lot of noise , but obviously it depends where they fall. The barrage on the Negev on March 19 did not really reverberate. The rest of the the country picked up its head at the sound, sighed and got back to the Purim revelries. The world didn’t hear even the missiles, which let alone the sigh. The missiles came with a message: “Look at us! We’re still here!” hissed the projectiles launched byIslamic Jihad in Gaza. While some commentators remarked that the terrorists were exploiting the turmoil elsewhere in the Arab world to attack Israel, it seems more likely that it was an effort to reclaim the spotlight. It almost failed. Apparently, most of the world doesn’t much care if missiles are lobbed at Israel at an everincreasing rate in ever-widening concentric circles. What is more important is Israel’s response. “Israel has a right to defend itself,” ambassadors and foreign ministers proclaim. Just don’t ask them how. “Israel doesn’t just have the right to defend itself,” said Minister Limor Livnat in a radio interview. “It has an obligation.” We’ll probably be damned if we do and damned if we don’t. As Beersheba, Ashdod, Ashkelon and the Gaza border communities all came under fire, and Jerusalem licks its latest wound, a phrase I hadn’t heard for a long time bounced back into usage: “Shigrat herum.” It is a typically Israeli term: a “routine emergency.” Life is going to continue as usual – for an emergency, that is. Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat called for the planned international marathon to go ahead on March 25. Instead of running away from terror, we might as well send Hamas and its allies a message of our own: We’re here to stay. Or as Mayor Barkat put it at the scene of the attack: “Jerusalem will not stop running” – forward, that is.
The writer is editor of The International Jerusalem Post

AJC/Seattle's Annual Cultural Gem of the Community!!! This Year's Jewish Film Festival "BUILDING BRIDGES" Series

2011-02-20T16:55:00.000-08:00

AJC/SJFF "BUILDING BRIDGES" FESTIVAL LAUNCHES MARCH 3
RUNS MARCH 12 - 20

Rav Nachman of Breslev's (1772-1810) famously said: "All the world is a narrow bridge, and the main thing is not to be afraid."

Shining a bright light on the cultural, ethnic, religious and demographic diversity, this year's Festival introduces the AJC BRIDGE SERIES - four (4) incredible films that explore AJC's bridge-building mission through film, musical performance and in vibrant discussion with critically acclaimed filmmakers, journalists, scholars and AJC experts in intergroup, interfaith and intercultural affairs.

In this sense, navigating a narrow bridge means the ability to both partner - link arms in the same direction - as well as make or give way to others crossing your path. Dialogue not fear is the foundation for mutual understanding.

Make way 520 - Seattle bridges will widen!
Come join us and be part of the dialogue!

Pamela Lavitt: Festival Director
Festival Co-chairs: Wendy Kaplan & David Brumer

AJC Bridge Series

Tickets Sold Individually: Purchase Now (click here)

100 VOICES: A JOURNEY HOME
Closing Night Film & Concert
Sun. March 20 7:30PM SIFF Cinema

A group of the world's finest cantors returns to Poland for a series of exhilarating, historical concerts in this deeply moving documentary. Special Guests: Directors Marthew Asner and Danny Gold, Randy Brown, AJC Asst. Director of and Cantor Nathan Lam Performing with Seattle Jewish Chorale
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DELICIOUS PEACE GROWS IN A UGANDAN COFFEE BEAN Jewish Activism in Africa
Mon. March 14 7:30PM SIFF Cinema

In 2003, a Jewish coffee farmer in Uganda joined forces with his Christian and Muslim neighbors to form an interfaith, fair-trade coffee cooperative. Special Guests: Director Curt Fissel and Producer Ellen Friedland
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PRECIOUS LIFE
Centerpiece Panel Discussion
Sun. March 13, 4:30PM AMC Pacific Place

With war in Gaza imminent, four-month-old Muhammad needs a costly bone-marrow implant - which only an Israeli hospital can perform - or he will die. Panel of Doctors and Bioethicists, Moderated by Margaret Larsen.
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THE ROUND UP (LA RAFLE)
France 2010 Roselyne Bosch
Thu, March 17, 7:30 PM SIFF Cinema

Set during one of the darkest moments in modern French history, The Round Up is a wrenching, dramatic re-creation of the Vichy regime's imprisonment of 13,000 Parisian Jews in 1942.
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AJC Bridge Series
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Thurs. March 3, 7-10 PM
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HOTEL SPONSOR DEALS STAYCATION ANYONE?
The Luxurious, 5-Star Pan Pacific Seattle is the Festival's Preferred Hospitality Sponsor.

Mention 'Jewish Film Festival' and receive a discounted rate of $169 for a Deluxe accommodation.

Offer includes two complimentary drink vouchers for the Lobby Bar (value $10 each)
Offer is based on availability. For reservations call 206.264.8111
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The Maxwell Hotel
Special Insider Rate! $125.00 + tax, single/double occupancy. This rate applies to an Aria King or a Duet Queen. Triple occupancy is $135.00 +tax, Quad occupancy is $145.00 +tax. Please note that parking is complimentary but not guaranteed. Internet access, wired and wireless is provided in-room and throughout the hotel at no charge.

Please email reservation@themaxwellhotel.com or call (1-877-298-9728)
Guests may also refer to Group Code SJJF or Group number 114454.

Offer Expires: March 2, 2011. After that, the rate will be based on the Best Available Rate.
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Fascinating Interview with Sharansky on the Promise of Freedom

2011-02-12T09:30:00.000-08:00

Sharansky offers a unique perspective on the promise of the Egyptian Revolution and prospects for a more durable peace in the long run. Truly an original thinker. Worth reading in its entirety.
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Maybe this is the Moment to Put our Trust in Freedom
By DAVID HOROVITZ
11/02/2011

A quarter-century after his release presaged the disintegration of the Soviet Union, an ‘even purer’ push for democracy is unfolding in our region, says Natan Sharansky.

It was precisely 25 years ago that Natan Sharansky, icon of the struggle to liberate Soviet Jewry, walked to freedom across Berlin’s Glienicke Bridge, that narrow tie between the Communist bloc and the West. Behind him, back behind the Iron Curtain in the Soviet Union, he left a vast community of Jews who ached to follow in his footsteps.

But not for long. The crack from which Sharansky emerged grew swiftly into a chasm. Within less than six years, amid the dizzyingly rapid collapse of the Soviet empire, no fewer than 400,000 members of that community had been freed to emulate him in making new homes in Israel.

What makes this anniversary particularly poignant is that it coincides with another potentially defining moment in the struggle for democracy over totalitarianism – a moment when people across our region, some tentatively and others more confidently, are rising up against their autocratic leaders. They are demanding the same opportunities, the same stake in determining their own futures, the same guarantees of freedom from persecution for speaking their minds that even the mighty, grey, terrifying Soviet bureaucracy proved incapable of denying to its masses.

And for all that tiny Israel is understandably concerned at the direction the truly free peoples of the Middle East might ultimately choose to follow with respect to our unloved Jewish state, Sharansky is enthralled and enthused by what is unfolding.

Six years ago, he published a book – co-written with Ron Dermer, now a senior adviser to the prime minister – titled The Case for Democracy and insistently subtitled “The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror.” But the skeptics and the self-proclaimed experts in this region always told Sharansky that, while he had evidently outwitted and outlasted the Communists, he really didn’t understand the ancient, bitter norms of the Middle East. In this part of the world, Israelis from Ariel Sharon on down would lecture him, bloody experience had long since demonstrated that nothing, actually, could overcome tyranny and terror.

Israel’s best hope, and that of the West, ran the thinking, rested in cultivating the more palatable tyrants. Arab democracy? How oxymoronic.

So this small, unstoppable man, who has somehow crammed long periods of dissidence, imprisonment, activism and politicking into his 63 years, is feeling a certain vindication on the 25th anniversary of his own liberation. Much more importantly, though, he recognizes the urgency and sensitivities of the hour. Huge public protest, the readiness to push for revolution, he says, is like water coming to the boil. Suddenly it rises up, overflowing with new capabilities. But slam the lid on, turn off the heat, and it falls back.

Iran saw a moment like this, less than two years ago, he recalls. The students, the unions, suddenly they scented weakness. Their frustrations with their Islamist rulers overflowed in the aftermath of the fraudulent presidential elections. They boiled.

But the West failed them. The West, and specifically, a new, untried president, hesitated. The moment was lost. The mullahs slammed the lid on.

This time, says Sharansky – in this fascinating conversation which took place at his chairman’s office in the Jewish Agency headquarters – Barack Obama is sending smarter signals. And Israel, he insists, must internalize how fortunate we are that the revolt is unfolding today in countries where the Islamists are not yet strong enough to sweep into power, in countries dependent on American aid, in countries where the West can yet seek to make its influence felt.

The unholy, unsustainable pact between the West and the dictators of the Middle East is being severed, as it should be, says Sharansky. It is being severed by the people. And their will must be done.

Egypt, Israel, The Muslim Brotherhood and the West's Myopia when it Comes to all Things Israel

2011-02-05T18:50:00.000-08:00

Several different perspectives on the crisis in Egypt. At present, it's hard to know what will be when the dust and sand storm settles, but one thing is certain. No Israeli leader worth his salt would make any dramatic moves until there is a surer sense of what direction things will go, and that could takes many months, if not years. Which makes Thomas Friedman look a bit silly when he suggests that now is the time for Israel to "strike a deal" with the Palestinians B.E., Before Egypt. A.E., After Egypt. Below, David Suissa on the hypocrisy and short-sightedness of the Israel bashing crowd, wasting precious energies putting Israel under a microscope when gross abuses have been perpetrated by every neighboring country against their own people for decades; Yossi Klein Halevi with more on Israel's neighborhood and what to be watching for, and a host of other thoughtful commentaries on the what the fires in Egypt may mean for Israel, America, the Middle East, and beyond.

While self-righteous Israel bashers have scrutinized every flaw in Israel's democracy -- some waxing hysterical that the Jewish democratic experiment in the world's nastiest neighborhood has turned into an embarrassment -- they kept their big mouths shut about the oppression of millions of Arabs throughout the Middle East.
They cried foul if Israeli Arabs -- who have infinitely more rights and freedoms than any Arabs in the Middle East -- had their rights compromised in any way. But if a poet was jailed in Jordan or a gay man was tortured in Egypt or a woman was stoned in Syria, all we heard was screaming silence.
Think of the ridiculous amount of media ink and diplomatic attention that has been poured onto the Israel-Palestinian conflict over the years, while much of the Arab world was suffering and smoldering, and tell me this is not criminal negligence. Do you ever recall seeing a U.N. resolution or an international conference in support of Middle Eastern Arabs not named Palestinians?
Of course, now that the Arab volcano has finally erupted, all those chronic Israel bashers have suddenly discovered a new cause: Freedom for the poor oppressed Arabs of the Middle East!

Israel Never Looked So Good
David Suissa

His column this week in the Huffington Post and the Jewish Journal:

They all warned us. The geniuses at Peace Now. The brilliant diplomats. The think tanks. Even the Arab dictators warned us. For decades now, they have been warning us that if you want "peace in the Middle East," just fix the Palestinian problem. A recent variation on this theme has been: Just get the Jews in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to "freeze" their construction, and then, finally, Palestinian leaders might come to the table and peace might break out.

And what would happen if peace would break out between Jews and Palestinians? Would all those furious Arabs now demonstrating on the streets of Cairo and across the Middle East feel any better? Would they feel less oppressed?

What bloody nonsense.

Israel's Neighborhood Watch - Egypt's Upheaval Means that Palestine Must Wait (quite the contrast to Thomas Friedman's message)
Yossi Klein Halevi
Until a decade ago, every Israeli government was committed to a security doctrine that precluded the establishment of potential bases of terrorism on Israel's borders. That doctrine has since unraveled. In May 2000, Israel's unilateral withdrawal from southern Lebanon led to the formation of a Hizbullah-dominated region on Israel's northern border. Then, in August 2005, Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza led to the rise of Hamas on Israel's southern border. As a result, two enclaves controlled by Islamist movements now possess the ability to launch missile attacks against any population center in Israel. And Iran, through its proxies, is now effectively pressing against Israel's borders.
For Israel's policymakers, the nightmare scenario of the recent Egyptian upheaval is that Islamists will eventually assume control as the clerics did in Iran. Such a turn of events would bring to power an anti-Semitic movement that is committed to ending Egypt's peace treaty with the Jewish state. "This could be the beginning of a 1948 moment," a senior Israeli official told me, meaning that Israel could eventually face a multifront war against overwhelming odds.
Even a relatively more benign outcome - such as the Turkish model - would mean the end of Israel's sense of security along its long southern border. And this will certainly adversely affect the Israeli public's willingness to relinquish the West Bank anytime soon. With peace with Egypt suddenly in doubt, Israelis are wondering about the wisdom of risking further withdrawals for agreements that could be abrogated with a change of regime. (Foreign Affairs)

How to Avoid an Iran-Like Tragedy in Egypt - Michael Rubin
Few Egyptians will mourn Hosni Mubarak's downfall. As a guest observer at Mubarak's 2006 National Democratic Party convention, I watched as senior officials cut microphone power to party members who used their speeches to complain about economic issues. Even the army will not be sad to see Mubarak go, after he tried to force his son to be his successor against the wishes of the generals.
A Muslim Brotherhood victory is not assured, however. Egyptians remained scarred by the Islamist violence the group encouraged in the 1990s. As tourism revenue plummeted, Egyptians felt the bite in their wallets. Likewise, while Egyptian animus toward Israel remains high, the Brotherhood's warning that "the people should be prepared for war against Israel" will turn off Egyptians who resent conscription and have no wish to see sons and husbands leave their jobs to fight at a new front. (American Enterprise Institute)

Hamas, the Brotherhood and Egypt - WSJ Editorial
Hovering like a dark cloud over the demonstrations in Egypt is the memory of the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections. For critics of the Bush administration, those elections, in which Hamas scored an unanticipated win, were proof that the "freedom agenda" would only grease the way for anti-American, Islamist parties to come to power. Those who believe that a democratic Egypt is doomed to fall into the Muslim Brotherhood's hands frequently cite the 2006 elections as Exhibit A. But the lesson of those elections is that Hamas should not have been allowed to participate, not that elections should never have been held.
If the Brotherhood wants to participate in elections, it should have to promise to play by democratic rules, respect religious and social pluralism, and honor Egypt's treaty commitments, especially to Israel. (Wall Street Journal)

A Quick Mubarak Exit Is Too Risky - Edward N. Luttwak
The Obama administration, like much of the world, is not reacting to the situation in Egypt - a mostly rural country populated mainly by poor peasants. It is reacting to the media spectacle in the center of Cairo, in which huge but largely middle-class crowds have gathered to demand President Hosni Mubarak's removal. The few journalists who speak colloquial Egyptian Arabic report that among the poor majority of the population many still support Mubarak.
Elite opinion in the West is almost unanimous that Mubarak must go now. Fears of an Islamist takeover are overblown, they argue. It is not often recalled that Hamas is simply the Gaza branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, which won power by election - and now refuses to hold more elections.
As for Israel, it is likely to lose an ally in Egypt but unlikely to face a military threat any time soon: The U.S.-equipped Egyptian armed forces could not fight a war without U.S. supplies - and it would take at least $20 billion and 10 years to re-equip them with non-U.S. weapons. The writer is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. (Wall Street Journal)

After Mubarak - Amir Taheri
Conventional wisdom claims that only Arab despots can ensure Israel's security. In fact, all the wars against Israel were started by such despots. If Egypt becomes a democracy, it will be harder to deny the Iranian people's demand for self-determination. But if Egypt falls under Islamist domination, the mullahs still wind up losers: An Egypt governed by the Muslim Brotherhood would represent a clear and present Sunni threat to Iran's ambitions to dominate the region in the name of Shiite Islam. (New York Post)

Desert Storm - Yossi Melman
For more than 30 years, Egypt has been Israel's best strategic ally in the region and part of a larger axis consisting of the U.S. and the so-called "pro-Western moderate regimes." Though Mubarak, a former commander of the air force who fought in the wars against Israel, was committed to the peace with Israel signed in 1979, he didn't allow the relationship between Egypt and Israel to prosper and be extended. Israel called it the "cold peace." But Mubarak's Egypt protected Israel's southern flank, enabling Israel to cut security budgets, enjoy economic prosperity, and divert its attention to the north, where enemies such as Hizbullah, Syria, and Iran posed much graver threats.
More recently, secret intelligence cooperation was flourishing under the guidance of General Omar Suleiman, the intelligence chief recently named vice president, who has frequently traveled to Israel for clandestine meetings with security officials. Israel and Egypt shared a mutual fear of a nuclear Iran, and a deep concern about the emergence of an Islamist entity led by Hamas in Gaza. The two regimes also saw eye-to-eye regarding efforts to uproot Sinai-based cells of al-Qaeda. (Tablet)

The Egyptian Military and the Fate of the Regime - Jeffrey White
The Egyptian Armed Forces (EAF) is perhaps the key actor in the current crisis. Since the Egyptian revolution of 1952, the military has played a key role in domestic political life. Every president since the revolution has been a military man, and military officials, active or retired, have occupied key positions in the government throughout the country's modern history. The military is not immune to penetration by external political forces, especially radical Islamism. Several plots against the regime, including the assassination of President Anwar Sadat, have been based in the military and influenced by radical Islamist ideas. (Washington Institute for Near East Policy)

Israel Faces Danger in Every Direction - David Horovitz
Egypt's blink-of-an-eye descent into instability underlines afresh the uniqueness of Israel, that embattled sliver of enlightened land in a largely dictatorial region. Those who like to characterize it as the root of all the Middle East's problems look particularly foolish: the people on the streets aren't enraged by Israel, but because their countries are so unlike Israel, so lacking in the freedoms and economic opportunities that both Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs take for granted.
For a generation, Israel has been trying to widen the circle of normalization - to win acceptance as a state among states. We made peace with Egypt, then with Jordan. We built ties with Morocco and the Gulf. We have reached out to the Syrians and Palestinians. Now, for the first time in more than 30 years, we see that momentum reversing. We see that all our borders are now "in play" - that the Israel Defense Forces must overhaul their strategy to meet the possibility of dangers in every direction. The writer is editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post. (Telegraph-UK)

Critical Challenges and Daunting Dilemmas Facing Israel: My talk at Congregation Beth Shalom, Seattle: Shabbat, 1/22/11

2011-01-23T06:47:00.000-08:00

Critical Challenges and Daunting Dilemmas on the Israeli Political Landscape. The Israeli political landscape can be a minefield of domestic and international issues where miscalculations can be deadly. Henry Kissinger once remarked “Israel doesn’t have a foreign policy; only a domestic policy” My talk was an effort to paint a picture of the of existential angst facing ordinary Israelis. Topics included BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions), Iran, the Palestinian conflict and prospects for, if not peace, at least interim accords and stability in an ever changing Middle East.

A variety of articles/blogposts/reading list, etc. are provided at the bottom of this post which were referenced in the discussion

Prelude to my talk:

On being tired and thirsty--and Jewish:

When tired and thirsty the Italian says, "I must have wine."
The Mexican says, "I'm tired and thirsty. I must have tequila."
The Russian says, "I'm tired and thirsty. I must have vodka."
The German says, "I'm tired and thirsty. I must have beer."
The Greek says, "I'm tired and thirsty. I must have ouzo."
The Jew says, "I'm tired and thirsty. I must have diabetes."

At a major International Zoology Conference on Elephants, presentations were made by leading experts of the gargantuan mammal. An English scholar gave a lively presentation on "The Elephant and the Hunt." A French expert spoke on "The Love Life of the Elephant." An Indian scholar offered a brilliant paper on "The Elephant and his March towards Death." Then a short, stout man from Israel stepped up to the podium with reams of paper and announced the title of his talk, "The Elephant and the Jewish Problem."

Safe to say we as a people are comfortable with both suffering and self-involvement.

Following up on elephants lurking in rooms, an excerpt from Judea Pearl piece honoring the memory of the late Richard Holbrooke:

A Champion of Truth Doha, Qatar, April 2005–

At a high-profile get together called the US-Islamic World Forum, organized by the Qatar government and the Brookings Institution, there was a conference packed with more than 150 scholars and leaders from all sides who, for two full days, diligently discussed the needs and means for achieving democracy, reforms and renaissance in the Muslim world. Oddly enough, there was hardly a Muslim speaker who did not tie the implementation of such reforms to “progress toward settling the Israeli- Palestinian conflict.”

From the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, to Rami Khouri, former editor of The Daily Star in Lebanon, almost every speaker ended his or her speech with a reminder that the Muslim world is not ready to accept reform for its own sake; reform is, in fact, a concession to America, and will be granted if, and only if, it “resolves the Palestinian problem.”

None of the speakers spelled out what “solution” meant to him or her; it was probably part of an unspoken agreement to avoid controversial issues for fear of spoiling the friendly atmosphere of renaissance and collaboration. It was only in private conversations that I discovered that, to most of them, the “solution” was unquestionably the same one proposed by Helen Thomas.

Richard Holbrooke spoke at the last session of the conference, addressing a large audience of Arab dignitaries, scholars and pundits. After repeating the great things that America can do for the Muslim world – in science, education, freedom, entrepreneurship and more – and after saying all the things that a seasoned diplomat would say on occasions like this one, he added one innocent remark that fell like a bombshell: “By now,” he said, “two and a half generations of Arabs have been brought up on textbooks that do not show Israel.

”The audience was stunned. I can still hear the pin-dropping silence as he calmly went on: “Such continued denial of reality, at the grassroots level, is a major hindrance to any peaceful settlement of the conflict.” (I am quoting from memory.)

I watched Holbrooke’s colleagues from the Brookings Institution to see how they reacted. Their faces were blank.

There were a couple of Palestinian women sitting next to me, and their faces looked like they had been caught cheating on an exam. One of them raised her hand and started to say something about checkpoints and occupation (“settlements” were not in fashion then), but in Holbrooke’s presence, she sounded more like someone complaining about the video cameras that caught her stealing.

Holbrooke answered her politely and comfortably: “Your textbooks do not show Israel on the map, and that does not help the peace process.”

There was no need for further elaboration. The elephant that everyone was pretending did not exist suddenly appeared in the room. Two days of hard deliberations, with Arabs pretending that “progress in the peace process” doesn’t really mean the elimination of Israel, and Americans pretending they have no reason to doubt it, had ended with a refreshing spark of honesty.

How to Be Human

Rabbi David Wolpe:
Rabbi Shlomo Carelbach used to say that if he met a person who said "I'm a Catholic" he knew he was a Catholic. If he met a person who said "I'm a Protestant" he knew he was a Protestant. If he met a person who said "I'm a human being" he knew he was a Jew.
Jews have led some of the great universalist movements of the world. They did so under the illusion that if all people were just alike, the thorny problem of being different would disappear. It never did. It never should. Being a Jew is not a problem but a blessing and a destiny.
There is no such thing as a person in general. Each individual grows up with a certain family, land, heritage, language and culture. To deny it is to cast off a piece of oneself. Jewish is not opposed to being human; rather it is an ancient and beautiful way to be human.
In every age there are those who dream of homogenizing the world. It is an ignoble dream. When we honor difference we honor the One who created this diverse, multicolored pageant of a world.

Living Ahavas Yisroel
Martin Jaffee • JTNews Columnist

The k’lal (the universal) was always known only through the prat (the particular). The road to universal human fellow-feeling first wound its circuitous route through the tangled pathways of intense Jewish communal solidarity.Which may have something to do with my dad’s response when, years ago, I came home from college touting the prophecies of Rosa Luxemburg, about whom I’d learned in a political science course. Jews, I proclaimed (over a plate of borscht with sour cream), should lead humanity out of the darkness of its particularistic atavisms into the clear light of “world citizenship.” This time, Dad knew better than to argue. He just looked up to the Heavens, spread out his hands in the classic Zero Mostel-Tevye pose and mocked: “I love humanity; it’s the people I can’t stand!”It took me years to understand the depth of his insight and satire. How easy it is to love a concept, and how difficult to love reality in all its particular messiness! How easy to forget that, if humanity is a family, it begins with a real mother, a real father, real brothers and real sisters — those who speak your language, know the smells of your kitchen, share your nightmares, and, it must be said, hate your enemies and love your friends, because, after all is said and done, “you are our flesh and blood.”

Just this, I suppose, is what irritates so many “universalists” (Jewish and otherwise) about the centrality of the concept of ahavas Yisroel (“Jewish love for Jews”) in Jewish ethical thought. Why shouldn’t Jews love all humanity equally? Why focus on the insular, bounded “tribe” at the expense of the whole? Isn’t “tribalism” the root of all social evil? The simple answer is: You can’t love “humanity” unless you see in it some familiar faces. It’s through the love called forth by those faces that we learn to see in them something larger — “humanity” as a potential community — something that never really exists, although we strive to reach it. While love of the “tribe” can certainly descend to “tribalism,” it is also true that “humanity” is revealed most richly through the “tribe.” When we lose our “tribe,” we lose the very thing that enables us to find a wider place in the universally “human.”

Ze'ev Jabotinsky in 1911: “Every accusation causes among us such a commotion that people unwittingly think, ‘Why are they so afraid of everything? Apparently their conscience is not clear.’ Exactly because we are ready at every minute to stand at attention, there develops among the people an inescapable view about us, as of some specific thievish tribe. We think that our constant readiness to undergo a search without hesitation and to turn out our pockets, will eventually convince mankind of our nobility; look what gentlemen we are – we do not have anything to hide! This is a terrible mistake.”

Paul Berman on the wave of Palestinian terrorism from 2000-2004, in his book, "Terror and Liberalism": “Each new act of murder and suicide testified to how oppressive were the Israelis. Palestinian terror, in this view, was the measure of Israeli guilt. The more grotesque the terror, the deeper the guilt…And even Nazism struck many of Israel’s critics as much too pale an explanation for the horrific nature of Israeli actions. For the pathos of suicide terror is limitless, and if Palestinian teenagers were blowing themselves up in the acts of random murder, a rational explanation was going to require ever more extreme tropes, beyond even Nazism.”

All the above as a prelude to our people's predilection for obsessive self-reflection, at times veering dangerously into self-flagellation, self-abnegation, and what Ruth Wisse describes as a "moral solipsism."

None of which is to suggest that Israel is perfect, or that its political system is a paragon of virtue. I don't mean to imply that there aren't real threats to Israel as a democracy; that the occupation isn't untenable and not only bad for the Palestinians, but also insidious and corrosive to the soul and moral fiber of Israelis; that Israelis aren't becoming more xenophobic and even anti-Arab and in some cases, down right racist about it. All this is sadly true and should deeply trouble and concern us.

BUT, I also want to paint a picture of Israel in a broader context that gives crucial perspective to understanding the situation, or as it's known in Israel, "Ha'Matzav."

First, a little about my background. I'm a psychotherapist and social worker by trade, and have been working with our Jewish elders for the last 14 years, as a social worker and now as a Hospice Director. I'm no stranger to fighting and advocating for the rights of the downtrodden and dispossessed. For years, I believed that Israel should leave the territories, if necessary unilaterally, working from the premise that we can't control the actions of another, but must do what's morally correct for ourselves.

The Second Intifada blew the lid off of the that belief system. Like most Israelis, I came to understand that the land for peace equation, which seemed so logic and sensible, was anything but. When suicide bombers began exploding themselves in Israel proper, it became obvious that this was no guerrilla war intended to liberate land the Palestinians dwelled in, but rather it was a war for the eradication of a Jewish State. The Hamas suicide bombing at the Park Hotel in Netanya in late March 2002, which came to be known as the Passover Massacre, where 30 Israelis were killed during a Seder and over 140 wounded, many elderly Jews and a number of Holocaust survivors, was a major turning point in my understanding of what exactly was happening. And of course, it was a major turning point in Israel's history, because shortly after Passover, Sharon launched Operation Defensive Shield, sending the Israeli Defense Forces back into the West Bank and Gaza to stop the hemorrhaging.

Okay, but now it's almost 10 years later, you say, Arafat is long gone, and much has changed. We shouldn't stay stuck in the past. And I would certainly agree. However, I'd also aver that it's vital to fully internalize and comprehend what has happened over the past 10 years in order to better understand what's happening today.

As a segue to that understanding, I'll recapitulate an interesting debate between Daniel Gordis and Peter Beinart a few months back, following Beinart's publication in the NYRB of an essay entitled The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment (which I have commented on here). I think Beinart is largely correct about that failure but for mostly all the wrong reasons (see my blogpost above for specifics). In any event, the essay caused quite a raucous in the Jewish community, as Peter is a modern Orthodox Jew, former editor of the liberal but staunchly pro-Israel journal The New Republic, and is considered a public intellectual who has always espoused Zionist ideals.

In the debate, Peter Beinart was given the podium for his opening remarks, and for 20 minutes he offered up a litany of Israel's current ills. When it was Daniel Gordis' turn to respond, he allowed that he actually didn't disagree with most of what Beinart had identified as issues of concern. These issues included increasing xenophobia among Israelis, anti-Arab sentiment bordering on racism among some young Israelis, the problematic nature of Avigdor Lieberman being Israel's foreign minister, issues with the Haredim including proposed new conversion laws, (in)tolerance for religious pluralism, corruption in public life, and on and on. Gordis did take issue with the fact that in all of Beinart's criticisms, there was no mention of what has transpired in the last ten years. He went on to elaborate on that context:

Four years of the Second Intifada, which was anything but an "intifada" or spontaneous uprising, but rather, a terror war against Israeli civilians. Withdrawal from Gaza in the summer of 2005 leading to an increase in Qassam rockets and mortar shells fired into southern Israel. The Lebanon/Gaza War of 2006 after Hezbollah raided the northern border, killing several Israeli soldiers while Hamas infiltrated the southern border, killing Israeli soldiers and capturing Sgt Gilad Shalit, who remains in captivity to this day. Hamas' bloody coup in June 2007 in Gaza, where they murdered rival Fatah Palestinians, in some cases by throwing them off rooftops, blindfolded and handcuffed. A further increase in rocket attacks into southern Israel which finally reached such unacceptable levels (upwards of 70-80 a day during late December 2008), culminating finally in 'Operation Cast Lead,' when Israel responded with a massive show of force to repel the attacks. The world's response, accusing Israel of "disproportionate use of force" and labeling Israel the 'War Criminal.' The Goldstone Report, which came to be known in Israel as the "Goldstone Effect," rendering Israelis ever more reluctant to consider further withdrawals or other painful sacrifices in search of peace for fear of finding itself on the docket of public opinion as war criminals in the event it had to again go back into the territories to respond to ever more powerful (and longer range) rocket attacks. The Orwellian absurdity of Israel finding itself the accused, when exercising the greatest of restraint, until left with no choice but to defend its vulnerable citizenry of the south. Fighting an asymmetric war against Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, who deliberately use their own children as human shields, hide in their own civilian populations, deliberately target Israeli civilians, all blatant war crimes. Dealing with the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) Movement, the unabashed effort to demonize and delegitimize Israel. We've seen it here in the Pacific Northwest, with unsuccessful efforts at boycotts at the Madison Market in Seattle and the Food Co-op in Port Townsend (largely thanks to Rob Jacobs and StandWithUs, the AJC and other local Israel Advocacy organizations), as well as the successful boycott of Israeli products at the Olympia Food Co-op. It's important to understand that the real danger is not economic hardships imposed on Israel (the boycotts will have scant economic effects), but rather the powerful symbolic import of the efforts. The real purpose behind BDS is to delegitimize Israel in the eyes of the world, to make the analogy of Israel to South Africa. so that if you are seen as supporting Israel, it becomes tantamount to what it would be like if you supported Apartheid South Africa in the 80's.

Okay, so this is all broader context, and it doesn't even include the Iranian nuclear threat, where a megalomaniac with delusions of ushering in an apocalyptic era of the 12th Hidden Imam by eradicating Israel, continues his dogged pursuit of nuclear weapons (the good news here is that it seems that the Stuxnet Worm and other covert ops have actually set the Iranian nuclear project back considerably, with some estimates by as much as several years; nonetheless, others caution that Iran may still be less than a year away from having the capability to construct a nuclear bomb). And let's remember that Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad are all subsidiaries of Iran, who Iran uses at this juncture as proxies in its war against the Jewish State.

All this should offer some perspective to how and why Israel has moved more to the right politically. It didn't happen in a vacuum. Let's remember that in 1992 Labor and Meretz had 56 seats between them in a Knessest of 120 seats. Today, Labor has imploded, with leader Ehud Barak creating a new party, Atzma'ut or Independence, taking 4 of the remaining 12 ministers from Labor with him. Labor's ability to remain viable is anyone's guess at this point. Meretz currently has 3 seats in the Knesset. This sea change did not happen because ordinary Israelis are inherently extremist, xenophobic, racist or warmongering. It is natural for any society living under the kind of strain Israel has over the past decade to become a lot more security conscious, hardened, suspicious, distrustful of a world that has largely abandoned her, and develop compassion fatigue for the plight of the 'Other.'

So yes, Israel's democracy currently has problems galore. Our foreign minister is a demagogue and not the best representative for us internationally, to say the least. But we need to remember too that this is part of the price that we pay for the in-gathering of our people, with upwards of a million Russian now being an integral part of the fabric of Israeli society.

I'd like to offer up an analogy of Israel as a kind of Jewish Rashomon (Kurosawa's 1950 film where a rape is re-examined from four different perspectives; that of the rapist, the victim, her Samurai husband, and a witness). Hat tip to Yossi Klein Halevi for the idea

If you're a South African Jew, it's quite natural for you to be exceedingly concerned about the possibility of Israel veering into Apartheid; if you're a South American Jew, you may well be anxious about the stability of Israel's democracy; a Russian Jew and you're likely most wary of Israel's enemies and Israel's ability to contend with them; a Jew from Arab lands and you may be baffled by all the mea culpas and Ashkenazi soul-searching regarding our behavior; an America Jew with a certain antipathy to the Bush/Cheney years, a penchant for civil rights issues, fairness and justice; well, you get the idea: We all bring our diaspora histories--and baggage--to the table.

I would argue that it's equally important to recognize and appreciate how well Israel has done, given the enormity of strain its society has lived under for the past decade, and in some ways, for the past 62 years. We shouldn't take Israeli democracy for granted; instead we should celebrate it for the miracle that it is.

As a point of comparison, we might consider too that if the United States had Israel's parliamentary system, Sarah Palin and the Tea Party would most likely have a much larger stake in the governing coalition than Lieberman's Israel Beitenu party has. You could also expect to see many smaller and much scarier parties having representation, including survivalist militia groups and hard-core religious zealots.

Now imagine that kind of governmental configuration and suppose San Diego and other parts of southern California had been the target of rocket attacks from irredentist Mexican groups for the past 10 years, launching literally thousands of crude bombs and mortars into our country. What do you think the response of that government would be? What do you think the response of the current American government would be? What would the French do if residents of Alsace-Lorraine of German heritage decided to reclaim that land, and continually sent suicide bombers into Parisian cafes, buses, and discotheques, followed by crude missiles and mortar shells? Let's remember that Israel's neighbors are not the Canadians or the Mexicans.

Other points touched upon.

Settlements as red herring issue. Israel has shown that when necessary, it is willing and capable of dismantling settlements from Yamit in Sinai to 21 settlements in Gaza and the northern West Bank, uprooting thousands of its citizens across the Green Line. Sharon intended to dismantle more settlements in the West Bank following the Gaza withdrawal in '05 and Olmert ran--and won Kadima leadership--on a platform of further withdrawals from the West Bank. Hamas' ascent to power, of course, changed all that.

Bush's letter to Sharon on April 14th, 2004, recognizing new "facts on the ground."
"In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949, and all previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution have reached the same conclusion. It is realistic to expect that any final status agreement will only be achieved on the basis of mutually agreed changes that reflect these realities."

See Gil Troy's piece below, "Settlement Subtleties" to better understand that not all settlements are alike.

Q & A: why the Hilltop Youth are not as dangerous as Palestinian extremists and could be easily subdued if a real peace agreement were in sight.

Why the peace process right now is in shambles and the notion of peace on the horizon is a chimera.

I'd like to end with a short blogpost by Jeffrey Goldberg on the continued vitality of Israel's democracy:

Yes, Israel is still a democracy, and no, I'm not referring to Ehud Barak's departure from Labor in order to form another perishable party (more on that later, unless I find these recent events too dispiriting to write about, in which case, radio silence, or maybe something about Stuxnet).

What I'm referring to is something else, the after-effects of the Moshe Katsav trial -- you know, Moshe Katsav, the ex-president of Israel convicted of rape. (Remember when Ben-Gurion said Israel would be a normal state when it had Jewish garbagemen, prostitutes and cops? I don't think he had president-level rapists in mind.) A few weeks ago, as some of you know, I wrote a post asking whether Israel would forever remain a democracy. Of course, people who despise Israel decided I had written definitively that Israel's democracy had already disappeared, but what are you going to do? Very few people know how to read on the Internet.

Anyway, when the Katsav verdict came down, I didn't quite realize who had delivered it. Now I do, and it is sort of stunning. There are six aspects of the Katsav trial which prove that Israel is still a democracy, and a country very much unlike all of its neighbors.

1) An ex-president of the nation was brought to account for his alleged crimes. Doesn't happen too often in Israel's neighorhood.
2) The crimes in question were crimes against women. Happens only rarely in the non-democratic East.
3) Two of the three judges in the Katsav case were women -- doesn't happen.
4) Here's the stunner -- the head judge of the three-judge panel was an Arab Israeli named Geoge Karra.
5) Maybe this is the real stunner -- No one in Israel seemed to think it abnormal for an Arab citizen of the Jewish state to sit in judgment of a Jewish ex-president.
6) And, by the way, the president was convicted.

I'm not expecting the forces of progressivism in Israel to have a particularly easy time in the coming years, not with Avigdor Lieberman, the intemperate foreign minister, playing a central role in politics. But the Katsav trial, weirdly, has reinforced the idea with me that Israeli democracy is far from a lost cause.

Very lastly (before the list of recommended articles), another revealing joke

Dan Rather, Katie Couric & an Israeli Sergeant

Dan Rather, Katie Couric, and an Israeli sergeant were all captured by terrorists in Iraq. The leader of the terrorists told them that he would grant them each one last request before they were beheaded.
Dan Rather said, "Well, I'm a Texan, so I'd like one last bowlful of hot, spicy chili."The leader nodded to an underling who left and returned with the chili. Rather ate it all and said, "Now I can die content."
Katie Couric said, "I'm a reporter to the end. I want to take out my tape recorder and describe the scene here and what's about to happen. Maybe someday someone will hear it and know that I was on the job till the end." The leader directed an aide to hand over the tape recorder and Couric dictated some comments. She then said, "Now I can die happy."
The leader turned and said, "And now, Mr. Israeli tough guy, what is your final wish?"
"Kick me in the ass," said the soldier."
"What?" asked the leader? "Will you mock us in your last hour?" "No, I'm not kidding. I want you to kick me in the ass," insisted the Israeli. So the leader shoved him into the open and kicked him in the ass. The soldier went sprawling, but rolled to his knees, pulled a 9 mm pistol from under his flack jacket, and shot the leader dead. In the resulting confusion, he jumped to his knapsack, pulled out his carbine and sprayed the terrorists with gunfire. In a flash, all terrorists were either dead or fleeing for their lives. As the soldier was untying Rather and Couric, they asked him, "Why didn't you just shoot them in the beginning? Why did you ask them to kick you in the ass first?""What?" replied the Israeli, "And have you two jerks report that I was the aggressor?!

NYRB: Hussein Agha & Robert Malley: Who's Afraid of the Palestinians?

Time Magazine: Response from the Prime Minister's Office to article, "Israel's Rightward Lurch Scares even some Conservatives

Leslie Gelb: President Emeritus of CFR: America Pressures Israel Plenty

Rich Richman: Everyone Does not Know what Everyone Supposedly Knows

Benny Morris: Bleak House

Gil Troy on Settlement Subtleties

My JPost review of Daniel Gordis' "Saving Israel"

My film review in Congress Monthly of "To Die in Jerusalem"

Judea Pearl on Richard Holbrooke: A Champion of Truth

Daniel Gordis' excellent reading list

Blog List
In the Trenches: http://cgis.jpost.com/Blogs/harris/ (blog) David Harris: (National Director of the AJC)
Goldblog : http://www.theatlantic.com/jeffrey-goldberg/ Jeffrey Goldberg
South Jerusalem : http://southjerusalem.com/ blog by Gershom Gorenbeg and Haim Watzman, journalists and authors
http://giltroy.com/Gil Troy: History Prof, McGill U
Ruminations: http://yaacovlozowick.blogspot.com/ Yaacov Lozowick: historian, author
The Jerusalem Post: http://www.jpost.com/
Ha'aretz: http://www.haaretz.com/
New Israel Fund: http://www.nif.org/
Bitter Lemons: http://www.bitterlemons.net/ Palestinian-Israeli Crossfire
Daily Alert: http://dailyalert.org/ prepared for Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Orgs (sourced from around the world)
Summary of editorials from Hebrew Press: http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA
Go to “editorials” changes daily; need to subscribe
my Blog, BRUMSPEAK: http://brumspeak.blogspot.com

Judea Pearl on Richard Holbrooke and the Elephant in the Room

2011-01-14T07:00:00.000-08:00

On the power of calmly speaking the truth to 'conventional wisdom' with a quiet dignity...
david
A champion of truth
By JUDEA PEARL
There are people whom you meet once and will never forget. Richard Holbrooke, whose shloshim falls today, was one of those people.

Richard Holbrooke spoke at the last session of the conference, addressing a large audience of Arab dignitaries, scholars and pundits. After repeating the great things that America can do for the Muslim world – in science, education, freedom, entrepreneurship and more – and after saying all the things that a seasoned diplomat would say on occasions like this one, he added one innocent remark that fell like a bombshell: “By now,” he said, “two and a half generations of Arabs have been brought up on textbooks that do not show Israel.”

The audience was stunned. I can still hear the pin-dropping silence as he calmly went on: “Such continued denial of reality, at the grassroots level, is a major hindrance to any peaceful settlement of the conflict.”

Richard Holbrooke, President Barack Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, passed away on December 13 at 69. He has been hailed by several Jewish papers as a friend of Israel, although not prominently involved in American-Israeli relations.

Indeed, in a column in The Washington Post two years ago, he wrote something we don’t often hear from presidential envoys and State Department officials. Holbrooke wrote that president Harry Truman should be admired for having recognized Israel as a state on May 14, 1948, and that the State Department’s attempts to undermine this decision was not something Holbrooke was proud of.

THERE ARE people whom you meet once and know you will never forget. I met Richard Holbrooke once, in Doha, Qatar, in April 2005 – a meeting I will never forget.

It took place at a high-profile gettogether called the US-Islamic World Forum. Organized by the Qatar government and the Brookings Institution, the conference was packed with more than 150 scholars and leaders from all sides who, for two full days, diligently discussed the needs and means for achieving democracy, reforms and renaissance in the Muslim world. Oddly enough, there was hardly a Muslim speaker who did not tie the implementation of such reforms to “progress toward settling the Israeli- Palestinian conflict.”

From the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, to Rami Khouri, former editor of The Daily Star in Lebanon, almost every speaker ended his or her speech with a reminder that the Muslim world is not ready to accept reform for its own sake; reform is, in fact, a concession to America, and will be granted if, and only if, it “resolves the Palestinian problem.”

None of the speakers spelled out what “solution” meant to him or her; it was probably part of an unspoken agreement to avoid controversial issues for fear of spoiling the friendly atmosphere of renaissance and collaboration. It was only in private conversations that I discovered that, to most of them, the “solution” was unquestionably the same one proposed by Helen Thomas.

Richard Holbrooke spoke at the last session of the conference, addressing a large audience of Arab dignitaries, scholars and pundits. After repeating the great things that America can do for the Muslim world – in science, education, freedom, entrepreneurship and more – and after saying all the things that a seasoned diplomat would say on occasions like this one, he added one innocent remark that fell like a bombshell: “By now,” he said, “two and a half generations of Arabs have been brought up on textbooks that do not show Israel.”

The audience was stunned. I can still hear the pin-dropping silence as he calmly went on: “Such continued denial of reality, at the grassroots level, is a major hindrance to any peaceful settlement of the conflict.” (I am quoting from memory.)

I watched Holbrooke’s colleagues from the Brookings Institution to see how they reacted. Their faces were blank.

There were a couple of Palestinian women sitting next to me, and their faces looked like they had been caught cheating on an exam. One of them raised her hand and started to say something about checkpoints and occupation (“settlements” were not in fashion then), but in Holbrooke’s presence, she sounded more like someone complaining about the video cameras that caught her stealing.

Holbrooke answered her politely and comfortably: “Your textbooks do not show Israel on the map, and that does not help the peace process.”

There was no need for further elaboration. The elephant that everyone was pretending did not exist suddenly appeared in the room. Two days of hard deliberations, with Arabs pretending that “progress in the peace process” doesn’t really mean the elimination of Israel, and Americans pretending they have no reason to doubt it, had ended with a refreshing spark of honesty.

AT THE end of the Q&A session, I walked up to Holbrooke and told him how much I admired his presentation and the way he handled the question. He looked at me with some astonishment and said: “This is obviously one of the main obstacles to peace.”

He said it as if stating in public what everyone knows to be true – even in a place like Doha – is as natural as breathing .

This was the meeting I will never forget.

Richard Holbrooke will be remembered in the history of the Jewish people as one of the few State Department officials who had the courage to proclaim Truman a hero for overruling his own State Department.

He will also be remembered for teaching his colleagues how honesty can be an instrument, not a hindrance to effective diplomacy.

The writer is a professor at UCLA and president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation (danielpearl.org), named after his son. He is a coeditor of I Am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl (Jewish Lights, 2004), winner of the National Jewish Book Award. This article was first published in The Jewish Journal.

The Big Lie: The Truth about Israel beyond the Failed Seattle Bus Ads

2011-01-04T13:26:00.000-08:00

The truth about Israel beyond the failed bus ads
A failed effort to place ads on Metro Transit buses that accuse Israel of war crimes is part of an effort to delegitimize the state of Israel. Guest columnist Jonathan L. Singer disputes the war-crimes allegations.
see the full list of pulpit rabbis from Seattle and Tacoma (below) who signed on to this article
By Jonathan L. Singer

Special to The Times

THE Big Lie is alive and well in Seattle, and this fact is ironic for a city that prides itself on having a commitment to diversity, openness and intellectual engagement.

In the past, big lies were used by fascists and dictators as a means of delegitimizing certain groups or classes, seeking a scapegoat upon whom to blame general societal disappointments. Experts at utilizing this tool understand you cannot start with an outlandish statement but must state many small lies at first. In an age of Twitter and instant messaging, our culture is ripe for domination by this political approach.

We recently saw this approach at work in the failed attempt to place billboard ads on city buses in Seattle claiming that Israel is a state actively engaging in war crimes with the support of American dollars. [" 'Israel right or wrong' crowd advocates censorship in Seattle," Opinion, Jan. 1]

It is a beautiful example of the Big Lie at work — on buses that normally have photos of theater performers, or insurance agents, the proposed ad would have given us a stark and chilling vision of a brutish monster oppressing a helpless victim. Had the bus ads been allowed, the only context of the message would have been a government-owned bus adding legitimacy to a claim that is anything but true.

Seattle is ripe for this kind of hate speech because in schools, houses of worship and political gatherings, our community leadership has not challenged the little lies that delegitimize the state of Israel. It has become commonplace to portray Israel as an oppressor and an occupier without respecting Israel's legitimate rights and fears in a region where her neighbors actively call for her destruction.

No condemnation is made with similar vehemence or focus of other nations that clearly violate human rights and receive millions from the U.S. government. Only Israel, the democratic state — that supports women's rights, to which Sudanese refugees flee oppression in their land, where none are at risk of genocide — is the focus of their ire.

If you go to the website of the group sponsoring the ads, they make it clear that no matter what Israel does, she should not exist. They claim that in 1948 she displaced the Palestinians, though they pose the argument as if the concern is only the land captured by Israel in 1967.

This ignores the fact that Jews have had a continuous presence in the land of Israel since Biblical times and that the Palestinians declared war on the nascent Jewish state.

They do not want you to know that throughout history there has never been another state on that land, that the land was purchased, and the Jewish state was and is recognized by the United Nations.

They fail to mention the call by Hamas, which rules Gaza, to destroy Israel, and the rockets still being fired at Israeli civilian population centers.

And then they conclude that their position is not anti-Jewish but only a protest against the misbehavior of a state, but we know that it really is a new form of the old anti-Semitism, wrapped in the Big Lie insinuating that Jews are guilty of defending themselves, and therefore must be punished by being ostracized by the world and made stateless yet again.

Israel, like all countries, makes mistakes. Criticism in the context of support for Israel's legitimate rights is not hate speech. We hope that Seattleites concerned with fairness who want to create space for real dialogue about difficult issues will speak out against all hate speech. That outcry should not just be against the big lies but should focus as well on the smaller lies about Israel and the Middle East that if unchallenged create an environment in which the Big Lie thrives.

Israel wants peace with her neighbors, she has accepted the idea of two states, one Jewish, one Palestinian existing as neighbors in peace. In spite of all efforts at obfuscation, that is the Big Truth.

Jonathan L. Singer is a senior rabbi at Temple Beth Am, Seattle. Another 24 rabbis in the Seattle and Tacoma area support this statement.

Rabbi Beth J Singer, Temple Beth Am, Seattle
Rabbi Daniel Weiner, Temple De Hirsch Sinai, Seattle and Bellevue
Rabbi Moshe Kletenek, Congregation Bikur Cholim Machzikay Hadath, Seattle
Rabbi Jay Rosenbaum, Herzl-Ner Tamid Conservative Congregation, Mercer Island
Rabbi Jill Borodin, Congregation Beth Shalom, Seattle
Rabbi James Mirel, Temple B’nai Torah, Bellevue
Rabbi Simon Benzaquen, Sephardic Bikur Holim Congregation, Seattle
Rabbi Daniel Septimus, Temple De Hirsch Sinai, Seattle and Bellevue
Rabbi Janine Schloss, Temple Beth Am, Seattle
Rabbi David Fine, Union of Reform Judaism
Rabbi Allison Flash, Temple Beth Am, Seattle
Rabbi Alan Cook, Temple De Hirsh Sinai, Seattle and Bellevue
Rabbi Mark Glickman, Congregation Kol Ami, Woodinville
Rabbi Yohanna Kinberg, Temple B’nai Torah, Bellevue
Rabbi Bruce Kadden, Temple Beth El, Tacoma
Cantor David Serkin-Poole, Temple B’nai Torah, Bellevue
Rabbi Harry Zeitlin
Rabbi Sarah Newmark
Rabbi Marna Sapsowitz
Rabbi Jaron Matlow
Rabbi Doug Slotnick
Rabbi Stanley Yedwab
Rabbi Jay Heyman
Rabbi Arlene Schuster

Charles Jacobs on Jewish Anemia when it Comes to Fighting Against Vilification & Demonization

2010-12-22T14:40:00.000-08:00

For its long-term security, what matters is how the Jewish state is viewed and valued in the world, especially in the Jewish community, and the skill set required for this fight – what we now call “the information war” – seems congenitally absent from the Jewish collective.

In 1911, Ze’ev Jabotinsky had it perfectly right. “Every accusation causes among us such a commotion that people unwittingly think, ‘Why are they so afraid of everything? Apparently their conscience is not clear.’ Exactly because we are ready at every minute to stand at attention, there develops among the people an inescapable view about us, as of some specific thievish tribe. We think that our constant readiness to undergo a search without hesitation and to turn out our pockets, will eventually convince mankind of our nobility; look what gentlemen we are – we do not have anything to hide! This is a terrible mistake.”

Charles Jacobs reminds us of the urgency, now more than ever, to fight the good fight. To stop apologizing for ourselves, and, as Ruth Wiesse points out, get over our 'moral solipsism.'
david brumer

Jewish malware

By CHARLES JACOBS
21/12/2010

The dynamic between Israel’s negative portrayal in the media and academia, and the inadequate fight against it, is something akin to the Stuxnet virus.

Reports surfaced last week that Stuxnet, the virus mysteriously implanted in the computers running Iran’s nuclear sites, is still wreaking havoc, despite claims by Teheran that it has been contained. No one knows for sure how much damage is being done, or if it can be stopped, or who is the culprit – but Israel has been mentioned as a prime suspect. When it was found that the name of a key file in the computer worm’s code is easily a cognate for Queen Esther, many imagined that the Jewish genius who delivered the poison pill to the Persian plotters did it while poetically recapitulating the Purim story – in malware. Compared to that feat, the WikiLeaks gambit is child’s play, simple pilferage.

But even if this is true, and Israeli technological genius can thwart or mitigate a looming disaster – just as its military genius has done in the past – Jews cannot afford a truly needed rest, because the sobering reality is that Jewish technological and military prowess has proved inadequate – necessary but not sufficient – to safeguarding Israel. For its long-term security, what matters is how the Jewish state is viewed and valued in the world, especially in the Jewish community, and the skill set required for this fight – what we now call “the information war” – seems congenitally absent from the Jewish collective.

Far from being geniuses, when it comes to rhetorical combat with defamers, or creating a culture of discourse that is honest and fair, world Jewry seems, tragically, imbecilic.

Compared to almost every nation, but particularly compared to its adversaries and accusers, Israel is a stellar state. Yet it is branded and portrayed in the media, on campuses and in increasing swaths of civil society in the West as among the cruelest of nations. How can this be?

THE DYNAMIC is something akin to the virus that flummoxes Iran’s computers. Jews may be susceptible to a particular type of rhetorical virus, so devastating that once implanted it prevents them from acting in their own self-defense and turns otherwise eloquent people into stuttering blockheads. The worm is simple, and ancient. It’s called “accusation.”

Accuse the Jews. Accuse them unfairly and with such disproportionate frequency that anyone who wishes to can see there’s an agenda at work that has little to do with the actual charges raised. Accuse the Jews and they instinctively, like moths fly to candles, start believing they can cleverly explain themselves, and convince their accusers of their innocence and their goodness.

I bring this up because the Jewish Week’s editor, Julie Wiener just reported that the major Israel advocacy organizations have done a major rethink and are now calling for a “more open, critical approach to teaching about Jewish state.” “Even centrist players,” Weiner wrote, “like Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life, the Jewish Agency for Israel, the David Project and people in the Jewish federation system are calling for more open, critical discussions about Israel.”

Why? Because much of our youth feels that Israel advocacy as it is now taught, makes them “check their liberalism at Zionism’s door.”

And so, rather than lose the kids who have fantasy notions about international politics, Jewish educators now think (I’m hoping Weiner got it wrong) students shouldn’t be advocates for Israel, but referees or judges in the Middle East contest. Their lessons will no longer be: “Israel is imperfect but fundamentally right, and the obstacle to peace is nothing more and nothing less than the Arab/Islamic refusal to abide Jewish sovereignty.”

Instead it will be “on the one hand the Israelis say X, and on the other hand, the Palestinians say Y. Can’t we all get along?”

So the net result is that the radical leftist professors and the growing Muslim student population are permitted to be advocates and propagandists for the Arabs, while Jewish students rise above the fray to contemplate the conflict. The vast student body will still only receive a mostly one-sided version which will demonize Israel and the next generation of American leadership will be less likely to empathize with the Jewish state – like the man in the White House.

But what’s really happened in the discourse is that authentic Jewish liberalism has been paralyzed – not by Zionism, but by anti-Zionism. Inserting the “accuse the Jews” worm into the discourse, anesthetizes the Jewish instinct to fight the good fight. Infected, Jewish students forget the ideals and the history of valiant battling for a universal standard of human conduct, of fighting for precisely those victims abandoned by the “civilized world.”

Instead of explaining to our students the dynamic of “accusation” that has been used to hobble Jews from time immemorial, we teach them to sit in the dock. Instead of exploring with them just how Israel is under a massive ideological assault which masquerades as legitimate criticism, we teach them to keep the focus of discourse on Jewish conduct, Israeli behavior, which is exactly what our adversaries want. Instead of turning our fingers back on the tyrannical Arab/Muslim world whose criticism of Israel defines chutzpah, we answer its charges.

Instead of exposing the hypocritical Western liberal elites – the “human rights” establishment, the media and the professoriate – who have abandoned for reasons of political correctness whole classes of people in the worst of circumstances: women, gays, apostates, Christians, democrats in the Islamic realm, we accept playing the the role of defendant.

In other words, instead of making the subject of this entire discussion the actual world tyrannies and the execrable Western hypocrites who aim to destroy us, we are bitten by the “accusation” virus, and we simply lose our minds.

Yes, it is not easy to educate a generation, brought up to believe that everyone has his own truth, about a global campaign to defame the Jewish state. And it is not easy to tell the hard truths about the world of radical Islam to students who are taught the multi-culturalist dream, taught even that to suspect another culture of being supremacist is itself “racist.”

And yes it is not easy to include in pro-Israel education an honest representation of the Palestinian narrative, so that it can be truly understood and seen for what it is. Pro-Israel organizations need to learn (with the help of our thus-far mostly silent professors, please!) to do all this. But pro- Israel organizations must first deal with the “accuse the Jews” killer virus.

In 1911, Ze’ev Jabotinsky had it perfectly right. “Every accusation causes among us such a commotion that people unwittingly think, ‘Why are they so afraid of everything? Apparently their conscience is not clear.’ Exactly because we are ready at every minute to stand at attention, there develops among the people an inescapable view about us, as of some specific thievish tribe. We think that our constant readiness to undergo a search without hesitation and to turn out our pockets, will eventually convince mankind of our nobility; look what gentlemen we are – we do not have anything to hide! This is a terrible mistake.”

You’d think all the smart Jews would’ve figured that out. By now.

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=200331

'Israeli War Crimes' signs to go on Seattle Metro buses: That's Right: Not Hamas War Crimes, but Israeli

2010-12-18T16:59:00.000-08:00

Ed Mast, the self-styled "peace activist" for the Palestinians is at it again. This time, as a spokesperson for the Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign. The group is paying for billboards to be plastered on Seattle Metro buses, starting on the 27th of this month, to "protest" Israeli war crimes. What are those crimes?
The Israeli response two years ago to unrelenting Hamas rocket attacks into southern Israel. Over 8,000 such rockets were launched from Gaza into Israel, thousands after Israel's total withdrawal from Gaza in the summer of 2005.
In a bizarre, Orwellian twist of logic, it is Israel who is being accused of war crimes for defending its citizenry from unprovoked attacks against its civilian population. For the historically challenged, over 250,000 Israeli citizens in southern Israel lived under constant terror from Kassam rockets and mortar fire from Gaza. Children and families had literally 15 seconds from the sound of a siren announcing the launching of another salvo to go to the safety of a bomb shelter.
It would seem to the average Martian who visited planet earth that the real war criminals are the leaders of Hamas, a terrorist organization with a charter avowing the destruction of Israel.
These leaders deliberately target civilians, firing their rockets from residential areas in Gaza, making it excruciatingly difficult for the Israelis to retaliate without causing inadvertent civilian casualties on the other side. Sounds to me like double war crime behavior on the part of Hamas.
But then, this is a group who, in their bloody coup against their rivals Fatah, back in the summer of 2007, threw their political opponents off of rooftops, blindfolded and handcuffed.
Hamas make no bones about their political agenda. Destroy the 'Zionist entity' by any means necessary.
Israel, fighting an asymmetric war against jihadist fundamentalists, makes every effort to avoid civilian casualties. In fact, by Hamas' own reckoning, the vast majority of those killed in "Operation Cast Lead," Israel's defense against those rocket attacks in late December, 2008, were Hamas operatives. Israel's track record in avoiding civilian casualties on the other side is unrivaled in modern warfare.
But so much for truth and an honest appraisal of the situation. For Ed Mast and his ilk, any tactic is acceptable, including a callous disregard for the facts.
One would think that fighting for the liberation of the Palestinians would necessitate identifying the true enemy of the Palestinians: Hamas, not Israel.
That these ads should appear on Seattle buses is as disgraceful as it is disingenuous.
David Brumer
Seattle
'Israeli War Crimes' signs to go on Metro buses

by ALLEN SCHAUFFLER / KING 5 News
SEATTLE – "Israeli War Crimes," the enormous advertisement reads. "Your tax dollars at work."

To the right of the image is a group of children -- one little boy stares out at the viewer, the others gawk at a demolished building, all rebar and crumbled concrete.

It's an ad you'll be seeing soon on a handful of Metro buses in downtown Seattle.

A group calling itself the Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign has paid King County $1,794 so that 12 buses will carry that message around town, starting two days after Christmas. That's December 27: the two-year anniversary of Israeli attacks on Gaza, aimed at stopping rocket attacks and weapons smuggling.

Ed Mast, a Seattle man who is a spokesperson for the group, says it’s not meant to be an anti-Israel message, but a message designed to generate discussion and awareness.

"I wouldn't say it's an anti-Israel message any more than any complaint about a country is anti-that country. We would like Israel to stop violating human rights. We would like Israel to give equal rights to its Palestinian citizens and its Palestinian subjects who live under occupation," said Mast.

At the Pacific Northwest office of the Anti-Defamation League, the ad campaign is seen quite a bit differently.

"We're dismayed," says Community Director Hilary Bernstein, who calls the bus-born advertisement grotesquely one-sided. "Citizens young and old will be seeing this sort of propaganda, this very one-sided distortion. It's unfortunate."

So, is the side of a public bus the right place for this kind of attack? Are the issues that regularly inflame one of the most flammable hot-spots in the world appropriate fare for people strolling the sidewalks of Seattle?

As far as King County is concerned, it's not really up to them what appears on the side of their buses, as long as it fits specific guidelines regarding:

•Pornography
•Alcohol
•Tobacco, and
•As long as the images and material used don't interfere with public safety or insult specific groups to the point that a riot could be incited, vandalism could occur or public safety could be threatened.
King County Metro Transit spokesperson Linda Thielke acknowledges some people will be offended by the campaign, but that is not enough to prevent the rolling billboards from hitting the streets.

"As a government, we are mindful of the provisions in state and federal constitutions to protect freedom of speech. So, we can't object these campaigns simply because they offend some people," said Thielke.

The Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign has targeted their advertising so that the buses carrying their message will run mostly on Seattle routes.

Steinberg on Bernstein: Exposing the Human Rights Facade

2010-11-25T11:29:00.000-08:00

Exposing the Human Rights Facade
Important piece once again documenting the extreme biases of too many human rights NGO's when it comes to anything relating to Israel. We need more courageous voices like Bernstein to speak out against this travesty. The stakes are ever higher with the growing international demonization and delegitimation of Israel epitomized by the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement.
Happy Thanksgiving to all!
david in seattle

The people and institutions that claim to uphold human rights and democracy are in fact nullifying these core moral principles.

At 87, Robert Bernstein, founder of Human Rights Watch, began his second life. Thirty- three years after he founded Helsinki Watch in 1976, which evolved into HRW and became one of the most influential human rights organizations in the world, he disowned his earlier creation. In October 2009, in an explosive column published in The New York Times, Bernstein denounced HRW and its leaders for distorting and exploiting human rights to attack democracies, and for playing a central role in turning Israel into a “pariah state.”

Now, Bernstein has gone further in working to reverse the moral failures of HRW and the wider network of highly politicized groups that use the façade of human rights to attack moral principles. Delivering the Goldstein Lecture on Human Rights at the University of Nebraska at Omaha [published in full on page 13 of today’s Jerusalem Post], he contrasted Israel’s democratic values with their notable absence in the Arab regimes and Iran. But most of HRW’s humanrights accusations are directed at Israel. Bernstein demonstrated that these “human rights organizations, including the one I founded,” as well Amnesty International, the Carter Center and other groups, are leading the political war against Israel by working closely with corrupt UN frameworks.

His involvement in free speech grew out of his background as a book publisher. In the 1970s, he went to the Soviet Union to negotiate copyright issues, and met the dissident scientist Andrei Sakharov and his wife, Yelena Bonner. Bernstein encouraged Sakharov to write an autobiography, and provided support as he came under increasing harassment, including exile to Gorky. (Natan Sharansky was jailed and sent to the gulag for his work with Sakharov.) The Soviet regime revoked Bernstein’s visa in a failed attempt to end this support.

This was the beginning of Helsinki Watch, which grew into HRW.

After the Cold War, Bernstein turned his attention to human rights issues in China, leaving HRW in the hands of cynical leaders who played a leading role in exploiting human rights principles to attack Israel. As the assault grew, amid the carnage of Palestinian terror bombings that killed more than 1,200 Israelis, Bernstein returned to an active role, joining HRW’s Middle East North Africa Advisory Board and observing its cynical manipulation of moral rhetoric.

He quickly noted the close cooperation between HRW and the UN Human Rights Council, which was “so critical of Israel that any fair-minded person would disqualify them from participating in attempts to settle issues involving Israel.” The UNHRC sought out “prominent Jews known for their anti-Israel views,” such as Richard Falk. (Falk had written an article comparing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to Hitler’s treatment of Jews in the Holocaust.) When Israel objected, HRW “leaped to his defense, putting out a press release comparing Israel with North Korea and Burma in not cooperating with the UN.”

The text defending Falk was written by Joe Stork, deputy director of HRW’s Middle East Division. As Bernstein reminds us, Stork had been an editor of a notorious pro-Palestinian newsletter before being hired by HRW.

Most of HRW’s accusations against Israel were not based on the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights but on subjective interpretations of the laws of war, the Geneva Conventions and international humanitarian law. But HRW has “little expertise about modern asymmetrical war.” Noting that Israel was responding to terror attacks from Iran’s non-state proxies – Hizbullah and Hamas – Bernstein relates the ways in which HRW’s reporting on this conflict consistently “faulted Israel as the principal offender.”

At first, Bernstein, like most journalists, diplomats and academics, was “inclined to believe what Human Rights Watch was reporting.

However, as I saw Human Rights Watch’s attacks on almost every issue become more and more hostile, I wondered if their new focus on war was accurate.”

THE BLOW that led a reluctant Bernstein to break publicly with his organization was HRW’s central role in promoting Richard Goldstone – one of executive director Kenneth Roth’s closest allies and an HRW board member – to lead the UN’s assault following the Gaza war.

“Human Rights Watch has been by far the biggest supporter” of this campaign to “bring war crimes allegations against Israel – based on [Goldstone’s] report.”

As Bernstein observed, HRW has ignored “many responsible analyses challenging the war crimes accusations made by Goldstone,” as well as detailed refutations of HRW’s own reports, which were filled with unverifiable and false claims.

Referring to the unresolved Marc Garlasco affair, Bernstein noted that “a military expert working for Human Rights Watch who seemed to wish to contest these reports was dismissed and... is under a gag order. This is antithetical to the transparency that Human Rights Watch asks of others.” (Galasco was also exposed as having something of a fetish for Nazi memorabilia, yet ironically, he was one of HRW's most objective analysts when it came to Israel--see Minority Report: TNR--db)
And he recalled that when HRW’s Sarah Leah Whitson went to Saudi Arabia in 2009 to raise funds by selling its support for Goldstone’s attacks on Israel, it is doubtful that she discussed textbooks published by the Saudis calling Jews “apes and pigs.”

Bernstein’s painful accounting regarding the organization he founded has of course been summarily rejected by this corrupt human rights priesthood and its acolytes. As a result, the people and institutions that claim to uphold human rights and democracy are in fact accelerating the tragic destruction of these core moral principles.

The writer heads NGO Monitor (www.ngo-monitor.org) and is professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University.

Seattle AJC: Addressing Israel's Future: Akiva Tor, Yehudit Barsky on BDS & "Lebanon"

2010-11-14T15:21:00.000-08:00

Last Thursday evening, on the 15th anniversary of the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin, the American Jewish Community and the Consulate General of Israel co-sponsored “Addressing Israel’s Future,” a program discussing new challenges and threats to Israel and the world Jewish community. The night also featured a private screening of Lebanon, winner of the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival.

The program was promoted as a “BUYcott Israel” event, and the sold out audience was encouraged to join the anti-boycott movement and strike back at the forces behind BDS, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement that has been gaining traction worldwide. The Pacific Northwest has become a lightning rod for the BDS movement, where the first successful boycott of a food co-op in America took hold in July at the Olympia Co-op.

Akiva Tor, the Consul General for the Pacific Northwest spoke about the importance of countering BDS, a movement whose agenda promotes the vilification and delegitimation of Israel, under the guise of promoting justice and freedom for the Palestinians. Tor described the groups supporting BDS as fringe organizations on the far left. Though lacking any real political power, he cautioned that the danger they pose is significant because of the power of symbols. And by deeming Israel as illegitimate, by extension, a shadow is cast on those who support it.

He applauded the efforts of the AJC, both locally and globally, educating the public to the insidious nature of these attacks against the Jewish State. Tor talked about the imperative to be proactive, citing the work the AJC and groups like StandWithUs have done, challenging the Administration at Evergreen College to secure a safe and normative educational environment for its beleaguered Jewish students, and the achievement of thwarting the proposed boycott at the Port Townsend Food Co-op.

Yehudit Barsky, director of AJC’s Division on Middle East and International Terrorism was also on hand, speaking about recent threats to the Jewish community, when two parcels containing bombs were recently intercepted in Dubai and Britain, with addresses earmarked for synagogues in Chicago. She noted that the media gave short shrift to fact that both targets were against Jews, with news reports downplaying the anti-Semitic intent of those behind the attempted terror attacks. Barsky, who is fluent in Arabic, described the work her division does around the clock, monitoring publications and websites of extremist groups like the ones behind the failed parcel bombs. While in Seattle, she met with the FBI and local police intelligence to discuss the growing risks posed by such terrorist organizations, particularly against Jewish targets.

Before the screening of Lebanon, Akiva Tor invoked the memory of the late Yitzchak Rabin, paraphrasing remarks Israel’s current Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu made at the memorial service held at Herzl cemetery in Israel. Bibi described how Rabin united the Israeli populace, evolving from a security hawk to a peace-seeking, and more importantly peace-believing dove. Despite media portrayals to the contrary, Netanyahu emphasized that Israel is less polarized today than it was when Rabin was its leader. Living through the collective trauma of the collapse of Oslo and the Second Intifada, the Right understands the Left better today, with the reverse being equally true. He ended by noting that the country is in fact more like Rabin today.

Tor then gave the sold out audience a brief historical backdrop to Israel’s war with Lebanon from 1982-1985. He explained the rationale for Israel’s initial incursion into Lebanon (the effort to eradicate the stepped up terrorism emanating from the PLO against northern Israel) and the problematic nature of the conflict, with Israel quickly finding itself in the quagmire of the Lebanese civil war. Tor spoke of how that war came to define his generation, and how that generation went on to come of age and produce powerful artistic testaments to that period, most notably through literature and film. Movies like Yossi and Jaeger, Beaufort, and Waltz with Bashir have all received international critical acclaim, with Beaufort and Waltz both nominated for Best Foreign Film by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Lebanon, Samuel Maoz’s first feature film, is a virtuoso addition to that already impressive body of work. A stunning artistic achievement, the film is shot entirely from the perspective of the inside of a tank (with the exception of the first and last shots). Psychologically riveting, cinematically daring and excruciatingly honest, Lebanon offers an unfiltered look at the chaos, confusion and terror experienced by four young Israeli soldiers thrust into battle on the first day of the war. Only through their periscope are we given a window to the fog of war outside the dank and darkened interior of the tank. And that window is filled with the horrific carnage that all wars leave in their wake. In fact, it is the universality of the soldiers’ experience that lends the film its distinctive humanity, despite the graphic, brutal violence it portrays. In the second to last scene, one of the Israeli soldiers performs an act of inordinate compassion to their Syrian prisoner. In those moments, when the two meet eye to eye, the essential humanity of the other trumps all else.

Israel can be proud that it fosters a culture which is willing to be that self-reflective, unafraid to look at itself, warts and all, and in the process produce such transcendent works of art.

David Brumer
Co-Chair, AJC Seattle Jewish Film Festival
Seattle AJC Executive Committee Member

YK Halevi on Why Settler Issue is More Complicated than it Appears & Oren & Shavit on Recognition of Israel's Jewishness as Existential Issue

2010-10-15T16:38:00.000-07:00

Why Israel Won't Abandon the Settlers - Yossi Klein Halevi
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak is attempting to legalize two houses in a tiny West Bank settlement called Hayovel that were built without government permission and face possible demolition. The houses were built by two war heroes. Major Eliraz Peretz fell in a skirmish on the Israeli-Gaza border a half year ago; Israelis were especially touched by his story because his older brother died in Lebanon 12 years ago. The second hero, Major Ro'i Klein, was killed in Lebanon in 2006 after leaping onto a grenade to save his men. Fallen soldiers have a sacrosanct status in Israel. Demolishing the houses that Peretz and Klein built for their families seems to Israelis, whatever their politics, an unbearable act of ingratitude.
Increasingly, Israel's military elite is coming from West Bank settlements and, more broadly, from within the religious Zionist community that produced the settlement movement. Perhaps 40% of combat officers are now religious Zionists (not to be confused with ultra-orthodox Haredim), nearly three times their percentage in the general population. The newly appointed deputy chief of staff, Maj.-Gen. Yair Naveh, is a religious Zionist.
The "settler" has assumed a near demonic image around the world, but most settlers are part of the mainstream. Crucially, few Israelis regard settlers as interlopers on another people's land. The political wisdom of the settlement project is intensely debated, but only a fringe denies the historic right of Jews to live in what was the biblical heartland of Israel. If the international community wants to understand why the Israeli public doesn't share its antipathy toward the settlers or its urgency to uproot settlements, a good place to begin is with Mr. Barak's effort to legalize two houses on a West Bank hilltop. The writer is a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. (Wall Street Journal)

Good minds think alike. Lozowick beat me to the punch, posting on both articles below before I ever got around to doing the same.
cheers,
david

That Pesky Jewish State

Michael Oren Exhorts American Jewry to Stand with Israel in these Ominous, Trying Times: YK Sermon at D.C. Shuls

2010-09-21T16:52:00.000-07:00

Ambassador Michael Oren posits that there are no easy choices here for Israel. Israelis live and die by their leaders' decisions. With history as a guide, he points to the damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't scenarios Israel faces. He also reminds us that Israel remains a robust democracy against daunting odds. And he beseeches us to respect the decisions the Israeli people make through their elected leaders and to respect the grave risks that they take in the name of peace. At the very least, they deserve our support, respect and gratitude.
david

On Yom Kippur we read the Book of Jonah, one of the Bible's most enigmatic texts. It is also one of the Bible's shortest texts, weighing in at a page and a half, which is quite an accomplishment for this holiday. And it features one of our scripture's least distinguished individuals. Jonah--a man whose name, in Hebrew, means dove--not dov, as in Hebrew for bear, but dove as, in English, pigeon.

Yet this same everyman, this Jonah, is tasked by God with a most daunting mission. He is charged with going to the great city of Nineveh and persuading its pernicious people to repent for their sins or else.

Not such an unusual task, you might think. Twenty-first century life is rife with people who warn of the catastrophes awaiting us if we fail to modify our behavior one way or the other. Today we call them pundits, commentators who, if proven correct, claim all the credit but who, if proven wrong, bear none of the responsibility.

Jonah, though, cannot escape the responsibility. Nor can he dodge his divinely ordained dilemma. If he succeeds in convincing the Ninevehians to atone and no harm befalls them, many will soon question whether that penitence was ever really necessary. Jonah will be labeled an alarmist. But, what if the people of Nineveh ignore the warning and the city meets the same fiery fate as Sodom and Gomorrah? Then Jonah, as a prophet, has failed.

Such is the paradox of prophecy for Jonah, a lose-lose situation. No wonder he runs away. He flees to the sea, only to be swallowed by a gigantic fish, and then to the desert, cowering under a gourd. But, in the end, the fish coughs him up and the gourd withers. The moral is: there is no avoiding Jonah's paradox. Once elected by God, whatever the risks, he must act.

As such, the Book of Jonah can be read as more than morality play, but also a cautionary tale about the hazards of decision-making. It is a type of political primer, if you will, what the medieval thinkers called a Mirror for Princes. The Talmud teaches us that, in the post-Biblical era, the gift of prophecy is reserved for children and fools. In modern times, we don't have prophets--pundits, yes, but no prophets. Instead we have statesmen who, like Jonah, often have to make fateful decisions for which they will bear personal responsibility. If not a paradox of prophecy, these leaders face what we might call the quandary of statecraft.

Take, for example, the case of Winston Churchill. During the 1930s, he warned the world of the dangers of the rapidly rearming German Reich. The British people ignored Churchill- worse they scorned him, only to learn later that he was all along prescient and wise. But what if Churchill had become Britain's Prime Minister five years earlier and had ordered a pre-emptive strike against Germany? Those same people might have concluded that the Nazis never posed a real threat and that their prime minister was merely a warmonger.

Or consider Harry Truman who, shortly after assuming the presidency in the spring of 1945, had to decide whether to drop America's terrible secret weapon on Imperial Japan. Today, many people, including some Americans, regard the dropping of the atomic bomb on two Japanese cities as an act of unrivaled brutality, but what if Truman had decided otherwise? What if the United States had invaded the Japanese mainland and lost, as the US Army estimated at the time, more than a million GIs? Truman, the decision-maker, was either the butcher of Japanese civilians or butcher of young Americans. Either way he lost.

The quandary of statecraft: every national leader knows it and few better than Israeli leaders. They, too, have had to make monumental--even existential--decisions.

On May 14th, 1948, Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion had to determine whether to realize the two-thousand year-long dream of Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel. But, by doing so, he risked an onslaught by overwhelming Arab forces against a Jewish population half the size of Washington, DC today armed mainly with handguns.

Another example: my personal hero, Levi Eshkol. On June 5th, 1967, Eshkol had to decide whether to unleash Israel Defense Forces against the Arab armies surrounding the Jewish State and clamoring for its destruction or whether to alienate the international community and especially the United States and be branded an aggressor.

Ben-Gurion's decision resulted in the creation of the State of Israel and Eshkol's in the immortal image of Israeli paratroopers dancing before the Kotel. Nothing is inevitable in history and in both cases the outcome might have been tragically different. Like Churchill and Truman, Ben-Gurion and Eshkol confronted the quandary of statecraft.

They also have to answer to their citizens. Unlike the prophetic leaders of antiquity, presidents and prime ministers are not selected by God but rather elected by the majority of their peoples through a democratic process. In America, the system was modeled on the Roman Republic in which citizens empowered senators to represent them in the distant capital. In tiny Israel, with its multi-party consensual style of democracy, the model is not Rome but rather ancient Athens. The American president, it has been said, represents 300 million constituents; Israeli prime ministers represent 7 million prime ministers.

Israeli democracy is rambunctious and intensely personal, placing the premium on individual participation. In our family, I can attest, my wife and I have never voted for the same party. Our son also went his own way politically. Together with his friends, he started a political party in our living room that now holds two seats on the Jerusalem municipality.

At 62 years old, Israel's democracy is older than more than half of the democratic governments in the world, which, in turn, account for less than half of the world's existing nations. Israel is one of the handful of democracies that has never succumbed to periods of undemocratic rule. And Israel has achieved this extraordinary record in spite of the fact that it is the only democracy never to know a nanosecond of peace and which has endured pressures that would have crushed most other democracies long ago. In a region inhospitable--even fatal--to government by and of the people, Israel's democracy thrives.

Democracy in Israel is not only personal and vibrant, but also grave, because the stakes are so enormously high. Recalling Jonah's paradox, the leaders we elect are confronted with grueling decisions.

Consider the case of terror. Israel today is threatened with two major terror organizations: Hamas in Gaza and, in Lebanon, Hizbollah. Both are backed by Iran and both call openly for Israel's destruction. And, over the past five years, both have acted on that call by firing nearly 15,000 rockets at Israeli towns and villages.

Next imagine that you're the prime minister of Israel. You know that in order to keep those thousands of rockets out of Hamas's hands you need to blockade Gaza from the sea. The policy is risky--people may get hurt, especially if they're armed extremists--and liable to make you very unpopular in the world. But you have to choose between being popular and watching idly while a million Israelis come under rocket fire. You have to choose between popular and being alive.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah has nearly quadrupled the rockets in its arsenal. They're bigger, more accurate rockets, with a range that can reach every Israeli city, even Eilat. Worse: Hizbollah has positioned those rockets under homes, hospitals, and schools, confident that if Israelis try to defend themselves from those missiles, they will be branded war criminals.

Imagine, again, that you're Israel's prime minister. Do you wait until Hizbollah finds a pretext to fire those rockets or do you act preemptively? Do you risk having the much of the country being reduced to rubble or having that same country reduced to international pariah status?

The terror threat is a very poignant example of the quandary of statecraft in Israel, but an even thornier case is posed by the peace process.

Yes, the peace process, with its vision of two peoples living in adjacent states in a relationship of permanent and legitimate peace. What could be so hazardous about that?

Well, let's return to that Kafkaesque scenario in which you wake up one morning and find yourself transformed into Israel's prime minister.

You know that to create that neighboring state that you're going to have to give up some land, but not just any land, but land regarded as sacred by the majority of the Jewish people for more than three thousand years. You know that a great many of your countrymen have made their homes in these areas and that numerous Israelis have given their lives in their defense. You know that Israel has in the past withdrawn from territories in an effort to generate peace but that it received no peace but rather war. And, lastly, you know that many Arabs view the two-state solution as a two stage solution in which the ultimate stage is Israel's dissolution.

What, then, Mr. or Ms. Prime Minister, do you do?

You could opt for maintaining the status quo, with the risk of deepening Israel's international isolation or you could specify a vision of peace that significantly reduces its perils. You could, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has done, insist that the future Palestinian State be effectively demilitarized, without an army that could bombard Israeli cities or an air force that could shoot down planes landing at Ben-Gurion Airport. You could insist that the Palestinian State reciprocally recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, and so put an end to all future claims and conflicts.

Even then, of course, Israel will be running incalculable risks, for what if the Palestinian state implodes and becomes another Gaza or Lebanon? What do you do if, a week after the peace treaty is signed, a rocket falls on Tel Aviv?

More than Gaza, more than peace, the ultimate quandary of statecraft centers on Iran.

This is the radical, genocidal Iran whose leaders regularly call for Israel's annihilation and provides terrorists with the means for accomplishing that goal. This is the Iran that undermines governments throughout the Middle East and even South America, and an Iran that shoots its own people protesting for freedom.

Iran does all this without nuclear weapons--imagine what it would do with the nuclear arms it is assiduously developing. And imagine what you, awakening once again as the Israeli Prime Minister, will decide. Do you remain passive while Iran provides nuclear weaponry to terrorist groups, targets Tel Aviv with nuclear-tipped missiles, and triggers a nuclear arms race throughout the region? Or do you act, as Israel has now, joining with the United States and other like-minded nations in imposing sanctions on Iran, hoping to dissuade its rulers from nuclearizing? And, if that fails, do you keep all options on the table, with the potentially far-reaching risks those options entail?

The issues of terror, the peace process, and Iran evoke strong emotions in this country and around the world, and often spark criticism of Israeli policies. Yet it's crucial to recall that those policies are determined by the leaders elected through one of the world's most robust and resilient democracies. Recall that the people of Israel--not of Europe, not of the United States--bear the fullest consequences for their leaders' decisions.

There is no escaping the responsibility--as Jonah learned thousands of years ago--and that responsibility is borne by our leaders and by the majority of the people they represent. Israel today faces decisions every bit as daunting as those confronting Jonah, but we will not run away. There is no gourd to hide under or fish to swallow us whole. Terror, the peace process, Iran--our Ninevehs--await.

Support us as we grapple with these towering challenges. Back us in our efforts to defend ourselves from terrorist rockets. Uphold us if we have to make painful sacrifices for peace or if we decide that the terms of the proposed treaty fail to justify those sacrifices. Stand with us as we resist Iran's efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Respect the decisions we take through our democratic system and respect the risks that we, more than any other nation, take.

The message of the Book of Jonah is one of personal and collective atonement, but it is also a message of unity and faith. "In my trouble I called to the Lord," proclaims Jonah, "VaYa'aneini" - "and He answered me."

Let us--Israelis and the American Jews--united by our faith, our peoplehood, and our common love for democracy. Let us assume responsibility for our decisions, crushingly difficult though they may often be, and appreciative of the quandaries our leaders face. When we call out, let us answer one another with the assurance that no challenge--no paradoxes, no Ninevehs--can defeat us.

BDS and the Pacific Northwest: The Seattle Community “Anti-Delegitimization” Task Force

2010-09-11T16:40:00.000-07:00

The trends are not encouraging.
This week's Time Magazine Cover Story is titled Why Israel Doesn't Care About Peace.
Nevermind that the Israeli Prime Minister met last week at the White House with a most reluctant Palestinian "peace partner," Mahmoud Abbas. According to Time, Israelis are otherwise engaged, soaking up the last rays of summer and busy making money. The BDS movement is alive and well, having successfully staged the first food co-op boycott of Israel-made products, right here in Washington State. Not to be outdone, California "activists" are ready to jump on the bandwagon.
California Activists Launch Ballot initiative to divest from Israel
Californians committed to peace and justice for Palestine-Israel will launch the statewide campaign of California ballot Initiative 10-0020 with a signing ceremony in front of the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles on Wednesday, September 8, 2010. Although California has adopted policies requiring divestment from Sudan, Iran and other nations, this is the first ballot measure in the nation aimed at changing Israeli policies through divestment by State agencies. It directs California’s large public employee and teacher pension funds to be consistent with their responsible investing policies and to divest from companies that violate the human rights of Palestinians...

The handwriting on the wall is clear. This is the time to stand up and denounce these insidious tactics, whose purpose is the delegitmizing of the Jewish State.
db

The Seattle Community “Anti-Delegitimization” Task Force

ADL Pacific NW Region - Hilary Bernstein
AJC Seattle – Wendy Rosen
Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle – Rachel Schachter
Hillel UW – Jeremy Brochin
StandWithUs Northwest – Rob Jacobs
Community Leaders: Rabbi Yohanna Kinberg, Adam Goldblatt, Sandy Berger, David Brumer, Carolyn Hathaway, Nevet Basker

Today, we in the Jewish community are faced with a serious threat. It’s important enough to bring up while we’re in the Yamim Noraim, the days of awe.Here in the Pacific Northwest, regardless of how we may feel about Israel’s policies, we are facing a real and concerted effort to delegitimize Israel, to convince Americans that we’d be better off if there were no Jewish state, no Jewish homeland. It’s an internationally organized effort to get you and other individuals, companies, universities and other organizations, to boycott all Israeli products, to divest from companies doing business with Israel and to push for sanctions against Israel.It’s called the “BDS movement.” “BDS” stands for the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions.Although we are all hopeful that the current Israeli-Palestinian peace talks will end in a lasting peace agreement, we recognize that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one between two peoples with indigenous ties to the land and that both sides will have to make painful sacrifices to ensure that a two-state solution, the only viable result, is implemented. The BDS movement is premised on the assumption that Israel is always in the wrong, no matter what it does.
Supporters claim that a boycott is a non-violent way to bring peace to the Middle East. While this sounds reasonable, it’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing.Why? Because these boycott initiatives ignore context and history, are counter-productive to the current peace talks, and would effectively end Israel as a Jewish state. Nearly all of their efforts insist that Israel accept a complete right of return for all Palestinians. They require that Israel allow 4.8 million Palestinians to take possession of the homes and land that their grandparents either fled or were forced to leave during a war initiated by the five Arab states against the day-old state of Israel.Instead, they say a boycott is necessary because Israel is a genocidal, apartheid state intent on continuing a 60-year policy of ethnic cleansing. The BDS speakers, along with the handouts at the co-ops and on college campuses, claim that Israel regularly commits atrocities.
Wherever the supporters of the BDS movement push for boycotts, they vilify Israel. The local newspapers report their allegations. And there is often little or no public outcry or visible response from the local Jewish community.And the BDS movement has been gathering momentum both locally and around the world. Two years ago we faced Initiative 97, an effort to have the City of Seattle divest from companies doing business with Israel. This year we saw an effort to have the Madison Market boycott all Israeli products. This year, nearly 78 percent of Evergreen State College students voted to divest from companies doing business with Israel. Less than two months ago, the Olympia Food Co-op did boycott all Israeli products. Now numerous other co-ops are considering boycott proposals.If false allegations are made often enough, they become someone’s truth. Now even Time Magazine’s cover continues the delegimization of Israel with “Why Israel Doesn’t Care About Peace” inside a Star of David. We’re in changing times and we cannot remain silent. Criticizing Israel is not wrong. As Jews, we care deeply about the suffering on both sides of the conflict. But vilifying Israel and making it into a pariah state is wrong and we cannot keep silent any longer. We read on Rosh Hashanah, “tein kavod le-amekha,” restore dignity to Your people. It will take more than head shaking and silent response to do that in the face of these lies. Our silence in the face of falsehoods appears to validate these libels. We need to speak out. Now. This is an assault on each and every one of us. For if Israel is deemed illegitimate then, by extension, so too is supporting it.