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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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YK Halevi: Bibi, The Surprising Uniter

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.

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Noah Pollak on the Shonda of B'Tselem

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.

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