ARSON IN JERUSALEM

Third intifada?


For a few hours yesterday, it looked like Palestinian leaders were about to unleash a third intifada. That they didn't is perhaps attributable to a recognition that centrally-planned terrorism - drive-by shootings, bus bombings, the slaughter of children in pizza shops - is now as passé as their previous tactic of airline hijackings. Still, there's plenty of room for spontaneous violence, inspired though not coordinated from above.

The special priestly blessings of the Succot festival which brought tens of thousands of worshipers to the Western Wall culminated without incident. Still, the joy of the occasion was somewhat lessened by the palpable tension of threatened Arab violence.

The background: Prior to Yom Kippur, the head of the Muslim Wakf learned that a fringe group of Jews planned a visit to the Temple Mount. They are harmless enough - part of a stream within the mostly settler milieu that wants to establish a Third Temple on the site of the Dome of the Rock and reinstate animal sacrifices.

Generations of Jewish scholars have studied the practices and rituals of our ancient Temples, praying that one day the Messiah would deliver the Jews, and that God's presence would be manifested for all. But the group in question has busied itself with stitching the garments and crafting the sacramental objects the Israelite priests will "soon" need.

Police learned that the Wakf was bothered, and preemptively barred the Third Temple group from the plateau. But as police opened the area to other visitors, escorting a group of mostly French Christians to the Mount, waiting Muslim youths unleashed a barrage of projectiles. The police rescued the tourists and arrested some of the rioters, but the atmosphere in and around Jerusalem's Old City remained tense.

CURIOUSLY, Ramadan passed with nary a disruption. Indeed, Israeli authorities took various measures to facilitate the unfettered observance of the holy month in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza also. Too bad, then, that Palestinian leaders could not find it in their hearts to reciprocate by allowing the Jews to observe Jewish holy days in tranquility.

But, really, that is comparing apples and oranges. Israeli authorities foster coexistence and maintain free access to the holy sites. Palestinian factions, by contrast, want just the opposite. Jews do not deny the religious significance of the Muslim sites on the Temple Mount. Yet Palestinians can't abide the fact that the Jewish presence in Jerusalem anteceded the Muslim arrival in 636 CE by well over a millennium.

No one knows why the Palestinians decided to stir things up just now. Some suggest it was part of an effort by Mahmoud Abbas to distract his people from the Palestinian Authority's unpopular decision not to further exploit the Goldstone Report at this time. Some say the PLO and Hamas are competing for influence in Jerusalem and with Israeli Arabs. Some argue it is the work of radical Palestinians who are citizens of Israel and want more influence within the Palestinian polity.

Whatever the reason, this much is clear: nothing brings Fatah in Ramallah, Hamas in Gaza City, and the Islamic Movement's Northern Branch in the Galilee more into harmony than "protecting" the Haram al-Sharif from - in the words of the PLO news agency WAFA - "radical Jew colonizers."

Sadly, not one Palestinian leader is willing to tell his people that, of course, there was a Jewish temple where the Aksa Mosque stands today. To admit a Jewish civilizational connection would demand that Palestinians agree to share the area and to treat Jewish holy places with respect. It would turn upside down a Palestinian political culture that has socialized generations to think of Jews as interlopers. And this neither Fatah's Abbas, nor Hamas's Ismail Haniyeh nor the Islamic Movement's Sheikh Raed Salah will ever do.

SINCE the liberation of Jerusalem in the 1967 Six Day War, the Jews have been magnanimous in victory. Not only have they permitted Muslims to retain administrative control over their holy places, Israeli authorities have forbidden Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount.

The Israel Police restricts visits by non-Muslims to 7:30-10:30 a.m. and 12:30-1:30 p.m. and bars them entirely on Muslim holidays. To appease Muslim sensibilities, since 2006, successive Israeli governments have forbidden the Antiquities Authority from blocking illegal Palestinian excavations below Temple Mount. And invariably, when Arabs threaten violence, it is the Jews who are barred from the site to reduce tensions.

So while Israel's "Third Temple" fanatics are carefully policed and marginalized by mainstream society, the Palestinian leadership continues to mainstream fanatical ideas about Jews - making reconciliation unreachable.

Good News From Iran

Iran sidetracks the world


There has been so much good news about Iran's nuclear weapons program lately that it's almost churlish to expose that news for what it really is - hollow and ephemeral.

Teheran has offered to ship much of its low-enriched uranium to Russia and France, where it will be processed before being returned for use in medical research and generating electricity. Yesterday, Iran also agreed to allow international inspectors to visit its previously secret - and still unfinished - uranium enrichment plant at Qom on October 25.

President Barack Obama said that the uranium export offer was "a step toward building confidence that Iran's program is in fact peaceful." Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations said that if Iran honored its pledge to export its fuel for processing, Washington's proliferation concerns would be partly alleviated.

But Henry Sokolski of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center asserted that "the fuel France and Russia will send back to Iran will be far more weapons usable, being enriched with 19.75 percent nuclear weapons-grade uranium, than the 3.5 percent enriched brew Iran currently has on hand."

Experts say that uranium needs to be enriched at 90% for use in a nuclear bomb.

So instead of talking about when Iran will suspend its fuel-making activities, the mullahs have cleverly shifted the conversation to what their export pledge means - even though it would not take effect for a year or two.

And just to muddy the waters, Iran's ambassador to Britain, Mehdi Saffare, a member of its delegation to the Geneva talks with the Security Council "five plus Germany," insisted that the idea of sending Iran's enriched uranium out of the county had "not been discussed yet."

ON SATURDAY, The New York Times reported (elaborating on a story carried last month by the Associated Press) that dissident experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency have tentatively concluded that Iran has "sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable… implosion nuclear device."

Their report, "Possible Military Dimensions of Iran's Nuclear Program," also argues that the country is aiming to place a nuclear payload on its Shahab 3 missile - which can reach parts of Europe.

The only genuinely good news is that "Overall the Agency does not believe that Iran has yet achieved the means of integrating a nuclear payload into the Shahab 3 missile with any confidence that it would work…."

Still, the IAEA specialists believe that though Iran hasn't detonated a device, the elaborate nature of its experiments gives it confidence that its bomb will explode.

Mohamed ElBaradei, the outgoing IAEA chief, has spiked the report. Yesterday, in Teheran he talked about how Iran has supposedly shifted from confrontation toward "transparency and cooperation."

With IAEA dissidents, and the intelligence services of Britain, France, Germany and, of course, Israel arguing that Iran is racing toward a bomb, Obama has instructed the US intelligence community to reevaluate its controversial 2007 finding that Teheran had halted efforts to design a nuclear weapon back in 2003.

NO MATTER how the US intelligence reassessment goes, or how Iran's export gambit plays out, or what happens when the inspectors visit Qom, at the end of the day - and in keeping with the mullahs' strategy - Iran will have bought time.

Obama insists his administration is "not interested in talking for the sake of talking. If Iran does not take steps in the near future to live up to its obligations, then... we are prepared to move towards increased pressure."

Of course, the president would have greater credibility with the mullahs if the heightened sanctions his administration insinuated would be forthcoming in September had actually been implemented.

At this point, there are only three possibilities: (a) Iran will build a bomb; (b) draconian sanctions, spearheaded by Washington, will persuade Teheran to abort its program; (c) military intervention will significantly set the mullahs back.

Assuming Obama realizes that the second option is by far the most preferable, he must not allow Teheran to sidetrack the discussion.

All the world needs to know is when Iran will stop enriching uranium, and when it will end its weapons program.

Book Review: "The Israel Test" by George Gilder

Das Capital

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The Israel Test
By George Gilder
Richard Vigilante Books, New York
255 pages. $27.95

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George Gilder's short, breezy, and passionately argued polemic might have been better titled "They Are Envious," or, "Netanyahu, Savior of Israel," or, The REAL Case for Israel," or, simply, "Jews are Smarter."



Gilder argues that Israel's fate, capitalism's prospects, and the ideal of liberty are interwoven. His immoderate tone will be off-putting -- at least initially -- to readers who are not enamored with capitalism in these times. His argument that Jews are inherently smarter than others will make even some members of the tribe squirm. His rapturous description of Israel's high-tech sector will irritate thousands of recently laid-off workers (especially native English-speaking technical writers whose work has been subcontracted to south Asia ). And his fawning tribute to Benjamin Netanyahu for rescuing Israel's economy in the 1990s will make those familiar with the Jewish state's transition from socialist corporatism to laissez-faire capitalism wonder why Gilder seems clueless about the critical role Shimon Peres played in this transition years earlier.



But to say this book is merely "red meat" for the high-IQ, anti-egalitarian, religious true-believers, not-one-inch, and venture capitalist crowd, does not really do it justice.



For once you get past the overbearing smugness of a writer who on the face of it abhors nuance, it turns out that there are long stretches of edifying and proleptic argument in The Israel Test. It's as if Gilder started out wanting to tell it like (he thinks) it is, and along the way decided that the messy business of trying to win over those who come to the book with a different viewpoint was worth the effort.



WERE GILDER Jewish, I'd describe him as Marx's living antithesis.

Where Marx was a self-hating Jew, Gilder is a "Judeophile." Indeed, he defines hatred of capitalism as a form of anti-Semitism, since Judaism provides a moral framework for capitalist activity. When Gilder says "Jews lead all other American groups in per-capita income," he plainly means this as a compliment. And he is convincing when he posits that "The success or failure of Jews in a given country is the best index of its freedoms."



Gilder sees Israel as one of the "world's leading capitalist powers" and presents a sort of domino theory: "If Israel is destroyed, capitalist Europe will likely die as well, and America , as the epitome of productive and creative capitalism spurred by Jews, will be in jeopardy." So in essence, "the Israel test" amounts to the degree of commitment the West is prepared to make for Israel 's survival and the extent it is willing to correctly identify and protect its own interests.



Even champions of Israel , he complains, too often make "the case for Israel " by "defending" Israeli policies based on mitigating circumstances. Not Gilder; because he believes Israel is hated not for what it does but for the virtues of the Jews. The Jews have been hated for their intellectual and entrepreneurial accomplishments since pagan times. He says outright: "The source of anti-Semitism is Jewish superiority and excellence." Part of the book seeks to prove this thesis by citing chapter and verse the extraordinary contributions of Jews to science and mathematics. There are fascinating sketches of brilliant minds, among them John von Neumann, without whose work on algorithms computers as we know them would not be.



GILDER'S BOOK is also an excellent primer against the Palestinian Arab cause.

Their self-induced dependency on foreign aid, exacerbated by the intervention of international aid groups, has "transformed the Palestinians into a ghetto of violent male gangs and welfare queens." Such over-the-top language actually camouflages an otherwise convincing argument.



As proof Gilder cites Musa Alami telling David Ben-Gurion in 1934: "I would prefer that the country remain impoverished and barren for another hundred years, until we ourselves are able to develop it on our own" than make common cause with the Zionists. Sure enough, between 1967 and 1987 – prior to the first intifada – the West Bank was "one of the most dynamic economies on earth."

True to Alami's sentiments, the Palestinians threw it all away by launching the first intifada in 1988. Then in the wake of the 1993 Oslo accords, their economy began thrived again. Hundreds of thousands of West Bank and Gaza Palestinians were employed within the Green Line; Nablus license plates could be seen on the streets of Tel Aviv. And still, in 2000, having rejected Ehud Barak's overly generous terms for a state, the Palestinian leadership launched the second intifada and again drove their people into a crater of violence and economic depression. It was all done out of irrational hatred. Gilder says "capitalism requires peace" and the Palestinians want neither.


THE strongest case conservatives have over liberals, in my view, is in how they understand human nature. Gilder quotes the physicist Eugene Wigner: "It is just as foolish to complain that people are selfish and treacherous as it is to complain that the magnetic field does not increase unless the electric field has a curl. Both are laws of nature." Gilder believes not just in the laws of nature but something greater: "The universe rests on a logical coherence that cannot be proven but to which men must commit if they are to create."



His enthusiasm for Israeli high-tech is explained by his first-hand knowledge of its key players and most intriguing innovations, the result of his being a "practicing venture capitalist." Gilder offers absorbing sketches of the people -- not a few of them immigrants from the United States -- behind the country's high-tech success.


"THE great irony of Israel ," writes Gilder, "is that for much of its short history it has failed the Israel test," meaning the Jewish state was mired in socialism.



It is certainly true that until 1977, when Likud wrested power away from it, the country was solidly in the grip of the Labor Party which was then social democratic in orientation and had used the state and the Histadrut to wield near-total power. It would take years to reconfigure the Israeli economy. In 1985, inflation ran at 450 percent a year. That's when the national unity government headed by Labor's Shimon Peres and Likud's Yitzhak Shamir adopted tough anti-inflationary measures, reduced taxes, and fundamentally liberalized the economy. I think it is a bit churlish of Gilder not to give Peres his due. By the time Netanyahu came into power in 1996 and promoted supply-side economics, the edifice of the old socialist-oriented economy had largely been consigned to the dustbin of history.



Moreover, as Israel moved from Labor-dominated corporatism to capitalism, and as state-owned companies were privatized, power shifted from the Labor Party/Histadrut/state troika, to a constellation of oligarchs who today hold sway over the economy. This is a far cry from genuine capitalist competition, I think.



THEIsrael Test contains an excellent chapter that deconstructs the certainties of the Left. (In Israel , "left" refers generally to security matters; many on the left are solidly bourgeoisie.)



Gilder visits with (or reads) a range of post-Zionists and leftists among them Ehud Olmert's draft-dodging, expatriate son, Shaul. Mouthing his hackneyed, discredited Peace Now dribble, Olmert junior is the perfect foil for Gilder. Only when he dismisses Olmert's criticism of the haredim, is Gilder on shaky ground. Gilder wrongly see these men in black as the "defenders of the faith" and the "answer to the [Palestinian] demographic crunch caused by secular Israelis with their abortion culture and their gay-rights marches."



In fact, the haredim are part of the problem. The more insular among them do not do national service and do not pay taxes; as a community they are dependent on the largesse of the taxpayers; some are openly anti-Zionist; and their political clout stymies needed reform of the political system. Finally their hijacking of the established "church" of Orthodoxy via their stranglehold on the rabbinate has alienated countless non-observant Israelis from their heritage.



Gilder's book has many heroes but among my favorite is Nobel laureate Robert Aumann whose analysis of Palestinian rationality – suicide bombers included -- and Israel's failing nerve, is worth the price of this book, and needs to be understood by anyone venturing an opinion on "how to achieve peace" in the Arab-Israel conflict.



Finally, writing prior to Netanyahu's seminal Bar-Ilan address in June offering negotiations toward the establishment of a demilitarized Palestinian state, Gilder makes an interesting, albeit unrealistic, moral defense of the West Bank status quo -- demography notwithstanding: "If the right answer for Israel is to rule for a thousand years the territories on which reside enemies committed to its destruction, then no true principle of democracy compels them to do otherwise."



The chapter that captured my heart was Gilder's affecting testimony of what it was like to grow up as a privileged WASP in an atmosphere where refined anti-Semitism was taken as a given. It is this section which unravels how Gilder came to be a Judeophile, and reading it reminded me how few friends the Jews have in this world outside the Christian evangelical fold.



In his affinity for Jews and Israel , Gilder recalls the late Robert St. John who wrote several admiring books about the Zionist enterprise and whom David Ben-Gurion described as "our goyisher Zionist."



With this book – for all its faults – Gilder becomes St. John's worthy successor.

Boosting Hamas will come back to haunt Israel

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A special mazal tov to Hadas Silver on her bat mitzva...
shabbat shalom
elliot
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Signs of life


The onus has always been on kidnappers to prove that their hostages are alive and well. Yet this week, the government of Binyamin Netanyahu paid Hamas to do just that.

Rather than tell Hamas that unless it could prove Gilad Schalit was in good condition there was nothing to negotiate, Israel agreed to release 20 Palestinian women prisoners in exchange for a recent video of the captive soldier.

The official spin is that these Palestinian ladies are not accomplished terrorists. Yet each and every one of them tried to kill, or help someone else try to kill Israeli soldiers or civilians. They are members of Fatah, Islamic Jihad and Hamas. Some, like the knife-wielding Bara'a Malki, are juveniles serving short terms. Others such as the 47-year-old Zohar Hamdan, were caught smuggling suicide bomb belts.

Forget those stereotypes about Jewish business acumen. This was a bad bargain.

In paying for this "sign-of-life," Israel has also certified that Hamas's counterintelligence operation is superb. Clearly, our intelligence agencies don't have a handle on where Schalit is being kept - even though it's probably a relatively short drive from the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv.

Discharging the women inmates is phase one of a deal that could see the staged release of 1,000 terrorists, including key operatives behind some of the most heinous bloodbaths carried out by the Palestinian "resistance." If things go smoothly for Hamas, it will have essentially achieved the objectives put forth the very first week Schalit was taken prisoner three years ago.

The main stumbling block to total Israeli capitulation is, apparently, the security establishment's insistence that the 1,000 terrorists be confined to the Gaza Strip. Assuming further elasticity of Israeli principles, a steadfast Hamas politburo will have triumphed over two consecutive Israeli cabinets loaded with savvy ex-generals.

WHILE PAYING Hamas's price will end the Schalit family's ordeal, it will also have two perilous repercussions: Some of Hamas's most able "engineers" and tacticians will resume their careers; and the movement's standing within the Palestinian polity - and in the international arena - will further solidify.

Palestinians assert that Israel is holding 9,000 prisoners. If one Israeli soldier can buy 1,000 prisoners, how many will it take to deliver the other 8,000?

From Hamas's vantage point, all this could not come at a better time. The Islamists, under Egyptian auspices, may soon sign a "national unity" pact with Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah, paving the way for West Bank and Gaza elections in 2010. Hamas will then reasonably campaign as the "resistance" faction that can "deliver" Israeli concessions.

It is true that the Abbas "moderates" have shown no sign of wanting to come to an agreement with Israel - not with the Olmert-Livni government, and not with Netanyahu's. Fatah refuses to recognize the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state; Abbas's maximalist negotiating demands would have a militarized Palestine face a truncated Israel confined behind the 1949 Armistice Lines. Strategic settlement blocs would have to be abandoned. The cost of making peace on Abbas's terms would be acceding to the demand for millions of Palestinians to "return" to Israel proper.

Nor has Abbas prepared his people for the idea of coexistence. In fact, though he egged Israel on to rout Hamas during Operation Cast Lead, now he's exploiting the Goldstone Mission's findings, leading the bandwagon to have Defense Minister Ehud Barak, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi and Shin Bet head Yuval Diskin labeled "war criminals."

With all that, Abbas does proclaim his backing for a two-state solution. He does not advocate portraying the Palestinian conflict with Israel as part of the global jihad. Hamas, in contrast, will not even entertain the prospect of Israel's right to exist. And its theoreticians are unregenerate anti-Semites.

WE DO not presume to know the depth of suffering felt by Gilad Schalit and his parents, Noam and Aviva, dignified and indefatigable advocates for their son's freedom. But the government's responsibility extends to the entire House of Israel.

Much as we Israelis welcome a sign of life from the soldier whose fate is so much in our hearts, it is the government's duty to pursue his freedom mindful of the many other lives at stake down the road.