The yarmulke adds a nice touch, no?

America Israel Public Affairs Committee in the Trump Era/J Street Era

Antisemitism, Trump and the Blame Game

We now know that an Israeli-American teenager made the bomb threats against US Jewish community centers. 

It struck me that the American Jewish community’s intramural bickering over anti-Semitism deserved a deeper look. 

I was curious why liberals needed to point to one kind of antisemitism while conservatives felt compelled to point in a different direction. 

Why —besides ideological rigidity — not go beyond the either/or?

And why is April 19th a day to be extra cautious...

All this led to the tour d'horizon below.

To Read Article

Hillel & the Struggle for Jewish Continuity

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwZ8wRaHufjfbjFKM0NNeWpVTG8

Taking Stock of Donald Trump

This is my "taking stock" of Trump piece that I wrote on the eve of his inauguration.

Some books I read in 2016 and can recommend as worth your time...

“Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief” by Lawrence Wright,

“It Can’t Happen Here,” by Sinclair Lewis

The Tragedy if Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 by Frank Dikotter

Jabotinsky by Hillel Halkin

Final Solution by David Cesarani

Coming Apart: The State of White America by Charles Murray 

The Misunderstood Op-ed

In the beginning there was the op-ed. The op-ed begot the blog. And the blog begot the talkback.

The first op-eds, as we know them, ran on September 21, 1970 in The New York Times. The editors were frank in telling readers that their purpose was not to “counterbalance” the newspaper’s views, nor to provide a platform opposite the editorial page for those who disagreed with the editorial line.

The idea, the paper explained, was for outsiders to diversify the paper’s own stable of columnists. 

The raison d'etre was diversity not balance.

That first batch of op-eds saw economist W.W. Rostow writing about the military budget; Gerald Johnson of The New Republic poking fun at the Nixon White House, and China-expert Han Suyin (Elizabeth Comber) writing from “Peking.” All this alongside Anthony Lewis’s regular column.

For 46 years now, those of us in a love-hate relationship with the Times have been kvetching that its op-ed pages are unbalanced. Truth is, though, they were never meant to be otherwise. Indeed, most days you would be hard pressed to find even a single viewpoint that is categorically opposed by the newspaper. 

Take the four op-eds running on November 28, 2016. In-house columnist Paul Krugman warns that Donald Trump is positioning himself to use the power of the presidency to expand his personal wealth. Contributor Achy Obejas, a Cuban-American, writes about how ambivalent he feels over the death of Fidel Castro. Policy wonk Christopher Daggett addresses the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to auction public airwaves. And Douglas Harris, an economist, decries the appointment of Betsy DeVos as education secretary.

The Times editorial page has historically been antagonistic toward Israeli policies. This outlook is echoed by columnists Roger Cohen and Tom Friedman – with outside contributors sometimes piling on.

In 2016, Israel’s ambassador, Ron Dermer appeared on the op-ed pages once — in a letter to the editor. Israel’s UN Ambassador Danny Danon got three letters published.

The Times, as the flagship of the liberal media, is an easy target. My hunch is that any analysis of The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed pages would turn up a similar policy, only in the conservative direction.

Since the late 1990s, the Internet has fostered a deluge of voices though not a torrent of counterbalancing opinion. 

Of course some platforms abjure being pigeonholed, but in the main right-wing writers and readers seek out right-wing sites; left-wing writers and readers seek out left-wing sites.

The real purpose of the blog and talk-back is not to counterbalance but to drive Internet traffic. Not only do bloggers write for free — they use their own so

cial media channels to promote the sites that run them thus generating more page views and unique visitors.

In 1921, Manchester Guardian editor C.P. Scott (pictured left) coined the phrase “comment is free,” adding that “the voice of opponents no less than that of friends has a right to be heard.”

Maybe that’s a credo belatedly worth resurrecting.

For Everything You Wanted to Know About the Balfour Declaration

I'd like to call your attention to the Balfour 100 website.

In addition to the 100^th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, 2017 is the 120^th anniversary of the First Zionist Congress, the 70^th anniversary of the UN General Assembly Partition Resolution, the 50^th anniversary of the Six-Day War, the 40^th anniversary of Anwar Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem, and the 30^th anniversary of the first intifada.

Perhaps you have heard that the moderate Palestinian Arab camp wants to sue the British government for issuing the Declaration. 

That suggests that the Arab-Israel conflict is not about boundaries, settlements, or about this or that Israeli policy, but reflects unrelenting Arab refusal to accept the right of the Jewish people to a national homeland in any part of Palestine.

This is what the extremist Hamas Charter says about the Balfour Declaration:

You may speak as much as you want about regional and world wars. They [the Jews] were behind World War I, when they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate, making financial gains and controlling resources. They obtained the Balfour Declaration, formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and paved the way for the establishment of their state. It was they who instigated the replacement of the League of Nations with the United Nations and the Security Council to enable them to rule the world through them. There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it.

Whereas this is what the Palestine Liberation Organization still says in the Palestinian National Charter:

Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people; it is an indivisible part of the Arab homeland and the Palestinian people are an integral part of the Arab nation. The Balfour Declaration, the Mandate for Palestine, and everything that has been based upon them, are deemed null and void. Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the true conception of what constitutes statehood. Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong.

This Balfour 100 site http://www.balfour100.com/ simply puts the Balfour Declaration in factual context.

Where would Ze'ev Jabotinsky fit into today's Israeli political spectrum?

Summer Hiatus - Meantime Catch me on Twitter

I'm on Summer Hiatus

I'm taking a break from blogging - but catch me on Twitter.

Just Seven More Bombing Days Left in Ramadan 2016

Both Hamas and the PLO responded to the murder of 13 year-old Hallel Yaffa Ariel (while she slept in her bed), by lauding the Palestinian Arab killer as a holy martyr.

We are all engulfed by a perfect storm of hatred – all around Muslims are marking Ramadan with the traditional (mostly Muslim-on-Muslim) blood-letting; Istanbul +Yemen +Syria + Jordan +Orlando +Lebanon + Israel.

Muslim young people on social media are goading each other to violence; their clergy in the mosques are inciting to hatred of the other; and their political leaders in government, from the West Bank PLO to Hamas in Gaza are using their official media outlets to add fuel to the fire.

It is meritorious, in Palestinian eyes, to kill Jews.

It's not just young people. The mother of Ariel's killer was positively orgasmic that her monster-son's died "defending" the Muslim holy sites; and she expressed faith ins'allah that other youngsters would follow in her spawn's bloody footsteps.

Pretty sick, no?

But here is something still sicker.

Machsom Watch moved swiftly to burnish the Palestinian Arab image. It is organizing meetings between gullible Israelis (and English-speaking conflict tourists) with "still peace-loving" Palestinian leaders in the coming days.

Machsom Watch is an unregistered foreign agent of the EU, other European governments, and overseas foundations dedicated (in the first instance) to pushing Israel back to the 1949 Armistice Lines.

Meantime, "In Israeli-occupied Netanya" on Thursday night another Shahid-wannabe stabbed two shoppers at an open market. Recall that Ramadan began with an attack in "occupied-Tel Aviv."

In Britain, Jeremy Corbin, the anti-Zionist leader of the Labour Party, compared Jewish support for the Israeli government to Muslim support for ISIS. (He is against ISIS as he backs Hamas and Hezbollah.)  The occasion was his taking receipt of an internal report on Jew-hatred within his party. The report asked party members not to call Jews "Zios" and (fair is fair) asked Jews not to dig too deeply into the anti-Jewish histories of party activists.

Over at Haaretz, the strangely well-funded /understandably low circulation post-Zionist outlet, is cheering the rapprochement between the Netanyahu and Erdogan governments. 

Just as Turkey facilitated ISIS and flooded Europe with over 1 million Muslims  "asylum seekers" (and demanded protection money from the Germans to stop), so Vlad Putin's Russia exported Muslim "militants" to Syria. 

Now, as fate would have it, Turkey paid a price for Vlad Putin's policies. Turns out the Istanbul airport bombers were Russian-speakers from the Muslim-majority  "stans" -- former Soviet republics.

Speaking of Haaretz – the paper's luminaries are decamping to London next week where there will be some de rigueur criticism of "Israeli policies" lots of post-Zionist soul-searching and, for balance - criticism of Israel from another perspective: the PLO's thuggish minister-of-sporting-relations-with-the-gullible-Zios, Jibril Rajoub, will fly in from Occupied palestine. The entire festival is bankrolled by the Clore Foundation with a little help from Yachad (the J-Street clone). 

Of course, Rajoub will have to, somehow, get by all those Zionist roadblocks, traverse the apartheid roads, the checkpoints, avoid poisoned wells, circumvent fanatical settlers, gigantic walls that cut pastoral farmers from their fields, and other indignities to make it to London. Can he? Stay tuned.

Department of Agitprop. This week Haaretz devotes its Friday magazine to rehabilitating the still-darling of the Israeli peace camp Marwan Barghouti. He helped orchestrate the murders of scores of Israelis during the second intifada and now sits in prison (Israel has no death penalty.) 

Can We All Just Get Along? 

Haaretz favors Barghouti over Mohammed Dahlan, another PLO thug-in-waiting also seen as a plausible replacement to Mahmud Abbas, palestine's president-for-life.

As for next week: 2 July/27 Ramadan is Islam's' Night of Power.  Will it be bloodier than last year's? 

Yes, Morally Obtuse Doves Can Fly

Ilana Dayan, a talented dovish advocacy journalist and an intellectual in her own right, interviewed Tel Aviv-Jaffa's pugnacious, dovish, Labor Party Mayor Ron Huldai on Army Radio Thursday morning. 

Before entering political life, Huldai spent 26 years in the Israeli Air Force. He also picked up an undergraduate degree in history from Tel Aviv University.

Dove-to-dove, Dayan egged Huldai on and His Honor, on the face of it, relished the opportunity to be goaded.

She asked him what he thought of the nutter talk-backers who (she reported) expressed happiness that "left-wing" Tel Aviv took a terror hit.

That gave Huldai the opening to blame the "occupation" for Wednesday night's terror attack that took four lives…

“We might be the only country in the world where another nation is under occupation without civil rights. You can’t hold people in a situation of occupation and hope they’ll reach the conclusion everything is alright....

“The problem is that when there is no terrorism, no one talks about [the occupation... We are 49 years into an occupation that I was a participant in...

“We need to show to our neighbors that we really intend to return to reality, to a Jewish state that is smaller but that has a solid Jewish majority..."

From the perspective of the "other nation," the "occupation" is not 49 years old – it is over 100 years old. 

Our neighbors don't want a "solid Jewish majority" in a truncated Israel. They want "Palestine." Full stop.

They see the return of the Jews in large numbers as the "original sin" of the Zionists.

They have no interest in "final status arrangements."

The "other nation" has been engaged in a zero-sum conflict with Zionism since 1917, at least. 

The "other nation" opposed the settlement of Tel Aviv in 1909. It still does. 

It rejects the right of the state of the Jewish people to exist anywhere in the Middle East. Always has. 

The most moderate leader of the "other nation," Mahmud Abbas, refuses to accept Israel's existence as a Jewish state.

The Arabs' most forthcoming peace offer (The Arab Peace Initiative) is a Trojan Horse.

The "other nation" has rejected endless opportunities at compromise. It has rejected a Palestinian Arab state time and again (starting in 1948) because the price included acknowledging the right of a Jewish state too.

The Palestinian Arabs have made a fetish of victimization. They have made themselves permanent refugees. They have raised new generations on hate meshed with Muslim fanaticism.

They have closed their minds and hardened their hearts. 

They have no interest in compromise that leaves us standing. 

The "other nation" fought Israel, boycotted Israel, divested from Israel, sanctioned Israel -- when the Arabs controlled the West Bank and Gaza;  when the Arabs dominated east Jerusalem, and the Temple Mount. Did the years 1949-1967 vanish from the collective memory.

But even if the mayor, his history degree notwithstanding, knows none of this – why would he willfully make such despicable, divisive, and inopportune polemical statements while the murdered had yet to be buried. 

What possess such revolting "blind dove" smugness?

And, no, the Arab-Israel dispute –which Huldai claims is about the West Bank "occupation"  -- is not the "only" conflict in the world. 

Here is a list of hundreds upon hundreds others many involving "occupations" real and imagined.

Anyway, how Jews can be said to "occupy" Judea and Samaria is beyond my ken. Perhaps the Arabs feel occupied. But the land is liberated. We have to bridge that gap but that requires good will on both sides.

We Israeli Jews are not pure as the driven snow.  It is fashionable to argue for territorial compromise --though to do so one would have to be oblivious to what's going on around us. It is acceptable to criticize Netanyahu government policies. I do it all the time. And yes, some Israelis have become corrupted, chauvinistic, and fanatical -- almost indistinguishable from "the other nation."

And yet... and yet, it is undeniable that the overwhelming responsibility for the Arab – Israel conflict rests with the Arabs. It always has.

Arab intransigence, rejectionism, and violence (like last night's) has done Palestinian Arabs lasting harm. They mean to kill Jews but the collateral damage is their own future. Their own souls.

For all these reasons, it is hard to respect Huldai's views so ineptly, callously, and heartlessly articulated at the worst possible time. 

It would be so if the blind doves knew what they were talking about. It is all the more painful because the arguments they make are --let's be frank -- void of merit.

In Gaza, Palestinian Arabs could have built a Singapore on the Mediterranean. Instead they build death-tunnels and frontally embrace extreme Islam. 

In the West Bank, the international community has invested, billions upon billions of dollars on Palestinian development with not much to show for it.

How many years will the "occupation" be blamed for the Palestinian failure to develop political institutions?  We want them to. We need them to. They just can't manage it.

Look at all the EU money invested in inculcating tolerance and how little there is to show for it.

If anyone wants to end the "occupation" how about showing up at the negotiating table? 

More than their moral obtusenes, the timing, Dr. Ilana Dayan, the timing, Mayor Ron Huldai-- was so off.

Have you no shame?

The Political Golden Mean

Political moderation is fostered by limiting direct democracy and bolstering representative government. 

That was James Madison's model of democracy. 

Take human nature into account and design a system that champions tolerance, minority rights, and blocks political lurching.

It is an imperfect system but better than all others.

Alas, 50+ years of political party reform leading to hyper- democratization, decades of shock radio, the it-is-what-it-is reality of social media, has empowered folks who really should stay home with their six-packs and watch Extreme Sports on television.

The jinni can't be put back in the bottle. But can a Madisonian political framework be configured to meet today's realities?

US voters face an unenviable choice between Trump, Clinton (maybe Sanders) and the Gary (who?) Johnson. 

All are deeply flawed candidates.  

When an electoral system tells you this is the best America can do -- fix the system!

America needs to do better.

I am dismayed by Republican worthies like Paul Ryan and GOP mega-donors like Sheldon Adelson lining up behind Trump.

As Charles Murray wrote definitively recently in The National Review:

"Donald Trump is unfit to be president in ways that apply to no other candidate of the two major political parties throughout American history."

Trump make America great again? I don't think so.

Behind the Scenes at Yad Vashem

MARCH 2016 -   The idea of a Zionist memorial to the victims of Hitler's war against the Jews came to Mordechai Shenhavi (1900-1983) even before the dreadful scale of the Holocaust was fully grasped.

In August 1942, Shenhavi, a socialist-leaning member of Kibbutz Beit Alfa in the Jezreel Valley, had a terrifying dream. In it he saw millions of Nazi victims marching toward Zion carrying tombstones on their shoulders. Gripped by this vision, he struggled to persuade the pre-state Zionist institutions to take up the proposal.

.....please go to Israel My Glory  (it is a Christian Zionist magazine) for the complete article.

----------------------------------------------------

Book Review:  The Uncompromising Truth About Meir Kahane From the Woman who Knew Him Best  

Rabbi Meir Kahane: His Life and Thought (1976-1983)

By Libby Kahane

Institute for the Publication of the Writings of Rabbi Meir Kahane

684 pages

$26. 50  |  NIS 103

The legacy of Rabbi Meir Kahane (1932-1990) remains so fraught that to say a sympathetic word -- no matter how qualified-- about any aspect of his career is to invite opprobrium. 

Yet the fact is that Kahane was one of the most influential, selfless, brilliant American Jewish personalities of the post-World War II era. 

In 1968, he founded the Jewish Defense League in New York, and in 1971 after immigrating to Israel he established the political party Kach (outlawed in 1988).

Under Kahane, JDL was a catalyst pressuring the US Jewish establishment to put Soviet Jewry, Jewish poverty, and urban anti-Semitism, higher on its agenda.

Kahane in his original JDL incarnation saved the souls of countless impressionable young Jews from terminal ennui if not outright assimilation.

After his move to Israel he became ever more extreme in his religious views. Maybe that was because the Zionist revisionist establishment spurned him. He was tarred as a racist because he wanted to "remove" the Arabs from Israel. Today, his devotees essentially reject the Herzlian model of Zionism and would replace it with a theocracy led by "Torah-fearing" Jews.

There was no grey in the mature Kahane's worldview. He paid the price for being obdurate. I can't think of another Jewish leader who served prison sentences in both the US and Israel. What other Israeli politician was held in administrative detention? How many went on hunger strikes time and again?

No one of his generation banged out as many fluidly-written, influential, polemical articles, pamphlets, and books. No American-born Jew had so much influence on the Israeli body politic. None could draw a crowd or mobilize young Jews to action like Kahane. His ideas came rapid-fire replete with action plans, blueprints, and milestones.

He was indefatigable and unbelievably creative. One day marching in Skokie against the Nazis the next organizing patrols in Brooklyn. One day forming a think tank another a training camp. One day trying to salvage JDL (which had shriveled when he made aliya) another articulating a platform against what he considered decadent Western culture.

He created front-groups and spin-offs such as the Conference of Jewish Activists, Student Activists for Soviet Jewry, Return [Diaspora Jews to Israel], and the Museum of the Potential Holocaust, to cite just some.

And in 1990, tragically, he was murdered in Manhattan by an Arab terrorist, part of a cabal that would be tied to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing -- the forerunner of September 11, 2001 and the Long War we find ourselves in.

Did I say he was charismatic? I found the early Kahane mesmerizing. I first appreciated the enormity of the Shoah because he talked about it when others didn't. Following him into the street from the auditorium of Hunter College chanting "Never Again" and sitting down on Third Avenue and 67^th Street near the Soviet UN Mission in Manhattan was like an ecstatic-religious experience for me.

   

But in his Kach incarnation his ideas sounded reactionary and repugnant. And for most people that is how he is remembered. For saying no to tolerance, no to respect for minority rights, no to religious pluralism, and no to compromise with political opponents. There were red lines. In response to a grenade attack on a 1983 Peace Now demonstration that took the life of Emil Grunzweig, Kahane declared that political violence against Jews was unacceptable.

No surprise then that the second volume of Rabbi Meir Kahane: His Life and Thought (1976-1983) written by his widow Libby Kahane has met not so much with disapproval as with averted eyes.

This disregard is unfortunate.

Like the first volume, published in 2008, this work presents essential material— and photographs— upon which any future critical appraisal of Kahane's career will likely rely. While far from iconography, his widow understandably writes with empathy and admiration.

That said, Libby Kahane, a retired librarian, has written a lucidly crafted, well-organized, and extensively footnoted narrative. Almost everyone in Kahane's circle is acknowledged. Virtually every documented article and speech is synopsized. True believers will be mesmerized. Historians will be grateful.

There is also a compassionate humane reason not to ignore this work.

Kahane never made money by being a "professional Jew." His family never enjoyed the accoutrements of middle class Jewish life. He sought to keep his family out of the limelight. Yet as fate would have it, Libby Kahane lost not only her husband but also a son, Binyamin Ze'ev, to Arab terror. The younger Kahane and his wife Talya were murdered in 2000 while driving early one morning on Road 60 in the West Bank during the second intifada. They were apparently random victims of PLO shooters. The couple's young children sitting in the back of the car came away, mercifully, physically unharmed. 

Misfortune continues into the next generation: Libby's grandson-- her daughter Tova's son Meir Ettinger-- a leader of the so-called Hilltop Youth was arrested on suspicion of vandalism against Muslim and Christian properties.

***

Volume II picks up in 1976 with Kahane's second attempt at running for the Knesset. 

His first effort in 1973 garnered nearly 13,000 votes about 3,000 short for that year's electoral threshold. 

Rav Tzvi Yehuda Kook, spiritual leader of the Gush Emunim settlement movement, was not altogether unsympathetic to Kahane's first Knesset run even though most of Kook's followers would presumably have voted for Mafdal (the National Religious Party). The book concludes on the eve of his election in 1984 to the 11^th Knesset. A third and final volume is planned.

Blocked by establishment organizations and many synagogues from public speaking, Kahane developed workarounds. There was his Jewish Press newspaper platform. He was also a first-class propagandist (in the pre-social media era) coming up with catchphrases that had instant resonance: "Not One Inch," "There is No Palestine," "Jewish Blood Is Not Cheap." 

He sought confrontation -- engaged in the propaganda of the deed. For instance, he had no compunction about advocating the destruction of the Muslim shrines atop the Temple Mount.

In his 1977 Knesset campaign, Kahane— now bearded— espoused a bellicose far-right Orthodox platform on conversions to Judaism, abortion, and religious pluralism. He was visceral in his attitude toward intermarriage and interpreted the presence of non-Jewish volunteers in Israel as a mortal danger.

Some of Kahane's positions are almost too painful to recount because he didn't begin his career as a religious fanatic. But once he became one there would be no wiggle room for compromise. That was no less true on politics. He vehemently protested against Menachem Begin for cutting a deal with Anwar Sadat at Camp David that led to Israel's withdrawal from the Sinai. Others did too, of course, but on military and strategic grounds.

What you don't get in this book is a handle on Kahane the man, husband, and father. The couple married in 1956 and had four children. Now a great-grandmother, Libby offers only a few vignettes about their personal life -- a bar mitzvah planned while Meir was in prison or a throwaway line about how much he missed the children. She seems determined to protect the privacy of a very public man. I hope in the final volume she will say more.

Had Kahane lived he would today probably be leading an opposition faction in the Knesset. I abhor the messianic, demagogic, and apocalyptic positions he espoused as leader of Kach. Israel's broken political system needs reform to bolster centrist and moderate elements. That said, it's indisputable that the existing system treated him shabbily. Rather than face up to the ideological challenge Kahane posed he was stifled. The same system that abides Arab Knesset members who relish the chance to incite would not tolerate Kahane's incitement.

  

Today those who carry the torch for Kahane's ideas are rudderless. Some may see this as a blessing. But the fact that they basically have no legitimate outlet for their views may do more harm than good. To paraphrase Lyndon Johnson: It would probably be better to have them inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.

---

Elliot Jager is a Jerusalem-based journalist, senior editor at The Jerusalem Report, and author of 'The Pater: My Father, My Judaism, My Childlessness' (The Toby Press). You can follow him on Twitter @JAGERFILE.