Ten (or so) snap judgments on Trump’s Jerusalem pronouncement

1. What Korean Peninsula? Trump has a knack for diverting attention from issues he'd rather you not focus on.

2. What Mueller investigation? What Russian/WikiLeaks/campaign collusion? You get the idea. Diversion is key to Trump's maddening Modus operandi.

3. What Russian entrenchments in Syria? What bad deal for Israel on the Syrian side of Golan Heights? What Iranian takeover of Iraq?

Forget all those -- focus onTrump's "recognition" of Jerusalem.

4.  BTW. The Russians already recognized west Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in April 2017. Trump, in practice" didn't even recognize west Jerusalem (even as a start).

4.  * Passports of US children born in Jerusalem will not be marked “Jerusalem, Israel.”

- Do you really think Washington needs three years or more to begin the process of building an embassy? How about putting a plaque: “Embassy of the USA” on the wall of the newly-built and well-fortified US Consulate in Talpiot, Jerusalem?

6. Nothing in Trump's statement changes the status quo, as the president himself said. By the way, I think he did a good reading job without going off on a tangent about, say, the size of the inauguration audience.  But if you actually watch his announcement all the way through you can see it took a toll.

7. Trump signed the very same waiver presidents before him signed (that didn’t make it into the speech).

8. He may have set the stage for a new tidal wave of Palestinian Arab violence.

9. Worse: His big empty gesture sets the stage for the "great" deal-maker to exact a steep price for “recognizing” Jerusalem.

The administration will supposedly unveil its proposed deal in early 2018.

Funnily, tragically, the Arabs don't see this and neither do the Trump-supporting Jews in the US and in Israel.

Or maybe...

If I’m right that Trump’s “recognition” of Jerusalem was intended to pave the way for heavy-handed pressure on Israel to make dangerous territorial concessions to the PLO – it might (counter-intuitively) explain Abbas’s violent reaction. Because, actually, Abbas does not want to make a real and lasting peace in which the Palestinian Arabs would have to come to terms with a Jewish national home in some part of “Palestine.” This situation recalls Ehud Barak’s go-for-broke offer to Yasser Arafat at Camp David II. Rather than take the best deal the Palestinian Arabs had ever been offered – he launched the second intifada.

10. Keep your eye on the ball: US policy since 1967 is to push Israel back to the hard-to-defend 1949 Armistice Lines (give or take) and Trump’s pronouncement doesn’t change that. Read the text.

So, what we have is, in principle, the right idea delivered ineptly by the Wrong Man at the Wrong Time in the wrong way.

With all that, it is sadly not surprising that Europe is again siding with the Arabs and that the Arabs -- following their 100-year script -- are turning to violence.


(*) h/t to IMRA for helping me crystallize this.

Register today for my talk at the Manhattan Jewish Center - See you Jan 9, 2018 Tuesday at 7:00 PM

Register now for my talk at the Manhattan Jewish Center - 

Hope to see you on Tuesday,  Jan 9, 2018, at 7:00 PM 

Follow this link

or copy & paste from below.

http://ebiz.jccmanhattan.org/PersonifyEBusiness/Default.aspx?TabID=416&pid=648196076&_ga=2.29753023.1056014840.1510908606-1115567384.1510671940&_gac=1.79932901.1510908606.CjwKCAiArrrQBRBbEiwAH_6sNBITfGSjY9f7RWz7OQurS7uRBACOq_Xjzql-Wpt2hOwbLCJ4EJp7_BoCjLgQAvD_BwE

Why Doesn't Sephardi Judaism have streams (Orthodox, Conservative & Reform) just like Ashkenazi Judaism does?

Why Doesn't Sephardi Judaism have streams (Orthodox, Conservative & Reform) just like Ashkenazi Judaism does?

&

When it comes to the idea of a national homeland for the Jews ... the PLO view


ABOUT MY JANUARY 2018 EAST COAST SPEAKING TOUR

UPDATED NOVEMBER 8, 2017 - Speaking engagements - email for specifics

Herzliya................DELIVERED -  Thank you!

Raanana................DELIVERED -  Thank you!


LONDON .........        DELIVERED - Thank you!

Next...

Hilton Tel Aviv Book Signing - November 8 at 7 PM

Also...

Rehovot ................ Monday, November 20 (morning)
                                 email for details

US East Coast......   January 2018 ...
                               email for venues, times, etc.

Invite me to speak at your organization...

elliot_jager@yahoo.com

Buy the book from Gefen or Amazon or Steimetzky or ask your local brick and mortar bookseller. 
In Jerusalem, also buy at independent bookseller Pomeranz
(around the corner from the original Knesset building on King George Street),

Balfour in Raanana

I will be doing a curtain raiser in Raanana for my forthcoming book on the Balfour Declaration (with an opportunity to advance order).

Here are the details (the talk will be in English):

במכללת דוברי האנגלית ביום שני הבא 11/9 בשעה 9 על הצהרת בלפור.

משך ההרצאה שעה והיא תתקיים במשכן למוסיקה, רחוב הפלמ"ח 2א' רעננה.

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

Anxiety over the upsurge in Palestinian Arab terror helped relegate to the back burner the Jewish world’s furor over the Israeli government’s plan to bolster the Chief Rabbinate’s monopoly over conversions and to revoke its pledge to formalize a place for non-Orthodox streams at the Western Wall plaza.

click for article

The Jewish Wars...

The British election was not about Israel. The dust hasn't settled. But they'll be raising a glass of juice at tonight's iftar meal in Gaza at Hamas headquarters

Jeremy Corbyn Reprise article 

Pro-Israelism and its Discontents - It is more complicated than you think

With so many folks writing about 1967, I decided to…

(a) Show the fundamentally unswerving nature of US policy regarding the West Bank since the Six Day War 

(b) Point out that successive administrations and Jewish actors have sought to dissociate support for Israel from support for its retention of the West                                  Bank;

(c) Puncture the notion that US Jewish criticism of Israel is novel or daring;

(d) Posit that maybe disagreement over the West Bank may not fully explain a certain cooling we sense in the American Jewish-Israel relationship.

Elliot

The piece is here...
Pro-Israelism and its Discontents

Does the world needs yet another book on American Jewish history? The short answer is yes. Here is why...

Full article here: History

How we got to today does actually matter - The Six Day War in context

You have joined this movie already in progress.

"Occupied" territories?
 "Palestinian Occupied Territories"  "Israeli Occupied West Bank" --

What is the prequel to this story?

This is the prequel...

Where were you in 1967?

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?