Netanyahu & Obama...continued

Seeing linkage, plainly


Saeb Erekat, the hardline chief PLO negotiator, is described as "discouraged" and "disappointed" in The Washington Post by the outcome of Monday's White House meeting between Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and President Barack Obama.

He started out in a bad mood, telling The Jerusalem Post he opposed any friendly gestures by the Arab League toward Israel even if the Netanyahu government put a total freeze on "settlement" construction in Judea, Samaria... and metropolitan Jerusalem. And Aaron David Miller, a former US Middle East negotiator who leans left, told The New York Times that "Anyone who was expecting a major rift in the US-Israeli relationship is going to be disappointed."

It will take a while yet to get a handle on the direction Obama wants to take. How will he finesse the seemingly irreconcilable differences with Netanyahu exposed at Monday's meeting? On Iran, for one, Israel feels more acutely threatened than the US. And on the Palestinian issue - which Obama intimated should be solved en route to grappling with Iran - the president gave the impression that Israel's leadership could somehow rapidly enable the creation of a non-threatening Palestinian state

Netanyahu has foolishly allowed himself to be perceived as an obstacle to progress by making an issue over Palestinian statehood, when he could so easily have found an "in principle" formulation that would in no way have undermined his legitimate concerns about the dangers Palestinian sovereignty poses.

The Palestinian Arabs have been opposing a two-state solution ever since the British Mandate. Nowadays, the PLO says it wants "Palestine" and Israel to exist side by side - though you wouldn't know it from the way it behaves at the negotiating table.

An insight into why this is so comes from Hussein Agha and Robert Malley in the June 11 New York Review of Books: "For Palestinians, the most primal demands relate to addressing and redressing a historical experience of dispossession, expulsion, dispersal, massacres, occupation, discrimination, denial of dignity, persistent killing-off of their leaders, and the relentless fracturing of their national polity. These… yearnings are of a sort that, no matter how precisely fine-tuned, a two-state deal will find it hard to fulfill."

No matter. On Monday, Obama in effect told Netanyahu: You want our help in stopping Iran getting nuclear weapons? Ease your grip on the West Bank so the Palestinians can create their state there.

Exerting leverage in this way is nothing new, as veteran Israeli diplomat Zalman Shoval points out. Jimmy Carter tried to link aid to Israel with a settlement freeze; George H.W. Bush tried to link loan guarantees for the absorption of Soviet Jews to a settlement freeze; and he even linked Israeli concessions on the Palestinian front to gaining Arab cooperation in America's 1991 Gulf War.

WHAT MAKES the current situation unique is the gravity of the Iranian threat and the ascendency of Hamas and Hizbullah, combined with the fact that a charismatic American president, capable of using the "power to persuade" in a coherent and determined manner, is apparently becoming convinced - in part by ostensible "friends of Israel" - that Israeli intransigence is at the root of Palestinian and wider regional tension.

Obama is not the first president to watch some among the Jewish lobby pressuring Israel on behalf of US policy, rather than the other way around. For example, leading figures in the community facilitated the Reagan administration in its desire to diplomatically recognize the PLO in 1988.

Administrations have long enjoyed political cover for their Israel-related policies from elements in the US Jewish community. It is legitimate for Jewish Americans not to support Israeli policies; Jewish machers have been giving our premiers a piece of their minds since Nahum Goldmann first tried to set David Ben-Gurion straight. And it is legitimate for them to champion American policies to Israeli leaders. It's even fine for them to yell gevalt over Israeli policies.

Where American Jews cross the line is in proactively lobbying their government to pressure Israel into steps most Israelis strongly feel would put this country in jeopardy - and in doing so under the intellectually dishonest banner of being pro-Israel.

This is a challenging time for Diaspora Jews. Netanyahu has failed to define Israel's "red lines," or say unequivocally what he's for. Nevertheless, no one whose lobbying platform is indistinguishable from Erekat's should get away with telling you he's "pro-Israel."

The Day After...

Washington summit

The long-awaited summit between Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and President Barack Obama finally took place yesterday - carrying on for considerably longer than scheduled. When it was over, both men came out smiling and exchanging compliments. Obama affirmed that the "special relationship" the two countries share is alive and well.

That tells us little about how things really went inside on the critical topic of Iran's quest for nuclear weapons. It tells us nothing about whether the president was privately persuaded that peace-making with the Palestinians has been made unworkable because Fatah and Hamas are bitterly polarized, and because even the relatively moderate Mahmoud Abbas has yet to abandon maximalist demands about boundaries and the so-called right of return. Nor do we know if Obama will press Abbas to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

Perhaps the biggest unknown is whether the two men - whatever their earlier prejudices - now feel that they can trust each enough to collaborate. Though Obama and Netanyahu had their "blink" moment in July 2008 at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, Monday's was their first lengthy and substantive get-together.

Obama has had greater exposure to the Palestinian "narrative" than previous presidents. Speaking to reporters after their meeting, he talked of the humanitarian situation in Gaza in the same breath as he recalled the security situation in Sderot. It would have been more helpful for him to note that Gaza would not be suffering deprivations if it wasn't led by a violent Islamist movement that uses the territory to attack Israel.

Regardless of what was said publicly yesterday, the question is whether Obama appreciates the distinction between a Netanyahu who is reluctant to foster the establishment of what could quickly devolve into Hamas-led "Palestine" on the West Bank, and a Netanyahu who is an "obstacle to peace." The two are not synonymous. Most Israelis do not have to be convinced that the establishment of a demilitarized Palestinian state (initially with limited sovereignty) is a clear Israeli interest. That's why the Netanyahu government is already reportedly holding discreet talks with Abbas's people on renewing negotiations.

Yet Netanyahu critics in Washington, along with the faux pro-Israel community, have been urging Obama to push for Israeli concessions on settlements as the perceived key obstacle, though they can't help but admit that the Palestinians are paralyzed by divisions and have been unwilling to accept Israel's viable proposals for reconciliation. Still, goes their reasoning, if it looks like the administration is not leaning on Israel, that "could turn opinion against Obama across the region." The question is whether Obama has himself accepted this argument.

Obama emphasized America's continuing commitment to a two-state solution, while Netanyahu said that if the two sides made progress the "terminology would take care of itself." The premier also reiterated that Israel has no wish to rule over the Palestinians and that they must rule themselves. He said he wanted to move the negotiating process along so that the two peoples could live side-by-side. Obama emphasized the road map and the obligations both sides have in fulfilling it, including a halt to settlements - a long-standing US demand.

ON IRAN the president said that America was committed to Israel's security and agreed that Iranian nuclear weapons were a threat not just to Israel, but to the US and to regional stability. Obama said he would not place a deadline on talks aimed at persuading Teheran that it is not in its interest to pursue nuclear weapons, but that obviously they could not drag on forever, and that he expected results this year. He earlier told Newsweek that the US is not taking any options off the table with respect to Iran.

Obama emphasized making progress on the Palestinian track, but in no way played down the looming menace from Iran. Netanyahu emphasized the threat from Teheran, but also said he was ready to "immediately" resume talks with the Palestinians. What was perhaps most surprising was the firmness with which Obama stressed a sequence - progress on the Palestinian front on the route to stopping Iran - so at odds with Netanyahu's view.

In the coming weeks, the president will be meeting in Washington with Abbas and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. After that, he will deliver a special address to the Muslim world from Cairo. Then we will we have a clearer picture of where the new administration is heading.

Hours Away ...Obama & Netanyahu

Obama, the realist


At 10:30 this morning Washington time, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu enters the Oval Office for a critical 90-minute meeting with President Barack Obama. That will be followed by a short photo-op and a second session over lunch.

There are those who are hoping Obama will read Netanyahu the riot act over "settlements," press him over the "two-state" issue and tell him that Israel's "privileged relationship" with America is over. Others, who keep insisting they are "pro-Israel," want him to use tough love, to impose a solution - because, supposedly, it's best in the long run.

We're hoping they will discover that Obama is a realist who understands why his predecessors' peace-making efforts failed to end the conflict.

Naturally, Washington and Jerusalem have had policy differences, yet these do not obscure our long-term mutual strategic interests. After a series of meetings with Arab leaders, and after seeing Netanyahu today, Obama should conclude that the reason there has been no breakthrough is principally attributable to Arab intransigence.

But aren't settlements the main obstacle? If only they were. Arab rejectionism predates the issue of settlements by two whole decades.

Israel can hardly dispute the long-standing US contention that settlements complicate peace-making. The State Department issued its first disapproval of "settlement activity" in January 1968, when it criticized the construction of apartment buildings on Mount Scopus and the Sheikh Jarrah areas of east Jerusalem. Nowadays, however, peace-making realists grasp that Israel will under no circumstances uproot neighborhoods and communities that are an organic part of the country.

At the same time, the Jewish state is willing to make painful territorial concessions. Didn't it withdraw from the Sinai peninsula in return for peace with Egypt? And seeing no Palestinian partner for peace, it unilaterally pulled out of Gaza in 2005. The Palestinians could have transformed the Strip into the Singapore of the Mediterranean; instead, it became Hamastan.

And yet, Ehud Barak in 2000 and Ehud Olmert in 2008 both offered massive territorial concessions in the West Bank and metropolitan Jerusalem - only to be rebuffed.

AS A realist, Obama is unlikely to conflate - as many do - disparate issues. Construction in strategic settlement blocs (such as Ma'aleh Adumim); house demolition in east Jerusalem; "unauthorized outposts," and natural growth in established communities beyond the security barrier must each be understood in its own complexity. Failure to do so is a recipe for deadlock.

We hope Obama will stand behind the March 2004 letter George W. Bush sent to Ariel Sharon (a reiteration of Bill Clinton's policy) making it plain that the 1949 Armistice Lines are not the realistic lines for a final-status agreement.

Everyone pays rhetorical homage to the "two-state" solution. In 1988, the PLO began hinting that it was willing to abandon the destruction of Israel in favor of two states. While the authenticity of this PLO commitment remains debatable, all Israeli premiers from Yitzhak Rabin to Netanyahu have made it plain that Israel does not wish to rule over the Palestinians.

In practice, it is the Palestinians who reject the two-state solution.

Mahmoud Abbas dismissed Olmert's plan for land swaps that would have fast-tracked a two-state solution and provided the Palestinians with the equivalent of 100 percent of West Bank territory (plus a link to Gaza). The hitch? Abbas's obdurate insistence on an Israeli pullback to the hard-to-defend '49 lines, and on the "right" of refugees from the 1948 war, plus millions of their descendents, to settle in Israel.

Given what the Palestinians have done to Gaza, Netanyahu is saying: Before we put anything like Olmert's offer back on the table, let's figure out what kind of sovereignty the Palestinians can be given without Israel's security being endangered. Obama will surely not blame Israelis for not wanting to wake up to an Iranian Revolutionary Guard base looming over Ben-Gurion Airport.

The issue, then, is not how to quickly restart negotiations, but how to avoid past pitfalls. One clear sign that the president is a realist: He's reportedly urging the Arab League to modify its 2002 initiative, transforming it from an unworkable diktat to a genuine peace plan.

That would mean getting real about boundaries, refugees - and, we trust, recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.

Pope Goes, Netanyahu Goes. Obama at home

Dear Readers,
Have a restful shabbat. The pope is leaving in a few hours. Traffic will return to normal.
-elliot



From Benedict to Obama


The past week showed that on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Pope Benedict XVI just doesn't get it. Next week, however, should prove that President Barack Obama does get it - which is far more essential.

Curiously, where Palestinians and Israelis are concerned, the views of the Catholic Church mirror those of the secular European intelligentsia. Together they see one reality; we Israelis see another.

We see the Palestinians perpetuating the "occupation" by refusing to negotiate in good faith and Gaza ruled by a Hamas more interested in pursuing its Islamist war-to-the-finish against us than in helping its own people. We are conscious that the security barrier was erected only after unpardonable Palestinian violence that claimed over 1,000 Israeli lives.

We know that Palestinian youth are drawn to violence primarily because of the pathological values inculcated in them by a political culture that revels in victimization and score-settling. We believe that the only way the Palestinian polity will make essential compromises for peace is for its leaders to start telling their people that painful concessions on borders, the nature of sovereignty and the right of return are necessary.

We know, too, that Hamas will never let Fatah make those compromises while its patron in Teheran looms near.

ISRAELIS were distressed by some of the remarks the pontiff made when he visited the Palestinian Authority. But they were even more troubled by his deafening silence on Iran. The Church has said that a nuclear-armed Iran is unacceptable. Yet it has essentially ruled out military intervention as morally unjustifiable.

Why do our views on the Palestinians and Iran leave the Vatican and Europe's intelligentsia cold? Because embracing our admittedly bleak appraisal would be awkward for a Europe whose governments still subsidize trade with Teheran.

Also, we keep repeating what we oppose, while inadequately explaining what we propose. And, let's be honest, our failure to consistently honor our commitments to the international community also influences perceptions.

NEXT Monday the spotlight shifts from a Europe in denial about the Palestinians and Iran to an America forthrightly struggling to develop sensible policies. Having parlayed with Egypt's Hosni Mubarak on Monday and with King Abdullah yesterday, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will hold a fateful meeting with President Barack Obama in Washington.

There are those who want the president to outline to the premier the contours of an imposed solution. We trust they will be sorely disappointed. Peace doesn't have to be "imposed" on us. Zionism's greatest triumph would be a comprehensive resolution of the conflict in which Jewish rights are finally recognized.

Still, this will be a historic opportunity for Netanyahu to make it clear that this government does not oppose a Palestinian state - that, indeed, by asking tough questions about the nature of such a state, the prime minister is arguably taking the prospect more seriously than his recent predecessors.

Everyone pays lip service to the need for a Palestinian state, but Washington knows that the most pressing item on the regional agenda is the Iranian bomb. That is what it is hearing behind closed doors from Arab leaders - including those who tell waiting reporters that the Palestinian issue is paramount.

CIA director Leon Panetta was recently in Israel, reportedly to urge Israeli leaders not to surprise the administration by acting precipitously on Iran.

There is a camp in the administration that is arguing, "Better an Iran with a bomb than the bombing of Iran." On May 18, in the privacy of the Oval Office, Netanyahu needs to make Israel's "red lines" unmistakenly clear and tell Obama how right he was in saying that a nuclear Iran is a game-changer.

"Iran first" isn't an Israeli gambit to change the topic from the Palestinians. It is a sound evaluation that coolly identifies the only way forward.

Netanyahu has already made plain his determination, right away, to improve life for West Bank Palestinians on the economic front. An assurance from Obama that right behind the administration's current efforts to engage the mullahs stands a menu of crippling sanctions should be matched by Netanyahu's parallel assurance that once the Iranian menace fades away - taking the threat of Hamas and Hizbullah with it - his government will push hard, too, to meet the Palestinians more than half-way on the diplomatic front.

Pope in Israel -- Continued

Limits of interfaith


Perhaps we expect too much of priests, rabbis and imams. We want our clergy to be spiritual beacons, above the temporal fray; and to be politically savvy. Alas, on this earth there is no unscrambling politics and religion. And this inevitable mingling of the holy and the profane sometimes leaves us dismayed that those who claim a deeper understanding of the Creator's will should behave parochially.

Still, man is a political animal and in his image did he create religion.

At Yad Vashem on Monday, Pope Benedict XVI spoke mostly as a theologian - which left many Jews wanting. Granted, the German-born pontiff expressed opposition to Holocaust denial: "May the names of these victims never perish! May their suffering never be denied, belittled, or forgotten!" Yet his pledge on arriving at Ben-Gurion Airport to "honor the memory of the six million" would have been better fulfilled had he referenced the relationship between the Church's age-old "teaching of contempt" and what the Nazis did.

It was a stark contrast to the March 2000 visit by the charismatic John Paul II, who found a way, politically, to combine personal testimony with the Catholic attestation: "The Catholic Church, motivated by the Gospel law of truth and love, and by no political considerations, is deeply saddened by the hatred, acts of persecution and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews by Christians at any time and in any place."

At the Western Wall on Tuesday, Benedict's decision to speak briefly in Latin in theological vein, citing the Book of Lamentations, seemed eminently sensible. Moments earlier, on the Temple Mount, visiting what the Holy See diplomatically referred to as "Mosques Square," he also delivered an altogether apolitical, mildly theological statement about the children of Abraham.

Only at Hechal Shlomo, where his Orthodox audience received his denunciation of moral relativism with silent approval, did the pope manage the right combination of politics and religion, saying: "The Catholic Church is irrevocably committed to the path chosen at the Second Vatican Council."

We found ourselves feeling oddly positive about the Chief Rabbinate yesterday.

Politically and theologically, the Jewish world speaks to the Church in three ways - via world Jewish bodies; via biannual meetings between the chief rabbinate and the Vatican; and via the Israel Foreign Ministry. Hechal Shlomo united all three channels. Sephardi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar and his Ashkenazi counterpart Rabbi Yona Metzger acquitted themselves well - they could have been mistaken for the national religious chief rabbis of old. Their performances almost justified their annual budget.

And yet, to Palestinian Arab ears, their remarks must have sounded politically loaded.

WITH HIS vitriolic Monday night performance at Notre Dame, the chief Islamic judge of the Palestinian Authority, Sheikh Tayseer Tamimi, embodied the most awful combination of politics and religion.

Tamimi stole the podium to deliver a harangue bereft of spirituality and drenched in the politically profane. Remember that Tamimi represents - not Hamas, but the moderate side of Palestinian religiosity. His Christian compatriots, no more moderate, waved PLO flags at yesterday's papal mass in the Kidron Valley, amid a sea of Vatican and Israeli flags. And if you missed the Palestinian Authority's apology for Tamimi's theatrics, so did we. The dirty little secret about interfaith work is that it's invariably spearheaded by non-Muslims.

The pope, visibly discomfited by Tamimi's tirade - though he didn't understand it - left earlier than scheduled, after a forced handshake with the Muslim cleric. Dozens of Arabs in the interfaith audience applauded the sheikh's anti-Israel calumnies.

The Vatican, to its credit, criticized Tamimi for this "direct negation of what a dialogue should be." To that, amen.

Tamimi will be delighted to learn that the Protestant World Council of Churches is planning its own week-long blitz in June: agitation against the "occupation," "settlements" and Jewish rights in Jerusalem. Fortunately, WCC-affiliated churches are in decline, whereas evangelical denominations displaying profound empathy with the Jewish state are thriving.

Since there is no separating politics from religion, the best we can strive for is that the spiritual in religion informs our politics more than the worst in our politics informs our religion.

Pray we have the wisdom to know the difference.

The King's London Times Interview

Taking a break from the pope today. But I was stuck in "pope traffic" last night. Our reporters and chief photographer (who are out there in the field) tell me they are exhausted from covering the pope. Nothing like it, they say. They have to show up hours ahead of schedule to events to get through extremely tight security...
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Abdullah's Vital Role

As the Royal Jordanian Airlines jet carrying Pope Benedict XVI to Israel taxied toward the waiting dignitaries yesterday, the cockpit side windows were adorned with the Vatican and Israeli flags. That was in keeping with protocol, yet it was a remarkable sight: a Muslim carrier bringing the Catholic pontiff to the Jewish state.

Then, too, there was the afterglow of the warm hospitality extended to the pope earlier by King Abdullah II and Queen Rania.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is interested in meeting with Abdullah before he sees President Barack Obama next week in Washington. Yesterday, however, directly after welcoming the pope, Netanyahu was off to Sharm e-Sheikh for lunch with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and talks about the new government's approach to the Palestinian issue, Iran and, presumably, Gilad Schalit.

Abdullah, for his part, has met with Obama (on April 21); addressed the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC (last Friday); and granted (yesterday) a major interview to London's Times - headlined, on page one: King's Ultimatum: Peace Now Or It's War Next Year.

Throughout, he's been hammering home the message - delivered with regal understatement - that Israel is to blame for the negotiating impasse with the Palestinians, and that it has maybe 18 months to submit to the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative. Everything, he says, hinges on the Obama-Netanyahu meeting. If there is "no clear American vision" - read: If Obama doesn't lean hard on Israel - the president will lose his credibility, and the region will go up in smoke.

THE KING is a genuine moderate. His father made peace with Israel in 1994. In a region prone to shrill bullying, Abdullah prefers reasonable-sounding persuasion.

And yet it is striking that all his recent pronouncements held hardly a hint of Arab self-criticism; not a word about what the Palestinians need to do for peace.

The king naturally wants to end the "occupation." He claims the "Arab Peace Initiative is the most important proposal for peace in the history of this conflict." And he warns that "any Israeli effort to substitute Palestinian development for Palestinian independence" is unacceptable.

But the king surely knows that:

# Israel has no interest in "occupying" the Palestinians. That's been the stance of every premier from Rabin to Netanyahu. It is the Palestinians who have prolonged the "occupation" by rejecting generous offers to end the conflict (the latest proffered by Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni at the end of 2008).

# The Arab initiative, as it stands, is a fatally flawed take-it-or-leave-it diktat. Too bad, then, that just last week, Jordan denied it had agreed to a reported Obama administration suggestion that it spearhead efforts to make the plan more palatable.

# The Palestinians are hardly ready - today, right now - for total sovereignty. They are violently divided between the West Bank and Gaza. Fatah itself is polarized between generational factions. Palestinian political institutions are, shall we say, embryonic.

Stampeding the creation of a militarized "Palestine" would endanger both Israel and Jordan (a majority of whose population is Palestinian).

The good news is that moderate Jordan can play a vital role in fostering peace. We don't mean via such Abdullah platitudes as - "We are offering a third of the world to meet them with open arms" - but by working to narrow the differences between the parties. For no one understands the dynamics of Palestinian polity or appreciates the geostrategic lay of the land west of the Jordan River better than the king.

Rather than expecting Obama to deliver Israel prostrate, the king needs to lobby the Arab League for essential improvements to its plan: removing unrealistic demands for a total Israeli pullback to the hard-to-defend 1949 Armistice Lines; dropping their insistence on a Palestinian "right of return" to Israel proper - no more than a mechanism for demographically asphyxiating Israel; and adding a necessary plank committing the League to recognizing the legitimate rights of the Jewish people to self-determination.

The king does an excellent job of making the Arab position seem reasonable. But he could better advance the cause of peace by helping to make it reasonable in practice.

The Pope in Israel

Monday - Salve, Shalom


On the blustery morning of January 5, 1964, president Zalman Shazar and prime minister Levi Eshkol stood ready to "unofficially" welcome the first head of the Catholic Church to the Jewish state.

Pope Paul VI crossed into northern Israel via the Ta'anech gate, near Megiddo, from the Jordanian-held West Bank. Such was the excitement that local cinema houses advertised newsreel screenings of the visit within 24 hours of the pontiff's departure.

A day earlier, in a story datelined "Jerusalem, Jordan," UPI reported that the pope was practically trampled on his visit to the Via Dolorosa "when hysterically excited crowds pressed in upon him," and later escaped harm "when the arc-light cables in the church of the Holy Sepulcher caught fire while he was saying mass. Many pilgrims and worshipers were injured in the pushing, thrusting, shouting crowds whose unruliness at times threatened to overwhelm the 66-year-old pontiff…"

On the Israeli side of the 1949 Armistice Line, the pope was determined not to utter the name "Israel," nor hold any formal meetings with the Israelis - not even with chief rabbi Yitzhak Nissim. The Vatican did not recognize the Jewish state.

Pope Paul conducted Mass in Nazareth and dipped his hands in the Sea of Galilee. Then he made his way to western Jerusalem, thousands of Israelis lining the roads; 25,000 awaited him at the entrance to the city.

Just 111⁄2 hours after arriving, the pope stood before the Mandelbaum Gate connecting divided Jerusalem, ready to take his leave.

The area was floodlit and 5,000 well-wishers came to bid him farewell. The president and prime minister were there, as were religious affairs minister Zerah Warhaftig and Jerusalem mayor Mordechai Ish-Shalom.

In brief farewell remarks delivered in French, the pope chose to dwell on the controversial figure who was pontiff during the Holocaust: "Our great predecessor Pius XII… everybody knows what he did for the defense and the rescue of all those who were caught in [the war's] tribulations, without distinction; and yet you know suspicions and even accusations have been leveled again the memory of the great pontiff… [This is a] slight against history."

Back in Rome, the pope sent a thank-you cable to Israel's president in "Tel Aviv," thanking nameless "authorities" for their logistical assistance during his visit.

AS Israel greets Pope Benedict XVI today, we cannot fail to recall, fondly, the March 2000 visit of pope John Paul II; how, standing at the Western Wall, the leader of the Catholic Church stuffed a note into a crevice among the ancient stones imploring God's forgiveness for those who had caused Jews to suffer throughout ages.

Clearly, any appraisal of relations between the Church and the Zionist enterprise must take a long view - from the January 25, 1904 meeting between Theodor Herzl and Pius X, at which the pontiff refused to support Zionism or recognize the Jewish people; to December 30, 1993, when the Holy See established diplomatic relations with Israel; to Benedict's arrival at Ben-Gurion Airport this morning.

The conclusion? There has been more progress in Catholic-Jewish relations during the past 105 years than in the previous 2,000.

Yet there is no papering over the reality that relations under this pope have not been entirely smooth. Elected in April 2005, Benedict pledged to continue in John Paul's path to have the Church recognize Pius XII as a saint. Benedict also tacitly encouraged the Latin Good Friday prayer "For the Conversion of the Jews," used by ultra-traditionalists. And he lifted the excommunication of four bishops belonging to the reactionary Society of Saint Pius X, which rejects reconciliation with the Jews. One of the four, the British-born Richard Williamson, is an unregenerate Holocaust-denier.

Since these contretemps Benedict has, however, reiterated his commitment to Vatican II's more liberal line, strongly repudiated anti-Semitism, called the Shoah "a crime against God" and labeled Holocaust denial "intolerable."

From now until he leaves Friday, the pope's every pronouncement will be scrutinized. On Mount Nebo, where tradition holds God showed Moses the Promised Land, Benedict made a promising start, citing the "inseparable bond" between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people, and speaking about "reconciliation" and "mutual respect."

It is in this spirit that we welcome the Holy Father.

Trial balloons

Erev Shabbat -

Nobody can be uncheered with a balloon. - Winnie the Pooh

Perhaps Pooh is right. Still, some balloons rise to the stratosphere, while others sputter into oblivion. This week witnessed a cascade of trial balloons - from Hamas, the American State Department, the Quartet and the Arab League.

Let's differentiate between the one potential high-riser and the three duds.

# The New York Times interviewed Hamas politburo chief Khaled Mashaal in Damascus this week. Hamas is following in the footsteps of the Yasser Arafat's PLO, circa 1980.

Arafat had come to the realization that "armed struggle" alone would not achieve his goals. So in July 1982, he confided to Uri Avnery that the PLO was prepared to "recognize" Israel. Avnery immediately shared the good news with the Times.

As it turns out the PLO hasn't, to this day, genuinely recognized Israel as a Jewish state.

Anyway, Mashaal has an offer: Were Israel to pull back to the hard-to-defend 1949 Armistice Lines, uproot "settlements" such as Jerusalem's East Talpiot and French Hill neighborhoods, agree to have its population inundated by millions of descendents of the original 650,000 Palestinian Arabs who became refugees during the 1948 war - Hamas would offer us a long-term truce.

Dud Number 1.

# Before Rose Gottemoeller became Assistant Secretary of State for Verification and Compliance in the Obama administration, she had been a think-tank wonk advocating a nuclear-free Middle East. In a 2005 paper "Universal Compliance: A Strategy for Nuclear Security," she called on Israel to "proactively" negotiate a Mideast "free of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons."

So it was little surprise that in her State Department capacity, in addressing the Preparatory Committee for the 2010 Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty Review Conference this week, she made waves by pointedly including Israel in her call for "universal adherence to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty," bunching us together with India, Pakistan and North Korea.

Dud Number 2.

Curiously, Gottemoeller did not include Iran, a NPT signatory working furiously to build a bomb.

Israel, unlike Iran, has never threatened to wipe one of its neighbors off the face of the earth. Jerusalem maintains a policy of nuclear ambiguity, but has said it will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the region.

Gottemoeller only needs to know that the raison d'etre of the Zionist enterprise is to make certain that, should our survival here be jeopardized, the Jews of Israel will "never again" go defenselessly to the slaughter.

# The Quartet is, according to Palestinian-sourced reports on Wednesday, working on a new peacemaking strategy, with input from the US, UN, EU and Russia, supposedly to be unveiled later this summer, promising a comprehensive solution to the Arab-Israel conflict.

Dud Number 3.

The Road Map broke down, in Phase I, due to ongoing Palestinian violence. But rather than hold the Palestinians to account, the international community produced Annapolis, which also bombed. Coming up with a new "framework" every time the Palestinians violate their promises is a recipe for failure.

# The London-based, pan-Arab, Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper reported that Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia are working on Version 2 of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative which will "clarify the vague points" of the defective original.

As far as this trial balloon goes, we confess to being intrigued. As we understand it, the plan calls for the Palestinians to abandon their demand for a "right of return" and be granted citizenship in Arab countries, or in the newly created and demilitarized Palestine. There would be a timetable for the establishing of diplomatic relations between Israel and the Arab states. Israel would not be expected to return to the 1949 Armistice Lines (there would be some kind of land swap). Jerusalem would not be physically partitioned, and the holy places would be placed under international stewardship.

OBVIOUSLY, we have lots and lots of questions, but this is broadly the kind of proposal that could constitute a realistic starting point for talks.

Reaction to the Al-Quds Al-Arabi report? Denials from Jordan and Egypt, and silence from the Palestinians. Meanwhile, Mahmoud Abbas says he's working on a peace plan...

Is "international law" out to "get" Israel?

Wed - Dickens' law

What a busy time it's been for those who exploit international law to gang up on Israel. Let us count the ways.

Starting with yesterday's UN report compiled by Ian Martin on that incident during Operation Cast Lead at the UNRWA compound in Jabaliya, the one that generated mendacious headlines like "Israeli shelling kills dozens at UN school in Gaza."

In fact, no one sheltering at the school was killed - but about a dozen Palestinians nearby (including gunmen) were when Israel retaliated to Hamas's shelling. While Martin pointedly refused to incorporate the IDF's side in drafting his report, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon promised his cover note to the Security Council will provide some of the missing details and extenuating circumstances.

Don't go confusing Martin with Richard Goldstone's commission, which will be also be investigating the Gaza war. And don't confuse Goldstone with Richard A. Falk's "investigation" for the UN's Human Rights Council.

All this is in addition to the routine "docketing" of Israel at the UN Committee Against Torture in Geneva, partly instigated by Israel-based advocacy groups, some of which receive funding from the New Israel Fund and foreign powers. The committee's chair is Claudio Grossman, a Chilean national whose connection to the NIF figures is no secret.

If that wasn't enough, there is the Spanish legal system's persecution of top Israeli officials for the 2002 operation that liquidated Salah Shehadeh. Tragically, 14 civilians also lost their lives. But unintended civilian deaths in warfare are not unheard of. Shehadeh supervised dozens of terrorist attacks, killing or wounding hundreds of Israelis. The "universal jurisdiction" claimed by Spain and other countries - even where neither the "perpetrator" nor the "victim" has anything to do with them - verily turns the law into an ass.

Let's not forget the Durban II farce starring Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or that it was ostensibly organized as a UN-sponsored "anti-racism" conference.

Finally, there's the unrelenting abuse of international law at every single UN body - except the essentially defunct Trusteeship Council.

WHY this obscenely inordinate investment of time, money and personnel in bashing us?

Because an odd coalition - of progressives and reactionaries - finds itself united in the aim of forcing Israel out of the West Bank, and international law is a potent weapon in their arsenal.

The progressives see Israel as "occupying" only the West Bank and Gaza (though Israel pulled out of there in 2005), while the reactionaries see the "occupation" as extending over all of "Palestine," and Israel's establishment as an inexpugnable sin. This "human rights coalition" is united in the belief that the end - forcing Israel out of the West Bank - justifies the means: exploiting and distorting international law.

That's why it has been made virtually "illegal" for Israel to defend itself. An "occupier" doesn't deserve that right.

The progressives' demand for a West Bank withdrawal is hardly tempered by concern for realities on the ground. Didn't Ehud Olmert offer just about the entire West Bank to Mahmoud Abbas? Hasn't every Israeli leader since Yitzhak Rabin made clear that Israel has no interest in ruling the Palestinians?

If the international community wanted to be part of the solution, rather than the problem, it would tell the Palestinians to stop hiding behind a perverted international law and start negotiating with Israel in earnest.

As for Spain, it's patently obvious that politicians in that country could have intervened to limit the scope of "universal jurisdiction." Their repeated failure to do so speaks volumes. Spanish diplomats and Spanish EU functionaries ought not to be astonished when Israelis show little faith in them as honest brokers.

Are we claiming that Israel - uniquely among nations - never commits human rights violations? Of course not. We are saying that the unprecedented manipulation of international law and global legal institutions to isolate and delegitimize the Jewish state is simply not fair. Moreover, it has the unintended consequence of ripping asunder the fabric of international law and morality.

For the Organization of the Islamic Conference and the Arab League this may not matter much, but shouldn't it matter a great deal to those who embrace Western values?

Iran or the Palestinians -- which should come first?

...but first two announcements.
1. Happy Birthday Jelly!!
2. Shmuel Katz haskara postponed. Details to follow
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Switching the subject


The president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, will be in Washington this week to reassure President Barack Obama that, contrary to appearances, his nuclear-armed country isn't really unraveling. The Pakistani army is killing increasing numbers of "militants" and there is no real danger of a creeping Taliban takeover, Zardari will assert.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, perhaps sitting in on the meeting, might opine that putting too much pressure on the Pakistani army to crush the Islamists could destroy the country's "nascent democracy."

Indeed, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told The Washington Post's David Ignatius: "My experience is that knocking [the Pakistani government and military] hard isn't going to work. The harder we push, the further away they get."

For the Taliban to be defeated, Mullen argues, the Pakistanis have to see their interests in the struggle. Of course, as Mullen well knows, there are elements in Pakistan's intelligence community that even today provide support to the Taliban.

At this point, neither Mullen nor Gates knows where all of Pakistan's nuclear sites are located. That's awkward considering that the Bush administration invested $100 million into helping Islamabad protect these nukes from falling into the hands of Muslim extremists. No one knows where the money really went.

Crisis or not, Pakistan continues to produce weapons-grade plutonium.

CLEARLY, Pakistan-Afghanistan presents American decision-makers with a conundrum.

Israelis could, perhaps, commiserate if the Americans threw up their hands and said: "Sorry, we just can't deal with an Iranian bomb because Pakistan is unraveling, Afghanistan looks set to again become a base for al-Qaida attacks on the West and, to boot, the prognosis in Iraq looks even worse than we thought."

But that's not what Washington is saying.

What they may be saying is, "Better a bomb than a bombing," as an Israel Television news report claimed Sunday, citing unnamed European and Israeli sources - meaning the administration has become reconciled to a nuclear-armed Iran.

If true, that would go counter to everything the administration is saying publicly, and every solemn personal commitment Barack Obama has made.

At the same time, the Iranians are talking straight about their plans. Following a report in the French magazine L'Express that the Israel Air Force staged exercises near Gibraltar, training for a possible attack on Iran, Maj.-Gen. Hassan Firouzabadi, the Iranian chief of staff, announced that he needs just 11 days to "destroy" Israel. Analysts here are still scratching their heads over the significance of the 11-day figure.

ADMINISTRATION officials are reportedly insinuating that the US will only act - in some unspecified fashion - on Iran if Washington can muster an alliance of European and Arab countries. For that to happen, as The New York Times put it Monday, Israel - if it wants the world to "confront" Iran - needs to "work toward" an end to the "occupation," halt settlement construction and foster the creation of a Palestinian state.

If this truly is Obama's position, frankly, we don't get it. Does America really feel hamstrung in "confronting" Iran without Arab and European support? Aren't the Arabs privately - and insistently - telling American envoys that they are as worried about Iran as Israel is?

Moreover, if, for argument's sake, Israel tomorrow - in the depths of existential despair - pulled back to the 1949 Armistice Lines, abruptly ending the "occupation" and uprooting every "settlement," does anyone this side of la-la land think such a withdrawal would constrain Iranian imperialism? Encourage Teheran to end its quest for nuclear weapons? Satiate Palestinian demands?

Israel isn't arbitrarily trying to "switch" the discussion away from the Palestinians to Iran. It is warning that a nuclear-armed Iran is the overriding threat - to Israel, the Arabs and the West. We are saying that the reason there is no Palestinian state is principally attributable to the intransigent, unrealistic and self-defeating Palestinian negotiating position which, if anything, will become less malleable should the mullahs get the bomb. Iran's proxies, Hamas and Hizbullah, would become even more puffed-up.

Someone is trying to "switch the subject" all right - but it isn't Israel.

Israel's Next Ambassador to the United States

SAVE THE DATE -- SHMUEL KATZ

May 31
Sunday
Shmuel Katz hazkara
The Begin Center
6:30 PM
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Monday - Our man in Washington


On Monday, August 21, 1995, a Hamas suicide bomber blew up the No. 26 bus in the northern Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramat Eshkol. Among the dead was Joan Davenny, a Connecticut schoolteacher here on sabbatical.

Some thought of her as soon as the news broke that Michael Oren was about to be appointed Israel's ambassador to the United States. For Joan's sister, Sally, is Michael's wife. This is a small country, and Oren is one of us - in every way.

Our new man in Washington, who will be giving up his American citizenship to take the job, made aliya at 15 from New Jersey. After serving in the paratroops, Oren returned to the US to take degrees from Columbia and Princeton universities. A senior fellow at The Shalem Center, Oren is a best-selling historian whose books include Six Days of War: June 1967, The Making of the Modern Middle East and, most recently, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present. He's also an accomplished polemicist with scores op-eds and television appearances to his credit.

As recently as Operation Cast Lead, Oren voluntarily donned his army uniform to work in the IDF Spokesman's office. He has diplomatic experience too, having served in Israel's UN Mission.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman jointly made the selection, which will take effect in time for Oren to accompany the premier to Washington for his May 18 meeting with President Barack Obama.

THE Washington ambassadorial job is arguably Israel's most important diplomatic posting.

Naturally, it entails representing our government. But it also requires the ambassador to ensure that the prime minister understands which way the wind is blowing at the White House, Foggy Bottom and on Capitol Hill. Moreover, the ambassador is the face of Israel to the American people.

Even in an era when Obama can Blackberry and Netanyahu can Twitter, a flesh-and-blood ambassador - one with a reputation of enjoying the complete trust of his prime minister - is an essential conduit. Though it behooves Oren to remain in Lieberman's good graces, his number one client is Netanyahu. Hawk or a dove, or the epitome of an independent thinker, Oren must now put loyalty to Netanyahu above any personal or political consideration.

There's a sense among some in the US pro-Israel community that while Oren is a fine appointee in terms of public diplomacy and hasbara, he still needs to master the art of the "Washington insider" - someone who can work behind the scenes to enable American decision-makers to understand what Netanyahu wants, and why.

Here, Oren could take a leaf from David Ivri, the air force commander who oversaw the 1981 Osirak raid and became our ambassador at the beginning of the second intifada. Ivri kept a low media profile, but achieved much behind the scenes.

Plainly, the Obama administration will not be spun or won over by Oren's rhetoric. With them, he will need to speak authoritatively for a premier who, we trust, will have a clear agenda - foremost on Iran and the Palestinians.

Still, Oren's appointment is heartening for a pro-Israel community that has at times in the past seen the posts of ambassador to Washington, the UN, and consul-general in New York go to individuals who, whatever their talents, do not excel in the media. Clearly, Israel needs articulate and knowledgeable diplomats like Oren, capable of bolstering those in the US who care about Israel.

Here at last is a figure at ease on the public stage, someone who knows what he's talking about and can speak to Americans in their own language.

We at The Jerusalem Post take pride in the appointment of a fellow Anglo, a reconfirmation of what immigrants can achieve in Israel. For in Oren we have an American who came here, served in an elite unit, and then worked tirelessly to improve the way the world understands our country and the region.

However, an ambassador, no matter how eloquent or well-connected, cannot be compelling if the policies at the top are jumbled or lack resonance. Oren will be at his most effective if Netanyahu can articulate a foreign and security policy that is coherent and sensible.

Barack Obama's first 100 days - part two

SAVE THE DATE -- SHMUEL KATZ

May 31
Sunday
Shmuel Katz hazkara
The Begin Center
6:30 PM
============================================================

Waiting for Netanyahu

President Barack Obama held a prime-time news conference Wednesday to mark his first 100 days in office. The potential flu pandemic was topic number one. Next came the economic crisis, with worries about the security of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal a close third.

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict went unmentioned.

Next week, however, expect Israel to be in the Washington limelight. The 2009 AIPAC Policy Conference kicks off on Sunday with speeches by leading US politicians and Christian religious leaders. President Shimon Peres is scheduled to talk on Monday morning, and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will deliver his banquet address Monday evening, via satellite.

Following his AIPAC speech, Peres will head to the White House for a meeting with Obama. Their conversation will focus on Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons - another topic which got nary a mention during the news conference.

This is an international problem, not Israel's alone, Peres will say. In an Independence Day interview with Channel 10, our president mused about a coalition nuclear umbrella which signals the mullahs: "If you use a nuclear weapon - no matter against whom - you'll get a nuclear response."

A better plan is to give them every reason not to build a bomb in the first place, and if necessary to ensure that they do not.

We hope Peres tells Obama that while Jerusalem can appreciate Washington's reluctance to broadcast a timetable for giving up on trying to talk the Teheran extremists out of building a bomb, there is, in fact, very little time left.

NETANYAHU is booked to travel to Washington for an all-important May 18 White House meeting. There, he will present Obama with his plan on how to re-float talks with the Palestinian Authority in the wake of Mahmoud Abbas's rejection of Ehud Olmert's late 2008 peace offer.

Our premier will likely also come away from that meeting with a realistic appraisal of whether Obama will make good on his campaign promise to "use all elements of American power" and do everything to "prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon."

Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is to travel to Italy, Germany, France and the Czech Republic next week to talk about Iran and the Palestinians. The EU's External Affairs Commissioner, Benita Ferrero-Waldner, has been pushing for a freeze on upgrading relations between the EU and Israel because... the Palestinians asked her to. She seems considerably less engaged over Iran's quest for an atom bomb.

Lieberman's task will be to urge more open-minded European leaders to await the outcome of Netanyahu's White House meeting and to accept that the current approach to Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations needs revamping.

Israel would like America and Europe to internalize that defanging Iran, while not a precondition to progress on negotiations with the Palestinians - or with Syria, for that matter - is an essential gateway. Also that flirting with an unreformed Hamas is a dead end if the destination is a two-state solution.

Pressuring Israel, a la Ferrero-Waldner, or making insinuations about an imposed solution, serve only to harden the already unreasonable expectations within the Palestinian polity. Thus is the conflict perpetuated.

THE PLAN Netanyahu will be taking to the White House next month needs to offer a sensible way forward on the Palestinian track, even if truly substantive progress may be difficult until the Iranian crisis is contained.

He will garner the support of Israel's majority - and of the pro-Israel community worldwide - if he broadly enunciates the country's "red lines" on defensible boundaries, strategic settlement blocs, the parameters of Palestinian sovereignty in the West Bank and Gaza, the issue of Jerusalem and Arab refugees.

Furthermore, his government's credibility would be immeasurably enhanced by the dismantling of unauthorized settlement outposts, demonstrating that the West Bank is not the Wild West. The Palestinians have just shown how "law" works in the territory under their jurisdiction: On Wednesday, a Hebron court sentenced a man to be hanged for selling a parcel of land to a Jew.

Though Fatah and Hamas continue squabbling, they agree on two things: a rejection of Israel as a Jewish state, and a refusal to share this land with non-Muslims.

If any plan presented by Netanyahu to Obama is going to matter, those attitudes have to change.

SAVE THE DATE -- SHMUEL KATZ

May 31
Sunday
Shmuel Katz hazkara
The Begin Center
6:30 PM

Obama's first 100 days & Israel

Thursday - Two new leaders

As Israelis celebrated Yom Ha'atzmaut yesterday, President Barack Obama completed the first 100 days of his presidency - with some pundits and lobbyists baying for him to "stand up to Israel" by imposing an American diktat to "solve" the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

These calls often come from those who - without a trace of irony - say they are friends of Israel. Zbigniew Brzezinski, for example, wants Obama to declare: "This is the settlement. This is what we're for."

J Street's Jeremy Ben-Ami is more tactful, saying his goal is to provide Obama with political support within the Jewish community for what amounts to an imposed solution.

Thus has Binyamin Netanyahu's new government been greeted just 30 days after taking office.

From the day he took office, Obama has been under vicious attack by incorrigible partisans who stoke the flames of polarization. Nevertheless, his approval ratings are higher than those of George W. Bush or Bill Clinton 100 days into their presidencies.

Netanyahu has been called an enemy of peace and an opponent of a Palestinian state.

Obama has been accused of embarking on a march toward fascism or socialism; one critic even claimed the US government was building "internment camps" for its enemies. Regrettably, even mainstream television and radio outlets have given platforms to such absurd accusations.

The truth is that any president inheriting a nosediving economy in the midst of a global financial meltdown would have embarked on something like Obama's $789 billion stimulus package. While Americans have every right to debate his economic policies, no person of good faith can claim that Obama is leading America toward "tyranny."

Obama inherited a quagmire in Iraq, which is again being riven by sectarian bloodshed and anti-American sentiment. But aside from Iran, his most formidable foreign policy dilemma is Afghanistan-Pakistan, where al-Qaida and the Taliban pose a clear and present danger to the cities of America and Europe. The president is committed to defeating the extremists on their own turf.

Netanyahu, for his part, inherited a moribund negotiating process after the Palestinians rejected an extraordinarily magnanimous peace overture from Ehud Olmert. No reasonable critic of Israeli policy would suggest that Netanyahu wants to rule over the Palestinians, or that he is not committed to a territorial arrangement with them.

SO AS Israelis consider Obama's first 100 days, and as American policy-makers mull over Netanyahu's first month, here's what really matters:

• America is Israel's closest ally because the two nations share values and interests. Still, Washington and Jerusalem have long differed over how best to trade land for peace. We anticipate that the new administration will stand with Israel no less than its predecessors did. Similarly, we fully expect there to be sharp differences - as there always have been. Simply, the interests of America and Israel are not always identical.

• The link between the peace process and confronting Iran is straightforward. We in Israel need to do a better job of explaining to the administration that the menace of an ascendant, nuclear-armed regime, funneling guns and cash to Hamas and Hizbullah, inhibits the Palestinians' taking the most elemental steps toward peace.

• The administration warns that Teheran faces "crippling sanctions" if its rapprochement with Iran fails. It must realize that the clock is ticking.

• No one, least of all the Arab states, should need to be bought off to oppose a nuclear-armed Iran. Stopping the mullahs is a shared Arab, American and Israeli interest.

• Funding a Fatah-Hamas unity government - not that there's one in sight - without an explicit Hamas commitment to recognizing Israel, ending violence and abiding by previous Palestinian commitments would achieve only the illusion of momentum. A "unity" government not wholeheartedly committed to a two-state solution is hardly worth anyone's effort.

Candidate Obama chose his words carefully when he declared that "Israel's security is sacrosanct," and that "the United States must be a strong and consistent partner - not to force concessions, but to help committed partners avoid stalemate."

Those who would try to talk Obama out of this solemn pledge are no friends of Israel - no way, no shape, no how.

Israel at 61

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Dear readers,
Wed is a bank holiday in Israel. In fact, it is the ONLY day off that is not connected to a religious holiday that I can think of. (I work on election day.) And because we don't have a paper on Wednesday, if I play my cards right, I can do my Thursday writing today and have a real day off. Yipee!
Happy independence day.
elliot

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Tears and joys

Do you want to understand this country? Accompany us during the 48 hours that take in Remembrance Day and Independence Day.

There's a joke that says most Jewish holidays can be summed up thus: "They tried to kill us, they didn't succeed, let's eat." Yom Hazikaron and Yom Ha'atzmaut are different. The reality is more like: "They're still trying to kill us. We won't let them win. Let's eat."

Remembrance Day commemorations began yesterday at Ammunition Hill in Jerusalem, where one of bloodiest battles of the 1967 Six Day War was waged. The fortified Jordanian police station that stood on the hill had to be overcome to help clear the way to Mount Scopus, the campus of the Hebrew University and the Old City. Thirty-six men gave their lives to achieve that mission.

At 8 p.m. last night, a siren ushered in memorial services throughout the land. Television and radio broadcast the main ceremony from the Western Wall plaza. Stirring our emotions, the cameras showed the memorial flame being lit, our flag at half-mast and the honor guard at attention, with the Wall illuminated in the background.

When our dispersed people began their return to this land in the 1880s, who could have foretold that the culmination of that homecoming would be too late for millions of them? Who, moreover, could have known that the 1948 War of Independence would be but a down payment on further wars to come?

Another siren will pierce our heart this morning at 11 o'clock in remembrance of the 22,570 men and women - of the defense forces, police, secret services and the Jewish undergrounds - who fell defending our national renewal; from 1860, when those Jews already here first began trying to build their lives outside the Old City walls, up to Operation Cast Lead this year.

What a lot has changed in 61 years. Iran, once friendly, is now an implacable enemy racing to build a nuclear bomb and threatening our annihilation. Egypt and Jordan once warred against us; now there is peace.

But the elusive peace is the one denied us 61 years ago. The Palestinian Arabs call our achievement of self-determination their catastrophe - nakba. In his latest book, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict, historian Benny Morris writes: "Put simply, the Palestinian Arab nationalist movement, from inception, and ever since, has consistently regarded Palestine as innately, completely, inalienably, and legitimately 'Arab' and Muslim and has aspired to establish in it a sovereign state under its rule covering all of the country's territory."

In other words, even if one has a skewed view of the conflict in which the "occupation," "settlements" and "east Jerusalem house demolitions" block out every other reality, Morris is implying that were these seemingly burning issues made magically to disappear, Israel would still be at fault - for existing.

This explains why, in late 2008, the most moderate of Palestinian moderates, Mahmoud Abbas, spurned Ehud Olmert's overture to create a Palestinian state on the equivalent of 100 percent of the West Bank, plus Gaza.

It also explains why the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative is predicated not just on forcing Israel back to the hard-to-defend 1949 Armistice Lines and on swamping us with millions of Palestinian "refugees," but also on the Arab League's unwavering refusal to accept the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state. Why? Because to do so would be to admit that the Jews have a connection to this place that predates the arrival of the Arabs and the birth of Islam.

It would be an admission that the Jews have a right to share this land.

INDEPENDENCE Day celebrations begin at 8 p.m. Tuesday night. For many, the transition from somber commemoration is jarring. Yet there is no better way to demonstrate the link between the tears of sacrifice and the joys of independence.

And so, we wipe away our tears and begin counting our blessings: In 1948, this country started out with 600,000 Jews; today there are 5,593,000. Since Independence Day last year, more than 150,000 babies were born; more than 12,000 Jews made aliya.

Keep counting, and Hag Sameah.

AND IN OTHER NEWS....

Monday - New flu in perspective


Gone are the days when a public health scare in Mexico or Hong Kong had little relevance for Israelis.

No sooner had Shabbat ended when news arrived that the H1N1 swine flu virus could be threatening a global pandemic. Over 80 Mexicans have been felled. Hundreds more are sick. Possible cases have been reported in France, Spain and New Zealand (among a group of students and teachers who returned to Auckland via Los Angeles after spending several weeks in Mexico). Eleven cases of H1N1 have been reported in California and Texas, along the Mexican border.

Some 3,000 miles away in New York City, health officials are examining whether eight students in Queens have come down with mild cases of the disease. And in London, officials breathed a sigh of relief after determining that the flu-like symptoms experienced by a British Airways cabin crew member on a flight from Mexico City was not swine flu.

Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organization, declared the disease a "public health event of international concern." The WHO threat level is currently set at 3. If a pandemic is imminent, it will rise to level 5.

Public health experts find it worrisome that those affected are not mainly the medically vulnerable, whose immune systems may be compromised, but also many young and vigorous people.

While swine flu is not new and cases of human-to-human transmission have previously been documented, the current H1N1 is the result of a mutation of genetic material from pigs, humans and birds.

There is no vaccine for H1N1, nor do scientists know whether individuals vaccinated against regular flu will be protected.

NATURALLY, there is a psychological component to the crisis. Images beamed around the world from Mexico City of nuns on their way to Sunday services and train commuters wearing surgical face masks create a sense of unease. Even the White House found it necessary to say that President Barack Obama was fine, thank you very much, in response to a disconcerting report that while in Mexico City, he met with Felipe Solis, an archeologist who subsequently died of flu-like symptoms.

While epidemiologists gather their data in an effort to clarify the nature and extent of the outbreak, Israel, like all countries in our globalized world, is gearing up. Better to be prepared, as we were for the 2003 SARS scare, than to be caught off guard.

H1N1 symptoms include a fever of more than 37.8°C (100°F), body aches, coughing, sore throat, respiratory congestion and, in some cases, vomiting and diarrhea.

At this writing, there have been no confirmed cases of H1N1 flu here. Physicians are, however, diagnosing a 26-year-old Israeli who returned from Mexico on Sunday and had himself admitted into Netanya's Laniado Hospital.

Obviously, Israelis who return from abroad feeling ill, with a fever, need immediate medical evaluation. Our Health Ministry has been in contact with health providers to ensure that cases of flu are promptly diagnosed and reported. Since carriers of the disease could themselves be asymptomatic, quarantining is not necessarily indicated. Still, the MDA is deploying special equipment in some of its ambulances should it prove necessary to transport highly infectious cases.

THE potential crisis comes just as Ya'acov Litzman takes over at the Health Ministry as deputy minister. Litzman is a savvy, dedicated and personally modest public servant who grew up in the Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. Although his haredi and non-Zionist United Torah Judaism party prefers (for religious reasons) not to have a cabinet vote, Litzman's talent and drive should not be underestimated.

Moreover, Israel enjoys a highly advanced medical infrastructure; and ample supplies of Tamiflu, generally effective against flu symptoms, are available. We're also fortunate that with spring here and windows open, making ventilation easier, the virus should find our climate less than hospitable.

As long as the authorities are alert, the rest of us can stay calm. Still, basic precautions are called for: Cover your nose and mouth with a tissue when you cough or sneeze. Wash your hands often with soap and water, especially after coughing or sneezing. Alcohol-based hand cleaners are also effective. Avoid touching your eyes, nose or mouth because germs spread that way.

We should all stay healthy.

Dr. Fadl and the muddled moralists

Erev Shabbat

How the human rights community keeps getting it wrong

Sayyid Imam al-Sharif - known as Dr. Fadl - was an early "spiritual" leader of al-Qaida and inspiration of Egypt's Islamic Jihad, which assassinated Anwar Sadat. In the wake of 9/11, he was arrested in Yemen. Today, sitting in an Egyptian prison and having experienced an epiphany, he spends his days writing on Islamic jurisprudence.

As Israel Television's Arab affairs analyst Oded Granot reported, Dr. Fadl recently launched a religious attack on the way Hamas conducted the recent Gaza war. The prophet Muhammad, he declared, would not have authorized the battle; and Allah will hold Hamas leaders accountable for every drop of Muslim blood spilled.

Granot's report came just as the preliminary results of the IDF's probe of civilian casualties in Operation Cast Lead were released. Five military investigative teams reviewed how our armed forces conducted themselves in the recent fighting. They examined incidents involving UN or international facilities fired upon; medical buildings, ambulances and crews shot at; numbers of civilians harmed; use of weaponry containing phosphorous; and, finally, damage caused to infrastructure and buildings.

WHEN Israel withdrew from Gaza in summer 2005, the Palestinian leadership wasted no time in turning the Strip into the prototype of the "Palestine" they hope to create, firing thousands of rockets and mortars at our civilian population. The people of Sderot and the surrounding Negev communities were traumatized; homes, schools, synagogues and parks were damaged. Life became close to intolerable. In December 2008, after Hamas refused to renew a de-facto cease-fire arranged under Egyptian auspices, Israel finally struck back.

To warn civilians away from areas about to come under bombardment, the IDF dropped 2,250,000 warning leaflets. It commandeered enemy radio frequencies, and made 165,000 automated telephone calls alerting individual Gazans. It used costly but highly accurate munitions. And it authorized humanitarian convoys to enter Gaza - indeed, it halted offensive activities for several hours a day to allow Palestinian civilians to obtain basic necessities.

While our army was attempting to minimize civilian casualties, the enemy's forces operated largely under cover of those civilians. Violating the elementary rules of war, Palestinian gunmen utilized residential dwellings, hospitals, mosques, schools and UN and other international agency buildings. Ismail Haniyeh chose Shifa Hospital as his headquarters, his gunmen camouflaging themselves as doctors and nurses. Red Crescent Society ambulances were used to smuggle fighters and weapons.

And still, according to these preliminary results, the IDF managed to operate in accordance with international law. Grossly irresponsible accusations recently aired by several Hebrew media outlets claiming that soldiers intentionally or recklessly targeted Palestinian civilians were, according to the probe, baseless.

SADLY, wars claim the lives of innocents: 150,000-200,000 in current intra-Muslim fighting in Algeria; 25,000-50,000 in Muslim-Russian fighting in Chechnya; and, since the US ousted Saddam Hussein, 600,000-1.2 million in Iraq, to cite just a few examples.

In the course of the Gaza fighting, the IDF killed 709 enemy combatants and 295 civilians (the identities of 162 other male dead have not been established). There is not an iota of proof that Israeli forces willfully killed a single civilian. And yet - because Hamas embedded itself among its own population - innocents died. To cite one ghastly blunder, 21 members of the Daya family were killed on January 6 because Israeli forces hit their home instead of the weapons depot just next door.

Some 600 structures were destroyed, either when gunmen shot from inside them, or because they served as armories; or to provide our troops with safe passage around booby-trapped buildings.

Will the IDF's probe lead media outlets to retract their assertion that "1,300 Palestinians, mostly women and children, were killed"? Probably not.

Will it make Israel's human rights community, or the foreign governments and foundations who bankroll them, stop claiming that the army is lying, or even inject greater caution into their critiques? Unlikely.

At root, the army's critics are frustrated by the link between the IDF's determination to minimize its own casualties (disparaged as "zero-risk" doctrine) and the number of enemy non-combatants killed. They see Israel's refusal to play into Hamas's human shields strategy as unethical.

For them, too few of our sons came home in body bags.

Which tells us that Dr. Fadl now has a better grip on right and wrong than certain morally obtuse human rights advocates.

CATCHING UP - Durban & Incitement

this brings me up to date... as far as catching-up goes.

The case for 'incitement'

It's no secret that stories critical of government polices that appear in the Israeli media become fodder for those abroad with an anti-Israel agenda. Indeed, foreign critics can honestly claim that they are "echoing" what media outlets or prominent journalists here are asserting.

But while there are often disturbing aspects to the populist and ideological bent of much of the media - which sometimes lapses into dangerous irresponsibility - our robust press is integral to civil liberties.

"Hasbara" - Israel's public diplomacy - is self-evidently problematic because the country does not speak with one voice. Israeli officials may be vexed by what they read in the morning papers or watch on the evening news. But they rightly have no control over news and opinion.

A free press is a "handicap" this and any democracy willingly embraces.

NOT SO in much of the Muslim and Arab world. Recently, Arab extremists learned that the Israel Foreign Ministry had been translating and posting articles on its website from the Arab media. This material highlighted the ideological divide between writers associated with the rejectionist camp (Syria, for example) and relative moderates (Egypt and Saudi Arabia). As reported by the invaluable Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a number of media outlets aligned with the rejectionists then published a blacklist of "moderate" writers who, they claimed were paid Zionist agents since their criticism of Arab affairs was picked up by Israel.

To which one blacklisted "moderate" retorted: "Israel is winning the wars because it has mechanisms for [self-] criticism [even] in times of war… The resistance and jihad movements must be divested of their aura of sanctity and subjected to a cost-benefit assessment."

Of course, the main reason differing views among the Arabs are aired at all is that opposing voices toe the line of the respective regimes under which they live; or because they work and publish in the West.

THE ISSUE of press freedom is very much on the agenda at the Durban II conference in Geneva even though Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's pathetic Monday performance hogged the media spotlight.

At stake is the question of whether Muslim and Arab delegates will succeed in imposing their free press "standards" on other civilizations. The conference will be voting on whether to include in its closing policy statement an innocuous-sounding clause prohibiting "incitement."

As anyone who has strolled down the streets of, say, Cairo, or picked up an Arabic newspaper knows, incitement to Jew-hatred and anti-Zionism is perfectly acceptable.

But the Muslim delegations would use the incitement clause of the final Durban II statement to ban all criticism of Islam, Shari'a law, the prophet Muhammad and controversial tenets of Islam.

Muslims point to the controversial 2005 cartoon depicting Muhammad with a bomb in his turban which was published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten as precisely the kind of "incitement" their Durban II efforts are intended to head off. That cartoon, and 11 others simultaneously published by that newspaper, sparked Muslim riots worldwide.

Flemming Rose, the editor who commissioned and published the cartoons, said he did so because he had noticed a disturbing trend of self-censorship. Writers, artists, museum curators and translators had all been intimidated into avoiding involvement with projects critical of Muslim extremism.

Rose, currently in Israel to deliver a series of lectures under the auspices of Hebrew University's Shasha Center for Strategic Studies run by Efraim Halevy, says he ran the cartoons to draw a line against this encroaching self-censorship, and to hammer home the idea that criticism of Islam - actually of those who hijack it for extremist purposes - is not synonymous with insulting the religion.

If Durban II supports the anti-incitement clause, the Muslim and Arab world will have succeeded in insinuating its illiberal attitude toward the press on the international community.

And if the West compromises on press freedom to placate Muslims, the capitulation will be seen, correctly, as a sign not of respect, but of submission.

CATCHING UP - A bad word about the Swiss

Morality in neutral


Switzerland is situated in the heart of Europe, surrounded by Germany, France, Austria and Italy. But unlike these EU-member countries, the Swiss are neutral in international affairs.

And under cover of neutrality, Swiss President Hans Rudolf Merz, who is both chief of state and head of government, met Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last night over dinner in Geneva. The Iranian leader is in town to attend the Durban II "anti-racism conference," which opens today.

Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon told Army Radio that the Merz-Ahmadinejad meeting "caught us by surprise." It shouldn't have.

The Swiss have their interests. Swiss businessmen with ties to Pakistan's A.Q. Khan have been implicated in selling, on the black market, blueprints for a compact nuclear weapon. The Swiss trading company EGL is doing billions of dollars' worth of (technically legal) business with Iran.

When Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey was granted an audience with Ahmadinejad last year, the feminist politician, eager not to offend, donned a head-scarf.

THE SWISS Foreign Ministry explains that Berne has a "long-term strategic rationale" for its actions. Some of that rationale was already on display during World War II, in Switzerland's erratic policies toward Jewish asylum seekers.

When it looked like Germany would win the war, Switzerland, for the most part, kept Jewish refugees out; but when it appeared the Allies might win, the Swiss reversed course. In the final weeks of the war, they even demanded that the Nazis stop deportations altogether.

Back in 1938, when Berlin was ascendant, the Swiss requested that Germany and Austria mark the passports of their Jewish citizens with a "J" so that Berne could distinguish between "genuine political refugees" and fleeing Jews. A Swiss police captain named Paul Gruninger who allowed thousands of Jews to cross the border illegally was thrown off the force.

But when it suited Swiss "rationale," Jews were allowed in - from The Netherlands and Belgium in 1941; from Italy in 1943. And in 1944, 1,684 Jews were permitted to enter from Bergen Belson as part of the Rudolf Kastner-Adolf Eichmann deal.

All told, perhaps 30,000 Jews managed to reach Switzerland during the Shoah.

All along, Eduard Von Steiger, who was in charge of Switzerland's refugee policies, claimed that "the boat is full." He would later explain that had he known the Nazis were systematically slaughtering Europe's Jews on the other side of the Swiss border, "we might have widened the bound (sic) of what was possible."

That alibi has more holes than a piece of Emmental cheese. By May 1942, Swiss army intelligence had photos of Jews who had been asphyxiated by the Nazis at the Russian front.

In fact, the Swiss leadership knew exactly what the Nazis were doing - from their own diplomats and businessmen, from the Brazilian ambassador and from German sources.

Hugo Remuad, of the Swiss Red Cross, argued that genocidal anti-Semitism was simply a consequence of there being too many Jews. Or as Swiss judge Eugen Von Hasler put it: "It is also in our own interest that the greatest thing of all [the destruction of Europe's Jews] is coming to pass, and our hearts beat as one with the young white men who, dog-tired, forge onward to the East as [defenders] of European culture."

Meanwhile, Swiss banks raked in their spoils both by collaborating with the Nazis over pilfered Jewish cash and gold, and - later - by retaining some 36,000 bank accounts, valued at $1 billion, belonging to murdered Jews. This wealth lay dormant until 2004, when a class-action suit (and the resultant Volker Committee) forced Swiss banks to begin returning the money to the estates of the murdered.

IN 1995, former Swiss president Kaspar Villiger apologized for his country's treatment of the Jews.

And yet his successor, Merz, met last night with Ahmadinejad even as the Iranian leader puts the finishing touches on his atom bomb, swears that the Holocaust never happened, and calls for the extermination of of the "filthy [Zionist] bacteria."

While Swiss leaders shamelessly fete Ahmadinejad, we Israelis are heartened by the decision of the United States, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia and Italy to boycott the Durban II circus, along with its various sideshows.

CATCHING UP - too slick to deny the Holocaust outright

The new deniers


It is Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day - Yom Hashoah. Here in Israel, the sirens will sound at 10 a.m. and for two minutes work will come to a halt, vehicles will idle, and Israelis will stand in silent memory of the six million victims of Hitler's war against the Jews.

The opening ceremony of Holocaust Remembrance Day was broadcast live from Yad Vashem in Jerusalem last night on television and radio. In the presence of President Shimon Peres, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Rabbi Meir Lau, chairman of the Yad Vashem Council and himself a child survivor, six torches were lit by six men and women who lived through the war as children. About 1.5 million of the murdered were children.

Today, therefore, is a time to reflect on the greatest tragedy to befall the Jewish people in modern times and to think about how anti-Semitism has morphed into anti-Zionism. It is also a day for soul-searching about the state of Holocaust remembrance.

Sixty-four years after the defeat of the Nazis, the memory and the meaning of the catastrophe they wrought is being chipped away, sometimes unintentionally, but mostly in a cynical, premeditated manner.

Holocaust denial dates back to the late 1960s and takes various forms. Some try to denigrate the Shoah by claiming that Hiroshima and Dresden prove that the allies were as heartless at the Nazis. Denial is propagated on the radical right, the radical left and by many in the Muslim and Arab world.

ON THE eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, the world's preeminent Holocaust-denier and leading anti-Zionist, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was granted a platform at Durban II, the UN's so-called anti-racism conference in Geneva yesterday. He promptly called for the destruction of Israel: "Governments must be encouraged and supported in their fights at eradicating this barbaric racism. Efforts must be made to put an end to Zionism," he said.

We watched in distress as many in the audience and galleries applauded. Such barefaced anti-Zionism is, however, offensive to Western governments and we were gratified that dozens of EU delegates - including those from France, Finland and the UK - walked out as Ahmadinejad spewed forth his venom. Of course, the real heartbreak was that these countries were represented in the hall in the first place.

Yesterday's farce in Geneva proved again how the charge of "racism" has been cheapened to the point of having lost much of its meaning. The same holds true for the words "genocide," "war crimes," "apartheid" and "ghetto." Those who distort - willfully or through ignorance - the meanings of the dreadful vocabulary of hate for tawdry political purposes commit an unpardonable injustice.

EQUALLY pernicious are those who are too slick to deny the Holocaust outright but instead claim that Israel inoculates itself with the memory of the six million in order to kill or oppress innocent Palestinians with impunity.

A variation on the theme that Israel uses the Holocaust as a battering ram against the Palestinians is the disingenuous argument that it's time for us Israelis to move on: We need "closure," runs this line of more subtle attack, because Zionism's guiding principle of "Never Again" supposedly deludes us into thinking that we face existential threats (from Iran, Hamas, Hizbullah) or demographic threats (posed by the Palestinian demand for the "right of return"). None of these factors, these manipulators would have the world believe, really threatens our existence.

Our bogus fears, goes the claim, are as "corrosive" as they are delusionary. They make us think we are vulnerable when we - a nuclear power - are stronger than all our enemies combined. Moreover, say the anti-Zionists proponents of "closure" - Israelis have "walled, fenced, blockaded and road-blocked" millions of Palestinians "into a pitiful archipelago of helplessness" all because of our exaggerated sense of fear. We've taken our unfounded fears of annihilation and used them to inflate the nature of the threats against us. And this "retreat into the victimhood" has made us think that our violent ways are nothing more than "self-defense."

It's hard to decide which is worse - outright Holocaust-denial of the Ahmadinejad variety, or insidious assertions by Euro-leftists and anti-Zionists that would lull Israelis into letting down our guard and robbing us of the will to fight for our survival.