The Canadian Exception
Geography, history, economics and necessity have made the U.S. and Canada allies, though Americans tend to take their good neighbor to the north for granted. Israel, six-thousand miles away, has every reason not to follow the American example.
Under Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservative Party, Canada's friendship toward Israel has stood in contradistinction to the treatment Jerusalem has gotten from its fair-weather European allies and a fickle Obama administration. In May 2nd elections, to Israelis' delight, Harper won a resounding electoral and ideological victory giving him a clear majority in parliament.
None of this was preordained. The trajectory of Israel's relations with Canada essentially mirrored those it has had with Western Europe – starting out warm and turning increasingly frosty. In 1947 Canada's Minister for External Affairs Lester Pearson, an internationalist liberal supported the partition of Palestine. The Zionists were grateful; the Arabs utterly rejected the two-state solution, went to war and lost.
During the 1956 Sinai Campaign France and Britain were allied with Israel as Canada sought to placate both London and a fuming Eisenhower administration. Afterwards, Ottawa's adhered to a pro-Israel stance through the 1967 Six Day War wobbling only after the 1973 Yom Kippur War with Pierre Trudeau in power (1968-1979 and again from 1980-1984). The 1973 Arab oil embargo, PLO airliner hijackings and terrorist outrages, such as the massacre of twenty-one Israeli schoolchildren at Ma'alot on May 15, 1974, swayed Europe and Canada against Israel.
In 1975, Trudeau postponed a UN conference slated to take place in Canada with Yasir Arafat's participation only under pressure from the Jewish community. As soon as Canada's Jewish leadership abandoned the issue, Trudeau's inhibitions about having his diplomats sit with the PLO disappeared along with any interest in opposing the Arab economic boycott of Israel.
Talk about moving Canada's embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was shelved as a self-deluded Canadian government, press and intellectual elite emphatically embraced an Arab line that negated Jewish rights in Judea and Samaria. Canada, like Europe, said settlements not unremitting Arab rejectionism was the obstacle to peace.
No surprise then that Ottawa showed no understanding of Israel's predicament leading up to and during the 1982 Lebanon War. By the mid-1980s, under Joe Clark and Brian Mulroney, Canada had formalized its pro-Arab course. Clark called for a Palestinian "homeland" long before Arafat even feigned recognition of Israel's right to exist and pressed Washington to exploit the political environment during the 1991 Gulf War to force Israeli concessions to the Palestinians. At the start of the first intifada (1987–1993) Clark ignored Palestinian-on-Palestinian bloodletting that would ultimately take over 1,100 Arab lives, overlooked Palestinian brutality against Jews that would claim 421 Israeli victims, and leveled his criticism primarily on Israel. Similarly, Canadian media coverage portrayed Israel as a Goliath striking down purportedly "unarmed" Palestinian protestors. Even the Canadian labor movement turned against Israel.
Only in the wake of the September 11, 2001 Islamist terror attacks and Arafat's unleashing of the second intifada that would take hundreds upon hundreds of Israeli lives did Canada begin, under Paul Martin (2003 – 2006), to slow its anti-Israel drift as exemplified by Ottawa's abstention on a UN vote against Israel's life-saving security barrier.
With Harper's election in 2006 the drift was halted and reversed. The new Canadian government became the first to cut ties with Palestinian Authority after radical Hamas won the 2006 parliamentary elections in the West Bank and Gaza. In July 2006, Harper courageously stood with Israel against Hizbullah in the Second Lebanon War. In 2009 Ottawa led the way in opposing a repeat performance of the anti-Israel, anti-Semitic Durban conference of 2001 as well as other Arab efforts to perversely exploit the UN Human Rights Council as a battering ram against Israel.
What explains this Canadian exceptionalism? Canadian political analysts insist that Harper's attitude toward the Jewish state is a matter of personal conviction and shared, moreover, by other party leaders including Stockwell Day and Jason Kenney. They see Israel for what it is: an unwavering island of democracy and a bastion of Western values in a perilous unstable region. The reconstituted Conservative party Harper now leads came into existence only in 2003 and does not carry the anti-Israel baggage of its predecessor.
Though it continues to import petroleum, Canada is actually the fifth largest energy producer in the world; third in gas; seventh in oil. Such energy independence lessens the penchant toward moral and diplomatic myopia suffered by Europe.
Harper's principled stance is by no means politically risk-free. Of the main national newspapers that delve into global affairs the National Post is editorially sympathetic to Israel though it relies on occasionally tendentious wire services for its Middle East coverage. The Globe & Mail which endorsed Harper is somewhat less supportive and its Israel bureau chief Patrick Martin has been a strident anti-Israel critic. And while Canadians are not particularly interested in foreign affairs, Harper's support for Israel hardly panders to popular opinion. A recent BBC World Service poll found that fifty-two percent of Canadians still view Israel unfavorably. During the Second Lebanon War only 45 percent agreed with Harper's pro-Israel position. In Quebec, historically less friendly to Jews and Israel, there has been even greater dissatisfaction with the government's stand.
Still, in Harper's core constituency, which includes Christian supporters of Israel, his willingness to go against the grain is valued. Moreover, increasing numbers of Jews in key Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver electoral "ridings" where they are sufficiently concentrated to hold sway have abandoned Liberal for Conservative candidates. Even the famously pro-Israel Liberal MP Irwin Cutler barely won reelection in a heavily Jewish district against his pro-Israel Conservative opponent. Unlike their co-religionists to the south, Canada's 350,000 Jews (out of a 34 million population) see themselves as part of a multicultural mosaic not a melting pot; they tend to be traditionally oriented with a large proportion having actually visited Israel. And they are far less prone to anchor their "Jewish identity" in criticizing Israeli policies.
Exactly fifty years ago, in May 1961, David Ben-Gurion became the first Prime Minister of Israel to make an official visit to Canada. Which brings us to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's planned visit to Washington later this month. Would it not be menschlich if he made it a point to stopover in Ottawa to personally express Israel's gratitude to Harper and the Canadian electorate for their refreshingly sincere and unqualified friendship?
###
-- May 2, 2011
Monday, May 16, 2011
Canadian Relations With Israel
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
WHAT IF BEN-GURION WERE MEETING OBAMA AND NOT NETANYAHU
What Would Ben-Gurion Do?
Here is a hypothetical being asked around Israel: How would David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973), Israel's first prime minister and a founding father, handle himself if it were he and not Benjamin Netanyahu who was scheduled to meet President Barack Obama on Friday (May 20), address AIPAC on Monday (May 23) and speak before a joint session of the US Congress on Tuesday (May 24)? Ben-Gurion's own meeting – precisely fifty years ago this month – with President John F. Kennedy provides some context about the limits of prime ministerial charisma and the constraints on Israel's freedom of action.
Start with U.S. Jewry. Even before he set out for America, Ben-Gurion found himself embroiled in a bitter public dispute with Nahum Goldmann and Irving Miller, top American Jewish leaders, over Israel's relationship with the Diaspora. Ben-Gurion began the row by saying that a Jew could only be a Zionist by making aliya – immigrating to Israel. The Jewish leaders insisted that one could be a perfectly good Zionist by aiding Israel from afar and by unifying Jews behind Israel as the civilizational core of world Jewry. Ben-Gurion further antagonized Goldmann and Miller by having issued a joint statement with Jacob Blaustein, head of the American Jewish Committee, which affirmed that Israel would not interfere in the internal affairs of the Diaspora and stipulating that aliya was a matter of personal choice.
Ben-Gurion well knew that the AJC in those days identified itself as non-Zionist and had pointedly stayed out of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in which Goldmann and Miller were leaders. Goldmann, who later became a vehement critic of the very Jewish establishment he helped create, lambasted Ben-Gurion for undermining the unity of American Jewry by fixing Israel-Diaspora relations with what Goldmann termed an "unrepresentative" AJC. One can only imagine Goldmann's and Miller's apoplectic reaction when they learned that while he was in the U.S. Ben-Gurion went so far as to meet with Lessing Rosenwald head of the stridently anti-Zionist American Council on Judaism.
Ben-Gurion departed Israel on May 24, 1961 travelling first to see Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker. At last, on May 30 at 4:45PM he was ushered into the presidential suite at Manhattan's Waldorf Hotel for his private meeting with Kennedy. The official explanation for the venue was that JFK would be leaving from New York for a summit in Vienna with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. In fact, the administration did not want to antagonize the Arab states by officially hosting Ben-Gurion at the White House. The premier, accompanied by Israeli Ambassador Avraham Harman, was described as tense heading into the meeting which included Myer Feldman, the president's liaison to the Jewish community and Phil Talbot from the State Department.
In a remark that Ben-Gurion later told intimates he found uncouth, JFK began by saying: "You know, I was elected by the Jews of New York" – indeed he had garnered 80 percent of the Jewish vote nationwide in his razor-thin victory over Richard Nixon in the 1960 elections – and that he felt obliged to "do something" in return. Taken aback, Ben-Gurion replied, "You must do whatever is good for the free world."
There were three main items on the president's agenda. He knew that Ben-Gurion would be asking to purchase HAWK anti-aircraft missiles. Kennedy's State Department was decidedly opposed; the Pentagon was indifferent. Next, Kennedy wanted to get Ben-Gurion's assurance that Israel would not use its Dimona nuclear reactor – just visited by international inspectors who returned with a favorable report – for military purposes. And finally, Kennedy wanted Ben-Gurion to make a gesture to the Arabs on the refugee issue.
Ben-Gurion first implied that the Eisenhower administration had been inclined to sell Israel the HAWKS. When he saw this tack wasn't working he made a fresh case on the merits: The Soviets were supplying Egypt with advanced MIG-19s warplanes and the purely defensive HAWKS were needed to counter this threat. Not wanting to introduce missiles into the region – or leave Israel in a position that invited attack – JFK pledged to "continue to review the missile situation." Ben-Gurion didn't get a "yes" but he found JFK far more sympathetic than his predecessor. Indeed, in August 1962, following a meeting between 39 year-old Shimon Peres, director-general of the Defense Ministry, and Attorney-General Robert F. Kennedy, the administration agreed to sell the anti-aircraft system to Israel.
On Dimona, Ben-Gurion had already told Diefenbaker just days earlier that as a matter of survival Israel might be forced to develop a nuclear capability. Kennedy talked in a friendly way about the recently completed international inspection at Dimona and said that there must not be even the appearance that Israel was pursing nuclear weapons. Ben-Gurion replied that for now the facility was indeed engaged in peaceful nuclear pursuits but that were Israel faced with an existential threat it would keep its future options open. Much depended on the Soviet and Egyptian threat. The signals from Gamal Nasser were more than discouraging. Ben-Gurion told JFK: "If they should defeat us they would do to the Jews what Hitler did."
Kennedy next wanted to talk about the Palestinian Arab refugees. The premier said that Nasser did not really care what happened to them. The Israeli position was that the refugees should be resettled and absorbed in Egyptian-occupied Gaza, the Jordanian occupied West Bank and in Lebanon. JFK asked Israel to take back a token number of refugees saying it would help the US in trying to mediate between the parties. Ben-Gurion predicted that the initiative would fail, but Kennedy responded that Washington would rather see the onus of rejectionism rest with the Arabs. So Ben-Gurion agreed that the initiative was "worth trying" and following the meeting told the press that he and JFK were in agreement on a refugee initiative. Either the two men did not understand one other or the U.S. toughened its stance, but when UN Ambassador Adlai E. Stevenson later detailed the specifics of the repatriation proposal to Israeli officials it became clear that there was an unbridgeable gulf between what Israel could live with and what Washington wanted.
By 6 P.M. the Ben-Gurion-JFK confab had concluded.
The next day, the New York Times led its coverage with the "problem of the Palestine Arab refugees."
Before leaving for London on his way back to Israel, Ben-Gurion met with the Conference of Presidents and with former president Harry S Truman, to thank him for his previous support He also saw former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Ambassador Stevenson, and Labor leader George Meany.
Anticipating criticism of the meeting, the State Department had sent diplomatic notes in JFK's name to Arab countries pledging that America would be an "honest broker" and continue to press Israel on the refugees. Secretary of State Dean Rusk insisted Washington wanted to remain impartial on the Arab-Israel conflict.
None of this, however, placated the likes of Lebanese-born Ahmad Shukeiri, then serving as a Saudi diplomat to the U.N. and later to become the founding head of the Palestine Liberation Organization when it was established by the Arab League in 1964. The administration's unappreciated efforts at "impartiality" nevertheless brought it in conflict with Congress which sought to cut U.S. aid to Egypt.
In grappling with the "What would Ben-Gurion Do?" question, journalist Amnon Lord, speaking recently on Israel's Knesset Channel, bemoaned the sense prevalent in Israel today that its fate is no longer in its hands; its independence seems to be dissipating. Who would have thought, he asked, that a Netanyahu government would have imposed a de facto freeze on new housing construction in Jerusalem?
Actually, Netanyahu's position is not spectacularly different from Ben-Gurion's. Granted, Obama is more of an Eisenhower than a JFK, but the options available to an Israeli premier haven't changed all that much. Ben-Gurion employed suasion on the HAWKS and succeeded; on existential questions of survival – what the future might hold for Dimona – he exhibited requisite toughness; and on the refugee issue he first tried diplomatic accommodation before digging in his heels. Fifty years on, Israel's standing with U.S. Jewry is no less complicated; its security predicament no less threatened; its international standing no less tenuous.
So Israelis would be well served if Netanyahu managed to emulate "the Old Man" by employing just the right combination of suasion, toughness and diplomacy.
###
-- May 16, 2011
Here is a hypothetical being asked around Israel: How would David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973), Israel's first prime minister and a founding father, handle himself if it were he and not Benjamin Netanyahu who was scheduled to meet President Barack Obama on Friday (May 20), address AIPAC on Monday (May 23) and speak before a joint session of the US Congress on Tuesday (May 24)? Ben-Gurion's own meeting – precisely fifty years ago this month – with President John F. Kennedy provides some context about the limits of prime ministerial charisma and the constraints on Israel's freedom of action.
Start with U.S. Jewry. Even before he set out for America, Ben-Gurion found himself embroiled in a bitter public dispute with Nahum Goldmann and Irving Miller, top American Jewish leaders, over Israel's relationship with the Diaspora. Ben-Gurion began the row by saying that a Jew could only be a Zionist by making aliya – immigrating to Israel. The Jewish leaders insisted that one could be a perfectly good Zionist by aiding Israel from afar and by unifying Jews behind Israel as the civilizational core of world Jewry. Ben-Gurion further antagonized Goldmann and Miller by having issued a joint statement with Jacob Blaustein, head of the American Jewish Committee, which affirmed that Israel would not interfere in the internal affairs of the Diaspora and stipulating that aliya was a matter of personal choice.
Ben-Gurion well knew that the AJC in those days identified itself as non-Zionist and had pointedly stayed out of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in which Goldmann and Miller were leaders. Goldmann, who later became a vehement critic of the very Jewish establishment he helped create, lambasted Ben-Gurion for undermining the unity of American Jewry by fixing Israel-Diaspora relations with what Goldmann termed an "unrepresentative" AJC. One can only imagine Goldmann's and Miller's apoplectic reaction when they learned that while he was in the U.S. Ben-Gurion went so far as to meet with Lessing Rosenwald head of the stridently anti-Zionist American Council on Judaism.
Ben-Gurion departed Israel on May 24, 1961 travelling first to see Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker. At last, on May 30 at 4:45PM he was ushered into the presidential suite at Manhattan's Waldorf Hotel for his private meeting with Kennedy. The official explanation for the venue was that JFK would be leaving from New York for a summit in Vienna with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. In fact, the administration did not want to antagonize the Arab states by officially hosting Ben-Gurion at the White House. The premier, accompanied by Israeli Ambassador Avraham Harman, was described as tense heading into the meeting which included Myer Feldman, the president's liaison to the Jewish community and Phil Talbot from the State Department.
In a remark that Ben-Gurion later told intimates he found uncouth, JFK began by saying: "You know, I was elected by the Jews of New York" – indeed he had garnered 80 percent of the Jewish vote nationwide in his razor-thin victory over Richard Nixon in the 1960 elections – and that he felt obliged to "do something" in return. Taken aback, Ben-Gurion replied, "You must do whatever is good for the free world."
There were three main items on the president's agenda. He knew that Ben-Gurion would be asking to purchase HAWK anti-aircraft missiles. Kennedy's State Department was decidedly opposed; the Pentagon was indifferent. Next, Kennedy wanted to get Ben-Gurion's assurance that Israel would not use its Dimona nuclear reactor – just visited by international inspectors who returned with a favorable report – for military purposes. And finally, Kennedy wanted Ben-Gurion to make a gesture to the Arabs on the refugee issue.
Ben-Gurion first implied that the Eisenhower administration had been inclined to sell Israel the HAWKS. When he saw this tack wasn't working he made a fresh case on the merits: The Soviets were supplying Egypt with advanced MIG-19s warplanes and the purely defensive HAWKS were needed to counter this threat. Not wanting to introduce missiles into the region – or leave Israel in a position that invited attack – JFK pledged to "continue to review the missile situation." Ben-Gurion didn't get a "yes" but he found JFK far more sympathetic than his predecessor. Indeed, in August 1962, following a meeting between 39 year-old Shimon Peres, director-general of the Defense Ministry, and Attorney-General Robert F. Kennedy, the administration agreed to sell the anti-aircraft system to Israel.
On Dimona, Ben-Gurion had already told Diefenbaker just days earlier that as a matter of survival Israel might be forced to develop a nuclear capability. Kennedy talked in a friendly way about the recently completed international inspection at Dimona and said that there must not be even the appearance that Israel was pursing nuclear weapons. Ben-Gurion replied that for now the facility was indeed engaged in peaceful nuclear pursuits but that were Israel faced with an existential threat it would keep its future options open. Much depended on the Soviet and Egyptian threat. The signals from Gamal Nasser were more than discouraging. Ben-Gurion told JFK: "If they should defeat us they would do to the Jews what Hitler did."
Kennedy next wanted to talk about the Palestinian Arab refugees. The premier said that Nasser did not really care what happened to them. The Israeli position was that the refugees should be resettled and absorbed in Egyptian-occupied Gaza, the Jordanian occupied West Bank and in Lebanon. JFK asked Israel to take back a token number of refugees saying it would help the US in trying to mediate between the parties. Ben-Gurion predicted that the initiative would fail, but Kennedy responded that Washington would rather see the onus of rejectionism rest with the Arabs. So Ben-Gurion agreed that the initiative was "worth trying" and following the meeting told the press that he and JFK were in agreement on a refugee initiative. Either the two men did not understand one other or the U.S. toughened its stance, but when UN Ambassador Adlai E. Stevenson later detailed the specifics of the repatriation proposal to Israeli officials it became clear that there was an unbridgeable gulf between what Israel could live with and what Washington wanted.
By 6 P.M. the Ben-Gurion-JFK confab had concluded.
The next day, the New York Times led its coverage with the "problem of the Palestine Arab refugees."
Before leaving for London on his way back to Israel, Ben-Gurion met with the Conference of Presidents and with former president Harry S Truman, to thank him for his previous support He also saw former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Ambassador Stevenson, and Labor leader George Meany.
Anticipating criticism of the meeting, the State Department had sent diplomatic notes in JFK's name to Arab countries pledging that America would be an "honest broker" and continue to press Israel on the refugees. Secretary of State Dean Rusk insisted Washington wanted to remain impartial on the Arab-Israel conflict.
None of this, however, placated the likes of Lebanese-born Ahmad Shukeiri, then serving as a Saudi diplomat to the U.N. and later to become the founding head of the Palestine Liberation Organization when it was established by the Arab League in 1964. The administration's unappreciated efforts at "impartiality" nevertheless brought it in conflict with Congress which sought to cut U.S. aid to Egypt.
In grappling with the "What would Ben-Gurion Do?" question, journalist Amnon Lord, speaking recently on Israel's Knesset Channel, bemoaned the sense prevalent in Israel today that its fate is no longer in its hands; its independence seems to be dissipating. Who would have thought, he asked, that a Netanyahu government would have imposed a de facto freeze on new housing construction in Jerusalem?
Actually, Netanyahu's position is not spectacularly different from Ben-Gurion's. Granted, Obama is more of an Eisenhower than a JFK, but the options available to an Israeli premier haven't changed all that much. Ben-Gurion employed suasion on the HAWKS and succeeded; on existential questions of survival – what the future might hold for Dimona – he exhibited requisite toughness; and on the refugee issue he first tried diplomatic accommodation before digging in his heels. Fifty years on, Israel's standing with U.S. Jewry is no less complicated; its security predicament no less threatened; its international standing no less tenuous.
So Israelis would be well served if Netanyahu managed to emulate "the Old Man" by employing just the right combination of suasion, toughness and diplomacy.
###
-- May 16, 2011
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Wednesday, May 04, 2011
EGYPT-ISRAEL RELATIONS AFTER MUBARAK: THE STATE OF PLAY SO FAR
New Egypt
As Israelis watched with unease Egypt's revolution unfolding they were told by European and American liberals to stop sulking; that Hosni Mubarak's February 12th departure had not been provoked by "Palestine" or "Allah;" that the chants in Tahrir Square of “Up with Egypt" more than drowned out those of “down with Israel."
Now, just short of three months into the new regime a sober assessment of Egyptian attitudes would suggest that it may be time to start worrying. The Hamas-Fatah reconciliation engineered by Egypt, regardless of its doubtful longevity, was enabled by changes in Cairo's approach toward the Islamist fanatics. Where the old regime assigned intelligence Chief Omar Suleiman to deal with them as a security problem, his replacement Murad Muwafi, backed by Foreign Minister Nabil el-Arabi, has been dealing with Hamas as a diplomatic partner. Mubarak distrusted Hamas -- the Gaza arm of Egypt's own Muslim Brotherhood -- and nominally aligned Cairo with Fatah. Now, Hamas is getting the kind of treatment terrorists crave – respect. Its "military commander" Ahmed Ja'abari is now no less welcome in Cairo than the movement's co-founder and theoretician Mahmoud al-Zahar or its Damascus-based politburo chief Khaled Mashaal. Hamas, now poised to join a restructured Palestine Liberation Organization, will reportedly open a mission in Cairo.
Egypt's concurrent decision to throw open its Rafah border with the Gaza Strip will make it far easier for Hamas to send its gunmen to Iran for specialized training and to bring in ever more lethal weaponry for use against Israel. Egypt's military chief General Sami Anan preempted Jerusalem's protests by letting it be known that the decision was purely Egypt's internal affair.
Meanwhile, Egyptians have held protests on a bridge overlooking the Israeli Embassy in Cairo demanding their government sever ties with Israel, and stop exporting natural gas to the Jewish state. The export of Egyptian gas to Israel has been portrayed as yet another manifestation of the old regime's corruption with claims that Mubarak's illicit wealth was generated by his conspiring with Israel to provide gas at below market rates at the expense of the Egyptian masses. Oddly, the pipeline carrying gas to Israel (and Jordan) has been twice sabotaged since the revolution and is now inoperative. This does not trouble Finance Minister Samir Radwan who remarked that the peace agreement does not obligate Egypt to sell gas to Israel.
Scapegoating Israel has never been bad politics in Egypt so it is predictable that the new regime is riding the ubiquitous crest of antipathy toward the Jewish state. A Pew opinion survey found that 54 percent of Egyptians want the peace treaty with Israel scrapped (another 10% "don't know."). And no one hates Israel more than the Muslim Brotherhood which is viewed favorably by a whopping 75% of Egyptians. In an apparent arrangement with the ruling junta, it has pledged to compete for half the seats in forthcoming parliamentary elections. With Egyptian political conditions so unsettled and expectations bound to outstrip any incoming regime's capacity to deliver, the Brothers have prudently concluded that they are not yet ready to rule.
Perhaps they are worried that they cannot provide jobs at a time of regional upheaval when remittances and tourism are down. What would they do, for instance, about populist pressure for a minimum wage? The Brotherhood is, astonishingly, the most left-leaning of eight Salafist groups active in Egypt and may simply prefer to follow the Bolshevik approach of not seizing power until conditions are ripe. They can afford to bide their time. Already 62% of Egyptians say they want to live under a political system in which adherence to the Koran is "strict;" another 27% favor a milder form of theocratic rule. Of course, even the sliver of the population that had identified itself with Mubarak's liberal opposition is no less hostile toward Israel.
At home, like in the old Soviet Union, Egyptians have complete liberty to lament the corruption of the old regime. But open criticism of the new supreme military council is cause for immediate arrest. Some 5,000 citizens face trial in military courts for unlawful behavior during the revolution.
Abroad, Egypt's Supreme Council of the Armed Forces headed by Defense Minister Muhammad Hussein Tantawi has been keeping a close eye on the unfolding Syrian situation which could influence Cairo's posture toward Jerusalem. Tantawi sought to limit criticism of the Assad regime's crackdown on protesters at the UN Human Rights Council. Concurrently, Tantawi's government-by-the-army has bolstered its legitimacy by turning the temperature of Mubarak's already "cold peace" down a few degrees.
Still, he can be expected to keep the relationship on minimal life-support if for no other reason than to avoid the ire of the U.S. government which sends $2 billion in annual aid to Egypt and is now making billions more "potentially available."
Moreover, given all that is on his plate, he would not want to spook the IDF into accelerating existing plans to augment its capabilities on the Egyptian front.
Israeli emissaries have been discreetly meeting with the new regime in Cairo, but Jerusalem's opposition to the Hamas-Fatah deal was rejected. Were Tantawi at all interested in allaying Israeli concerns about Egyptian intentions he could earn major points by leveraging Egypt's new relationship with Hamas to facilitate the release of captive IDF soldier Gilad Schalit. In the interim, he could instruct foreign minister el-Arabi, who plans a visit to Ramallah, to meet Israeli officials while he's in the area.
Positive gestures would be welcome, but Israeli officials are plainly troubled by what appears to be a strategic shift in Cairo's orientation, one that in the most optimistic analysis replicates Turkey turn against Israel. Egypt's ultimate trajectory is impossible to forecast. The evidence so far suggests that no matter what government formally replaces Mubarak's the broad outlines of the new regime's approach toward Israel are already ominously discernable.
###
-- May 2, 2011
As Israelis watched with unease Egypt's revolution unfolding they were told by European and American liberals to stop sulking; that Hosni Mubarak's February 12th departure had not been provoked by "Palestine" or "Allah;" that the chants in Tahrir Square of “Up with Egypt" more than drowned out those of “down with Israel."
Now, just short of three months into the new regime a sober assessment of Egyptian attitudes would suggest that it may be time to start worrying. The Hamas-Fatah reconciliation engineered by Egypt, regardless of its doubtful longevity, was enabled by changes in Cairo's approach toward the Islamist fanatics. Where the old regime assigned intelligence Chief Omar Suleiman to deal with them as a security problem, his replacement Murad Muwafi, backed by Foreign Minister Nabil el-Arabi, has been dealing with Hamas as a diplomatic partner. Mubarak distrusted Hamas -- the Gaza arm of Egypt's own Muslim Brotherhood -- and nominally aligned Cairo with Fatah. Now, Hamas is getting the kind of treatment terrorists crave – respect. Its "military commander" Ahmed Ja'abari is now no less welcome in Cairo than the movement's co-founder and theoretician Mahmoud al-Zahar or its Damascus-based politburo chief Khaled Mashaal. Hamas, now poised to join a restructured Palestine Liberation Organization, will reportedly open a mission in Cairo.
Egypt's concurrent decision to throw open its Rafah border with the Gaza Strip will make it far easier for Hamas to send its gunmen to Iran for specialized training and to bring in ever more lethal weaponry for use against Israel. Egypt's military chief General Sami Anan preempted Jerusalem's protests by letting it be known that the decision was purely Egypt's internal affair.
Meanwhile, Egyptians have held protests on a bridge overlooking the Israeli Embassy in Cairo demanding their government sever ties with Israel, and stop exporting natural gas to the Jewish state. The export of Egyptian gas to Israel has been portrayed as yet another manifestation of the old regime's corruption with claims that Mubarak's illicit wealth was generated by his conspiring with Israel to provide gas at below market rates at the expense of the Egyptian masses. Oddly, the pipeline carrying gas to Israel (and Jordan) has been twice sabotaged since the revolution and is now inoperative. This does not trouble Finance Minister Samir Radwan who remarked that the peace agreement does not obligate Egypt to sell gas to Israel.
Scapegoating Israel has never been bad politics in Egypt so it is predictable that the new regime is riding the ubiquitous crest of antipathy toward the Jewish state. A Pew opinion survey found that 54 percent of Egyptians want the peace treaty with Israel scrapped (another 10% "don't know."). And no one hates Israel more than the Muslim Brotherhood which is viewed favorably by a whopping 75% of Egyptians. In an apparent arrangement with the ruling junta, it has pledged to compete for half the seats in forthcoming parliamentary elections. With Egyptian political conditions so unsettled and expectations bound to outstrip any incoming regime's capacity to deliver, the Brothers have prudently concluded that they are not yet ready to rule.
Perhaps they are worried that they cannot provide jobs at a time of regional upheaval when remittances and tourism are down. What would they do, for instance, about populist pressure for a minimum wage? The Brotherhood is, astonishingly, the most left-leaning of eight Salafist groups active in Egypt and may simply prefer to follow the Bolshevik approach of not seizing power until conditions are ripe. They can afford to bide their time. Already 62% of Egyptians say they want to live under a political system in which adherence to the Koran is "strict;" another 27% favor a milder form of theocratic rule. Of course, even the sliver of the population that had identified itself with Mubarak's liberal opposition is no less hostile toward Israel.
At home, like in the old Soviet Union, Egyptians have complete liberty to lament the corruption of the old regime. But open criticism of the new supreme military council is cause for immediate arrest. Some 5,000 citizens face trial in military courts for unlawful behavior during the revolution.
Abroad, Egypt's Supreme Council of the Armed Forces headed by Defense Minister Muhammad Hussein Tantawi has been keeping a close eye on the unfolding Syrian situation which could influence Cairo's posture toward Jerusalem. Tantawi sought to limit criticism of the Assad regime's crackdown on protesters at the UN Human Rights Council. Concurrently, Tantawi's government-by-the-army has bolstered its legitimacy by turning the temperature of Mubarak's already "cold peace" down a few degrees.
Still, he can be expected to keep the relationship on minimal life-support if for no other reason than to avoid the ire of the U.S. government which sends $2 billion in annual aid to Egypt and is now making billions more "potentially available."
Moreover, given all that is on his plate, he would not want to spook the IDF into accelerating existing plans to augment its capabilities on the Egyptian front.
Israeli emissaries have been discreetly meeting with the new regime in Cairo, but Jerusalem's opposition to the Hamas-Fatah deal was rejected. Were Tantawi at all interested in allaying Israeli concerns about Egyptian intentions he could earn major points by leveraging Egypt's new relationship with Hamas to facilitate the release of captive IDF soldier Gilad Schalit. In the interim, he could instruct foreign minister el-Arabi, who plans a visit to Ramallah, to meet Israeli officials while he's in the area.
Positive gestures would be welcome, but Israeli officials are plainly troubled by what appears to be a strategic shift in Cairo's orientation, one that in the most optimistic analysis replicates Turkey turn against Israel. Egypt's ultimate trajectory is impossible to forecast. The evidence so far suggests that no matter what government formally replaces Mubarak's the broad outlines of the new regime's approach toward Israel are already ominously discernable.
###
-- May 2, 2011
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Ford Foundation & Israel
'The Road Ahead' Without Ford
With little fanfare, the Ford Foundation has declared victory and prepared for a phased withdrawal from its long, largely inconspicuous campaign to influence Israeli politics. News reports have focused mostly on the foundation's 23-year-long patronage of the New Israel Fund which, in addition to some laudable activities, has funded opaque groups that have exacerbated tensions between Jews and Arabs. Some NIF-backed pressure groups including B’Tselem, HaMoked and Adalah self-righteously colluded with the now discredited Goldstone Commission Report.
But Ford's involvement in Israel's affairs goes well beyond the New Israel Fund. The Foundation, today with $10.2 billion in assets, was created in 1936 by automobile magnate Henry Ford's son Edsel. Since then it has disbursed a staggering $16 billion in grants worldwide. While Henry was a notorious Nazi-sympathizer and anti-Semite, the foundation his money helped endow transmogrified into a quintessentially "progressive" entity devoted to promoting "social change worldwide."
In 1953 the foundation began making apolitical grants that benefited research in Israel. Then, on the very day Israel claimed victory in the June 1967 Six Day War, President Lyndon Johnson recalled McGeorge Bundy, his former foreign policy aide, newly ensconced at the helm of the Ford Foundation, to explore ways to coax Israel out of the just liberated Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Bundy did not produce any tangible results though in hindsight his involvement can be seen as having driven the foundation's fixation with changing Israeli policies.
Ford became a benefactor of writers, researchers and pressure groups devoted to ending the "occupation" notwithstanding Arab intentions. Judging by where it puts its money, Ford views Israel as an oppressor state that routinely victimizes its Palestinian Arab minority.
By the 1980s it had helped bankroll Meron Benvenisti's West Bank Data Project campaign which sullied as ineluctably in the wrong Jewish life beyond the Green Line. When the Palestinians under Yassir Arafat declared a state – the first time around on November 15, 1988 in Tunis – it was thanks to a blueprint drafted by Prof. Jerome Segal who was later rewarded as a Ford grantee. Ford supported Stephen P. Cohen's Institute for Middle East Peace and Development which gave him the institutional heft that allowed his chum, New York Times advocacy journalist Tom Friedman to incessantly cite Cohen as a "Middle East expert" in promoting their shared views critical of Israeli policies.
Ian Lustick, the intellectual godfather of efforts to "redefine" pro-Israelism and to dissociate American Jewish backing for Israel from support for its West Bank and security policies would also go on to work for Ford. The foundation remained on the periphery of an interlocking directorate of agencies including the Foundation for Peace in the Middle East and the Tides Foundation that conducted a withering pressure campaign to force Israel back to the 1949 Armistice Lines.
The now defunct International Center for Peace in the Middle East provided the organizational front for disaffected Israeli and Americans Jewish actors such as Abba Eban and Rita Hauser as they campaigned for precipitate U.S. recognition of Arafat's PLO.
Ford also become a major funder of Arab and far-Left groups behind the virulently anti-Israel 2001 UN sponsored Durban Conference and with a few degrees of separation continued to back the malevolent boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against the Jewish state. Whether by backing innocuous-sounding groups like One Voice and Peres Center for Peace or by supporting tendentious polling on behalf of the Geneva Initiative, Ford's efforts have weakened Israel's ability to reach a negotiated solution.
Like Peace Now, the Geneva Initiative is so well-funded by European governments that it simply does not need Ford's money. But Ford has gone on to lend moral support for J-Street as it takes Lustick's crusade to redefine pro-Israelism to ever more absurd heights.
Looking back, Ford's directors can feel vindicated that the fund's heavy investment in artfully stoking a multi-layered campaign to force an Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 Armistice boundaries – irrespective of Palestinian belligerence – has gained inexorable momentum. Ford's outlay has helped leave Israel's security damaged, its international standing weakened and its domestic divisions worsened. As for the New Israel Fund's ability to carry on Ford's work alone after 2013, that will depend on how successful it is in branding itself dedicated to "creating a better Israel" even as it obfuscates the, shall we say, awkward activities of its dependent NGOs.
###
-- April 24, 2011
With little fanfare, the Ford Foundation has declared victory and prepared for a phased withdrawal from its long, largely inconspicuous campaign to influence Israeli politics. News reports have focused mostly on the foundation's 23-year-long patronage of the New Israel Fund which, in addition to some laudable activities, has funded opaque groups that have exacerbated tensions between Jews and Arabs. Some NIF-backed pressure groups including B’Tselem, HaMoked and Adalah self-righteously colluded with the now discredited Goldstone Commission Report.
But Ford's involvement in Israel's affairs goes well beyond the New Israel Fund. The Foundation, today with $10.2 billion in assets, was created in 1936 by automobile magnate Henry Ford's son Edsel. Since then it has disbursed a staggering $16 billion in grants worldwide. While Henry was a notorious Nazi-sympathizer and anti-Semite, the foundation his money helped endow transmogrified into a quintessentially "progressive" entity devoted to promoting "social change worldwide."
In 1953 the foundation began making apolitical grants that benefited research in Israel. Then, on the very day Israel claimed victory in the June 1967 Six Day War, President Lyndon Johnson recalled McGeorge Bundy, his former foreign policy aide, newly ensconced at the helm of the Ford Foundation, to explore ways to coax Israel out of the just liberated Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Bundy did not produce any tangible results though in hindsight his involvement can be seen as having driven the foundation's fixation with changing Israeli policies.
Ford became a benefactor of writers, researchers and pressure groups devoted to ending the "occupation" notwithstanding Arab intentions. Judging by where it puts its money, Ford views Israel as an oppressor state that routinely victimizes its Palestinian Arab minority.
By the 1980s it had helped bankroll Meron Benvenisti's West Bank Data Project campaign which sullied as ineluctably in the wrong Jewish life beyond the Green Line. When the Palestinians under Yassir Arafat declared a state – the first time around on November 15, 1988 in Tunis – it was thanks to a blueprint drafted by Prof. Jerome Segal who was later rewarded as a Ford grantee. Ford supported Stephen P. Cohen's Institute for Middle East Peace and Development which gave him the institutional heft that allowed his chum, New York Times advocacy journalist Tom Friedman to incessantly cite Cohen as a "Middle East expert" in promoting their shared views critical of Israeli policies.
Ian Lustick, the intellectual godfather of efforts to "redefine" pro-Israelism and to dissociate American Jewish backing for Israel from support for its West Bank and security policies would also go on to work for Ford. The foundation remained on the periphery of an interlocking directorate of agencies including the Foundation for Peace in the Middle East and the Tides Foundation that conducted a withering pressure campaign to force Israel back to the 1949 Armistice Lines.
The now defunct International Center for Peace in the Middle East provided the organizational front for disaffected Israeli and Americans Jewish actors such as Abba Eban and Rita Hauser as they campaigned for precipitate U.S. recognition of Arafat's PLO.
Ford also become a major funder of Arab and far-Left groups behind the virulently anti-Israel 2001 UN sponsored Durban Conference and with a few degrees of separation continued to back the malevolent boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against the Jewish state. Whether by backing innocuous-sounding groups like One Voice and Peres Center for Peace or by supporting tendentious polling on behalf of the Geneva Initiative, Ford's efforts have weakened Israel's ability to reach a negotiated solution.
Like Peace Now, the Geneva Initiative is so well-funded by European governments that it simply does not need Ford's money. But Ford has gone on to lend moral support for J-Street as it takes Lustick's crusade to redefine pro-Israelism to ever more absurd heights.
Looking back, Ford's directors can feel vindicated that the fund's heavy investment in artfully stoking a multi-layered campaign to force an Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 Armistice boundaries – irrespective of Palestinian belligerence – has gained inexorable momentum. Ford's outlay has helped leave Israel's security damaged, its international standing weakened and its domestic divisions worsened. As for the New Israel Fund's ability to carry on Ford's work alone after 2013, that will depend on how successful it is in branding itself dedicated to "creating a better Israel" even as it obfuscates the, shall we say, awkward activities of its dependent NGOs.
###
-- April 24, 2011
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
WHAT DOES THE LIKUD PARTY STAND FOR?
Between Idealism and Pragmatism
The Likud Party faithful who gathered in Tel Aviv on April 14 for a pre-Passover holiday toast heard party chairman Benjamin Netanyahu announce that he would amplify Israel’s security and peace principles for negotiations with the Palestinian Arabs before a joint session of the U.S. Congress next month.
As he surveyed the crowd from the podium Prime Minister Netanyahu was no doubt reassured by a recent survey showing that 76 percent of Likud members opposed annexing all of Judea and Samaria. Yet he also would have known that 10,000 party recruits had newly been signed up by uncompromising settler leaders. To keep the Likud unified and in the center of Israel's political mainstream, Netanyahu's mission will be to bridge the gap between ideological purism and pragmatism, the religious settlers and centrist hawks, the needs of security and the quest for peace.
In doing so, he follows in the footsteps of party founder Menachem Begin, according to Hebrew University political scientist Abraham Diskin, editor of From the Altalena to the Present Day, a newly published political history (Hebrew) of the movement and its transition from Herut to Likud.
Menachem Begin's decision to form the Herut party (Likud's antecedent) on May 14, 1948, the day the state was declared, can be seen as a victory of pragmatism over ideological zeal. All too often when underground factions compete -- such as Begin's Irgun Zvai Leumi and David Ben-Gurion's Haganah – in a liberation struggle they have gone on to fight one another after independence, as Herzl Makov, chairman the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem pointed out in the book's preface. Begin, however, was determined that there would be no Zionist civil war even after the Haganah fired upon and sank the Irgun arms ship Altalena off Tel Aviv on June 6, 1948 with Begin on board. From that dark day on, in the face of relentless campaigning by Ben-Gurion to marginalize and delegitimize the Herut party, Begin steadfastly committed the movement to the ever-shifting center-right of Israel's parliamentary democracy.
From the beginning, the political deck had been stacked against Begin. Ben-Gurion's Labor movement had dominated the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency and Histadrut workers federation so it was no surprise that his Mapai faction captured a 46 seat plurality in the first Knesset elections on January 25, 1949 against 14 mandates for Herut. Ben-Gurion then formed the country's first coalition government as his movement continued to dominate all subsequent governments until 1977.
Not only did Ben-Gurion rule out a political reconciliation between the Begin-led Jabotinsky camp and his own Laborites, the Mapai boss pledged to forever ostracize Herut by keeping it out of any Labor-led government. His animosity ran so deep that Ben-Gurion wouldn't even deign to utter Begin's name in the Knesset referring to him instead as "the man sitting next to Dr. Yohanan Bader."
Paradoxically, it was Begin's quest to surmount Ben-Gurion's blacklisting that contributed mightily to his determination to keep Herut in the political mainstream. But in crystallizing Herut's ideology, diluting Jabotinsky's ideas and replacing them with his own, Begin had also to overcome the opposition of the Revisionist Zionists party, which claimed to be the true standard-bearer of Jabotinsky's ideology. Under the leadership of Herzl Rosenblum and Aryeh Altman, Ben-Gurion had welcomed the party into the Provisional State Council, though it failed to cross the one-percent electoral threshold in the first elections and would ultimately be absorbed into Herut. The Freedom Fighters for Israel (Stern Group) also ran independently for the first Knesset garnering one seat. Only in 1973, with Yitzhak Shamir's entry into Gahal, would the remnant of Abraham Stern's followers rejoin the Jabotinsky movement under Begin.
Begin's fiery 1952 orations against Israel accepting Holocaust reparations from West Germany were portrayed by Ben-Gurion's supporters as indicative of his innate right-wing extremism. In truth, opposition to taking "blood money" from the Germans was hardly limited to the right. And in any event, Herut picked up one additional mandate in the next elections.
Ben-Gurion's political quarantine on Begin began to disintegrate in 1954 as a result of the political fallout following a botched Israeli intelligence operation in Egypt known as the Lavon Affair. With the Laborites bickering among themselves and Ben-Gurion out of power, in 1964 Prime Minister Levi Eshkol permitted Jabotinsky's remains to be brought to Israel and interred on Mount Herzl not far from the gravesite of the Zionist movement's founder. This, too, subtly contributed to Herut's legitimacy as a mainstream party. Next, Begin orchestrated an alignment with the centrist Liberal Party, which had fallen out with the Laborites over the Lavon Affair, to form Gahal which garnered 26 mandates in the 1965 elections. As a classical liberal, Begin's principled opposition to maintaining military law over Israel's Arab citizens (rescinded in1966) further chipped away at Labor's defamation of Herut.
But it was Gahal's entry into the Labor-led national unity government just before the outbreak of the 1967 Six Day War that permanently shattered Begin's political isolation. He became a minister without-portfolio and in that capacity rejoiced over the IDF's liberation of Judea and Samaria. In due course, Begin quit the government, now headed by Gold Meir, to protest its acceptance of the 1969 Roger's Plan.
After the devastating 1973 Yom Kippur War, with Labor's authority to rule increasingly called into question, Begin joined forces with Ariel Sharon to orchestrate the emergence of the Likud from Gahal (and several smaller factions). Begin's sacrifice of ideology for pragmatism bore fruit in the Likud's smashing 1977 electoral victory overturned Labor's monopoly on power. Begin had pulled together settlers, security hawks, predominantly Ashkenazi proponents of a free market economy, and working class Sephardim tethered to the welfare state. It was an amalgamation that he further reinforced in 1981 during his second administration by solidifying Orthodox backing. The glue that held it all together was an overriding distrust of Arab intentions.
In government, Begin redefined Jabotinsky's line on Greater Israel, according to the Jabotinsky Institute's Prof. Arye Naor, a contributor to From the Altalena to the Present Day and Begin's former cabinet secretary. The political center in Israel had shifted and Begin was determined to attune his leadership accordingly even if it required jettisoning ideological purism. In 1979, Begin came under bitter criticism from former comrades-in-arms Shmuel Katz, a Jabotinsky biographer and movement ideologue for trading Sinai land in return for peace with Egypt and from Geula Cohen who broke away from Likud to help form Techiya. Begin's alliance with the Orthodox parties was yet a further deviation from Jabotinsky's preference for a separation of religion from politics. When Begin went to the polls in 1981 it was under the banner: "Better the Difficulties of Peace Than the Pains of War."
Some saw his decision in December 1981 to have the Knesset suddenly annex the Golan Heights as a manifestation of his Jabotinsky ideology, but the case can be made that it was more the result of Begin's justifiable pique at the Reagan administration. After all, the Syrian's had let it be known that they would not recognize Israel even if the Palestinians did; Washington was in the process of selling advanced military weapons to Saudi Arabia while threatening to embargo military aid to Israel over the destruction of the Iraqi nuclear reactor; and the State Department had infuriatingly criticized an Israeli retaliatory raid against PLO facilities in Beirut. Begin had had enough, asking rhetorically of America: "Are we a vassal-state of yours? Are we a banana republic?"
In a nut shell, all subsequent Likud prime ministers have grappled with the same tensions between pragmatism and ideology. Under Yitzhak Shamir, Likud demonstrated far more ideological steadfastness yet even his government could not avoid being dragged under U.S. pressure to the 1991 Madrid talks which were aimed at achieving a permanent resolution of the Palestinian issue. In his first administration, Netanyahu far from renouncing Israel's commitments to the fatally flawed 1993 Oslo Accords actually carried out a partial Hebron pullback in 1997. In the midst of the second intifada, Ariel Sharon campaigned in 2003 elections as a "Leader for Peace" and in May 2003 accepted the Quartet's Road Map whose endgame was the establishment of a Palestinian state. When the Likud rank-and-file repeatedly voted not to support his unilateral Gaza disengagement plan, Sharon defected in 2005 to form Kadima.
Netanyahu has now been back in power for the past two years juggling the demands of his right-wing coalition against those of Israel's fickle international allies. If From the Altalena to the Present Day is any guide, he will continue to navigate the Likud toward the political center – where most voters are – espousing strength on security along with pliability on the diplomatic front and striving, like his predecessors, to bridge the gap between idealism and pragmatism.
###
-- April 18, 2011
The Likud Party faithful who gathered in Tel Aviv on April 14 for a pre-Passover holiday toast heard party chairman Benjamin Netanyahu announce that he would amplify Israel’s security and peace principles for negotiations with the Palestinian Arabs before a joint session of the U.S. Congress next month.
As he surveyed the crowd from the podium Prime Minister Netanyahu was no doubt reassured by a recent survey showing that 76 percent of Likud members opposed annexing all of Judea and Samaria. Yet he also would have known that 10,000 party recruits had newly been signed up by uncompromising settler leaders. To keep the Likud unified and in the center of Israel's political mainstream, Netanyahu's mission will be to bridge the gap between ideological purism and pragmatism, the religious settlers and centrist hawks, the needs of security and the quest for peace.
In doing so, he follows in the footsteps of party founder Menachem Begin, according to Hebrew University political scientist Abraham Diskin, editor of From the Altalena to the Present Day, a newly published political history (Hebrew) of the movement and its transition from Herut to Likud.
Menachem Begin's decision to form the Herut party (Likud's antecedent) on May 14, 1948, the day the state was declared, can be seen as a victory of pragmatism over ideological zeal. All too often when underground factions compete -- such as Begin's Irgun Zvai Leumi and David Ben-Gurion's Haganah – in a liberation struggle they have gone on to fight one another after independence, as Herzl Makov, chairman the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem pointed out in the book's preface. Begin, however, was determined that there would be no Zionist civil war even after the Haganah fired upon and sank the Irgun arms ship Altalena off Tel Aviv on June 6, 1948 with Begin on board. From that dark day on, in the face of relentless campaigning by Ben-Gurion to marginalize and delegitimize the Herut party, Begin steadfastly committed the movement to the ever-shifting center-right of Israel's parliamentary democracy.
From the beginning, the political deck had been stacked against Begin. Ben-Gurion's Labor movement had dominated the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency and Histadrut workers federation so it was no surprise that his Mapai faction captured a 46 seat plurality in the first Knesset elections on January 25, 1949 against 14 mandates for Herut. Ben-Gurion then formed the country's first coalition government as his movement continued to dominate all subsequent governments until 1977.
Not only did Ben-Gurion rule out a political reconciliation between the Begin-led Jabotinsky camp and his own Laborites, the Mapai boss pledged to forever ostracize Herut by keeping it out of any Labor-led government. His animosity ran so deep that Ben-Gurion wouldn't even deign to utter Begin's name in the Knesset referring to him instead as "the man sitting next to Dr. Yohanan Bader."
Paradoxically, it was Begin's quest to surmount Ben-Gurion's blacklisting that contributed mightily to his determination to keep Herut in the political mainstream. But in crystallizing Herut's ideology, diluting Jabotinsky's ideas and replacing them with his own, Begin had also to overcome the opposition of the Revisionist Zionists party, which claimed to be the true standard-bearer of Jabotinsky's ideology. Under the leadership of Herzl Rosenblum and Aryeh Altman, Ben-Gurion had welcomed the party into the Provisional State Council, though it failed to cross the one-percent electoral threshold in the first elections and would ultimately be absorbed into Herut. The Freedom Fighters for Israel (Stern Group) also ran independently for the first Knesset garnering one seat. Only in 1973, with Yitzhak Shamir's entry into Gahal, would the remnant of Abraham Stern's followers rejoin the Jabotinsky movement under Begin.
Begin's fiery 1952 orations against Israel accepting Holocaust reparations from West Germany were portrayed by Ben-Gurion's supporters as indicative of his innate right-wing extremism. In truth, opposition to taking "blood money" from the Germans was hardly limited to the right. And in any event, Herut picked up one additional mandate in the next elections.
Ben-Gurion's political quarantine on Begin began to disintegrate in 1954 as a result of the political fallout following a botched Israeli intelligence operation in Egypt known as the Lavon Affair. With the Laborites bickering among themselves and Ben-Gurion out of power, in 1964 Prime Minister Levi Eshkol permitted Jabotinsky's remains to be brought to Israel and interred on Mount Herzl not far from the gravesite of the Zionist movement's founder. This, too, subtly contributed to Herut's legitimacy as a mainstream party. Next, Begin orchestrated an alignment with the centrist Liberal Party, which had fallen out with the Laborites over the Lavon Affair, to form Gahal which garnered 26 mandates in the 1965 elections. As a classical liberal, Begin's principled opposition to maintaining military law over Israel's Arab citizens (rescinded in1966) further chipped away at Labor's defamation of Herut.
But it was Gahal's entry into the Labor-led national unity government just before the outbreak of the 1967 Six Day War that permanently shattered Begin's political isolation. He became a minister without-portfolio and in that capacity rejoiced over the IDF's liberation of Judea and Samaria. In due course, Begin quit the government, now headed by Gold Meir, to protest its acceptance of the 1969 Roger's Plan.
After the devastating 1973 Yom Kippur War, with Labor's authority to rule increasingly called into question, Begin joined forces with Ariel Sharon to orchestrate the emergence of the Likud from Gahal (and several smaller factions). Begin's sacrifice of ideology for pragmatism bore fruit in the Likud's smashing 1977 electoral victory overturned Labor's monopoly on power. Begin had pulled together settlers, security hawks, predominantly Ashkenazi proponents of a free market economy, and working class Sephardim tethered to the welfare state. It was an amalgamation that he further reinforced in 1981 during his second administration by solidifying Orthodox backing. The glue that held it all together was an overriding distrust of Arab intentions.
In government, Begin redefined Jabotinsky's line on Greater Israel, according to the Jabotinsky Institute's Prof. Arye Naor, a contributor to From the Altalena to the Present Day and Begin's former cabinet secretary. The political center in Israel had shifted and Begin was determined to attune his leadership accordingly even if it required jettisoning ideological purism. In 1979, Begin came under bitter criticism from former comrades-in-arms Shmuel Katz, a Jabotinsky biographer and movement ideologue for trading Sinai land in return for peace with Egypt and from Geula Cohen who broke away from Likud to help form Techiya. Begin's alliance with the Orthodox parties was yet a further deviation from Jabotinsky's preference for a separation of religion from politics. When Begin went to the polls in 1981 it was under the banner: "Better the Difficulties of Peace Than the Pains of War."
Some saw his decision in December 1981 to have the Knesset suddenly annex the Golan Heights as a manifestation of his Jabotinsky ideology, but the case can be made that it was more the result of Begin's justifiable pique at the Reagan administration. After all, the Syrian's had let it be known that they would not recognize Israel even if the Palestinians did; Washington was in the process of selling advanced military weapons to Saudi Arabia while threatening to embargo military aid to Israel over the destruction of the Iraqi nuclear reactor; and the State Department had infuriatingly criticized an Israeli retaliatory raid against PLO facilities in Beirut. Begin had had enough, asking rhetorically of America: "Are we a vassal-state of yours? Are we a banana republic?"
In a nut shell, all subsequent Likud prime ministers have grappled with the same tensions between pragmatism and ideology. Under Yitzhak Shamir, Likud demonstrated far more ideological steadfastness yet even his government could not avoid being dragged under U.S. pressure to the 1991 Madrid talks which were aimed at achieving a permanent resolution of the Palestinian issue. In his first administration, Netanyahu far from renouncing Israel's commitments to the fatally flawed 1993 Oslo Accords actually carried out a partial Hebron pullback in 1997. In the midst of the second intifada, Ariel Sharon campaigned in 2003 elections as a "Leader for Peace" and in May 2003 accepted the Quartet's Road Map whose endgame was the establishment of a Palestinian state. When the Likud rank-and-file repeatedly voted not to support his unilateral Gaza disengagement plan, Sharon defected in 2005 to form Kadima.
Netanyahu has now been back in power for the past two years juggling the demands of his right-wing coalition against those of Israel's fickle international allies. If From the Altalena to the Present Day is any guide, he will continue to navigate the Likud toward the political center – where most voters are – espousing strength on security along with pliability on the diplomatic front and striving, like his predecessors, to bridge the gap between idealism and pragmatism.
###
-- April 18, 2011
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
DRIFTING APART - NEW GERMANY AND NETANYAHU'S ISRAEL
The news that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman were in Germany last week was overshadowed in Israel by coverage of Hamas's anti-tank missile attack on a lumbering yellow school bus that left one Israeli youngster fighting for his life.
At the de rigueur joint news conference in Berlin with Chancellor Angela Merkel, Netanyahu described Germany as a "great friend of Israel" saying that the talks had taken place in an atmosphere of mutual trust and friendship. Yet any sober assessment of the German-Israel relationship would reveal that Berlin is no longer Jerusalem's most dependable ally inside the EU. Germans have grown increasingly -- sometimes unreasonably – disenchanted with Israeli policies. As a German friend working in Israel recently told me, "We just don't understand Israelis anymore."
German's bristle at being told they are naïve. Their faith in the two-state solution, and by implication in Mahmoud Abbas's goodwill, is unshakeable. Germany is Europe's biggest financial backer of the Palestinian Authority. For Germans a solution to the Palestinian issue is practically a prerequisite for regional stability and they blame Israel – definitely not the Palestinians – for the current diplomatic stalemate. Germans myopically view settlements as the alpha and omega of conflict: Israel's refusal to peremptorily capitulate on settlements all but justifies Abbas's intransigence.
But the fissures extend to just about every facet of Israeli behavior. While most Israelis have not forgiven Turkey for its role in the Mavi Marmara affair, the Bundestag unanimously blamed Israel not Ankara or the violent Islamist radicals on board. Israel behaves as if it has no respect for international law, say Germans. Outrageously, 47.7 percent of Germans surveyed believed “Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians.”
Sitting next to Merkel, Netanyahu was prompted to comment on the upheaval in the Arab world. He said Israel wanted to see its neighbors move toward democracy, "but we can't be sure" whether the transformations underway were a harbinger of the positive change Europe experienced in 1989 or that left Iran a mullahtocracy in 1979 "and we have to fashion our policies to that effect."
But many Germans have been infuriated by Netanyahu's attitude. On Egypt, for example, my German friend said Israelis ought to be cheering on the protestors and trying to form positive relationships with this new generation of potential leaders. In the face of the democracies they sense to be blooming, Germans see Israelis' obsessing over the Islamist menace as cynical and counter-productive.
On the diplomatic front, Germany supported a Security Council resolution promoted by the Arabs in February that demanded Israel cease all "settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory" including metropolitan Jerusalem, and termed any Jewish presence anywhere over the Green Line "illegal." Only a US-veto blocked passage. In the old days, Germany would have justified its infidelity toward Israel by citing the obligation to vote with other EU members. (Actually, the German's broke ranks with the EU by abstaining on the Libyan "no-fly zone" in the council.) When Netanyahu telephoned Merkel to protest the German vote on settlements, she turned the tables on him complaining that he had not followed through on a promised new peace overture.
To give Merkel her due, she did assure Netanyahu last week that Berlin would not agree to any unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state at the UN. This commitment takes on added significance because Germany has just begun a two-year term on the Security Council. Even so, there are persistent reports that Germany, France and Britain have been egging on the Quartet toward imposing a solution on Israel – hardly any better than Palestinian unilateralism in Israeli eyes
In 2008, Merkel told the Knesset that Germany would "never abandon Israel" and would "remain a loyal partner and friend." At the press conference with Netanyahu she declared that Iran's nuclear program is "a greater threat now than ever before" and that everything possible must be done to prevent the Islamic Republic from acquiring nuclear weapons.
But Merkel's kinship toward Israel wins her few points even in her inner circle. Sixty-five years after the Holocaust, sentimental notions of historic responsibility are mostly balanced by realpolitik and Euro-left political culture.
That may be the context in which to understand Berlin's €4 billion annual trade with genocide-advocating Iran. To be fair, doing business with Iran is not illegal anywhere in the EU so long as it does not directly aid the mullahs' quest for nuclear weapons. Berlin, unlike Washington, professes to be unconvinced that the Hamburg-based European-Iranian Trade Bank is in fact a financial conduit for Iran’s nuclear proliferation. Anyway, Germans are big believers in engagement and say that punishing sanctions would mostly hurt innocent Iranians while paving the way for China and Russia to exploit the business vacuum created by Europe's departure.
Despite a sense of disillusionment that is increasingly mutual, it would be reckless to minimize Jerusalem's need for good relations with Germany. Germany is one of Israel's most important trade partners and its largest trading partner in Europe. Berlin has financed half the costs of three custom designed Dolphin-class submarines for the Israeli navy; two more are on order (negotiations over subsidizing a sixth are foundering). The subs are crucially vital to Israel's strategic deterrence against Iran. Germany's Interior minister was in Israel last month and held meetings with intelligence officials as part of the ongoing security relationship.
Netanyahu acknowledged in Berlin that Israel's existential security is one of Merkel's paramount concerns. Unique among EU leaders, she unequivocally refers to Israel as "the Jewish state" when promoting the two-state solution. For now, and under this Chancellor, the foundation of the German-Israel partnership remains solid even if, plainly, the façade is starting to crumble.
###
-- April 12, 2011
At the de rigueur joint news conference in Berlin with Chancellor Angela Merkel, Netanyahu described Germany as a "great friend of Israel" saying that the talks had taken place in an atmosphere of mutual trust and friendship. Yet any sober assessment of the German-Israel relationship would reveal that Berlin is no longer Jerusalem's most dependable ally inside the EU. Germans have grown increasingly -- sometimes unreasonably – disenchanted with Israeli policies. As a German friend working in Israel recently told me, "We just don't understand Israelis anymore."
German's bristle at being told they are naïve. Their faith in the two-state solution, and by implication in Mahmoud Abbas's goodwill, is unshakeable. Germany is Europe's biggest financial backer of the Palestinian Authority. For Germans a solution to the Palestinian issue is practically a prerequisite for regional stability and they blame Israel – definitely not the Palestinians – for the current diplomatic stalemate. Germans myopically view settlements as the alpha and omega of conflict: Israel's refusal to peremptorily capitulate on settlements all but justifies Abbas's intransigence.
But the fissures extend to just about every facet of Israeli behavior. While most Israelis have not forgiven Turkey for its role in the Mavi Marmara affair, the Bundestag unanimously blamed Israel not Ankara or the violent Islamist radicals on board. Israel behaves as if it has no respect for international law, say Germans. Outrageously, 47.7 percent of Germans surveyed believed “Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians.”
Sitting next to Merkel, Netanyahu was prompted to comment on the upheaval in the Arab world. He said Israel wanted to see its neighbors move toward democracy, "but we can't be sure" whether the transformations underway were a harbinger of the positive change Europe experienced in 1989 or that left Iran a mullahtocracy in 1979 "and we have to fashion our policies to that effect."
But many Germans have been infuriated by Netanyahu's attitude. On Egypt, for example, my German friend said Israelis ought to be cheering on the protestors and trying to form positive relationships with this new generation of potential leaders. In the face of the democracies they sense to be blooming, Germans see Israelis' obsessing over the Islamist menace as cynical and counter-productive.
On the diplomatic front, Germany supported a Security Council resolution promoted by the Arabs in February that demanded Israel cease all "settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory" including metropolitan Jerusalem, and termed any Jewish presence anywhere over the Green Line "illegal." Only a US-veto blocked passage. In the old days, Germany would have justified its infidelity toward Israel by citing the obligation to vote with other EU members. (Actually, the German's broke ranks with the EU by abstaining on the Libyan "no-fly zone" in the council.) When Netanyahu telephoned Merkel to protest the German vote on settlements, she turned the tables on him complaining that he had not followed through on a promised new peace overture.
To give Merkel her due, she did assure Netanyahu last week that Berlin would not agree to any unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state at the UN. This commitment takes on added significance because Germany has just begun a two-year term on the Security Council. Even so, there are persistent reports that Germany, France and Britain have been egging on the Quartet toward imposing a solution on Israel – hardly any better than Palestinian unilateralism in Israeli eyes
In 2008, Merkel told the Knesset that Germany would "never abandon Israel" and would "remain a loyal partner and friend." At the press conference with Netanyahu she declared that Iran's nuclear program is "a greater threat now than ever before" and that everything possible must be done to prevent the Islamic Republic from acquiring nuclear weapons.
But Merkel's kinship toward Israel wins her few points even in her inner circle. Sixty-five years after the Holocaust, sentimental notions of historic responsibility are mostly balanced by realpolitik and Euro-left political culture.
That may be the context in which to understand Berlin's €4 billion annual trade with genocide-advocating Iran. To be fair, doing business with Iran is not illegal anywhere in the EU so long as it does not directly aid the mullahs' quest for nuclear weapons. Berlin, unlike Washington, professes to be unconvinced that the Hamburg-based European-Iranian Trade Bank is in fact a financial conduit for Iran’s nuclear proliferation. Anyway, Germans are big believers in engagement and say that punishing sanctions would mostly hurt innocent Iranians while paving the way for China and Russia to exploit the business vacuum created by Europe's departure.
Despite a sense of disillusionment that is increasingly mutual, it would be reckless to minimize Jerusalem's need for good relations with Germany. Germany is one of Israel's most important trade partners and its largest trading partner in Europe. Berlin has financed half the costs of three custom designed Dolphin-class submarines for the Israeli navy; two more are on order (negotiations over subsidizing a sixth are foundering). The subs are crucially vital to Israel's strategic deterrence against Iran. Germany's Interior minister was in Israel last month and held meetings with intelligence officials as part of the ongoing security relationship.
Netanyahu acknowledged in Berlin that Israel's existential security is one of Merkel's paramount concerns. Unique among EU leaders, she unequivocally refers to Israel as "the Jewish state" when promoting the two-state solution. For now, and under this Chancellor, the foundation of the German-Israel partnership remains solid even if, plainly, the façade is starting to crumble.
###
-- April 12, 2011
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Monday, April 04, 2011
Was Mohandas Gandhi a Zionist? Not quite.
A Saint for 'Palestine'
A new book about Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948) by Joseph Lelyveld, a former executive editor of the New York Times, has set off stormy protests in India because it implies that the country's iconic founding father was bisexual.
In “Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India,” Lelyveld recalls Gandhi's relationship with a well-to-do German-Jewish architect, Hermann Kallenbach (1871–1945), though makes no explicit assertion of a sexual angle. That claim was made by British historian Andrew Roberts in his cutting review for the Wall Street Journal. Roberts said Lelyveld's account provides enough material to conclude that Gandhi was "a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent and a fanatical faddist."
The book will likely find readers in Israel not only because of the titillating possibility that Gandhi's homoerotic interest was a Jew, the suicidal counsel he proffered Jews facing Hitler and his hardhearted opposition to Jewish national self-determination, but also because Indian elites relied on his teachings to frame their country's foreign policy toward Israel. Gandhi's ideas greatly influenced the country's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
Nowadays, Gandhi's memory is being repeatedly invoked by Palestinian Arabs and their cultish international supporters to reinvigorate the 60 year-old Arab boycott of Israel.
His "legacy of peace" has also become a family franchise for two grandsons, Arun and Rajmohan Gandhi, who make appearances in Bil'in the site of ferocious weekly demonstrations by Palestinian Arabs and foreign radicals against Israel's life-saving security barrier. Anna Baltzer, winner of the "Rachel Corrie Prize" is one of many Jewish "activists" who has invoked Gandhi legacy in her "reportage."
Another is filmmaker Julian Schnabel who paid tribute to the Gandhi myth in an interview about his recent Israel-exploitation film Miral. In awarding the perfidious ex-Israeli academic Ilan Pappe their Honorary Guide Title, even a group devoted to belief in extraterrestrials cited Pappe's attachment to Gandhi.
In this way, the mahatma, or great soul, has also become a fuzzy icon for the history-challenged.
Palestinian Arabs have drawn parallels between Gandhi's imaginary support for black Africans and their own cause. In truth, during the 21 years he lived in Africa, Gandhi was not particularly sympathetic toward black liberation. Instead, the Hindu solicitor became an indispensable go-between for the Muslim Indian business elite and the authorities. A proponent of race purity, he was known to complain that "the Indian [was] being dragged down to the position of the raw Kaffir."
It was, incidentally, during this period that Gandhi left his wife to live with Kallenbach.
Later, back in India, this saint of the underdog went on his first hunger strike in 1932 to oppose granting low-caste "untouchables" political representation in the Indian parliament. Though media-savvy Palestinian Muslims have adopted Gandhi as their a hero, his inept handling of relations with Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who became Pakistan's first leader, helped set the stage for the break-up of the Indian subcontinent into warring Hindu and Muslim states.
Like Africans, Jews have little reason to place Gandhi on a pedestal. "My sympathies," he wrote in late November 1938 after Kristallnacht, "are with the Jews." No doubt, in a peculiar sense, this was true. He valued Jews like Sonja Schlesin, his loyal secretary in South Africa and Henry Polak his soul mate and right hand man.
Such sympathy notwithstanding, in 1937 and again in 1939, Kallenbach visited Gandhi in India endeavoring to elicit his support for the Zionist enterprise to no avail. Gandhi wrote about it in a 1939 letter: "I happen to have a Jewish friend living with me. He has an intellectual belief in non-violence…I do not quarrel with him over his anger [against the Nazis]. He wants to be non-violent, but the sufferings of his fellow-Jews are too much for him to bear." Gandhi acknowledged that the Nazi persecution of the Jews had no parallel in history. Nevertheless, Gandhi's resolute counsel to Jews facing the Nazis was non-violent civil disobedience – and forgiveness.
In contrast, to his own followers he taught that "war may have to be resorted to as a necessary evil." He even blessed a provincial Hindu nawab who had given orders to shoot ten Muslims for every Hindu killed in his state.
Whatever their mutual affections, Kallenbach, a utopian Zionist who served on the Executive of the South African Zionist Federation, was unable to convert Gandhi to the cause. "The cry for a national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me," he confessed. Why couldn't the Jews think of Palestine as a kind of biblical metaphor and let that suffice. He dismissed international commitments for a Jewish homeland as illegitimate. If they must settle in Palestine, Gandhi told the Jews, they should do so only with Arab goodwill.
If worse comes to worse, the Jews should allow themselves to be "thrown into the Dead Sea." Any other course to preserve their survival would make them the guilty party. Even after the destruction of European Jewry and a litany of Arab atrocities in Palestine, Gandhi held firm: the Jews must practice non-violence.
No doubt Gandhi was a complicated historical figure yet this much is straightforward. He was not the liberal humanist many in the American civil rights movement imagined him to be. He was no friend of Africa; certainly no lover of Zion. In the stark judgment of historian Paul Johnson, his teachings didn't even have much relevance to India's problems. Upon further reflection, perhaps it's fitting that a fraudulent Palestinian "narrative" has appropriated the Gandhi phenomenon to its century long and comprehensive war against the Jewish return to Israel.
###
A new book about Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948) by Joseph Lelyveld, a former executive editor of the New York Times, has set off stormy protests in India because it implies that the country's iconic founding father was bisexual.
In “Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India,” Lelyveld recalls Gandhi's relationship with a well-to-do German-Jewish architect, Hermann Kallenbach (1871–1945), though makes no explicit assertion of a sexual angle. That claim was made by British historian Andrew Roberts in his cutting review for the Wall Street Journal. Roberts said Lelyveld's account provides enough material to conclude that Gandhi was "a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent and a fanatical faddist."
The book will likely find readers in Israel not only because of the titillating possibility that Gandhi's homoerotic interest was a Jew, the suicidal counsel he proffered Jews facing Hitler and his hardhearted opposition to Jewish national self-determination, but also because Indian elites relied on his teachings to frame their country's foreign policy toward Israel. Gandhi's ideas greatly influenced the country's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
Nowadays, Gandhi's memory is being repeatedly invoked by Palestinian Arabs and their cultish international supporters to reinvigorate the 60 year-old Arab boycott of Israel.
His "legacy of peace" has also become a family franchise for two grandsons, Arun and Rajmohan Gandhi, who make appearances in Bil'in the site of ferocious weekly demonstrations by Palestinian Arabs and foreign radicals against Israel's life-saving security barrier. Anna Baltzer, winner of the "Rachel Corrie Prize" is one of many Jewish "activists" who has invoked Gandhi legacy in her "reportage."
Another is filmmaker Julian Schnabel who paid tribute to the Gandhi myth in an interview about his recent Israel-exploitation film Miral. In awarding the perfidious ex-Israeli academic Ilan Pappe their Honorary Guide Title, even a group devoted to belief in extraterrestrials cited Pappe's attachment to Gandhi.
In this way, the mahatma, or great soul, has also become a fuzzy icon for the history-challenged.
Palestinian Arabs have drawn parallels between Gandhi's imaginary support for black Africans and their own cause. In truth, during the 21 years he lived in Africa, Gandhi was not particularly sympathetic toward black liberation. Instead, the Hindu solicitor became an indispensable go-between for the Muslim Indian business elite and the authorities. A proponent of race purity, he was known to complain that "the Indian [was] being dragged down to the position of the raw Kaffir."
It was, incidentally, during this period that Gandhi left his wife to live with Kallenbach.
Later, back in India, this saint of the underdog went on his first hunger strike in 1932 to oppose granting low-caste "untouchables" political representation in the Indian parliament. Though media-savvy Palestinian Muslims have adopted Gandhi as their a hero, his inept handling of relations with Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who became Pakistan's first leader, helped set the stage for the break-up of the Indian subcontinent into warring Hindu and Muslim states.
Like Africans, Jews have little reason to place Gandhi on a pedestal. "My sympathies," he wrote in late November 1938 after Kristallnacht, "are with the Jews." No doubt, in a peculiar sense, this was true. He valued Jews like Sonja Schlesin, his loyal secretary in South Africa and Henry Polak his soul mate and right hand man.
Such sympathy notwithstanding, in 1937 and again in 1939, Kallenbach visited Gandhi in India endeavoring to elicit his support for the Zionist enterprise to no avail. Gandhi wrote about it in a 1939 letter: "I happen to have a Jewish friend living with me. He has an intellectual belief in non-violence…I do not quarrel with him over his anger [against the Nazis]. He wants to be non-violent, but the sufferings of his fellow-Jews are too much for him to bear." Gandhi acknowledged that the Nazi persecution of the Jews had no parallel in history. Nevertheless, Gandhi's resolute counsel to Jews facing the Nazis was non-violent civil disobedience – and forgiveness.
In contrast, to his own followers he taught that "war may have to be resorted to as a necessary evil." He even blessed a provincial Hindu nawab who had given orders to shoot ten Muslims for every Hindu killed in his state.
Whatever their mutual affections, Kallenbach, a utopian Zionist who served on the Executive of the South African Zionist Federation, was unable to convert Gandhi to the cause. "The cry for a national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me," he confessed. Why couldn't the Jews think of Palestine as a kind of biblical metaphor and let that suffice. He dismissed international commitments for a Jewish homeland as illegitimate. If they must settle in Palestine, Gandhi told the Jews, they should do so only with Arab goodwill.
If worse comes to worse, the Jews should allow themselves to be "thrown into the Dead Sea." Any other course to preserve their survival would make them the guilty party. Even after the destruction of European Jewry and a litany of Arab atrocities in Palestine, Gandhi held firm: the Jews must practice non-violence.
No doubt Gandhi was a complicated historical figure yet this much is straightforward. He was not the liberal humanist many in the American civil rights movement imagined him to be. He was no friend of Africa; certainly no lover of Zion. In the stark judgment of historian Paul Johnson, his teachings didn't even have much relevance to India's problems. Upon further reflection, perhaps it's fitting that a fraudulent Palestinian "narrative" has appropriated the Gandhi phenomenon to its century long and comprehensive war against the Jewish return to Israel.
###
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Monday, March 28, 2011
THE NEXT GAZA WAR -- WHAT ISRAEL MUST DO
Gaza Endgame
The weekend meeting in Ramallah between Palestinian Authority chairman and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas and an unofficial delegation of West Bank Hamas "parliamentarians" was not just about reconciling the two factions.
Abbas told his visitors that long months of Palestinian diplomacy were being jeopardized by Hamas's bellicosity.
Fatah is on the cusp of gaining United Nations backing for a Palestinian state along the 1949 Armistice Lines, without having conceded the "right of return," or recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, or addressing a single of Israel's security needs.
If the Palestinians played their cards right they could bring Yassir Arafat's June 1974 plan for the destruction of Israel in phases massively closer to realization. But another Gaza war now, Abbas warned, would only highlight Palestinian disunity and prove Israel's claim that an imposed international solution would leave Jews and Arabs still killing each other.
Abbas might have told his visitors that in the West Bank and east Jerusalem Palestinians can hurl rocks at Israeli motorists or ambulances, attack soldiers without provocation, or riot against the security barrier without negative consequences to Palestinian interests simply by invoking the "occupation."
Some in the media had even downplayed the slaughter of a Jewish family at Itamar as having been provoked by "settlements." He might have agreed that Palestinian diplomacy was not adversely affected by Israel having interdicted a ship laden with weapons bound for Gaza "militants," and that no one seems perturbed over foiled Hamas terror efforts to tunnel into Israel from Gaza.
Still, some recent "resistance" activities had risked Fatah's strides at the UN. What was the point of pummeling Israel from Gaza with 50 mortars in 15 minutes back on March 19th? Or take the recent bus-stop bombing in "west" Jerusalem which almost claimed a British television reporter and killed a visiting Christian bible scholar? How are Fatah's diplomats to explain the bombardment of Beersheba and Ashdod by Grad missiles?
A direct hit on some Jewish kindergarten could setback painstaking PLO diplomacy.
Had they been in a position to speak frankly the Hamas men would have acknowledged that they, too, have an interest in seeing Abbas succeed at the U.N. After all, a diplomatic victory for Fatah today will accrue to Hamas tomorrow – as the Islamists fully expect to one day assume control over a reunited Palestinian polity.
For now, however, Hamas's calculations are anything but straightforward. The popular uprisings now sweeping the Arab world have shaken Hamas's confidence as demonstrated by the brutally with which its thugs have crushed Gazans' protests. What better way to redirect criticism of the regime than by instigating a conflict with Israel?
Moreover, Hamas is not monolithic. There are divisions between the hard-line armed faction led Ahmed Ja'abari and the purportedly more moderate "government" led by Ismail Haniyeh. He wants to be seen as open to reconciliation with Abbas; Ja'abari makes no such pretense. There are also tensions between the Damascus-based leadership, buffeted by the upheavals in Syria, and Hamas chiefs in Gaza.
In this environment, it may be that Hamas is having trouble imposing its will on other extremist factions in the Strip. For only hours after Hamas announced that Gaza terror groups were ready to return to a de facto ceasefire with Israel, two Islamic Jihad gunmen were liquidated by the Israeli air force on their way to launch rockets against Israel. (Curiously, for its own Machiavellian reasons, Islamic Jihad has been advocating Fatah-Hamas reconciliation.)
Add to this mix uncertainty over the future of Syria and by implication, Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan and it's no wonder that Hamas would rather Palestinians vent their spleen against Israel.
That is precisely why Israel has no interest in shifting the attention of the Arab street onto itself. By demolishing the headquarters of the Hamas government in Gaza, continuing pinpoint targeting of terrorists engaged in attacks, deploying the imperfect Iron Dome anti-rocket defensive shield, and signaling that targeted killings of Hamas leaders was on the agenda, Jerusalem is endeavoring to deter Gaza violence in a prudent and calibrated manner.
What if, nevertheless, a terror attack resulting in mega casualties leaves Israel with no choice but to go to war? If an Operation Cast Lead II becomes obligatory, Israel will obviously strive to avoid the mistakes of the first Gaza war. But it must do more.
This time Israel needs a coherent mission: ending Hamas rule. That would require a strategy of unremitting attack against the movement's leaders, structures and symbols regardless of whether they are political or military so that Hamas loses the ability to command and control events in the Strip.
With its back to the wall Hamas can be expected to unleash its entire arsenal. To win, the IDF will need to be led with élan. A broad based national unity cabinet would need to inspire heretofore elusive solidarity on a besieged home-front. The country's diplomats would have to argue convincingly that with Hamas looking over his shoulder, Abbas has been petrified to make necessary compromises for peace and has turned, instead, to a morally obtuse international community to deliver Israel prostrate.
What would the impact of destroying the Hamas government be on Abbas's diplomatic campaign?
With Hamas vanquished and the Palestinian Authority presumably back in Gaza, Abbas will be faced with a dilemma: make real peace with Israel or continue down Arafat's falsehearted path. The big unknown is whether the Obama administration and those EU countries not pledged to Arab cause robot-like will press Abbas to choose wisely.
Defeating Hamas would be no panacea, but as Max Singer, a Senior Fellow at the BESA Institute of Bar Ilan University has argued, an Israeli willingness to defeat a Palestinian army and destroy a Palestinian government can serve as an important deterrent, signaling that the Jewish state will not tolerate a belligerent regime anywhere between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
###
March 28, 2011
The weekend meeting in Ramallah between Palestinian Authority chairman and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas and an unofficial delegation of West Bank Hamas "parliamentarians" was not just about reconciling the two factions.
Abbas told his visitors that long months of Palestinian diplomacy were being jeopardized by Hamas's bellicosity.
Fatah is on the cusp of gaining United Nations backing for a Palestinian state along the 1949 Armistice Lines, without having conceded the "right of return," or recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, or addressing a single of Israel's security needs.
If the Palestinians played their cards right they could bring Yassir Arafat's June 1974 plan for the destruction of Israel in phases massively closer to realization. But another Gaza war now, Abbas warned, would only highlight Palestinian disunity and prove Israel's claim that an imposed international solution would leave Jews and Arabs still killing each other.
Abbas might have told his visitors that in the West Bank and east Jerusalem Palestinians can hurl rocks at Israeli motorists or ambulances, attack soldiers without provocation, or riot against the security barrier without negative consequences to Palestinian interests simply by invoking the "occupation."
Some in the media had even downplayed the slaughter of a Jewish family at Itamar as having been provoked by "settlements." He might have agreed that Palestinian diplomacy was not adversely affected by Israel having interdicted a ship laden with weapons bound for Gaza "militants," and that no one seems perturbed over foiled Hamas terror efforts to tunnel into Israel from Gaza.
Still, some recent "resistance" activities had risked Fatah's strides at the UN. What was the point of pummeling Israel from Gaza with 50 mortars in 15 minutes back on March 19th? Or take the recent bus-stop bombing in "west" Jerusalem which almost claimed a British television reporter and killed a visiting Christian bible scholar? How are Fatah's diplomats to explain the bombardment of Beersheba and Ashdod by Grad missiles?
A direct hit on some Jewish kindergarten could setback painstaking PLO diplomacy.
Had they been in a position to speak frankly the Hamas men would have acknowledged that they, too, have an interest in seeing Abbas succeed at the U.N. After all, a diplomatic victory for Fatah today will accrue to Hamas tomorrow – as the Islamists fully expect to one day assume control over a reunited Palestinian polity.
For now, however, Hamas's calculations are anything but straightforward. The popular uprisings now sweeping the Arab world have shaken Hamas's confidence as demonstrated by the brutally with which its thugs have crushed Gazans' protests. What better way to redirect criticism of the regime than by instigating a conflict with Israel?
Moreover, Hamas is not monolithic. There are divisions between the hard-line armed faction led Ahmed Ja'abari and the purportedly more moderate "government" led by Ismail Haniyeh. He wants to be seen as open to reconciliation with Abbas; Ja'abari makes no such pretense. There are also tensions between the Damascus-based leadership, buffeted by the upheavals in Syria, and Hamas chiefs in Gaza.
In this environment, it may be that Hamas is having trouble imposing its will on other extremist factions in the Strip. For only hours after Hamas announced that Gaza terror groups were ready to return to a de facto ceasefire with Israel, two Islamic Jihad gunmen were liquidated by the Israeli air force on their way to launch rockets against Israel. (Curiously, for its own Machiavellian reasons, Islamic Jihad has been advocating Fatah-Hamas reconciliation.)
Add to this mix uncertainty over the future of Syria and by implication, Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan and it's no wonder that Hamas would rather Palestinians vent their spleen against Israel.
That is precisely why Israel has no interest in shifting the attention of the Arab street onto itself. By demolishing the headquarters of the Hamas government in Gaza, continuing pinpoint targeting of terrorists engaged in attacks, deploying the imperfect Iron Dome anti-rocket defensive shield, and signaling that targeted killings of Hamas leaders was on the agenda, Jerusalem is endeavoring to deter Gaza violence in a prudent and calibrated manner.
What if, nevertheless, a terror attack resulting in mega casualties leaves Israel with no choice but to go to war? If an Operation Cast Lead II becomes obligatory, Israel will obviously strive to avoid the mistakes of the first Gaza war. But it must do more.
This time Israel needs a coherent mission: ending Hamas rule. That would require a strategy of unremitting attack against the movement's leaders, structures and symbols regardless of whether they are political or military so that Hamas loses the ability to command and control events in the Strip.
With its back to the wall Hamas can be expected to unleash its entire arsenal. To win, the IDF will need to be led with élan. A broad based national unity cabinet would need to inspire heretofore elusive solidarity on a besieged home-front. The country's diplomats would have to argue convincingly that with Hamas looking over his shoulder, Abbas has been petrified to make necessary compromises for peace and has turned, instead, to a morally obtuse international community to deliver Israel prostrate.
What would the impact of destroying the Hamas government be on Abbas's diplomatic campaign?
With Hamas vanquished and the Palestinian Authority presumably back in Gaza, Abbas will be faced with a dilemma: make real peace with Israel or continue down Arafat's falsehearted path. The big unknown is whether the Obama administration and those EU countries not pledged to Arab cause robot-like will press Abbas to choose wisely.
Defeating Hamas would be no panacea, but as Max Singer, a Senior Fellow at the BESA Institute of Bar Ilan University has argued, an Israeli willingness to defeat a Palestinian army and destroy a Palestinian government can serve as an important deterrent, signaling that the Jewish state will not tolerate a belligerent regime anywhere between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
###
March 28, 2011
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Monday, March 21, 2011
IS TURKEY A MODEL FOR ARAB AND ISLAMIC DEMOCRACY IN THE MIDDLE EAST?
One best case scenario to the current upheaval in the Arab world foresees the emergence of Turkish-style political systems in places like Egypt and Tunisia in the event Islamic parties come to power by democratic means. In Egypt, a plebiscite over the weekend approved amending the constitution in a way that strengthens the prospects of the Moslem Brotherhood in forthcoming parliamentary elections. As for the depth of Turkey's own commitment to democratic principles, that may only begin to clarify itself after elections on June 12th.
Polls predict the Islamic AKP (Justice and Development Party) will easily achieve its third consecutive victory. AKP's strongest challenger, the CHP (Republican People's Party) is not expected to garner more than 20 percent of the vote. The CHP and its new leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu carry the mantle of the country's founder and architect of Turkey's secular path Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. AKP's platform pledges to amend Turkey's constitution, but doing so could further entrench Islamist control. Customarily, the Turkish army had served as a (self-interested) guarantor of the country's faithfulness to Ataturk's path.
Paradoxically, as Turkey became more democratic, more committed to joining the EU, as its government became more religiously parochial, the principle that the army had a homeostatic role to play if the nation drifted from Ataturk's ways has become delegitimized.
Meanwhile, the AKP's go slow, Islam-friendly, conservative approach begs the question: What is its ultimate destination? It has deftly reworked the ideas of the late Necmettin Erbakan, who trailblazed non-violent Islamist participation in Turkish politics; breaking with his anti-free-market principles – by, for instance, favoring accession to the EU – while modulating his anti-Western, though less so his anti-Zionist, line.
At a recent conference at Hebrew University's Truman Institute to discuss the Middle East in transition, Prof. Umit Cizre of Istanbul University pooh-poohed concerns that AKP had a hidden Islamist agenda or intended to introduce Sharia law. Instead, she criticized Turkey's secularists for harping on the Islamist threat without presenting a coherent political platform of their own. Yet Cizre described the AKP as having "deliberately" positioned itself "ambiguously" on the political spectrum.
Why, though, is the secular camp so weak? Voters are uncomfortable with hard-line secularism. A new class of Islamic business elites has arisen alongside their secularist counterparts. Also, secularists have also been blamed for mishandling their management of the state when they were in charge. Moreover, while the moderate tone pursued by AKP has made it difficult to mobilize non-Islamists, ideological and personal differences have riven the secularist camp.
It may also be true that nowadays secularists are less committed to pure democracy than the Isalmists. Last but not least, secularists have been undermined by the so-called Ergenekon affair, which the government asserts has exposed a vast plot by the military and their allies in the media to overthrow the regime. A good number of serving generals have been arrested on "flimsy" even "fabricated" evidence, say the generals' defenders.
No one disputes that the AKP has helped make Turkey a success story and engineered the world's 15th largest economy. Unparalleled political stability has contributed to economic boom; GDP is up to $10,000 compared to $3,000 at the start of the decade. Turkey's economy would be still better if it didn't need to import 95% of its energy needs.
As befitting a regional power with grand aspirations, Turkey recently hosted an alternative "political" Davos in Istanbul. Unfortunately for Erdogan and his political rival President Abdullah Gül the gathering was a complete flop as unrest at home kept expected guests – including Syria's leader Bashar Assad and Egypt's Gamal Mubarak (invited before his father was ousted from the presidency) from attending. Even Spain's Socialist Workers' Party Premier Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who is in the forefront of an effort to paper-over differences between Western civilization and the Islamists, was a no-show.
Abroad, Turkey's distancing from Israel exemplified by Erdogan's periodically staged outbursts against the Jewish state and by a sharp deterioration in bilateral relations in all fields -- save trade -- is now a well established feature of Ankara's foreign policy.
Turkey may claim that its warmth toward Hamas and its instigation of the Gaza flotilla crisis is intended to somehow promote peace. But Israelis can't imagine how and wonder if Erdogan is tapping into the kind of anti-Semitic sentiment that has propelled such despicable films as Valley of the Wolves into blockbusters.
Actually, foreign policy signals out of Turkey are jumbled. For instance, Turkey opted not to stop the Victoria from leaving its port bound for Gaza via Egypt with Iranian weapons in its hold. But it grounded two Iranian planes in search for arms. Ankara denounced the Itamar massacre but in the same breath asserted the community's existence was a breach of international law. So far, it has had nothing to say about Hamas's intensified bombardment of Israel.
Other aspects of Turkey's foreign policy are equally troubling. Erdogan's chauvinism and Islamic assertiveness has led him to accuse Germany of pushing its 3.5-million-strong Turkish minority too hard toward acculturating into their adopted country. Teach your children Turkish before German, he told a Dusseldorf rally.
But with countries it borders, including Iran, Syria and Iraq, Ankara professes to pursue a "zero problems" policy. Sure enough there has been a substantial increase in trade and exchange of high-ranking visitors with Iran and mutual cooperation against the Kurds. Nevertheless, the geo-strategic rivalry between Iran and Turkey is undeniable even if camouflaged by talk of pan-Islamic solidarity. Dr. Gallia Lindenstrauss, a Turkish foreign policy specialist at Tel Aviv University told the Truman conference that the Turks see a nuclear-armed Iran as destabilizing. Nor is it a coincidence that an Erdogan visit inevitably follows one by Ahmadinejad around the globe. The two countries are destined to balance each other's power. For instance, while Iran will oppose a Syrian peace with Israel, Turkey favors one (albeit on Syria's terms). Or take Turkey's warning that it would not "remain silent" if the IDF retaliated against Lebanon for Hezbollah attacks on Israel. Some analysts interpret this as a challenge to Teheran's hegemony over Beirut as much as a cheap jab against Jerusalem.
Indeed, Lindenstrauss makes the case that if any country can pull Syria away from Iran it will be Turkey. Sure enough, Ankara, which was once on the brink of war with Damascus, now helps train the Syrian military. As for Iraq, Turkey is now its number one trading partner and recently opened a consulate in the Kurdish city of Erbil. And while Iran wants a Iraq weak, Turkey prefers Iraq to remain unified and stable.
At home, Turkey is still a free country where television can show a series about Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent that jars Islamic sensibilities, but not without a warning from regulators at the Radio and Television Supreme Council.
Freedom of the press is mostly unfettered but secular voices have been increasingly targeted; some have been arrested in connection with the Ergenekon conspiracy and one journalist critical of the regime was murdered in 2007 under suspicious circumstances. The AKP has not even hinted at imposing Sharia law, but the authority that oversees religious affairs is coming under greater government control and there are signs it is moving in a more traditionalist direction.
So is the Turkish model a paradigm for democratic rule in Moslem-majority countries? The jury is still out but the signs are not encouraging. In advance of Turkey's elections, one thing is for sure, in the words of the Turkey-sympathetic Economist: Erdogan "is getting bossier and less tolerant by the day."
###
-- March 21, 2010
Polls predict the Islamic AKP (Justice and Development Party) will easily achieve its third consecutive victory. AKP's strongest challenger, the CHP (Republican People's Party) is not expected to garner more than 20 percent of the vote. The CHP and its new leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu carry the mantle of the country's founder and architect of Turkey's secular path Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. AKP's platform pledges to amend Turkey's constitution, but doing so could further entrench Islamist control. Customarily, the Turkish army had served as a (self-interested) guarantor of the country's faithfulness to Ataturk's path.
Paradoxically, as Turkey became more democratic, more committed to joining the EU, as its government became more religiously parochial, the principle that the army had a homeostatic role to play if the nation drifted from Ataturk's ways has become delegitimized.
Meanwhile, the AKP's go slow, Islam-friendly, conservative approach begs the question: What is its ultimate destination? It has deftly reworked the ideas of the late Necmettin Erbakan, who trailblazed non-violent Islamist participation in Turkish politics; breaking with his anti-free-market principles – by, for instance, favoring accession to the EU – while modulating his anti-Western, though less so his anti-Zionist, line.
At a recent conference at Hebrew University's Truman Institute to discuss the Middle East in transition, Prof. Umit Cizre of Istanbul University pooh-poohed concerns that AKP had a hidden Islamist agenda or intended to introduce Sharia law. Instead, she criticized Turkey's secularists for harping on the Islamist threat without presenting a coherent political platform of their own. Yet Cizre described the AKP as having "deliberately" positioned itself "ambiguously" on the political spectrum.
Why, though, is the secular camp so weak? Voters are uncomfortable with hard-line secularism. A new class of Islamic business elites has arisen alongside their secularist counterparts. Also, secularists have also been blamed for mishandling their management of the state when they were in charge. Moreover, while the moderate tone pursued by AKP has made it difficult to mobilize non-Islamists, ideological and personal differences have riven the secularist camp.
It may also be true that nowadays secularists are less committed to pure democracy than the Isalmists. Last but not least, secularists have been undermined by the so-called Ergenekon affair, which the government asserts has exposed a vast plot by the military and their allies in the media to overthrow the regime. A good number of serving generals have been arrested on "flimsy" even "fabricated" evidence, say the generals' defenders.
No one disputes that the AKP has helped make Turkey a success story and engineered the world's 15th largest economy. Unparalleled political stability has contributed to economic boom; GDP is up to $10,000 compared to $3,000 at the start of the decade. Turkey's economy would be still better if it didn't need to import 95% of its energy needs.
As befitting a regional power with grand aspirations, Turkey recently hosted an alternative "political" Davos in Istanbul. Unfortunately for Erdogan and his political rival President Abdullah Gül the gathering was a complete flop as unrest at home kept expected guests – including Syria's leader Bashar Assad and Egypt's Gamal Mubarak (invited before his father was ousted from the presidency) from attending. Even Spain's Socialist Workers' Party Premier Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who is in the forefront of an effort to paper-over differences between Western civilization and the Islamists, was a no-show.
Abroad, Turkey's distancing from Israel exemplified by Erdogan's periodically staged outbursts against the Jewish state and by a sharp deterioration in bilateral relations in all fields -- save trade -- is now a well established feature of Ankara's foreign policy.
Turkey may claim that its warmth toward Hamas and its instigation of the Gaza flotilla crisis is intended to somehow promote peace. But Israelis can't imagine how and wonder if Erdogan is tapping into the kind of anti-Semitic sentiment that has propelled such despicable films as Valley of the Wolves into blockbusters.
Actually, foreign policy signals out of Turkey are jumbled. For instance, Turkey opted not to stop the Victoria from leaving its port bound for Gaza via Egypt with Iranian weapons in its hold. But it grounded two Iranian planes in search for arms. Ankara denounced the Itamar massacre but in the same breath asserted the community's existence was a breach of international law. So far, it has had nothing to say about Hamas's intensified bombardment of Israel.
Other aspects of Turkey's foreign policy are equally troubling. Erdogan's chauvinism and Islamic assertiveness has led him to accuse Germany of pushing its 3.5-million-strong Turkish minority too hard toward acculturating into their adopted country. Teach your children Turkish before German, he told a Dusseldorf rally.
But with countries it borders, including Iran, Syria and Iraq, Ankara professes to pursue a "zero problems" policy. Sure enough there has been a substantial increase in trade and exchange of high-ranking visitors with Iran and mutual cooperation against the Kurds. Nevertheless, the geo-strategic rivalry between Iran and Turkey is undeniable even if camouflaged by talk of pan-Islamic solidarity. Dr. Gallia Lindenstrauss, a Turkish foreign policy specialist at Tel Aviv University told the Truman conference that the Turks see a nuclear-armed Iran as destabilizing. Nor is it a coincidence that an Erdogan visit inevitably follows one by Ahmadinejad around the globe. The two countries are destined to balance each other's power. For instance, while Iran will oppose a Syrian peace with Israel, Turkey favors one (albeit on Syria's terms). Or take Turkey's warning that it would not "remain silent" if the IDF retaliated against Lebanon for Hezbollah attacks on Israel. Some analysts interpret this as a challenge to Teheran's hegemony over Beirut as much as a cheap jab against Jerusalem.
Indeed, Lindenstrauss makes the case that if any country can pull Syria away from Iran it will be Turkey. Sure enough, Ankara, which was once on the brink of war with Damascus, now helps train the Syrian military. As for Iraq, Turkey is now its number one trading partner and recently opened a consulate in the Kurdish city of Erbil. And while Iran wants a Iraq weak, Turkey prefers Iraq to remain unified and stable.
At home, Turkey is still a free country where television can show a series about Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent that jars Islamic sensibilities, but not without a warning from regulators at the Radio and Television Supreme Council.
Freedom of the press is mostly unfettered but secular voices have been increasingly targeted; some have been arrested in connection with the Ergenekon conspiracy and one journalist critical of the regime was murdered in 2007 under suspicious circumstances. The AKP has not even hinted at imposing Sharia law, but the authority that oversees religious affairs is coming under greater government control and there are signs it is moving in a more traditionalist direction.
So is the Turkish model a paradigm for democratic rule in Moslem-majority countries? The jury is still out but the signs are not encouraging. In advance of Turkey's elections, one thing is for sure, in the words of the Turkey-sympathetic Economist: Erdogan "is getting bossier and less tolerant by the day."
###
-- March 21, 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Monday, March 14, 2011
Bar-Ilan 2.0 -- Does Israel Need a Peace Plan?
Earthquakes, tsunamis and a nuclear meltdown in Japan top the news pushing aside mad Muammar Gaddafi, upheaval throughout the Arab world, and the butchery of five members of a Jewish family in their sleep by Palestinian Arabs at Itamar. Rest assured, however, that in short order Israel's wobbly friends in Europe and the U.S. will be back to press Jerusalem to "do something" about what Washington sees as the "unsustainable" stalemate in the "peace process" over which German Chancellor Angela Merkel scolded Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “You haven’t made a single step to advance peace.”
Not a single step?
Israel's lifting of 400 security checkpoints up and down the West Bank including near Itamar, its ten-month moratorium on most settlement building, its willingness to extend the freeze another three months, and Netanyahu's 2009 Bar-Ilan University address have, to be sure, not had much of a diplomatic shelf-life. In the Topsy Turvy world of Mideast peacemaking, because none of these moves enticed Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian faction to end their two-year boycott of negotiations, Israel is blamed for the impasse.
Abbas – recklessly impelled, initially at least, by President Barack Obama – has adhered to the position that the Palestinians simply can't negotiate so long as any Jewish construction continues anywhere beyond the 1949 Armistice Lines. Of course, the West Bank settlements issue would be resolved were Abbas willing to negotiate permanent boundaries with Israel. But why should he have to compromise in direct negotiations with Netanyahu when his internationally backed intransigence promises to deliver an Israeli withdrawal to the euphemistically called "1967 border."
Netanyahu, under withering pressure to somehow assuage the smoldering irritation of Israel settlement-obsessed Europeans and Americans, has reportedly been planning a major address to expand upon his Bar-Ilan "vision of peace" for "two peoples" speech. Yet it is difficult to see what Netanyahu could say or do – short of capitulating to all of Abbas's demands – to win lasting EU and Obama administration acclaim.
With the Hamas-led Palestinian faction in Gaza explicitly, unalterably, committed to the destruction of the Zionist enterprise; with Abbas refusing to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, compromise on refuges, and resolutely committed to an internationally imposed solution that would completely disregard Israel's legitimate territorial rights and basic security needs, what realistically could Netanyahu offer?
Put another way: Can Israel placate its irritated allies while not committing national suicide?
No sooner had Netanyahu's office leaked the prospect that he would present (either to the Quartet or in a Washington speech) a new plan that would promote an interim arrangement with the Palestinians by recognizing a Palestinian state within temporary borders then Abbas utterly rejected the idea.
To complicate matters, if nascent pressure from young Palestinians for Fatah-Hamas reconciliation were to gain traction the result would undoubtedly be yet a further hardening of the Palestinian position rather than a softening of the Islamist one. No one in Fatah is talking about Hamas recognizing Israel, renouncing violence and adhering to previous diplomatic agreements signed by the PLO, the requisite demands by the Quartet for Hamas to join a Palestinian unity government.
Netanyahu's predicament recalls Ariel Sharon's whose disengagement plan announced in 2003 was partly intended to head-off pressure from President George W. Bush, who during the height of second intifada terror in 2002 "envisioned" a roadmap to a Palestinian state. Sharon was also profoundly worried about growing international support for the EU-backed Geneva Initiative and, notwithstanding Palestinian violations, for the Quartet's Road Map. All these schemes were designed to push Israel back to the old, hard to defend, armistice lines. Essentially, by "doing something" Sharon had sought to buy time, reap diplomatic approval and garner an American commitment for strategic settlement blocs in the West Bank. All these gains proved ephemeral.
Given this experience and the fact that any Netanyahu peace offering would be dead on arrival, is this really the time for him to present a new Israeli peace plan?
Yes and no.
Israel does need to put forth a coherent plan – to its own citizenry. Netanyahu should turn inward to broaden the domestic consensus on what the Jewish state can realistically offer the Palestinians and what it must expect in return. Fortunately, the fundamentals have already been laid out by Lt.-Gen. (ret.) Moshe Ya'alon (now Minister for Strategic Affairs).
Rather than take chances with Israel's security, Netanyahu needs to take personal political risks. He should appoint Ya'alon defense minister and together present a revised, fully detailed version of Ya'alon's blueprint to the electorate. If need be, Netanyahu should call for new elections seeking a clear mandate for the Ya'alon plan.
In coalition negotiations, Israel's mainstream political parties would likely have no trouble embracing Ya'alon's outline, but if they expect to – let them explain why to the electorate.
Instead of allowing Europe and the Obama administration to railroad him into proffering concessions that will not deliver peace and security – or even short-term diplomatic breathing space – Israel's best bet is to have a forthright internal dialogue aimed at building domestic cohesion for Ya'alon's plan that can offer the Palestinian Arabs a state and Israel security.
Areas that Israel needs to retain in any peace accord should not be subject to a any building freeze. Israelis living in Judea and Samaria have a right to know which parts of the Jewish heartland will one day be abandoned in the event an Arab partner for peace emerges.
Were Israeli decision makers -- with a clear electoral mandate -- to speak coherently and consistently, the country could garner support in Washington outside the administration and in fair-minded EU countries.
###
-- March 14, 2010
Not a single step?
Israel's lifting of 400 security checkpoints up and down the West Bank including near Itamar, its ten-month moratorium on most settlement building, its willingness to extend the freeze another three months, and Netanyahu's 2009 Bar-Ilan University address have, to be sure, not had much of a diplomatic shelf-life. In the Topsy Turvy world of Mideast peacemaking, because none of these moves enticed Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian faction to end their two-year boycott of negotiations, Israel is blamed for the impasse.
Abbas – recklessly impelled, initially at least, by President Barack Obama – has adhered to the position that the Palestinians simply can't negotiate so long as any Jewish construction continues anywhere beyond the 1949 Armistice Lines. Of course, the West Bank settlements issue would be resolved were Abbas willing to negotiate permanent boundaries with Israel. But why should he have to compromise in direct negotiations with Netanyahu when his internationally backed intransigence promises to deliver an Israeli withdrawal to the euphemistically called "1967 border."
Netanyahu, under withering pressure to somehow assuage the smoldering irritation of Israel settlement-obsessed Europeans and Americans, has reportedly been planning a major address to expand upon his Bar-Ilan "vision of peace" for "two peoples" speech. Yet it is difficult to see what Netanyahu could say or do – short of capitulating to all of Abbas's demands – to win lasting EU and Obama administration acclaim.
With the Hamas-led Palestinian faction in Gaza explicitly, unalterably, committed to the destruction of the Zionist enterprise; with Abbas refusing to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, compromise on refuges, and resolutely committed to an internationally imposed solution that would completely disregard Israel's legitimate territorial rights and basic security needs, what realistically could Netanyahu offer?
Put another way: Can Israel placate its irritated allies while not committing national suicide?
No sooner had Netanyahu's office leaked the prospect that he would present (either to the Quartet or in a Washington speech) a new plan that would promote an interim arrangement with the Palestinians by recognizing a Palestinian state within temporary borders then Abbas utterly rejected the idea.
To complicate matters, if nascent pressure from young Palestinians for Fatah-Hamas reconciliation were to gain traction the result would undoubtedly be yet a further hardening of the Palestinian position rather than a softening of the Islamist one. No one in Fatah is talking about Hamas recognizing Israel, renouncing violence and adhering to previous diplomatic agreements signed by the PLO, the requisite demands by the Quartet for Hamas to join a Palestinian unity government.
Netanyahu's predicament recalls Ariel Sharon's whose disengagement plan announced in 2003 was partly intended to head-off pressure from President George W. Bush, who during the height of second intifada terror in 2002 "envisioned" a roadmap to a Palestinian state. Sharon was also profoundly worried about growing international support for the EU-backed Geneva Initiative and, notwithstanding Palestinian violations, for the Quartet's Road Map. All these schemes were designed to push Israel back to the old, hard to defend, armistice lines. Essentially, by "doing something" Sharon had sought to buy time, reap diplomatic approval and garner an American commitment for strategic settlement blocs in the West Bank. All these gains proved ephemeral.
Given this experience and the fact that any Netanyahu peace offering would be dead on arrival, is this really the time for him to present a new Israeli peace plan?
Yes and no.
Israel does need to put forth a coherent plan – to its own citizenry. Netanyahu should turn inward to broaden the domestic consensus on what the Jewish state can realistically offer the Palestinians and what it must expect in return. Fortunately, the fundamentals have already been laid out by Lt.-Gen. (ret.) Moshe Ya'alon (now Minister for Strategic Affairs).
Rather than take chances with Israel's security, Netanyahu needs to take personal political risks. He should appoint Ya'alon defense minister and together present a revised, fully detailed version of Ya'alon's blueprint to the electorate. If need be, Netanyahu should call for new elections seeking a clear mandate for the Ya'alon plan.
In coalition negotiations, Israel's mainstream political parties would likely have no trouble embracing Ya'alon's outline, but if they expect to – let them explain why to the electorate.
Instead of allowing Europe and the Obama administration to railroad him into proffering concessions that will not deliver peace and security – or even short-term diplomatic breathing space – Israel's best bet is to have a forthright internal dialogue aimed at building domestic cohesion for Ya'alon's plan that can offer the Palestinian Arabs a state and Israel security.
Areas that Israel needs to retain in any peace accord should not be subject to a any building freeze. Israelis living in Judea and Samaria have a right to know which parts of the Jewish heartland will one day be abandoned in the event an Arab partner for peace emerges.
Were Israeli decision makers -- with a clear electoral mandate -- to speak coherently and consistently, the country could garner support in Washington outside the administration and in fair-minded EU countries.
###
-- March 14, 2010
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Let the Arab League Enforce the No-Fly Zone
I see that the Arab League called on the United Nations Security Council to impose a no-fly zone over Libya.
Once it does, how about if Arab air-forces enforce the no-fly zone?
There are some 21 Arab air-forces represented in the League.
Many have the latest US equipment including F-15s.
Why should NATO have to carry this burden?
Why should all eyes be turning to Washington and Europe?
Once it does, how about if Arab air-forces enforce the no-fly zone?
There are some 21 Arab air-forces represented in the League.
Many have the latest US equipment including F-15s.
Why should NATO have to carry this burden?
Why should all eyes be turning to Washington and Europe?
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Monday, March 07, 2011
Juliano Mer, a prominent Israeli actor of mixed Jewish-Christian Arab parentage, was shot dead yesterday afternoon in Jenin...
WHERE HAVE ALL THE ARAB MODERATES GONE?
Juliano Mer, a prominent Israeli actor of mixed Jewish-Christian Arab parentage, was shot dead yesterday afternoon in Jenin.
-- News Report, April 5, 2011
What made Shahbaz Bhatti the moderate Pakistani minister assassinated by Islamist "militants" for campaigning against the country's blasphemy law unique was that he was – a Christian. Muslim extremists tend to invest the bulk of their homicidal energies in slaughtering their own coreligionists.
Mass casualty suicide bombings, now obscenely routine and carried out by Muslims against Muslims mostly in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan have engendered pathological responses.
Yet no less devastating in their impact on Muslim civilization have been pinpoint assassinations intended to obliterate individual moderates. In fact, the term assassin dates back to an 11th century Persian Shi'ite sect that first employed the systematic use of murder as a political weapon, according to historian Bernard Lewis.
Bhatti's murder followed on the heels of the assassination in January of Salman Taseer, the cosmopolitan governor of Punjab province. His killing was the most devastating assassination of a moderate politician since the 2007 murder of former premier Benazir Bhutto.
Political assassinations intended to eradicate moderates are no less rampant among Arab Muslims. Take the 1951 killing of Jordan's King Abdullah, suspected of being willing to make peace with Israel; he was shot at the Aksa Mosque in Jerusalem. Or Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, murdered in 1981 for having made peace with the Jewish state.
The litany includes Algerian president Mohamed Boudiaf, shot dead in 1992 by an Islamist bodyguard and Lebanon's Sunni Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, killed in 2005 by the Shi'ite Hezbollah network. Lebanon's Christian president Bashir Gemayel was assassinated in 1982 for meeting with Israel's premier Menachem Begin to discuss a possible peace treaty.
While no one would accuse Hariri of wanting to make peace with Israel, he apparently did not kowtow with sufficient obsequiousness to Hezbollah's masters in Iran's. Teheran also has a bloody history of assassinating its own moderates including former premier Shapour Bakhtiar in 1991.
Even the U.S. has not been immune to the phenomenon of radicals murdering comparative moderates.
This month marks the (February 21, 1965) 46th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X, the African American radical who was killed after he broke with Elijah Muhammad's xenophobic Nation of Islam and converted to Sunni Islam.
But it is the Palestinian Arabs who have made a morbid fetish of murdering those of their own suspected of being ready to compromise for peace.
Twenty-five years ago this week, (March 3, 1986) Zafer Al-Masri, the forty-four year-old mayor of Nablus was assassinated on the doorsteps to city hall by Palestinian gunmen. Tarred as "an Israeli collaborator," he was said to have close ties to Jordan which at the time was seeking West Bank Palestinians willing to negotiate with Israel under its auspices.
Palestinian Arab society had historically been divided between fanatics led by Haj Amin al-Husseini, former mufti of Jerusalem, and relative moderates, who included notable families such as the Nashashibis. They moderates had reluctantly concluded that the Zionists could not be defeated and that coexistence was a Palestinian interest.
Already by the time Israel was established in 1948, hundreds upon hundreds of Palestinian moderates had been murdered. Moderation came to be treated as treason and punished by death. That is how the Husseini camp came to dominate Palestinian politics and created an intransigent political culture which would ultimately spawn both Fatah and Hamas.
This brings us to the supposedly moderate Palestinians running the West Bank today. Saeb Erekat – one of the most accommodating figures in the PLO hierarchy – confidentially assured Western diplomats that the Palestinians were prepared to compromise on the issue of refugees.
Publicly, however, he continued to insist on the so-called right of return for "seven million" refugees and their descendents to Israel proper as "absolutely necessary for the stability of peace" – a death knell to resolving the conflict. Whatever the motivation for Erekat's duplicitous statements the net effect has been that the Palestinian masses remain unprepared for requisite compromise.
Lately, the only point of consensus between Hamas and Fatah is that Western-backed "moderate" Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad – widely credited for developing political institutions his people will need for statehood – must go. Despite the fact that he spearheaded a boycott against Jewish products manufactured in the West Bank, Fayyad is suspected of sincerity in professing acceptance of a two-state solution.
The systematic slaughter of genuine moderates has necessitated redefining moderation. Only by the Hobbesian yardstick of Palestinian politics, where the lives of peacemakers have been brutishly cut short, can an obdurate Mahmoud Abbas, now two years into his boycott of negotiations with Israel, be pronounced a "moderate."
-- March 7, 2011
Juliano Mer, a prominent Israeli actor of mixed Jewish-Christian Arab parentage, was shot dead yesterday afternoon in Jenin.
-- News Report, April 5, 2011
What made Shahbaz Bhatti the moderate Pakistani minister assassinated by Islamist "militants" for campaigning against the country's blasphemy law unique was that he was – a Christian. Muslim extremists tend to invest the bulk of their homicidal energies in slaughtering their own coreligionists.
Mass casualty suicide bombings, now obscenely routine and carried out by Muslims against Muslims mostly in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan have engendered pathological responses.
Yet no less devastating in their impact on Muslim civilization have been pinpoint assassinations intended to obliterate individual moderates. In fact, the term assassin dates back to an 11th century Persian Shi'ite sect that first employed the systematic use of murder as a political weapon, according to historian Bernard Lewis.
Bhatti's murder followed on the heels of the assassination in January of Salman Taseer, the cosmopolitan governor of Punjab province. His killing was the most devastating assassination of a moderate politician since the 2007 murder of former premier Benazir Bhutto.
Political assassinations intended to eradicate moderates are no less rampant among Arab Muslims. Take the 1951 killing of Jordan's King Abdullah, suspected of being willing to make peace with Israel; he was shot at the Aksa Mosque in Jerusalem. Or Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, murdered in 1981 for having made peace with the Jewish state.
The litany includes Algerian president Mohamed Boudiaf, shot dead in 1992 by an Islamist bodyguard and Lebanon's Sunni Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, killed in 2005 by the Shi'ite Hezbollah network. Lebanon's Christian president Bashir Gemayel was assassinated in 1982 for meeting with Israel's premier Menachem Begin to discuss a possible peace treaty.
While no one would accuse Hariri of wanting to make peace with Israel, he apparently did not kowtow with sufficient obsequiousness to Hezbollah's masters in Iran's. Teheran also has a bloody history of assassinating its own moderates including former premier Shapour Bakhtiar in 1991.
Even the U.S. has not been immune to the phenomenon of radicals murdering comparative moderates.
This month marks the (February 21, 1965) 46th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X, the African American radical who was killed after he broke with Elijah Muhammad's xenophobic Nation of Islam and converted to Sunni Islam.
But it is the Palestinian Arabs who have made a morbid fetish of murdering those of their own suspected of being ready to compromise for peace.
Twenty-five years ago this week, (March 3, 1986) Zafer Al-Masri, the forty-four year-old mayor of Nablus was assassinated on the doorsteps to city hall by Palestinian gunmen. Tarred as "an Israeli collaborator," he was said to have close ties to Jordan which at the time was seeking West Bank Palestinians willing to negotiate with Israel under its auspices.
Palestinian Arab society had historically been divided between fanatics led by Haj Amin al-Husseini, former mufti of Jerusalem, and relative moderates, who included notable families such as the Nashashibis. They moderates had reluctantly concluded that the Zionists could not be defeated and that coexistence was a Palestinian interest.
Already by the time Israel was established in 1948, hundreds upon hundreds of Palestinian moderates had been murdered. Moderation came to be treated as treason and punished by death. That is how the Husseini camp came to dominate Palestinian politics and created an intransigent political culture which would ultimately spawn both Fatah and Hamas.
This brings us to the supposedly moderate Palestinians running the West Bank today. Saeb Erekat – one of the most accommodating figures in the PLO hierarchy – confidentially assured Western diplomats that the Palestinians were prepared to compromise on the issue of refugees.
Publicly, however, he continued to insist on the so-called right of return for "seven million" refugees and their descendents to Israel proper as "absolutely necessary for the stability of peace" – a death knell to resolving the conflict. Whatever the motivation for Erekat's duplicitous statements the net effect has been that the Palestinian masses remain unprepared for requisite compromise.
Lately, the only point of consensus between Hamas and Fatah is that Western-backed "moderate" Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad – widely credited for developing political institutions his people will need for statehood – must go. Despite the fact that he spearheaded a boycott against Jewish products manufactured in the West Bank, Fayyad is suspected of sincerity in professing acceptance of a two-state solution.
The systematic slaughter of genuine moderates has necessitated redefining moderation. Only by the Hobbesian yardstick of Palestinian politics, where the lives of peacemakers have been brutishly cut short, can an obdurate Mahmoud Abbas, now two years into his boycott of negotiations with Israel, be pronounced a "moderate."
-- March 7, 2011
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Monday, February 28, 2011
BYE BYE J STREET?
On the face of it, J-Street appears to be a success story.
In a little over three years, the lobby has either supplanted or co-opted Americans for Peace Now, Israel Policy Forum, New Israel Fund and other likeminded outfits to emerge as the preeminent Jewish force committed to pushing Israel back to the 1949 Armistice Lines irrespective of what the Palestinians do. This remarkable achievement by executive director Jeremy Ben-Ami is attributable to the branding of J Street as "passionately and unapologetically pro-Israel.”
A neophyte to the American Jewish political scene could be forgiven for taking him at his word. After all, J Street's just concluded policy conference drew 1,500 "pro-peace, pro-Israel" conventioneers, 500 animated college students, junketeering opposition Knesset members, progressive rabbis, advocacy journalists and even a welcoming letter from Kadima party head Tzipi Livni.
Without doubt, most of the attendees came in good faith convinced that they were bolstering the two-state solution. Had they appreciated J-Street's disingenuously cloaked agenda, utterly reckless policy prescriptions and deeply troubling ethical lapses, many would, presumably, have stayed home. That they did not is a tribute to artful political manipulation practiced by J Street's strategists.
J-Street has capitalized on the "fatigue" many liberal Jewish Americans feel in having to defend unpopular Israeli positions on campus, in the media, and around the office water cooler. J Street promotes the fanciful notion that public criticism of Israel has been inhibited by a monolithic Jewish "establishment" (headed by AIPAC) and that its "dissent" is somehow gutsy.
In truth, discomfiture with this or that Israeli policy has been a factor in the Israel-Diaspora relationship dating back to Nahum Goldmann's break with David Ben-Gurion in the 1950s and was reaffirmed by the precipitate flirtation by Breira and the New Jewish Agenda with the pre-Oslo PLO in the 1970s and 80s. What's more, with the 1977 election of Menachem Begin, Israel's first nationalist prime minister, major American Jewish leaders have routinely lambasted Israel's West Bank settlement policies.
J-Street's more savvy defenders claim its saving grace is that it offers ashamed liberal Jewish undergraduates besieged by virulent campus anti-Zionism (of the Tony Judt strain) with a way of joining the bandwagon of criticism while remaining "pro-Israel."
Regrettably, J-Street does more than criticize Israel; it actively lobbies the U.S. Congress to take steps that would undermine Israeli security and it serves as an enabler to an unsympathetic Obama administration whose misguided policies have impeded the peace process and hardened the already intransigent positions of the Palestinian Authority.
In fact, J Street relishes the role of providing domestic political cover for White House pressure on Israel. J Street stands apart from other Jewish critics of Israel for its ability to legally raise money and give it away to candidates who share its redefinition of pro-Israelism.
Making no substantive demands on the Arabs, J-Street blames Israel solely for the breakdown in negotiations. It claims to support Israel's right to self-defense; yet since its founding J Street has opposed every measure Israel has taken to defend its citizens. It is against the security barrier which has kept suicide bombers at bay.
It opposed military action to stop Hamas's bombardment of the Negev. It abandoned Israel in the face of the Turkish flotilla hullabaloo. And it had to be dragged kicking and screaming to embrace even mild sanctions against Iran.
J-Street professes to oppose the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel. In practice, it has partnered with BDS proponents and some of its supporters believe in selective sanctions. It has shown no scruples about aligning with the vociferously anti-Zionist U.S. Council of Churches. Rather than discrediting Judge Richard Goldstone's lawfare campaign to enfeeble Israel's right to self-defense, J-Street staffers actually promoted his appearances in Congress. J Street has even provided cover for the crusade to delegitimize Israel by the U.N.'s so-called "Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People."
In fact, one is hard put to discern any policy differences between the Palestinian Authority's stated positions and those of J-Street. This explains why the PLO ambassador in Washington was glad to address J Street's 2011 policy conference while Israel's ambassador stayed away.
Both J Street and the PLO oppose any and all Jewish presence over the Green Line, metropolitan Jerusalem included. Both oppose Palestinian recognition of Israel as a “Jewish State.” Both back efforts to turn the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood into sovereign Palestine thus endangering access to the nearby Hebrew University campus on Mt Scopus. The PLO and J-Street's partners, the Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity Movement, want to see the Jewish Agency, Jewish National Fund and the Israeli Land Authority abolished because, in the words of Sara Benninga, a Sheikh Jarrah activist and J-Street honoree, ending the "occupation" is not enough.
Both J-Street and the PLO support the Trojan horse Arab Peace Initiative which Ehud Olmert, Shimon Peres and Tzipi Livni, not to mention Benjamin Netanyahu, have all sensibly rebuffed. Like the PLO, J Street brazenly – albeit unsuccessfully – prodded the administration not to veto the recent UN Security Council resolution terming any Jewish presence over the Green Line as "illegal."
What, unadorned, does J-Street advocate?
In face-to-face negotiations, the Palestinians would be expected to compromise on boundaries, refugees and security. Consequently, J-Street advocates that the U.S. impose a solution. But what motivates such behavior? One clue comes from J Street co-founder Daniel Levy who has said that Israel's creation was "wrong." That is in line with the Arab view that Israel's "original sin" was to have been born; it furthermore illuminates why elements in J Street's base favor a one state solution.
This year's policy conference may be J Street's last hurrah.
Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.), a leading Congressional dove has acrimoniously broken with the group prompting Ben-Ami to ruefully acknowledge that he had overplayed his hand. Taglit-Birthright has rebuffed J Street's cheeky request to co-sponsor a trip to Israel. But it is the momentous upheaval in the Arab world, along with Iran's newly revealed ramped-up quest for the atom bomb that may prove to be J Street's ultimate undoing.
No amount of wordplay will convince the Diaspora's mainstream that J-Street's scapegoating of Netanyahu and its drive to push Israel back to indefensible borders now is even remotely "pro-Israel."
###
-- Monday, Feb. 28, 2011
In a little over three years, the lobby has either supplanted or co-opted Americans for Peace Now, Israel Policy Forum, New Israel Fund and other likeminded outfits to emerge as the preeminent Jewish force committed to pushing Israel back to the 1949 Armistice Lines irrespective of what the Palestinians do. This remarkable achievement by executive director Jeremy Ben-Ami is attributable to the branding of J Street as "passionately and unapologetically pro-Israel.”
A neophyte to the American Jewish political scene could be forgiven for taking him at his word. After all, J Street's just concluded policy conference drew 1,500 "pro-peace, pro-Israel" conventioneers, 500 animated college students, junketeering opposition Knesset members, progressive rabbis, advocacy journalists and even a welcoming letter from Kadima party head Tzipi Livni.
Without doubt, most of the attendees came in good faith convinced that they were bolstering the two-state solution. Had they appreciated J-Street's disingenuously cloaked agenda, utterly reckless policy prescriptions and deeply troubling ethical lapses, many would, presumably, have stayed home. That they did not is a tribute to artful political manipulation practiced by J Street's strategists.
J-Street has capitalized on the "fatigue" many liberal Jewish Americans feel in having to defend unpopular Israeli positions on campus, in the media, and around the office water cooler. J Street promotes the fanciful notion that public criticism of Israel has been inhibited by a monolithic Jewish "establishment" (headed by AIPAC) and that its "dissent" is somehow gutsy.
In truth, discomfiture with this or that Israeli policy has been a factor in the Israel-Diaspora relationship dating back to Nahum Goldmann's break with David Ben-Gurion in the 1950s and was reaffirmed by the precipitate flirtation by Breira and the New Jewish Agenda with the pre-Oslo PLO in the 1970s and 80s. What's more, with the 1977 election of Menachem Begin, Israel's first nationalist prime minister, major American Jewish leaders have routinely lambasted Israel's West Bank settlement policies.
J-Street's more savvy defenders claim its saving grace is that it offers ashamed liberal Jewish undergraduates besieged by virulent campus anti-Zionism (of the Tony Judt strain) with a way of joining the bandwagon of criticism while remaining "pro-Israel."
Regrettably, J-Street does more than criticize Israel; it actively lobbies the U.S. Congress to take steps that would undermine Israeli security and it serves as an enabler to an unsympathetic Obama administration whose misguided policies have impeded the peace process and hardened the already intransigent positions of the Palestinian Authority.
In fact, J Street relishes the role of providing domestic political cover for White House pressure on Israel. J Street stands apart from other Jewish critics of Israel for its ability to legally raise money and give it away to candidates who share its redefinition of pro-Israelism.
Making no substantive demands on the Arabs, J-Street blames Israel solely for the breakdown in negotiations. It claims to support Israel's right to self-defense; yet since its founding J Street has opposed every measure Israel has taken to defend its citizens. It is against the security barrier which has kept suicide bombers at bay.
It opposed military action to stop Hamas's bombardment of the Negev. It abandoned Israel in the face of the Turkish flotilla hullabaloo. And it had to be dragged kicking and screaming to embrace even mild sanctions against Iran.
J-Street professes to oppose the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel. In practice, it has partnered with BDS proponents and some of its supporters believe in selective sanctions. It has shown no scruples about aligning with the vociferously anti-Zionist U.S. Council of Churches. Rather than discrediting Judge Richard Goldstone's lawfare campaign to enfeeble Israel's right to self-defense, J-Street staffers actually promoted his appearances in Congress. J Street has even provided cover for the crusade to delegitimize Israel by the U.N.'s so-called "Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People."
In fact, one is hard put to discern any policy differences between the Palestinian Authority's stated positions and those of J-Street. This explains why the PLO ambassador in Washington was glad to address J Street's 2011 policy conference while Israel's ambassador stayed away.
Both J Street and the PLO oppose any and all Jewish presence over the Green Line, metropolitan Jerusalem included. Both oppose Palestinian recognition of Israel as a “Jewish State.” Both back efforts to turn the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood into sovereign Palestine thus endangering access to the nearby Hebrew University campus on Mt Scopus. The PLO and J-Street's partners, the Sheikh Jarrah Solidarity Movement, want to see the Jewish Agency, Jewish National Fund and the Israeli Land Authority abolished because, in the words of Sara Benninga, a Sheikh Jarrah activist and J-Street honoree, ending the "occupation" is not enough.
Both J-Street and the PLO support the Trojan horse Arab Peace Initiative which Ehud Olmert, Shimon Peres and Tzipi Livni, not to mention Benjamin Netanyahu, have all sensibly rebuffed. Like the PLO, J Street brazenly – albeit unsuccessfully – prodded the administration not to veto the recent UN Security Council resolution terming any Jewish presence over the Green Line as "illegal."
What, unadorned, does J-Street advocate?
In face-to-face negotiations, the Palestinians would be expected to compromise on boundaries, refugees and security. Consequently, J-Street advocates that the U.S. impose a solution. But what motivates such behavior? One clue comes from J Street co-founder Daniel Levy who has said that Israel's creation was "wrong." That is in line with the Arab view that Israel's "original sin" was to have been born; it furthermore illuminates why elements in J Street's base favor a one state solution.
This year's policy conference may be J Street's last hurrah.
Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.), a leading Congressional dove has acrimoniously broken with the group prompting Ben-Ami to ruefully acknowledge that he had overplayed his hand. Taglit-Birthright has rebuffed J Street's cheeky request to co-sponsor a trip to Israel. But it is the momentous upheaval in the Arab world, along with Iran's newly revealed ramped-up quest for the atom bomb that may prove to be J Street's ultimate undoing.
No amount of wordplay will convince the Diaspora's mainstream that J-Street's scapegoating of Netanyahu and its drive to push Israel back to indefensible borders now is even remotely "pro-Israel."
###
-- Monday, Feb. 28, 2011
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Will Egypt and Iran Now Be Friends?
Add bilateral relations between Teheran and Cairo in the post-Mubarak era to the already boiling Mideast cauldron. The request of two Iranian warships bound for Syria to transit the Suez Canal for the first time since the 1979 Iranian Revolution has met with telling indecisiveness on the part of Egypt's ruling military council.
One barometer of where Sunni Arab Egypt is heading will be the evolution of its bilateral relations with Shi'ite Persian Iran. Another will be the latitude Cairo gives Iran's Hamas-client in Gaza. It is surely not a good omen that the exiled old anti-Semite and anti-Zionist, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, al-Jazeera's rabble-rousing preacher and darling of the Moslem Brotherhood, was granted a platform to address the multitudes at Friday prayers in Tahrir Square.
The Jewish state has long been a bone of contention in Iran-Egypt relations. Iran's 1950 de facto recognition of Israel was put on ice the following year by the newly appointed premier Mohammed Mossadegh; and resumed in 1953 with his downfall. The Arab League, instigated by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, retaliated against Iran, now directly ruled by Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as Shah, and imposed sanctions. Against the canvass of the Cold War, Nasser aligned with the Soviet Union while the Shah sided with the West. Yet both men felt threatened by the Islamists. Nasser executed Moslem Brotherhood theologian Sayyid Qutb, while the Shah merely exiled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Attitudes toward Jews also differed. The Shah (who happened to be married to the deposed Egyptian King Farouk's sister) protected his country's 80,000 Jews so that there was little overt anti-Semitism. Far from the institutionalized Holocaust denial of the Islamist-era, Iran's press under the Shah openly covered the Eichmann trial of 50 years ago. Even today, the Iranian Jewish population numbers some 11,000 souls. By the late-1960s, in contrast, Egypt's Jewish community had ceased to exist.
Under Anwar Sadat cordial bilateral relations were finally established. These ended, however, after Iran's 1979 Islamist revolution, reflecting Khomeini's unbendable antagonism toward the Egypt-Israel peace treaty and his temper at Sadat for having granted the Shah temporary asylum. In 1981, the shameless mullahs would dedicate a street to Sadat's assassin.
Despite overtures by Iran on pan-Islamic grounds, Hosni Mubarak remained suspicious of their intentions, convinced that Teheran was organizing insurrection inside Egypt and seeking to influence events in the Sudan and Gaza – Egypt's backyard.
The Mubarak regime had been of two minds about Iran's quest for the atom bomb. In June 2009, Mubarak allowed an Israeli submarine to traverse the canal sending an implicit message that Egypt was committed to stopping the Iranian bomb. Yet Egyptian diplomats simultaneously led the UN mob in claiming that Israel was the real nuclear threat in the region. In November 2009, for example, the Mubarak government criticized an IAEA resolution that required Iran to cease construction of its enrichment facility near Qom. Egypt vacillated; sometimes abstaining at IAEA votes critical of Iran, other times calling on Teheran to cooperate with the international community.
Mubarak and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad met in 2008; the two countries established interest sections in each other's capitals. Yet relations remained strained as Mubarak blamed Iran for Egypt's failure to reconcile Fatah and Hamas. When Cairo barred an Iranian weapons ship from the Suez Canal, Ahmadinejad accused Egypt of selling out the Palestinians in favor of relations with the Zionists. In 2009, when a Hezbollah cell was uncovered preparing to carry out attacks inside Egypt, Mubarak saw further proof that Iran had designs on the Sunni Arab world. (The cell's imprisoned leader escaped during the anti-Mubarak upheaval to Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon.) Mubarak watched warily as the Sunni Moslem Brotherhood, along with its Hamas affiliate, built ecumenical bridges to Shi'ite Iran rooted in their mutual loathing of Israel and disdain for the West.
With all that, toward the end of the Mubarak era, Iran had secured Egypt's agreement for the resumption of direct flights between their respective capitals. Perhaps to delink Cairo from Washington, Iran offered not only to help Egypt develop its nuclear power industry but also to provide it with wheat to cover shortages and ameliorate rising bread prices.
Where are bilateral relations heading? Iranian leaders are positing that the anti-Mubarak uprising was inspired by the Iranian Revolution. Anyhow, the Muslim Brotherhood is an essential part of the dialogue between the opposition and the ruling junta. Moreover, two probable presidential candidates, Arab League Secretary-General Amr Musa and ex-IAEA chief Mohammad ElBarade are both known for their warm ties to Iran. As far as Jerusalem is concerned, this is almost beside the point since even the liberal opposition figure Ayman Nour has called for reassessing the Egypt-Israel peace treaty.
Iran certainly expects relations with Egypt to become "more balanced" and, most likely, for a resumption of full diplomatic relations. But a genuine strategic alliance between the two countries would be unprecedented. After all, Iran, Egypt and Turkey have traditionally been geostrategic rivals. A thin veneer of pan-Islamic solidarity may not be able to overcome the deep-seated patterns of history.
The biggest wildcard is whether the contagion of popular uprisings sweeping the region, notwithstanding the mullahs' utter ruthlessness in putting down dissent, may yet lead to the toppling of Iran's benighted regime and a truly new Middle East.
###
--Feb 24, 2011
One barometer of where Sunni Arab Egypt is heading will be the evolution of its bilateral relations with Shi'ite Persian Iran. Another will be the latitude Cairo gives Iran's Hamas-client in Gaza. It is surely not a good omen that the exiled old anti-Semite and anti-Zionist, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, al-Jazeera's rabble-rousing preacher and darling of the Moslem Brotherhood, was granted a platform to address the multitudes at Friday prayers in Tahrir Square.
The Jewish state has long been a bone of contention in Iran-Egypt relations. Iran's 1950 de facto recognition of Israel was put on ice the following year by the newly appointed premier Mohammed Mossadegh; and resumed in 1953 with his downfall. The Arab League, instigated by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, retaliated against Iran, now directly ruled by Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as Shah, and imposed sanctions. Against the canvass of the Cold War, Nasser aligned with the Soviet Union while the Shah sided with the West. Yet both men felt threatened by the Islamists. Nasser executed Moslem Brotherhood theologian Sayyid Qutb, while the Shah merely exiled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Attitudes toward Jews also differed. The Shah (who happened to be married to the deposed Egyptian King Farouk's sister) protected his country's 80,000 Jews so that there was little overt anti-Semitism. Far from the institutionalized Holocaust denial of the Islamist-era, Iran's press under the Shah openly covered the Eichmann trial of 50 years ago. Even today, the Iranian Jewish population numbers some 11,000 souls. By the late-1960s, in contrast, Egypt's Jewish community had ceased to exist.
Under Anwar Sadat cordial bilateral relations were finally established. These ended, however, after Iran's 1979 Islamist revolution, reflecting Khomeini's unbendable antagonism toward the Egypt-Israel peace treaty and his temper at Sadat for having granted the Shah temporary asylum. In 1981, the shameless mullahs would dedicate a street to Sadat's assassin.
Despite overtures by Iran on pan-Islamic grounds, Hosni Mubarak remained suspicious of their intentions, convinced that Teheran was organizing insurrection inside Egypt and seeking to influence events in the Sudan and Gaza – Egypt's backyard.
The Mubarak regime had been of two minds about Iran's quest for the atom bomb. In June 2009, Mubarak allowed an Israeli submarine to traverse the canal sending an implicit message that Egypt was committed to stopping the Iranian bomb. Yet Egyptian diplomats simultaneously led the UN mob in claiming that Israel was the real nuclear threat in the region. In November 2009, for example, the Mubarak government criticized an IAEA resolution that required Iran to cease construction of its enrichment facility near Qom. Egypt vacillated; sometimes abstaining at IAEA votes critical of Iran, other times calling on Teheran to cooperate with the international community.
Mubarak and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad met in 2008; the two countries established interest sections in each other's capitals. Yet relations remained strained as Mubarak blamed Iran for Egypt's failure to reconcile Fatah and Hamas. When Cairo barred an Iranian weapons ship from the Suez Canal, Ahmadinejad accused Egypt of selling out the Palestinians in favor of relations with the Zionists. In 2009, when a Hezbollah cell was uncovered preparing to carry out attacks inside Egypt, Mubarak saw further proof that Iran had designs on the Sunni Arab world. (The cell's imprisoned leader escaped during the anti-Mubarak upheaval to Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon.) Mubarak watched warily as the Sunni Moslem Brotherhood, along with its Hamas affiliate, built ecumenical bridges to Shi'ite Iran rooted in their mutual loathing of Israel and disdain for the West.
With all that, toward the end of the Mubarak era, Iran had secured Egypt's agreement for the resumption of direct flights between their respective capitals. Perhaps to delink Cairo from Washington, Iran offered not only to help Egypt develop its nuclear power industry but also to provide it with wheat to cover shortages and ameliorate rising bread prices.
Where are bilateral relations heading? Iranian leaders are positing that the anti-Mubarak uprising was inspired by the Iranian Revolution. Anyhow, the Muslim Brotherhood is an essential part of the dialogue between the opposition and the ruling junta. Moreover, two probable presidential candidates, Arab League Secretary-General Amr Musa and ex-IAEA chief Mohammad ElBarade are both known for their warm ties to Iran. As far as Jerusalem is concerned, this is almost beside the point since even the liberal opposition figure Ayman Nour has called for reassessing the Egypt-Israel peace treaty.
Iran certainly expects relations with Egypt to become "more balanced" and, most likely, for a resumption of full diplomatic relations. But a genuine strategic alliance between the two countries would be unprecedented. After all, Iran, Egypt and Turkey have traditionally been geostrategic rivals. A thin veneer of pan-Islamic solidarity may not be able to overcome the deep-seated patterns of history.
The biggest wildcard is whether the contagion of popular uprisings sweeping the region, notwithstanding the mullahs' utter ruthlessness in putting down dissent, may yet lead to the toppling of Iran's benighted regime and a truly new Middle East.
###
--Feb 24, 2011
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
My Recent Radio Appearance
Listen to David Parsons of the Christian Embassy in Jerusalem and I discuss the implications of events in Egypt on Christian radio, "FrontPage Jerusalem," broadcast throughout the US and online at:
http://www.frontpagejerusalem.com/site/index.php
February 14 (web broadcast date)
(Our discussion is five minutes into the program...)
The show is co-hosted in the US by one of Israel's most selfless friends, Earl Cox.
http://www.frontpagejerusalem.com/site/index.php
February 14 (web broadcast date)
(Our discussion is five minutes into the program...)
The show is co-hosted in the US by one of Israel's most selfless friends, Earl Cox.
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Thankless Task at Turtle Bay
After more than six-months of squabbling, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Likud) and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman (Israel Beitenu) have, at last, agreed to dispatch veteran diplomat Ron Prosor as Israel's ambassador to the United Nations. Meron Reuben had been saddled with the unenviable task of holding down the fort while the politicians bickered.
But what, realistically, can any Israeli ambassador hope to achieve at the UN where over 118 members identify with the farcically labeled "non-aligned" bloc, an interlocking directorate that includes 57 Organization of the Islamic Conference countries, 22 members of the Arab League, and Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and North Korea, states that do not have diplomatic relations with Israel. As if this wasn't bad enough, the European Union nowadays rarely takes any initiative to defend Israel's right to self-defense. And even Washington has been known to express its diplomatic pique by occasionally throwing Jerusalem to the jackals.
From the beginning, Israel's first UN ambassador Abba Eban (1949-1959) essentially disregarded his immediate diplomatic audience to address his "language and emotion to the wider world beyond." Eban served concurrently as ambassador to Washington and to the UN. His successor Michael Comay (1960-1967) became one of Israel's leading representatives to American Jewry. In the lead up to the Six Day War, Gideon Rafael (1967-1968) transmitted diplomatic messages from US decision makers interpreted by the Israeli cabinet as providing a green light for a preemptive attack by the IDF against massed Arab forces.
Not much, however, could be done inside the UN. To PLO chief Yasir Arafat's gun-toting inaugural General Assembly speech in November 1974, Yosef Tekoa (1968-1975) could best direct his rebuttal to Israel's friends outside the auditorium. Similarly, Chaim Herzog (1975-1978) took to the General Assembly podium and demonstrably tore apart resolution 3379 which odiously equated Zionism as “a form of racism." But, he too, was speaking to the civilized world beyond.
Renowned jurist Yehuda Blum (1978-1984) bluntly declared that the UN had become an arena that "fanned the flames of Arab-Israel conflict." And while helping to fight off attempts to deny Israel's credentials at the General Assembly, Benjamin Netanyahu (1984-1988) focused his polemical talents at the American popular press. As chargé d’Affaires, Johanan Bein (1988-1990) could do nothing to stop the General Assembly from relocating to Geneva to again provide Arafat with a platform. "As I prepare to leave the post," he would later write in The New York Times, "I…ask myself … if my country's predicament at the U.N. is permanent."
Yoram Aridor (1990-1992) was fortunate to see the "Zionism is racism resolution" rescinded under US pressure, yet could then do nothing about, what the Times called "the harshest criticism of Israeli policies ever made at the Security Council" by the George H.W. Bush administration over Israel's deportation of 12 Palestinian terrorists to Lebanon during the first intifada. Gad Yaacobi (1992-1996) represented Israel during the Oslo-era but, he too, could not dissuade the US from joining the Security Council majority in a sweeping condemnation of Israel in the wake of Baruch Goldstein's massacre of Arab worshippers in Hebron.
The first US-born Israeli to be appointed ambassador to the UN, Dore Gold (1997-1999) was effective at public diplomacy, but could not sway the General Assembly against voting 131 to 3 to condemn Israel for housing construction in Jerusalem. During the barbaric Palestinian violence of the second intifada, Yehuda Lancry (1999-2002) endured shameless UN condemnations against "the excessive use of force" by Israel.
Dan Gillerman (2002-2008) was, arguably, the most thriving recent ambassador: Promulgating the first Israeli resolutions ever adopted by the United Nations; elected vice-president of the assembly one year, and impelling secretary-general Kofi Annan to speak out against the GA's ad nauseam attacks against Israel as counterproductive.
Finally, though she established rapport with a not unsympathetic UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Gabriela Shalev (2008-2010) was powerless as Judge Richard Goldstein led a lawfare campaign against Israel's right to defend its civilian population along the Gaza border.
Plainly, the labors of Israeli ambassadors take on a Sisyphean almost fatalistic character. So, why bother? Simply because the UN is where the family of nations, such as it is, comes together to make consequential collective decision.
In any event, Prosor's main role will be to represent Israel beyond the UN's corridors; most prominently to the global media and the U.S. Jewish community, a task he will partly share with Michael Oren, Jerusalem's ambassador in Washington (whose primary mission is focused on the US-Israel relationship).
Yet their public diplomacy roles have been made near-impossible because official Israel does not speak with one voice. Should Israeli ambassadors take Netanyahu's Bar-Ilan speech as their marching orders? Or the contradictory line articulated by Lieberman at his 2010 UN address? To further complicate matters, today's Internet offers a competing cacophony of dissenting voices all claiming to know what's best for Israel.
Prosor's advantage is that he is a compelling figure with superior communications skills and diplomatic heft to credibly present Israel's positions in both public and confidential settings. The rest depends on the two men who belatedly sent him. Not only must Prosor have unfettered access to the foreign minister and premier, he must be encouraged to provide them with unvarnished assessments of how their – sometimes incongruent – policies are affecting Israel's image in the media and support among American Jews.
###
But what, realistically, can any Israeli ambassador hope to achieve at the UN where over 118 members identify with the farcically labeled "non-aligned" bloc, an interlocking directorate that includes 57 Organization of the Islamic Conference countries, 22 members of the Arab League, and Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and North Korea, states that do not have diplomatic relations with Israel. As if this wasn't bad enough, the European Union nowadays rarely takes any initiative to defend Israel's right to self-defense. And even Washington has been known to express its diplomatic pique by occasionally throwing Jerusalem to the jackals.
From the beginning, Israel's first UN ambassador Abba Eban (1949-1959) essentially disregarded his immediate diplomatic audience to address his "language and emotion to the wider world beyond." Eban served concurrently as ambassador to Washington and to the UN. His successor Michael Comay (1960-1967) became one of Israel's leading representatives to American Jewry. In the lead up to the Six Day War, Gideon Rafael (1967-1968) transmitted diplomatic messages from US decision makers interpreted by the Israeli cabinet as providing a green light for a preemptive attack by the IDF against massed Arab forces.
Not much, however, could be done inside the UN. To PLO chief Yasir Arafat's gun-toting inaugural General Assembly speech in November 1974, Yosef Tekoa (1968-1975) could best direct his rebuttal to Israel's friends outside the auditorium. Similarly, Chaim Herzog (1975-1978) took to the General Assembly podium and demonstrably tore apart resolution 3379 which odiously equated Zionism as “a form of racism." But, he too, was speaking to the civilized world beyond.
Renowned jurist Yehuda Blum (1978-1984) bluntly declared that the UN had become an arena that "fanned the flames of Arab-Israel conflict." And while helping to fight off attempts to deny Israel's credentials at the General Assembly, Benjamin Netanyahu (1984-1988) focused his polemical talents at the American popular press. As chargé d’Affaires, Johanan Bein (1988-1990) could do nothing to stop the General Assembly from relocating to Geneva to again provide Arafat with a platform. "As I prepare to leave the post," he would later write in The New York Times, "I…ask myself … if my country's predicament at the U.N. is permanent."
Yoram Aridor (1990-1992) was fortunate to see the "Zionism is racism resolution" rescinded under US pressure, yet could then do nothing about, what the Times called "the harshest criticism of Israeli policies ever made at the Security Council" by the George H.W. Bush administration over Israel's deportation of 12 Palestinian terrorists to Lebanon during the first intifada. Gad Yaacobi (1992-1996) represented Israel during the Oslo-era but, he too, could not dissuade the US from joining the Security Council majority in a sweeping condemnation of Israel in the wake of Baruch Goldstein's massacre of Arab worshippers in Hebron.
The first US-born Israeli to be appointed ambassador to the UN, Dore Gold (1997-1999) was effective at public diplomacy, but could not sway the General Assembly against voting 131 to 3 to condemn Israel for housing construction in Jerusalem. During the barbaric Palestinian violence of the second intifada, Yehuda Lancry (1999-2002) endured shameless UN condemnations against "the excessive use of force" by Israel.
Dan Gillerman (2002-2008) was, arguably, the most thriving recent ambassador: Promulgating the first Israeli resolutions ever adopted by the United Nations; elected vice-president of the assembly one year, and impelling secretary-general Kofi Annan to speak out against the GA's ad nauseam attacks against Israel as counterproductive.
Finally, though she established rapport with a not unsympathetic UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Gabriela Shalev (2008-2010) was powerless as Judge Richard Goldstein led a lawfare campaign against Israel's right to defend its civilian population along the Gaza border.
Plainly, the labors of Israeli ambassadors take on a Sisyphean almost fatalistic character. So, why bother? Simply because the UN is where the family of nations, such as it is, comes together to make consequential collective decision.
In any event, Prosor's main role will be to represent Israel beyond the UN's corridors; most prominently to the global media and the U.S. Jewish community, a task he will partly share with Michael Oren, Jerusalem's ambassador in Washington (whose primary mission is focused on the US-Israel relationship).
Yet their public diplomacy roles have been made near-impossible because official Israel does not speak with one voice. Should Israeli ambassadors take Netanyahu's Bar-Ilan speech as their marching orders? Or the contradictory line articulated by Lieberman at his 2010 UN address? To further complicate matters, today's Internet offers a competing cacophony of dissenting voices all claiming to know what's best for Israel.
Prosor's advantage is that he is a compelling figure with superior communications skills and diplomatic heft to credibly present Israel's positions in both public and confidential settings. The rest depends on the two men who belatedly sent him. Not only must Prosor have unfettered access to the foreign minister and premier, he must be encouraged to provide them with unvarnished assessments of how their – sometimes incongruent – policies are affecting Israel's image in the media and support among American Jews.
###
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Monday, February 07, 2011
What is Qatar's Game?
On the Middle East map, the peninsula state bordering Saudi Arabia, jutting into the Persian Gulf opposite Iran, is easy to overlook. Yet Qatar is one of the world's wealthiest countries, the dominant exporter of liquefied natural gas, and through its sponsorship of Al Jazeera, punches considerably above its weight.
On the face of it Qatar is not easy to pigeonhole. In 2022, it will host the World Cup football (soccer) games; it's already home to perhaps the first world class museum of modern art in the Arab world; and its national airline (besides inspiring some of the most creative commercials on television) has 180 planes on order including five superjumbo A380s.
Its attitude toward Jews in comparatively enlightened. In 1996, Qatar hosted the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and invited Israel to open a trade mission. In 2008, the sheikhdom allowed Israeli tennis star Shahar Pe'er to play in a WTA Tour tournament, and Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni to address its Doha “Democracy Forum." This barely raised eyebrows as Shimon Peres had made his second visit to Doha in 2007. Qatar is also considered an American ally and hosts (rent free) the US military's Central Command which oversees operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
All this development and cosmopolitanism – in a country where native Qataris, practicing "liberal" Wahhabi Islam and comprise 200,000 out of a total 1.4 million population – is attributable to Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani and family. First lady Sheikha Mosah Bint Nasser al-Missned spearheads reform and is one of the most influential women in the world. Prime Minister (and businessman) Hamed bin Jaber al-Thani's recent corporate flirtation with Israeli entrepreneurs has been interpreted in some quarters as a political overture to the Jewish state.
There is, alas, also a darker side to the equation. During Israel's 2008-2009 military campaign to stop Hamas from firing rockets into its territory from Gaza, Qatar broke relations with Israel and moreover hosted extremist Arabs, plus Iran, to mobilize support for Hamas. (The Qataris subsequently offered to resume relations in return for being allowed to funnel reconstruction money directly to the Hamas authorities.) In addition to helping bankroll Hamas, the al-Thani's have played a key role in facilitating Hezbollah's suzerainty over Lebanon. And in December 2007, Qatar invited Mahmud Ahmadinejad to address the Gulf Cooperation Council in Doha, the first Iranian leader ever to do so.
Al Jazeera, based in Doha and created by Sheikh Hamad in 1996, is a tool of Qatar's foreign policy. In an Arab world where, until recently, dissent was forbidden, the channel's readiness to criticize Arab autocrats (excluding, naturally, the ruler of Qatar) has been exhilarating. Al Jazeera has also played a critical role in setting or codifying the pan-Arab agenda. But by notoriously, over and over again, disseminating the fulminations of al-Qaida's Osama bin Laden, the station concurrently promoted violent pan-Islam. Unlike the BBC's World Service shortwave broadcasts or even of Radio Free Europe of yesteryear, Qatar's soft power exercised through Al Jazeera has too often been in the service of tyranny.
While Al-Jazeera's English-language website and television mirror the BBC's professionalism (and frostiness toward the Zionist enterprise), the Arabic service often serves as a demagogic platform for spreading the radical views of the Moslem Brotherhood. Al Jazeera has provided a bully pulpit for extremist preacher Yussuf al-Qaradawi, promoted the Hamas-Iran-Syria-Hizbullah agenda, and glorified as shahids those killed "resisting" Israel. (To be fair, Al Jazeera allows the occasional Israeli spokesperson to appear in this sea of enmity.) Al-Jazeera's championing of Hamas over Fatah led it to broadcast The Palestine Papers, purporting to expose Mahmoud Abbas's peace negotiators as Zionist collaborators. When Qatar's rulers don't know what to make of a crisis, the network can vacillate. For instance, at their outset, Al Jazeera downplayed the disturbances in Egypt, only to become the nexus of anti-Mubarak agitation.
To a Western observer, Qatar's foreign policy can seem incoherent, even duplicitous. On the one hand the ruling family professes to promote reform and democratization, yet it is also a friend of medievalism and rejectionism. It is as if Qatar wants to be an unscrupulous Switzerland of the Middle East. In return for not being targeted, Qatar has come to an arrangement with terrorist groups and has for years provided safe haven to Muslim Brothers. Since 2003, Qatar has reportedly been paying al-Qaeda to spare it from terrorist attack; members of the royal family are said to have provided safe haven for 9/11 terrorists.
The al-Thani clan's continual playing off the forces of enlightenment and darkness against each other might be, somehow, excusable were its ultimate goal bringing the values of modernity to the Arab world. Regrettably, there is slim evidence they have any purpose beyond self-preservation and the consequences be damned.
###
Feb. 7, 2011
On the face of it Qatar is not easy to pigeonhole. In 2022, it will host the World Cup football (soccer) games; it's already home to perhaps the first world class museum of modern art in the Arab world; and its national airline (besides inspiring some of the most creative commercials on television) has 180 planes on order including five superjumbo A380s.
Its attitude toward Jews in comparatively enlightened. In 1996, Qatar hosted the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and invited Israel to open a trade mission. In 2008, the sheikhdom allowed Israeli tennis star Shahar Pe'er to play in a WTA Tour tournament, and Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni to address its Doha “Democracy Forum." This barely raised eyebrows as Shimon Peres had made his second visit to Doha in 2007. Qatar is also considered an American ally and hosts (rent free) the US military's Central Command which oversees operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
All this development and cosmopolitanism – in a country where native Qataris, practicing "liberal" Wahhabi Islam and comprise 200,000 out of a total 1.4 million population – is attributable to Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani and family. First lady Sheikha Mosah Bint Nasser al-Missned spearheads reform and is one of the most influential women in the world. Prime Minister (and businessman) Hamed bin Jaber al-Thani's recent corporate flirtation with Israeli entrepreneurs has been interpreted in some quarters as a political overture to the Jewish state.
There is, alas, also a darker side to the equation. During Israel's 2008-2009 military campaign to stop Hamas from firing rockets into its territory from Gaza, Qatar broke relations with Israel and moreover hosted extremist Arabs, plus Iran, to mobilize support for Hamas. (The Qataris subsequently offered to resume relations in return for being allowed to funnel reconstruction money directly to the Hamas authorities.) In addition to helping bankroll Hamas, the al-Thani's have played a key role in facilitating Hezbollah's suzerainty over Lebanon. And in December 2007, Qatar invited Mahmud Ahmadinejad to address the Gulf Cooperation Council in Doha, the first Iranian leader ever to do so.
Al Jazeera, based in Doha and created by Sheikh Hamad in 1996, is a tool of Qatar's foreign policy. In an Arab world where, until recently, dissent was forbidden, the channel's readiness to criticize Arab autocrats (excluding, naturally, the ruler of Qatar) has been exhilarating. Al Jazeera has also played a critical role in setting or codifying the pan-Arab agenda. But by notoriously, over and over again, disseminating the fulminations of al-Qaida's Osama bin Laden, the station concurrently promoted violent pan-Islam. Unlike the BBC's World Service shortwave broadcasts or even of Radio Free Europe of yesteryear, Qatar's soft power exercised through Al Jazeera has too often been in the service of tyranny.
While Al-Jazeera's English-language website and television mirror the BBC's professionalism (and frostiness toward the Zionist enterprise), the Arabic service often serves as a demagogic platform for spreading the radical views of the Moslem Brotherhood. Al Jazeera has provided a bully pulpit for extremist preacher Yussuf al-Qaradawi, promoted the Hamas-Iran-Syria-Hizbullah agenda, and glorified as shahids those killed "resisting" Israel. (To be fair, Al Jazeera allows the occasional Israeli spokesperson to appear in this sea of enmity.) Al-Jazeera's championing of Hamas over Fatah led it to broadcast The Palestine Papers, purporting to expose Mahmoud Abbas's peace negotiators as Zionist collaborators. When Qatar's rulers don't know what to make of a crisis, the network can vacillate. For instance, at their outset, Al Jazeera downplayed the disturbances in Egypt, only to become the nexus of anti-Mubarak agitation.
To a Western observer, Qatar's foreign policy can seem incoherent, even duplicitous. On the one hand the ruling family professes to promote reform and democratization, yet it is also a friend of medievalism and rejectionism. It is as if Qatar wants to be an unscrupulous Switzerland of the Middle East. In return for not being targeted, Qatar has come to an arrangement with terrorist groups and has for years provided safe haven to Muslim Brothers. Since 2003, Qatar has reportedly been paying al-Qaeda to spare it from terrorist attack; members of the royal family are said to have provided safe haven for 9/11 terrorists.
The al-Thani clan's continual playing off the forces of enlightenment and darkness against each other might be, somehow, excusable were its ultimate goal bringing the values of modernity to the Arab world. Regrettably, there is slim evidence they have any purpose beyond self-preservation and the consequences be damned.
###
Feb. 7, 2011
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
Thursday, February 03, 2011
What Gives גלי צה"ל Galei Tzahal? Why the Friedman Infatuation?
Am I the only one in Israel who wonders who at Israel's Army Radio is so infatuated with Tom Friedman of the NYTimes that they keep referencing his op-eds as if... they were something significant that we should all care about.
It seems that Old Tom has compared PM Netanyahu to Hosni Mubarak calling Netanyahu the "Mubarak of the peace process."
Standard Tom. Yawn.
Old Tom has been wrong about Israel more times than I'd care to count in this quickie posting.
He started being wrong from his college days when he was active with Breira. Sadly, from Beirut to Jerusalem (which, I'll admit is a good book with lots of bad ideas) has influenced thousands of young people to mis-perceive the Arab-Israel conflict.
So what gives Galei Tzahal?
Who is the Friedman-groupie in your news department?
It seems that Old Tom has compared PM Netanyahu to Hosni Mubarak calling Netanyahu the "Mubarak of the peace process."
Standard Tom. Yawn.
Old Tom has been wrong about Israel more times than I'd care to count in this quickie posting.
He started being wrong from his college days when he was active with Breira. Sadly, from Beirut to Jerusalem (which, I'll admit is a good book with lots of bad ideas) has influenced thousands of young people to mis-perceive the Arab-Israel conflict.
So what gives Galei Tzahal?
Who is the Friedman-groupie in your news department?
I am an Israel briefer and analyst, a political scientist, and a speaker on Jewish civilization. I'm also a rewrite guy & fact-checker, who can make your writing clear and compelling & help you contextualize.
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