Where the moderates are

Army of Shadows
By Hillel Cohen
Translated by Haim Watzman
University of California Press
344 pages; NIS 159/$29.95

This is a book I purchased because I was tempted by its cover photograph of a Jew visiting an Arab village in 1940, even as I was repelled by the word "collaboration" in its subtitle.

The Jew - the jacket description calls him a "settler" - wearing a Western suit, is sitting slightly higher than the Arab, who is traditionally dressed and wearing a keffiyeh. The Arab has his hand on the visitor's knee. He looks warily at the camera as his guest, whom we see in profile, speaks.

In Army of Shadows - Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948, Hillel Cohen of the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem tells the absorbing story of the Palestinian Arabs who sought accommodation with the Zionist movement. This book answers the question: Where are the Palestinian moderates?

For more than 90 years, Arab radicals have been at war not only with with Zionism, but simultaneously with any Arab voice - Christian, Muslim, Druse or Beduin - advocating moderation and coexistence with the Zionist enterprise. So, where are the moderates?

They are dead - hacked up with axes, riddled with bullets, slaughtered with knives and exploded by bombs. That's where the Arab moderates are. This book chronicles their story from the start of the British Mandate until the War of Independence.

I GET the impression that Hillel Cohen is sympathetic to the Palestinians' plight - he knows Arabic, has many Arab friends and a long-standing interest in the Arabs of Israel and the Arab "peace camp." Here he tells a poignant tale that is seldom presented in Palestinian history about the many, many, let's call them "moderate" Arabs who recognized that going to war with the Zionist enterprise would end in catastrophe for the Arab side - in a nakba. These Arabs were labeled "traitors" and "collaborators."

Cohen says that "as an Israeli Jew, I have no standing to determine who is a traitor to the Palestinian cause." Well, as an Israeli Jew and a Zionist reading this book, I think the evidence is overwhelming: Arab fanatics are the real traitors to the Palestinian cause; it is they who prevented the creation of a Palestinian state in 1948, and it is they who have been doing everything inhumanly possible to foil the creation of a Palestinian state ever since.

As Cohen tells it, there were two factions in Palestinian Arab society: the fanatics led by Haj Amin al-Husseini, mufti of Jerusalem; and the moderates, who included such notable families as the Nashashibis. The latter "believed that the Zionists could not be defeated and that the common good of Palestinian Arabs demanded coexistence with Jews."

The Zionists, yes, collaborated with the moderate Arabs in land purchases, business, trade, intelligence and sometimes also militarily. Cohen's research shows that the Jewish Agency and Hagana paid Arab informants, funded pro-Zionist Arab newspapers (though often insufficiently and erratically) and made an effort (often far too little) to support Arabs who were friends of the Jews. The Zionists correctly intuited that the Arabs of Palestine did not mostly define themselves as "Palestinians," but self-identified by their clan, locale - urban or rural - and as part of the greater Arab or Muslim collective.

The "collaborators," says Cohen, had various motives: sometimes personal gain, but just as often communal interest. Often they merely wanted to do the ethical or humane thing.
Yet the mufti insisted that Palestinian Arabs define their cause in religio-nationalist terms - insisting that only his brand of Palestinian identity was legitimate and that a moderate nationalism which acquiesced in any semblance of Jewish rights to the Land of Israel was treason.

THE REJECTIONISTS spearheaded a continuum of murderous riots, beginning in the 1920s. Even as they were killing Jews, they were also intimidating any Arab tainted by a Jewish link. Fanatics even opposed connecting Arab villages to the Zionists' electrical grid. They opposed establishing self-governing institutions for the Arabs of Palestine and participation in municipal elections. They advocated a boycott of Jewish products and vehemently opposed Jews and Arabs working for or with each other.

Then, as now, the hard-liners controlled the mosques, which they used to incite against the Jews and against Arabs who did business with Jews. Initially, their fatwas merely warned of beatings for disobedience. With time, they would command the murder of moderates. (Christian Arab clerics issued their own anti-Jewish rulings in their elusive quest to win acceptance as loyal Palestinians.)

Cohen reports that "in autumn 1929, for the first time, a Palestinian public figure was murdered for collaborating with the Zionists - Sheikh Musa Hadeib from the village of Duwaimah, head of the farmers' party of Mt. Hebron."

The incitement in the mosques and pro-mufti newspapers intensified and begot a brutality which became part of the fabric of Palestinian society. In 1928, Izz a-Din al-Kassam (among others) organized jihadist cells which attacked Jews, the British and Arab "collaborators."
"Any person who dares negotiate with [Chaim] Weizmann will meet a bitter end," the extremists warned.

In the period covered by the book, hundreds of Palestinian moderates - maybe 1,000 - were murdered. Countless others got the message: Moderation is treason punishable by death.
There was no appeasing the rejectionists. Not even the draconian White Paper, issued just four months before Hitler's invasion of Poland - a British policy turnabout which dealt a near-fatal blow to the Zionist enterprise - went far enough for the fanatics. No step save the complete eradication of the Zionist enterprise would be tolerated.

Yet here is the voice of one moderate speaking to the extremists, as unearthed by Cohen's research: "I am not a traitor... I am not a Zionist... Our national demands are equivalent, but our means differ. Your method will lead you to destruction and to expulsion. A man has a right to criticize, and criticism should not be obstructed... I cannot recognize Haj Amin al-Husseini as the leader of Palestine because his direction has brought no benefit to the country.

Those were the sentiments of Muhammad Tawil from Acre. His words went unheeded by the Palestinian Arabs, and he was ultimately abandoned to his own devices by an ungrateful Jewish Agency leadership.

IN TELLING the story of the "collaborators," Cohen also sheds light on the development of Palestinian nationalism, aspects of the Arab refugee problem, and also why so many Palestinian Arabs simply refused to join the radicals in fighting the Jews during the War of Independence.

Cohen demonstrates how, at some level, the Zionist enterprise and Arabs in Palestine were indeed engaged in a zero-sum competition. Without land there could be no Jewish state, and you don't have to be a bleeding-heart leftist to realize that much injustice was done to the poor Arab fellahin. Yes, in many instances there was dispossession - even if, in a technical sense, it was done legally.

And yet, had the Arab moderates triumphed, all-out catastrophe could have been avoided. A modus vivendi could have been found. Mandatory Palestine - which, after all, was supposed to stretch from the Mediterranean to what is today the Iraqi border - could have accommodated both peoples. The Jews had no alternatives but to resurrect their ancient homeland - and the Zionists recognized this long before 1933, when Hitler came to power, or 1942, when the Nazis were implementing their industrial-scale genocide.

Army of Shadows is an important academic work that is accessible to general readers. It painfully exposes how today's violent, dysfunctional, pathological polity that is "Palestine" came to be.

It is a story of a misbegotten revolution that consumed its own.

FROM A Q&A WITH THE AUTHOR

The cover photo of your book is intriguing. What's the story of that picture?
I found the photo at Israel's national photo collection, and it caught my eye immediately, mainly because it represents the meeting of two nationalisms and actually two cultures.
What we see is a group of Jews from Zichron Ya'acov visiting a neighboring village. Its name was not mentioned in the photo description, but it was probably Subbarin (demolished in 1948).
We see the physical nearness, together with the cultural gap. For me the scene represents the attempts Zionist settlers made to communicate with the local Arabs, and the apparent difficulties of such meetings.
And since I wrote the book before I found the photo, it tells me how little we can really know about such a meeting, since this kind of encounter was sometimes based on a genuine wish to create good relations, sometimes aimed at exploiting the Arabs, and so on. In other words, the photo illustrates the complexity of the Zionists' attitude toward the Palestinian Arabs, and vice versa.

You identify yourself as an Israeli and as a Jew. Given that this book is about Palestinian Arabs and Zionists, what - if anything - should we read into your decision not to self-identify also as a Zionist?
Don't read anything into it. Sometimes I identify myself as a Zionist, sometimes not.

Do you agree that had the "collaborators" gained the upper hand in the development of Palestinian nationalism, the past 60 years could have been very different?
Yes, this is part of what I suggest, but of course only as a possibility, not as a firm conclusion. It is very difficult to know what the Zionist response would have been had Arab moderation triumphed. Remember that in 1948, Arab rejectionism served to the advantage of the Zionist movement and was, in some cases, encouraged by it.

Meir Kahane by Libby Kahane

My militant husband

Rabbi Meir Kahane
His Life and Thought
Volume One: 1932-1975
By Libby Kahane
Urim, NIS 150/ $36

It's hard to think of a 20th-century Jewish figure who inspired so many of my generation to stay Jewish, yet who also generated such visceral loathing among our elders.

Rabbi Meir Kahane ­ as man and phenomenon ­ could never have arisen, much less flourished, had he been born in Melbourne, Johannesburg, London or even Los Angeles. Whatever his gifts and foibles, Kahane could only have sprung to prominence in the tumultuous time and perilous place that was New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was the perfect storm
for Diaspora Jewish militancy.

Entire urban Jewish neighborhoods were under siege: synagogues firebombed; cemeteries desecrated; elderly Jews beaten mercilessly. It seemed as if the city's liberal mayor, John V. Lindsay, had traded peace with the volatile Black and Puerto Rican communities ­offering affirmative action, community power-sharing in the form of decentralization and enhanced welfare services at Jewish expense.

Jews who could flee to the suburbs did so (enabling many to hang onto their liberalism), while those of us trapped in the five boroughs were left to our own devices.

From their suburbs (or Manhattan enclaves) the well-heeled, acculturated leaders of the Jewish establishment were cut off from the concerns of their poor, mostly Orthodox, coreligionists. Prominent Jewish organizations, settlement houses and even so-called Jewish hospitals became devoted to serving the Negro and Puerto Rican communities. There was no money for Jewish education; none for the Jewish poor (who were thought not to exist); and nothing ­ needless to say ­ for defense in the inner-city jungle.

At the other end of the communal spectrum were the Old World rabbis, including those in my Orthodox Lower East Side yeshiva, who were painfully disconnected from the pulsating temptations and lurking dangers that surrounded their charges.

The choice seemed to be: We could hang on to the waning yiddishkeit of the shtetl, embrace by hook or by crook the faux Judaism of the limousine-liberal crowd, or walk away from the whole kit'n kaboodle at the first opportunity.

INTO THIS maelstrom burst Meir Kahane, seemingly offering a third way: engagement in politics, ethnic pride, self-defense, a channel for our adolescent energies and (I thought) a redefinition of what it meant to be Jewish.

For those who think of Kahane exclusively in the Israeli context, as the founder in 1974 of the anti-Arab Kach movement, his contribution to American Jewish continuity can easily be overlooked. I don't know if Meir Kahane saved Soviet Jewry ­ -- though he certainly put the
issue on the front pages of the newspapers ­ -- but he undoubtedly saved thousands of American Jewish youths like me, not only those who joined his Jewish Defense League, but those who benefited collaterally from it. And for that, whatever his failings, I, for one, am in his debt.

IT'S A CLICHE to call a woman "long-suffering," but if anyone deserves that appellation it is Kahane's widow, Libby, who for all the years of her husband's activism stayed out of sight raising their four children, only to lose Meir to an Islamist assassin in 1990, and son Binyamin Ze'ev to a Palestinian Arab terrorist in 2000.

She has now, hesitatingly, entered the limelight by writing the story of her husband's life until 1975. A concluding volume is in the works.

If, as Spanish essayist Jose Ortega Y Gasset argued, "Biography is a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified," this book doesn't qualify. Instead, the author's stated aim was to produce an authoritative study of her husband's "one-man struggle to promote the Torah way of life."

Yet, to her credit, Rabbi Meir Kahane can't be dismissed as pure iconography. Indeed, this important work is not easily pigeonholed.

A deeply private, religious woman, now a grandmother, Libby Kahane is in no position to produce either an impartial assessment of her husband's place in history or a kiss-and-tell bestseller. Instead, the author, who is also a professional librarian, has done much of the archival and chronological heavy lifting that will one day allow a more dispassionate ­and, with a bit of luck, fair-minded ­biographer to write the full-scale, balanced and yet illuminating biography Meir Kahane deserves.

KAHANE WAS born into a relatively comfortable family. His father was a pulpit rabbi during the Great Depression. Meir was educated in the yeshiva school system, developing a stutter which he overcame with great effort only in adulthood. He joined Betar in 1946, Bnei Akiva in 1952. Meir told Libby that he quit Betar because he wanted a more Orthodox environment.

At any rate, he met her at a Bnei Akiva gathering in 1954. "After several months, Meir asked me out. I have always felt that Meir and I were fated to marry," she writes.

That's about as personal as this volume gets.

Kahane studied at the illustrious Mirer Yeshiva during the day, graduated Brooklyn College night school and married Libby in 1956. Their dream was to make aliya and for Meir to work for the Foreign Ministry. This option was closed to him, as Libby tells it, because Kahane belatedly discovered that such opportunities went exclusively to Labor Party loyalists.

Along the way, Kahane received his rabbinical ordination from Rabbi Abraham Kalmanowitz, got a master's from NYU in international relations, and a law degree from New York Law School (he failed the bar exam, which many do on the first try, and never tried again).

Afterwards, Kahane went through a series of jobs: newspaper delivery man, pulpit rabbi and budding journalist, sometimes writing under the name of Martin Keene.

The murkiest years in Kahane's life (hardly covered in this book) are those between 1963-1965. He and his college buddy Joseph Churba set up a Washington DC think-tank that never really took off. This was when Kahane sometimes went under the name Michael King and reportedly did not lead the lifestyle one would have expected from a married Orthodox rabbi.

You don't have to be Sigmund Freud to speculate why this clean-shaven, modern Orthodox man ultimately reinvented himself into a religious obsessive.

Around this time, Meir started writing for the Brooklyn-based
Jewish Press, which would be (despite some intermittent friction with publisher Rabbi
Solomon Klass) Kahane's main source of income. The tabloid would also become his bully pulpit. Kahane was extraordinarily prolific, yet Klass never paid him enough to make a decent living.

In 1968, in the context of increased levels of violent Jew-hatred stemming
from New York¹s minority communities, Kahane, with attorney Bert Zweibon and public relations man Mort Dolinsky, founded the Jewish Defense League. Dolinsky soon left to make aliya and became head of the Government Press Office.

Zweibon became JDL's general counsel and Kahane's ostensible number two.

THIS BOOK is replete with detail: names, dates, speeches, columns, travels, ripostes to trial judges, and so on.

We learn that Kahane's first arrest came when he held a sit-in at the NYC Board of Education in
downtown Brooklyn, demanding that the agency terminate two black anti-Semites who had ensconced themselves in a local school board as part of Lindsay's decentralization scheme.

Later, when Black militants threatened to turn up at Temple
Emanuel on Fifth Avenue to demand "reparations" from Jews for supposedly exploiting
black folks, Kahane and his fledgling JDL showed up with baseball bats and lead
pipes to protect Jewish honor.

That incident gained Kahane tons of publicity and gave JDL plenty of traction.

KAHANE SOON diversified JDL's activities to the struggle for Soviet Jewry. He employed his knack for public relations, together with bluff, a whiff of violence and a pinch of intimidation to generate badly needed attention for the movement. From there, it seemed only natural to channel JDL's energies toward defending Israel from US pressure to abandon the territories captured in the 1967 Six Day War.

Along the way, he started a variety of front groups, including DIJEL to press for democracy in Jewish organizational life; the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Activist Organizations; and Shuva to foster the mass aliya of US Jewry.

Kahane was both a brilliant theoretician and a master logistician. Yet given how many balls this one-man act had in the air at any one time, he inevitably fell short when it came to following through.

As Kahane's face became well known, followers urged him not to go anywhere
without security. Poignantly, and perhaps more tellingly than intended, Libby Kahane writes that "Meir adamantly refused to have a bodyguard. He had complete trust that G-d would protect him in his efforts to help His people."

Only with hindsight does it strike me that Kahane had become delusional about his role in history and his omnipotence. For all his brilliance, media savvy, boundless energy, micromanagement skills, writing talent and charisma, as the years went on Kahane's views became ever more sensational, his schemes ever more grandiose. There seemed no one he could turn to for a reality check; no one to rein him in.

At the end of the day, Libby Kahane's work is indispensable for the detail it provides. Yet it disappoints in offering few insights into Kahane's complex personality. I hope she allows herself, in the final volume, to get more personal. It must have been a severe blow for him to have been rejected by Menachem Begin and the Jabotinsky movement. Was that what helped push him to ever greater theological and ideological extremism?

These are the things readers really want to know. Meir Kahane was a flame ­ both illuminating and incendiary. This book is only part of his story.

The catharsis Israel needs

Ehud Olmert must go. But would we be better off under Binyamin Netanyahu?

The Winograd Committee, established to examine the Second Lebanon War, determined that a leader who sends his army into battle is obligated to analyze in depth the nature, timing and chances of success of the campaign: "We saw that the rash decisions to go to war made by the government headed by [Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert did not meet these conditions."

Thus spoke the five-member committee in May 2007, when it released its interim findings.
Last month, the committee presented its final report, saying, "We want to stress that we stand behind everything we said in the interim report, and [that] the two parts complement each other."

According to the final report, there were "serious failings and shortcomings in the decision-making process." Let's recall that at the top of the decision-making pyramid was Ehud Olmert.

The premier, said the committee, had one of two choices after Hizbullah attacked: "The first was a short, powerful, strong and unexpected blow on Hizbullah, primarily through 'stand-off' firepower. The second option was to bring about a significant change of the reality in the south of Lebanon with a large [-scale] ground operation, including temporary occupation of Lebanon and 'cleaning' it of Hizbullah military infrastructure."

But, said Winograd: "Israel went to war before it decided which option to select, and without an exit strategy...."

The committee concluded that Israel's chances of victory were stymied by the government's failure to deploy the necessary troops for a ground offensive; that Olmert allowed himself to be "dragged" into a belated attack in the last days of the war; that the government showed "no understanding of the theater of operations, of the IDF's readiness and preparedness, and of the basic principles of using military power to achieve a political and diplomatic goal."

Finally, the committee said that no one gave "serious consideration" to whether it was reasonable to achieve anything tangible in the offensive Olmert launched in the last 60 hours of the war, during which 33 IDF soldiers gave their lives.

NOW, I know some pundits are claiming that this report is not damning of Olmert, and that the heaviest criticism was leveled at the IDF. But I'm not so sure.

In a democracy, the civilian commander-in-chief is responsible for defining the army's mission; mission then defines strategy. Absent a mission, how could the IDF win?

It is true that, for inexplicable reasons, the theater commander was hardly speaking to the commanding officer of the north; that the OC Northern Command was hardly speaking to the chief of staff; that the chief of staff was barely talking to the defense minister, and that the defense minister and prime minister were hardly speaking to one another. That accounts for some of what went wrong.

AS THESE words are being written, security forces are on high alert in expectation that Monday's attack in Dimona - which may have emanated from Gaza - might be the start of a new wave of Palestinian terrorism.

A large chunk of the responsibility for events in Gaza (and for the failure to finish the security barrier in the Hebron area) rests not only with Ehud Olmert, but also with Defense Minister Ehud Barak. He reportedly did very little consulting with the IDF high command or with the security cabinet even as Israel ratcheted up the pressure on Hamas in the Strip.

Once again - as in the Second Lebanon War - we see a failure to consider all possible scenarios, a refusal to consult, and an over-reliance on improvisation.

Plainly, Barak hasn't changed. He's still impulsive and full of himself. He is not the antidote to our leadership problem.

Bottom line? Olmert must go. Yet Barak is not the guy to replace him. And polls show he would not.

IT IS CLEAR that if elections were held today, the Likud would form the next government. So assuming Binyamin Netanyahu did become prime minister, would Israel be better off? Is he today more credible than Olmert?

The harsh reality is not that Bibi has suddenly become more trustworthy, but that Olmert, by comparison, is so untrustworthy. So, yes, Netanyahu is more credible than Olmert.

But Netanyahu has a history of saying one thing and doing another. He cut a deal with the PLO over Hebron in 1997; he was ready to give up 13 percent of the West Bank to Arafat in the 1998 Wye Agreement; he reportedly sent Ron Lauder to try and work out a deal with Syria's Hafez Assad over the Golan Heights.

As finance minister Netanyahu paid for the disengagement from Gaza, only to quit before its implementation. And, more recently, he could not help himself from talking too much on television about Israel's September 2007 bombing of a suspected nuclear site in Syria.

At the end of the day, Bibi's pragmatism - so long as it does not devolve into the kind of self-serving opportunism Olmert has fallen into - might prove an asset. But the Israeli body politic can't afford another leader who says one thing and does another. The effect on public morale would be simply too devastating.

In his Monday night attack against Olmert from the Knesset podium - "Would the captain of the Titanic have been given another command?" - Bibi rose to the occasion.

The opposition leader had been strangely silent lest he ruin his chances of coasting into the premiership. He never really articulated the case against Annapolis. Though he spoke out on Jerusalem, here too he was a bit disingenuous, as the division of Jerusalem - whatever that means - is the least immediate of the threats facing Israel in the charade talks with the hapless Mahmoud Abbas.

Anyway, Netanyahu's rhetorical abilities have never been in question. Now, more is needed: Specifically, the opposition leader should present an unambiguous platform that tells Israelis not just what the Likud opposes, but what it proposes, and how it hopes to achieve its goals.

WHEN YITZHAK Rabin returned to power, he gave us Oslo; when Ariel Sharon came back from the political wilderness, he brought us disengagement.

We all make mistakes. The real question is: At age 58, is Netanyahu able to learn from his? Can he reinvent himself and lead Israel in the treacherous times ahead? I hope so. Because Ehud Olmert really must go.

In the long term, a key answer to our systemic problems would be electoral reform and a restructuring of the political system. But more immediately, Israel needs a catharsis; and, for better or worse, Binyamin Netanyahu is the only candidate that can offer it.

Gaza - Three Possible Scenarios

Last Thursday, Hamas demolished the Philadelphi Corridor --
but not the perception that Israel is still in charge


To this day, it's been hard for Israel to rid itself of the Gaza Strip and its 1.3 million Palestinian Arab inhabitants.

Prime Minister Menachem Begin tried to convince Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to take Gaza in 1979, when Israel turned over the Sinai Peninsula as part of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty.

No thanks, said Sadat, though Egypt had occupied the Strip from 1948 until the 1967 Six Day War.

Israel's unilateral disengagement from Gaza in 2005 was another attempt to solve our Gaza problem. The Palestinian Authority, under EU tutelage, was supposed to handle border control at Rafah. But the Europeans and "moderate" Palestinians abandoned their posts in the wake of Hamas's violent takeover of the Strip in the summer of 2007 (which, you'll recall, followed its earlier, electoral victory over Fatah in 2006).

All this undercut a pillar of Israel's disengagement strategy: to be done with Gaza. Jerusalem could not really disengage under an onslaught of flying bombs aimed at the Negev - even if every last Israeli citizen had been evacuated and the IDF had pulled out.

Those of us who supported disengagement must now admit that it created more problems for Israeli security and diplomacy than it solved.

AS FAR as I know, no pundit or intelligence agency forecast what happened on January 23. There was no advance warning that the Philadelphi Corridor would essentially disappear. At this writing, the division between Hamas-controlled Palestinian Arab Gaza and Egyptian Sinai has vanished. Or as a BBC correspondent put it: "There are so many Palestinians in Rafah that it is almost as if the town had been annexed by Gaza."

What had been a background headache for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and his security chief Omar Suleiman is now a full-blown migraine.

Moreover, it now transpires that Hamas didn't just engineer the recent "humanitarian crisis" in Gaza, but also plotted demolishing the Philadelphi Corridor fence separating Egyptian from Palestinian Rafah.

For his part, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has been shown (once again) to be a hapless bystander with little influence over what happens on the Palestinian street.

In the wake of Thursday's events, there are more questions than answers.

Among the people wondering what happens next are the clans who made their living transporting contraband and weapons via the tunnels under the Philadelphi Corridor. Will they still have a business? How will they adapt to the new situation? What impact will the fall of the Philadelphi Corridor have on rapprochement between Fatah and Hamas? Will the Sinai-Negev border now become a new flashpoint?

And, conversely, does the corridor's collapse end the talk of Gaza being "a big prison" and of Israel's "occupation" continuing? Or will the media take the line adopted on Thursday by the Guardian that the crisis continues, and it's Israel's fault?

A ROSY SCENARIO argues that Gaza is at last no longer Israel's problem; it's the clear responsibility of Egypt and Hamas. Ranking Israeli officials told The New York Times that the events in Gaza may be "a blessing in disguise... some people in the Defense Ministry, Foreign Ministry and Prime Minister's Office are very happy with this. They are saying, 'At last, the disengagement is beginning to work.'"

In other words, now that the border is open, Hamas must begin worrying about the delivery of essential services and the population's welfare, something that would necessitate a genuine cease-fire with Israel and the end to cross-border attacks.

A gloomier scenario would argue that the fall of the Philadelphi Corridor may have dire consequences for the Mubarak regime itself; that the Islamist triumph and Cairo's sclerotic management of the developing crisis will embolden the Muslim Brotherhood, which, for all we pundits know, is right now making quiet inroads into the Egyptian military.

Further, on the internal Palestinian front, Hamas will seek to leverage its Gaza accomplishment by manipulating Abbas to end what's left of the EU and US embargo.

The Abbas approach of dealing with Israel - call it outward accommodation, the phased plan, whatever - has less credibility on the Palestinian street than ever.

The Fatah chief will either further adapt his policies to Hamas, or quit to make way for a newly released Marwan Barghouti.

MY HUNCH is that in the near-term, Egypt will try to pick up the pieces. It will attempt to control traffic between the Sinai and Egypt proper; it will bring Hamas and Fatah together, with the Islamists as the senior partners and the nationalists as conduits to the civilized world. Israeli decision makers, after due deliberation, will probably opt not to send the IDF back into Gaza to rebuild and take charge of the Philadelphi Corridor.

Fruitless negotiations on a "shelf agreement" between Israel and the PA will naturally continue because the Bush administration needs this illusion of momentum, the EU thinks the talks can actually produce something tangible, and Ehud Olmert has every incentive (if he survives the Winograd Commission's report later this week) to play along.

Hamas will reduce attacks on Israel even as it lays the groundwork to continue the struggle. It will, meantime, concentrate on rebuilding its network in the West Bank.

All this makes the post-Annapolis negotiations aimed at a theoretical, paper agreement (which, Israelis are told, will be implemented only if the Palestinians change their violent ways) an even more dangerous exercise in futility: Concessions to Abbas may yet be reaped by the Islamists who stand poised to take over Palestinian society.

Even if the Rafah barrier is reconstituted, how the bitter lemons of Hamas's latest achievement can be turned into lemonade is beyond me.

Cairo diary

It was with some trepidation that Lisa and I set off from Jerusalem for a 4-day mini-vacation to Cairo. Tensions between Egypt and Israel had spiked over the ongoing crisis in Gaza and the Egyptians had all but declared Israel’s Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, persona non grata.

On the other hand, it was hard to imagine relations warming anytime soon and who knows how things will play out once Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, 79, leaves the scene.

If we wanted to see the pyramids, visit the bazaars and eat authentic koshari now was the time to make a move.

El-Al flies to Cairo International Airport on Sunday and Thursday nights. Since we didn’t want to spend Shabbat in Egypt we took the Sunday flight which gave us four full days before our journey home late on Thursday.

Can you "do" Cairo in only four days?

Absolutely. In fact, we took it at a leisurely pace.

And still we made it to significant mosques, bazaars, the pyramids, the Egyptian museum, and a performance of whirling dervishes.

As we got to Ben-Gurion, we were curious about who else would be flying to Cairo besides us. Since the the Aksa Intifada exploded in September 2000, no Israeli citizen in our acquaintance had made the journey.

Most of the other passengers on the one-hour flight whom we presumed to be Jewish were transferring in Cairo. Also on board were Israeli Arabs and Christian pilgrims – tradition has it that Joseph, Mary, and baby Jesus fled to Egypt in order to escape Herod’s “massacre of the innocents.”

And there were several Israeli “businessman-types” whom we imagined to be arms merchants on their way to some African hotspot.

We opted to travel on our US and British rather than Israeli passports and on arriving in Cairo purchased visas ($15 each) at the easy-to-miss foreign currency booth just before passport control.

We’d arranged through the Hilton Nile Hotel for a car and – what turned out to be a “fixer” – to meet us ($30 plus tips) just as we got off the plane.

It was reassuring to be greeted in this foreign port of call by a pleasant, well-dressed man holding a placard with our names on it. He helped us with our landing cards and withdrew to the other side of passport control where he later helped us retrieve our luggage.

Our fixer then escorted us, through no-go areas, past armed security men, to where hundreds of white-clad pilgrims, loaded down with immense parcels, had just returned from the haj in Mecca.

Outside the terminal we found ourselves thrust into a raucous scene.

There were cars, luggage wagons, and people jostling to inch their way out of the compound. In the parking lot, our fixer handed us over to a hotel chauffeur for the 30-minute drive to the Hilton which is located on the shores of the Nile.

Our first – and lasting impression – as we got closer to Cairo proper was of the unrelenting honking of car horns, the near absence of traffic lights, the madcap ways of Cairo drivers, and the ubiquitous, though ineffective, presence of traffic police and an assortment of security personnel everywhere one looked.

At the Nile Hilton compound, our car was cursorily checked by security men and a bomb-sniffing dog. At the entrance, we were ushered through a metal detector and into the serenity of the Hilton lobby.

It was an orderly oasis in an otherwise frenzied metropolis. A classical music ensemble played Mozart in a corner.

AFTER A good nights sleep in our comfortable, spacious 1970s-style room which included a large balcony overlooking Tahrir Square, the Egyptian Museum and the Arab League building, we headed upstairs for a buffet breakfast.

There was plenty of food we felt comfortable enjoying – eggs, vegetables, yogurt, humus, babaghanoush, cheeses, bread, coffee and tea.

We drank bottled water but used the hotel’s tap water for showering and brushing our teeth without any problems.

Though the hotel knew we were from Israel, service throughout our stay was prompt and solicitous. We asked that a tea-kettle and cups be brought to our room and within minutes they were provided.

FIRST THING Monday morning, our plan was to head straight for the Pyramids at Giza, some 45 minutes away.

We had organized a guide recommended through a local Israeli contact. But when it turned out she was indisposed and wouldn’t be able to join us until the following day, we put off the pyramids and headed instead, on our own by taxi, to the Mosque of al-Azhar, a key center of Islamic learning (founded in 970 CE), and located near the glitzy, bustling Khan al-Khalili bazaar, in a section called Islamic Cairo.

The taxis we encountered proved that there is life after mechanical death.

Their interiors tended to be skeletal; knobs and casings having been stripped away or atrophied sometime during the middle kingdom; windshield wipers? – a wasteful accessory.

Many drivers (not just of taxis) preferred to “save their battery” by not to using headlights after dark.

The appalling air-pollution, with cars belching fumes and burning oil, made us long for the blue skies and pristine mountain air of Jerusalem.

Just crossing the street in Cairo is a challenge. With few traffic lights, cavalier attitudes toward the occasional red light, and traffic police as abundant as they are indolent, we relied heavily on shadowing “human shields” – local denizens who are expert at dodging traffic coming from every which way – to get to a sidewalk.

MOST MOSQUES welcome visitors. All you do is tip the custodian to watch your shoes.

We were already familiar with the amplified call to prayer (five times a day) which has long been part of our Jerusalem experience. Muezzins call the faithful to worship from the minarets towers (which in Israel are often illuminated by green lighting at night).

Inside, all mosques have a mihrab, a sort of alcove, which indicates the direction of Mecca. Mosques are distinguished by their tiling, design, lamps, method of construction. But compared to cathedrals, mosques (like synagogues) are relative simple affairs.

We managed to visit the famous Azhar mosque and a half-dozen others including the Abbasid-era mud-brick Mosque of Ibn Tulun (879 CE), and the Mosque of Amr ibn al-Aas (640 CE) which was the first place of organized Islamic worship in Egypt.

That’s also where I bought a string of prayer beads (to help the faithful recall the 99 names of Allah).

Our favorite market was the Khan al-Khalili bazaar. It’s far larger and more varied than Jerusalem’s Old City shuk. You’ll find spices, water pipes, jewelry, trinkets, and places to grab a snack including a pancake café and Arab-style tea room.

We didn’t actually buy anything despite the best efforts of the hawking merchants. Mostly we enjoyed stealing away from the narrow touristy alleyways, to where fewer trinkets and more staples (chicken, meat, and vegetables) were being sold.

ON TUESDAY, the moment we’d been waiting for had arrived.

Together with our guide Iman and a van driver, we’re off the see the pyramids.

We’d imagined that we’d have to traverse a sandy desert until, at last, we’d spy these great wonders. Not so.

Cairo’s huge metropolis (16 million people) leads directly, once you cross the Nile, into Giza whose crumbling buildings and squalid appearance also define large tracts of Cairo proper.
It was only on the way home that we saw Western-style middle-class apartment blocks in the suburbs near the airport.

At any rate, nothing – not the hordes of tourists, not the vehicles clogging the access roads, not the locals trying to sell us everything from camel rides to kaffiyehs, not the huge number of security men – nothing ultimately could detract from the sight of these awesome, monumental tombs built 5,000 years ago.

These immense structures emblemize a civilization that predates the Biblical stories of the Israelite patriarchs and matriarchs.

We explore the terrain, walking (and driving) around the pyramids, visiting the “solar boat” museum containing an actual, reconstructed, full-size Egyptian boat which had been used to transport royal corpses for burial, and we later gawk at the iconic Sphinx which guards the Giza plateau.

Then it is back to Old Cairo for a visit to the heavily-guarded Ben Ezra Synagogue, Egypt’s oldest, and now a museum.

Ben Ezra is also famous for its treasure-drove of sacred texts discovered in its geniza by Solomon Schechter in 1896.

Iman also shows us the nearby Church of St. Sergius, the oldest Coptic Church in Cairo.


ON WEDNESDAY, we dodge the traffic of modern Cairo to walk from our hotel to the Shaar Hashamayim Synagogue, where services are held only if enough foreigners happen to be in town.

Most of Wednesday is devoted to a visit to the cold and jammed corridors of the Egyptian Museum.

The museum is a throwback to an earlier era.

Precious little is protected by climate controlled casings. The lighting is poor. The floors are densely packed with artifacts, strewn warehouse-like. Many of the exhibits are unmarked and poorly described. Only some objects have code numbers matching an old handbook loaned to us by a cousin who’d been here decades earlier.

We allowed about three hours for strolling around.

Our favorite exhibit was the lavish Tutankhamun gallery which is set off within the museum building. Also worth searching for is the wood-carved statue of Ka-Aper.

Like at the pyramids, we just kept reminding ourselves that we were in the presence of objects that were practically as old as history itself.

It had probably been a mistake not to have paid an additional entrance fee for the Royal Mummy Room. But after hours inside we were starting to suffer museum fatigue and were glad to have chalked-off another tourist milestone.

AN UNQUALIFIED highlight of our Cairo visit came Wednesday night when we took a taxi to the Al-Ghouri Complex in Islamic Cairo to see a performance of Whirling Dervishes.

These are Sufi Muslim mystics who use musical instruments and, ecstatic, trance-inducing whirling to achieve a closer connection with God.

Security was tight because of long-simmering tensions between the mystics and Islamists. But we were gratified that the audience included locals as well as tourists.

ON THURSDAY, our final day in Cairo, we asked Iman to come back and show us a neighborhood where “regular” people live.

She took us back to Islamic Cairo where the medieval walled city of Cairo once stood.

It had rained the night before and that had overwhelmed the city’s decaying sewer system.
We trudged through the muddied streets (there being no sidewalks to speak of) and watched as Cairones cleared the areas in front of their shops and stalls.

This walk, and one we had earlier taken in Old Cairo on our own, reinforced the impression that many people live in squalid, crowded, rundown conditions, but that basic foods were plentiful and, apparently, affordable.

There was plenty of fresh meat and chicken to be had though some people looked too poor afford it.

A loaf of bread, subsidized by the government, costs about 5 pennies (US) -- though corruption means that the cheap bread is hard to come by.

Presumably, of the 80 million Egyptians, people living in the capital are among the better off. The average annual income in Egypt is $1,250, but some 45 percent of the population lives on less than $2 a day; and a staggering 14 million are in dire poverty even by Egyptian standards.

THE CAIRENES we met were generally friendly and curious, though no one was affable out of sheer bonhomie.

People were insistent (a tad in-your-face), but never hostile or threatening.

“Do you want taxi?” we’d often be asked -- even if not necessarily by someone who had a taxi. Everyone wanted to be a fixer.

“Welcome, where from?” was the unvarying greeting.
“England,” we’d reply – knowing that acknowledging we were from Israel would be unwise.
“Happy New Year, Merry Christmas,” the reply came (it was the Muslim New Year as well as the Coptic Christmas during our visit).

*********************
JEWISH CAIRO – On one of our walks , we came upon the derelict Ben-Maimon synagogue. There are 12 shuls still standing in Cairo, seven are in the custody of the antiquities authorities, but there is obviously no budget to renovate and maintain most of them.

At any given time there are fewer than 100 Jews in Cairo.

When I put on my tefillin in the morning, I was keenly aware that I might be the only Jew davening in all of Egypt. But the portion of the week was “Bo” – and come to Pharaoh we did.

Locals estimate that there are perhaps 40 indigenous Egyptian Jews most of whom are elderly widows. The putative head of the community is Carmen Weinstein (whom we did not meet). Her main goal, according to press reports, is to preserve and rehabilitate Cairo’s Jewish communal assets without raising the ire of the authorities who do not want to pay reparations for confiscated or nationalized Jewish property.

Across from our hotel, we passed street vendors selling Arabic editions of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Mein Kompf alongside the daily papers and various magazines. There must be a market, probably fed by the Egyptian media’s nasty depictions of Jews and Israel.

So wearing a kipa or letting strangers know you are Jewish or an Israeli is plainly not a good idea.

Still, Egyptians adamantly protest that they are not anti-Jewish, only stridently anti-Israel (despite the peace treaty) because of what they say is Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian Arabs and the “occupation.”

The only book shop we found that carried English-language books about the Arab-Israel conflict not knee-jerk hostile toward Israel was also the overall best source of English-language material we came upon: the book store on the campus of the American University of Cairo.

SOUVENIRS – If like us you don’t much fancy bazaar haggling, it might be worth your while to track down the brilliant gift shop run by Maryse and Ismail Borhan at 17 Ahmed Ibn Touloun Square, just opposite the Tulun Mosque and down the block from another gem, the Gayer-Anderson Museum, which is a complex of homes restored by a British officers in the 1930s.

FOOD - We had no trouble with food in Cairo. In addition to our hotel breakfast, we enjoyed Koshari, a dish comprised of pasta, rice, lentils, tomato sauce, fried onions and (for Elliot) some hot sauce.

We also ate falafel (made of fava beans and parsley) as opposed the Israeli falafel made of chickpeas.

We particularly enjoyed a meal at L’Aubergine, in the Zamalek area, which while not strictly vegetarian, has a good veggie menu and is geared to expats and visitors.

It’s no hassle ordering wine or beer in Western-friendly restaurants (except on Muslim holidays).

PREDICTIONS FOR 2008

Watch out, Amos Oz and David Grossman, I'm propheysing too


British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks told Haaretz last week that when visiting Israel he prefers to spend time with what the paper termed the new prophets of the Jewish people. "I've tried to begin a serious conversation with Amos Oz and David Grossman, either of whom would have been prophets if they were religious," said Sacks.

This leads me to reveal here (for the first time) that along with Grossman and Oz, I too have prophetic talents. With the New Year just around the corner, and with a tip of the hat to Jeane Dixon, here are my own predictions for 2008.

January: To the surprise of some and the chagrin of others, Mahmoud Abbas tells the London-based Asharq al-Awsat that the Palestinian Arabs indeed recognize the right of the Jewish people to a national homeland in Palestine.

"Let us share the land in harmony; we in our state and you in yours. Just as Arabs live as citizens in Israel, I invite Jews to stay in their West Bank communities and enjoy dual citizenship. You have returned to the heartland of your civilization. Whatever our differences over this disputed land, we can work them out."

Palestinian Prime Minister Salaam Fayad declares that with the billions Palestine is receiving in international aid, his goal is to turn the West Bank and Gaza into "the Singapore of the Middle East."

Several hundred thousand Palestinians demonstrate in Nablus under the banner: "A Demilitarized Palestine." Rally organizers say the people want Palestine's leadership to pour the bountiful resources provided by the international community into building civil society, blending Islam with modernity, creating representative democracy and inculcating tolerance and pluralism.

Meanwhile in Gaza, Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh and Mahmoud Zahar, along with top Islamic Jihad, Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade and Popular Resistance Committee chieftains, complain that Israel is moving too slowly to process the tons upon tons of collected weapons, bombs and ammunition now decommissioned.

An exasperated Farouk Kaddoumi, the PLO foreign minister, tells reporters: "We need to tear down the refugee camps to build permanent housing, but our efforts are hampered because of the vast stores of weapons and explosives in every nook and cranny. Let us be rid of these instruments of bloodshed. Sixty - no, 100 years have been squandered!"

February: Speaking with an upper-crust British accent, Syrian President Bashar Assad, who trained as an ophthalmologist in London, admits to the BBC's Zeinab Badawi that his country has long been engaged in a campaign to destabilize Lebanon. "We're awfully sorry for the assassinations and bombings and for robbing Lebanon of its sovereignty. Dirty pool. Bad business. That's done with."
Were Assad in Israel's shoes, Badawi inquires, would he give up the strategic mountain ranges of the Golan Heights?

"Heavens, no." Assad replies. "That's why I propose that Israel 'return' the heights to us then we will immediately lease them back to the Jewish state for 100 years. Assuming things go smoothly, the next generation can sort things out."

March: London's Independent breaks the story that Peace Now, founded in 1978 to uproot every vestige of Jewish presence in Judea, Samaria and those areas of metropolitan Jerusalem liberated in the Six Day War, is finally closing its doors, grounding its spy helicopters and ceasing operations.

Peace Now has come under increasing scrutiny from the Israeli tax authorities for having accepted millions of dollars over the years from foreign governments and foundations who want to influence Israeli security policies. Several Peace Now leaders seek asylum in Norway.

April: Israel Radio reports an announcement by Rabbi Yona Metzger and Rabbi Shlomo Amar that they are jointly stepping down as Israel's chief rabbis to devote their lives to Torah study and good deeds.

The Degel Hatorah party newspaper, Yated Ne'eman, reports that Metzger and Amar "are obviously correct in pointing out that the mixture of politics, patronage and Judaism has undermined yiddishkeit and created one desecration of God's name after another."

In an editorial headlined "Goot G'zooked" - well said - Hamodia, the hassidic daily, praises the two outgoing chiefs for advocating the separation of "synagogue from state."

"Opposing pluralism and tolerance," Hamodia writes, "has been bad for the Jews. It's time to end the rabbinate's control over marriage, divorce and over defining 'Who is a Jew' for purposes of immigration and naturalization. Away with both hegemony and dependency."

Yom L'yom, the Shas newspaper, adds: "The two chief rabbis are paving the way, baruch Hashem, for more Ashkenazi haredim to serve in the IDF or do other forms of national service. It's about time."

May: The Jerusalem Post reports that a Haifa truck driver began a better driving movement that's spread like wildfire. Rafi Shaked placed a notice in the windshield of his lorry declaring that he would "yield the right of way - absolutely."

A grandmother in Beersheba, Ludmilla Chertok, noticed the sign while driving on Route 6 and promptly put a large notice on the door of her car: "I will always signal."

A tipping point was reached when an Army Radio personality persuaded upwards of 350,000 motorists to stop their cars for one minute during the Thursday evening rush-hour in support of "always giving pedestrians the right of way at a crosswalk."

Traffic police say that if the "sanity on the roads continues into 2009, it will be necessary to shift resources into other areas." By the end of 2008, failing to signal, not yielding the right of way, and driving above the speed limit is frowned upon as "un-Israeli" behavior.

June: JPost.com reports that an increasing number of students in secular schools are insisting on calling their teachers Mr. or Ms. or "teacher" instead of by their first names. Such deference has long been the tradition in the national-religious system.

Meanwhile, Finance Ministry officials insist that the education minister accept a 20 percent increase in funding. The new moneys come from funds heretofore earmarked to support avant-garde art, alternative filmmaking and other cultural projects that ministry officials now claim are heavily laden with post-Zionist messages.

September: The Islamic Republic News Agency reveals that after returning from the haj in Saudi Arabia some eight months ago, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told aides that he experienced an epiphany and now believes that Islam forbids terrorism, nuclear proliferation and Jew-hatred.

After months of behind-the-scenes consultation among the country's leading mullahs, Ahmadinejad was authorized to appear on television to tell the nation: "In the name of God the almighty and merciful, when I was on haj, I saw a light around me. I was placed inside this aura. I felt the atmosphere suddenly change, and as I was performing tawaf around the Ka'aba, my eyes were opened. The Jewish people are not our enemies, they are our brethren. They must not be harmed. We must provide Israel - may her years be many and serene - with free petroleum. All praise is to Allah."

November 4, 2008: In the US, presidential race exit polls indicate that the independent ticket's Michael Bloomberg and Barack Obama have been elected president and vice president.

I'M ALSO predicting these less earth-shattering, but still consequential events in the course of 2008:

• HOT, the Israeli cable provider, brings back CNN. CEO David Kamenitz explains, "Let's be frank. We're raking it in. We can't just cut out a popular and essential station and not reduce our charges. So, CNN is back."
• Rabbi Eric Yoffee, head of the Reform movement, embraces Sufi Islam and takes the name "Cat Stevens."
• Meteorologist Robert Orlinsky is named chair of the Academy of the Hebrew Language in appreciation for making the language more accessible to new immigrants.
• Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei retires as director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and takes up a senior leadership position at Lighthouse For The Blind in New York City.

FINALLY, in December 2008, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks authors an "Open letter to Amos Oz and David Grossman," which London's Jewish Chronicle publishes.

The chief rabbi thunders: "What has systematically derailed Israel's efforts for peace is the fact that every concession it has made, every withdrawal it has undertaken, has been interpreted by its enemies as a sign of weakness, and has led to more violence, not less.

"The Oslo process led to suicide bombers, Ehud Barak's offer led to the so-called Al-Aksa intifada. The withdrawals from Lebanon and Gaza led directly to the onslaught of Katyushas and Kassams. How does any nation make peace under these conditions?"

Celebrating skepticism

This week marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of
Louis Jacobs's 'We Have Reason to Believe'


Who could disagree with Pope Benedict XVI's statement in his just-released second encyclical that "a world without God is a world without hope"?

Well, I suppose there are some, but for most of us balancing modernity and its intrinsic absence of absolutes with religion, which demands belief in a divine power, is what struggling with God is all about in the 21st century.

Isn't it paradoxical that in our post-modern world the search for God continues? A recent survey by the Guttman Center of the Israel Democracy Institute reveals that most native-born Israelis consider themselves either traditional or religious. Younger people nowadays, more than older folks, identify themselves as religious. So there's little question that Israelis are searching for God and hope.

Yet, how are we to reconcile the hard data with our intuitive sense that Israelis are mostly non-practicing Orthodox or altogether secular; that the average Israeli (like his American Jewish cousin) is so unfamiliar with the liturgy that if thrown into a Shabbat morning service, they'd be clueless.

Part of the answer, I suppose, is that while some Israelis reject organized religion which they associate with the corrupted official rabbinate - Israel's established church - many retain a deep cultural need for traditional customs in marking life-cycle milestones, thereby keeping God (however defined) and hope in their lives.

ONE MAN who was ahead of his time in this great effort to balance faith with modernity was Rabbi Louis Jacobs, who died in London last July at 85. This week marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of his We Have Reason to Believe.

Back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Jacobs was at the epicenter of a hullabaloo for - what seems in hindsight - his rather diffident attempt to coax Orthodox Judaism into the 20th century.

For his troubles, Jacobs lost a shot at becoming chief rabbi of Great Britain, but his imagination gave further impetus to the development of centrist Judaism worldwide and, in Britain, of the Masorti movement.

On December 2, some of his admirers gathered at the New London Synagogue on Abbey Road in St. John's Wood, which Jacobs founded and where he held the pulpit for many decades, to inquire whether there is still reason to believe.

What set off the "Jacobs Affair" half a century ago was the rabbi's suggestion that maybe, just maybe, not every word and every letter of the Pentateuch was literally dictated by God to Moses. This audacity cost Jacobs his Orthodox pulpit in the late 1950s, and by the end of 1961 he was also forced to resign his position as "tutor" at London's Jews' College, then the training ground for Orthodox ministers, rabbis and cantors.

Here is what Jacobs said in bidding farewell to his students: "Doubt is the source of inquiry. Yet large sections of Jews live in self-assured ease. Their religion was part of their contentment, but who wants a life of contentment? Religion throughout the ages has been used to comfort the troubled. We should now use it to trouble the comfortable..."

DEBATING WHETHER the Torah is min hashamayim (from Heaven) may seem oddly esoteric from the vantage point of the 21st century. On the one hand, for today's Orthodox (and certainly among the thriving numbers of the newly religious), Torah min hashamayim isn't debatable - it's dogma. A strict-constructionist interpretation of God-given texts, and belief in divinely inspired precedent, continues to propel the Orthodox approach to Jewish law and custom.

On the other hand, for most non-Orthodox Jews - meaning the majority of Jewish people - there is no debate about Torah min hashamayim. That's because the Jewishly illiterate, the secular and the assimilated are oblivious to the issue. At the same time, practicing Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist Jews continue to grapple with the Torah min hashamayim dilemma in their own ways.

Generally, Reform Jews say that the Torah is a compilation of both the divine and human; Conservatives say that the Torah is divinely inspired; while a Reconstructionist might fudge matters further by saying, as Rabbi Arthur Green does, that there may not be a Force out there, but there is a "deep consciousness" that underlies our existence.

ALL THIS matters, because Jewish civilization and with it our raison d'etre - for being Jews and for being Zionists - cannot reasonably be detached from Judaism's religious legacy. We either wrestle with this issue or we cease being Jews.

In his day, Jacobs was denounced as an apikoros by the Orthodox establishment. His so-called heresy, however, was in practice an authentically Jewish approach in struggling with God. Not everyone can or wants to take the leap of faith which unvarnished Orthodoxy demands. Take the highly educated - the Guttman survey showed that the more education people have the less religiously inclined they tend to be. It needn't be that way - perhaps we should redefine what it means to be "religious." We need to give people legitimate and enlightened options apart from Orthodoxy.

Reading Jacobs today, he hardly strikes me as much of a radical. Where Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan's Reconstructionist philosophy saw "Judaism as civilization" and God as a sociological construct, Jacobs argued that we ought to avoid, "when thinking of God, the extremes of both anthropomorphism and 'de-personalization.'" God can never be comprehended, Jacobs insisted. His creatures will find Him if they seek Him.

That reads pretty traditional to me.

FOR THE middle-of-the-road Jacobs, Conservative Judaism came with a small "c." He believed in God and in the possibility (at least) of an afterlife. As best as I can tell, he opposed abortion (with some exceptions), capital punishment, homosexuality and, perish the thought, even smoking. He acknowledged the validity of the theory of evolution, and he was said to champion women's rights.

Without question, however, some of his message was and remains radical. Jacobs argued that belief in the literal resurrection of the dead was not central to Judaism (Maimonides thought otherwise). He appeared not to subscribe to the idea of a personal messiah, nor did he hope for a concrete rebuilding of the Third Temple and the resumption of animal sacrifices.

Perhaps most iconoclastic of all, Jacobs - like many of today's observant non-Orthodox - understood mitzvot as binding only to the extent that they serve as a pathway to Godly behavior.

In some ways, it may have been easier to embrace centrist Judaism in his day than in our own. Today defining the middle ground - to the right of Reform and the left of Orthodoxy - is increasingly difficult. Certainly, the Conservative movement's inability to articulate a unified centrist dogma has been costly in membership and prestige.

And yet, precisely by not defining absolute parameters the movement is being true to itself. In Emet v'Emunah, the 1988 statement of principles of Conservative Judaism, proponents of centrism argued that "given our changing world, finality and certainty are illusory at best, destructive at worst. Rather than claiming to have found a goal at the end of the road, the ideal Conservative Jew is a traveler walking purposefully towards 'God's holy mountain.'"

In the quest for God and hope, centrist Judaism has had little choice but to emphasize observance over dogma, and in so doing has doubtlessly moved to Jacobs's left - even as Orthodoxy has lurched to the right of where it was when it ostracized him.

Still, if you ask me, we do have reason to believe. Whatever our doubts, prayer and ritual give us an essential framework for living spiritually. And that's vital because for all its heterogeneity, Jewish civilization cannot survive absent God and hope.

Treacherous crossings

There's a tradition of switching sides in politics.
The trick is not to switch to the wrong side


Toward the end of what is probably John LeCarre's finest espionage novel, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), Jim Haydon, a Soviet mole at the pinnacle of British counter-intelligence, justifies his betrayal of Queen and Country to George Smiley ­ the spymaster who exposed Haydon ­ by blaming London's relationship with Washington.

Writes LeCarre: "He hated America, very deeply, he said, and Smiley supposed he did."

"'It's an aesthetic judgment as much as anything,' he explained, looking up. 'Partly a moral one, of course.'

'Of course,' said Smiley politely."

THIS SCENE came to mind after Moscow announced that George Koval, who died last year at 92, was on November 2 posthumously awarded the title of Hero ofthe Russian Federation by President Vladimir Putin ­ -- himself a former spy -- having infiltrated America's Manhattan Project, the secret plan to develop an atomic bomb during WWII and funneling its most precious secrets to Stalin.

Putin's announcement said Koval's work "helped speed up considerably the time it took for the Soviet Union to develop an atomic bomb of its own," which it exploded in August 1949.

Experts surmise Koval may well have been the most significant Soviet mole in the Manhattan Project.

George Koval's family was active in Jewish communist circles. He was born in Sioux City on Christmas Day, 1913. The family moved to the Soviet Union in 1932 during the Depression to help build a secular Jewish homeland -- Stalin's solution to the Jewish problem ­-- in Birobidjan, Siberia.

A bright boy, George ended up at Moscow's Mendeleev Institute of Chemical Technology and in 1934 was recruited ­-- not by the KGB, but apparently by the GRU (military intelligence) ­ -- as a deep-cover agent. He was sent back to the United States to conduct scientific espionage.

As Russia's luck would have it, Koval was drafted into America's top-secret nuclear program. He gained extraordinary access to the Manhattan Project largely because he was assigned to health and safety work ("making sure stray radiation did not harm workers").

As The New York Times put it last week, Koval had the perfect cover ­ "born in Iowa, college in Manhattan, army buddies with whom he played baseball."

Alas, there was no George Smiley to unmask this double agent. Instead, US counterintelligence agencies bickered among themselves (just as they did prior to 9/11) while Koval managed to escape back to the USSR.

Add Koval to the embarrassingly long list of Jewish-born spies and agents of influence who betrayed America for the Soviet Union. They did so not necessarily because they hated America, but because they were intoxicated by the messianic ideal of Marxism-Leninism.

WHETHER IN politics, sports, religion or in our private lives, it's hard to think of anything worse than duplicity.

In LeCarre's Tinker, Tailor, Haydon not only betrays Britain as a Soviet double agent, he also carries on an affair with Smiley's wife, Ann ­ -- a double betrayal.

Still, not every shift in loyalty is necessarily treasonous.

Giving aid and information to the enemy clearly is; so is violating oaths of allegiance or acting clandestinely on behalf an enemy power. Taking money from a foreign power to influence the policies of your own country is, arguably, a form of betrayal.

But abandoning one's political or religious orientation, going from Right toLeft (or vice versa), or from secular to ultra-Orthodox (or vice versa), maybe a "betrayal" of earlier values, it may hurt those close to you ­ but it'sno crime. It's not treason.

People change sides. Sometimes they cite ideology when the motivation may be purely personal (an affront of some sort, perhaps). Sometimes we never know the motivation.

Take Tom Dine, for instance, who once headed the America Israel PublicAffairs Committee (AIPAC), went on to run Radio Free Europe, later took charge of the San Francisco-based Jewish Community Federation, and has now gone over to AIPAC's dovish counterpart, the Israel Policy Forum.

There he joins MJ Rosenberg ­ another former AIPAC staffer ­ and, for my money, the single most articulate advocate for an Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 Armistice Lines now engaged in Israel-related polemics.

OF COURSE, AIPAC doesn't need a dovish counterpart because it never was the right-wing bastion its critics claim.

Indeed, AIPAC does not lobby forIsrael ­ it lobbies on behalf of the pro-Israel American community ­-- both liberal and conservative.

It has always sought to balance the desires of this heterogenous constituency while attempting to work in sync with whatever Israeli government happens to be in power ­-- Left, Right or center.

AIPAC never, to my knowledge, supported Jewish sovereignty in Judea, Samaria or Gaza, or the retention of the Territories in perpetuity. That makes AIPAC the quintessential centrist organization.

Nevertheless, the Israel Policy Forum was established in 1993 in the wake of the Oslo Accords and is today a sort of shadow opposition to AIPAC. Like Americans for Peace Now, the New Israel Fund and others, the Israel PolicyForum could be accused of being intoxicated by a messianic ideal of its own: Palestine and Israel living side by side in celestial harmony.

The group is led by the esteemed Park Avenue lawyer Seymour Reich, who is a former chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American JewishOrganizations.

As I understand it, IPF lobbies US decision-makers to pressure Israel into making what IPF sees as concessions to foster peace. They tell House members, senators and White House policymakers that far from there being negative political repercussions to such coercion, American Jews want what amounts to an Israeli pullback to the 1949 Armistice Lines (with minor modifications).

Maybe there's truth to that argument.

Most US Jews have never been to Israel, and can't possibly comprehend the strategic implications of the 1949 boundaries. And public opinion is malleable: Ask questions the right way and you can get the desired answers.

There's little doubt that having the IPF's Jewish imprimatur helps Washington politicians and policymakers get tough with Israel.

But let's be fair, with Vice Premier Haim Ramon a featured speaker at the group's Annual Leadership event set for December 3 in New York, no one can legitimately complain that the Israel Policy Forum is working at cross-purposes with the Kadima-led government.

This allows IPF to robustly champion the creation of a Palestinian state today, right now, in the West Bank, as if the Palestinian Arabs were genuinely geared up to live alongside Israel in peace; as if Ben-Gurion Airport could safely operate with sovereign Palestine situated on the adjacent hills; as if even moderate Palestinians had already accepted the existence of a sovereign Jewish state within the 1949 Armistice Lines.

THE FOLKS formerly with AIPAC or the Presidents Conference who have gone over to the IPF have every right to change political course, and even to try and redefine what being pro-Israel is all about.

Let's face it, there would have been no neo-conservative movement had people such as Irving Kristol not abandoned the moral relativism of Leon Trotsky.

Winston Churchill changed parties from Conservative to Liberal, and back again; Ronald Reagan went from the Democratic Party to the GOP.

Yet switching sides ­-- especially in the Jewish context -- ­ is only defensible if your move enhances Jewish continuity and the Zionist enterprise.

In other words, whether it's done transparently out of well-intentioned conviction, or surreptitiously and deceitfully, a la Hayden and Koval, crossing political lines, like everything we do, has consequences.

The consequences of the line the Israel Policy Forum has taken just happensto place the organization largely in harmony with the Palestinian negotiating position going into Annapolis.

And the last time I checked, the Palestinian negotiators weren't looking out for Jewish continuity or the welfare of the Zionist enterprise.

So, you want to write an op-ed?

Here's what you mustn't do

When you read them for a living, it's natural to form some opinion about what makes a good op-ed. For me, it's clear writing, a focused argument, the introduction of fresh facts, top-notch analysis and a good opener.

Perhaps it's easier to detail the makings of a bad op-ed: long, complex, meandering sentences, plodding prose, pretentious or jargon-heavy language, categorical statements that can't be backed up, or the absence of a clearly enunciated opinion. You'd be surprised how many writers beat around the bush, insinuating, without actually saying outright, what they want readers to believe.

Finally, op-eds that fail to take into account the opposing view, or do so in a cursory, condescending or dismissive way, also get a poor grade.

Former Jerusalem Post editor-in-chief Bret Stephens, now back at the Wall Street Journal, drummed into his staff that an op-ed has to be proleptic - anticipating what the other side would argue, and then knocking down its claims. Such an approach demonstrates that your stance is based upon substantive reflection.

Another no-no: Writers who make use of exclamation points! or CAPITALS. They're like the guy poking his finger in your belly to make a point; all you want to do is create some distance from them.

The same is true of shrill writing that's replete with name-calling, exaggerated (or patently untrue) claims, and the manipulation of statistics. Savvy readers intuitively sense when they're being hoodwinked.

I'M BORED by writers who are completely predictable, who preach to their own amen-corner and whose product is intended primarily as "red meat" for true-believers. Hey, what about the rest of us?

Granted, there's no shortage of folks who keep coming back for what amounts to a slight variation of the same argument, week in and week out. Which means columnists with a purposefully narrow repertoire had better be extra good at what they do.

This isn't to argue that all ideological writing is inherently bad. The views of, say, a Maureen Dowd or a Paul Gigot may be foretold - but they are invariably well-argued, informed and entertaining. Plainly, there are writers who push a coherent, consistent view of politics and people, yet nevertheless manage to deliver columns that are almost always engrossing.

At the end of the day, good op-ed writing is a combination of art and skill; you may be able to deconstruct a piece to explain why it works (or doesn't), but there's no off-the-shelf template for novice writers to follow.

WOULD-BE op-ed contributors need to consider very carefully what they're going to write about. Most of the unsolicited op-eds we receive at The Jerusalem Post fall broadly into two subject categories: the Arab-Israel conflict (and related issues), and the intramural wars of the Jews (over identity, theology, the nature of the Jewish state, and the like).

Thus if everyone is writing about, say, Annapolis, unless you happen to be a world-renowned Mideast expert you should probably find another topic to address. (Assume, too, that our regular columnists won't let this little conference go unmentioned.)

I'm amazed by how many unsolicited submissions we get that simply cover old ground, regurgitate stale arguments, or fight yesterday's ideological battles when the rest of the world has moved on.

Then there are the folks who write about a topic that has no immediacy, neither news nor chronological hook - in fact, nothing to pique the readers' interest.

But don't lose heart. We sometimes reject a piece not because there's anything inherently wrong with it, but because (a) there is no available space; or (b) to maintain the range of our pages. Regular readers know that Post policy is to provide viewpoints from across the political and religious spectrum. And we trust local readers will have noted that their newspaper also publishes op-eds on music, art, science and popular culture - because there is a world out there, and we can't obsess about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for example, to the exclusion of all else.

EVERY OP-ED writer develops his or her own voice. The question of who's worth reading - and emulating - is largely subjective. Over the years I've found myself drawn to the work of an eclectic bunch of op-ed writers, even though - looking back - I can't honestly claim they meet all the criteria outlined above.

I'm excluding Jerusalem Post columnists and contributors from this discussion for obvious reasons: I don't want to get beaten up in the hallway.

THE FIRST columnist I recall making it my business to read was Pete Hamill. This was when I was in high school and the street-smart Hamill was writing something like three or four columns a week for Dorothy Schiff's New York Post.

I enjoyed Hamill's down-to-earth style. He wrote with a liberal passion that appealed to my adolescent sense of justice. Hamill penned a column in 1970 endorsing Bella Abzug in the Democratic congressional primary on Manhattan's Lower East Side for the US House of Representatives. He argued that Abzug would actively oppose the war in Vietnam, while the incumbent, Leonard Farbstein, was an old fuddy-duddy who wouldn't stand up to Richard Nixon. Because of that column, I went out and volunteered for Abzug's campaign, handing out leaflets on East Broadway near my yeshiva.

Some time later, however, when Hamill wrote a column which - if memory serves me all these decades later - excused the behavior of a punk who mugged his mother on the grounds that the root cause of crime was poverty and discrimination, I abandoned Hamill and never really warmed to him again.

Fortunately, in the natural course of development, adolescent liberals mature into healthy adult centrist pragmatists.

THERE WERE some writers I used to read because they wrote fluidly and I agreed with them. The late Eric Breindel, who was editorial page editor and columnist after Rupert Murdoch took over the New York Post, fell into that category.

Others I read today because they have interesting insights even though I might not agree with them, such as the Paris-based William Pfaff, who publishes in the International Herald Tribune.I'll make time to read Frank Rich of The New York Times even though almost every column takes up most of the op-ed page and is devoted to bashing George W. Bush. Rich is one liberal polemicist who can't be ignored because he marshals his facts so skillfully.

Some writers I read for the sheer pleasure of enjoying their carefully crafted and reported opinion. For instance, Roger Cohen, who writes the "Globalist" column for the Tribune. I always ask myself how a guy so good on other topics can be so wrong about the Palestinian Arabs.

I also read Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal, for the same reason I like a good glass of wine, or a fine cigar.

Then there are the op-ed writers I'll keep an eye out for because their work often contains tidbits of information unavailable elsewhere. These include: John K. Cooley (who first caught my attention when he reported on, and championed, the Palestinian cause for the Christian Science Monitor); Robert D. Kaplan, who traverses the world to produce longish op-edy features for, among others, The Atlantic Monthly; and The Washington Post's Jim Hoagland, for his knowledgeable inside-the-beltway reportage on US foreign policy.

In other words, I prefer columnists who research, report and synthesize rather than exclusively pontificate.

Finally, a word about brevity: Do as I say, not as I do. Almost any argument can be effectively made in roughly 750-850 words. If you are just starting out - and especially if you want to reach people under 30 - aim for staccato writing and paragraphs of no more than a few short sentences.

We're several decades into the Internet age, so keep in mind that many of your readers won't be mulling over your words in hard copy while sipping a cup of coffee; they'll be gulping them down in a frenzy of click-and-scroll.One wrong move, and you lose their attention.

REGARDLESS of your intended audience, to achieve an op-ed worth the readers' time, carefully edit what you write. Few writers can produce anything worth reading on the first draft.

One last thing. Publishing your opinion carries with it the danger that you will contribute to your readers' ignorance. To paraphrase the communications theorist Marshall McLuhan, some people use a point of view as a substitute for true insight. Don't contribute to their stupidity.