Ramadan, 1429

From Granada in Spain and Aubervilliers in France, to Cairo and Jakarta, more than a billion Muslims are this month marking the "handing down" of the Koran. Through daytime fasting, Ramadan, which this year falls September 1-30, is a time to subjugate the body to the spirit.

The advent of Ramadan, which most Westerners would hardly have noticed a decade ago, now merits coverage in such disparate media as the Dallas News and London's Times.

In a passage that Jews who observe communal and personal fast days can identify with, a Muslim contributor to the Times explained that "The late afternoon is always the hardest part of the fast." The Los Angeles Daily News tells its readers that the fast is over only when the "crescent of the moon has been sighted," while The Iowa City Press Citizen empathizes with how difficult it must be to keep the holiday in a place where Muslims are a small minority.

This is also the period when the faithful try to resolve their differences peaceably.

The Pakistani military said it would suspend offensive operations against the Taliban.

As a Ramadan goodwill gesture, Egypt opened the Rafah crossing between Sinai and Gaza.

And Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah movement announced it is committed to negotiating with Hamas rather than fighting - even though the two sides can't even agree on the time of day. Daylight Savings Time in Gaza ended Saturday, but will last for several more days in the West Bank. Also in Gaza, thousands of government employees, among them teachers and medical workers associated with Fatah, are on strike against the Hamas government.

Curiously, this is also a time when some non-Muslims are prone to blame anyone but Muslims for the violence and frustration so prevalent in Islamic civilization.

For instance, an Agence France-Presse dispatch begins: "As most of the rest of the Islamic world welcomes Ramadan... Palestinians in the Gaza Strip warily brace for another holiday under a crippling [Israeli] blockade."

No mention is made of Hamas's adamant refusal to recognize previous Palestinian agreements, end violence against non-combatants, or even accept the right of the Jewish state to exist. There's nothing about Gilad Schalit; or about tons of humanitarian aid Israel has allowed in; or about the 200 Hamas-authorized (and revenue-producing) tunnels between Sinai and Gaza which funnel, among other commodities, arms, missiles and explosives; or about concerted preparations for further aggression. AFP notes only that "Israel has kept the sanctions in place despite a two-month-old truce with Palestinian militants which has mostly halted rocket fire on southern Israel."

DESPITE the fact that the second intifada was launched from the Temple Mount in September 2000, Israel is going to great lengths to accommodate Muslims from Judea and Samaria who wish to attend Friday prayers on the Mount. Married men between 45 and 50 and married women 30-45 can request entry permission, with the expectation that it will be granted. Men over 50 and women over 45 can enter freely.

In addition, for this month the opening hours of checkpoints between the West Bank and Israel proper are being extended. Palestinian inmates in Israeli prisons will be allowed to receive special Ramadan packages from their loved ones. And Arab citizens of Israel will be permitted to enter PA-controlled Area A, from where all Israeli citizens are normally barred.

To sensitize Israeli soldiers who come into contact with Palestinian Arab civilians during the holiday, the Civil Administration has distributed leaflets explaining the times, dates and customs of Ramadan: "Soldiers [are] directed to show consideration for the population and instructed to avoid eating, drinking and smoking in populated areas, with an emphasis on the crossing points."

RAMADAN may be an appropriate time for Muslims to reflect on the challenges of faith and modernity. Much of the bloodletting in the Mideast and other Muslim population centers takes place among believers themselves - between those who appear ascendant, who want to return Islam to its most bellicose and imperialistic path, and those who seek coexistence with the "other."

Only when Muslims who aspire to live in harmony with those who do not share their faith are able to triumph over the fanatics will peace between civilizations become a reality.

For this, we too pray.

From Humphrey to Obama

On this day 40 years ago, Hubert H. Humphrey accepted the nomination of the Democratic Party for the presidency of the United States. As rioting raged outside the Chicago convention hall, he began his stirring oratory by citing St. Francis of Assisi: "Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light."

Humphrey, who ultimately lost to Richard M. Nixon, may have been the last instinctive friend of Israel to seek the presidency. It was uncomplicated to be a friend of Israel in 1968, even though Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian Arab, only weeks earlier.

It was clear in those days that Israel faced an Arab world that refused to accept a Jewish state anywhere in the Middle East; that whatever its blunders, Israel was fundamentally in the right; that Arab diplomacy from the 1917 Balfour Declaration through to the 1967 Arab Summit in Khartoum was nothing but a litany of rejectionism.

On the night Humphrey accepted the nomination, Barack Obama, born August 4, 1961, was seven years old. For Obama's generation, and even more for the ones following it, political, moral or theological certainties about Israel - or about anything else - are passé.

LAST NIGHT, as this newspaper was going to press, it was Obama's turn to accept the Democratic presidential nomination in Denver. Delegates had decamped to the Invesco Field at Mile High stadium so that Obama could speak in front of 75,000 enthusiastic supporters. Sen. Hillary Clinton had earlier moved that the nomination be offered to Obama by acclimation.

In the course of the convention, delegates heard vice presidential nominee Sen. Joe Biden declare that the Bush administration had failed to defeat al-Qaida and the Taliban, "the people who actually attacked us on 9/11," while getting bogged down in the war in Iraq.

They applauded as Bill Clinton declared: "Hillary told us in no uncertain terms that she'll do everything she can to elect Barack Obama. That makes two of us."

The Obama-McCain campaign kicks off in earnest after next week's Republican National Convention, and Israelis have been watching the presidential race with fascination. While the Israel-America relationship is fundamentally solid and bipartisan, Washington and Jerusalem have had their ups and downs in every administration from Harry S Truman to George W. Bush.

We do not take it for granted that both candidates define themselves as friends of Israel - yet friendship has to be backed by substance.

• On Iran, Obama says he does not want Israel to feel as if its "back is against the wall," and wants America "to act much more forcefully." Yet he would also try to talk the mullahs into being better global citizens. What specific steps on Iran would an Obama-Biden administration take in its first six weeks?

• On borders and settlements, this is what Obama told the Post in a July interview here: "Israel may seek '67-plus' and justify it in terms of the buffer that they need for security purposes. They've got to consider whether getting that buffer is worth the antagonism of the other party."

Biden once warned premier Menachem Begin that if Israel did not cease settlement in Judea and Samaria, the US would have to cut economic aid to Israel.

Do Obama and Biden think it is possible to be "pro-Israel" in 2008 while being sanguine over an Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 Armistice Lines? Where does the campaign stand on strategic settlement blocs and a Jewish presence in such Jerusalem neighborhoods as Gilo, East Talpiot and Har Homa?

• On Palestinian refugees, Mahmoud Abbas has called for the "right of return" to Israel proper for the refugees and their descendents. What's the campaign's position?

IT MAY be unrealistic for Israelis to expect that an administration taking office in January 2009 will empathize with Israel the way a 1969 Humphrey White House might have.

But what the Obama-Biden ticket needs to demonstrate is that backing for a secure Israel living within defensible boundaries is as integral to Democrats today as it was when Hubert Humphrey was their standard-bearer.

WRAP -- Gilad Schalit and Little Rose

Police Blues

Aug. 26, 2008

Lurid details are now emerging about the murder of four-year-old Rose Ron - allegedly by her grandfather, with the complicity of her mother (the two were married). Police suspect Rose's body was placed in a suitcase and dumped in the Yarkon River.

Since the story of her disappearance first broke on Sunday and her haunting portrait seared itself into the public consciousness, we all feared something evil had happened to her. Now we know it did.

Meanwhile, two alleged organized crime figures, brothers Itzik and Meir Abergil, are facing extradition to the United States over their reputed involvement in the 2003 murder of an Israeli drug dealer in Los Angeles. Their syndicate is also reportedly implicated in the botched mob hit on a Bat Yam beach last month that saw an innocent bystander, Marguerita Lautin, shot dead in front of her children and husband.

Chaim Nachman Bialik, the legendary Hebrew poet, was said to have coined the Zionist credo: "When the first Jewish prostitute is arrested by the first Jewish policeman and sentenced by the first Jewish judge, we can consider ourselves a sovereign state."

Israel has achieved this, and more.

Protecting law-abiding citizens from evil and the criminal falls mostly to the guardians of civilized society, the police. Yet as the Post has been reporting since Monday, the police itself is under criticism: Key field assignments, set to take effect next year, have apparently been made on the basis of cronyism. Even the appearance of favoritism, let alone the reality, shakes the already wobbly faith of Israelis in their political and legal systems.

WHEN ISRAEL'S top cop, Insp.-Gen. David Cohen, decided to transfer his number two, Deputy Insp.-Gen. Shahar Ayalon, to the post of Tel Aviv police chief and replace him with the current head of the Tel Aviv district, Cmdr. Ilan Franco, he created at least the appearance of impropriety, casting himself and Avi Dichter the minister for internal security, in a dismal light.

Franco would be positioned to replace Cohen as Israel's top cop, even though a 2007 panel headed by former District Court Judge Vardi Zeiler specifically recommended against giving Franco the country's top police post. The Zeiler Committee was set up to examine the police command's questionable handling of suspicions that a rogue cop had maintained ties with underworld figures Oded and Sharon Perinian.

Besides his plan to promote Franco, Cohen also embarked on a series of appointments intended to help old friends (Dep.-Cmdr. Jackie Bray and Cmdr. Shai Amihai, for instance) and hinder those who aren't - specifically, Cmdr. Uri Bar-Lev, a reform-minded manager credited with a huge drop in crime in the southern district.

Rather than advance him through the ranks, Cohen allowed personal animosities to rule and ordered Bar-Lev to take paid educational leave. Bar-Lev, a decorated veteran of an elite IDF unit, already holds two undergraduate degrees and refused to waste public funds on unnecessary study or be put out to pasture. Cohen then released a bogus statement announcing that Bar-Lev had decided to quit, to which Bar-Lev responded: "I have no plans to resign for the next 10 years."

Bar-Lev is precisely the kind of policeman a good boss should be nurturing, and a chorus of universal outrage has rightly erupted over Cohen's abysmal treatment of him, and Dichter's failure to date to decisively rectify it.

CAN A force plagued by a lack of professionalism and a leadership vacuum afford to lose a commander of Bar-Lev's caliber? And for what? To make room for more of the commissioner's good ole' boys?

Israelis cannot help but wonder how we got saddled with the apparently mendacious Cohen and, in Dichter, a minister who seems more concerned with respecting "the organizational culture" of the police than its effectiveness.

This episode is not only about an honest, dedicated and charismatic cop being unwarrantedly shunted aside, but, most fundamentally, about a law enforcement organization begging for upstanding leadership, adequate resources and competent ministerial oversight - and, so far anyway, getting none of these.

The buck stops with Dichter, a former Shin Bet head and now a candidate for Kadima's leadership. The minister of internal security, who appointed Cohen to the commissioner's job, is failing the public, and should get a grip or hand over to someone who can.





'Unparalleled cruelty'
Aug. 26, 2008

There are an estimated 8,500 Palestinian Arab prisoners from the West Bank and Gaza in Israeli custody. Over 5,000 of them are serving out sentences; 2,300 are awaiting trial, the remainder are in administrative detention.

No one would suggest that Israeli prisons are fun places. Each inmate has loved ones who presumably miss them dearly. That said, the incarcerated are menacing figures in the Palestinian "resistance," many having planned, executed or enabled attacks aimed at murdering or maiming Israelis in buses, cafes, nightclubs and hotel banquet rooms.

Recently, prisoners in a high-security wing of the Sharon penitentiary - killers mostly - complained to a visiting delegation from the Israel Bar Association of mistreatment: stuffy rooms, poor lighting and such. A more serious allegation, which requires a response from Prison Services Commissioner Lt-Gen. Benny Kaniak, is that members of the elite Nachshon Unit have used dogs to "humiliate" the inmates.

The lawyers also questioned the continued incarceration of Mahmoud Azan, who reached Israel from Afghanistan and has been held in administrative detention for 10 years. Israel is reportedly prepared to deport Azan, but no country will have him. Bar Association chair Yuri Guy-Ron declared that the lawyers' subsequent report shows the importance of "having objective professional representatives of the bar continuing to visit prisons in order to view prison conditions."

It certainly does. Which is why we are gratified that, on any given day, Israeli prisons are hosting Red Cross representatives, journalists, lawyers and prisoners' advocates, as well as family members. Prisoners are even permitted conjugal visits.

WITH THESE thousands of prisoners in Israeli custody, Palestinian society cannot fathom - yet is delighted to exploit - Israelis' fretting over Gilad Schalit, their lone Israeli prisoner, who will mark his third birthday in captivity this Thursday.

Putting aside the fact that Schalit is not a terrorist but a simple soldier who was guarding sovereign Israeli soil when he was abducted on June 25, 2006; and that he had done no Arab any harm, probably never having fired his weapon except in training, the biggest distinction between him and the thousands of Arab prisoners Israel holds is that not one of them would want to switch places with the Israeli captive for even a day.

Why? The IDF soldier - who under international law should be treated as a POW - is not allowed to see Red Cross representatives or consular officials (Schalit also holds French citizenship). Hamas boasts that he is not permitted to exercise in the sunshine. Not only are his parents forbidden to visit him, only rarely has even a letter or video reached them - and any that did were intended to serve the enemy propaganda machine.

Insight into the heartless environment in which Schalit is being held can be gleaned from the popularity of a mock recording of the soldier's mother addressing her son. Gazans by the thousands have downloaded the sound file onto mobile phones and computers.

Yesterday, meanwhile, Israel released 198 long-serving Palestinian prisoners, including several killers, in a misguided gesture intended to boost PA President Mahmoud Abbas's standing among his people.

Abbas could have used a Ramallah ceremony welcoming the men to talk about reconciliation; to say that the sooner the 60-year-plus war against the Zionist enterprise was halted and a two-state solution accepted by the Arabs, the sooner many more prisoners would be released. He could have mentioned Schalit, if only on humanitarian grounds.

Instead Abbas told the crowd: "We will not rest until [all] the prisoners are freed and the jails are empty," specifically citing Marwan Barghouti, serving five consecutive life terms for murder; Ahmed Saadat, imprisoned for the assassination of cabinet minister Rehavam Ze'evi; and Aziz Duaik, a Hamas politician taken into custody in response to Schalit's abduction.

It is sobering to remind ourselves that Abbas reflects the most moderate of Palestinian opinion.

Writing in Yediot Aharonot on Monday, novelist and playwright Yoram Kaniuk, a government critic who has long expressed compassion for Palestinian suffering, did what Abbas should have done. He urged ordinary Palestinians to call for better treatment of Schalit, and say: "Keeping a young person imprisoned without trial, without his parents being able to visit him, is unparalleled cruelty."

It is.

Tribes and tribulations

What if 300,000 members of a heretofore unknown ethno-European tribe claiming descent from Jewish ancestors were suddenly discovered? And what if, given the right circumstances, they were willing to affiliate with Jewish civilization, learn Hebrew, serve in the IDF and imbue their lives with traditional Jewish values?

The good news is these potential Jews do not have to be airlifted to Israel - they are here from the former Soviet Union, under the Law of Return. Moreover, they serve in the army, pay taxes and have already enriched our society.

The bad news is the state has done precious little to absorb them into the Jewish people. Once it became clear that this "ethno-European tribe" would not jump through every hoop demanded by the religious establishment and that most were unwilling to lead Orthodox lifestyles, Israel's ultra-Orthodox, non-Zionist state rabbinate callously turned its back on them.

Not unlike their African, Indian and South American counterparts, these "lost" Jews of the former Soviet Union had long been cut off from their heritage. Over some 70 years, when not overtly oppressed, they were strongly discouraged from studying Torah and observing the festivals. Rampant intermarriage ensued and, as a consequence, many are not halachically Jewish.

Successive governments abdicated their responsibility to exhort the rabbinate to reconnect these newcomers with their Jewish brethren.

To be sure, broadminded, Zionist-oriented, Orthodox rabbis exist who would be willing to convert potential Jews even if they do not commit to Orthodoxy. But they are held in disdain by the religious establishment.

IT IS in this context that we must consider efforts to bring to Israel all 7,232 members of the lost tribe of Bnei Menashe from northeastern India. Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit is not keen on facilitating their aliya, though consultations are continuing between his ministry, the Prime Minister's Office, the Absorption Ministry and the Jewish Agency. Officials are also considering the sensitivities of the Indian government and relations between Jerusalem and New Delhi.

This newspaper would like to see the Bnei Menashe brought to Israel as swiftly as possible. We applaud the indefatigable efforts of Post columnist Michael Freund and his Shavei Israel group, which assists "lost Jews" seeking to return to the Jewish people. That the Bnei Menashe will have to undergo Orthodox conversion presents no problem; they will not hesitate to meet whatever religious demands the rabbinate places on them.

Meanwhile, last week thousands of Ethiopian immigrants demonstrated outside the Knesset demanding that 8,700 Falash Mura - descendants of the community who converted under duress to Christianity - be brought to Israel. The official rabbinate supports their cause and stands ready to convert them because they too are willing to commit to Orthodoxy.

We concur with the government's approach on the Falash Mura - namely, that individuals who qualify for aliya under the Law of Return should be brought to Israel on a case-by-case basis, noting that the 120,000-strong Ethiopian community itself and a number of its spiritual leaders have reservations about bringing the Falash Mura over en masse.

The absorption of the Beta Israel has not been an unmitigated success. Some are college graduates, IDF heroes, even diplomats and Knesset members. Still, there are serious problems, especially among the youth, with truancy, alcoholism and drugs. Sixty-five percent of Ethiopian families remain dependent on the welfare system.

This being the case, we invite the advocacy groups now calling for additional Ethiopian immigration to commit themselves to a similar passionate involvement in the community's ongoing absorption. (The same need for an ongoing commitment applies to the Bnei Menashe too.)

AS A staunchly Zionist newspaper, we want to see ever-increasing numbers of Jews making Israel their home. Yet it is disingenuous for the Orthodox establishment to encourage aliya from Africa, Asia and South America because immigrants from those places are more theologically pliable while tens of thousands of potential Jews already here from the former Soviet Union get the rabbinate's cold shoulder.

At the end of the day, all potential Jews need to be given the necessary tools and encouragement to make an affiliation with Jewish civilization inviting. And those desirous of making a formal commitment to Judaism need the appropriate options for conversion - Orthodox, traditional or progressive.